Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "But I will give to everyone who asks me": that covers almsgiving, not extortion. He says "to him who asks"; but the man who strong-arms you is not asking. The man who threatens, if he gets nothing, is not requesting but wringing it out of you; he is not waiting for charity, he who comes not to be pitied but to be feared. I will give in the name of mercy, not of my own cowardice — where the one who receives honors God and returns a blessing to me, not where he believes he has done me the greater favor, and eyeing his loot says, "for services rendered." [2] A toll-collector, and an enemy!" But even granting that enmities go by other names too, Scripture never called him a betrayer, a persecutor, or an extortioner; for how much the more shall I heap coals on his head if I do not buy myself off! "Likewise," he says, "if a man takes your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." That applies to a man who is after my property, not my faith; I will give up my cloak too to a man making no threats — but if he threatens betrayal, I will demand my tunic back as well. [3] All the Lord's sayings now have their own particular cases and their own rules; their limits do not run on forever or apply to everything; and indeed he commands giving to "everyone who asks," yet he himself gives no sign to those who ask him. Otherwise, if you think you must give indiscriminately to every asker, it seems to me you would give — I won't even say wine to a man in fever, but poison or a sword to a man begging for death. [4] As for how "make yourselves friends by means of unrighteous mammon" is to be understood, let the parable prefacing it teach you: it was spoken to the Jewish people, who, having mismanaged the estate entrusted to them by their Lord, ought to have looked to make friends rather than enemies out of the men of mammon — which is what we were — relieving us of the debts of sin by which we were held bound to God, if by their lord's own reckoning they conferred that on us, so that when grace began to desert them, fleeing to our faith they might be received into the eternal dwellings. Though grant, if you like, some other interpretation of that parable and saying for now — still you must know it is not plausible that our extortioners, won over into friendship by way of our mammon, will then receive us into the eternal dwellings. [5] But what will cowardice not talk itself into? As if it were written that flight is permitted, and ransom commanded! It is little enough if this man or that gets himself dug out that way — whole churches, en masse, have levied a tribute on themselves! I don't know whether to grieve or blush that in the tax-rolls of the informers and the pryers, among the tavern-keepers and pimps and bath-house thieves and gamblers and panders, Christians too are listed as ratepayers. [6] Did the apostles set up this form of episcopate with such foresight, so that bishops might enjoy their own little kingdom safely, under the pretext of procuring salvation? As if, to be sure, that was the kind of peace Christ, on his way back to the Father, commanded to be bought from soldiers with Saturnalia money!
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