The Fear Of Beggars

Book

Kelly Johnson. The Fear Of Beggars: Poverty and Stewardship in Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.

Reviewer

Lynn Miller, Stewards Theology and Stewards Investing Consultant, Mennonite Mutual Aid

Reading The Fear of Beggars in the midst of an economic recession reminds you of the impact that context has on what you get out of a book. Personal involvement with homeless and jobless people in both the US and internationally makes me eager for wisdom about solutions and responses to poverty. In that regard, this book is a disappointment, for early on the author admits that she is not going to offer any advice about how we respond to beggars or to the poverty that lies behind begging.

Rather, this volume is an exhaustive and excellent description of the thought behind, and the practice of, “voluntary poverty,” from Saint Francis to Thomas Malthus to Peter Maurin, and offers much to learn about its history and its role in church life.

Chapter three, “Stewardship: The Rehabilitation of Humility,” contains one of the best historical descriptions of the theology of stewardship that I have ever read, well worth the price of the book, and despite an earlier thought that I was reading the wrong book, it made me glad I had agreed to review it.

Throughout her discussion Johnson reminds us that our response to begging is really a response of anxiety about the loss of our own wealth, and not of concern for our ability to meet the needs of the beggar. This is a lesson that our wealth-obsessed culture needs badly to learn.

Unfortunately for this reviewer, the phrase “voluntary poverty” has an oxymoronic feel to it, for out of my experience I have come to believe that poverty is defined less by a lack of money than a scarcity of choice.

For example, the people I met and worked with who were living in the “bush” of the Kalahari desert of Southern Africa in the 1970s had little cash but everything they needed because of the choices available to them to make, grow, and find resources from the natural abundance of their rural environment.

However, their cousins who had moved to the cities to find work, so they could have a cash income and the ability to purchase the consumer goods advertised as signs of the “good life,” found themselves trapped in a constant cycle of scarcity now that they had little choice but to buy everything they needed. What was worse was the loss of choice to return to their villages because of the shame at having failed at achieving the African version of the American Dream.

Another analysis of poverty, and one unfortunately missing from Johnson’s otherwise fine historical treatise, is that of the Fourth World Movement. In the book describing this little known but revolutionary approach to poverty and the poor, The Poor Are the Church by Gilles Anouil (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1983), its founder, the French Catholic priest Joseph Wresinski, says he learned from both his own childhood of poverty and a life of living with and working among the poor that poverty is not simply a matter of financial destitution or institutional oppression but a continual condition of crippling social isolation.

In Wresinski’s analysis “voluntary poverty” is neither a weapon against the wealthy class (à la Peter Maurin) nor a necessary self-correction for the rich individual (à la St. Francis), but simply something that is necessary in order to be a member of the whole human race, including its poorest citizens, and to identify with Christ Himself.

The claim in the New Testament that the “kenosis” of Christ was necessary to identify with sinful humanity should be reason enough for us to empty ourselves of the trappings of wealth to likewise identify with all of our fellow human beings.  

Sadly, in the conclusion to The Fear of Beggars Johnson shows her acquiescence to the culturally self-justifying thought that worldly resources are finite and cannot meet all human need, economics is the science of facing those limits, and stewardship is the “dirty work” of making judgments about who gets how much of what.

All these assumptions persist in the face of the biblical assertion that God has provided a creation of abundance and that it is the worship of Mammon that has created scarcity for some and over-abundance for others. Economics then has become the scheme of allocating more to those who “deserve” more, and “stewardship” has become the method of making theological excuses for this imbalance.

Although I was probably the wrong person to review this particular book, and despite my criticisms, Kelly Johnson has nonetheless done us a favor by her study of an otherwise obscure but timely subject.