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.”
Dear Philip,
My husband and I have been fans of your writing even before we met each other. We felt so understood when we read your books on the realities of suffering. I’m 39 weeks pregnant and we decided to name our boy ” Ephraim Yancey ” in your honour. Our prayers are that people who ask him the meaning of his name, will read your books, feel understood and rediscover their faith.
It has been a number of years since I read your book The Jesus I Never Knew, but I recently picked it up again and used it to describe the incarnation (salt-water aquarium) for a Christian Worldview Course that my wife and I are doing for people. That illustration always stuck with me and I just wanted to say thank-you for being a faithful follower of Christ and for doing what He created you to do.
Hi Philip, we live in South Africa. We love your books and DVDs and use your Grace Notes each morning to start our day. I am happy to have found your website and have signed up to receive your mailings. I was reading through some of your Q&As and noticed the following from you:
I would point to how Jesus dealt with people who were moral failures … Jesus chose one such woman, a woman who had five failed marriages in her resume, as his first missionary.
We dealt with this story in church yesterday and I feel I have to “defend” the Samaritan woman at the well. There is nothing in John’s account to suggest she was an amoral woman. Jesus says nothing to her about sin, as he did with the woman caught in adultery, he merely reveals her life story to show his particular divine insight. She was respected enough by her community that they listened to her account about Jesus and let her lead them to him. The fact that she had been married five times may have just been that in those days young girls were married off to much older men, who may have died. In this case, she would then have been married off to someone else, without whom she would have been a completely unprotected, economically destitute woman. The men may well have divorced her (women could almost never divorce their husbands) due to her being barren. So all her previous marriages say nothing about her moral character and in fact may all have been very happy and successful. The fact that she lived with a man who was not her husband could again have a simple explanation. Roman law did not allow the marriage of previous slaves and free-borns, so common-law marriage was rife. Men also took concubines when they were already married and she may have been forced to agree to this for this to have the protection of a man and family. This woman was theologically and politically astute, challenging Jesus as to where the centre of worship was, aware of the conflict between Samaritans and Jews. She had amazing spiritual insight and was keen to evangelise her community. I see no sign of a moral failure and feel this feisty woman has been given very unfair bad press by the church.
Thank you for this, Sally. I may well have misinterpreted what was going on. Traditionally, the fact that she was drawing water at noon, the hottest time of the day, is seen as a sign that she’s viewed as a bit of an outcast by the women of the community, though that’s rather presumptive. Jesus does seem to bore in a bit by his comment that the man she now has is not her husband, so that may also be a clue too. Yet the cultural patterns you mention are certainly true. Women had it tough in those days! I’m sorry if my references gave the wrong impression. Mainly, I love the acknowledgment of “thirst” that Jesus draws from her–if only we all admitted that thirst so readily. –Philip
Mr. Yancey,
When I first read your book “What’s So Amazing About Grace” in high school, it felt heretical to super-conservative evangelical me! I worried it was blasphemous and put it down and was afraid to read it again for a long while. But isn’t it funny how God works? Years later, when I first started to really struggled with the church I attended and with a season of doubt in the pursuit of my Ph.D., I found it again – and God used it to keep me hanging on. I’m 35 now and since that time, I have followed all your works. You write often about those writers and thinkers who have mentored you along spiritually; you have become one of those mentors for me as I make my own way along as a writer and a scholar. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank you properly or tell you that. I often wish I could have met you in person to say thank you; but I do believe that one day, in the light and joy of the redeemed world we are all longing for, I will. Until then, I keep you and yours in my prayers: may you persevere the race marked out for us! Bless you, and thanks!