Compassion: A Common Good
Compassion, by Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. Morrison, and Henri J. M. Nouwen (Doubleday, 1982, 142 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by James L. Sauer, head and reference librarian, Eastern College, Saint Davids, Pennsylvania.
Christianity and liberalism both embrace compassion as a common good. Compassion is their synthesis: an expanded exhortation to compassionate existence as seen from a liberal Catholic perspective.
McNeill, Morrison, and Nouwen are three priests whose work in education and counseling provide some basis for speaking on compassion. They have coauthored a book whose aim is not analytic, but, like the provocative drawings throughout the text by artist Joel Filartiga, it is designed to move our faith to work.
Compassion is the central message of their gospel: “God is a compassionate God. That is the good news brought to us in and through Jesus Christ.” The concrete example of compassion is the obedient servanthood of Christ, the God-with-us. This core idea is explored in community and discipleship “through the discipline of patience, practiced in prayer and action.”
Mixed with this clear Christian message is the ideological framework of the authors. Examples are numerous: the prevalence of buzz words like “solidarity” and “community”; illustrations of oppression only from right-wing nations; lists of horrors that include rapes, torture chambers, and nuclear plants in the same sentence. There is also a tendency toward biased antithesis: a “competitive” life made incompatible with a compassionate life; an “ordinary and proper life” that is inconsistent with a life of pilgrimic “displacement”; and heroism belittled in favor of servanthood.
The authors’ ideological vocabulary also tends to get away from them at times: “we see how voluntary displacement leads to a new togetherness in which we recognize our sameness in common vulnerability, discover our unique talents as gifts … and listen to God’s call, which continually summons us to a vocation beyond the aspirations of career.”
Christians of a socially liberal bent will find this work a motivating expression for faith lived in this world. Christians of a conservative sort might read it for some insights, but only with compassion.
The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, by Tom Sine (Word, 1981, 246 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Robert D. Pitts, professor of religion, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana.
Our society is blessed with a growing group of people who serve as our collective conscience as we merrily spend and consume our way through life. Tom Sine is legitimately classed with Rifkin, Sider, and others who have sounded notes of alarm about the voracious appetites of the Western world while two-thirds of the world suffer from hunger, cold, disease, and godlessness.
In the early stages of Mustard Seed, Sine, a Christian futurist, generates a guilt trip for his readers. But his real thrust is an appeal for Christians to join in fashioning “lifestyles that are … more celebrative and more just.” He boldly asserts that “… simply participating in the frenetic activity and programs of the institutional church cannot be a substitute for being committed members of a small fellowship group.” Instead, he urges Christians to get busy helping God turn the world “right side up.”
Sine feels that unless a Christian is expending his energy and resources among the needy, wherever they are, he probably is not fulfilling Christ’s commands. Therefore, he advocates that Christians should (1) reduce waste in their budgets and share their savings with those in need, (2) reduce their time commitments to be able to enjoy God and others more, and (3) share their housing, transportation, meals, and other expenses to free up money to invest in kingdom work.
The difference between most Christians and Tom Sine is that he believes Christians can make a difference in the trouble spots of the world, and he has committed himself to do something about it. Not everyone who reads this book (and every Christian should) will agree with Sine’s analysis, but the points he makes are hard to refute.
The Mustard Seed Conspiracy certainly is not a tirade against the church; it is a sane, well-balanced appeal for more of us to plant our seeds of concern, be they ever so small, beside those already in the conspiracy to bring God’s kingdom to pass in the world.
The Flames of Rome, by Paul L. Maier (Doubleday, 1981, 443 pp., $14.95), is reviewed by Jill Baumgaertner, assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
Paul Maier is a veteran author of historical novels about early Christians. His latest is set in first-century Rome where the aged but able emperor Claudius is poisoned by his wife so that her son, Nero, can assume the throne. The empire, which had become well versed in the sensational and the degenerate under Claudius’s predecessor, Caligula, experiences a resurgence of Bacchic behavior. Lewdness, murder, and sexual perversion provide a rather titillating backdrop for the entrance of the apostle Paul into Rome, where he is defended in front of Nero by Flavius Sabinus, the novel’s major character. Simon Peter also eventually appears in Rome, as do Aquila, Priscilla, and Luke.
To allay rumors that the emperor himself had started the great fire of Rome, Nero blames the Christians and stages a two-day persecution festival. It is then that Peter is crucified and hundreds of other Roman Christians are tortured and devoured by wild beasts.
The historical connections Professor Maier has uncovered are fascinating and impressive. His portrayal of the depravity rampant in Rome is certainly eye opening, and his research and description of Rome’s fiery devastation seem well documented in his notes. The Flames of Rome is too much like a movie spectacular, however. While the scene is first-century Rome, Maier’s characters are twentieth-century American in outlook and orientation. They also suffer somewhat limited development. Flavius Sabinus and clan lack depth. Though they are seen struggling the way good people in a corrupt regime most struggle, we never see them in totality. The characters, fall into only two camps: the good and the evil. There is nothing realistic in between. All of this is narrated in a panting, florid style, overwritten and underedited.
Historical fiction can be an uncomfortable hybrid, satisfying neither the historian nor the literary critic. The Flames of Rome might provide interesting historical contexts, but it cannot be experienced or praised as a fine piece of literature.
