For Christmas my wife gave me Philip Yancey’s latest book “Soul Survivor”. It’s fascinating.

The subtitle reads “How My Faith Survived the Church” which gives an indication of the theme of the book.

It’s partly autobiographical in tone. In the introductory chapter Yancey reveals something about his Christian upbringing, and it’s not a nice story. Fortunately in Australia fundamentalist churches of teh variety Yancey attended are pretty rare. As an example on the first page he writes:

“I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church. One church I attended during formative years in Georgia of the 1960s presented a hermetically sealed view of the world. A sign out front proudly proclaimed our identity with words radiating from a mnay pointed star: `New testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillennial, Dispensational, Fundamental, …’ Our little group of 200 people had a corner on the truth, God’s truth, and everyone who disagreed with us was surely teetering on the edge of hell. Since my family lived in a mobile home on church property, I could never escape the enveloping cloud that blocked my vision and marked the borders of my world.”

On the next page he mentions going to Bible College.

“After high school I attended a Bible college in a neighbouring state. More progressive than my home church, the school had admitted one black student. To stay on the safe side, they assigned him a roommate from Puerto Rico. This college believed in rules, many rules – sixty-six pages’ worth, in fact – which we students had to study and agree to abide by. The faculty and staff took pains to trace each one of these rules to a biblical principle, which involved a degree of creativity since some of the rules (such as those legislating length of hair on men and skirts on women) changed from year to year. As a final-year student, engaged, I could spend only the dinner hour, 5.40 p.m. until 7 p.m., with the woman who is now my wife. Once, we got caught holding hands and were put `on restriction’, forbidden to see each other or speak for two weeks. Outside somewhere in the great world beyond, other students were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights on a bridge near Selma, Alabama, and gathering to celebrate love and peace in Woodstock, New York. Meanwhile we were preoccupied, mastering superlapsarianism and measuring skirts and hair.”

In the remainder of the book Yancey writes about 13 writers who have influenced him, and were responsible, in large part, for him not completely abandoning his faith. They are a very mixed lot: Martin Luther King, G.K. Chesterton, Paul Brand, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Mnahatma Ghandi, C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Henri Nouwen. I must admit that some of the names were new to me.

Yancey gives some information about the lives of these people, and what they have achieved, and how they influenced him. I’ll have to go back and re-read some of Dostoyevsky again to see what I can get out of him – it must be nearly 40 years since I last read some of his stuff.

To whet your appetite, and encourage you to read the book for yourself, here are a few comments Yancey makes throughout the book. You can have fun trying to decide which of the writers inspired the different thoughts here.

First, three more bits from the introductory chapter “Recovering from Church Abuse”.

“Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals. How can I fit together my religious past with my spiritual present?”

“We sang `Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight …’ but just let one of those red, yellow or black children try entering our church.”

“I am neither pastor nor teacher, but an ordinary pilgrim, one person among many on a spiritual search. Unavoidably and by instinct, I question and re-evaluate my faith all the time.”

And from some of the other chapters:

“Politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the Bible and claim to speak for God – which I can easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern.”

“Yes, we have the example of St Francis of Assisi trying to halt the Crusades, of monks who outdo Ghandi’s ascetism, of missionaries who serve the suffering, of Quakers and Anabaptists who oppose all violence. But by and large the history of European Christianity is the record of a church that relies on wealth, power, prestige, and even coercion and war to advance its cause.”

“After two millennia of Western domination, is it time to look East for wisdom about the faith we have practised so erratically?”

“In 1983, after I had just returned from India and Richard Attenborough’s film `Ghandi’ was released, I wrote a profile of the man for `Christianity Today’ magazine. Although I have received plenty of venomous letters over the years, I was not prepared for the volume of hate mail the article generated. Readers informed me that Ghandi is now roasting in hell, and that even the Devil believes in God and quotes the Bible. `So it’s Ghandi on the cover this month,’ wrote one reader. `Who will it be next month, the Ayatollah?’ Another reader called him `a heathen agitator who did more than any other person to undermine the influence of Western civilisation.’ A prominent Christian spokesman railed against the magazine for `replacing Jesus on the cover with Mahatma Ghandi!’ ” (you should be able to guess that one)

“The most influential person who has ever lived, Jesus held no office, had an attitude approaching contempt towards political power, and left no material possessions other than the robe on his back.”

“And what good is a faith that has little relevance to the broader culture?”

“It does no good to quote Bible verses to people who do not revere the Bible, or threaten God’s judgment on people who do not believe in God.”

“The only hope for any of us, regardless of our particular sins, lies in a ruthless trust in a God who inexplicably loves sinners, including those who sin differently than we do.”

“By and large, the church has abandoned nature to physicists and geologists and biologists. Writers of faith tend to tiptoe around God’s creation, dismissing it as mere matter, unworthy of the attention granted the mind and spirit. Doing so, we forfeit one of God’s main texts.”

Yancey quotes some of what the people he writes about have said in different circumstances. There are far too many of these to even attempt a short list, so I’ll content myself with just one. C. Everett Koop was Surgeon General opf USA under reagan. He was well-known for his opposition to abortion and homosexuality, but found himself at odds with the conservative Christian lobby when he refused to press their agenda, and insisted that he was there to help all American citizens, not just conservative Christians. He said at one stage “I’m Surgeon General, not Chaplain General”.

He was asked to look at evidence whci, some Christians claimed, showed that women who had undergone an abortion suffered psychological harm. After looking at the data he concluded taht all the surveys had methodological flaws, and in spite of his opposition to abortion he reported accordingly. Conservatives took this as support for abortion, as did abortionists, and he objected that both sides were misrepresenting him. To a woman who congratulated him on changing his attitude towards abortion he said

“Madam, you have misunderstood me completely. I have not turned my position on abortion; I just refuse to be dishonest with statistics, that’s all.”

And in an Interview with Yancey he said:

“What bothered me most, as I reflect, was the lack of scholarship by Christians – as if they felt that by leaning on a theological principle they didn’t have to be very accurate with the facts.”

Read the book for yourself – and follow it up be reading some of the people he cites as helping him gain a better understanding of Christianity, even though they were not Christians themselves.

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `The point I shall endeavour to establish is that these statements about God the Creator are not, as is usually supposed, a set of arbitrary mystifications irrelevant to human life and thought.’ Dorothy L. Sayers