Treasure Hunting with Philip Yancey

As a young man, award-winning US author, Philip Yancey (What’s So Amazing About Grace?; Disappointment With God), found in the works of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and others ‘hidden treasures’ which helped him escape his fundamentalist upbringing. On a recent Australian tour to promote his latest book, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, he spoke to Gordon Preece and Paul Mitchell about his explorations.

GP: ARE WE LIVING in times when, for a Christian, belonging to the church is ‘just another option’?

PY: I don’t think belonging to the church is just an option. But let’s face it: the church has at various times done a horrendous job of representing what God is like. You’ve only got to look at church history to see some of the things the church has done: the crusades, the inquisition, slavery. And are we any better today? I’m sure in hundreds of years they’ll probably look back on the modern church and say, ‘Can you believe the way those Christians were?’

The Bible seems to be very honest about the church; Paul’s letters and Revelation are. I’m not here to defend the church and I’m not trying in this book [Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church] to rattle the faith of people with really healthy church backgrounds. But I am trying to speak to a largely overlooked group of people who’ve been damaged by the church, and to validate their experience. But I’m also saying, Let’s not judge God by those experiences.

GP: So your real audience are the walking wounded; the people the church often shoots . . .

PY: This book is mainly for the secular bookshop market. We have lots of people in the US — like I’m sure you have — who were raised with close church connections, but have drifted away andhave some mixed memories of them. Maybe it was a Catholic school or a Fundamentalist church like I grew up in. And those are the kind of people I direct this book towards.

GP: You write very honestly about growing up in a racist and fundamentalist church in the South. Does your experience help you sympathise with individuals who may be caught up in a church that functions almost like an institutional principality and power?

PY: When you grow up in a very tight, almost cultic environment, you have a corner on truth. You perceive yourself as a besieged minority of truth and everyone else is out there straying. But then I discovered that a lot of those things I was taught were wrong. Then you feel betrayed. ‘I am trying to speak to a largely overlooked group of people who’ve been damaged by the church, and to validate their experience.’

GP: How did you discover a wider view of the church than the one you’d grown up with?

PY: A lot of the answer to that traces back to writers. I guess that’s why I became a writer because I realised the power of words to open up cracks and open windows to show you a different world. With racism, I had some life experiences. In my first job, a summer internship during high school at the Centre for Disease Control, I walked in and reported to my boss, a PhD in biochemistry — and he was a black man. This didn’t add up with what I’d been told in church about what black people were capable of doing. Then I remember reading a book called Black Like Me about a white man who takes medicines to turn his skin brown and then travels through the South and is treated very differently because of his ‘colour’. And To Kill a Mockingbird also penetrated my sealed environment and showed me a new world out there.

GP: Does the church have ‘treasure in clay pots’; not only the gospel, but great writers like C.S. Lewis hidden away in libraries?

PY: When Paul used that metaphor in 2 Corinthians, he emphasised the treasure. But we’re all flawed containers. That’s not a message I‘d heard in church. They were all trying to decorate the pots and say, ‘Look how good I am.’

But a book’s a nice clay vessel. It’s not threatening; I’m in control when I have a book, I’m not being manipulated by someone screaming at me, with locked doors, like the church I grew up in. So I was able to, as this young, impressionable, wounded person, reflect on and meet people who saw the world of faith very differently. And they came from dramatically different backgrounds. C.S. Lewis, an Oxford don, raised in Ireland; there’s very little parallel between our lives. Or G.K. Chesterton, this huge, fat, Victorian journalist, as opposite from me as you could be. He was a jolly, cheerful person, completely absent-minded. I’m a very controlled, melancholic, thin person [laughs]. Yet his insights into the world changed me as much as anybody’s.

PM: Are there other, more contemporary writers who are doing similar things for you now, in terms of inspiration and ‘opening up the cracks’?

PY: I mention one in the book, Frederick Buechner, who’s taught me a lot about personal, subjective writing. Another one’s Eugene Peterson, who’s spent most of his time recently writing The Message, although I wish he’d go back to writing more directly and personally [smiles]. But those are two who talk freely about their failures. Peterson as pastor talks very freely about the failures of the church. Buechner has a hard time even going to church, but he slogs it out. He lives in a tiny town in Vermont, and the churches don’t offer very good ‘entertainment value’ in that part of the world.

GP: IT SEEMS AS if as a young man you were looking for the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ in the church, but found them hard to find. Then you found them in various writers: Martin Luther King exemplified love, even of enemies; Chesterton, joy; Dr Paul Brand [with whom Philip has co-authored two books], humility.

But the other side for these people was that their virtues became their vices. It could be said Martin Luther King loved too much; he was a womaniser, and you don’t white-wash that in your book. Chesterton enjoyed life and food too much; he was a glutton. Maybe Paul Brand was so humble and had such a simple lifestyle he was almost ascetic at times. Do you think these are fair comments?

PY: I wasn’t looking so much for the fruits of the Spirit as for truth and authenticity because I’d found falsity in the church.’ As a journalist these were the people who most impressed me, who as people I wanted to be like. They each had a different thing to offer. They’re all people who became famous in one way or other. A couple of Nobel Prizes, several Pulitzer prizes. And world-changing people are pretty unbalanced people, not like our middle-class placid existence. World changing people are like Ghandi and Tosltoy. No one would call them balanced. Even a Paul Brand; I’m sure his service to his patients [who often had leprosy] took a toll on his family.

One of the things that worries me about modern psychology is they’re trying to straighten us all out. But if you straighten out a Beethoven you miss half of his good music; you get muzak, not Beethoven. So these people I write about are the ‘Beethovens of the spirit’. World changing people are like Ghandi and Tosltoy. No one would call them balanced.

GP: You emphasise grace strongly, especially in What’s So Amazing About Grace?, over and against a fundamentalist obsession with law and rules. But outside fundamentalism the danger might be more one of relativism. There seem to be lots of ex-fundamentalists who’ve rebounded so far they are now relativists. But you’ve seemed to not rebound that far. What has helped you return to a reasonably balanced position?

PY: There are two basic types of behaviours: ‘approach’ behaviours and ‘avoidance’ behaviours. People can study a subject or learn a skill or sport to approach excellence and enjoy it, or to avoid failure. I think people are more healthy and stress-free if they’re positive and focus on approach behaviour, not avoidance. That’s a basic principle of human behaviour.

Paul the Apostle said the Law mainly showed him ways to rebel. Paul Brand told me about a conference he attended discussing health problems in the US where they listed the Top 10 health problems: alcohol-related; diabetes; diet-related disorders; drug problems; AIDS and STDs. Smoking was the biggest one. Every one of them was a behaviour-related syndrome.

Paul Brand said in India their Top 10 would be malaria at number one; polio, yellow fever, leprosy. If you went to the doctors of India and said, ‘I could eliminate those Top 10 diseases’ they’d think they were in paradise. But we’ve eliminated them in the US and Australia and we’ve replaced them with our own.

It struck me the rules of what a good life should look like — which I have no problem with — and that it’s better to see God as a doctor who is primarily concerned with our health and well being, not a mean librarian saying, ‘Don’t you do that, you shut up now.’ God isn’t trying to keep us from having fun.

I quote Irenaeus in the book saying that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. But the church so often comes across with the scolding, avoidance behaviour rather than this is the way to the most fulfilled life. My book is about people who demonstrate what that enlarged, fulfilled life looks like. And they’re not following the American Dream by and large — beautiful and wealthy etc. It’s not an issue of right and wrong — the relativist issue — but what’s the most effective motivation. The rules are for our good, not God’s good.

GP: You also show a vivid awareness of nature and the goodness of creation which hasn’t been a strong point of Fundamentalism or for some evangelicals.

.PY: By and large evangelicals haven’t been leaders in the environment movement. If you read your theology books the chapters on God start off with all these big words like omnipotence, omniscience etc. But if you just look at the world the most striking thing is God’s sense of beauty and artistic creation. If you drive into Melbourne there’s ‘art’ all over the place, and if you go to WA there’s wildflowers everywhere, or the Rocky Mountains or the Barrier Reef. And whoever and however he created it, clearly he values beauty.

PM: In Reaching for the Invisible God, you said when we go through periods of doubt, what we need are ‘doubt companions’. It struck me that perhaps we need to look at the church as a community of ‘faithful doubters’, rather than a ‘community of faith’.

PY: It doesn’t take a lot, but if a pastor would just say, ‘I know some of you will find this hard to take . . . ‘ and ‘I couldn’t have said this 20 years ago’ — acknowledge that everyone is where they are. You don’t assign the doubters like Thomas to write your creeds. Thomas didn’t believe the most basic fact of orthodox Christianity. He doubted the resurrection, but the only way he got to see Jesus was because the other disciples allowed him into their group, because Jesus only appeared to small groups. But if they’d said, Thomas, you don’t even believe in the resurrection, get out of here’ Thomas would never have seen the resurrected Jesus. The church then became a safe place for a doubting person to prepare them for the time when they could believe a convincing revelation. I think that’s a good goal for the church today.
A doubt companion is not one who doubts more strongly than you do, it’s someone who doesn’t punish you for your doubts, or reject you or patronise you for not being mature.

GP: It also says in Matthew 28 that after the resurrection Jesus appeared and some believed but some didn’t, not just Thomas who’s often today isolated as the only doubter. He may be the one who voiced what others were feeling and like Peter put his foot in it.

PY: Absolutely, I agree.

GP: In What’s so Amazing about Grace? you mention your struggle with your friend Mel White (who was pastor at my church, Pasadena Covenant, when I was in the US) over the homosexuality issue. He once ghost wrote for Jerry Falwell and others and then came out as gay. How do you think the church is handling the gay issue give it’s one where many people feel bruised and abused?

PY: The church in the US is handling it terribly. Mel turns up at every church conference and pickets them to ordain gays and gets arrested, so he’s kind of creating division as well. But the church seems to want enemies, especially the electronic church who have to raise money to stay in business.
When their were Communists we had enemies. After Communism faded homosexuality arose as the enemy. Now it may be Muslims, I don’t know.

A friend of mine who struggles with homosexuality himself, but would consider himself a changed person and is married, is deeply compassionate for homosexuals and runs a ministry for AIDS sufferers. He said Christians tend to get very angry towards other Christians who sin differently than they do. That’s a very important line for me. People write to me and say, How can you possibly be a friend of a sinner like Mel White?’ I say, ‘How can Mel White possibly be a friend of a sinner like me?’

We sin differently and its really up to God to judge whether Mel’s right or wrong in his conclusions about that. Mel’s sincere but he may be wrong. I don’t agree with his stance. But Jesus seemed exceptionally tender towards people with sexual sins and exceptionally fierce towards people with pride, ‘judgmentalism’, racism etc. These are the sins and temptations for me. So I’ve got to look out for my own sin.

Jesus seemed exceptionally tender towards people with sexual sins and exceptionally fierce towards people with pride, judgmentalism, racism . ..

GP: YOU MENTIONED EARLIER Buechner’s difficulty going to church. There are probably a lot of creative, imaginative Christians in the same boat who find church really difficult. Do you have anything to say for those in that situation?

PY: It’s easy to say something, but harder to live it out. First, there aren’t that many places where you can go and mix inter-generationally; with families, young children, older people. How many places do you go that mix the generations like that? Church should also be a place where you have a mix of races, classes or economic backgrounds. That’s often not true of the church, but ideally a good church should be like a melting pot of meeting for people very unlike each other, but brought together by a common mission.

So I’d say that even if the ‘entertainment value’ is pretty small that’s not the real purpose of church: it’s to worship, to gather together. Karl Barth said church should be ‘a sign of contradiction’ to the culture at large. And to someone like Buechner I’d say, ‘Hey, maybe the church needs you more than you need the church.’

There may be some angry, impressionable young teenager there who could be dramatically affected by just seeing Frederick Buechner in church, hearing him preach occasionally. I’m one of those people. I think for people like that the real value may be in what they have to offer, not what church has to offer them.

PM: I’m interested to pick up on the theme of ‘generationalism’. Because in some of the new expressions of church, which focus on Generation Y and the bottom end of Generation X, there’s almost a history-free, generational approach to church. Have you seen anything like that?

PY: You’re right, it used to be cultures were determined by country and race. So that, for instance, black churches in the South are very different to the First Baptist Church of Jackson Mississippi that’s going to be very uptight, formal and predictable. But virtually any black church in Jackson’s going to be lively and loud and active. So that’s traditionally where different cultures of worship have come from.

But now it’s as much age-determined as anything. But I think that’s changing, even in the US. For a while young people were demanding a kind of narcissistic worship experience. But now there are many who’re interested in being challenged and stretched. Mike Yacconelli [former editor of The Wittenberg Door] has a whole program of spiritual disciplines for younger people, and some of the best programs for younger people are heavily into Bible teaching. Services with loud music and long Bible teaching — that’s pretty much what I grew up with [laughs]

Things come and go, so the Willow Creek model of theatre style comfort and good entertainment may be on the way out. The more we play to those cultures, the more we exclude other generations.