Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. We do get tired of sending weapons. We just get tired of wars, and I understand that. But this is different. This is kind of a hinge for all of history. Look at Europe. They have pulled together like never before.
Our guest now on First Person is author Philip Yancey, whose new book deals with the Russian war against Ukraine. I'm Wayne Shepherd, and the conversation will begin shortly. First, thank you for listening each week. Today's interview is a little different, but we often feature personal stories of faith and calling. You can go back in time and listen to any of our past programs and even perhaps share them with others when you visit FirstPersonInterview.com or use our free smartphone app called First Person Interview.
Along with John Birnbaum, Philip Yancey has written a book titled What Went Wrong? Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine. The book recounts Philip's trip to Russia after the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, but it goes on to analyze the present war and its many implications. Both authors are very knowledgeable of the past and present.
Philip Yancey joined me online to talk about it, and as we began, I asked him to first comment on his health, which he has acknowledged became a concern recently. I'm doing okay. I announced about a year ago that I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which explained a lot of funny little things that were occurring to me in
and they had nothing in common. And then later I found out, yeah, they do. Actually, your brain controls everything. And Parkinson's is a disease of neurons in the brain. And it really has not inhibited me from doing the life I had before. I still ski, I mountain bike, I do all those kind of Colorado outdoor adventures. But I have to be very careful. I have to work on balance. I have to work on exercise. And
And I've signed up for a clinical trial of a drug that does show some promise. So I'm getting a lot of medical attention. That's the good thing. I have to go in. My goodness, I feel like a blood donor. I go in every couple of weeks and they take 11 or so vials of blood, but they can keep
keep on top of what's going on in my body by doing that kind of thing. Well, as you have observed many times, you've been writing all these years about pain and suffering. Right. You are going through your own physical trial. And it's interesting that the John Donne book that you've done comes out called Undone. Great title, by the way, published by The Rabbit Room. I think that's your latest, right? Correct. Yes. Pretty recent.
I had done a, during the pandemic, I wanted to get out
This incredible book that John Donne wrote 400 years ago. It's never been out of print in 400 years. And No Man is an Island for Whom the Bell Tolls. You know, in high school, we learned some of these phrases from that book, which he wrote in the middle of a pandemic when he thought he was dying of the Black Plague. Turned out he didn't die and it wasn't the Black Plague, but it was just an incredible book.
However, it's 400 years old and I had a lot of strange science and a lot of, one sentence was 234 words long. So I did what I call a modern rendering of John Donne. I cut out some of the anachronistic science and
Made it a little simpler and easier to read. Just so the people could learn from the wisdom that one of the great poets and preachers of all time contributed. But your interest in John Donne's work predated your own diagnosis, right? So you weren't searching for what he had to say to apply to your own life necessarily? Isn't that funny how those things happen? Yeah, you're right. I wanted to have a message for people who were confused and confused
Concerned going through the pandemic and scared, you know, the kind of things we all go through and done had lived through that had emerged with a lot of wisdom and sure enough
And just as I was about to finish the project, I had my own diagnosis and I went back in and added some of that, some of the application to my own life that I learned from John Dunn 400 years ago. All right. Well, we'll put a link to it in our program notes at FirstPersonInterview.com. I, of course, recommend it to our listeners as well.
But I want to change gears. I want to talk about another book you've written recently, What Went Wrong, Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine. This has historical roots because of a trip you took back in 1991. We all remember those days of the, those heady days when we thought the Cold War was behind us and
All that threat from Russia was long gone, but talk about those days. Yes, I was invited with a group of American Christians. Still have the invitation letter. It came from Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. They were kind of arm wrestling to see who was going to end up on top at the time. Gorbachev had been weakened because he was held hostage by people in his armed forces. It was just chaotic. You never knew...
Who was on top? And in the middle of that, we got the letter from the two leaders of the Soviet Union, and they said, we'd like you to come. We need a message of Christianity, and we want you to come and help restore morality to the Soviet Union. Mm-hmm.
And there were others like people from World Vision and Prison Fellowship who could give them actual practical help, which they were interested in as well. But when we got there, we found out that it was just a country...
that was going through a kind of nervous breakdown. They didn't know what to believe. And we went to the KGB headquarters, we went to Pravda, the Academy of Sciences, the Parliament, and each time they treated us like these esteemed guests and said, "Please tell us, how can we be good again?"
Because we've been told for 74 years that we have the answers, and actually, it's a monstrosity that we've done. Solzhenitsyn had just been published, and he had detailed how they had killed 60 million of their own people through Stalin and Lenin and all the purges and all that. 60 million people.
in the Gulag Archipelago. And they were facing the horrible facts of their own civilization, and they knew they had to change, and they just didn't know where to turn. So they turned to Christians. And one of my co-authors, well, my co-author, John Birnbaum, was in that group. He ended up staying
and made, I think, 110 trips, he tells me, back and forth between America and Russia, and founded a Christian university there, which looked like a good start to what they were asking.
There was about a 15-year period, Wayne, I'm sure you know this, when Russia was wide open to the West. They were bringing in economists, they were bringing in journalists, they welcomed missionaries, about 7,000 missionaries.
flooded into the Soviet Union. They were teaching morality in the schools. In fact, Campus Crusade at the time, CRU and a group of other organizations got together and created a curriculum based on the Ten Commandments. They were outdoing us at that time. Yeah, I know. Russia said, we need the Bible in the public schools. We know what it's like to live under atheism. It is not a pretty thing. So we need to start somewhere. And then...
about the year 2000, the turn of the century, that's when a new person, Vladimir Putin, who had been head of the KGB at one point, was appointed and then elected president of the Soviet Union, and he quickly started turning everything back, labeling the missionaries as foreign agents and not renewing their visas, and finally, John Birnbaum had to shut down his university. It was just impossible to operate under those strictures.
Well, I mentioned the book What Went Wrong that you wrote with John Birnbaum. And of course, it draws heavily on your experience and your book Praying with the KGB that you wrote after that 1991 experience. But then you both look at things now, and we'll get into that in a few moments. But I recall my own trips to Russia in 92, 93, while not near as high level as yours, they were with Russia.
All over the country with, you know, just typical Russians. And I remember the openness that you're talking about, the eagerness to learn. And I remember walking down a street in Krasnodar with my 12-year-old son, you know, a little redheaded guy.
bespectacled little boy and they would look at us just in wonderment and ask why why are you here what are you doing here you know and uh we were able to share christ openly and it was just a remarkable heady time but then things changed and today it's a much different situation and i don't think you'll be getting invitation soon to go back to russia uh
anytime, although we pray for Russians. I mean, we have many, many friends in Russia who need our prayers, and we'll talk about Ukraine and the need there as well, but I'm sure you have acquaintances still in Russia. I do, yes. My Russian publisher, I was one of the few
Protestants who was allowed to have my books in Orthodox churches. They don't have Christian bookstores, but they tend to sell Christian books in their churches. And it took about seven years. You know, they
went through my books very carefully and finally decided, okay, we'll allow a few of his books in here. I don't know if that's still true, but my publisher is a devout Christian and there's so many Russians who are dismayed by the war and the cost and just the things that are happening, you know, the assassinations. It's the old Russia, unfortunately, and the leadership
And not so much among the common people, but then they hear propaganda, one-sided propaganda all day long, and they really don't know what to believe about what's going on in the rest of the world. The stated goal is to reassert the Russian Empire, really, isn't it? Mm-hmm.
You're absolutely right. And that's kind of the untold story. You don't hear that so much on CNN or Fox in trying to understand this war, but it really goes back to the year 989. So over a thousand years ago when Vlad, the original Vladimir, Vladimir the Great founded the empire of Rus as it was called. And
And he decided they should become religious. And he kind of auditioned some different people and decided, I like the Orthodox religion. They have good music. They have nice art. They're icons. I like them.
And decreed that everybody had to be baptized. And that's when Russia became a Christian nation. It had been pagan until then. And ever since, there's been this strange dance between the church and the state, you know, under the czar's command.
the Tsars actually appointed the patriarch of the church. So, it would be like our president of the United States appointing the head of the largest denominations. We would never do that. We believe in separation of church and state. But in Russia, they were close together. And then during the revolution, when the Tsars were overthrown and killed, the churches became associated with the old regime, and they were a target. So, the
Tens of thousands of priests were killed. Russian churches were destroyed or turned into barns for animals, things like that. It was a very dark time for 50 years or so. And in our own time,
Vladimir Putin saw the church as a possible power base. And so he met with the patriarchs and once again, kind of cut a deal, said, if you support me and the things that I do, I'll restore your churches. I'll be very different than the history you've had in recent years. And so he did that. And the biggest cheerleader in the invasion of Ukraine really was the patriarchs.
of the Russian Orthodox Church. And it's been very difficult for Orthodox believers in Ukraine, you know, because they say, "Wait a minute, you know, we're part of you and no more." It's led to a lot of confusion, hasn't it? Yeah, it really has. As you know, if you speak up against the war, you're risking your life. Alexei Navalny, people, you know, the opposition has mostly fled Russia.
So there are a lot of strong Christians in Russia, but they just can't speak openly because of the consequences. It's a very difficult time for Christians in Russia. We'll continue speaking with author Philip Yancey about his book, What Went Wrong, on this edition of First Person. Stay with us.
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My guest is Philip Yancey. We're talking about a book called What Went Wrong? Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine, co-written with John Birnbaum, our friend who has studied Russia, lived in Russia, known the Russian church and the evangelical church for a long time. John's not with us today, Philip, but I'm very glad to talk with you about these things. Let me turn the corner and talk about Ukraine. What draws your heart to the Ukrainian people? When you go to Ukraine...
If you look at the tourist books, you see one sad history after another. Under Stalin, they had this famine and five to eight million people just starved to death, even though they were the breadbasket of Europe because Stalin took all of the grain away and used it in Russia and let them starve. And then in World War II, first Hitler took over, so the Germans...
completely ruled Ukraine and then the Russian armies came in and chased them out and stayed and they were part of the whole Soviet Empire there and this poor people, you know, they've got this beautiful land. It's mostly flat and so it's easy to march across and they have just been stomped on from every direction for hundreds and hundreds of years and
Suddenly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they experienced freedom and they started electing their own politicians and then they would have interference from Russia and then they would march in the streets. They had several kind of people's revolutions. The Orange Revolution you hear about, the Revolution of Dignity.
And they really believed in democracy, and it also became something like the Bible Belt of the former Soviet Union. I know, Wayne, that you've been involved with a mission called Mission Eurasia, as I have as well. It used to be called Peter Danica's Russian Ministries, and then it gradually expanded into Ukraine, and when they were kicked out, along with everybody else, by
by Putin, they found a receptive audience in Ukraine. They wanted to change. They didn't want that long history of being ruled as an autocracy. They wanted freedom. They wanted democracy, and especially freedom of religion. And unusually,
they got all the denominations to work together on projects. So, even the Orthodox Church and the Protestants and Catholics, Pentecostals, whoever, they would tend to work together on these projects because they were emerging from an officially atheist state and they said, you know, you're not the enemy. The people, we need to work together. We got a common message.
That's the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is separate from the Moscow. That's right. That's right. It is now, for sure. Well, there is such great personal suffering. We've all seen it. I think Americans are, you know...
predictably growing disinterested because it's just as fading from the headlines, unfortunately. But the suffering continues. The last time I was in Ukraine was two years ago after the start of the full-scale war. And I remember talking with a 99-year-old woman who was a refugee living away from her home and
And she said she had been a Soviet nurse in the Russian army in Siberia in World War II. And now she's on the run as a refugee from her home in Ukraine. She says, I'm 99 and have to go through another war, she said. And I mean, your heart just goes out to those who are
You know, everyone knows someone that they've lost because of this war. And the good thing, and you don't hear this in the news so much, the good thing is that the church has really, they've stood up. Oh, yes. And they have been, they represented light in darkness. And it's just very practical stuff.
My books on pain and suffering have been translated into Ukraine and they use them in just helping people face trauma.
You mentioned this Mission Eurasia, and they had this great creative way of helping ordinary people for about, I think it's about $250. You can sponsor a wood stove, one of these cast iron wood stoves. Isn't that amazing? It's great, and it'll keep your apartment warm when there's no electricity, when the bombs fall, and then you can cook on it at the same time. And they have packages like that for people who are
who are fleeing, who need medicines. The church has really been a bright spot. And early on in the war, when the UN started sending supplies in, they thought, well, who can we trust? And they decided, well, the churches tend to have more trust than government or anybody else. So, we're going to use them as our main distribution sites. And as a result, people who had never gone to church
They would go to church, and then they would stay, and there's something of an underground revival going on in many parts of Ukraine. That's the report that I'm getting as well from many organizations, including Mission Eurasia. Far East Broadcasting Company has radio stations and counselors dealing with people all the time, and those are the reports they're giving us constantly.
And not only that, some of those people go as refugees to places like Poland and Hungary and carry that message with them. And often their pastors will go with them, and they'll have as many people in the church in another country as they had back in Ukraine. Yeah. So...
Where's this going to end? I mean, right now, it just looks like Russia has the upper hand militarily. Of course, we can't predict the outcome, but what are your thoughts about what happens now? It's hard to imagine Russia ceding back the territory that they have already conquered. And those are parts of Ukraine that were Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians living there.
Ukraine, of course, under Zelensky, has said there's no way we're going to cede one inch of our territory. It's hard for them to hear that, isn't it? It really is hard. The concern that our government has is that a person like Vladimir Putin doesn't stop there. No. Even this week, there was a situation of one of the Russian dissidents who had fled to Lithuania, and he was...
he was hammered with an actual literal hammer in the streets because he was on the staff of Alexei Navalny, who of course was killed recently. And we dare not, at this point in history, there's kind of a hinge between
there had been a move toward democracy and freedom, certainly after the fall of communism. It seems like it's turning back that axis of Iran and North Korea, China and Russia. They're all working together, supplying weapons on Ukraine. There really seems to be a hinge between which direction is the world going to go? Is it going to go more toward freedom and democracy as it was, or is it going to go back toward autocracy
We do get tired of sending weapons, we just get tired of wars and I understand that, but this is different. This is kind of a hinge for all of history. Look at Europe, they have pulled together like never before. Sweden, countries like that who were always neutral, realized what the danger is and immediately went out and joined NATO. John Birnbaum, especially in the book, explores various alternatives.
It's a serious time. It's a serious thing. We can't just say, "Well, we Americans, we have our own problems, so we can't worry about them." It's going to affect us. The way the world goes is going to affect us from now till the foreseeable future.
I agree with Philip Yancey's assessment of the war in Ukraine. You can read more of his perspective in this book titled What Went Wrong, which Philip co-wrote with John Birnbaum, himself a person with much personal experience in dealing with Russia. We'll place a link to the book at FirstPersonInterview.com. We'll also link you to Mission Eurasia, which Philip mentioned in the course of our conversation. Again, you'll find this at FirstPersonInterview.com.
And as you pray for Ukraine, also remember to pray for the radio stations there operated by the Far East Broadcasting Company. Each day, these radio programs spiritually encourage and build up the faith of the people of Ukraine as they suffer this ordeal. They also operate a counseling service which has helped countless thousands cope with the crisis. Learn more at febc.org. That's febc.org.
Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening to First Person.