In the mid-nineteenth century a young minister fell to thinking about the church-going businessmen of his acquaintance. All too often Samuel Harris found them “full of forethought and anxious calculation to realize the utmost of worldly acquisition; deliberate and far-sighted in planning, cautious in executing, lynx-eyed to discern an opportunity to gain, exact to the last fraction in their accounts, but heedless and planless in all they do for charity.”

What they needed, he concluded, was a plan for “systematic benevolence” - regular giving, “proportionate” giving “as God hath prospered him” (the King James version of a phrase in I Corinthians 16:2). By “proportionate” Harris did not mean the tithe. That ancient standard often asked too much of the poor and not enough of the rich. That would no longer do. Each one of us would have to arrive at our own decision about what constituted a true and just proportion of our resources.

But what is a just gift? Or in the language of the United Way in the twentieth century, what is my “fair share?”

The story of Samuel Harris’ search for a “systematic benevolence” plan is told in Resource 4.5 - An Antidote to Covetousness. While studying this document you might also read in tandem fashion Aristotle, “Generosity, Extravagance, and Stinginess” (The Perfect Gift) pp. 15 - 20.

Another pertinent text is Resource 4.15 - Reinhold Niebuhr, Is Stewardship Ethical? Niebuhr raised in acute fashion the difficulties of arriving at an honest decision about our “fair share” whenever our self-interest is in full play. Contemplate, for example, the story Robert W. Lynn tells about his experience of sitting in on one of Niebuhr’s classes in 1947.

Even today, some fifty-eight years later, I can still vividly remember one exchange between the renowned teacher (Reinhold Niebuhr) and a student. Their conversation pivoted around a debate over the ethical power of voluntary action versus a coerced response. In an effort to defend the ethical superiority of voluntary action, the student asked if Professor Niebuhr agreed with her about a proposal to make the act of paying the Federal Income Tax entirely a voluntary manner. The citizens would then pay whatever they believed they owed the Federal government. Her teacher quickly replied "No! Most of us would pay twice as much as we think we should pay, and that would only be half of what justice would require us to pay." Or, to paraphrase a famous Nieburian dictum, our capacity to exaggerate our own generosity in voluntary giving is as evident as is our incapacity to discern fully the demands of justice. (Robert Wood Lynn’s introduction to Rresource 4.15 - Is Stewardship Ethical?)