Where Is Camus?

Where Is Camus?

He was an unlikely inquirer.

ALBERT CAMUS, the prominent existentialist thinker, struggled with religious issues like the meaning of life, the foundation for morality, the problem of suffering and evil, and the desire for eternal life. His major novels—The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956)—exhibited his conviction that God does not exist and that the world is without meaning.

Camus’s main frustrations came from the issues of suffering and evil. Seeing pain and suffering all around him, he could not believe that a God who was good and all-powerful would watch such events and do nothing to alleviate them. Such a God, he felt, was not worth believing.

Camus could not merely sit by and watch the suffering of what he felt was a meaningless world. He tried to create meaning by showing compassion to the suffering and encouraging others to do so as well.

Howard Mumma, a Methodist pastor, was a guest minister at the American Church in Paris for several summers in the late 1950s. During these summers he was approached by Camus. Mumma was sworn to secrecy at the time, and his conversations with Camus were “irregular and occasional,” but they had an impact. Mumma saw a man who had questions and doubts about his convictions. Camus told him, “I am searching for something I do not have, something I’m not sure I can define.” Rather than try to point out the flaws in Camus’s philosophy, Mumma commiserated with him and expressed his own inability to understand the world, man’s existence, and purpose.

As their conversations continued, Camus began to read the Bible that Mumma gave him. As he read, something began to click in Camus’s thought process.

At a later meeting Camus unexpectedly asked, “Howard, do you perform baptisms?” He also inquired what it meant to be born again. Mumma explained that “baptism is a symbolic commitment to God” and that being born again means “to enter anew or afresh into the process of spiritual growth . . . to receive forgiveness because you have asked God to forgive you of all your sins.” Camus replied, “Howard, I am ready. I want this.”

Camus wanted a private baptism, but Mumma would not agree to that. Instead he suggested that Camus continue to study his Bible and postpone his baptism until the two could agree on how to go about it. They parted for the season with Camus saying, “My friend, mon cher, thank you . . . I am going to keep striving for the Faith!”

A few months later, on January 4, 1960, Camus was killed in a car accident.

Reflection

Do you expect to meet Albert Camus in heaven? If you had been Howard Mumma, would you have done anything differently in talking with him?

The Scriptures say, “I will destroy human wisdom and discard their most brilliant ideas.” So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe.

1 Corinthians 1:19-21