Regarding all this, a case in point is a book, originally written in 1977 by Ronald J. Sider and called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It was published by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Downer’s Grove, Illinois. I understand this book has gone through several printings and some of the later ones are not quite as left-leaning as the earlier printings. I wonder, did some folks catch on and complain and so the publisher decided to tone it down a bit? Nonetheless, something like 350,000 copies of the earlier left-leaning printings still went out to a mostly evangelical audience. In the copy I have, which is the 1977 printing, Mr. Sider is quite hard on anyone that didn’t immediately sell all that he had over and above the bare subsistence level and give it away to the poor.
On pages 75-76 he wrote about rulers cheating the poor. What else is new? Surely this isn’t “news” to Mr. Sider. This has gone on in every culture and in every century of human history. It’s not a peculiarly American problem. On page 76 he wrote about the “God of the poor” as though God were not God to anyone but the poor. Somehow you get the impression from Sider’s comments that no one but the poor deserved to have God be concerned about them. In John’s Gospel, in chapter 3, we are told that God loved the world, not just the poor that happened to be in it.
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