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.”
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Thank you Philip for the extensive research in The Jesus I Never Knew. Only recently come across it and found it a fantastic insight, to give new eyes to our reading of the gospel and to understanding Jesus.
You have inspired a new series at our church, New Eyes. Looking at the great irony, that we know Jesus backwards, yet our life unfolds forwards.
Mr. Yancey,
I have read one of your books. I am now trying to read “Reaching for the Invisible God.”
I have a problem which puts me in your first chapter. I am a Christian, a believer in God who will not give up. I know a little about mathematics and biology. I have believed in evolution since childhood, grudgingly, but it made no difference, I was always a believer in God.
I recently looked up the theory and equations of radioactive dating. The field is extremely interesting because the equations are correct, confirming and expounding upon the geologist’s relative time scale. There is NO CHANCE the equations and results are incorrect. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and life has changed through the ages. All periods from Cambrian to Holocine have their own radiogenic dates. Regardless of what you believe about evolution, life has changed through the ages. This is an ultimate proof of evolution.
In the 4th chapter of Genesis it says:”Tubalcain was an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.” From archaeologists in the Levant, the Bronze age ended 1500 B.C. Also in the last 1000 yrs of the Bronze Age people knew about iron but could not make much of it and made jewelry of it. So Tubalcain lived 1000 years into the Bronze Age which was 2000+1500+1000=4500 years ago. Tubalcain was about the 6th generation from Adam, so you could roughly add another 500 years to make the age of Adam 5000 years ago. The traditional age for creation is 6000 years ago. Not bad for one verse in Genesis!
Now for my problem, I have a huge hole in my soul and being. I know for a fact that the first 11 chapters of Genesis did not take place 6000 years ago because of radiogenic dating. Therefore, there was no Creation , Eden, Adam and Eve, Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark, or Tower of Babel. So much for the foundation of the Bible. They can at best be only myths or fables, only symbolic tales with a traditional grain of truth. Woodlands Indians were making arrow heads on our farm 1000 years before Eden.
This never bothered me much till I recently read a volume about Darwinism. Darwin was 99% correct about evolution and natural selection, but nobody knows how or why evolution really works. Evolution is correct and functional but nobody knows its purpose or why. Darwin says it is adaptation to life’s conditions. This is not a real good answer, but it is all we have.
Herbert Spencer and others created Social Darwinism and caused a huge amount of suffering. Only the fit survive. Actually some species cooperate or stay as they are for millions of years flying in the face of evolution.
Do we live in a world with no religion and only the fit survive?
This is what God himself apparently says since mathematics is the magic behind physics and the Word himself (Jesus, the second person of the Trinity) is the spirit of mathematics. Nothing was made without the Word from the book of John. The natural world is controlled by the Word through mathematics to the natural laws. The natural world rules, though miracles may happen. Evil spirits are definitely present, existing somehow independently of the natural world. To sum up, the natural world is what we live in and we are a part of it.
Does God have a right to twist our beliefs to something untrue? He said you SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE. I feel free but I feel betrayed. I do not have an answer for this.
For now my faith is limited. There is a supernatural God, but he put himself back in with the ancient Mid Eastern gods of darkness if you believe in Genesis. The present religion is wallowing in untruths.
The Creationist groups are responsible for part of our problem. Look up Preston Cloud for a clear and logical rebuttal of Creationist beliefs.
Benny
I strongly recommend that you peruse the BioLogos website, an organization founded by Dr. Francis Collins, one of the premier scientists of our time (he directed the Human Genome Project and now heads the National Institutes of Health). They deal with these science/faith issues so much better than I could, with far more expertise. As for Genesis, I recommend that you find books by John Walton. You ask very good questions, and some experts in both science and the Bible may be able to help. –Philip
Dear Mr. Yancey,
I represent the online ministry http://www.befreeinChrist.com. We are a fellowship of Christian men who are struggling with lust, in one form or another. We would like post your article “Holy Sex, How it Ravishes Our Souls” as a resource on our website.
This article was originally posted on October 1, 2003, on Christianity Today. We typically feature a different writing each week to every 2 weeks.
Please let me know if you would allow us to provide our brothers with this wonderful resource.
May God bless you and your efforts to help others!
In Christ,
Joe
Absolutely. You’re quite welcome to post this. Please note that it’s adapted from the book “A Skeptic’s Guide to Faith.” –Philip
Dear Philip
I have read a couple of your books and it has catapulted me to beautiful planets beyond this life.
How could I ever thank you enough?
It enriches my walk with the Lord and it is an invaluable resource!
The Lord uses your books mightily (without you even knowing it, I suspect).
Blessings and Shalom!
Ghian
Wellington, South Africa
I think you are a money-loving hypocrite. You do not do anything that Jesus has taught. What a waste of life.