Judging by the testimony of the Book of Acts, the early Christian Church was meant to be a community where, among other things, common ownership of property was the norm. Later many Christians, and not only they, tried to follow the early Christian ideal...
Judging by the testimony of the Book of Acts, the early Christian Church was meant to be a community where, among other things, common ownership of property was the norm. Later many Christians, and not only they, tried to follow the early Christian ideal. Some succeeded better, some worse. But what moved all these people? After all, common ownership of property was practiced by representatives of certain religious-philosophical teachings even in pre-Christian times, not to mention Jewish religious brotherhoods like the Essenes. What prompted these very different people to give up their property in favor of the community?
Very often the main motive turned out to be the striving for ascetic life, which moved not only Christian monks of the Middle Ages and the modern period, but also, for example, the followers of Pythagoras, in whose communities common ownership of property was also, if not obligatory, then apparently quite widespread. Here a person was moved first of all by the desire to simplify his life as much as possible, including its economic and social ties. By renouncing property, the person thereby also renounced society, as well as what bound him to society.
Another case is the renunciation of property in the context of an approaching eschatological and apocalyptic perspective, as happened, for example, among the Qumran Essenes. Here the conviction played its role that the world was doomed to destruction because of its impurity, and that only those belonging to the community of the "pure," by whom the Qumranites of course meant themselves, could be saved. Here the donation of property to the community was equivalent to a contribution to the construction of the only saving ark on earth, for which nothing should be spared.
But could the early Christian Church have been guided by ascetic or apocalyptic motives? Probably not, after all. The matter was not abstinence and not the coming end, but the life of the Kingdom. Here there was another, no less powerful stimulus: the experience itself of life in the Kingdom. For the Kingdom is possible only as giving, as the renunciation of one's separateness, as readiness to share everything one has in order to receive everything in return for the small part one gives. Here to give means not to renounce or lose, but to acquire and receive. This is precisely the case where sharing means multiplying. And common ownership of property turns out here not to be the embodiment of an idea, ascetic or eschatological, but the natural continuation in the untransformed world of that life of the Kingdom which someday, after transformation, will become natural and organic for it.
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4:32 And the multitude of them that believed - Every individual person were of one heart and one soul - Their love, their hopes, their passions joined: and not so much as one - In so great a multitude: this was a necessary consequence of that union of heart; said that aught of the things which he had was his own - It is impossible any one should, while all were of one soul.So long as that truly Christian love continued, they could not but have all things common.