One more excerpt from the first half of Miroslav Volf's "Free of Charge". This one comes as a lengthy outtake - in fact, it's a complete section of a chapter. If I were to be so bold and daring, I might suggest that if you get nothing else out of this book beyond this section, you'd be much further along than you were before in life. The entire first half of the book is devoted to the concept of giving and just sings much of Paul's Corinthian letters in a new and refreshing way. I'm just about done with the second half, which focuses on forgiveness. It doesn't lack for anything that the first half has. Look for a few excerpts of that next week. Beyond that, I think it's a given that I've got to add Volf's "Exclusion and Embrace" on my reading list beyond the summer.
God of Abundance (pgs. 105-107)
Limited resources are one of the reasons we don't give. No matter how much we have, our resources are finite, and we ourselves, fragile. Take our amenities away and we feel diminished. Take food and shelter away, and we languish and even die. To care well for ourselves and those entrusted to us, we seek to acquire and keep rather than to give away. To give, we must overcome a hard-wired selfishness born partly of our inescapable finitude. And that's where the God who gives abundantly comes in. Such a God makes giving possible. But how?God doesn't just give; God "scatters abroad", writes the apostle Paul, echoing the psalmist (2 Corinthians 9:9). The image of the God who strews liberally may mislead us to conclude that God has given to the Corinthians in profuse abundance, so they could give to those less fortunate. After all, didn't the Apostle write about their receiving "every blessing in abundance," about "always having enough of everything", of being "enriched in every way" (vv. 8-11)?
But that's all about what God is able to do for them, not what God has already done. The Corinthian believers were poor, and the Apostle knew it. The Macedonian believers who also contributed to his collection for the Jerusalem poor were even worse off. When they gave, they were in the midst of a "severe ordeal of affliction" and plagued by "extreme poverty" (2 Corinthians 8:2) God seems to give measly gifts, but the Apostle and the psalmist wrote about God "scattering abroad"!!? A cynic may conclude that the talk about God's abundant giving is just a piece of religious ideology designed to suck the blood of the poor.
Most of us are concerned primarily with the things that God gives - with necessities that millions of people lack or with luxuries in which a few wallow. Such gift items are important for the simple reason taht so many people in our world don't have sufficient food, water, clothing, and shelter. and they are important because they are part of God's blessing, intended for our good and our enjoyment. So if God's resources are inexhaustible, why doesn't God give more?
The relationship between God as giver and the growing poverty in the world is a complicated one that lies beyond the scope of this book. We should keep two things in mind, however. First, God doesn't just give so that we can have and enjoy but so that we can pass gifts along to others. As we have seen in previous chapters, we are given to so we can be givers, not just recipients. Second, what's primarily at issue is not why God doesn't give more, but why we don't pass on to the needy what we already have. At the current levels of economic productivity, there is enough "stuff" around that no one need go hungry and everyone's basic needs can be met. Yet they are not. We pass too little on. If Christians in the United States alone gave 10 percent of their income, the problem of world hunger could be solved. But those of us who have tend to squander or hoard and what we do pass on its often misappropriated by middlemen. No, it's not clear that increasing the amount of things given by God would actually help.
We want God to multiple the loaves and fish to feed the multitudes, as Jesus did in the Gospels. But the Apostle suggested that we'll be able to feed the multitudes if we'd let God change how we think about the loaves and fish we already have. Consider the extraordinary claim he made about Macedonian believers: Their "extreme poverty ... overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part" (2 Corinthians 8:2). The apostle knew, of course, that you can't give what you don't have. They gave "according to their means, and even beyond their means" (v. 3), no more than that. But he also believed that we don't ahve to have an excess of goods in order to give.
We can be poor and afflicted - indeed, we can be extremely poor and severely afflicted - and still give. We can be affluent and secure - indeed, we can be opulent and bursting with power - and still not give. Wealth doesn't make us givers; poverty can't prevent us from being givers. The poor can give a kind word, a sympathetic ear, or a helping hand. But they can also share food, clothing, shelter, and money - and they generally do it in greater proportion to their means than the wealthy do.
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