Cover Story6 April 2014

Philip Yancey:The Question Man

April 2014 7

With a writing career that spans almost40 years, PhilipYancey has sold morethan 15 million books worldwide,

making him one of the best-selling evangelicalChristian authors. He’s penned numerous award-winning books, including two winners of theEvangelical Christian Publisher Association (ECPA)Book of theYear Award. He’s made a career ofdelving into difficult issues such as DisappointmentWith God:Three Questions No One Asks Aloud (Zondervan,1988), Prayer:Why Does It Make Any Difference?(Zondervan, 2006),What’s So Amazing About Grace?(Zondervan, 1997), and The Gift of Pain:WhyWe HurtandWhatWe Can Do About It (Zondervan, 1993),co-authored with physician Paul Brand.

Yancey doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions.Instead, he asks them humbly and honestly, as one ofthe masses.This approach has made him universallyappealing, and his books have been translated into35 languages. “Even today,” he says, “I cling to thestance of a solitary pilgrim struggling throughdifficult questions of faith—not an authorityfigure dispensing the church’s official position.”

Yancey is a 1970 alumnus of Columbia InternationalUniversity,where he met his wife, Janet.With graduatedegrees in Communications and English fromWheatonCollege and the University of Chicago, he began hiscareer as a journalist. He joined the staff of CampusLife magazine, a sister publication of ChristianityToday, where he worked as writer, then editor, andeventually publisher. For years, he wrote a monthlycolumn in ChristianityToday magazine, where hecontinues to serve as Editor at Large.

Early in his career as a journalist,Yancey wrote for avariety of publications, including Reader’s Digest. In acolumn called “Drama in Real Life,” he chronicledthe stories of people who had suffered tragedy.A

recurring theme was the contradictory and confusingcounsel from Christians attempting to bring meaningto those who survived tragic circumstances. Hebegan grappling with Christianity’s failure to givea good answer. His attempt to answer the nigglingquestion was a 336 page book entitled Where Is GodWhen It Hurts?, published in 1977.The book soldmore than 1.5 million copies and garnered theGold Medallion BookAward from the ECPA.

Yancey has since built his career on asking questionsrather than having answers. “You can go to theChristian book store and find lots of books fromexperts about how to have a perfect marriage, howto be intimate with God, and how to solve all yourproblems,”Yancey says. “I’m a pilgrim, just like you,

sitting in a pew.The difference is my full time jobis to go to the library for answers to my questions.Most people have jobs and can only explore theirquestions at odd hours; investigation is my job. ”

BecauseYancey has searched out the hard questions,he’s often looked to as “the answer man,” a reputationhe earned by authoring book after questioning book.But forYancey, it has always been about the questions,and even after writing dozens of books in search ofanswers, he’s still more comfortable seeing himselfas “the question man.” It’s an irony and a paradoxhe’s learned to live with. “For a few years, it was ahuge identity issue for me. I didn’t feel comfortablein that role,” saysYancey. He elaborates in his latestbook, The QuestionThat Never Goes Away. “I avoidtrying to answer the why question because anyattempt will inevitably fall short and may evenrub salt in an open wound.”

COVER STORY

By Dawn González

Dawn Gonzalez is a pastor’swife and the mother of threeteens. She is a writer, Bibleteacher, and author of the blogEveryday Ordinary Dawnings(http://www.DawnGonzalez.com). She and her family residein Columbia.

“investigation is my job. ”

Cover Story8 April 2014

In the book,Yancey returns to the why question.“Why do bad things happen?Why does God allowevil to take its awful course?What possible good cancome from such events? I haven’t stopped wrestlingwith these questions since my first book.”

Approached again in 2012 as the answer man,Yanceywas asked to speak in Japan on the first anniversaryof the tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people.He was also invited to war-torn Sarajevo, Bosnia,and to Newtown, CT after 26 first-graders weremassacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Thesequel to Where Is GodWhen It Hurts?,Yancey’s latestbook is proof that there are no easy answers. “Thereare hints,” he says, “but the Bible doesn’t havedefinitive answers to our why questions.”

Looking to Job’s questions and God’s responses,and examining how Jesus handled suffering whilehe walked the earth,Yancey says, “the biblicalemphasis is not on why, but on what, what we cando about it.”We are to respond with compassion andwith the hope for a redeemed and restored futurethat is unique to the Christian worldview. “Thechurch doesn’t always express it well. Sometimeswe come along with judgment and make people feelworse, but Jesus brings words of comfort and hope.”

AllYancey’s books center on the themes of eithersuffering or grace. “No matter what I start outwriting, I end up, in some way, writing aboutthese two themes,” he says. Because he is a Christian,Yancey approaches each book’s difficult subject fromthe context of his biblical faith.

Taken as a whole and in sequence,Yancey’s booksspiral inward.They start out in the margin withgeneral questions and issues like reconciling Godwith our pain and handling disappointment withGod.The subjects gradually move into more intimatequestions about living out our faith, such as Who isJesus?What is grace? and How do I relate to an invisible God?

Because of this loose progression,Yancey is considering

a memoir as his next project. “I want to do somethingvery different stylistically. It’s time to put the booksin a framework of my own life, my own story, andnot just have the ideas I’ve encountered and exploredalong the way.”

Yancey’s faith journey begins with personal disap-pointment in a well-meaning but dysfunctionalfundamentalist church background. Growing up,“[I] heard about love and grace, but I didn’t experiencemuch.And we were taught that God answers prayers,miraculously, but my father died of polio just aftermy first birthday, despite many prayers for his healing.I grew up confused by the contradictions.” It led himto turn away from faith in God for a time until here-embraced God with a new and different faith.

“I was cursed with the worst the church has to offerand blessed with the best the church has to offer,”Yancey says. “There are a lot of good memoirs aboutgrowing up strict Catholic or strict orthodox Jewish,but I don’t know of one that captures the strictfundamentalist evangelical experience that endsredemptively,”Yancey says.

The ultimate concerns of faith often bring aboutextremism, judgmentalism, legalism, and exclusivism.It is a potential weakness of many faiths, not justChristianity.AfterYancey’s early experience in extremes,he now articulates his faith with words that usequestion marks to back away from the issues endingin exclamation points.This softens extremes intobeliefs that have a period at the end. “I search for afaith that makes its followers larger, not smaller,”Yancey explains.

PhilipYancey has changed the landscape of Christianpublishing with his unique voice and questioningstyle. But regardless of whether he is the questionman or the answer man, the one definitive answerhe has given us with his vast body of work is thatit’s okay to ask God our hard questions. ROC

As part ofColumbia

InternationalUniversity’s

90thAnniversaryCelebration,

Yancey willspeak at abanquet atBrookland

Baptist Churchon May 2. Visit

yanceyciu.eventbrite.comto register forthe ticketed

event.