Tithing Not a Substitute for Heart Service
Let us not be confused over the relationship of the material recognition to the spiritual blessing. Tithing does not work automatically in producing spiritual blessing. There are no mechanical means of sanctification. It is not a substitute for heart service, a self-acting means of grace. But the Bible does teach that tithing in the right spirit, as an expression of recognized stewardship, is a means of grace. Grace comes through faith; faith is strengthened through obedience, and tithing is an expression of obedience. The unselfish use of our substance in a course indicated by God, and for His sake, brings His approval and benediction.
Tithing as an expression of recognized stewardship represents thanksgiving on the one hand and self-examination on the other, and cannot prove other than a powerful incentive to holy living. It brings a spiritual blessing when it is a conscious endeavor on the part of the tither to do what he believes to be pleasing to God. If rendered as a spiritual worship, a thankful acknowledgment of God's gracious provision, and an adoring sense of God's ownership both of the one tenth and also of the nine tenths, it becomes a renewal of consecration, and pours into the life the expression of divine favor, sanctifying power, and grace.
One ever-present danger is to regard the means of grace as a power in itself to sanctify the worshiper. We may tithe ever so scrupulously, and leave undone the weightier matters. We are prone to think that if we give the exact proportion indicated that is all that is necessary. Such a vision tempts to self-complacency and misjudging of others. He who depends on money for his spiritual grace does not differ radically from Simon Magus. We may pay with a mercenary motive, thinking it will increase our income; self-righteously, to have the glory of man; legalistically, grudgingly, and of necessity, because we think we must, afraid of blight from disobedience; or carelessly and perfunctorily.
Any form of service is exposed to the same temptation and may prove the occasion for spiritual pride and condemnation. None of the appointed means of grace will work without cooperation on the part of the man himself. To illustrate with respect to prayer, the Word, and the Lord's Supper: It is not much speaking in prayer, but personal communion of the soul with God that is essential. As to the Word, Paul says: "The word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it" (Heb. 4:2). Again, if the Lord's Supper is not partaken of worthily it is positively injurious. No religious act is efficacious if the heart is not right.
We continue now with the historical tracing of stewardship. Leaping the intervening years between Malacni and Jesus' earthly sojourn, we find that the Saviour approved the validity of the tithe. As with the Sabbath, He came not to abolish but rightly to interpret its provisions. The writers of the New Testament, and all the early Christians as well as the contemporary Jews, understood tithing and paid tithe. For two thousand years this principle had been so firmly fixed that it had become a habit of the Jewish race. In Matthew 22 Christ clearly confirms this principle of rendering to Caesar the taxes that are his due, and to God His tithe.
Failure of the Pharisees
The Pharisees were the most punctilious of the cults, as well as the most bitter foes of the Master. He rebuked scores of their nefarious practices. Their hypocrisies called forth from Jesus many a condemnation and woe. But there was one thing He commended—their payment of tithe. Thus we read it in connection with one of His woes in Luke 11:42: "Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
"Ought" constitutes a moral obligation. The failure of the Pharisees was a failure to conceive of the one tenth as the acknowledgment of total surrender of all possessions and a pledge of godly life, of mercy, and of justice. Their lives lacked loyalty and love toward God, and were devoid of concern for humanity. They were narrow, hard, and barren of sympathy, long on tithe and short on judgment and love. So it is possible to pay tithe and at the same time be a Pharisee and a hypocrite. The church today is inclined, on the contrary, to be long on judgment and love and short on tithe. It is not enough to say we love the helpless heathen and lament the misfortune that they do not know about Christ. It is the right sort of tithing that we want, springing from a heart of love—the perfect combination. Evangelistic fervor and faithful tithing always go hand in hand.
Early Church Recognized God's Ownership
Reference to Pentecost was made in the preceding study, hence brevity here. But one of the most glorious results of Pentecost was the attainment of the divine ideal of ownership as stewardship. Christ's followers were entrusted with the "great commission" of spreading abroad the gospel, and there were two notable results—a consuming passion to testify for Jesus and an unswerving stewardship of material possessions. For the first time since the dawn of Creation the angels looked down upon a church that accepted in full the divine principle of God's ownership of all property— that it is held only in trust. Was it not an earnest of the conditions of the latter-day Pentecost, when the possessions of the remnant will be dedicated to finish the world task as God again assumes His rightful place as Owner, Upholder, and Redeemer of all?
What is needed is the steadfast operation of this principle at all times and under all conditions. It is not difficult to stir emotions and stimulate giving by recounting stories of human needs. But that is merely using emotional forces—common fire. Remove the storyteller, the emergency, the personality, and the flow of money ceases. But under the sway of the royal principle of stewardship it will flow on unceasingly, for it becomes the personal acknowledgment of an individual relationship between the soul and God. This is not subject to change or dependent upon human exhortation and stimulation. Shall we not shift to this sure basis?
And now we turn to the blighting story of apostasy during the centuries of the Christian Era. It is true that in the early church tithing was the standard for centuries. The early Church Fathers —Ire-naeus, Cyprian, Chrysostom, and even Augustine—all declared that one tenth was the portion due to God. So also did Clement and Tertullian, as their writings disclose. Eight great church councils ordered all Christians to pay tithe. We find traces of the recognition of the principle among the Waldenses, and Luther and Calvin urgently advocated it. But a careful reading of church history shows just how the great apostasy included in its scope the marked falling away from this basic principle of God's ownership and man's stewardship.
Origin of Pagan Conception of Human Ownership
About A.D. 323, after nearly three centuries of pagan persecution of the Christians, the Roman Emperor, Constantine, was accepted as a Christian, and Christianity was officially recognized by the empire. Then came compromise, perversion, and the tragedy of the Dark Ages. Christendom was loaded down with pagan ethics, including the pagan idea of property ownership. This pagan conception of human ownership remained forever fixed and legally established as the empire became professedly Christian. So, the doctrine of human ownership, as commonly defined in the jurisprudence of the nations of the West, is pagan both in origin and in intent.
In this way the Christian principle of stewardship was submerged by the pervasive heathenism. False concepts permeated. They passed into all Christian institutions and usage, and thus the tragic centuries of the Middle Ages came to be. It was the price paid for the official recognition of the church by the empire. And what a price!
But let us trace this malign principle to its inception. There are just these two theories of ownership—pagan and divine, or the jungle law and the Christian principle. Paganism teaches that man is the absolute owner of all he can get; Christianity teaches that we own nothing in our own right. Paganism says, Use what you have as you please; Christianity says, Use it as God wants. Paganism says, The supreme purpose of life is to get; Christianity says, The supreme objective is to give. The ideal of paganism is acquisition; of Christianity, contribution. The first looks upon life as a grab bag; the second views it as a priceless opportunity for service. They are as basically opposite as black and white. The first has led to slavery, wars of conquest, selfishness, and oppression; the second leads to peace, prosperity, and blessedness.
In the jungle, men struggle for an existence against the forces of nature and the beasts of the forest. They fight for things. They know no law but to get and to keep. The primitive pagan conception was that the best title to property was conquest, and that ownership depended upon physical ability to get and to hold it personally. This became the custom of the people and in time was brought into pagan Rome's civil law, which, as we have seen, was passed in turn to our modern civilization. The barbarian hordes o£ northern Europe overran the Roman Empire and spiked its massive machinery. But it simply resulted in slowly spreading among the northern tribes the wider understanding of the principles of Roman law.
Such is the origin of the common law of Europe. The idea of property ownership remained pagan, embodied in law. Indeed the word property is from propius— that which is "proper to me," like my own proper name, mine exclusively. I am its absolute owner, none hindering. In fact, the root idea of legal ownership is not so much "control" as "hindrance," the proof of ownership lying not so much in enjoying one's own possession as in excluding others from using or enjoying it. While the fact of ownership no longer depends on actual physical prowess, nevertheless the underlying pagan meaning of ownership remains unchanged.
Now look at another angle of the question. The fogs and mists of paganism embrace thinking of the Deity in terms of impersonality, with idolatry as its inevitable
accompaniment. To the Christian the Deity is not a philosophical concept, but a personal, living Being. To the pagan Roman, God was universal reason, natural law, creative force, eternal energy, a divine essence —but not a person. And God without personality cannot own anything. Human ownership was therefore the logical and necessary attitude of the pagan, because God, to his mind, was not personal but impersonal.
Thus the outstanding difference between the two concepts lies in recognition of the personal God and His kingdom, and our stewardship of life. This gross perversion was introduced into Roman law through the philosophy of the Stoic lawyers, who molded the law of the empire. They exalted and inwrought the idea of "divine nature," teaching that the universe is simply pervaded by an all-present being. They deified nature. Thinking of God as law, therefore as impersonal, they made man the logical source of ownership and dominion. And this pagan conception accepted by the papacy was in the process of time transmitted to the popular Protestant churches. Such is its pedigree. It has blurred the whole relationship of man to God, sweeping through civilization like a devastating flood of error.
Not Renunciation but Dedication
Mark for a moment its havoc upon the Roman Catholic Church. When this doctrine of human ownership obscured the divine principle of man's stewardship, asceticism was introduced as a palliative for the resultant evil. Teaching that the material world was evil, the spiritual-minded concluded that one must renounce it, dress in rags, and withdraw as a hermit. So Thomas
a Kempis said, "The greatest saints avoid the company of men as much as they can, and live to God in secret." The pious ascetics, who could ill be spared from society, fled away from the riches of the world and prayed apart while evil men dominated the people.
But the ascetics were simply adding to the problems. The social body was robbed of its most godly men, and moral corruption became rampant. The confusion was over property regarded as an earthly treasure instead of a heavenly trust. If ownership in the pagan sense were true, asceticism would be logical, for the sin of covetousness is rooted deep in the human heart. How else could man escape from the riches that clog the higher life save through poverty? So reasoned the Roman Catholic ascetic. But it is not renunciation but dedication that God wants.
In Buddhism and Hinduism renunciation of home, friends, and riches are set forth as a means of coming into communion with God. It is a basic principle of heathenism. The story of Buddha presents merely a conspicuous attempt to gain merit. The Hindu ascetic sits under the blazing sun, unshaded from its burning rays, skin unprotected save by a loincloth, with nothing before him but a beggar's bowl, his arm upraised until it has grown into immovable deformity—such is the human doctrine of renunciation. The records of the Middle Ages are filled with accounts of men and women who renounced all and took the vow of poverty to follow Jesus—a prepossession strongly entrenched even in many professed Christian minds today.
Covetousness and Greed Corrupted the Church
Again, in Catholicism property was "devoted" to the church through men governed by the philosophy that it actually belonged to them. The result was that the church became enriched by vast estates of which it assumed the prerogative of proud possessor and lord. And as with individuals, covetousness and greed corrupted her heart, which all her individual and isolated acts of asceticism had no power to heal. Begging churches and mendicant priests were among the inevitable results. The constant attitude of beggary and mendicancy has characterized all the religions of the world except the Jewish and the pure Christian faith. The "holy" men of India are beggars. And when Christianity departs from the true pattern it degenerates to the same level. The political effect upon society was feudalism, that system of polity prevailing in Europe during the Middle Ages, based on the relation of lord and vassal, for the human doctrine of sovereignty involves ownership not only of land but of people. The Teutonic tribes, sweeping Rome, impressed their own ideas of allegiance upon the vanquished. Their conquering armies compelled their acceptance. In return for vassaldom they promised protection. In the course of time Central and Northern Europe were divided into petty lordships based on this idea. So, sovereignty became identified with ownership. In theory all land belonged to the king. Under him reigned the feudal lords.
This is the basis of all autocracy. Pen can never portray nor tongue recite the train of woes that have followed the acceptance of the pagan conception of ownership and its corollaries throughout Christendom. What tragedies, wars, and bloodshed might have been averted had not the great apostasy of the Church of Rome on stewardship come into being! So grossly was the principle and spirit of tithe paying perverted that even under these conditions it was later wrought into civil code, first in France and then in England, for legal support of the church. Men were imprisoned and their goods seized because they refused to pay enforced "tithe."
Modern socialism is at bottom a protest against the hangovers of decadent feudalism. It is a futile attempt to give a satisfying conception of human brotherhood without a recognition of our stewardship relation to God, the Father of all. The nominal Protestant churches failed to reinstate this basic principle, so others with partial and distorted views have caught the ears of multitudes. The complete truth of the threefold Advent message contains the only real answer to every religious departure and social vagary that afflicts mankind today. Thank God for His goodness to men, and the honor bestowed upon the remnant church through glimpsing His will as related to man, whom He created.
One of the greatest tasks of the hour is to bring complete emancipation to the remnant church from the pago-papal ideas of ownership in vogue in the world about us. The world gets along on friendly terms with every sort of philosophy except that of the one Eternal Person to whom we all are accountable. The idea of human ownership is one of the most subtle and universal temptations. The concept of the Advent people recognizes that the fact of Creation proclaims Jehovah as lord and owner of all. It pledges our fidelity to Him. Modernism's impersonal god of universal reason or cosmic force is not our God.
Stewardship, running through the Bible like a golden thread from Genesis to Revelation, is one of God's acid tests to His remnant people. Its foundations are as sure as the bases for the moral law, for they are built upon relationships that cannot be overthrown as long as Creator and creature exist. They are universal in their obligation; eternal, immutable, and unchangeable in their nature; as old as the race; reaffirmed under the Mosaic economy; endorsed by Jesus; taught by the apostles; observed by apostolic Christians for centuries. They have been restored to the remnant church to have full sway over the lives of a people turned fully into "the faith which was once delivered unto the saints."
(To be continued)