312 - Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor

Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor
By Carter Lindberg
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1993. 235 pp. $14.95 (pb).

Carter Lindberg, Professor of Church History at Boston University, has written this book specifically with pastors in mind, and it has much to recommend it. The first chapter provides one of the fullest summaries in

314 - Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor

English of the state of research on the poor in pre-modem Europe, rightfully underlining a number of themes extant in that literature. First and foremost, the book delineates the tenuous existence of the great majority of Europeans up to the nineteenth century, thus providing a complex vision of poverty and its causes. Moreover, it describes those distinctions contemporaries made among the poor: in terms of their character, between those who were "deserving" of charity and those who were not, the "undeserving poor"; and, in terms of type, among widows, orphans, the fame, the blind, the disabled, those who were poor from bad fortune, and those who were poor by choice. It also provides a clear discussion of begging, though it would have benefited from recent work on the distinction Protestant theologians, made between the gesture of begging, itself value-free, and the motive for begging, which could range from the self-serving and false asceticism of mendicants to the desire to feed and clothe oneself and one's children on the part of the desperately indigent.

Chapters two through four turn to "charity," both the institutions of charity and the ideals of charity formulated by various intellectuals from the humanists Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives through Anabaptists such as Thomas Müntzer. As a scholar of Zwingli and of the Reformed tradition, I found these chapters very troubling indeed. Lindberg seeks to denigrate the innovations of Vives, the powerful ethics of Erasmus, as well as the originality of Carlstadt in order to make his case: that Luther alone formulated a new Protestant ethic of charity. Lindberg does not even acknowledge Huldrych Zwingli, whose direct involvement in the formulation of Zurich's policy of poor relief and his simultaneous preaching of an ethic of brotherly love surely deserve consideration in a book on "Reformation Initiatives for the Poor." Nor does Lindberg took at Calvin, whose reconsideration and recovery of the diaconate Elsie McKee has explored so brilliantly. Missing, too, are the English Poor Laws, which have provided important models for more recent legislation.

The second half of the book provides a sampling of "Sources on Poverty and Social Welfare." Welcome will be those medieval treatises, a number translated here for the first time, that chronicle the continuities as well as the changes between Catholic and modern secular views. So, too, the polemics against beggars provide an important source for social history as well as the history of Christian ethics. Here again, however, Lindberg's narrow Lutheran focus excludes social welfare legislation, translated elsewhere, of concern to Reformed churches: the Poor Laws of Zurich, Strasbourg, and Geneva as well as any of those promulgated in the British Isles and any of the writings of Zwingli, Martin Bucer, or John Calvin.

In sum, Beyond Charity articulates an admirable goal: to offer modern churches a discussion of "Reformation initiatives," both as ways of understanding the situation of the poor and for formulating policy in response to their condition. It provides modern pastors with a powerful source for comparison with their own time. It offers Lutherans a rich and

316 - Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor

detailed treatment of Luther's discussion of the poor, as well as of the distinct phenomenon of poverty and some of his efforts to provide responsible care for them. It is all the sadder, then, that Lindberg's vision of "Reformation" narrows the range of "initiatives" he is willing to recognize and to offer to his modern audience. Our modern debates about the care of the poor need as many visions of charity as the Reformation has to offer.

Lee Palmer Wandel
Yale University
New Haven, CT