He posted this on Facebook, so I figure it's fair game to post here. This writer is Billy Graham's ex-son-in-law, and as he mentions here, also committed adultery, which he owns.
I appreciate his words, but I still find the hypocrisy of Yancey speaking and writing while being in the affair to be . . . I can't say unforgivable, but disqualifying. Why didn't he believe what he wrote? Did he write to convince himself, or just to make money? I'm a cynic, I suppose. I've seen too much of this in my life.
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Philip Yancey, one of the most influential Christian writers of the last fifty years, has confessed to an eight-year affair. He is 76 years old.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Yancey authored award-winning books like “What’s So Amazing About Grace”, “Disappointment with God”, and “The Jesus I Never Knew”. His writing gave countless people permission to wrestle honestly with faith, doubt, suffering, and grace. I’ve long admired him. His books shaped me. And none of this changes any of that.
The news is, of course, heartbreaking. News like this always re-breaks my heart and sends shivers down my spine, because it pulls me back into the devastation I caused by my own infidelity—the wreckage, the shockwaves, the lives of those I love altered in ways that never fully return to “before.”
An affair is not an abstract moral failure. It is a long obedience in deception, and it leaves wreckage in its wake. Trust me, I know. Real people, especially those closest, carry the weight of betrayal, disorientation, grief, and a loss of trust that words alone cannot repair. Any talk of grace that does not first make room for that devastation is not grace at all; it’s evasion. For those affected, it’s understandable that hearing about grace in any form might feel like an allergen right now, a bitter reminder that feels premature or even painful.
What shocks me most, however, isn’t Philip’s sin. It’s the way Christian subculture routinely reacts when broken people break things.
Disappointment? Yes. Sadness? Absolutely. Feeling gut-punched? Of course. But shock? That’s the tell.
Shock almost always signals that Christian subculture is still operating with a high anthropology rather than a low one. We say we believe in the depth of human brokenness, but we rarely believe it applies to the people we admire most. We expect sin in theory, just not in our heroes.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to believe there is a fundamental difference between certain people and the rest of us—that some are less broken, less fragile, less capable of failure. But while there are functional differences between roles, statuses, and responsibilities, there is no fundamental difference at the level of human nature. The idea that some people don’t struggle with the same fears, temptations, and contradictions as everyone else is a myth. Human beings are human beings, carrying the same flaws, anxieties, and sinful tendencies across the board. No one lives outside the bounds of reality or human nature.
I have a friend who once said that all of us are three bad days away from becoming a tabloid headline and most of us are already on day two. All have fallen short, across every culture, vocation, ideology, and persuasion under the sun. Sin is a shared, ever-present reality, something that clings to all of us. All of us.
So if our theology leaves us stunned by human failure, it may be worth asking whether we’ve quietly believed in ourselves more than we realized.
What’s so amazing about grace? It covers both the sin of adultery and the sin of the one who looks down on the adulterer. It doesn’t excuse the devastation. It doesn’t bypass the wounded. It doesn’t ask whether one fall is worse than another. Grace simply shows up where it is needed most—over the wreckage, over the betrayal, over us all. #philipyancey
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