Philip Yancey's Blog, page 20

International Grace

A few days ago I got a letter from a Croatian man who introduced himself as the translator of my book What's So Amazing About Grace? into Croatian.  He asked if I would write a preface for the book specifically for Croatia. 

"You have referred to the Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian experience during the recent war," he said.  "Although the war ended over 15 years ago, the wounds are still here and we are very very far from true reconciliation."  He went on to say that Christians in the Balkans are still struggling with truth and justice, and wonder whether grace can apply without the prior steps of truth and justice.

The Balkan countries still celebrate war criminals as heroes of the nation, often with the church's approval.  Rapes, tortures, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing—these memories of war still haunt the landscape.  The translator asked, How can we "do grace" in such a setting?  More, how can we keep another Balkan war from breaking out again in several decades?

I did write the preface, beginning with these paragraphs:

If I had originally envisioned this book for a Croatian audience, it would be a different book.  How so?  I cannot say for sure.  The Balkans do not need an American writer to barge in with a limited understanding of your history and culture and offer advice.
For this reason I present this book as a kind of dialogue with you the reader.  I depend on you, indeed I urge you, to take what I set forth in these pages and apply them to your own country.  At times, as you read, you may find yourself shaking your head and saying, "He doesn't understand Croatia!"  You are right—I don't.  But you do, and it is up to Croatians to come to terms with your recent past as well as your distant past.

I went on to say that as an American I can offer some hope.  After all, I grew up in the southern state of Georgia, which endured a brutal campaign by General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom some historians credit as introducing the modern "scorched earth" tactics of total war.  His troops burned my home city of Atlanta to the ground, and all over Georgia you can find bronze markers recalling the destruction his armies inflicted during their March to the Sea.

My Philadelphia uncles used to taunt me by asking me to book them a room in Atlanta's "General Sherman Hotel," which of course did not exist.  We viewed Generals Sherman and Grant as war criminals, and in school we were even taught to scorn President Abraham Lincoln, who had forcibly reunited a divided country.  The Georgia state flag incorporated the design of the Confederate flag, and I went to a high school named for a Confederate general.  A popular bumper sticker in my childhood featured a cartoon figure of a Confederate soldier with the words, "Hell, no, we ain't forgettin'!"

Before the Civil Rights Act forced change, we southerners also trampled on the rights of citizens from a different race.  In a genteel version of ethnic cleansing, we fought in the courts and sometimes on the streets to keep them out of "our" restaurants, churches, neighborhoods, and schools.  One race used to own the other, and I can hardly imagine a starker example of "Ungrace" than the slave trade that brought millions across an ocean to serve wealthy plantation owners.  Visit the modern city of Atlanta today, however, and you will find few vestiges of that kind of racial division and regional patriotism.  It takes time but wounds heal, justice triumphs, change happens.

Historian Shelby Foote points out that only after the Civil War did Americans start saying "The United States is…" rather than "The United States are…."  Our identity as one nation came out of our bloodiest war.  Indeed, I recently learned that the burning of Atlanta played a crucial role in that re-union.  Exhausted by war, the Democratic Party of 1864 adopted a platform calling for peace negotiations based on recognizing Confederate independence and nominated General George McClellan to oppose the beleaguered President Lincoln in that year's election.  News of Sherman's September triumph in Atlanta helped swing popular support back to the Republican incumbent Lincoln, who pursued the war to its conclusion.

More recent times show that the same pattern of healed wounds can apply internationally as well.  Two of America's closest allies are Germany and Japan, the two nations who opposed us in the most destructive war in history.  U. S. ties are strengthening with Vietnam, another nation who fought us in a bitter and bloody campaign.  I have witnessed similar scenes of reconciliation in places like Germany, where East and West reunited, and in South Africa, where under the leadership of Nelson Mandela a majority race chose the way of truth but not revenge and in the process forfeited justice for the sake of reconciliation.

For these reasons, I have hope for Croatia and its neighbors.  Fortunately, Croatia has outstanding scholars and pastors who are seeking how best to apply theology to their nation's history.  Among the most insightful is Miroslav Volf, who emigrated from Croatia to teach at Fuller Seminary in California and then at the Yale Divinity School.  The End of Memory, a magnificent book, includes his comments about memories of the traumatic past: "They need not colonize the present nor invade the future by defining what we can do and become.  Past wrongdoing suffered can be localized on the timeline of our life-story and stopped from spilling forward into the present and future to flood the whole of our life."

Grace is the only force I know of that can block the toxic influence of a painful past on the present and the future.  As Volf says, "For in the light of Christ's self-sacrifice and resurrection, the future belongs to those who give themselves in love, not to those who nail others to a cross."

For years the Balkans have been a laboratory of what I call "Ungrace," the law in relationships that echoes one in physics: Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.  You have lived with the deadly consequences of that law for centuries.  Can the modern Balkans become instead a laboratory of grace?  And what would that look like?

Befriending Winter

My life divides into geographical thirds—one-third in Atlanta, one-third in Chicago, and one-third in Colorado—and each has presented a different perspective on winter.

In the Atlanta of my childhood enough snow would fall to accumulate on the ground maybe once every two or three years.  These were magical days of cancelled school, snow forts and snowball fights, and snowmen decorated with branches for arms, radishes for eyes, and a carrot for a nose.  The magic was ephemeral, however: a week later a warm spell might lure forsythia bushes into a false spring, coaxing out yellow blossoms vulnerable to the next frost.  More commonly we faced winter ice storms that brought down trees and power lines and treacherously coated roads (you may have seen a video clip of the guy ice-skating down Peachtree Street this winter).

Lakeshore Drive

Now, Chicagoans, they knew how to handle winter!  Until this year's storm the city had not cancelled school classes for a dozen years.  Footage of the surreal sight of a thousand cars abandoned on Lake Shore Drive brought back memories of days when I used to jog along that major artery.  I had determined never to let weather deter me from outdoor exercise, though I did wear a painter's mask over my mouth whenever the thermometer dipped below zero.  Once I was running on the narrow breakwater along Chicago's lakefront when suddenly I found my legs pumping against pure air, not concrete.  Ice from a rogue wave had coated the top step and I had slipped off into empty space.  I felt like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner when he looks down and realizes he has just run off a cliff.

Chicagoans love to grouse about the cold but I'm convinced they're bluffing.  Secretly, they love it.  I noticed, for example, that people seemed most friendly on days most frigid.  At bus stops we actually talked to each other, albeit mumbling through breath-frosted scarves.  Conversation rarely strayed from one topic—the cold—yet at least we were talking.  "It was so cold that my wine rack froze last night, splattering purple all over the walls of my dining room."  "Tried to get my dog outside this morning.  She took one sniff and headed for the radiator."  "I heard the difference between forty below and thirty below is that your spit freezes before it hits the ground.  At sixty below your eyeballs start to freeze."

A good blizzard rearranges priorities.  A million people may be marching in downtown Cairo and war grinds on in Afghanistan but local newscasters will swap stories about the cold for five minutes before they acknowledge such world events.  For now, at least, our real opponent is outside and we humans hunker down and huddle together to survive.

A winter storm also rearranges the landscape.  Ice floes pile up arctically against Lake Michigan's shore, parked cars become snow moguls, and every dead tree transforms into an exquisite work of art.  In a city, though, the beauty lasts a mere day or two before snow becomes an ugly pile of brown slush.  Not until I moved to Colorado did I experience the lasting beauty of winter.  Snow stays white for months in the Rocky Mountains.  It outlines craggy peaks, sugar-coats evergreen trees, and smothers dead grass under a blanket of glistening white.  Thanks to snow I can follow animal tracks back to the homes of the raccoons, skunks, and foxes who have been eating the birdseed that falls beneath the feeder.

Coloradans know what to do with winter—indeed, our economy depends on it.  I ice-skate on a lake near my home, cross-country ski or snowshoe on trails that begin in my backyard, and downhill ski in some of the world's finest champagne powder.  Meteorologists monitor the snow pack like a patient in Intensive Care because most of the moisture that feeds our streams and rivers falls in frozen, not liquid, form.  (There are downsides to winter here, of course: when the thermometer hit 23 below zero last week one of our pipes froze.)

Just as Chicagoans will be talking about the winter of 2011 for years to come, Coloradans swap stories about the blizzard of 2003.  Where I live, seven feet of snow fell in two days that March.  My house lost electricity for an entire week, which means we lost central heating and our well.  Fortunately, we had a propane stove on which to melt snow for water and a wood-burning fireplace that could "warm" the house to 50 degrees.  It took me several hours just to shovel a path to the wood pile.  No snow plows or bulldozers could get through until we chain-sawed the trees that had fallen across our road and driveway.

With my computer useless, I had thoughts of cozying up to a fireplace and reading books for several days, only to discover that it's hard to read when you're shivering and, more to the point, snowdrifts had blocked out most outside light and covered all skylights.  After the last flakes had settled, I buckled on snowshoes and laboriously hiked up the hill behind my house.  With each step the snowshoes sank through powder to a depth of about three feet and I could only move forward by lifting a foot as high as I could and then lunging.  When I reached the top of the hill I saw a glorious sight worthy of the first day of creation: a gleaming white landscape of snow-covered hills leading to two majestic 14,000-foot mountains to the west.  With no traffic on nearby roads, silence was thick as the snow.  Laden, the trees appeared to bow in respect to a higher power.

Without warning a sharp sound like a rifle shot interrupted my reverie and instinctively I ducked.  Another report followed, then another.  As I watched, branches of Ponderosa pine trees thicker than my waist gave way to the weight of snow and cracked, crashing to the ground with a mighty whoosh!  More than 200 trees fell to the ground that day in sight of our home.  Below me, two mule deer plunged through the snow in a panic, leaping high and falling exhausted, panting, to gain strength for another leap.

As it happened, the Iraq War began the day of the big blizzard.  Sparingly, so as not to drain batteries, we would turn on a portable radio and listen to faraway news of the "shock and awe" bombardment of Baghdad in the desert.  No one could imagine then what a quagmire that war would lead us into and how it would change the globe.  Its repercussions continue to this day as crowds swarm in the Middle East, some of them chanting for freedom, some chanting anti-American slogans.

We think we run the world, we humans.  We think we manage history and determine its outcomes.  One of winter's gifts, all too brief, is a reminder of just how little lies under our control.  Winter, above all, offers a reminder of creaturehood.  Once more we see ourselves as tiny, huddling creatures dependent on each other and on the God who created the awesome universe.  "God's voice thunders in marvelous ways," said Elihu to Job.  "He says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.'  So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor."

Last week a blizzard covered most of the continent, grounding seven thousand planes and turning major cities into Nordic ski parks.  As reported on CNN it seemed a disaster.  I wonder, though.  Childhood laughter and adult community, beauty on grand scale, a potent lesson in humility—for these rare gifts, shouldn't winter prompt more gratitude than grousing?

Speaking to Gay Christians

Various blogs have been hammering me for agreeing to speak to a group called the Gay Christian Network.  I get tired of writing about this issue because it stirs up such a storm of controversy and little of the dialogue seems constructive.  On the other hand, the church must keep engaging, and I know of no better way to engage than to hear the stories of Christians who are struggling personally with homosexuality.  Some conservatives think the very term "Gay Christian" is an oxymoron.  I wish they could attend a gathering such as the one I spoke to last week and hear the stories I heard.  Rather than try to defend my decision just to speak to Gay Christians, I will quote here a letter from the head of GCN:

An Open Letter about Philip Yancey

From GCN's Executive Director, Justin Lee

Since we announced that bestselling Christian author Philip Yancey would be addressing the GCN conference in 2011, questions have been flying, online and offline. "Is Philip Yancey pro-gay?" some have asked. "What are his views on homosexuality?" "Why would he agree to speak to this conference?" "Why would GCN invite him in the first place?"

Some have criticized me for extending the invitation, thinking an evangelical author like Philip is surely far too conservative to speak to a group like ours. Others have strongly condemned him for accepting the invitation, saying he's condoning sin. Some have even called for other Christians to disassociate with him.

So I'd like to set the record straight on exactly what this conference is about and why we invited him.

When I was a teenager, I discovered to my horror that I was attracted to guys instead of girls. I was a deeply committed Christian growing up Southern Baptist, and I was firmly opposed to homosexuality in any form. Nevertheless, when I turned to my pastor, church, and Christian friends for prayer and support, they all turned their backs on me, condemning me for my temptations even though I hadn't acted on them.

GCN began when I met other Christians who were in the same boat. All of us were struggling to figure out how to live holy lives with our same-sex attractions, and all of us had felt the church's rejection. Some of us ultimately decided to commit ourselves to lifelong celibacy, while others of us decided to pursue monogamous relationships. In spite of our theological disagreements with one another, we all wanted to serve Christ, and we all longed for a Christian community that would hear our stories.

The annual GCN conference is a place for Christians to hear those stories and worship and pray together—gay and straight, women and men, some believing in gay marriage and some believing that gay people are called to celibacy. Our organization does not advocate for any viewpoint on gay marriage, gay rights, or any similar issue; our goal is simply to let people know that Jesus loves them and to provide a safe and compassionate space for the church to work through some of these difficult issues.

I invited Philip Yancey because I respect him as a Christian. I've always been impressed at how well he balances our need to live moral, holy lives as Christians with our need to have grace toward those who do things we disapprove of. I did not invite him because of any views he might or might not hold on gays; I invited him because this is a group of people who desperately need to hear not only that God loves them, but that other Christians do, too.

I have no idea what Philip's views are on gay relationships, same-sex marriage, or anything of the sort. He's never told me. Honestly, it wouldn't affect my decision either way. That's not the point.

Last year, we had a keynote delivered by Baptist minister and author Tony Campolo. Dr. Campolo believes that gay relationships are sinful, and he said so during his keynote address. He also received a standing ovation at the end—from an audience including some people in the very relationships he had just condemned. Why? Did they think he was supporting their decisions? Not at all. They applauded him because he was one of the very few Christians who would dare to reach out to them in love and say, "Even though I don't agree with you, I love you. I hear your stories of pain, and I want to count you as my friends." That message was powerful. It changed lives.

I don't know what Philip Yancey will say in a few weeks when he addresses our audience. We've asked him only to say whatever God puts on his heart. I do know that his audience will be diverse: gay couples in monogamous relationships; same-sex-attracted Christians wrestling with the loneliness of celibacy; Christian parents struggling with how to respond to their gay children. One woman I know will be attending with a heavy heart, carrying the memories of her gay daughter, who committed suicide years ago after feeling her mother's rejection.

As those people, with all their theological disagreements, come together to seek God's heart, I can think of no one better equipped to speak to them than a man who has gained a reputation both as solidly evangelical and filled with grace toward others. And even though I'm sure he knew people would misconstrue it, I am so grateful that he had the courage to reach out to us in love. It is, I believe, exactly what Jesus would do.

Justin Lee

Executive Director

The Gay Christian Network

————————–
(Note: if you have comments to make on this blog entry, please keep them brief and polite. I do not intend to make the blog a platform from which to condemn people holding different points of view. Also, please refrain from posting any URLs to personal blogs or other websites.  Thank you. — Philip)

God's Talent Pool

Over the last several months I've been traveling a lot, mainly in connection with the release of the book What Good Is God? I've also done radio interviews from my home in Colorado and written blogs for the likes of CNN.com and The Huffington Post.  Those last two assignments gave me a window into just how much hostility the topic of religion stirs up.

In answering the question, "What good is God?" I respond that I note positive benefits on three levels.  1) On an individual level, faith can help transform the lives of the needy, such as prostitutes, alcoholics, Dalits (Untouchables), and leprosy victims—the stories I tell in my book.  2) The community of faith also responds with comfort and practical help to those in need: both in natural disasters, such as an earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in New Orleans, and in human ones such as the mass murders at Virginia Tech and Mumbai.  3) Finally, the gospel spreads like yeast in bread, as Jesus predicted, affecting whole societies.  Google the websites that rate countries on freedom, prosperity, freedom from corruption, charity, or gender equality, and virtually all have in common a strong Christian heritage.  To take a striking example, what changed Sweden from a tribe of pillaging warriors—the fearsome Vikings—into the civil, generous society we see today?

I had no idea that such assertions would whack a hornet's nest of protesters.  Hundreds of people must cruise the Internet daily looking for anyone who says something good about religion.  What an idiot I must be!  How can I possibly suggest that religion ever does any good!  Don't I know about the Crusades and the Inquisition?  Religion does little but delude people, strip them of money, and further violence and ethnic division.

Here are a few samples of those comments:

–God makes waffle batter fluffy.  His only power.  Little known fact.

–Religion and a nickel will get you a cup of coffee.

–The question for evangelical ministers isn't whether there is or isn't a God or whether God matters. The question for their flock simply is; WHERE'S THE MONEY? SHOW ME THE MONEY!

–The guy looks like a wacko, like all evangelicals…

–if there is a god, he sucks.  no good god would allow some of the things going on around us to exist.  conseqently, if the there is no god we would have no one to blame.  assuming there is a god he doesn't do any of us any good at all.

Some got more personal, such as the writer who posted about me, "He needs his neck broken, I think.  Too bad he didn't die before writing such a pathetic book.  What a waste of paper and medical resources."

Lest you think these sentiments represent a radical minority, consider that before a debate on "Is religion good or bad?" between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens in Toronto , the organizers commissioned a poll of 18,000 people in 23 countries.  Final results: 52 percent of those surveyed concluded that religion does more harm than good.  (The nation with the most appreciation for religion, 92 percent, was Saudi Arabia; the nation with the least appreciation for religion, ironically, was Sweden, at 19 percent.  Ah, what short memories have those Swedes.)

As I've often written, in my fundamentalist past I saw the toxic effects of religion gone bad.  And in my career as a journalist I've met my share of characters who seem more suitable for Worldwide Wrestling than for spiritual leadership.  In fact, the Huffington Post responses caught me off guard because I'm far more accustomed to hearing from Christian flame-throwers who judge me soft or heretical.

Yet I must acknowledge that some of the oddest characters I've met, the larger-than-life ones with a surplus of ego and a deficiency of sophistication, are those who have accomplished most in the work of God's Kingdom: organizing relief work, feeding the hungry, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus.  That pattern simply replicates what the Bible shows so clearly: God used Jacob with his slippery ethics, David with his moral lapses, Jeremiah with his morosity, Saul of Tarsus with his abusive past, Peter with his bodacious failures.

Thinking back over the Christian personalities I've known, as well as those featured in both Old and New Testaments, I've come up with the following principle: God uses the talent pool available.

To adapt an analogy I heard recently, when the Pueblo, Colorado, Symphony Orchestra plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—don't blame Beethoven.  On the other hand, the only way many Coloradans will ever hear Beethoven is through that struggling ensemble.  Unlike Christopher Hitchens and the defenders of non-religion, I can still hear strains of the Good News wherever I go in the world, which is why I keep writing about it.

Francis Collins, a Faithful Scientist

Drew Dyck's book Generation Ex-Christian includes the following anecdote about the author's visit to the Wheaton Atheist Club (Who knew such an organization existed?).

Somewhere in the midst of our conversations, a jovial young man named Dan came clean as a former Christian.  He'd left the faith only months earlier.

"I was in the Assemblies of God all my life," he said.  "I even played in a Christian band."

What had caused his crisis of faith?

"I always believed the earth was 6,000 years old," Dan said bitterly.  "But now I know it's not."

For years Dan tried desperately to maintain his belief in the young earth theory.  He read material from Answers in Genesis, a Christian apologetics organization, consulted his pastor and people in his church.  But ultimately he said he just couldn't deny what he saw as the evidence that the world was much older than 6,000 years.

"That's when I realized that Christianity just wasn't true." he said.

Inwardly I cringed at the false-alternatives scenario that Dan had set up in his mind.  For him, one geological question (which the Bible doesn't even address explicitly) was the deciding factor for faith.  Even Answers in Genesis, which holds unswervingly to a literal reading of the Bible's first book, seems to place less importance on the earth's age.  The first bullet point of their statement of belief reads: "The scientific aspects of creation are important, but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer and Judge."  However, for Dan, the question of the earth's age was paramount, and in his view Christianity had failed.

In part because of his concern over young people like Dan, Dr. Francis Collins founded an organization called BioLogos, which addresses issues of science and faith (www.biologos.org).  No one can dispute Collins' credentials as a scientist: he holds both a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale and an M.D. from North Carolina, gained renown for finding the gene that causes cystic fibrosis, and directed the Human Genome Project toward its triumphant goal of mapping all three billion letters of the human genetic code.  Yet Collins identifies himself as an evangelical Christian and has engaged in public debates with some of the "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (the latter in a Time cover story).

I have attended two meetings sponsored by BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation, including one that took place last week in Manhattan.  Each brought together an assortment of scientists, theologians, and pastors in order to discuss how the findings of science shed light on our understanding of the Bible's account of creation.  BioLogos accepts the findings of science that the earth is 4.7 billion years old and that the diversity of species has come about through the process of evolution.  At the same time, it affirms the classic Christian creeds and sees no necessary conflict between science and the Bible.

Francis Collins had to step back from direct management of BioLogos in 2009 when he accepted the position of director of the National Institutes of Health, the nation's largest scientific organization.  In such a prominent role, he attracts strident criticism from both sides of the science/faith debate.  When he was nominated for NIH, one scientist accused him of suffering from dementia and another complained, "I don't want American science to be represented by a clown."  They were reacting to his outspoken beliefs in a personal God who created the universe, answers prayer, and performs miracles.  Meanwhile, Collins and BioLogos absorb flames and arrows from some in the Christian community who question their salvation or theological purity because they reject a young earth and affirm the common descent of species.  Truly, BioLogos walks a tightrope.

Gently yet persistently, Collins meets with both groups and explains why he sees science and faith as compatible expressions of God's "two books": God's Works and God's Word.  As he told Richard Dawkins, "I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature.  Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe.  The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan?  And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate."

Collins's best-selling book The Language of God articulates his beliefs, as well as giving a kind of personal testimony.  Collins has sympathy for atheists, for as a student at Yale he was a "fundamentalist atheist" who took delight in arguing with believers.  His shift into medicine introduced challenges to his non-belief, especially as he encountered people who endured great suffering yet clung to their faith.  "If they believed in a God and he let them get cancer, why weren't they shaking their fist at him?  Instead, they seemed to derive this remarkable sense of comfort from their faith, even at a time of great adversity."

One day, an elderly woman suffering from an untreatable illness asked Collins what he believed.  He had no response, no answer to such questions as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", and "Is there a God?"  He realized that as a scientist he had always insisted on collecting rigorous data, yet in matters of faith he had never even sought data.  After consulting with a minister he read the Gospel of John, then turned to the writings of C. S. Lewis, beginning with Mere Christianity.  As Lewis himself once said, an atheist can't be too careful what he reads; the surprised and reluctant young doctor fell into the arms of faith.

Three decades later, having just turned 60, Collins heads one of the world's most important scientific organizations, overseeing twenty thousand employees and grants to 325,000 outside researchers.  In personal style he breaks the mold.  Though his skin has the paleness of someone who spends all day at a desk job, he commutes to work on a red Harley-Davidson motorcycle.  A scientist with impeccable credentials, at Christian groups he will pull out a custom guitar inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of the DNA double-helix and lead the gathering in praise choruses.  (Even at scientific gatherings he may perform a folk song composed on the spot; his parents ran a back-to-nature farm in Virginia that hosted actors and musicians, including Bob Dylan who spent his 18th birthday there.)

I have observed Francis Collins at two different workshops sponsored by BioLogos.  He never missed a meeting, always sitting on the front row, and unlike some participants he kept his Blackberry phone in his pocket.  Between meetings he worked on statements that scientists, theologians, and pastors could all agree on—periodically reminding us of our responsibility to students who faced a crisis of faith because of careless assumptions by both science and the church.  In contrast to many scientists, he spoke in complete sentences, free of jargon, as he distilled the various arguments that had been presented.

Two things, however, impressed me about Collins more than his many achievements.  First, I learned of how he treats his adversaries, some of whom speak of Collins with contempt.  Whenever he visits Oxford he tries to have tea with Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, who has called religious faith a "virus of the mind."  Similarly, he has met often with the militant atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great.  He told one reporter, "As you might have heard, Christopher has esophageal cancer, and I have actually been spending a fair amount of time with him and his wife, Carol, trying to help him sort through the options for therapy—including some rather cutting-edge approaches based on cancer genomics."

The second thing that impressed me occurred in the early morning hours, before 5 am.  I had flown to New York from Europe the night before and my biological clock had not adjusted to the time change, so I got up and made my way down to a floor where the hotel provided a coffee machine.  I heard not a sound in the hallways, as all reasonable people were sleeping.  But when I got to the coffee room, to my surprise I found a familiar figure, Francis Collins, standing before the coffee machine in his pajamas.  "You know, e-mail, keeping up with the bureaucracy, all that stuff," he explained.  Oh, yes—even though he would spend all day giving full attention to a group of Christians who were thrashing out matters of theology, he did have those 20,000 employees to worry about.

Roaming in Romania: October 2010

Roaming in Romania: October 2010

November 2 was election day in the United States, and on the Internet I read about the "Tea Party Revolution" sparked by dissatisfaction with President Obama and the Democrats.  Earlier in the day I stood on Revolution Square where a local told me his memories of that fateful day 25 years before, on December 25, 1989.

"I was a teenager, son of a pastor, and one of my earliest memories was of my father lying on the bed with an oversized transistor radio propped on his stomach, tilting the case to the right then the left trying to find a signal for Radio Free Europe, which the communists kept jamming.  We had heard of riots in a northern city, set off by the arrest of a Hungarian Reformed pastor, with 100,000 people gathering in the square to protest.  No one knew the whole story, of course, just wild rumors, and on December 22 the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stood on the balcony of his palace in Bucharest to calm the crowds and restore order.

He began the speech using the predictable socialist phrases.  Suddenly a firecracker went off.  The security agents jumped to attention.  Someone in the audience jeered, another whistled in contempt and soon something unimaginable happened: the crowd of tens of thousands, who had stood through many such speeches and loyally applauded, shouted back in open contempt.  A tomato was launched from the crowd toward the balcony.  Or was it a rock?  Ceausescu's mouth dropped open and a look of terror flickered across the faces of his bodyguards.

The sound of gunfire rang out.  (Later some speculated that the secret police had played a tape of it as an excuse to fire back at the protesters, a theory made plausible by the fact that the bullets all came from the government buildings.)  More gunfire, including bursts of machine guns.  People fell to the pavement or ran away.  Within seconds the television transmission abruptly ended, and that's when we knew: it's over.  The reign of terror has ended.  The witch is dead."

I came to Romania to speak to a large gathering of pastors and Christian leaders as well as a conference of medical students.  I knew little about the country, other than the stereotypical accounts of Romanian orphans, gypsies, Dracula, and Nadia Comaneci.  While there I listened to story after story of life "after the revolution," a phrase you hear nearly every day in this country.  Communism fell at the very end of 1989, yet even today its shadow darkens the land.  Last year, for example, a book came out naming collaborators within churches.  Imagine your reaction if you learned that for years your pastor had been reporting to the secret police on you and other parishioners, including the content of private counseling sessions.  Or, imagine a presidential election in which both major candidates had held high offices under Ceausescu's regime, one of the most brutal and corrupt of modern times.

Under Ceausescu, as many as one in eight Romanians worked for the secret police.  Two million citizens, one-tenth of the population, were murdered.  The remainder lived in a constant state of fear and mistrust.  Let alone hunger.  I noted that my hosts seemed inordinately obsessed with meals: "Do you have lunch plans?  What about dinner?  Do you have snacks in your room?"  Finally one told me that this obsession stems from the years of hunger when each day a family member had to stand in a long line and wait an hour or two for a meager ration of milk or bread and, very rarely, vegetables or meat.

Meanwhile one-third of the national budget (!) was going toward construction of the "Palace of the People," Ceaucescu's Brobdingnagian building project taking shape on the highest hill of the capital city.  He knocked down 35,000 houses in one of the loveliest sections of old Bucharest, cleared the rubble, and set out to construct the second largest building in the world—only the Pentagon is larger.  The residents of those destroyed houses had to move into matchbox-sized apartments in ugly Stalinesque apartment blocks.  (To this day hundreds of dogs roam the streets of Bucharest, abandoned by their owners who were forbidden to bring them into apartments.)  Constructing the palace required 700 architects and 20,000 workmen on round-the clock shifts.  The building used a million cubic yards of marble for its floors and walls and a million cubic yards of crystal for its chandeliers.  Like any egomaniacal dictator, Ceaucescu made sure the building flattered him: a short man, he reduced the height of all stairs, and designed the halls in which he addressed the people as echo chambers so that applause for him would ring loud and long.

Meanwhile Nicolae Ceaucescu's wife Elena was making her own mark.  Romanians swear she owned more shoes than Imelda Marcos.  In order to overcome the inferiority complex she got by flunking third grade, she aspired to become a great scientist, proudly attaching her name to papers written by legitimate scientists and naming herself to prestigious positions over research institutes.

On Christmas Day 1974 Ceaucescu boasted that in 25 years atheism would triumph in Romania, meaning the lovely churches that pierce the skies from every tiny village would survive only as museums and historical artifacts.  He proved no better as a prophet than as a politician, for on Christmas Day 1989 Ceaucescu and his wife were both killed by a firing squad after a kangaroo court trial.  The revolution had triumphed, and church bells rang out once more.

As I look back on my life, the fall of communism stands as the most  climactic event of a climactic era, one that never got the attention it deserved.  In Atlanta I grew up practicing drills in case of nuclear missile attacks from Cuba; bomb shelters were my high school's favorite science projects.  Then in that magical year of 1989 the Iron Curtain rusted and fell in a heap in places like Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Moldova, Albania, Latvia, and Lithuania.  Of the Soviet bloc countries, only Romania experienced much violence in the process.  Some say 3000 died in the uprisings—shot, clubbed to death, crushed by tanks—though officially the count is 1100 dead and more than 3000 injured.  In the major cities, crosses mark the exact location where protesters, most of them teenagers, gave their lives.

Modern Romania has joined the European Union and NATO, something inconceivable to the older generation.  Said the man who showed me Revolution Square, "Twenty years ago, if someone had told me that I would be standing in this place talking freely and openly to a Christian author about the end of communism here—I would more easily believe that I would be standing on the moon!"  He drove us down a street once named Victory of Socialism Boulevard.  For better or worse, it might as well be renamed Victory of Capitalism Boulevard, for billboards advertising Coke, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's dominated the landscape.  When the first McDonald's opened in Bucharest, 35,000 people showed up to buy a hamburger.

Huge problems remain.  The number of Romanian orphans has decreased from 50,000 to 10,000, but some have grown up almost as feral children, living in the heating pipes and storm sewers under the cities.  Six million Romanians have fled the country, creating a diaspora in the West.  Romanian is the third most common language in Silicon Valley, California, and England, France and Spain staff their hospitals with doctors and health workers from Romania.  The temptation to leave is hard to resist. We spent a day with a couple, both doctors, who work twelve-hour days and receive about $400 per month salary.  A few Romanians have become billionaires while in the countryside millions still work the farms using scythes, donkey carts and wooden wagons.  In the cities, platoons of workers sweep the streets with straw brooms and gather leaves by hand, using simple rakes.

And yet, and yet…freedom lives.  Romanians speak of the wonder of being able to express their opinion, out loud, without whispering or scanning the room for bugging devices.  Though not all can afford quality goods, shops now have them on display.

I like the Romanian people.  They have a kind of shyness and humility, no doubt forced on them by years of oppression, but the expressive Latin temperament also comes through.  They are warm without being pushy and physically attractive without being vain.  I counted it a privilege to speak to them on Grace, something citizens of post-communist countries badly need.  The church is full of problems, and I heard of many first hand.  Yet it withstood the worst of a brutal atheistic regime.  One more freedom has opened up in recent years, the freedom to worship.

Listening to election returns on CNN, I felt a rare moment of patriotic nostalgia.  Ah, how much do we Americans take for granted, how little do we know of real suffering compared to other parts of the world.  And I say that in full awareness of the problems facing our own country.  When in doubt, I think of Romania.

Latest Book Released Today In the U.S.; Live Radio Interview 1:30 p.m. (E.S.T.)

Philip Yancey's newest book, What Good Is God, makes its U.S. debut today, October 19.

Excerpts from the book can be found on this link:

At 1:30 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, Philip will take part in a live interview on Hachette Book Group's BlogTalkRadio channel available for listening online.

A City Weekend

We had a "city weekend," which included a play by Isabella Allende on Friday, a memorial service for a Dr. Vernon Grounds on Saturday, and an urban church on Sunday.  Up in the foothills where we live, the golden aspen leaves have mostly fallen, the mountains visible through our windows are freshly coated in white, and the bull elk rest quietly in meadows or under trees, exhausted by their annual ritual of sparring and mating.  Squirrels and chipmunks are storing up seed for the winter, and the birds have narrowed down to those species brave enough to endure a Colorado winter.  Three times this weekend we left all that behind and drove to the city.

I had met a pastor who told me about his church in Denver which holds to a strong evangelical theology but is "welcoming and affirming" of the gay community.  (I know that any time I mention this issue I open the floodgates to vitriolic responses from people who have way too much time to surf the Internet and post stern pronouncements on homosexuality.)  I deliberately avoid taking a firm position on most of the nuanced questions on homosexuality and the church for a couple of reasons: 1) It is a complex issue, not nearly as black-and-white as either side thinks, and 2) I believe our primary charge is to demonstrate God's love, which is most difficult when a relationship is mainly characterized by heated argument.

Recently the novelist Anne Rice, outspoken about her conversion a few years ago, announced, "I quit being a Christian…I remain committed to Christ…but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity.  It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group."  She mentioned Christians' hatred of gay people as a major factor.

More sardonically, the gay activist Dan Savage said, "All gays and lesbians want from evangelical Christians is the same deal the Jews and the yoga instructors and the atheists and the divorced and the adulterers and the rich all get: full civil equality despite the going-to-hell business.  (And isn't hell punishment enough?  Do we have to be persecuted on earth too?)"

I read both these quotes in a newsletter the very morning I attended the welcoming and affirming church.  I must say, it was a relief to read this church's approach as printed in their bulletin:

Married, divorced or single here, it's one family that mingles here.

Conservative or liberal here, we've all gotta give a little here.

Big or small here, there's room for us all here.

Doubt or believe here, we all can receive here.

Gay or straight here, there's no hate here.

Woman or man here, everyone can serve here.

Whatever your race here, for all of us grace here.

In imitation of the ridiculous love Almighty God has for each of us and all of us,

let us live and love without labels.

The service followed the format common in modern evangelical churches: praise songs led by a band onstage, a sermon, more singing, and communion.  During the singing, small children danced in the aisles before being ushered into another room for the children's lesson.  The sermon, centering on the story of the widow who attracted Jesus' praise by giving two small coins, "everything she had to live on," was as rich, insightful, and eloquent as any I've heard in months.  Indeed, nothing struck me as notably different about this church unless I looked around and noticed the homosexual couples scattered through the congregation.  (That's not quite true: the variety of hair styles, dress, tattoos, and piercings marked this as a distinctively urban church.)

My visit did little to resolve the questions I still have about evangelicals and homosexuality, but it did make me grateful for a church that courageously welcomes those who would feel judged or excluded from many other churches.

From there I went to a barbecue celebration of Metro CareRing, a nonprofit organization that provides food for Denver's hungry.  The organizers had predicted a turnout of 300, but a cold, drizzly rain kept attendance down to less than half that.  A number of churches had sent representatives, and I agreed to say a few words and to give away signed books to anyone who gave a donation of any size.  The Denver Broncos were playing in another state, but it occurred to me that 60,000 screaming fans would gladly have paid to sit through miserable weather for three hours had they scheduled a home game that day.  Instead, a cause like hunger attracted a small group of churchgoers, idealistic college students, and street people who always seem to know where food is being served.

I learned an important principle by studying the motley collection of characters who populate the pages of the Bible: God uses the talent pool available.  In the sermon earlier that day, the guest preacher mentioned her initial discomfort with the story of the widow who gave all she had.  Why did Jesus simply praise her, as an object lesson contrasted to the rich people who proudly made large contributions?  Why didn't he do something to address her state?  Her conclusion: "God leaves the justice issue up to us."  I pondered that statement as I stood in the rain and watched a small crowd of volunteers unloading food donations while a soul sister belted out, "His eye is on the sparrow."  For all its faults, the church still soldiers on; it is, after all, the talent pool available to do God's work.

© 2010 by Philip Yancey

Live Interview on BlogTalkRadio 10/19

 A live interview with Philip Yancey about his new book, What Good Is God? is scheduled for the Hachette Book Group Radio channel on BlogTalkRadio on Tuesday, October 19 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Click on the link below for more details. A recording of the interview will also be posted once it concludes.    – Website Administrator

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An Interview In The Christian Post

Rather than add another note to the blog, I'm linking to this interview on my book which will be released October 19.  It's from an online Christian newspaper (new to me) called The Christian Post.  I don't know why they publish these things before a book is available…