There are many moral issues that are dealt with in an ambiguous way
by the Bible. The treatment of the poor is not one of them. The
teaching in the Gospels is part of a tradition that is based in the
words of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).
Jesus was not making up something new and different, he was telling
the Jews what the prophets had been telling them for hundreds of
years and holding them accountable for not living their beliefs.
(from the sermon on the mount: "do not suppose I come to abolish
the law and the prophets, I come not to abolish but to
complete".)
The Hebrew Bible is full of tales of the poor, the powerless, and
women being raised up by God to confound the rich and the
unjust.
Christians have a right and an obligation to call their fellow
Christians to task when they ignore these principles. This is not
an attempt to insert religion in the political process but a call
at the personal level to ask people to live what they say they
believe. It is quite different from someone like Falwell standing
in his pulpit and criticizing non-Christians for being
non-Christians, duh, of course they aren't.
The exegetical abuse of the Caesar passage by the literalist
'religious' right is typical of the slipshod way they approach the
biblical text they claim to revere. They never take literally the
parts of the Bible that apply to their behavior.
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