For those in the borderlands

Rumours of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? Philip Yancey. Zondervan, 2003. 262 pages.

“Is the visible world all there is?” The question has been asked since the beginning of recorded history. Philip Yancey too has undertaken the challenge.

This book is not, however, just another argument for the existence of the “invisible world.” Yancey writes to those who “live in the borderlands of belief,” between the warring camps of the believers and unbelievers. Additionally, he writes “not as much to convince anyone else as to think out loud in hopes of coming to terms with my own faith.”

The book begins by asking, “What Are We Missing?” and spells out what Yancey feels is the root of unbelief in the “invisible world.” The problem is “reductionism,” or the inclination, especially in the scientific community, to define life by its components.

“Signs of Disorder” demonstrates that even in the problematic aspects of humanity such as sex, guilt and pain there are signs that something more is at work. Sex, for all of its dangers, is a gift from God. Pain and guilt, while unpleasant, are warning signs of danger. Even sin, which we no longer know how to talk about, is a sign that something beyond the visible world must exist. The alternative is unthinkable.

Finally, Yancey gives his solution under the heading “Two Worlds”: the visible and invisible worlds are in fact one. “As I search the Bible for clues about the invisible world, I find that it consistently pulls the two worlds together, connecting them in a wholistic way.” Yancey provides vignettes of those who have lived their lives in this unified world. This section was both the strongest and the weakest part of the book. Yancey is a superb storyteller and his stories are very moving. Unfortunately his argument is weak. The separation of the material and spiritual worlds that we have inherited from the Greeks may not be biblical but the solution is not just to conflate them. The Bible does not allow that either.

Does Philip Yancey succeed in making the case for the existence of the “invisible world”? To this end the book has two problems. First, for the skeptics who live in the “borderlands,” the dazzling and eclectic array of authors he quotes could feel like a shell game. Freud, William James, Milton, Hitler, C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Buechner, Darwin, T.S. Elliot, Chrysostom, Herman Melville and scores of others fly across the pages.

Second, Yancey writes very autobiographically and even though he sets out “not to mine my past yet again” the book fails to move beyond the scars that southern fundamentalism and Bob Jones University left on his psyche. Some tribes live in the borderlands because they carry similar scars and may find Yancey’s answer intriguing and even compelling. I suspect that the rest of the tribes in the borderlands will find Yancey’s journey too personal to be generally convincing.

James Toews is pastor of Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C