This Is Our City

"He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty" (Luke 1). She caught the vision of revival that Jesus had when he proclaimed in his first sermon: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor" (Luke 4). So revival is now all about the redistribution of wealth? Where in the gospels did Jesus fill the hungry with the good things of this world, clothes, money, a supply of free food, transportation and clean drinking water? Or did He say that “the kingdom of God is not about eating and drinking” or “don’t worry about what you shall wear” and “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again”. What did Jesus say when the disciples complained that a woman had poured perfume over Him worth a years wages and could have been sold giving the money to the poor? “The poor you will always have with you”. This reinterpretation of Jesus message is a Marxist/leninist fantasy.

Jason, if you go to the sourjourner site and search for "gospel of scarcity" you will get this : "Jubilee on Wall Street: Reimagining God's Vision in Action Originally Posted: 08/31/2011 - 4:39pm | Type: Blog " it was a I cried because it was a reminder that we still have a choice. We can live by the gospel of scarcity or we can live by the gospel of abundance. We can live as if life is a crap shoot or we can live ..." But if you follow the link to the article that sentence isn't there. There is a missing paragraph in the article. The sentence may have been there and the web manager erased it. But I have seen the phrases "gospel of scarcity" and "gospel of abundance" in Wallis' books too. You have to read a lot of Wallis to get what he means by those phrases, which I have and I think my explanations are accurate. However, Wallis seems to be ashamed of the phrases now. He hasn't changed his mind. He is very much opposed to the science of economics and makes that very clear.

Jason, I got them directly from his web site years ago. Maybe he is embarrassed by those words and is trying to hide his socialism.

Passion is fine, but to paraphrase Paul, zeal should be tempered by knowledge. I realize that most people care about emotions and nothing else, but that only belies their assumption that no objective truth is possible. The science of economics contains many important truths about how to help the poor that no amount of passion will erase, such as destroying the wealthy will only make everyone poorer without helping the poor. Of course Wallis, founder of Sojourners, demands that people abandon the “gospel of scarcity” (his term for economic science) and embrace the “gospel of abundance” (his euphemism for socialism).