“If you will not work, you will not eat”
The long misuse of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 to punish the poor goes against its intention. Understanding its context helps us reclaim a more just vision of work and reward.
Words: Adam Spiers
The vicar took another sip from his tea, waited a few seconds, then cautiously offered his justification: “I think, for me, the Bible makes it clear that if you won’t work you won’t eat.” I was only a young man, many years his junior, and I had no response. But I felt its callousness, even as I knew he was trying to avoid making it personal. But how could it not be personal? Here was a man faced with a young person whose family had been scarred by poverty, who had personally experienced food insecurity, who had every right to criticise policies that drove people into poverty, and his response was to weaponise the Bible to justify that poverty?
It’s an idea I’ve since heard dozens of times, but its rhetorical force is somewhat deadened by the sheer weight of the biblical mandate against poverty. Again and again, the Bible commands hearts and hands open (Deuteronomy 15:7-8), fields not fully harvested (Leviticus 19:9-10), and rights maintained (Psalm 82:3-4) for the poor. Again and again, it condemns profiteering (Amos 8:4-6), the exploitation of labourers (James 5:4), and the hoarding of wealth (Luke 12:16-21). If your interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 leads you to blame the poor for their own poverty, if it leads you to support parties and policies that seek to punish the poor, you might need a new interpretation.
2 Thessalonians is, in a sense, a mirror of 1 Thessalonians, but whereas 1 Thessalonians was written partly to address concerns that deceased members of the community might miss out on salvation, 2 Thessalonians was written as a kind of correction after some in the community concluded that the imminence of the second coming meant they need not work. There is, however, some question as to the authorship of 2 Thessalonians. Traditionally, it has been attributed to Paul, as indeed it claims to be, but perhaps a majority of biblical scholars now lean toward it being a pseudonymous work, in which case it would have been written much later. In any case, there are textual clues suggesting the community was comprised largely of people of a single trade or a single type of trade. Adam Kotsko suggests they were “most likely leatherworkers”, like Paul, but either way, this was a group of able-bodied men who worked with their hands.
As Roman A Montero points out, the fact this kind of problem developed in the Christian community in Thessalonica is evidence that Christian communities in the first and second centuries had a system of welfare and mutual aid. One might, in light of passages such as Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-37, understandably regard this as self-evident, but it has not always been widely accepted amongst scholars. Montero’s point is an important one for our investigation here, though, because it negates the use of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 as a proof-text for opposing social welfare. Indeed, this passage has been cited by socialists, including Vladimir Lenin himself, as a core socialist principle on the road to communism, so it will not do to assume a meaning in line with those especially punitive capitalists who would seek to remove a necessary safety net for the poor.
So, we know we need to read this passage with its context and specificity in mind, which means being aware that it is highly critical of a specific group of able-bodied people who have chosen to live off the labour of others rather than contribute to a community in which they have chosen to participate. But this does not leave us empty handed. If we take the author’s admonition alongside the broader scope of the Bible, it can become a powerful critique of forms of living that profit from the labour of others without contributing labour in return. The Early Church practised communal sharing precisely to prevent need, and yet it also disassociated from those who sought to live off that generosity without reciprocating. Montero’s research shows that these fledgling communities were not naive; they developed rules to guard their mutual aid practices from abuse. The principle “if you do not work, you do not eat” therefore operated inside a system committed to meeting need, not to expelling the needy.
Nevertheless, a word of caution is required here. We are talking about a non-state entity in the ancient world organising for the collective good. Rules created to safeguard that system cannot be used to justify the withholding of resources in a modern welfare state that exists to ameliorate the worst excesses of a stratified capitalist order, regardless of whether there are some who seem to take without contributing. Mutual aid systems, even those that bear some resemblance to welfare systems, are not the same as a welfare state. They are attempts to gather up the fragments of lives broken by the wider system, whether by state capitalism in our own day or by the slave society of the Roman Empire.
This helps explain why many on the left argue that people actually should claim as much as they can from welfare systems: the safety net is financed by collective labour, but organised under political compromises that favour private property and profit. Receiving benefits is not freeloading; private property is. Benefits are restitution. Even if someone receiving them has not consciously thought about them in this way, they are a necessary reclaiming of social wealth that has been siphoned into private hands. This perspective needs to be reclaimed. Too many people feel ashamed of their poverty, to the point of not claiming benefits to which they are entitled. In reality, the shame is with those who profit from their poverty in the first place.
Understood in this context,
2 Thessalonians 3:10 is better aimed at unearned income: rent-seeking, usury (lending with interest), dividends and profits extracted from workers. All are the heirs of the exploitative practices the prophets and the New Testament condemn: James 5’s rebuke of the rich for withholding wages and then living in luxury; the Jubilee laws that bring economic restitution; the commands against usury. All of these point toward a covenantal economy that resists riches accumulated at the expense of the other, which is to say, all riches.
To apply 2 Thessalonians 3:10 to the poor is to invert its moral thrust. It is not instructing an entire polity to cut aid to widows and the stranger; it is holding accountable those who abuse the community by shirking responsibility whilst consuming its goods. That is the target we should keep in view. The real shirkers are billionaires who extract profit from every conceivable source, landlords who hoard homes and charge people to use them, bankers who use financial instruments to make a fortune from economic crises of their creating. These are the people living off the labour of others without labouring for the common good.
Some churches recognise this. A few still fight for the common good through mutual aid and well-placed accountability. But too few. Christians must go further. If faith without works is dead (James 2:26), theology without organising is, too. We must refuse a gospel that blesses avarice and embrace a gospel of common wealth. Unionisation and workplace organising, building and propagating co-operatives and common ownership, working for public acquisition of land and housing, and demanding the cancellation of debt and of extreme wealth are all Christian values. If this is not the gospel we preach, if we instead preach a gospel that blesses the accumulation of wealth by impoverishing others, we must ask ourselves: how exactly is this good news to the poor?
Adam Spiers is a writer, educator, and co-host of the leftist Christian podcast Bread and Rosaries. As a self-described ‘libertarian-socialist’ and former ordinand in the Church of England, Adam maintains a complicated relationship with both the Church and society at large. His work draws primarily from anarchist and Marxist perspectives as well as liberation theology and critical pedagogy. breadandrosaries.com