Finding the Gospel in the Classics

This is a book recommendation, or a review if you like, for The Jesus I Never Knew written by Phillip Yancey. More specifically, it is a recommendation to consider a particular chapter of the book.

Chapter 6 focuses on the beautiful idealism of the Sermon on the Mount, the frustrations of not being able to live up to those lofty ideals, and the grace that solves the conundrum. Yancey is not content to simply relate his own struggles, he drags in two of his spiritual mentors—no other than the two most famous Russian novelists, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The writings of the two men are highly regarded for their unmatched insights into human nature and the real world need for the gospel. Yet they too struggled greatly with their zeal to understand and apply the great truths of the gospel to their own everyday lives. Yancey briefly shares their powerful stories, as well as his own, of internal struggle that so deeply influenced the stories they wrote.

Tolstoy, it seems, was so impacted after reading the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount in particular, that he made every effort to follow the teachings of Jesus to the letter. You’ll have to read the book to discover exactly how that went, but suffice it to say, he “failed to practice what he preached.” In the end, after his death, his own wife revealed, “There is so little genuine warmth about him; his kindness does not come from his heart, but merely from his principles.”

According to Yancey, Tolstoy was as sincere as any man ever was in trying to live up to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and tormented himself with the knowledge that he just could not do it. In one of Tolstoy’s personal letters, he responds to a critic; “… I can preach only through my actions, and my actions are vile. … And I answer that I am guilty, and vile, and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.”

Yancey observes,

“I feel sad as I read Tolstoy's religious writings. The x-ray vision into the human heart that made him a great novelist also made him a tortured Christian. Like a spawning salmon, he fought upstream all his life, in the end collapsing from moral exhaustion.”

I can certainly see why Yancey relates so well to Tolstoy’s struggle. I do too, because I believe we should all struggle somewhat with the deep sense that we can never be good enough. Because we can’t!

Yancey summarizes Tolstoy’s plight with this:

“A biographer of Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson, remarks that Tolstoy suffered from a ‘fundamental theological inability to understand the Incarnation. His religion was ultimately a thing of law rather than of grace, a scheme for human betterment rather than a vision of God penetrating a fallen world.’ With crystalline clarity, Tolstoy could see his own inadequacy in the light of God's ideal. But he could not take the further step of trusting God's grace to overcome that inadequacy.”

WOW!

Evidently Fyodor Dostoevsky is a man who found the gospel in a prison among the deplorables after nearly being executed. The gospel and the experiences changed his life. The short version of his life, as Yancey tells it, is powerful and makes me want to read the biography. But here is the contrast. While Tolstoy struggled to understand and accept God given grace, Dostoevsky got it!

Yancey says he “encountered grace in the novels of Dostoevsky.” Crime and Punishment—a story of redemption. The Idiot—“A Christ figure in the form of an epileptic prince….”. And The Brothers Karamazov, in Yancey’s words, “perhaps the greatest novel ever written, draws a contrast between Ivan, the brilliant agnostic, and his devout brother, Alyosha. Ivan can critique the failures of humankind and every political system designed to deal with those failures, but he can offer no solutions. Alyosha has no answers to the intellectual problems Ivan raises, but he has a solution for humanity: love. ‘I do not know the answer to the problem of evil,’ said Alyosha, ‘but I do know love.’”

I highly recommend reading The Jesus I Never Knew in its entirety. The discussion in chapter 6 has left an indelible imprint on me. Not the least of which is the whole thought process of weighing The Law against, or with, love and grace. Oh my, what wonderful conversations I have had because I read that chapter!

The other major influence of this chapter was how it inspired me to read the “masters,” starting with Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov). Both, though intimidating and requiring an effort of time, deeply impacted me. For the record, I read right through War and Peace, but it took a couple false starts before I was able to get through Brothers. As with most readers, after reading a good book, I wanted to share the experience with others. I discovered that “the classics” of literature do not appear on most Christian must-read lists. Ah, they should. They should.

Are they challenging? Of course. The authors lived in a different time and, for the most part, are all dead. But they are great stories, written by the masters, and you will be surprised how many have the gospel, in one way or another, woven all through them. The gospel is Life, and there is life in these stories!

I would love to discuss with anyone the lessons learned from Chapter 6, or the incredible joy of reading the classics.