![]() © 2010 by the Theology of Work Project, Inc. Based on a work at You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work), and remix (to adapt the work) for non-commercial use only, under the condition that you must attribute the work to the Theology of Work Project, Inc., but not in any way that suggests that it endorses you or your use of the work. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Theology of Work Project Online Materials by Theology of Work Project, Inc. Finally, the idleness of Christians appears to have given the church a bad name in the pagan community.Īdopted by the Theology of Work Project Board July 27, 2010. It is equally clear that Paul is disturbed when people take advantage of the generosity of others in the church. Responsible Christian living embraces work, even the hard work of a first-century manual laborer. People were using some aspect of Christ’s teaching-whether it was his second coming, or his commission to evangelize the world, or his command for radical sharing in the community-to justify their idleness. First, we may note that the views above share a common, but false, supposition-namely, Christ’s coming into the world has radically diminished the value of everyday labor. We can, however, move forward even in the absence of complete certainty about what was going on to cause the problem of idleness in Thessalonica. for the third time this year) and the global context (e.g., the question of whether some foreign aid does more harm than good). And questions of unhelpful dependence on the charity of others arise both in the local context (e.g., pastors who are asked to give money to a man whose mother died. Many people today undervalue everyday work because “Jesus is coming soon, and everything is going to burn up anyway.” Plenty of Christian workers justify substandard performance because their “real” purpose in the workplace is to evangelize their co-workers. They all have something in the letters to support them, and it is not hard to see modern analogies in the modern church. It is difficult to choose between these different reconstructions. ![]() The injunction for Christians to care for one another formed a ready pretext for them to continue in this parasitic lifestyle. ![]() They discovered that life as the client of a rich patron was significantly easier than life as a laborer slogging out a day’s work. Some manual laborers were unemployed (whether through laziness, persecution, or general economic malaise) and had become dependent on the charity of others in the church.
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