Soul Survivor

Section Internet Links	Jock's Notes	Wayne's Notes	Back to Index
Jock. - Dr. C. Everett Koop In Dr. Everett Koop, Phillip Yancy has picked a rare example - a Man of Principle in the public arena. He recounts the conflicted views of his earlier years where church representatives seemed naive on political issues and were easily co-opted. Where, no one ever expected a politician to behave on moral principle. Views that exist still today. He asks: "Can a person of faith get involved in politics without making crucial compromises?" (p 181) But Dr. Koop struck the balance as few others have managed. Dr. Koop was a paediatric surgeon who was active in opposing abortion - a committed Presbyterian with unwavering confidence in God's sovereignty. He held a very conservative view. This reputation caused the new President Reagan to want him as Surgeon General. But the ensuing congressional and public debate dragged on nearly a year. He endured this criticism and inactivity and became a Surgeon General that earned the respect of all sides. All strangely except the evangelicals who had thought him their exclusive champion. "I had a chance to look at the health problems of the nation and wonder what I could do about them when I was finally let loose. I decided I would use the office to espouse the cause of the disenfranchised: handicapped children, the elderly, people in need of organ transplantation, women and children who were being battered and abused. During that nine months I developed a detailed agenda, something no Surgeon General has ever had before. In the end, that period of acute frustration made possible every single thing I was able to accomplish in office. Now that's the sovereignty of God at work!" (p 186). His advocacy for the public was in complete regard for political consequence, but out of his own moral sense. He is most famous for his integrity and bluntness in accusing the tobacco industry and working for a non-smoking world - all in defiance of his political masters. Whatever his personal belief, he sought a public compromise. This earned him the respect of many and the approbation of those who saw things as all-or-nothing. He said "You may hate the sin, but you are to love the sinner." Yancey quotes an aid to Koop, "What people didn't understand about Dr. Koop is that he is pro-life in the purest sense of the word: not anti-death, but pro-life. I have seen him with thousands of people - malnourished children, Washington socialites, dying AIDS patients, abused wives, abortion rights activists - and he treats every one of them as if he truly believes, which he does, that they are created in the image of God. … He truly does respect the value of all human life." (p 185) Yancey knew him for 30 years and had the occasion to discuss these matters with him. Yancey notes that Koop first managed to "convince a skeptical public of his basic integrity." Koop advises us to get the facts right and not make "knee-jerk" statements. That we should distinguish between the immoral and the illegal. He believed that science and faith could "walk together". "The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church tilts one direction or the other. Either it lowers the ideals, adjusting moral standards downward, softening Jesus' strong commands, rationalizing behavior; or else it pulls in the boundaries of grace, declaring some sins worse than others, some sinners beyond the pale. Few churches stay faithful both to the high ideals of gospel and its bottomless grace. Dr. C. Everett Koop's life in the spotlight shows how difficult a balancing act that is. Nevertheless, I am convinced that unless we embrace both messages we will betray the good news that Jesus brought to earth." (p 203). To background the meaning of "the sovereignty of God" that is used much here by Yancy and Koop, I found a illustrative bit in the work of H. Richard Niebuhr. While this is not our current manner of theological language, it is very much that of the time that Yancey and Koop were forming their faith. Neibuhr was a prime source of theological expression for the theological mainstream of his time - mid century America. Faith and Ethics, (Harper 1957) is an analysis of Neibuhr's theological work. Neibuhr is called a neo-conservative for he refreshed conservative values in Christian theology. You can see how this thinking grounded the lives of many Christians and helps explain the perspective, the ethic and the persistence of Dr. Koop. The context of the excerpt is the chapter "The Kingdom of God in America and the Task of the Church". This is a somewhat brutal distillation of the chapter. Any who like are welcome to the volume. Faith and Ethics shows us the "fundamentalist" view is not the only conservative Christian view. And that in Niebuhr we have the integrity and sophistication of view that motivated his generation to lives of Christian service. That includes Yancey and Koop. "The kingdom of God means that God is sovereign. He is the ruler over the destinies of men and of nations, over history as well as nature. ... The Bible is "whole-istic" in its understanding of the sovereignty of God. He rules over all; no act or phase of history can be understood as being apart from his providence. We err if we think of his sovereignty solely in terms of what we regard as the "good" acts of man and nations or only in terms of the "good" which we experience. Just as in the world of nature "he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust," so in the world of history his sovereignty is evident in the acts of Israel and of Persia (or Cyrus) and his power is manifested in both the good and the evil that is done "in the city." ... the sensitive Christian will endeavor to become a citizen of the kingdom of God, to give his allegiance to the sovereign, to live as best he can according to the sovereign's will, and to affirm his faith before others. ... Given this foundation, which is quite substantial indeed, the rest will have to be improvisation. ... If one takes this view of the sovereignty of God seriously, one will endeavor to find meaning in American's beginnings, history, and destiny in terms of his providence and his sovereignty. One cannot stop with socioeconomic factors alone nor even with the movement of ideas and ideals - be they even religious ideas and ideals. In all humility and exercising utmost ability, one will want to search out the ways of God with this nation. " (p266) Again Yancey has found a worthy mentor - one who has found in the words of Jesus, the strength for his own deeds. Dr. Koop has put his name on a website offering medical information with a substantial depth to it. It's http://drkoop.com/

Wayne. - Dr. Robert Coles I have long respected Robert Coles, a Harvard psychologist who gained much attention and a large reading audience as a result of his five volume series entitled ''Children in Crisis,'' and with other books that have piqued the interest of the general public with their insights. His famous studies: The Moral Life of Children, The Political Life of Children, and the Spiritual Life of Children - are all based on his personal interviews with children, particularly in minority and economically depressed circumstances. He learned to listen to them, with the primary agenda of ''hearing'' them, not getting them to say what he wanted them to say. His basic thesis, as far as his children's studies were concerned, was that children early develop a moral, political and spiritual sense, and that their insights are often wise beyond their years. Many mothers know that already! But it sometimes takes a bit longer for academics to discover that. From those early studies, Coles went on to write The Call of Service and The Call of Stories. These books focused on how the altruism of doing special things for others was deeply in-grained in the human heart. It is through telling and listening to stories that many are inspired to do good and achieve things beyond what might normally be expected. I once remember meeting and conversing with an author in Banff named Tillie Olson of San Francisco. At 80 years of age, she was involved in a writing program there. As a younger woman - in the evenings after she had put her children and husband to bed - she spent many late nights writing stories containing significant insights she had discovered from her seemingly mundane life. Some of these stories reached the attention of Robert Coles and he saw in them great wisdom and possibility. He interviewed her, and included some of her narratives and his assessment in The Call of Stories. I considered it an honour, to come to know her a little. (Intriguingly, when I went to visit her at work in a writer's hut at the Banff Centre, I one day found her walking in the rain, tripping through water-puddles in red rubber boots!) Yancey's Learning from Robert Coles So the first thing we can learn from Robert Coles is that he bridged the gap between academic and non-academic cultures through listening attentively and discerningly to ordinary people. In his listening he would discover elements of nobility, wisdom and greatness that others would miss. It is important to remember that he valued both worlds and the skills developed by people living in each of those worlds. The last Coles book I have read is one of his best. In 1999 he wrote The Secular Mind. Only a Pulitzer prize-winner with tenure at Harvard could pull off with credibility what he did in that book. Coles questions the most hallowed premise of modernity (Yancey's words, p. 117-8) - that we find meaning here ''in ourselves'' rather than ''out there'' somewhere. We may not realize the significance of what that means because we are people living in a post-modern era. But a generation ago, Coles defied the experts by claiming that truth was embedded in all of us, not just in so-called ''authorities.'' He encouraged people like Tillie Olson, to discover her inner truth through story-writing. From this unknown woman who first struggled to write of herself after her day's work has come significant insight. 2. A second important lesson from The Secular Mind was that Coles serves as a bridge-builder between modern secularity and religion (p. 111). He was a teacher of spiritual literature. He swam against the current of secularity that had assumed a firm grip upon many university faculties - especially places like Harvard. He also navigated the stream of simplistic faith that many secular people had abandoned to demonstrate that God gives us minds and expects us to use them. Through his life and work, Coles demonstrated that you could be good at what you do and a good Christian too. He helped people who wanted to combine faith with daily living to do so. Faith, for him, was not just a matter of church on Sunday, or the pious response to questions that do no have easy answers - as in ''you just have to have faith.'' Thinking informed Coles' faith and faith became infused with his rationality. I can see how Yancey would have been impressed with Coles - this Catholic layman who went regularly to mass and who all through his life involved himself in ministries of charity. Coles did not claim religion as a stop-gap activity. He was constantly looking for the spiritual meaning behind his life experiences. He saw how this fortified his mind and how his mind fortified his faith. So, Coles taught Yancey that he could use his faith and his reason interactively. Several years ago, the pope issued an encyclical entitled: Fides and Ratio (Faith and Reason). The opening paragraph of this lengthy document on modern religion and science was memorable. It said, essentially, that humans need reason to help them contend with superstition and compromised religion. At the same time, humans need faith in order to give them a clearer perspective of reality; to keep them humble; enabling them to recognize that the mind, though a great gift, must ultimately recognize a Wisdom greater than itself. We need both faith and reason to be what God has created us to be. Implications of Yancey's Learnings from Coles Yancey discovered from Coles that in his great effort to break from the redneck fundamentalism within which he had been raised, he had turned into an ''enlightened, right-thinking, educated cultural observer'' - the perilous stance that Coles had battled all his life. Like the Pharisees against whom Jesus has issued so much criticism for hypocrisy, Yancey realised: ''I had substituted a new kind of fundamentalism for the old; one borne of snobbery, not ignorance (p.105). I needed to rediscover the levelling truth of Jesus' gospel which has more appeal to the prodigal son than to his responsible and respectable brother. I needed a change of heart as much as a change of thought.'' (p.107) Other discoveries: Plenty and privilege are the greatest temptations (p.110) Comfortable people have a stunted sense of compassion... (while) the poor are mysteriously blessed... The rich live in peril (p.111). Gloom and self-importance both lead to sin (p.116). ''I needed to forgive the church that had wounded me,'' says Yancey. ''My heart goes out to people I hear called rednecks,'' says Coles. ''They have little, if anything. Hate is still something they can call upon reliably, and it works for them.'' 3. Coles makes a strong claim for the dignity of all human beings, created in the image of God. He writes in the spirit of the French Catholic philosopher, Simone Weil: ''I have less charity in my heart for well-to-do and well-educated people - for their snide comments, clever rationalized ones, for the way they mobilize their political and even moral justifications to suit their own purposes... Someday all of us will see that when we start going after a race or a religion, a type, a region, a section of the Lord's humanity - then we're cutting into his heart, and we're bleeding badly ourselves.'' Those of us who come from simple though noble backgrounds how much to ponder in this. We might be asking ourselves, in light of Coles: Who is wise, and who is ignorant? Who is poor, and who truly rich? It seems that reading Yancey and his interpretation of Robert Coles is a lot like encountering Jesus in the Gospels. The Lord had a way of inverting values - turning them totally into their opposites - and without being preachy or judgemental - he helped his hearers to look at themselves in ways they had failed to do previously. What Robert Coles has been talking about all these years is the inherent dignity of human beings, the image of God (imago dei) that lives in all of us. He does this by bridging the gaps we allow to exist between faith and reason, between secular and sacred, between person and person. How clearly do we see the image of God in all human beings? Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement has the last word in this chapter. ''For all we know that (Bowery bum who stumbles into our relatively secure and privileged lives) might be God Himself come here to test us. So let us treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine.''

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