Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
Book Review
by David Gushee, Union University
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
Christine D. Pohl, Eerdmans, 1999.
In a time in which many scholarly works are both hastily written and of dubious significance, Christine Pohl`s fine work on hospitality is quite the opposite on both counts. It will stand as the benchmark work on this subject for a long time to come.
This is a work in ethical archaeology. Pohl digs through the centuries` layers and discovers hospitality as a way of living out the Gospel that was once central to Christian experience, but for several centuries has been marginalized. She argues convincingly that the church needs to recover the practice of hospitality, not only because it meets the needs of the poor but also for the church`s own sake.
The biblical demand for hospitality, Pohl shows, is clear in both Old and New Testaments. The people of God are aliens and strangers whom God has welcomed into the "household of faith." In turn, God`s people are to "make room" for the stranger, not only in the community of faith but also in their own personal households. This is the biblical meaning of hospitality-making room for the stranger, especially those in most acute need. Such care must not be reduced to mere social entertaining nor may it be self-interested and reciprocal; instead, biblical hospitality reaches out to the abject and lowly and expects nothing in return. Hospitality is not optional, nor should it be understood as a rare spiritual gift; instead, it is a normative biblical practice that is learned by doing it.
Hospitality is implicitly subversive in the way it shatters social boundaries, especially those boundaries enforced by table fellowship. When we eat with the lowly and welcome strangers and "sinners" to our table, we topple social expectations and bear witness to the kind of love God has for all his creatures. It is not coincidental that Jesus perhaps most scandalized his critics in his practice of table fellowship. "He eats with tax collectors and sinners"-this was not a compliment. And it was precisely the radical nature of Christian hospitality, Pohl shows, that characterized the early church, helped spread the Gospel, and healed the dramatic social barriers that initially confronted the church as the Gospel permeated the Greco-Roman world.
The connection between hospitality and Jesus is indeed rich and mysterious. As Pohl shows, in New Testament perspective Jesus is simultaneously guest, host, and meal. He is guest whenever we welcome and care for the stranger and the broken (Mt. 25:31-46). He is host, for example, when he hosts the Last Supper, during which "we . . . celebrate the reconciliation and relationship available to us because of [Jesus`] sacrifice and through his hospitality" (p.30)-and when he will host the Great Supper in the Kingdom. And he himself, as our paschal sacrifice, is the meal we eat, not only in Communion but in ongoing Christian experience as we feed on his life to nourish our own.
In tracing out the history of the Christian practice of hospitality, Pohl marshals an array of quotations from such church leaders as Chrysostom, Lactantius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, as well as 20th century practitioners of hospitality such as Dorothy Day and Edith Schaeffer. It is clear from the historical account given here that extraordinary attention was paid to hospitality as a normative Christian practice through the entirety of church history until relatively recent times.
Interestingly, the decline of hospitality as a widely shared tradition is in part traceable to the specialization of hospitality under the pressure of human need. I was reminded that such institutions as hospitals, hostels, hospices, and even hotels–note the shared etymology of all these words as well as "hospitality"-all were developed by Christians as they responded with increasing specialization to various forms of human need. Yet the specialization and eventual bureaucratization of care weakened hospitality as an aspect of everyday Christian practice. Today most Christians do not welcome refugees or the homeless into their homes; if we are concerned at all about such people, we most often send money to help fund specialized efforts undertaken by someone else.
Yet hospitality is a practice that is good for the Christian soul. We lose something of the distinctive nature of Christian discipleship when we delegate the work entirely to specialists. This Pohl most appealingly demonstrates in the latter chapters of her work, as she walks through what might be called a "thick description" of the actual practice of hospitality as it exists today. Her visits to several contemporary Christian communities that practice Christian hospitality-such as L`Abri and the Catholic Worker-infuse this work with the warm wisdom of hospitality`s most experienced practitioners in our present day.
My family has extended itself more in recent years than previously to welcome the stranger and I resonated deeply with Pohl`s description of the difficulties as well as the rewards of hospitality. It was clear that Pohl herself has undertaken extensive hospitality efforts and thus writes out of a base of experience rather than dispassionate research. This is the rare academic effort that one could easily see occupying a valuable place in the thinking of those who actually do hospitality most extensively.
If the discipline of Christian ethics is to serve the church well in years to come, we must do more of this kind of work–retrieving aspects of the Christian moral tradition for contemporary application, writing both out of personal moral practice and richly researched scholarly effort. We must be both moral archaeologists and practitioners. Christine Pohl`s Making Room can be a model for such efforts in the years to come.
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