On a Lifeboat with a Man Who is God (Maybe)

A review of Mitch Albom's 'The Stranger in the Lifeboat.'

By Ryan Brown

Dec 18, 2021

Imagine for a moment you’ve just survived a tragic shipwreck and you’re stuck on a lifeboat with several other people you barely know. After a few days of floating aimlessly, another person is hoisted from the sea onto the raft. Someone says, “Thank the Lord we found you.” And the person responds, “I am the Lord.”

No spoiler alert is needed here, as that’s the first scene in Mitch Albom’s great new book, The Stranger in the Lifeboat.

What would be your reaction? “Wow, we’re going to be ok!”? Or perhaps, “Great, another crazed survivor and one more mouth to feed”?

The main characters in this story grapple with the existence of God and what that means for their life. Albom tells this story from two points of view: that of a survivor from the lifeboat and also an investigator on a remote island that a raft from the shipwreck washes up on.

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About Ryan Brown

Ryan Brown is a Community Manager for The Dispatch. He previously served as a researcher and production assistant for Meet the Press

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Kevin Johnson 1 year ago

What a wonderful, concise, clear review! It is the best short book review I’ve ever read. Well done!

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Mike W. 1 year ago

Great review of a really moving and thought provoking book. I've not always been a huge Albom fan, but I really enjoyed this one and have thought a lot about it after I finished the book. Thanks, Ryan and Merry Christmas!

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Bill Nelson 1 year ago

Sorry, but I have to go with humor here. In “Life, the Universe and Everything”, the 3rd book of the 5 book trilogy, our hero visits a planet in which God has left a final message to his creation in a flaming rock cliff: “Sorry for the inconvenience”.
God does have a sense of humor.

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

Or one might prefer "Life of Pi".

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Evan Donovan 1 year ago

To be clear, I just liked this initial comment because the book sounds very derivative of Life of Pi. But they could be opposites philosophically, as was discussed below.

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Xaveria 1 year ago

As someone who was deeply repelled by the slowly revealed nihilism in the Life of Pi, I would really be interested in a side by side comparison between that and this book.

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

Hmmm... in what way did you see it as nihilistic?

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Xaveria 1 year ago

Maybe kind of spoiler below!!! Stop reading if you haven’t read Life of Pi and intend to.

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If I had to sum up the message of that book, it would be this “Every person is like a carnivorous island — eating, and being eaten. All the religions in the world, and all the stories we tell each other, they are all just lies we tell ourselves to hide from that horrible truth.”

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

I see it differently although you may think it's also nihilistic.

"Life eats life". The stories we tell each other and ourselves sometimes conceal this truth and in some myths reveal it, eg. Kirttimukha, the monster that consumes itself. The latter Hindu myth would address your point.

One can even think of Christ's sacrifice as another instance of life consumed(symbolically in the Eucharist) but more directly as a life taken for more life.

We simply have a choice about which stories we want to believe.

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Xaveria 1 year ago

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

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Evan Donovan 1 year ago

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

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Evan Donovan 1 year ago

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

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Evan Donovan 1 year ago

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Thanks for your further comments. To answer you adequately, this will be long. TL;DR: Girard's argument, and mine, is that Campbell fundamentally misunderstands Christianity because he presupposes all religions are the same at base. But that is something he brings into his studies, rather than something he has derived from them.

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I think the main difference between your view and mine is whether religion is simply a product of human evolution, or whether divine revelation is actually possible.

I don't believe that all religions simply emerge from a "substrate", and neither did Rene Girard, since he was a devout Catholic.

For those that accept the authority of the Bible, it's a key part of Christian doctrine that Jesus' sacrifice was *voluntary*. For example, see his statement in John 10:17-18:

"The reason the Father loves Me is that I lay down My life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from My Father."

In religions before Christianity that incorporate ritual sacrifice, a sacrifice was something that people made to appease God - but not of themselves. Rather a "scapegoat" was found - to use Rene Girard's term (borrowed from the Hebrew Bible).

In Roman culture, the scapegoat was a person who was seen as guilty of sins and the community united against them. Girard talks about how this is what underlies the story of Oedipus, for example - that Oedipus is blamed for incest, but Girard says that's really part of the mythmaking, that he could very well be innocent.

Similarly, in the case of Jesus' death, he was set up as a scapegoat - as Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest at that time said, "It is better for us that one man die for the people rather than the whole nation be destroyed." (John 11:50)

However, when Christ actually dies, the scapegoating aspect of sacrifice is revealed for what it truly is. His innocence is shown - for example, one of the Roman centurion who killed him sees his death and says, "Surely this man was the Son of God!" (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39; Luke 23:47)

But Jesus doesn't simply die, like an ordinary sacrifice would. He rises again, and speaks a word of forgiveness to all those who colluded in his death, just as he did beforehand - "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." (Luke 23:34)

Now, as Girard writes, the word "sacrifice" has a different meaning than it did in the pagan culture of Jesus' day. It is about something that we do willingly, like how the Apostle Paul says, "Therefore...I urge you to present your bodies as a *living* sacrifice" (Rom. 12:1, emphasis added).

And even in popular culture, this meaning persists in phrases like "He sacrificed a lot for the sake of his children." That sentence doesn't mean that his children *forced* him into it - rather, it was a choice he made.

But that's not what sacrifice was in pagan culture. Consider how in South America for example there was a culture that killed over 130 children, likely in an effort to appease the gods after flooding - https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-did-the-ancient-chimu-civilization-sacrifice-hundreds-of-young-lives

That is an *antithetical* form of sacrifice to what Jesus Christ's sacrifice represents.

People like Campbell can claim that the Lord's Supper is a sublimated form of ritual cannibalism, but that's not a sustainable claim. Rather it is a *subversion* of the ritual. In the Lord's Supper, Christians believe draw life from the living Christ rather than that they are killing him again.

The book of Hebrews, chapter 10, makes this argument in detail - that Jesus' death is a "sacrifice that ends sacrifice", as and S. Mark Heim puts it (in Heim's book, "Saved from Sacrifice"). See especially verses 12-14:

"But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a *single* offering he has perfected for all time those who are being [made holy]" (emphasis added)

Finally, to answer your questions more directly:

1) In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to let the cup of wrath pass from him, but said also "let your will be done." It's certainly possible in life to do something willingly but also to wish you didn't have to do it - wartime might be a good analogy here. In Hebrew 12:2, it says that "for the joy set before him", Jesus "endured the cross." So that shows that it wasn't something forced upon him.

2) An observer from Mars might not see a difference between Christianity and pagan religions on the issue of sacrifice, but an observer from Mars wouldn't understand lots of human culture Their lack of understanding doesn't mean that there aren't substantial differences.

An observer from Mars probably wouldn't understand human incest taboos either - that doesn't mean they aren't significant.

3) I addressed the question of cannibalism above.

4) To get back to my point at the top, if you don't believe divine revelation is possible, then yes, we believe the stories we wish or need to believe.

But saying divine revelation is impossible is an assumption on your part - an assumption that there may actually be evidence to disprove.

I wouldn't try to definitely *prove* Jesus Christ's resurrection by historical evidence now, but that was certainly the method used by the writers of the New Testament at that time period - see 1 Cor. 15, for example. And you can make a probabilistic argument for the truth of the resurrection based on claims like this, as people like NT Wright have.

5) I will admit that my knowledge of Campbell's work is second-hand, either through summaries from favorable sources, or else through Girard's critique. I should be get more familiar.

And I haven't studied anyone else's work on religion from an evolutionary perspective. So, to be completely fair to your side, I will need to do more on that. But I don't have time at the moment.

For now, I've just been attempting to outline Girard's argument, with some added parts of my own from the Bible. Hopefully that helps anyway.

As a parting note, I think it's worth comparing Campbell's sanguine views about paganism to Nietzsche's. I think Nietzsche had a more honest understanding of what pagan sacrifice demanded. Campbell wants Christian morality without Christian reality.

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Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B) 1 year ago

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Victor Clairmont 1 year ago

“ Why did God give them to us?”

And that, is a perfect encapsulation of a question many should ask, and yet do not.

Consider a copy of the book bought after that last line.

Nice review.

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Mudskipper 1 year ago

You know, if I were on my deathbed, suffering through the agonizing end to an incurable cancer, and someone chirped up "I am so glad that God gave you to me," I'd be tempted to empty my bedpan on their head.

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Victor Clairmont 1 year ago

Well if it got me out of my student loan debt….

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