Section 07: Moral and Social Teaching
St. John Chrysostom is the Church’s most insistent preacher of the social Gospel and one of her most searching teachers of the married life. This section gathers his teaching on wealth and almsgiving — the “sacrament of the brother,” the altar of the poor, and the conviction that withheld surplus is theft — alongside his theology of marriage and the household as a “little church.” Both files present his demands at full strength while resisting two distortions: softening his rhetoric into idealism, and reading his monastic preference as contempt for the world.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| Wealth and Almsgiving | The Sermons on Lazarus and the “sacrament of the brother” / altar-of-the-poor passages of Homily 50 on Matthew; his theology of property as stewardship and almsgiving as restitution; the begging-and-spectacle world of Antioch and Constantinople; and a modern reception claimed by both Christian socialists and their critics |
| Marriage and Family | Against the merely-ascetic reading: Homily 20 on Ephesians on love and mutuality, the SVS collection On Marriage and Family Life, the household as ecclesiola (“little church”), children’s formation and the disputed On Vainglory, and his high theology of marriage set beside his monastic preference |
How to Use
- Wealth and Almsgiving is the Chrysostom most quoted in modern Orthodox social documents — the preacher whose “the surplus belongs to the poor” stands behind the patristic foundation of Orthodox social ethics.
- Marriage and Family corrects the caricature of a Chrysostom who despised marriage: a preacher who told husbands to value a wife’s love above wealth and to make the home a church.
- Both files anchor on the public-domain NPNF translations and cite the SVS Popular Patristics translations where those are the working text.
Cross-References
- Social Ethics — Orthodox social ethics from the Cappadocians to the modern social documents
- Marriage — the Mystery of Crowning
- St. Basil the Great — the same patristic theology of wealth
- Difficult Legacy — the texts that bear his name but are not his
References
- See the collection README for principal sources; each content file carries its own full reference list. The core texts here are NPNF I/10 (Homilies on Matthew) and I/13 (Homilies on Ephesians), with the SVS Popular Patristics translations On Wealth and Poverty (Roth) and On Marriage and Family Life (Roth & Anderson).