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It may be surprising to most people that the word “religion”
is hardly ever used in the Christian Bible.
One place it is used is in the highly practical letter of James. Here we find these words:
Religion that God our Father
accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in
their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)
In this post, I will focus on the way Christians from the
beginning were people who looked after orphans in their distress.
Jesus Christ and
his first followers lived in the context of the Roman Empire. However, they lived within a Jewish enclave
of that empire, where many laws, traditions and ways of living continued to be
practiced even if they were not universally shared. When the first followers were dispersed
throughout various pockets of the Roman Empire, they may have found a Jewish
synagogue or a small worshipping community of Jews by a river side (see Acts 16:13),
but Greco-Roman patterns and ethics dominated all of society.
Greco-Roman
attitudes regarding the value and status of women, children and slaves affected
their everyday interactions with each other and colored their sense of justice
as well. Because infants and children were
not valued, it was common for them to be abandoned at birth if the parents did
not want to raise them. Such children
either died of cold or hunger or were seized by slave traders who would exploit
them. Christians began to rescue and embrace these infants, raising them with “the
aid of the community fund.” [1]
Apostolic
Constitutions (eight treatises dated from 375 to 380 (Book IV) Section 1. On
Helping the Poor refer to the practice within the church for members to adopt
and raise any Christian child whose parents had lost their lives whether by
martyrdom or natural causes. Orphanages
as an institution began to be opened in the East at the same time as St. Basil
was founding hospitals in the early fourth century.
A prominent
Christian who cared for children in orphanages was George Muller, a German-born
missionary who came to London to evangelize Jews. Eventually he settled in Bristol at a time
when a cholera epidemic was decimating the population. So many children were left without parents
that Muller took action and started Orphan Homes. Eventually there were five of them, without
any fundraising or asking for money. Muller
strongly believed that the Lord would provide financially without his approaching
any individuals or groups. In all over 10,000 children were cared for in Muller’s
homes. [2]
Christian missions
overseas have also often focused on the need to provide care for vulnerable
orphans. This has taken various forms,
including adoption (for example, the cases of missionaries Amy Carmichael and Gladys
Aylward in India and China, respectively), establishing orphanages, and more
recently by organizing and supporting foster care within the child’s own
community (such as is done by Visionledd in African nations ravaged by
AIDS).
As I was
researching orphan care, one of the things that popped up in my browser search
was a news story about “the first atheist orphanage.” A group of humanists announced in the
February 2015 article that they would open the first atheist orphanage and
would rely on crowd funding. I suppose
this really is newsworthy because it admits that faith has motivated the vast
majority of homes for orphans.
Furthermore, it shows that through all the years of human history it has
taken thousands of years before someone of no religion felt inclined to launch
such an initiative.
[1] Will Durant, Caesar
and Christ (1944), p. 598; also E. Gibbon, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1900), p. 480.
[2] See www.Muller.org
[3] See the full article at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-first-atheist-orphanage-just-launched-a-crowdfunding-campaign
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