Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 84 No. 3, 2014.
Review article
The Poor and Poverty in the Holy Scripture: The Phenomenon and (Im)Possibility of Its Idealisation
Ivica Čatić
; Catholic Faculty of Theology in Djakovo, University of Josip Juraj Strossmayer, Djakovo, Croatia
Abstract
The journey of exploration of the topic of the poor and poverty in the Holy Scripture starts on its first pages and with its accounts of creation. After providing a panoramic overview of the main characteristics of each individual group of books, the author focuses on the issue of whether it is possible to detect a theological discourse on poverty as an ideal in the Old Testament. The analysis of the Old Testament texts reveals, primarily, God’s will that the human being should enjoy material abundance, the phenomenon of various kinds of social-economic injustices, and an indication on how to re-introduce order in this area of life – the most radical measure would be to realise the ideal of the jubilee year. The New Testament section of this article begins with some methodological remarks related to the difficulty of detecting the nature of poverty about which individual texts speak, and continues with an analysis of certain expressions in individual books or groups of books. A separate section analyses the Pauline writings, which offer the most detailed insight into the praxis of the early Church. These two sections, which focus on the New Testament writings, are also exploring the possibility to found a theology or a spirituality of poverty (based on them) in the sense of it being an ideal that should be followed. However, both Testaments actually encourage going beyond poverty through the communion of goods, whose sharing within a community signifies the direction of journey towards the ideal.
Keywords
Holy Scripture; Old Testament; New Testament; socio-economic injustice; the poor; poverty; jubilee year; egalitarian justice
Hrčak ID:
129334
URI
Publication date:
4.11.2014.
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