Christians who oppose the modern welfare state and, more generally, "handouts" sometimes cite St. Paul's instruction to the Thessalonians, "If anyone will not work, let him not eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). In a recent thread,a commenter misquoted this verse, revealingly, as "He who does not work shall not eat" (emphasis mine). This is not just adifference of tense. The "will" in theRevised Standard Version's translationis not an auxiliary; it is a separate verb,"to be willing" -- in St. Jerome's Latin,vult ("si quis non vult operari nec manducet"). So Paul's point here is only about the willingness to work. If someone wants to work but doesn't because he can't -- because he is disabled, perhaps, or because he can't find a job -- then Paul's rule does not instruct us to let him starve. In fact, Paul's rule comes pretty close to the Marxist rule for the socialist state: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (Marx thought that once the intermediary socialist state had given way to full-blown communism, such a rule would no longer be necessary: technology, properly employed, would ensure such material abundance that no one would have to work much and everyone would have more than he needed.)

Notice that Paul's instruction does not entail the rule, "Let a man eat only as much as his work allows him to pay for." We know that the early Christian communities pooled their resources, that rich Christians paid for the needs of poor Christians. So a fully articulated version of Paul's rule might look something like this: "As long as someone is willing to work -- no matter whether he does work and no matter how much money he gets for his work -- let him eat, and have enough to eat." By "work" Paul, a  tent maker, probably meant "labor." It's not clear that he would have regarded what a modern financier does as work in the sense he intended. And notice that Paul's rule has nothing to do with what someone owns. To the idle, able-bodied heir to a fortune, Paul might say: "It doesn't matter what you can afford. Get to work, real work, or you don't eat either."

By commending work, Paul is not also defending the prerogatives of private property. So where does that leave us? Obviously not with an early-apostolic warrant for the modern welfare state. Paul could not warrant, or condemn, what he did not anticipate. But I do think we can safely extrapolate a principle that should disturb Christians who support capitalism. Paul is rebuking those who are content to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor. He was thinking of loafers and malingerers, but the overpaid CEO also answers to this description.