Philip Yancey, What Good is God? On the Road with Stories of Grace, H&S, 2010.

Anyone who reads Christian books knows Philip Yancey. In his 20+ publications this ‘Progressive Evangelical’ popular writer is renowned for his stories, excellent research, readability, and global appeal.

This one’s more autobiographical than most. Eg.: ‘I should mention that on personality tests I score off the charts as an introvert. Writing is a lonely act, and I am quite content to hole up in a mountain cabin with a stack of books for a week at a time, speaking to no-one but the grocery-store attendant.’

And he’s a modern prophet. Like this: ‘How do we admire Miss Universe without devaluing the 15-year-old high-school girl who wears glasses, has pimples and whose figure resembles a lamp-post? Or how can we honour Bill Gates and also the man who empties Bill Gates’s rubbish?’

In this book he recounts ten journeys. Each chapter has two parts – the people he’s met, then what he said to them (speeches, sermons, talks, whatever). His questions are huge: ‘Can the “God of all comfort” truly bring solace to a wounded place like Mumbai or the Virginia Tech campus? Will the scars of racism ever heal in the American South, let alone South Africa? Can a Christian minority have any leavening effect in a sometimes hostile environment such as China or the Middle East?’ The issues don’t get bigger than these…

Here we’ll simply recount a core insight he learned in each situation, and a key element of ‘Grace’ he imparted to his hosts (all the while running a big risk that lifting out just a sentence or two may convey triteness).

1. Virginia Tech: Campus Massacre. ‘Each of the thirty-three who died (yes, including the killer, Cho) had a designated place inside the [big] tent where friends and family could leave personal mementos: a baseball, a teddy bear, a copy of The Great Gatsby, a Starbucks coffee cup…’

‘Cling to the hope that nothing that happens, not even this terrorist tragedy, is irredeemable. We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new. J R R Tolkein spoke of “joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief”.’

2. China: Winds of Change. Estimates of the number of Christians in China vary from 80 million to more than 100 million. ‘This, the largest religious revival in history by far, took place with little direction and no foreign influence’.

‘Whenever I return to the US after an international trip I wince at the shallowness of our popular culture. China is dealing with huge issues, such as lifting hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty… As a society the US spends more money on beauty products than on education.’  Quoting C S Lewis: ‘Moderns in the post-Christian age are to pagans as a divorcee is to a virgin’.  ‘Some parts of the world, such as rural China, may receive the gospel as fresh good news, but the West has a cynical, “been there done that” spirit of resistance.’

3. Green Lake: Professional Sex Workers. Hilda, from Costa Rica, through her tears: ‘My family had no money, and so, when I was four years old, my mother sold me into sexual slavery. While other kids went to school, I worked in a brothel, earning the high rates paid for young girls… As a teenager I got pregnant, twice, and each time my mother took my child from me. “A filthy girl like you cannot raise a child,” she said… From then on I worked harder, often double shifts, to earn money to support my children…’ (The UN estimates that three million women are trafficked worldwide each year, and more than a million children).

‘The author and pastor John Piper insists that the worst tragedy in sexual sins is not fornication or pornography or other acts of moral failure. The tragedy is that a gnawing sense of guilt and unworthiness over sexual failure can overtake us, causing us to feel cast aside from God’s use and even God’s love. Wallowing in guilt, we shrink from the forgiveness God freely offers.’

4. Cambridge: Remembering C S Lewis. C S Lewis is often rated as the most influential Christian writer of our time, ‘even though he hardly fits the evangelical profile. A conference in his memory focuses on mere Christianity, avoiding such divisive issues as universalism, baptism, the sacraments, inerrancy and eschatology.’ ‎

‘An ambivalence about pleasure has marked all religions, including Christianity. The novelist Salman Rushdie observes that the true battle of history is fought not between rich and poor, socialist and capitalist, or black and white, but between the epicure and the puritan… C S Lewis unifies by bringing together two worlds, the visible and the invisible, this life and the next. The suicide bomber sacrifices one for the sake of the other; the Christian ascetic forgoes the pleasures of one for the sake of the next. Lewis believed strongly that the two worlds interpenetrate each other, now and for ever.’  

5. Bible College: Student Daze. The fundamentalist Bible College Yancey attended ‘had a sixty-six-page rulebook, which students had to sign each year. Even students engaged to be married could only ‘socialize’ one hour a day, during the evening meal with the entire student body.’ (Interestingly, the rule-book had nothing about consuming alcohol: it was simply assumed that particular vice was obvious – on a level with sex-with-animals). 

‎‘I learned more from Catholics about prayer than from any other group… Similarly I learn mystery and reverence from the Eastern Orthodox. In music, in worship, in theology they teach me of the “mysterium tremendum” involved when we puny human beings approach the God of the universe – a lesson difficult to learn in evangelical churches where worship is led by guitar players in shorts and sloppy T-shirts who wear their baseball caps backwards.’

6. South Africa: Breaking Down the Walls. Bill Clinton asked Nelson Mandela ‘Didn’t you really hate them for what they did?’ Mandela replied, ‘Oh yeah, I hated them for a long time. I broke rocks every day in prison, and I stayed alive on hate. They took a lot from me… They took me away from seeing my children grow up. They abused me mentally and physically. And one day I realized they could take it all except my mind and my heart… I simply decided not to give them away.’

‘Paul undertook fundraising campaigns to aid the impoverished Christians in Jerusalem. Given his own biography of shipwreck, prison, beatings and an unhealed “thorn in the flesh”, the concept of a prosperity gospel most likely never crossed his mind…

‘My travels convince me that Christians are as likely as non-Christians to be poor, and in many places they are more subject to oppression.’ [And re legalism]: ‘Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem have programmed certain elevators/lifts to stop at every floor of high rise buildings, because pressing the buttons is work. Also some hotels pre-fold toilet paper for their guests before sabbath…’  (preached to the largest church (Rhema) in South Africa)

7. Memphis: An Alternative Vision. ‘It took Southern Baptists 150 years to apologize for their support of slavery, and not until November 2008 – two weeks after Obama’s election – did Bob Jones University admit their error in barring black students before 1971 and banning interracial dating until 2000.’

‘The basketball player Kevin Garnett, who admittedly excels at putting a round ball through a round hoop, will earn more money this year than the entire US Senate. What kind of society values one person’s athletic prowess more than the contributions of its top 100 legislators?’

8. Middle East: Church at Risk. Muslim man to Philip: ‘I have read  the entire Koran and can find no guidance in it on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society. I have read the entire New Testament and can find no guidance in it on how Christians should live as a majority.’

The revered missionary Christy Wilson PhD, pastor of the Christian Community Church in Kabul, took a visiting group of American young people in the early 1970s to the ‘infidels’ cemetery. ‘This man worked for 30 years, translated the Bible into Afghan, not a single convert. This one replaced him, toiled for 25 years, and baptized the first Afghan Christian…’_{  ÂÂ} Ã‚ 

9. Chicago: A Place for Misfits. ‘During the Middle Ages, with Europe’s polluted water supplies, people drank a lot of beer, and some historians report that the Protestants’ 11 am Sunday worship time traces back to that practice: Martin Luther, who liked to sleep in after Saturday-night beer benders, scheduled Sunday services for the last hour still considered morning.’

Quote from Mark Noll: ‘The song “Turn your eyes upon Jesus” plainly errs when it says ”And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace”. No, the rest of the world grows clearer, not dimmer, in that light. God created the world of matter, set us down in its midst and entered it in the incarnation.’

10. Mumbai: A Marathon of Horror. ‘A well-known female journalist held hostage in her hotel-room text-messages a half-page article that describes gunshots in the corridor… She barricades the door with furniture, but still feels vulnerable… We share her fright. The next day the newspaper prints her final message, written from under her bed – “They are in my bathroom. This is the end for me – “ with an editor’s note that commandos have found her body.’

‘I have gone through the Gospels and placed Jesus’ contacts on a graph. With few exceptions, the more upright, conscientious, even righteous a person is, the more Jesus threatens that person. The more immoral, irresponsible, social outcast a person is – in other words, most unlike Jesus himself – the more Jesus attracts that person. (How is it that Jesus’ followers usually do the opposite?).’

After Prayer, this is the best of the half-dozen Yanceys I’ve read. Provocative, prophetic. I’m giving my copy to my hosts here in Macao, but I’m now going online to the Book Depository to order half-a-dozen more, to read again and give away.

Rowland Croucher

September 2011

jmm.aaa.net.au

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