It is important that we examine what the Scripture says the approaches of matters about today's poverty and poor people. The text in the Bible which deals with the poverty, clearly are deeply concerned with historical, political, and economical backgr...
It is important that we examine what the Scripture says the approaches of matters about today's poverty and poor people. The text in the Bible which deals with the poverty, clearly are deeply concerned with historical, political, and economical backgrounds. Therefore, I am going to study how to understand the poverty in the Old and New Testaments. By doing so, we can rightly understand the conception of the poverty shown in the Bible. Simultaneously, we can reconfirm the meaning of true poverty mentioned on St. Luke's Beatitudes(Lk. 6,20b). These are the goal of my treatise.
In the first chapter, I researched the ambiguity about the word,"poverty", to understand the major word, "poverty".
In the second chapter, I looked over the poor how to appear historically through the economical and social consideration of Israel at that time. That is, I inquired it at the starting point of Cannaanite settlement, the period of Imperial rule and excilic life. And then I investigated the poor people by means of the Pentateuch, the Prophetic book, the Wisdom literature and the Psalms.
In the third chapter, I examined the situation the poor people faced in Jesus' age through the economical and social consideration in His time. And I studied the poverty mentioned in post-judaism, the Gospel and St. Paul's letters. Finally, at the end of the third chapter, I inspected the colligation of Biblical view and theological understanding with relation to the poverty.
In the forth chapter, I looked into the poverty given in the Beatitudes. Above all, I studied the position of St. Luke's living and what the poor who St. Luke says mean, and the concrete message about the poor people through the text in the Bible. And, to examine the meaning of poverty in Lk. 6,20b, through a comparative research with Matthew 5,3, parallel phrase with this phrase. I took it concrete shape the meaning of the poor, the first Proclamation of the Beatitudes. And then I concluded as producing the true sense through Biblical exegesis.
We Christians who live filled with individualism should escape from the adhesion of material and live in spiritual poverty as well as in material one for the kingdom of God and the poor. In other words, we ourselves share riches of this world which are undertaken from God, the Creator and Supreme Being community of the Early Church practiced. Moreover, we ourselves recognize that we don't have anything to be proud of before God, trust wholly the God and pursue His kingdom first of all. By doing this, the Church is not for the poor, but it will have the first step to live as the church of the poor people.