A Conversation

With Philip Yancey

Author of Rumors of Another World

Q: You have been called a “writer’s writer.” Why do you write?

Yancey: I write books for myself. I write books to make resolution toresolve things that are bothering me, things I don’t have an answers to. There are some people who, once they find an answer, they decide to write a book about it. I would be bored very quickly if that were true. My books are a process of exploration and investigation. So, I tend to tackle different problems with faith, things of concern to me, things I wonder about, and worry about.

Q: Who do you have in mind when you write?

Yancey: My calling is to people for whom the formula hasn’t worked! They’ve already heard it. I was one of those people, and I have a pretty strong resistance to propaganda from the church. Because I heard a lot of it that just wasn’t true. I figure, who needs another Christian book? The only thing I have to offer, really, is honesty, and if I hold to that then maybe the reader can trust me. I’ll say, “Okay, this is the way prayer is supposed to work and the way the Bible says it works, but you know what? It doesn’t work like that for me.” If that is my experience, I’m going to say it. 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. So, for those who struggle with my books, I just say, “Then, you really shouldn’t be reading them.” But some people do need the kinds of books I write. They’ve been burned by the church or they are very upset about certain areas — and I am called to speak to those people.

Q: Who is the intended reader for your new book, Rumors of Another World?

Yancey: It’s written for people in what I call the “borderlands of belief” — those who probably have a strong hunch there is something real about the whole spiritual thing, but who haven’t found that realized in a fruitful way in a church setting. It is the people who are suspiciously circling the church that I have in mind with this book, those wondering: “Is there a God? How can I know? What difference does it make in my life?”

Q: Why did you write this book?

Yancey: I meet many church-going Christians who would find it difficult to articulate why they believe as they do. Perhaps they absorbed faith as part of their upbringing, or perhaps they simply find church an uplifting place to visit on weekends. But if asked to explain their faith to a Muslim, or an atheist, they would not know what to say. As a matter of fact, the thought hit me personally: “What would I say?” That question prompted this book. I wrote it not so much to convince anyone else as to think out loud in hopes of coming to terms with my own faith. Does religious faith make sense in a world of the Hubble telescope and the Internet? Have we figured out the basics of life or is some important ingredient missing? C. S. Lewis wrote a wonderful book titled Mere Christianity, and I have narrowed that range even further, to Even More Mere Christianity.

As I have pondered this, I have realized, the great divide separating belief and unbelief reduces down to one simple question: Is the visible world around us all there is? Those unsure of the answer to that question live in the borderlands. They wonder whether faith in an unseen world is wishful thinking. Does faith delude us into seeing a world that doesn’t exist, or does it reveal the existence of a world we can’t see without it?

Q: As someone who has struggled with faith, how would you describe your own spiritual journey?

Yancey: The early part of my life I experienced the “works” of the Christian faith. Some very rigid, angry, legalistic people presented to me a view of God, which was really that of an abusive parent, more than anything else. So, I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught and even throwing my faith completely away at one point. Then I came back to faith mainly by encountering a world that was quite different than I had been taught about; a world of beauty and goodness. As I experienced that, I realized, maybe God had been misrepresented to me. So, I went back, warily circling around the faith. Earlier in my writing career I dealt with perennial problems, Where is God When it Hurts?, Disappointment with God, those questions of faith. Then, only fairly recently have I felt free to explore the central issues of faith with books like What’s So Amazing About Grace and The Jesus I Never Knew. The new book (Rumors of Another World) is a bit different because I’m really reaching out to people who are where I was, circling warily around faith.

Q: After spending time “warily circling around faith,” what made you eventually believe?

Yancey: I admit that I am at times a reluctant Christian, plagued by doubts and “in recovery” from bad church encounters. I have explored these experiences in other books, and so I determined not to mine my past yet again in this one. I am fully aware of all the reasons not to believe. So then, why do I believe? In my own days of skepticism, I wanted a dramatic interruption from above. I wanted proof of an unseen reality, one that could somehow be verified. However in my days of faith, such supernatural irruptions seem far less important, because I find the materialistic explanations of life inadequate to explain reality. I have learned to attend to fainter contacts between the seen and unseen worlds. I sense in romantic love something insufficiently explained by mere biochemical attraction. I sense in beauty and in nature marks of a genius creator for which the natural response is worship. I sense in desire, including sexual desire, marks of a holy yearning for connection. I sense in pain and suffering a terrible disruption that omnipotent love surely cannot abide forever. I sense in compassion, generosity, justice, and forgiveness a quality of grace that speaks to me of another world, especially when I visit places, like Russia, marred by their absence. I sense in Jesus a person who lived those qualities so consistently that the world could not tolerate him and had to silence and dispose of him. I could go on and on. In short, I believe not so much because the invisible world impinges on this one but because the visible world hints, in the ways that move me most, at a lack of completion.

Q: How do you describe your own spiritual journey?

Yancey: The early part of my life I experienced the “works” of the Christian faith. Some very rigid, angry, legalistic people presented to me a view of God which was really that of an abusive parentGod, which was really that of an abusive parent,, more than anything else. So, I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught and even throwing my faith completely away at one point. Then I came back to faith mainly by encountering a world that was quite different than I had been taught about; a world of beauty and goodness. As I experienced that, I realized, maybe God had been misrepresented to me. So, I went back, wearily circling around the faith. Earlier in my writing career I dealt with perennial problems, Where is God When it Hurts?,, Disappointment with God, those questions of faith. Then, only fairly recently have I felt free to explore the central issues of faith with books like What’s So Amazing About Grace and The Jesus I Never Knew. The new book (Rumors of Another World) is a bit different because I’m really reaching out to people who are where I was, circling wearily around the faith.

Q: Tell me more about the church of your growing up years. Did The church you grew up in, did it focus a lot of energy on staying separate from the rest of the world?

Yancey: Oh yes, you could tell by the way they dressed. They wouldn’t go bowling because liquor was served in bowling alleys, and they wouldn’t go roller skatingroller-skating because it looked like dancing. They were separatists from the rest of the world. They worked very hard at that, and took great pride in it. That church went out of business, finally, about two years ago. It kept moving faurther and faurther out of into the suburbs as the neighborhoods kept comingchanging in racial makeup, as they do in Atlanta. Then, finally, they just gave up and, in a great irony, sold their building to an African-American denomination.

Q: Why do you think this church becaome so small minded?

Yancey: I think they just experienced what any religion experiences when you get a cultic mentality. “We have a corner on the truth, and only we have a corner on the truth. You’ve got to follow us.” As a young person I was more aware of the negatives. Actually, those people who went there were probably better off in a lot of ways. They needed something to hang onto to make sense out of life, and there was a funny kind of charity within the church itself. If a person’s home got were burned down by fire, the others in the church would quickly rally around. But if it was a person of a different race across the street, it was a different story. Part of the confusion for me growing up was that strange mixture of some residue of the Gospel, certainly, because we would hear the words. But then there was a very inconsistent playing out of what those words meant.

Q: How long were you subject to the environment of your a repressive church, and at what age did you realize there was something wrong?

Yancey: The most toxic church I attended was during my last couple years of high school and the first couple years of college— very formative years, for anybody. I realize d something was wrong when I started to think and read literature that would call to question my conscience. I was being blasted in one ear with, “This is the way the world is, this is true,” then on the other hand I was hearing contradictory messages in my education. It was a confusing time as I tried to sort it all through.

Q: In light of your upbringing, how have you avoidied becoming bitter toward the church, religion as a whole, or even toward certain people who call themselves “Christians”?

Yancey: When you’re a writer, even the negative experiences turn into material. And when they turn into material, they become positive! A lot of people wouldn’t understand that who haven’t written. For instance, my family, people who used to be offensive to me, now they’re curious to me. But actually, I think the pattern that I underwent is one that I think is a good pattern. That is, to be raised in a very strict environment, because you do learn things — you learn discipline, you learn a lot of Bible knowledge, you learn some good practices. And then, coming out of that, to discover freedom and grace, is a good pattern. The resentment comes in because I realize not everybody survives; a lot of people just throw the whole thing out. They never find the grace part. My bitterness is not really a personal one, because I feel quite comfortable with my pilgrimage and how it ended up. But I know many people, including a brother, who came through a similar environment, but didn’t end up in a healthy place.

Q: The church of your youth abused its authority.  Has that experience shaped your view of God today?

Yancey: For a time I resisted thinking of God as an authority figure; harsh images from childhood had scarred too deep. Like many people, I saw religion mainly as a set of rules, a moral code handed down from an invisible world that we on this planet were somehow obligated to obey. Why it might matter to God whether puny creatures on a tiny planet kept his rules, I had no clue. I only heard the dire warnings that if I broke the rules, I would pay.

More recently, however, I have come to recognize that sometimes I submit gladly to authority. When my computer software acts up, I call technical support and scrupulously follow the technician’s orders. When I want to master a difficult sport, such as golf, I pay for lessons. And when I get hurt or sick, I see a doctor. In fact, a doctor is probably the most helpful image for me to keep in mind while thinking about God and sin. Why should I seek out God’s view on how to live my life? For the same reason I seek my doctor’s opinion. I defer to my doctor, trusting that we share the same goal, my physical health, but that he brings to the process greater wisdom and expertise. And I am learning to view sins as spiritual dangers--much like carcinogens, bacteria, viruses, and injuries--that must be avoided at all costs, for my own sake. I am learning to trust that God wants the best life for me in this world, not some diminished, repressed life.

Q: What does a spiritually healthy person look like, in your opinion?

Yancey: AWell, a spiritually healthy person is usually very others-directed, globally. There is a quote I use in one of my books from a second century theologian that says a spiritual person is a person who is “fully alive.” Not someone closed off, with blinders on, pulling in, afraid to sample the world. But, instead, someone utterly convinced this is God’s world, I ‘ am here to explore and to reach out and to try to represent God and His hands in this world.’ Of course, that means caring for the needy, but it also means flat out enjoying the great goodness of this world around us. Boy, I look at the spiritually healthy people in the Bible and they’re characters, every one of them. They’re wild people. They’re out of the box. We’re not supposed to be cookie cutter, uptight people. We’re supposed to be fully alive.

Q: In your opinion, howHow do you believe one canwe become that person you just described, the “spiritually healthy person?” And, are you that person?

Yancey: I personally look for a church that encourages diversity and grace. Diversity is a big part of it. The cultic groups I know tend to surround themselves with people who are alike, and the world is not made up of that. I think that’s dangerous. Also, in my case, an international perspective is huge. We take about four overseas trips a year, and when you start viewing your own life through different eyes it helps expand vision. That’s been very helpful for me. I know not everybody can do that. I think encouraging curiosity is good. I worry about — it’s more of a problem in the South than anywhere else — a lot of Christians, they turn on the Christian radio when they get up and they watch Christian TV and go to Christian bookstores, and they have a Christian yellow pages to determine where to get their car repaired and their rug shampooed. — and I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind at all. If anything, He was going away from people like Him and reaching out to others. That keeps you from being in-grownin-grown and shakes up your faith.

Q: How do you, personally, connect with God?

Yancey: I am an introvert. I’m a writer, and I live with words. So, each day, I spend a good hour reading, meditating, praying. That’s really my time of spiritual nourishment, even more so than church or a group setting. It’s what I call aligning myself with God. It’s a conscious alignment every day. In the morning I generally read other books. I’ve been reading a book recently about Luke’s writing. Then, often in the afternoon, I’ll do my best to go through the Bible, about a chapter at a time. I try to make it less of a study and more of, ‘What can I discern about God speaking to me.’

Q: Who do you have in mind when you write?

Yancey: My calling is to people for whom the formula hasn’t worked! They’ve already heard it. I was one of those people, and I have a pretty strong resistance to propaganda from the church. Because I heard a lot of it that just wasn’t true. I figure, who needs another Christian book? The only thing I have to offer, really, is honesty. The reader can trust me. I’ll say, “Okay, this is the way prayer is supposed to work and the way the Bible says it works, but you know what? It doesn’t work like that for me.” If that is my experience, I’m going to say it. What I find is, a lot of other people write in and say, “Gosh, I’ve had that experience and I’ve always been afraid to say it, but you’re not afraid to say things like that.” And I tend to go back to the Bible as a model, because I don’t know a more honest book. It has the formulas. I can’t think of any argument against God that isn’t already included in the Bible. So, for those who struggle with my books, I just say, “Then, you really shouldn’t be reading them.” But some people do need the kinds of books I write. They’ve been burned by the church or they are very upset about certain areas — and I am called to speak to those people.

Q: Who is the intended reader for your new book, Rumors of Another World?

Yancey: It’s written for people in what I call the “borderlands of belief” — those who probably have a strong hunch there is something real about the whole spiritual thing, but who haven’t found that realized in a fruitful way in a church setting. It is the people who are suspiciously circling the church that I have in mind with this book, those wondering: “Is there a God? How can I know? What difference does it make in my life?”

Q: I read where you said you struggled with pride and/or self-righteousness at one time. Is that correct?

Yancey: I think, frankly, every writer faces the temptation of pride. There’s an inherent incorporate assumption that what I’ve got to say is worth your time — read my book! (Laughter) Writing is an odd field because there is no more paranoia-producing, lonely occupation than sitting there with a blank computer screen wondering if you can come up with something that can capture people’s attention. So, that’s a very humbling aspect. But then, if the book works and you go out to a book signing or to speak somewhere, then there are all these people saying, “Oh, you’re so wonderful. You changed my life. You have all these answers.” Fortunately, 80 percent of my life is sitting in the basement struggling and the other part just seems like this unreal world.

Q: Have you ever considered writing fiction?

Yancey: I took a class in fiction at the University of Chicago and just decided I’m probably not a fiction writer. It’s a different kind of writing for me. I decided I just better stick with essays. (Laughter)

May 2003