Kimberlee+Poole+Summary

Navigation: home Kimberlee Poole Introduction Kimberlee Poole Summary Kimberlee Poole Connection Kimberlee Poole Conclusion

=Summary=

Each of the thirteen people Yancey identifies as his specific mentors show how a person can have a drastic influence on another person without necessarily realizing. All of the mentors throughout //Soul Survivor// also demonstrate how specific people can help guide an individual through a period in his or her lives. For Yancey, these people helped him determine how his faith could survive multiple bad encounters he experienced in the church.

In the first section of the book,**chapters 1-7**, Yancey describes a couple of the issues he encountered in his church experience, racism and stereotyping. Yancey grew up in the south, and all during the time he was growing up, the church he attended encouraged its members to think of African-Americans as lower than whites. Yancey tells about his church experience in the following clip: media type="youtube" key="wMys3iNFBz4" width="425" height="350" Yancey wrote that he struggled with those feelings for years, but two mentors he had, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Robert Coles helped him to begin to overcome those experiences. These two men lived quite different lives, and Yancey personally only met one of them (Coles) but both of their influences changed him drastically.

 That desire to change that Yancey experienced from the influence of these men, and really all the mentors identified in this first section, did not always come directly because of what one m ight expect. One might think, for example that it would have been King’s lifestyle or the way he reacted to those who opposed him that would have caused Yancey to want to change (40). Yancey writes, however, that it was neither of those things. “In the end...it was his grounding in the Christian gospel that finally made me conscious of the beam in my eye and forced me to attend to the message he was proclaiming. Because he kept quoting Jesus, eventually I had to listen. The church may not always get it right...but when it does, God’s own love and forgiveness flow down like a stream of living water” (40).  One of the other major things Yancey struggled with in the first section of the book was the idea of “why doesn’t faith work?”. Interestingly enough, he found some answers to that question in the writings of Russian authors Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky. These two men’s influence on Yancey’s life show that the actions and works that one does during a lifetime can touch people that do not even live in one’s lifetime. One of the most powerful ways Tolstoy approached answering the question of why does faith not work was by saying, “Don’t judge God’s holy ideals by my inability to meet them. Don’t judge Christ by those of us imperfectly bear his name” (129-130). It was through these writer’s works that Yancey realized humanity has fallen from “absolute ideals and absolute grace” (145). Faith does not work or does not seem to work because humanity’s sin nature gets in the way; that is why, as Yancey realized after reading Tolstoy and Dostovesky, that the only answers can be found in Jesus (145).

The other three mentors in these first seven chapters each helped Yancey with a different aspect of his faith life. G. K. Chesterton helped Yancey see the Christian life as one of joy instead of pain or oppression (43, 53). Dr. Paul Brand Yancey see that pain was sometimes a good, necessary thing (71-73). Mahatma Gandhi showed Yancey that people who choose to not become Christians can still have a great impact on this world, and even have a great impact on believers and the church by the way they live their lives and the wisdom they leave behind (170-177). In the second section of the text (**chapters 8-13 and the epilogue**), Yancey’s mentors, as discussed for the second quiz for class, did or wrote things that caused them to come into tension with the church. Perhaps, that was part of their appeal to Yancey as he was struggling with his own feelings about his church experience. A few of Yancey’s mentors from the later half of the book who especially caused tension were Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Dr. C. Evertt Koop,

Buechner caused tension because of his views and writings on how he thought of God’s presence in this world as being active and magical and how he considered faith to be a gamble (252-253). Endo wrote of Jesus in a way that the Eastern world would understand and on how those who, in the face of martyrdom for the name of Christ, chose to deny their faith (274-276; 288-289). Endo realized that in the face of what many martyrs face he too would have denied his faith (276). Koop acted as Surgeon General, and though at first he was endorsed by Evangelicals, later they turned their back on him because he at times had to put his personal beliefs aside to determine what was right for the country as a whole to do (184-186, 197-198).

One of the important things to point out about the mentors Yancey had, both in this second section and in the first, was that they had character traits or personal struggles that they faced; they were not perfect individuals. One of Yancey’s mentors, Henri Nouwen struggled with his sexuality (he was homosexual), but he still was able to have a highly effective, influential ministry (302). Another of Yancey’s mentors, Frederick Buechner wrote of his own imperfection when, “he only writes of people with feet of clay because they are the only people he has met, including himself;” here he is referring to the weakness of humanity (268). Despite their struggles, all of Yancey’s mentors, while they may not have known it at the time, were helping Yancey through a time in his life where he needed guidance.  Yancey, in the epilogue of the //Soul Survivor// said, “As I review the list in total, I see flawed not perfect people. Several of them, a psychiatrist would probably diagnose as unstable. Each one had longings that went unfulfilled, dreams that never entered reality. I learned form them how to handle my own longings” (321).