What is Charity?

Today, the word “charity” generally refers to an organization set up to help people in need. In the Christian tradition, however, the word has a much deeper meaning. First and foremost, it is a theological term, the highest of the “theological virtues.” In the King James Version, charity is the English word used to translate the Greek word “agape,” or self-giving love, that Paul praises in 1 Corinthians 13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century philosopher and theologian, defines charity (in Latin, caritas) as “friendship of man with God.” According to Aquinas, charity is “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.” Readers may recognize that Aquinas is paraphrasing Matthew 22, in which Jesus relates the greatest two commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. It is charity, in other words, given to us through God’s grace, which allows us to follow God’s highest commandments.

In the Christian “economy of charity,” it is important to recognize that the second of the greatest commandments (love of neighbor) is subordinate to the first (love of God). In other words, man loves God, and therefore man loves his neighbor. This distinction might seem like splitting hairs. It may even seem cold or lacking in compassion. Why do we need to love God before loving our neighbor? Isn’t our neighbor enough to love by himself?

Loving our neighbor “for the love of God,” as Aquinas put it, is what separates Christian charity from secular humanitarianism. Loving others out of love of God forces us to see others as more than they might appear. Instead, charity demands that we see other people as God sees them, giving us a high and universal standard to guide our actions. To look at another person through the eyes of Jesus is to see a human person, made in the image and likeness of God, endowed with dignity, creative capacity, and an eternal destiny. Christian charity gives us this exalted vision of the human person even when everything about an individual’s life, circumstances, choices, or cultural context might suggest something less lovable. Recognizing “the image of God” in each person and acting accordingly is a radical and peculiarly Jewish and Christian concept; it is also the foundation of contemporary notions of “rights.” Hard-line secularization that seeks to remove the divine source of law and rights inevitably undermines the whole project of universal human rights. Love of God is the surest foundation for the love of man.

Christian Charity or Humanitarianism?

The contemporary counterfeit of Christian charity—ironically practiced by many organizations that identify as “charities”—is humanitarianism. Humanitarianism focuses narrowly on providing material comfort. It is a hollowed out, secular version of Christian love. Often it extends aid at the expense of independence.

The Jewish tradition provides a useful framework for evaluating the practices of modern humanitarian organizations, religious or secular. Maimonides, the 12th century philosopher and Torah scholar, imagines a ladder of charity (in Hebrew, tzedakah). The higher you climb the ladder’s eight rungs, the purer your charity, the closer you are to heaven. On the lowest rung is the person who gives reluctantly and regretfully—but who still gives. On the second rung is the person who gives graciously but less than he should. And so on. On the final rung, we find that the highest form of charity is something which today is not typically associated with charity at all: self-sufficiency. In other words, the highest form of charity is to empower someone to no longer need charity. Maimonides says this can be granted by a gift, a loan, or employment.

As noted earlier, the word “charity” in common usage is today restricted to the philanthropic sense of “almsgiving.” Still, if Christians are to practice philanthropic charity well—that is, in such a way that honors our fellow human beings, who bear the divine image, and encourages their authentic flourishing—we must never lose sight of charity’s theological meaning. Another definition of charity attributed to Aquinas is “to will the good of the other.” It is good to help people who need it. It is also good for people to be self-supporting as it accords with their dignity, authority, and the responsibility, given to them by God, to steward His creation. In practicing Christian charity, this is the good we should will people.

In the rest of this essay, we’ll reflect on a few aspects of charitable giving in light of the previous discussion.

Giving in the Bible

From a Biblical perspective, generosity is a non-negotiable. All are called to “excel in the grace of giving,” as Paul exhorts the Corinthian church (2 Cor 8:1-7). Paul attributes to Christ a saying unrecorded in the Gospel: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Caring for widows and orphans is a theme throughout the Old and New Testaments, including notably the epistle of James. James writes that, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). The concepts of “giving” or “caring for” should not be confined strictly to financial and material generosity. Indeed, throughout scripture, material generosity is scarcely separated from personal involvement in the lives of people in need. Additionally, Paul states an important principle for charitable giving in 2 Thessalonians 3:10. “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” Paul writes. “For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.” Paul is not, it should be noted, speaking about widows and orphans in this passage, but about members of the Thessalonian Christian community who could be working but who are not. Our giving should help people in need and encourage the best in them, neither enabling idleness nor paternalistically removing agency from their lives.

Government transfer payments, including foreign aid, are not the same as charitable giving. While taxes and transfer payments are mandated through legislation and laws, charitable giving is the fruit of an individual’s decision and drawn from his own resources. Voluntary giving, in contrast to compulsory giving, gives the individual an opportunity to exercise compassion, act on his conscience, and direct gifts toward projects or causes that accord with his values and away from those that do not. Christ gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan as a model of Christian charity in Luke 10:25-37. Upon finding the man attacked by robbers, the Samaritan shares his own oil and wine, his own donkey, and his own money. The assistance he gives is personal and voluntary. We can hope that the taxes we pay do more good than harm; it is the Christian’s responsibility to steward the rest of his resources to further God’s kingdom.

Good Intentions

In the modern Western world, charitable giving typically means giving money to people or a cause through an intermediary organization like a nonprofit or a church. That gift is given in trust that the intermediary has some expertise or closeness to the problem, ensuring the gift will be stewarded well and reach someone in need. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Charities, like any organization, face many pressures and hazards. These range widely from meeting payroll to mission drift. An excellent marketing department or effective development team does not guarantee that the organization is actually accomplishing its mission to promote human flourishing. The law of unintended consequences refers to outcomes of a particular action that are not intended or foreseen. This law can apply with calamitous results just as equally to the decisions of individuals, businesses, governments, and charities.

The best of intentions do not guarantee a good outcome. As with government-to-government foreign aid, sometimes charitable giving may do more harm than good. The developing world abounds with tragic stories of charitable giving gone wrong. In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, The Nation published an article highlighting some of the ways generosity has twisted—and even captured—the culture of developing nations, especially among the forty-eight nations classified by the United Nations as Least Developed Countries (LDC). The author writes:

Critics have taken to calling these LDCs “NGO Republics”— countries where nongovernmental organizations and wealthy donor entities have created parallel states endlessly richer and, at the end of the day, more powerful than the national governments themselves. Ultimately, it’s the NGOs that decide how these governments will spend the funds and run their countries, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.

Little has changed for the better in the years since that article was published. Both foreign aid and charitable giving, though well-intended, have created unhealthy, paternalistic relationships between countries in the developed and developing world. Not in all circumstances, but in many.

Charitable Giving and Subsidiarity

As a general rule, the most effective charity happens in relationship with individuals. The principle of subsidiarity, which has been developed throughout Christian tradition, is the idea that the needs of people are best met by the closest competent authority—the more local, the better. If a family, local organization, or government can’t solve the problem, a higher authority is obliged to step in for as long as its help is needed.

The principle of subsidiarity, practiced at scale, requires a robust civil society. Civil society, in turn, depends on a vibrant commercial society, and vice versa. Westerners concerned with problems in West Africa, for instance, are not more concerned than West Africans. They don’t know more about their than West Africans do. The goal of our international charity should be to partner with the poor and empower them to tackle their own social challenges. It would be a mark of a country’s success when its nonprofit sector is no longer dominated by foreign entities. The “NGO Republics” should be fighting for their own obsolescence.

Pope John Paul II defined poverty in an illuminating way, not as a lack of money, but as exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange. Cash transfers and material aid can be essential for helping people get through challenging life events—the loss of a spouse, a natural disaster, or an economic downturn, for instance. To achieve longterm, sustainable, and authentic development, however, we must go beyond material comfort to address John Paul’s definition of poverty. An essential means of addressing poverty, in other words, is economic partnership, including entrepreneurship and business. No country will rise out of poverty through charitable giving alone; cash transfers by themselves do not create flourishing communities.

“I have never heard of a country that developed on aid,” Herman Chinery-Hesse, the late Ghanaian entrepreneur, told PovertyCure. “I know about countries that developed on trade and innovation and business. I don’t know of any country that got so much aid and then suddenly became a first-world country.”

From paternalism to partnerships

Chinery-Hesse says the key problem faced by many Africans is that they are disconnected from the global trading network. “The people here are not stupid,” he told PovertyCure. “We’re just disconnected from international trade. The infrastructure that is required for the average, even semi-literate African to start trading with the world doesn’t exist…You are stuck in a hole in a village with all your skills and all your talent and that is just unfortunately the way it is. And that [state of affairs] is what we need to crack.”

Christians are obligated, by the teachings of Christ himself, to have a heart for the poor. It’s essential that they also have a mind for the poor. This means being generous to those who need it while also acquainting themselves with the Judeo-Christian tradition’s rich reflections on what true charity looks like. This includes Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 and his exhortations to “excel in the grace of giving.” It also includes Aquinas’ writings and Maimonides’ ladder: Outside of times of crisis, empowerment and self-sufficiency should be the ultimate goal of any charity worthy of the name. This is what it means to “will the good of the other.”