Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-050 (Book Review)

REACHING FOR THE INVISIBLE GOD – Philip Yancey

(HarperCollins / Zondervan, 2000, $A14.95)

Reviewed by W L James

When Maria, wife of the great missionary pioneer James Hudson Taylor, lay dying in China in 1870, she told her husband that “for ten years past there has not been a cloud between me and my Saviour”. Those whose experience of the Christian life has been similarly one of unbroken fellowship and victory need to read this book in order to find out how the rest of God’s people live. Yancey has written it for those of us who cannot go for ten minutes, let alone ten years, without a doubt or a discreditable thought.

In fact, many of us would admit that there are considerable periods when we not only fail to experience the presence of God, but forget about his very existence. The book could well have been sub-titled ‘Spirituality for Dummies’. It comes as a salutary jolt to those of us who “Trust and obey”, but have become resigned over the years to the likelihood that we are not going to be deliriously “happy in Jesus” this side of glory.

Not all the issues raised by Yancey would have made much sense to first century or sixteenth century Christians. They might not all be relevant to Christians today in Bangladesh or Ecuador or Senegal. But for better or worse, they are painfully pertinent to middle-class, Western believers on the cusp of the twenty-first century. He defines his aim thus: “I have lived most of my life in the evangelical Protestant tradition, which emphasises personal relationship…I want to identify for myself how a relationship with God truly works, not how it is supposed to work”.

The book is written in six parts. The title of Part One, Thirst: Our Longing for God, might appear to promise a conventional treatment of spirituality, but the title of Part Two better captures its theme and the tone; it is called Faith: When God Seems Absent, Indifferent, or Even Hostile. While he goads Christians to passionately pursue a relationship with their God, Yancey faces up to all the doubts, mysteries, disappointments, failures, frustrations and anguish which such a quest can entail. He is relentlessly realistic, and devastatingly scathing about easy answers and shallow platitudes.

He has an uncanny gift for reproducing the glib (“Greet the folks around you with a smile”) and the slick (“God is whispering to me right now that someone in this audience is struggling with a broken marriage”). His rubbish detector homes in unerringly on material that we parrot so easily. For example: “Just last week my church sang: “I want to know you more / I want to touch you / I want to see your face”. Nowhere in the Bible do I find a promise that we will touch God, or see his face, not in this life at least”.

One of the recurring themes is that of faithfulness over the long haul, no matter what we are feeling or experiencing. The theologian B.B. Warfield married at the age of twenty-five. During his honeymoon, his wife was struck by lightning and was paralysed for the next forty years. According to one of his biographers, “The continued care and love that Warfield devoted to his invalid wife throughout the remainder of her life have often been mentioned by those who knew them well as a notable manifestation of the work of the Holy Spirit in his life”. Now that is spirituality. But so is Practising the Presence, and the pursuit of the Beatific Vision.

Yancey quotes freely from Roman Catholic writers, but then so did evangelical giants as diverse as John Calvin and Amy Carmichael. At least there is no reference to “spiritual directors”.

It would be difficult to imagine any [Christian] who would not benefit from reading this book. To paraphrase an old pop song, “This is for all those burned out Christians / Thinking that Life has passed them by / Don’t give up…….!”

– William L. James <>