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.”
Excellent question. I too resist those who appropriate verses from the OT that were given to Israel and apply them directly to modern times. As for the extravagant promises on prayer, along with C. S. Lewis I do see some of these as given to Jesus’ disciples, who became the apostles, and who had certain powers specific to their calling and time. Discerning which ones we can take as promises and which ones were restricted–now that’s a tricky question, and I don’t have a good answer. As you say, I do my best in discussing in the book on Prayer. –Philip
Hi Philip, Thanks for the reply. Can you expand some more on your thoughts concerning election/predestination and how you look at it at this point? I read the book by the way!
If I were going to write on that topic, I’d need to spend months researching and thinking about it. So I’d best decline. –Philip
Hi, Mr. Yancey, I want to thank you for writing The Jesus I Never Knew. My grandmother and my aunt fell in love with it almost twenty years ago, and after they shared it with me, I fell in love with it too. It opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the Lord, and it was a better way. My problem is this, Mr. Yancey. I am a biological male happily married to another male, and although I respect your difficult decision to keep an open dialogue on homosexuality, I don’t believe your attitude is morally defensible. As a respected scholar you almost certainly know better than I that discrimination against gay people is at its heart discrimination based on gender. The Old Testament’s virtual silence on lesbianism and the fact that Jesus’s statements against divorce were about men divorcing women, not the other way around, are just a few of the examples that reinforce this fact. Being a gay man is to want something that only women are supposed to want, thus robbing women of their “proper use” as Paul puts it, whereas being a lesbian was virtually incomprehensible to the ancient Roman world in which the Church fathers wrote what became the New Testament canon. I think it’s time to listen to what Jesus said about the law permitting those with hard hearts to do things an objective morality would not permit, and it’s hard for me to conceive of something more objectively wrong than treating love between unrelated consenting adults as sinful just because of what’s between each partner’s legs, to put it bluntly. I understand you may not be able to change your mind openly because that may affect your livelihood and the circles in which you move, but I think it’s sad for a man who clearly knows better to tap dance around an issue that I believe he fully understands and refuses to fully discuss. In short, you are better than that, Mr. Yancey, and I hurt for you because you do not seem to want to admit it.
I think I understand your point of view, and thank you for it. I think you should be careful, though, in declaring “morally indefensible” a position that the vast majority of scholars, religious and secular, have agreed on until very recently–and that scholars such as Richard Hays and N. T. Wright maintain to this day. Many majority opinions get proven wrong (slavery, women), but in a transition time I think appeals to grace and reason, as you do elsewhere in your comment, are more compelling than ad hominem arguments. Regardless, thank you for commenting. –Philip