Christianity has often understood the death of Jesus on the cross
as the sole means for forgiveness of sin. Despite this tradition,
David Downs traces the early and sustained presence of yet another
means by which Christians imagined atonement for sin: merciful care
for the poor. In Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early
Christianity , Downs begins by considering the economic context of
almsgiving in the Greco-Roman world, a context in which the
overwhelming reality of poverty cultivated the formation of
relationships of reciprocity and solidarity. Downs then provides
detailed examinations of almsgiving and the rewards associated with
it in the Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and the New
Testament. He then attends to early Christian texts and authors in
which a theology of atoning almsgiving is developedâ 2 Clement ,
the Didache , the Epistle of Barnabas , Polycarp, Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, and Cyprian. In this historical and theological
reconstruction, Downs outlines the emergence of a model for the
atonement of sin in Christian literature of the first three
centuries of the Common Era, namely, atoning almsgiving, or the
notion that providing material assistance to the needy cleanses or
covers sin. Downs shows that early Christian advocacy of
almsgiving's atoning power is located in an ancient economic
context in which fiscal and social relationships were deeply
interconnected. Within this context, the concept of atoning
almsgiving developed in large part as a result of nascent Christian
engagement with scriptural traditions that present care for the
poor as having the potential to secure future reward, including
heavenly merit and even the cleansing of sin, for those who
practice mercy. Downs thus reveals how sin and its solution were
socially and ecclesiologically embodied, a vision that frequently
contrasted with disregard for the social body, and the bodies of
the poor, in Docetic and Gnostic Christianity. Alms , in the end,
illuminates the challenge of reading Scripture with the early
church, for numerous patristic witnesses held together the
conviction that salvation and atonement for sin come through the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the affirmation that the
practice of mercifully caring for the needy cleanses or covers sin.
Perhaps the ancient Christian integration of charity, reward, and
atonement has the potential to reshape contemporary Christian
traditions in which those spheres are separated.
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