"Yes," he said.

 

He was far more comfortable with ambiguity than most of us, and he generally assumed (a presumption many interpreted as naïve) that people of goodwill could honestly arrive at vastly different conclusions--and that we simply had to learn to live together in that awkward reality.

In A Burning in My Bones, Winn Collier often creates a Eugene Peterson who has an uncanny fidelity to the man I knew as a writer, pastor, and friend. His answer to my question concerning Phillip Yancey's Mel White chapter fits the Peterson Collier creates in his fine biography. The genuine truth of the matter was, back then, that Eugene didn't know, he honestly didn't know how he felt--and, Collier would say, I'm sure, that was okay with him. In a world made dangerous by razor-sharp absolutes, Eugene would much rather look out over the placid world of the lake beneath his Montana cabin, as many of us would. 

But the world he lived in--and the pastoral theology he offered in his writing--simply wouldn't allow him to avoid the wrecking ball that hit churches and homes: how, spiritually, to deal with same-sex marriage. Collier's biography appears to make the final years of Eugene's life, sadly enough, to be the most difficult and withering.

Collier tells a story familiar to many Christian writers--offend the piety of those who don't share your view and the super-righteous immediately play the God-card, make knee-jerk decisions about issues of life and death. Soon enough, the righteous become reprobate.

In an interview by the Religious News Service (RNS), Eugene was asked--after a few questions on the subject--whether or not, if he were a pastor that day, he would marry a gay couple from his church.

Reportedly, a long, long silence ensued before Eugene answered with one word: "yes."

All hell broke loose. The biggest Christian bookstore chain in America immediately issued an ultimatum: "either Eugene clarify his position or his books would be banned from their stories." It would have been difficult at the time to think of any other one-word answer that could have triggered the level of horror his "yes" did. 

When Collier claims that Eugene was beginning to show symptoms of the senility that would eventually settle permanently in the synopses of his brain, he doesn't say that to explain Peterson's answer to the question the RNS asked, but to explain how immensely difficult it was for him and for Jan to stay afloat in the flood of criticism that arose once the heretic detectors were unboxed and switched on.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, Collier says, reached a level of darkness and sin in mind, and heart, and soul, in Eugene's mind and heart like church schism. He hated to see churches breaking up. "I don't think pastors are called to be God's policemen," he once wrote. Eugene Peterson would have wholeheartedly agreed with Anne Lamott: "the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty."

To many believers, Eugene had signed on with the enemy.

I don't know that the outcome of what happened at this year's CRC Synod would have been any different, but I can't help thinking that if every last delegate had been assigned to read the sad and even tragic story of the last few years of Eugene Peterson's life, maybe the sharp cutting edge of synod's ruling could have somehow been tempered. 

Peterson freely admitted ambiguity, Collier says, quoting from Eugene's own memoir: "[These things] are as murky to me as to you. And I have no airtight, clearcut 'answers.' The difference between us at this point, I think, is I don't feel that I have to have clarity in order to live honestly as a pastor."

What happened to Eugene is a very sad story, as all of them are.