by William Sloane Coffin. Louisville: WJKP, 2005. ISBN 0-664-22929-8. Hb., 185 pp., $14.95
I didn’t know her well when she came to my office the first time. I had heard from colleagues and from her peers that she had teetered on the edge of fundamentalism when she arrived at college. As of late, however, other rumors stirred about her. She was asking questions in her fellowship groups. She was challenging her peers at the lunch table and was far less diligent in commitment to Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night church services. As she sat in my office for the first of what would become many visits, she described an inner tear that felt as if the curtain of her inner holy of holies had been rent. The sharp edge of doubt cut through what had once been a forbidden barrier between belief and doubt, between an angry certainty and passionate questions. Oh, how I wish I had offered her the wisdom of William Sloane Coffin!
In Letters to a Young Doubter, Coffin offers an imagined correspondence between himself and Tom, a first-year college student who represents a composite of many young people Coffin once knew as a chaplain at Yale. We are given only Coffin’s letters, leaving the reader to imagine Tom’s side of the dialogue. The book draws its title from the oft-quoted Rainer Maria Rilke admonition to the young poet, Franz Xavier Kappus, whom Rilke advised “to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.” Coffin continues, “Then gradually, Rilke suggests, ‘you will live into the answers.'”
Coffin poses the occasional question, each of which seems particularly attuned to the developmental and existential crises of young adults. For example, early in the correspondence, he asks Tom, “Who tells you who you are?” In this age of fragmented identity, such a question is as vital to the Church as it is to individual believers.
Readers of Douglas John Hall will recognize the similar premise in his book Why Christian? While Hall’s work richly develops several central theological doctrines of the church, Coffin is true to the ministry he has offered for almost 60 years: he is provocative and pastoral, offering well-crafted convictions in few words, leaving his young friend and his readers to craft the answers into which we might live. His scope of topics is very contemporary, with letters challenging Tom on his understanding of war and violence (with strong words about the war in Iraq and his explanation of why he is not a pacifist), abortion, homosexuality, poverty, and globalization. He explores doubt, sin, freedom, failure, death, guilt, joy and wonder. In one letter, he encourages Tom to take his parents out to dinner during their Christmas vacation, while in another he challenges Tom’s decision to take a summer job as a lifeguard to earn enough money to buy a car. To Coffin’s delight, Tom finds work registering voters in the inner city.
Throughout the letters, Coffin generously sprinkles quotes from a wide variety of great literature, offering a canon of sources that clearly shapes his thought (and could greatly enhance many of my own sermons.) In addition to the 29 letters to Tom, Coffin includes “An Open Letter to the Roman Catholic Bishops of America” from November 2000 in which he challenges the church’s hierarchy on its stance on homosexuality. He also includes an Easter sermon through which he proclaims Christ’s call for humanity to no longer “continue the illusion of a Good Friday world [and to] start living the reality of an Easter one.”
Coffin never shies away from the progressive tone that has characterized his ministry from his early days as a “Freedom Rider.” His gift for eloquent brevity will challenge some who long for elaboration. His insistence that “social justice is central to the gospel, not ancillary to it” will likely confront those more wedded to a pietistic faith. And while the book jacket describes Coffin as “famous,” he speaks prophetically as a voice outside the mainstream of contemporary Christianity, calling the Church to live into its promise as the body of Christ, not as a servant of the dominant discourses of capitalist and militarist culture. He writes, “Over the years I have been convinced that the more important question is not who believes in God, but in whom does God believe. Rather than claim God for our side, it’s better to wonder whether we are on God’s side.”
The student I described at the beginning of this review is now a graduate and completing a year as a Young Volunteer in Mission. While she is still riddled with questions about God, the Church, and the world, I am firmly convinced that she is on God’s side (whether she is convinced or not.) My hope is that she will find grace and courage in this text as she makes her way in the world. Either way, she’ll soon be receiving a belated graduation gift.
Trace Haythorn is Assistant Professor of Religion and Director of the Vocation and Values Program, Hastings College, Hastings, Neb.
