An argument to reconnect with the church

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This article was published 17/02/2002 (8738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Soul Survivor- How My Faith Survived, By Philip Yancey (Doubleday Canada, 321 pages, $23)

Reviewed by Harold Jantz

AMERICAN Christian author Philip Yancey can write about his struggles with God and the church without throwing all of it overboard.

In Soul Survivor, Yancey helps explain what was so toxic about the church he grew up in. It excluded blacks, easily dismissed Christians who viewed some beliefs even just slightly differently, rejected most knowledge and, while it spoke of a God of love, Yancy writes, projected an image of God that “resembled an angry, vengeful tyrant.”

These are themes the Colorado-based writer has returned to many times in his 16 books, including such bestsellers as Reaching for the Invisible God, What’s So Amazing About Grace and The Jesus I Never Knew.

Soul Survivor will resonate with readers who have contended with similar issues. He does it by relating how a gallery of people — many of them writers — have helped him. Martin Luther King and another southern black leader, John Perkins, helped Yancey to see that the way of Jesus is “to love every man because God loves him.”

The Bible college he attended, Yancey says, tended to “punish rather than reward intellectual curiosity.” G.K. Chesterton kindled the hope in him that somewhere there are Christians “who loosed rather than restrained their minds,” and who “experienced life with God as a source of joy and not repression.”

One of those people who brought “seismic change” to Yancey’s life was Paul Brand, an orthopedic surgeon and specialist in leprosy, who spent many years in India. Brand’s ideas about the “gift” of pain, his sense of a God of love in a suffering world and his love of learning deeply affected Yancey.

Another person who profoundly influenced Yancey is the Harvard Medical School professor and psychiatrist Robert Coles, whose writings on children in crisis won him a Pulitzer Prize and revealed how deeply children can understand God.

It was Coles who interviewed Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old black girl who broke the colour barrier at Frantz School in New Orleans where only whites had previously attended.

Coles watched her walk to the school day after day, surrounded by federal marshalls who separated her from a mob of white people screaming obscenities, yelling threats and waving fists at her.

Confidence

Coles won the little girl’s confidence and finally asked her how she could walk such a gauntlet (he didn’t use that word) day after day. This little girl, hardly able to read or write, answered that she prayed “for herself, that she would be strong and unafraid, and also for her enemies, that God would forgive them.”

“‘Jesus prayed that on the cross,'” Coles quotes the little girl saying, “as if that settled the matter. ‘Forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.'”

Her knowledge of Jesus changed the direction of Coles’ life. Yancey’s roster includes others. Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have found their way in. So have Mahatma Gandhi, former U.S. surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop, 17th-century cleric and poet John Donne, the contemporary writers Annie Dilliard and Frederick Buechner, the Japanese Christian author Shusaku Endo and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen.

Each has given Yancey a gift of understanding that has enriched his appreciation for God, “intimations of something more,” and God’s activity in our world.

Soul Survivor is rich because of the insights it provides into each of these people and its insistence on not avoiding their failures. Yancey’s honesty about himself and the people who’ve helped him embrace God and the church is the book’s most appealing quality.

Here is a persuasive tonic for people who’ve become jaded in their Christian faith and who want an argument to reconnect with the church.

Harold Jantz is a local writer and editor. He was the founding editor of ChristianWeek and longtime editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald.