DALLAS (ABP) — In 1520, as Ferdinand Magellan's ships rounded the tip of South America, lookouts sighted people on the shore carrying burning torches. But the natives seemed oblivious to Magellan's galleons that had suddenly appeared close to their shore. The explorers were puzzled, and perhaps a bit insulted. They were used to being feared as invaders or fawned over as gods. But how could they be ignored as if they were invisible?
Apparently, Magellan's odd vessels, manned by the strangely clad and strangely hued Spanish, did not compute to the locals, who sailed in canoes. The native population simply had no experiential reference points to make sense of what their eyes recorded. So, they later explained, they just assumed the strange sighting was an apparition and, without speaking to each other about it, went about their lives as if nothing had changed. Such vessels simply didn't exist, they thought. So all evidence to the contrary was suppressed.
Many inhabitants of the 21st century encounter God the same way, explains Philip Yancey in his latest book, “Rumors of Another World.” Evidence that points to a loving, creator God is ignored or misinterpreted, he says.
Yet spiritual reality, like Magellan's men, doesn't cease to exist just because it can't be examined through a microscope or telescope or explained by a system of philosophy, Yancey says. It hovers just beyond the acknowledgement of our reluctant senses, waiting for men and women to translate “truth” from one world to another.
Yancey has been a highly successful author for 20 years — 16 books and 7 million copies. His earlier books invite believers into constructive criticism of their churches and their spiritual selves. Unblinking and often jarring honesty have become his trademark. “Other 'Christian' writers focus on giving us answers,” one critic noted. “Yancey keeps stirring up more questions.”
But “Rumors” is different. The honesty is still there, but this book wants to engage a secular audience, persons apt to say, “I'm spiritual but not religious.” And by suggesting truth may lie outside our rational minds, Yancey may very well scratch postmodern spiritual wanderers where they itch.
When he began transferring these ideas to paper, Yancey strenuously self-edited to avoid repeating his earlier books that speak to Christians. “At one point I went back and cut 25,000 words,” he told FaithWorks magazine. “That hurt. But I had to do it to keep my focus on those who are suspiciously circling the church and wondering, 'Is there a God? How can I know? What difference does it make in my life?'”
In a Borders bookstore in north Dallas, about 60 present-day spiritual explorers gathered around Yancey at a recent book signing. These were mostly the Doubting Thomas types, the ones who profess, “Most of the time I'm pretty sure there is a God who loves me, but sometimes I don't understand what he's up too.”
A middle-aged couple bought a copy of “Rumors” to send to their son off at college. A woman was buying a copy for her atheist friend. A professor from Dallas Theological Seminary waited in line behind an Anglican priest. There was a leader of a local agnostic group, a teacher at a Catholic boy's school, an art gallery owner. Meanwhile, a tired-eyed, 20-something mother, with a ricocheting toddler but no wedding ring, hovered on the edge of the crowd to be the last in line.
Each had a story to share with the thin, goateed writer with the Afro, often about how they had passed one of his books on to a fellow struggler.
But these were mostly hardcore Yancey fans, passionate owners of dog-eared copies of “Disappointment with God,” “What's So Amazing About Grace?” or “Reaching for the Invisible God.” This crowd represented only half of “Rumors'” intended audience, but – more importantly – they could be the links to the other half, the spiritual wanderers Yancey writes about.
Zondervan, recognizing the crossover potential for “Rumors,” for the first time aggressively marketed a Yancey book in secular book chains and investing significant advertising dollars outside the Christian cultural ghetto.
Prior to the book signing, Yancey talked about his life as a writer in general and Rumors specifically.
As people encounter the suggestions of an invisible but very real spiritual world, Yancey explained, they can either ignore the rumors or begin to ask themselves “the great divide question” — Is the visible world around us all there is?
Yancey has his own word for those willing to ask that question: Borderlanders, “those who live in the borderlands of belief,” roaming a no-man's land between clear-eyed faith and unwavering atheism. Their number includes those who have never engaged the church, those who have been driven from the church, and those who wander back and forth.
Borderlanders, he explained, wonder if “religious faith makes sense in a world of the Hubble telescope and the Internet.” Many of them keep a safe distance from church and Christians, he said, but they aren't quite able to “set aside the feeling that there must be a spiritual reality.” Roaming among them are the “reluctant believers,” unable to articulate the “whys” behind their faith, which just won't let them go.
Yancey knows whereof he writes. A “sometimes reluctant Christian” who has spent his entire adult life recovering from the “toxic” fundamentalist church of his childhood, Yancey walked away from religion in college.
His return to faith was not the product of typical Christian evangelism. “I was immune to gospel tracts. I could tune out Billy Graham.” Instead he encountered “a world quite different than I had been taught about, a world of beauty and goodness.” He kept bumping into hints that a loving God was out there somewhere, visiting grace on his creation.
Realizing maybe God had been misrepresented to him, Yancey said he began “warily circling around the faith.” The lives of dedicated Christians spoke to him, especially friend Paul Brand, the brilliant surgeon who invested his life in caring for lepers. Brand became Yancey's co-author and later his surrogate and spiritual father.
Reading let Yancey enter the debate about the nature and existence of God. He read C.S. Lewis and Karl Marx, G. K. Chesterton and Nietzsche. Eventually he returned to the Bible. “I can't think of any argument against God that isn't already in the Bible,” he said. He read it with new eyes, ones opening to possibilities of God's grace he saw in the birth of a child and the funeral of a man who died from AIDS.
There were three specific areas where Yancey says he kept bumping into a God he couldn't always see: the complex beauty of nature, the soaring and healing beauty of classical music, and the ecstatic beauty of romantic love.
During his time at Bob Jones University, where his rejection of the church of his childhood festered until it ruptured, Yancey often would escape into the empty chapel and play the grand piano for hours. The ability of classical music to calm the anger and fear raging inside him suggested to Yancey that something or somebody beyond his physical senses loved him.
Romantic love, Yancey said, “convinced me of the possibility of change in myself [when] I met a woman who saw worth in me where I had seen little.”
Yancey bluntly admits he can produce no incontestable empirical evidence for the existence of God – his or any other version. But, he points out, that reductionist approaches to reality don't disprove the invisible world but only ignore it.
“Rumors” is Yancey's attempt to amplify “the thin, quenchable voice of God.” He points out that humankind, though made in God's image, is also subject to “baldness, hemorrhoids, presbyopia, osteoporosis and every other ailment in the medical encyclopedia.” He notes that “Jesus was the first world leader to inaugurate a kingdom with a heroic role for losers.”
He calls as witnesses Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and John Merrick (The Elephant Man). He quotes Puritan proverbs, Martin Luther, Sister Wendy and William James. All to answer the questions so often posed by spiritual wanderers: So what of the realities of that other world as framed by Christianity? That world where marriages and friendships and politics are salvaged by foolish-seeming acts of forgiveness? A world where Jesus' advice — that people gain true riches by giving away wealth instead of hoarding it — proves true? Where accepting the reality of that other world changes a person's spiritual reality, in the same way string theory and quantum physics changes the accepted rules of science?
In the mid-20th century, Sri Lankan theologian D. T. Niles famously defined Christian evangelism as one hungry beggar telling another hungry beggar where to get bread. In the opening decade of the 21st century, perhaps that metaphor can be restated as one borderlander telling another that the rumors of a distant land of grace are indeed true.
— This article first appeared in FaithWorks magazine, published by Associated Baptist Press.
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