Breadline outside a Catholic Worker hospitality house on Mott Street, New York City, circa 1938. Photograph: Raynor Memorial Libraries Special Collections and University Archives

Throughout much of the ancient Near East, a certain lack of material goods was hardly a distinguishing characteristic—almost everyone lived on the margins of subsistence. And so poverty was more commonly viewed as a social condition than an economic one, linked to the experience of being weak, dependent, inferior—of being oppressed. The Jewish people knew this condition; from their struggles with the Philistines and Canaanite tribes, their acquaintance with the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Rome, they knew firsthand and regularly the experience of being humbled.

The Old Testament, however, offers three views of poverty: The first is the secular wisdom that indigence is a consequence of laziness or foolish behavior. The second is a theological rendering of poverty as divine retribution, God’s punishment of Israel for transgressions against the Covenant. And the third view recognizes the inadequacy of the first two. It grows from the observation that many unrighteous and unjust people make out fairly well in this world, while many virtuous and principled people suffer to their graves. In this way, the Israelites came to see poverty as a scandal—as a condition that ought not to be.

Resistance to poverty in the Old Testament takes chiefly two forms. There is alms-giving to the exile, the widow, and the orphan—the marginalized, in other words, in the Israelites’ midst. And there is prayer and lamentation to God to relieve and assist the poor. In this view, God has a special attachment to the poor and measures the faith of others by how they are treated.

Members of the early Christian communities also were not among the elites of their societies. They were, in the main, small farmers, urban tradespeople—poor in the sense that the majority of them were never far from economic disaster brought on by drought, illness, war.

In the Acts of the Apostles, there are scenes of the early Church struggling with how to think about material possessions. Barnabas is praised for selling a piece of property and placing the proceeds at the feet of Peter, to be distributed to others in the community as needs arise. His example is contrasted with the actions of Ananias and Sapphira, the couple who sell their property and come before Peter with part of the proceeds but keep a little back for themselves. As God was wont to do in those days, he struck Ananias and Sapphira dead. We can be glad that God has learned patience with us as the years have gone on.

There are more instances of the Church finding its way with respect to the poor. In several letters, Paul appeals to gentile communities for contributions that he can bring back to help the poorer community of Jerusalem. And in Corinth, we find him preaching about the scandal of the rich who celebrate the Eucharist apart from the poor; Paul excoriates the rich for not understanding the necessary unity of the Eucharistic assembly that shares in the one bread and one cup. James, in his letter, scolds a Christian community for overlooking its poorer members while fawning over a man “with gold rings.”

The constant refrain in the New Testament texts is not a call for political reform or new economic structures; for the Christian community in the Roman Empire, these were not realistic options. Rather, it is the idea that works of mercy must extend beyond the borders of one’s group—gentile Christians have obligations to Jewish Christians, and vice versa—and that they must extend beyond one’s religious group, as well. In short, as Christians began to move out into the wider society in the cities of the empire, “thy neighbor” became anyone in need.

Later Christians—hermits, theologians, monks, mendicants, mystics, social reformers, spiritual writers— they’ve all added their voices to this discussion of poverty within the Christian tradition. At times, they’ve praised it as a virtue.

Poverty has elicited many kinds of reactions in part because it refers to different realities. Theologically, the fundamental reality of poverty is that of creatureliness. To be human is to be poor. This is the poverty of finitude: Not one of us willed ourselves into existence, and none of us can sustain our existence. To be a creature is to be, in a word, contingent. Hard as it is for us to swallow, we are simply unnecessary.

None of us need be, yet we are. We have been brought into life by a Creator God, and Christians believe that the Creator’s will is loving and purposeful. That’s the Christian realization of the human condition. It does not lead to despair. It makes us aware that everything that exists, including ourselves, including our enemies, is a grace.

But there are other forms of poverty. The Catholic Church’s teaching since at least the time of John XXIII (1958–63) has consistently acknowledged that human rights exist not only in civil and political life—the right to peaceful assembly, to due process of law, to religious expression—but also in economic and social life. There is a right to food, to healthcare, to shelter, to a safe environment, to a basic education.

This is a lesson of Catholicism: The test of a good community is not, How well are those at the top doing? The test is always, How well are those at the bottom faring? Can people find work that provides a living wage? Is there an adequate safety net for those who are too old or too young, who are chronically ill or temporarily incapacitated? As James indicated in his letter, we are only as good a community as we are hospitable, generous, and decent to the poor among us.

But there is also spiritual poverty in our world. One may have material well-being and yet suffer from a profound sense of isolation from community, from friendship, from intimacy and love. There are those unfortunate people in our midst who are plagued by mental and emotional suffering, for whom the challenge of rising from bed is a daily struggle with depression, anxiety, grief, despair.

I’ve always found interesting the sermon of St. John Chrysostom on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, a reflection on the affluent who are truly poor. There are people abounding in wealth but starving in virtue. There are people living in easy comfort who find no meaning amidst their luxury. Christians ought to be among the first to recognize the signs of spiritual poverty in their own lives as well as in the lives of others—and must remember that works of mercy are spiritual as well as material.

Yet another distinction to bear in mind when thinking about poverty is the difference between relative and absolute poverty. Tattered and shrunken as it may be, the safety net in most economically developed countries is meant to raise all people above the level of absolute poverty. The World Bank has put a dollar figure on absolute poverty in the poorest nations of the globe. It sets the standard at $1.25 per person per day. The United States sets its poverty standard, according to recent figures, at about $15.15 per adult per day.

Relative poverty is difficult to define. It is determined by social context, and it is most commonly described by economists and others as the percentage of a population that has less than a certain proportion of their society’s median income—for example, less than 50 percent. Relative poverty is a way of talking about inequality. It’s not about survival but about whether a person is able to effectively participate in the life of society.

This is not a new idea. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), defined poverty as the lack of “whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people . . . to be without.”

So, not having a telephone may not always have seemed a harsh reality. But in our culture, when people presume they should be able to reach you, and they can’t, you become marginalized. (Try getting a job without a phone.) You become ineffective.

An argument has been made that charity is equivalent to pulling drowning people out of a river, while justice goes upstream to find out why people are falling into the river in the first place, and builds a bridge. Another way to think about this is to see these two virtues—and they are both virtues, charity and justice—in the way Benedict XVI did in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Benedict described the work of justice as “the institutional path—we might also call it the political path—of charity.” It is, he said, “no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly.” In other words, justice can be understood as the political expression of charity, the application of charity to the institutional and structural aspects of our life as a society.

These are two complementary and necessary moments in the response of Christians to the evil of poverty. Philanthropy and personal involvement are vitally important, as disciples follow in the way of the Lord Jesus. But preventing future and further poverty through necessary social reform is also a work of neighbor love. Indeed, it may be the best way to assist the distant neighbor whom we will never meet face to face.

Kenneth Himes, OFM, is an associate professor in Boston College’s theology department and the author of Christianity and the Political Order: Conflict, Cooptation, and Cooperation (2013). His essay is drawn from a talk sponsored by the Church in the 21st Century Center and delivered in Gasson 100 September 23, on “The Poor: What Did Jesus Preach? What Does the Church Teach?”