About Philip
Growing up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the southern USA, a young Philip Yancey tended to view God as “a scowling Supercop, searching for anyone who might be having a good time—in order to squash them.” Yancey jokes today about being in recovery from a toxic church. “Of course, there were good qualities too. If a neighbor’s house burned down, the congregation would rally around and show charity—if, that is, the house belonged to a white person. I grew up confused by the contradictions. We heard about love and grace, but I didn’t experience much. And we were taught that God answers prayers, miraculously, but my father died of polio just after my first birthday, despite many prayers for his healing.”
For Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. So, he devoured books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against what he had been taught. A sense of betrayal engulfed him. “I felt I had been lied to. For instance, what I learned from a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or Black Like Me contradicted the racism I encountered in church. I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught, and even discarding my faith. I began my journey back mainly by encountering a world very different than I had been taught, an expansive world of beauty and goodness. Along the way I realized that God had been misrepresented to me. Cautiously, warily, I returned, circling around the faith to see if it might be true.”
Ever since, Yancey has explored the most basic questions and deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, guiding millions of readers with him. Early on he crafted best-selling books such as Disappointment with God and Where is God When it Hurts? while also editing The Student Bible. He coauthored three books with the renowned surgeon Dr. Paul Brand. “No one has influenced me more,” he says. “We had quite a trade: I gave words to his faith, and in the process he gave faith to my words.” In time, he has explored central matters of the Christian faith, penning award-winning titles such as The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace? and Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? His books have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than 17 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide. In his memoir, Where the Light Fell, Yancey recalls his lifelong journey from strict fundamentalism to a life dedicated to a search for grace and meaning, thus providing a type of prequel to all his other books.
Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of magazines. In the process he interviewed diverse people enriched by their personal faith, such as President Jimmy Carter, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. In 1992 he and his wife Janet, a social worker and hospice chaplain, moved to the foothills of Colorado, and his writing took a more personal, introspective turn.
“I write books for myself,” he says. “I’m a pilgrim, recovering from a bad church upbringing, searching for a faith that makes its followers larger and not smaller. Writing became for me a way of deconstructing and reconstructing faith. I feel overwhelming gratitude that I can make a living exploring the issues that most interest me.
“I tend to go back to the Bible as a model, because I don’t know a more honest book. I can’t think of any argument against God that isn’t already included in the Bible. To those who struggle with my books, I reply, ‘Then maybe you shouldn’t be reading them.’ Yet some people do need the kinds of books I write. They’ve been burned by the church, or they’re upset about certain aspects of Christianity. I understand that feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. I feel called to speak to those living in the borderlands of faith.”
There is the scene at the cross where Jesus prays for forgiveness for the people who crucified him–who clearly had not asked.
I recommend that you Google Wilma Derksen’s YouTube talk on forgiveness. Very rich (and her daughter was murdered). If you use Facebook, I am posting on that.
–Philip
Hi Philip,
I am a student who is currently studying at a bible college in Australia. I just wanted to say thank you….Thank you for being honest in your books, such as, “Disappointment With God” and “The Jesus I Never Knew.” The honesty in your words have given me much revelation about God and why certain things happen the way they do. These books have been very helpful and challenging for me. It’s helped to reveal Jesus in a more tangible way to me. Thank you very much! Thank you for asking the hard questions!
Joshua Naranjo
Thank you for having the heart of Christ. God looks at the heart.Look at David in the bible.God said David is a man after my own heart.
Philip,
I’m responding to your encouragement that we should follow the example of our Lord in forgiving when he prayed for his crucifiers, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Although this prayer reveals that the heart of Jesus was full of forgiveness at that moment (a wondrous thing!), it does not mean that Jesus was actually extending forgiveness to his murderers at that moment. When our Lord actually extended forgiveness to another person, he did it with these words: “Your sins are forgiven” as in the case of the cripple let down through a roof. Yet our Lord did not pronounce forgiveness upon his murderers at that moment by saying to them, “I forgive you” or “Your sin is forgiven.” No, instead he prayed that they would be forgiven, which is very different than actually pronouncing a person to be forgiven. And, since it was a prayer, might we know if and when this prayer was answered? I believe we can know. It was answered 53 days later, but only after Prosecutor Peter delivered a blistering indictment upon the Jewish crowd, confronting them with their heinous crime and causing them to be cut to the heart. Only after they were deeply convicted of their crime and asking how they might be saved from its consequences did they hear that word of amazing grace, the offer of baptism, and the promise of forgiveness. Though, like our Lord, we must grow hearts full of forgiveness, we do not extend it to those who have hurt (or, even, harmed) us until these people are first blessed by guilt.
You were the first Christian writer who made room for a thinker like me. Maybe twenty years ago I found your books, and your unique mix of artistry, doubt, compassion, and Sehnsucht cast a vision for me as a young believer. So many storms have hit since then, and I have learned how simple and how fragile my first faith really was. There must be a God, not just because Creation rings with Him, but also because in all of these deep and lonely breakings He has continued to help me praise Him again.
I’ve recently been contacted by a publisher and asked to write a book, and part of that has involved setting up a website/blog so that people on the internet connect with me as a person. That’s been scary for several reasons. I don’t know when a person begins to feel like a “real writer,” or that something he (or she) has to say might do a stranger good instead of harm. But as I was adding a list of favorite places to that site today I ended up here and remembered that you had gone before me.
I remembered how human you were in your books and how your writing established a template that allowed room for my brain, for my soul, for my poetic thrashings. That gave me courage. You are one of those essential spiritual fathers for me like Lewis, and Chesterton, and Tim Keller. And I just wanted to tell you thank you for leading the way.