Originally posted on EerdWord, the blog of Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing.
On the morning of June 5, I received word from a friend at Asbury Seminary that Christine Pohl died earlier this morning. Later that day, Asbury Seminary posted the news on its website and on Twitter. Subsequently a full obituary was posted on the Legacy website.
When I started my work at Eerdmans in June 2015, my esteemed predecessor, Jon Pott, stayed on for several weeks to tell me as much as possible about our authors and books. I came to realize, over the course of those weeks, that Christine was one of his most treasured and trusted author-friends. When I had the opportunity to meet her in person, and then to cultivate that implausible but genuine form of friendship that can grow between people who see each other only for a few hours during one or two academic conferences per year, I learned why.
In an earlier life, Christine had run a Christian bookstore. As a former bookseller, she understood, as not all authors do, that a book must be written for the benefit of readers, and that an author must understand who those readers are, what they know, what they don’t know, what they care about, and what they need. Readers, before they can trust an author, must be able to see that the author understands them and is sympathetic to them, and also has the wisdom to lead them in the next steps of their journey.
Christine’s Eerdmans books benefitted from her awareness of these things as well as from her deep knowledge of the Bible, the dynamics of corporate Christian spiritual life, and the field of Christian ethics. She was not charismatic in the sense of flashiness. She was more quietly and authentically iridescent. Reading her writing, or listening to her in person, you were not overwhelmed with a despair-inducing sense that you were in the presence of a spirit or a power that was unapproachably far above you. She seemed very normal. She induced not awe but hope, and joy: maybe it’s normal for an ordinary Christian scholar or minister or even editor/publisher, through years of obedience in the same direction, to become a person who, without pyrotechnics or self-conscious heroics, can discern deeply, write beautifully, and lead gently. Maybe I too could someday become a wonderful, welcoming, and wise person like this!
Christine’s Eerdmans books certainly benefitted from her academic training and were interesting and inspiring for scholars, but they were meant to be, and were, readable and helpful for ordinary Christians: Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (1999), Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us (2011); and (with her student, then friend, Keith Wasserman) Good Works: Hospitality and Faithful Discipleship (2021). Jon had invited Christine to write a book on contentment, and she was intrigued, and willing; and I encouraged her for several years, partly because I thought that if I were ever going to read a book on that topic, I would love for it to be from her! But cancer intervened before she could settle on an outline that she liked.
So Christine’s final Eerdmans book will be the 25th-anniversary edition of Making Room. And that will be a fitting bookend, because hospitality—which is at the very heart of the Christian understanding of the work of God in the world—is a topic that very much requires upholding and explaining in our Christian communities today. On March 31, Christine emailed her preface and afterword for this anniversary edition to me and her project editor, Jenny Hoffman. The new edition (not yet available for preorder: ISBN 978-08028-8381-0) is scheduled for publication on January 16, 2024.
Which means I should be able to take a few copies with me to the Society of Christian Ethics meeting at Chicago a couple of weeks earlier. For me, seeing Christine was always one of the best parts of that annual conference. She fostered community in that setting as well, and many there will miss her sorely.
Here are the unedited concluding paragraphs from Christine’s afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of Making Room:
A final reason—though there are so many others—that it is important to recover hospitality is that our culture is open to mystery, in fact dangerously open to mystery today. People know that life has to consist of more than what they can see or buy or earn. They are looking for meaning and for encounters with God. Often they look in the wrong places, and draw the wrong conclusions. But Christians have the wonder and mystery, we have the story and the practices that together meet the yearnings for community and meaning and transcendence, yearnings to be helpful to others and to find personal healing in the process. Often, the practice of hospitality is a window into some of that mystery—a mystery that is as mundane as soup and as transcendent as angels.
In conclusion, recovering hospitality will require much more from us than adding it to our list of tasks or duties. While hospitality involves tasks, it is also so much more—it is a way of life, a way of life deeply connected to the gospel, rich with grace and mystery, surprise and healing. The Scriptures and Christian tradition invite us to see hospitality as a means of grace, not just to the recipient but also to the giver. The practice of hospitality gives us opportunities to be instruments of healing in a hostile world, to encounter Jesus in the midst of brokenness, and to experience grace as we offer welcome.
All of us at Eerdmans offer our condolences to Christine’s family, and to the Asbury Seminary community, and to all whose lives she touched, including those who benefited from her books. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, but the taking away leaves us with a rich legacy of memories—and of written wisdom which may benefit many for years to come. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
James Ernest, vice president, editor-in-chief
See also Christine’s 2012 blog post on Living into Community.
Verba Sparsa 