The Apologetic of Generosity
Unreciprocated human generosity defies every reasonable naturalistic explanation. A community that practices such generosity demonstrates the inadequacy of materialistic accounts of human nature.
A excerpt from the forthcoming book by Jamaal Williams and Timothy Paul Jones, In Church as It Is in Heaven (InterVarsity Academic, 2023):
In the earliest centuries of Christianity, generosity was a mark of the Christian life that pointed to a power greater than any human purpose or plan.
According to a second-century writing known as Epistle to Diognetus, the ultimate evidence for the truth of the Christian faith was martyrdom: “Don’t you see them exposed to wild beasts, that they may be persuaded to deny the Lord, and yet they are not overcome? … This doesn’t seem to be a human work, does it? This is the power of God, and these are evidences of his presence.” But what about Christians who never have the opportunity to prove the truth of the faith through martyrdom?
That’s where generosity comes in.
Sacrificial Giving as Rehearsal for Martyrdom
According to the author of this ancient epistle, generosity is an apologetic for God’s truth. That’s because Christian generosity is a living imitation of the sacrificial love that God revealed through the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ. This pattern of giving includes caring for the physical needs of one’s neighbors, but it isn’t limited to the giving of goods or money. It includes the ways that a Christian uses power and privilege too. In the words of Epistle to Diognetus, “happiness is not a matter … of ruling over one’s neighbors, desiring to have supremacy over those that are weaker, or possessing wealth and using force.” Hoarding of wealth and lording of power are, according to the author of this ancient epistle, “alien to the greatness” that belongs to God because such practices do not reflect God’s self-giving love.
Sacrificial giving is, in some sense, a rehearsal for martyrdom that points to the self-giving nature of God. Sharing power, giving freely to the poor, tending the sick, caring for the incarcerated—all of these are habits that no purely natural category is able to explain.
I am not suggesting, of course, that everyone who practices unreciprocated generosity is a Christian. There are, after all, plenty of philanthropic atheists! What I am contending is that no one would pursue such generosity unless there is more to the cosmos than mere matter and naturalistic causes. Certainly, there would be no communities practicing radical generosity together.
What the Argument from Generosity Can—and Can’t—Accomplish
This argument from generosity doesn’t get us all the way to the truth of the gospel, but it does help us to falsify the secular claim that everything in our experience is explainable on the basis of naturalistic evolution. Unreciprocated human generosity defies every reasonable naturalistic explanation. And thus, for early Christians, the church’s acts of generosity functioned as miniature martyrdoms that provided the world with living evidence for the truth of the gospel.
They still can, and they still do.