Introduction

For the last 150 years or so, the practice of tithing has attracted supporters from across the vast spectrum of American Protestant life. Church leaders of almost every theological persuasion – liberals as well as conservatives, lay folk and clergy alike – have rallied in support of this cause. Its champions have figured in the lives of most denominations. But a conversation among these champions in any generation since the 1850s would have also revealed some deep divisions.

Disputes abound in the history of tithing. Can a true tither give less than ten percent of gross income? Or is it fifteen percent, as some have claimed? Does it go only to the church? Can one’s tithe include gifts to other community institutions?

Some of these questions surfaced again in the mid-twentieth century as various Episcopalians began proclaiming the virtues of the “modern tithe.” The following reading, “The Theological View of Money,” nicely illustrates this new version of a venerable practice. 

In 1952 Richard S. Emrich (1910-1997), Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, found himself enmeshed in one of the rituals of twentieth century seminary life. Like many theological schools in the 1950s, the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia sponsored an annual lectureship series. A visiting professor or a church leader would came to the campus and speak on a topic of presumed interest to the student body. When Emrich visited Alexandria, he knew how little he could presume upon the interest of the student body in the topic for one of his three Reinecker Lectures, “The Theological View of Money.” A former seminary professor, he understood the challenge he had set for himself. Neither the young clergy in Michigan nor the students at Alexandria (if they resembled his old students at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge) probably wanted to hear anything on this unfashionable subject.

No matter. A brisk, “no nonsense” confidence suffused the Bishop’s written text. Emrich was certain, for instance, about the need to modify inherited teachings about tithing. “The ancient tithe,” he announced, “is not realistic for us today, because so many of the charities conducted by the Temple or the Church are now carried on by the community. What is realistic today is five percent of one’s net income for the Community Fund, the Red Cross and other community projects; and five percent for the church.”

His insistent emphasis upon “what is realistic” fit the theological mood of an era when leading theologians pled the cause of “Christian realism.” American household budgets are different now, Emrich seemed to be saying, and it is time to face hard truths and recognize a new world in which many institutions do what one institution (the church) once did by itself.

Bishop Emrich’s argument can also be read as a plea for lowering the churches’ expectations. As a “realist,” he was pointing to the presence of “the Community Fund, the Red Cross and other community projects” as a major new force in shaping middle class expenditures. The growing prowess of the Community Chest movement in mounting annual fund drives was becoming increasingly evident in the post-World War II years. And the Red Cross, along with countless other good causes, had become fixtures on the American scene.

Yet there wasn’t anything startlingly new about fierce competition for “charity” dollars. That sort of rivalry was an old story for most Protestant denominations. Ever since World War I, if indeed not well before the 1910s, congregations had been feeling pressure from “other community projects.”

The new force at work was concealed in Emrich’s cryptic allusion to “five percent of one’s net income.” The single word, “net,” provides a tell-tale clue. The federal income tax had become a formidable reality for most middle class Americans.

In my review of Protestant teachings about giving between 1913 (when the federal income tax became law) and 1945, I have discovered few traces of worry about this law and its impact upon giving. That is not surprising. In the mid-1930s, for example, “fewer than one American household in twenty paid any federal income tax at all.”[1] That wasn’t the case in the late 1940s. The costs of World War II and then the accelerating expenses of the cold war pushed income tax rates dramatically upward. Not even the deft innovation of “withholding” taxes from one’s regular paycheck could quite disguise the bite that the federal income tax took out of the budgets of middle class Americans. An old phrase like “take-home pay” acquired new meanings.

All these changes, Emrich believed, signaled the arrival of a new era. So it made sense to call for a “modern” tithe. Yet he believed it was still a tithe. The “Law of the Pentateuch,” he declared, “is not abrogated.” Despite changing circumstances, the sense of continuity from one generation to another can remain intact.

But was the tradition still intact? Is the tithe an absolute rule? Is each generation free to arrive at its own version after considering the distinctive demands of life in its own time? What standards of judgment guide a generation’s decision? How do we know we are faithful to the tradition? Or should we abandon the use of that age-old symbol when making changes of this magnitude?

And there are more questions that will occur to you as you study the next reading.

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Source: Richard S. Emrich, “The Theological View of Money,” Successful Fund-Raising Sermons (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1953), pp. 234 - 247.

The Theological View of Money

One of the subjects closely tied to the missionary enterprise is that of finance. All of your lives, most of you here will be concerned with budgets, either for the work at home or abroad. And yet there is no subject about which young clergy are often more afraid to speak. They seem, some of them, to reason thus: that it is their task to be spiritual leaders, and therefore they feel as if they were somehow lowering themselves when they speak of money. To be sure, the spiritual work must go on, so it is necessary to speak of money; but it is an unpleasant task.

I do not need to tell you that this attitude is false. Christianity is, as William Temple says, the most materialistic of all religions. God likes matter, says Temple: He made it. And in the Incarnation the Word became flesh, and at the end of the Creed comes the resurrection of the body. In Christianity it is not man's spirit that is saved apart from the rest of man: it is the whole man, body-spirit, that is raised to new life.

By the spiritual we never mean something apart from matter. All men have bodies, all men have sex; the spiritual is the manner in which we use our bodies. The libertine has a body and the Christian has a body; they use them differently. And all men handle money or material things. The materialist handles them one way, the Christian another. When we speak of the spiritual, therefore, we mean that manner in which we order our existence.

Furthermore, when we turn to the New Testament we find no reluctance on the part of our Lord in speaking of money. Talents, lost coins, pennies, and widow's mites come to mind, for the fact of the matter is that there is little on this earth that is more important, religiously, than money. In money, as the parable of the rich man with his barns tells us, men try to find their security, and always will try. The rich young ruler turns sadly away. In and through money, power and prestige are expressed. (Remember Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.)

The use of money reveals the state of a man's soul; and all of us as we approach the canvass and the budget, should be very sure to treat them not as a subject apart, a kind of bothersome thing, but in the full light of Christian theology. And, of course, all Christian thought can be expressed and understood through the understanding of the word stewardship.

Our Stewardship–Let's sketch this drama of faith-through-stewardship. Since God is the Creator of all things, we look upon all life as grace, or free gift. Everything we have comes from the hand of Another, belongs to Another; and our ownership is, therefore, never absolute. There is only one absolute owner, God; and before His majesty we little creatures come and go on the face of the earth. We are in fact the stewards of all that we have received.

To believe in the Creator means to be humble because we have received, thankful because we have received, responsible because it belongs to Another. And yet in the teaching of man as sinner we perceive, to put it mildly, that this is not the case. Man, who is meant to live thankfully, responsibly, humbly, with his face toward God, turns his back toward God. As the Theologia Germanica puts it, “Sin came into the world when Eve said, ‘This is my apple.’” Sin is pride, self-will, a declaration of independence from God. And the results of this are seen with vividness in the use of possession.

There is the waste of a people, who live as if they were the last generation on earth, with no planning, or sense of stewardship, for those who are to follow. There was the rape of the forests of Michigan. There are the nouveaux riches in all their vulgarity. There are those who spend too much on self, while good causes go to ruin. And, worst of all, there is the respectable selfishness that is in us and surrounds us. There is the keeping up with the Joneses. There is all the absorption in material things, the materialism of capitalism, which led to the materialization of communism. There is the thankless heart which receives the gifts and never thanks the Giver.

For Paul, the flesh meant man apart from God, and the fruits of the flesh in possessions are many. (I like Augustine's phrase, “The trouble with this world is that men worship what they should use and use what they should worship.”) And then into our dark, confused, disordered, rebellious world there comes the next gift of grace – our Lord – to set things straight, to return us who are God's property to our proper allegiance. And we who were turned in on ourselves and dead to God now live to God, and this new birth, this conversion, becomes meaningful and relevant only when we consider its meaning for the important things of life. (That is, conversion becomes relevant only when we start to be specific.) It means to return to the truth of our nature and to say, “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”

And then in the church, by the Holy Spirit, we are that fellowship which offers itself to God through Christ. We pray that we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal. And we know that material things are not just material, that to want money, for example, for missions and the poor is a very spiritual thing. In other words, the best way to speak of money is in a sense not to speak of money, but of creation, sin, redemption, the Holy Spirit, and then of how these bear on this important part of life. You will speak of money truly only in the large setting of man's nature and destiny.

I like particularly as an illustration of this the way in which our Lord spoke of earthly goods in the parable of the rich man and his barns. The Lord speaks here not so much about possessions as about a great fact–the fact of death! He takes the possessions and places them before the great background of death, and lo! what we thought was security is no security, what the rich man thought was riches is no riches, and what the world thinks is wisdom is foolishness. If you preach about money in this way, you should look forward to it and not dread it, for by it the Gospel can be conveyed.

Money-Raising in the Church

The chief method by which your parish or mission will raise its budget is the Every-Member Canvass. The good and necessary thing about the canvass is that every year you will strive to reach everyone in your congregation for a responsible pledge. All of us would agree that this is essential. But who will deny also that there is something wrong somewhere with what we do? All of us have felt this, I think, even though we may never have analyzed it carefully. Let me list some of the weaknesses of what we do, because when we see what is wrong it helps us to see what is right.

Some Weaknesses in Our Approach – First, because we base our promotional material chiefly upon sympathy and not upon the drama of redemption – and not upon solid theology – we make our canvass year after year without conveying real teaching or a sense of responsibility to thousands and thousands of our people. One would think that this much organization, this much printed material, and this much real effort would leave lasting, powerful religious teaching. But somehow it does not. And it doesn't because we jump from this sympathy to that sympathy, from this (almost) sentimentality to that sentimentality, instead of teaching what Scripture says about possessions over and over again, until it's built like a rock into our people in logic and in meaning. If we can do this much together in one hour, think of what the church could do if it turned all of this promotion loose on this subject! If Scripture is our chief authority, let us bend before Scripture as we create our promotional material, then rise to say obediently, in a living manner, what Scripture says.

Another weakness is that for two or three weeks in the fall we go into a kind of flurry and frenzy, and then do practically nothing for the rest of the year. We cannot always be canvassing, but some more indirect form of education should be carried on all year long by a committee of the parish that has in its possession materials which carry the abiding teachings on this subject. Two or three weeks in the fall with materials that change with the headlines is not sufficient, and I believe that every thinking person will agree with this.

Still another weakness is that we go to our people chiefly with the budget. We draw up an inadequate budget, and then we ask the people to meet this inadequate budget, which has no necessary relationship to their ability to give. But we know that many of our churches need more clergy, that a large percentage of the clergy are underpaid, that new areas at home and abroad are crying for new men, that there are innumerable needs not provided for by the budget. Yes, there is something wrong in drawing up an inadequate budget and then asking people to meet this inadequate budget which is unrelated to their ability to give.

In life, when we start from a false position, good things that happen to us can turn into evil things. If, for example, a person is a selfish materialist and then inherits a million dollars, that money can further damn his soul – a good thing curses him. But if he starts from a good position on the road of truth, the blessing can bless him and others. And further, if bad things happen to a person who thinks correctly, those bad things can bless him – as, for example, sickness can bring a person nearer to God.

Now I have seen this motive of meeting the budget to be wrong, because on this basis I have seen blessings curse a congregation. A large gift, for example, as an endowment can curse a congregation under the present system; for if your motive is to meet the budget, no responsibility is taught to a congregation in an endowed parish. So I have one man of great means in Michigan who does not believe in endowments, because under the present system this generation will pay the next generation's bills. Something is wrong, brethren, and we must think about it. If your motive is to meet the budget, he's right, and we'd better get on a footing where blessings will bless and not curse.

Our weakness is revealed further when you analyze the income figures in your parish or mission. You will find that about 25 percent of your people will give 80 percent of the budget. In brief, the trouble with the present system is not that we try to reach everyone with a canvass – that is good; the trouble is that in full seriousness throughout the year we do not teach the people either why or how to give. We have had no standard that we speak of year in and year out, until in big talk and small talk everyone knows of it. In our present system we have no standard that comes from the faith and goes to the heart of every member of the church.

The Practice of Proportionate Giving

Given these weaknesses, one of the tasks of a bishop is to form a policy and to make universal in a diocese practices which are sound religiously and will help to overcome these problems; and I present this to you tonight for your discussion. It is a policy which I believe should be adopted by the whole church, because in many, many dioceses now people have gratefully adopted it, and the number is growing. It is not, of course, really new: it was tried and tested for many years by one of the larger parishes of Michigan, a parish which has the best record proportionately of any in the diocese.

The Ancient Tithe – Many minds in many parishes, facing the same problem and the difficulties which we have been discussing, have arrived independently at the necessity for a standard – the necessity for the teaching of proportionate giving. This has the tradition of Scripture and of some of the early church behind it. It was the practice, as we all know, in the Old Testament to give ten percent of one's income to the Lord. This practice was undoubtedly supported by our Lord, and in His life it is almost blasphemy to ask if He tithed. Did He who had no place to lay His head and who gave His life for men, did He tithe? That is almost blasphemy. But He said that “not one jot nor one tittle” was to be taken from the Law, and He told His followers that their righteousness was to exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees. He did not abrogate this rule, but in his ethic turning everything to the heart, rather purified and intensified the whole question of possessions.

This leaves us face to face with the relation of the Law of the Pentateuch to the Gospel. I do not need to tell you that the Law is not abrogated, except as a means of salvation. It still stands, and the three functions usually assigned to it are these:

1. The Law, and the knowledge of it, preserves the world. It is a preservative which keeps us outwardly conforming when perhaps we do not conform in our hearts.

2. The Law drives to repentance. We see ourselves in the Law as in a bright mirror, and, knowing we are not good, see the need of a Saviour.

3. It is a guide to the Christian (this is the point I want to stress), showing him what love means. In this sense the law is simply a commentary on love, footnotes on the great commandment.

We shall return to the Law a little later; and if someone objects that the Lord asked us to give from the heart, that it is the motive that counts, we would, of course, agree. But I am rather tired of having that high and noble teaching, which was meant to lead our righteousness to be superior to that of the Pharisees, used as an excuse for a paltry gift: “It's the motive, you know” – along with the dime!

The Modern Tithe

The ancient tithe is not realistic for us today, because so many of the charities once conducted by the Temple or the Church are now carried on by the community. What is realistic today is five percent of one's net income for the Community Fund, the Red Cross, and other community projects; and five percent for the church. The realistic plan today is, in brief, to continue our Every-Member Canvass–and then, in season and out, all year long, in small groups and large, to teach this standard as a guide for all people. It comes from the faith and goes in complete seriousness to the heart of the believer.

Let's list some of the reasons for this proportionate giving, or the modern tithe.

The Need for a Standard–Let us sketch again the need for a standard and a guide. We tell people about the needs of the church and of the community (and that's good), but we give them no guidance whatever in how to give. I really don't understand how we can be so lax! The results of this are clear–a giving, by the vast majority of our people, that bears little relation to their ability to give. There is a serious giving on the part of a small inner circle, but a wandering, confused ignorance on the part of most others. But if the Law is a guide and is necessary to Christians, do you not think that we should show people what the love of God and man means as far as our pocketbooks are concerned? Now, when a sincere canvasser approaches a sincere new churchman, and the latter asks, “What would you suggest that I give? What does the church say?” the church weakly answers, “Give what you can” – and that is no answer.

For What We Have Received – Since I have been in the ministry I have never gone to any man and asked him for a specific amount. There are rich men in my diocese, but I have never said, “Give the church $10,000;” nor have I said to men of more average means, "Give $3.00 a week." I don't know enough definitely about any man's personal affairs to ask him for a specific amount. But I do not have the slightest hesitation in asking every man to be responsible to God, grateful to God, to remember his soul and his Maker, and to be fully serious. I have not the slightest hesitation in asking a man to give remembering what he has received. The time has come to say with definiteness, and to suggest without prying into details, what seriousness and gratitude mean. They mean five percent to the church and five percent to the community.

Can We Value the Gospel? – Now, someone will say, “too much”; and here I can only repeat something taught me by a layman. How can any man say that five percent of his net income is too high a standard when the government permits him to deduct fifteen percent of his gross income? If the men in Washington say fifteen percent of gross income, you would not respect the church or its estimate of the Gospel it wants to preach if, apart from the traditional tithe, it suggested a lower figure than five percent of net income. There will be some people who will say that this is too little, and I know some now; and there are more people than you imagine who are already giving this, when you think of building funds, special gifts, pledges, and so forth. But this is a standard, a guide, and the real sacrifices of the few will continue to go beyond it. And the result of teaching this is an immediate raising of pledges, as people turn and look at the percentage they now give.

Is Tithing Rewarded? – One of the things which I have heard from many people (this is fundamentalist teaching) is that God rewards those who tithe. I have heard that again and again from people in low station and in high. It is, as we know, an Old Testament concept of rewards for the righteous which has been changed by Christian thought, but you see this if you read a pamphlet on tithing by a fundamentalist. Two things we have to say to this: first, it is wrong to tithe with material reward as a motive, and any such teaching must be completely avoided; second, it is not true; our lives are interlocked, and if any national disaster came we would all suffer whether we tithed or not.

However, when a group of people affirm something vigorously, we may be sure that somewhere in what they say there is some truth. Let's examine further this question of whether God rewards those who tithe.

Stewardship Leads to Rewards – The Christian virtues of stewardship and of responsibility, by doing away with carelessness, do in a sense lead to prosperity. If every person here took five percent of his income and, in gratitude to God, set it aside for his church, that would mean responsibility with five percent; it would mean careful budgeting; and, being careful with five percent he would be responsible with ninety-five percent. In other words, the reward follows a law of character which we all know.

One time last year I talked with a man who tithes. He is a fine person, admired by everyone, and I asked him this question: “Why do people who tithe look with such confidence at the future?” And he replied, “Because they are the kind of people who tithe. They live for the right things, and they know that tomorrow, no matter what happens, love for the Lord will see them through.” The practice of tithing does bring spiritual rewards, and, springing from the spiritual, leads to a stability which brings material rewards. I believe this is true. The only thing is that we must be very careful to keep the thought of reward on a high Christian plane.

Faith Is Strengthened by Giving – There is another aspect of the reward from tithing. We usually speak of good works as the result of faith – “a good tree bringeth forth good fruit.” And so we lay our great stress upon devotion or conversion which issues in good works. And, of course, that is a true and proper stress. However, life is not simple, and there are many truths in it. It is true that faith results in good works; but it is also true that good works lead to faith. I begin with weak steps and stumbling faith to work for God, and as I work for Him, God becomes more real to me and strengthens me. God gives His Spirit to those who fight His battles, not to armchair critics. We learn to love God as we work for Him, and grace comes to strengthen us.

It is true to say that giving springs from faith: it is just as true to say that faith is strengthened by giving. And since this is so, we do our people a real injustice when we do not hold before them a serious standard which could lead them to deeper things. If you teach this, you will find that people discuss it, that it becomes common knowledge in a congregation, and that a new seriousness comes to the people. Is not one of the problems of the church that we have not asked really serious things of men, specifically, which reveal to them the full seriousness of the faith and the necessity for important decisions? This is certainly only part of what we should suggest to men, but its full seriousness should be welcomed by a church that often plays with Christianity.

A Gift in Gratitude – All of us want to keep the worship of the church real. We do not want to play with Christianity. Today, to a great extent, we do play with it. One of the great teachings of the faith is gratitude: since Christianity is a religion of grace – and all life is grace – we are meant to return to God thankful hearts for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; for our redemption by Christ Jesus; and the constant assistances of the Holy Spirit. One of the places where we do that symbolically is in our church offering. It is an offering to God in money of our work, our hours, our talents, ourselves. We say, “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”

Now, if I tip God – if I toss Him the remaining fifty cents at the end of my personal budget, after all comforts, luxuries, vacations have been taken care of – that's not serious, nor real, nor grateful. The point is, do I give to God after I am through with my living, or do I give to God of my living? Think of the teaching power in putting at the top of your budget your designated amount, out of your life, not after your life! But why shouldn't people, in a kind of innocence, give these little gifts if we suggest no standard to them?

If we truly want reality in worship, we must set a standard that will show people that all things do come from God, and that they should recognize this fact in serious gratitude. And then when we give and our envelope is raised at the altar, it will be a real thing – and people will know it is meant to be a real thing – and it will add reality to our whole life with God.

Equality of Responsibility – Tithing is democratic and fair. There are rich men and poor men in the church, and before God within His church they should stand on an equal footing. The rich man should not feel that he is taking over; and the rich man should not feel that he is the only one responsible, which sometimes happens. They should stand side by side as friends, knowing that both are trying to be responsible and that both are responsibly using the talents God has given them. When a man dies and his casket lies before the altar, God asks chiefly whether with his particular talents he was a grateful and responsible man. There should, therefore, be an equal and fair standard for all men: a tithe–five percent to the church and five percent to the community.

And, speaking of fairness – and here, I believe, is where the laymen have arrived at this theory independently – doesn't the fact of inflation drive us to the theory of proportionate giving? In a day when the value of the dollar fluctuates, how can you finance a church unless when there are more dollars in circulation the church receives more dollars, and when there are fewer we receive fewer? It would seem to me that proportionate giving is the only thing that will meet inflation.

When we were talking at dinner tonight, I recalled an occasion in Michigan which was rather interesting, as it shows one of the mistakes we sometimes make. I went out to speak to a big parish canvass, which was beautifully organized. There were about one hundred fifty canvassers there, and everything was all set. Then the chairman of the canvass said, “Because of the increased expenses this year, we are asking everybody to make a ten percent increase right across the line.” Somebody in the group got up and asked the $64 question: “On what basis did you set that ten percent? This is a well-to-do parish; suppose a man in the motor industry has had an increase of $25,000 a year in his salary and suppose he now gives $1.00 a week, are you asking him to give $1.10? Or suppose somebody has had a cut in his salary, and is giving too much already, are you going to ask him to give ten percent more?"

This isn't the answer; the answer is to get at the root of the thing, and say, “Five percent of your net income, after taxes.” And this, I think, is one of the reasons why businessmen, as they have wrestled with church finance, have come up on their own with a form of proportionate giving.

Greater Freedom and Dignity – If from one end of the country to the other clergy and laity, in groups, were to join the effort to teach this standard in personal conversation as well as in larger meetings, a great thing would happen. It would not happen suddenly, because it takes time to move a large body, or to teach a large body anything; but it would surely happen, and you would be building solidly instead of jumping from headline to headline.

After seven years of teaching about proportionate giving, a large and increasing number of the members of Grace Church, Port Huron, Michigan, give five percent to the church. Since this standard is taught and assumed, it has raised the giving of all their members. Now, many things happen. A standard which is taught year after year is far better than ever-changing, “catchy” promotional stuff; a new seriousness comes to the congregation; the vestry has real dignity. It is really an extraordinary church – the only one of its kind that I have ever seen. For example, they gave $3,000 to a nearby mission to help them with a parish hall. Then they gave $1,000 to a mission in the other end of the diocese to help them with the erection of a new church; and just before I left they gave $2,000 to help another mission build a rectory. They meet their responsibility to the diocese with swift and businesslike dispatch. They pledge more than they are asked for, and they give more than they pledge. They do not haggle all night, like some vestries do, about whether the eaves troughs should be fixed: they do it!

And – and this is the great thing – the clergy, the vestry, and the women's guilds are freed for the more fundamental matters our Lord would have us tend to: the reaching of the unchurched, the quality of the church school, adult education, the shut-ins of the parish, and the giving to new work.

I will never forget my amazement the night I sat at a dinner in Port Huron, when I was presenting the budget of the diocese to a convocational meeting. The treasurer of the church asked me, when I showed him the diocesan budget, when I was going to learn how to run a church! I asked him what he meant, and he told me that the present diocesan budget was peanuts. We ought to ask three times what we do, said he. I said, “Tell me how you think a church should be run,” and the good layman poured out his heart on tithing. We have a long, long way to go, and we are not at the moment proud of our total diocesan missionary giving. But I can say that every church which has taught tithing – and the majority teach it now – has reported back with enthusiasm about the results.

The Way to Begin – The way to begin it is, of course, with ourselves. Revivals in the church begin with groups of men who believe deeply, and because they know a thing to be true can speak of it with power. The best teaching is not to exhort others to tithe, but to share with them your own experience and to give them the deepest religious reasons why you tithe. I can bear witness that it means much in my family and affords us, as we budget, an opportunity to show ourselves and our children that we are really trying put the Lord first.

Two Dangers – Two things I am afraid of, and I will close with these:

1. I am afraid of self-righteousness – the tithers may be some day looking down on the non-tithers. This is a possibility I suppose, just as church attendance could lead to self-righteousness – anything can. I think the best thing is to teach the principle in all seriousness, and have laymen bear witness to its meaning, but leave to the Lord the final figures of those who tithe. In the last analysis, it's between a man and his God. I have seen no self-righteousness at all, but this would do away with any danger of it.

2. My greatest fear is that men who do not understand the great motive of tithing – gratitude to God – will look upon it as a “money-raising scheme.” It is not: it is, rather, a way of teaching all of us a means to bring us to God, a result of serious faith. It teaches us what is important in life, brings home to our budgets the claims of God and the awareness of His Presence, teaches us gratitude, teaches us how to worship by giving ourselves.

The man who knows that God is the central fact of his life, who feels the daily nearness of God, who sees around him the evidence of God's love, and who gives himself to God in gratitude is a transformed man. The purpose of tithing is to secure, not just the gift, but the giver; not just the possession, but the possessor; not the money, but each of us in a new way and a great way for the Lord.

Source: Richard S. Emrich, “The Theological View of Money,” Successful Fund-Raising Sermons (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1953), pp. 234 - 247.

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[1]  David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 276.