(continued from Part 2)

Yancey: Do you know the book by the Frenchman Philippe Aries, "The Hour of Our Death?" He describes the change in language from graveyard to cemetery, a change wrought by Christians in the Middle Ages. Graveyard is a spooky place out from town where goblins and ghosts live. Cemetery is a sleeping place, and ultimately the tombs were brought in from the barrens outside town to the churchyard. Aries suggests that Christians tamed death, as it were, with their emphasis on the afterlife. It made death less of an enemy.

Selzer: Yes, but it didn't work, not to my knowledge. No one is accepting of death. You jog up and down the mountains because you don't want to die. You want to live forever and be slim and beautiful in your coffin. Along with other religions, Christianity has invented the hereafter to make it easier on us all.

Yancey: It's very significant that the afterlife is barely mentioned in the Old Testament. I think it's rather admirable of God, if I may use such language, to make that the last thing he brought up. In other words, God wanted us to love him for what he was, not for any future reward.

Komp: Bonhoeffer's theology--that your faith should not depend on whether or not there's life after death.

Selzer: But for most people it does. Being a nonbeliever, I must honestly say that I'm at peace about dying. Although I have no thought that anything of me will survive after my last breath, I am strangely at peace with that idea. Why is that? Why is a nonbeliever able to accept death with equanimity whereas so many people who have an abiding faith cannot?

Yancey: If I thought existence ended with death, then all anxiety would end, too. There will be nothing to survive on the other side to face any kind of threat. Existence ends--what's to fear? Unless, of course, you're wrong, and there is an afterlife.

Komp: I have to admit that during the 15-year period I would describe myself as an atheist, I had no fear of death. I now have a different view--that there is life after death--but that is not what drove me to become a Christian.

Yancey: What did drive you back?

Komp: I became convinced of the existence of God, a God who cared.

Yancey: The bedside of a dying child is a tough place to see a caring God.

Komp: Agreed. But that's where I found him.

Yancey: Dr. Selzer, if you were in Diane Komp's place dealing with all these parents of four- and five-year-olds, would you be honest with them and tell them, "I don't believe in a hereafter"?

Selzer: No one would dare to ask me that. It would be too threatening and dangerous. Who would ever ask a doctor that?

Yancey: What about you, Dr. Komp?

Komp: Patients usually start very simply, "Do you believe in God?" Or, "Do you believe in miracles?"

Yancey: You've both observed many families who confront terrible suffering. Do you see any difference in how people with faith respond compared to people without faith?

Komp: I'll tell you, when I see a Christian family come in who have triumphalistic views, I'm a nervous wreck.

Yancey: What do you mean by triumphalistic? "God's going to heal this"?

Komp: The kind of denial that Dick is talking about. I'm able to say to fellow human beings: This really shakes my faith, that children get cancer. I've got doubts, questions. I don't worry about the children themselves--they're smarter than we think, and have more spiritual intuition. But when a Christian family comes in, I take a deep breath, because I wonder if they'll have the freedom to ask their questions out loud like other people would. Which is how God would prefer it, I think.

Selzer: The issue of innocent suffering is not my block to faith. I just believe these are the things that happen. Children die. It has nothing to do with God. God doesn't take them back and make sunbeams of them, as the nineteenth century would have had us believe.

Yancey: We've got our angels today.

Selzer: Yes, and they're not much like the angels Isaiah saw, dipping tongs and putting that hot coal on Isaiah's lips to purge his sins so he could speak to God.

Yancey: Where did you learn all this? Were you raised by believing Jews?

Selzer: No. I'm a self-taught Christian. My father was an atheist. My mother's father and my father's mother--both widowed--were Orthodox Jews, and they shared our house. Generally, they did not go to worship, but they did faithfully pray. They put on the phylactery in the morning and prayed in tandem, and it was a marvelous thing to behold. For half an hour the parlor was transformed into a synagogue. They didn't like each other very much, but they did pray together.

Yancey: And peace reigned when they prayed--a cease-fire?

Selzer: Only when they prayed was there peace, and then they had nothing to do with each other the rest of the day. Otherwise, there was absence of faith in my home. My father called the hereafter The Great Perhaps. I came to this interest in faith by myself, trying to make sense of the world and my life. Thinking that perhaps one of those angels had touched me on the mouth with hot coals so I could write.

But I never received the gift of faith myself. Believe me, I have warm feelings for believers. I'm fascinated. But it bothers me that everybody can interpret Christianity according to his or her own light. What also bothers me is the blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus Christ. It makes me shudder.

Yancey: You should shudder. We should shudder. I'm sure God does shudder.

Komp: And I'm German, so I shudder more.

Yancey: Yet, Dr. Selzer, despite these struggles and doubts--which we all have in some form--you manage to keep surrounding yourself with Christians.

Selzer: I know some marvelous Christians. Paul Minear, the New Testament theologian who was one of the Revised Standard Version translators, is a close buddy. Every time I ask him a question about the Scriptures, he takes it so seriously.

Roland Bainton, the church historian who wrote "Here I Stand," was a great friend. I operated on him once, using a local anesthetic. He told stories during the entire procedure.

Then I got to know Annie Dillard because my first book came out the very same day as her "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." We stood around the publisher's office in New York at this little reception--wine in paper cups, and cookies--and all these famous people like Kurt Vonnegut showed up to see Annie.

Also, I have a great many clergy among my readers who write to me. An interesting thing happened. A woman minister from a small town in Ohio wrote me a letter saying she had read my books and been deeply affected by them. I answer every letter I get, so we began a correspondence. She's a woman in her seventies, married long ago and divorced, poor as a church mouse. She went to seminary and became something of a scholar. She knows Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and every other darn thing. I write her questions about Job and all my other Scriptural questions. Every question I ask, she responds with a long letter or a tape. The correspondence has now gone on for about three years. When I write to her I address her, "Dear Rabboni."

Komp: You must publish that correspondence. It's a book.

Selzer: Perhaps. I've read books like that: C. S. Lewis's "Letters to an American Lady" and the correspondence he had in Latin with that Italian priest.

Yancey: Yet this woman whom you call Rabboni has not answered your questions?

Selzer: Well, faith is a gift, is it not? So far I have not received the gift.

Yancey: Let me thank you again for being, as you say, "the goy among the Jews," both in this conversation and in your presence here. You sit here with two Christians and talk about your faith--or nonfaith--all evening. Tomorrow you will speak to a gathering of Christian physicians. Such an interchange takes courage and is all too rare.

Selzer: Well, I may be an outsider, but I'm not an opponent. There are some mysteries that were not meant to be solved; they're meant to be deepened.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 10

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