Philip Yancey Books
Numerous excerpts from Philip Yancey’s books, The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace, are placed within the “Postlude” sections of my essays. I have devoured Yancey’s books about the Christian faith, reading some of them several times over. His transparent vulnerability invites us to be honest about our true nature, as we contemplate the true nature of God. This honesty saturates us with recognition of how and why we need Him, and awareness that He longs for us to find our complete fulfillment in Him.
Yancey’s mission to rescue truth from Scripture, amid a deluge of neglect, manipulation and misapplication, is needed. I am deeply grateful for his life’s work of research and writing, and for his heart and courage to share with us. I encourage you to pick up these, or any of his books, and dive in! You won’t regret it for a moment. In the meantime, here’s a tiny snippet to get you started…
The Jesus I Never Knew, p 22-25
...Jesus, I found, bore little resemblance to the Mister Rogers figure I had met in Sunday school, and was remarkably unlike the person I had studied in Bible college. For one thing, he was far less tame…Other people affected Jesus deeply: obstinacy frustrated him, self-righteousness infuriated him, simple faith thrilled him. Indeed, he seemed more emotional and spontaneous than the average person, not less. More passionate, not less.
The more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him…One day miracles seemed to flow out…the next day his power was blocked by people’s lack of faith…He fled from arrest at one point and marched inexorably toward it at another. He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his disciples to procure swords. His extravagant claims about himself kept him at the center of controversy, but when he did something truly miraculous he tended to hush it up. As Walter Wink has said, if Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.
Two words one could never think of applying to the Jesus of the Gospels: boring and predictable. How is it, then, that the church has tamed such a character…?
No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same. I have found that the doubts that afflict me from many sources – from science, from comparative religion, from an innate defect of skepticism, from aversion to the church – take on a new light when I bring those doubts to the man named Jesus.” (The Jesus I Never Knew, Copyright 1995 by Philip Yancey, used by permission.)
https://philipyancey.com/books