Book Review: Christian compassion: A charitable history by Monty Lynn

Monty Lynn calls compassion “an enduring motif in the history of Christianity” (p. 1) and in this book “Christian Compassion: A Charitable History” documents the manner in which compassion has been understood and practiced throughout the Christian history. He defines compassion as “a divinely inspired calling to charity, mercy, service and justice that participates in the suffering, love and hope of all humanity, and thereby enables us to partake in God’s healing of the world” (p. 1). In the opening chapter, Lynn stresses that his goal is to show how compassion has been understood and practiced through the ages, while grounding his understanding of compassion in key Biblical texts such as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, the imago Dei, and Paul’s injunctions to churches he founded. He stresses that compassion is not just an ethical ideal, but something that is felt, heard, seen, desired and acted out. Lynn divides Christian history into three eras—Antique and Medieval, covering the 1st to the 15th centuries; Modern, covering the 16th to the 19th centuries; and Contemporary, dealing with the 20th century to the present. According to Lynn, during the Antique and Medieval period, the first Christians began living out their faith in community with others, mutually sharing their material goods while facing persecution from both Jewish antagonists and their Roman overseers. However, with the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 313, Christianity went from being a marginalized faith to the religion of the powerful. Fearing an unholy alliance between political power and faith, the ascetic movement emerged, where hundreds of mystics withdrew to the desert, and stressed living simple lives, communal living, and the cultivation of righteous character and personal virtues. At the same time recognizing the dramatic change in the socio-political status of Christianity, thinkers such as Augustine grappled with how wealth could be used to relieve the suffering of the poor. Like Augustine, many church leaders wrote about the importance of sharing one’s goods with the poor, but it is unclear how the powerful elite received and responded to these calls for sharing. In the period between the 5th and 15th centuries, in the name of Christianity the Roman Empire conquered and spread the gospel by fiat and often involved war, slavery and other means of oppression, which dramatically departed from the early Christian message of sharing and compassion for the marginalized. The Modern Era from the 16th to the 19th century, as described by Lynn, was characterized by the Protestant split from the Roman Church and the alliance of the Church and State to promote social welfare and the teachings of the church. In the midst of ongoing battles for sovereignty and control reformers such as Ponce de Leon, Menno Simons, and Ignatius of Loyola reached out to marginalized groups and themselves were often persecuted for their separation from the dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant groups. At the same time, Reformers like Martin Luther Book Review