Arguments Against Tithing Debunked - Part 1 - Introduction to the Issues

A quick Google search for “tithing” brings up a litany of very passionate anti-tithing websites that share many of the same views and arguments. The fact that there is such a large body of literature against tithing and the fact that people are so zealously against it has compelled me to thoroughly analyze and evaluate these arguments in light of what the scriptures actually say.

1 Peter 3:15-16 

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.

To get you up to speed on what the arguments are, I’ll try to give them to you in a somewhat structured order. Typically, if someone were trying to persuade you not to tithe, you would undergo a barrage of the following points all mixed together with no distinction between what argument the person is actually trying to make. It can seem overwhelming if you’ve not heard the arguments before – which is why they present it in that way: to confuse you so that you can’t stop and really scrutinize any one argument. The following is a list of the main arguments that are made, and I’m going to cover them in the following order to isolate the relevant parts of each one and put them into their proper context:

1.     The practice of tithing for Christians is no longer valid because it is part of the Old Covenant law, which is no longer valid. Some people make an even more specific assertion than this – they claim that Hebrews 7 is not invalidating the law, but specifically invalidating tithe. As many of my readers know, I believe that NONE of the law of God has ever been “done away.” Though I have written articles about this before, I would like to look at this issue specifically from the standpoint of tithing and the profound impact that tithing actually has on the topic of keeping the Law.

2.     Ministers in any modern church are not qualified to receive any kind of tithe because only the Levites could receive the tithe in the Old Covenant. This assertion works under a different assumption than the first argument. In this case, the argument is independent of whether or not tithing is required for Christians because it deals exclusively with whether non-Levites are authorized to receive tithe. If non-Levites can’t receive tithe, then tithing would be impossible today since we don’t know who the Levites are. My counter-argument on this topic will in fact be a corollary to my conclusion from the first argument.

3.     Tithing applies specifically to agricultural products such as crops and livestock, but not to income – so no Christian should have to tithe unless they are a farmer. This last assertion is, again, independent of the first two. It says that even if Christians are required to tithe and even if non-Levites can receive tithe by the law, then tithing only applies to agricultural products and not to “wage-earners” or monetary income. Some actually take this argument a step further and claimed that tithe would only apply to a farmer in Israel – therefore, no one in America (or anywhere other than Israel) would have any need to pay tithe at all, even if they were a farmer.

My next 3 posts on this topic will cover these three arguments in detail. As you can see, the anti-tithers have constructed attacks at every level of the practice.

Additionally, there are a couple of minor arguments that I would also like to formally clarify after the main topics are covered:

1.     There is no scriptural evidence that Jesus, Peter, or Paul ever tithed, and there is no instruction to tithe given after Christ’s death. Some will even be so bold as to even say that “Jesus never tithed.” There is some interesting logic involved here that is useful for more general applications than just this one argument, so I think it is worth taking a look at in detail.

2.     In the story of Abraham and Melchizadek, Abraham only tithed on the spoils of war, so this can’t be used as an example of tithing on one’s income today. Many defenses of the practice of tithing cite the story of Abraham tithing to Melchizadek as an example for Christians today. I’m going to examine this story in detail along with the implications that it has on Hebrews 7 to reveal the truth of the matter. Although this will be closely related to the first article in this series that will deal with Hebrews 7, there is some additional subtlety that I think distinguished the issue enough to deal with it separately.

I hope that this post has alerted you to what arguments against tithe are out there, and perhaps given some small hints about how to answer them. Feel free to comment with other categories of anti-tithing arguments that you may have heard, and stay tuned for the upcoming rebuttals of these issues!