Allen Says the Gospel Must Never Be Bought With Charity or Healing
Paul did not convert people by working miracles on them, and he did not attract them by offering healing or relief. Allen makes this a principle in Missionary Methods, citing Harnack that the early church knew of no case where Christians tried to win adherents through the charity they dispensed. Miracles, where they occurred, served as signs of divine approval of the message, not as bait. Allen notes that the marvels of Acts are rarely said to have spread the faith, and that at least once a miracle provoked serious obstruction rather than belief.
Allen turns this into a pointed critique of modern method. He recalls Indian missions that once paid scholars a fee to attend Christian schools, a plan later abandoned because the results were bad, and he argues that offering secular education or medical treatment as an inducement to submit to religious instruction is the same thing in a less vicious form. He predicts the church will one day regard any material inducement to faith as contrary to sound doctrine, exactly as it had come to regard the money payments of earlier days. The gospel must persuade on its own terms or not at all.
This sits beside Allen’s insistence that Paul kept money and gospel apart and gives the evangelistic counterpart to his financial discipline. It also belongs in the vault’s wider unease with funded inducement, sharpening the same nerve the Gospel Patronage discussion probes from the giver’s side: the moment the gift becomes a lever on belief, the gospel is misrepresented.
Related
- Missionary Methods: source
- Paul’s Three Money Rules Left Every Church to Fund and Govern Itself: the financial twin of this principle
- Gospel Patronage: the funding question viewed from the giver’s side
- Missionary Methods - Summary: the wider argument