Reading Philip Yancey after His Confession

I spent some time yesterday morning re-reading a couple of Philip Yancey’s books.

It’s been a while since I’ve read much of Yancey, but at one time, he was one of my favorite authors. I’ve recommended his books to multiple people and loaned out copies to some. I have taught adult Sunday school classes on two of his books.

Like many long-time Yancey fans, I wondered what to make of Yancey’s confession this month that he was involved in an eight-year affair with a woman married to another man. Yancey said that his affair was “totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings” and “defied everything that I believe about marriage.”

I don’t expect Yancey to say anything more about his sin. He has closed his social media pages and announced that he is “retiring from writing, speaking, and social media,” so there will probably be large pieces of this psychological puzzle that we will never fully know.

Nevertheless, as an intellectual historian who believes that there is a connection between belief and behavior, I want to make sense of Yancey’s writings in light of his confession. What should I do with Yancey’s writings now that we have found out that he was an adulterer long after publishing his bestselling books? Are they still worth reading? And if so, how can I reconcile Yancey’s past words with his recent actions?

I actually think that Yancey’s books are still worth reading. But I do read them differently in light of Yancey’s affair – and I think there’s a way to do that thoughtfully by noting both what they emphasize and what they do not.

Adultery, of course, is a sin that strikes at the heart of the most intimate human relationship that God created, and it does tremendous damage. It violates the picture that God gave of his relationship with his people. And it frequently is accompanied by persistent dishonesty that destroys a person’s integrity.

Nevertheless, some books written by adulterers are obviously still worth reading. If we didn’t believe that, we would never read Psalm 51.

And beyond that, I think that most of us would say that insightful works that have little to do with personal morality are still worth reading even if the writers were adulterers with deep personal flaws. Alexander Hamilton, for example, had an extramarital affair, but that has never stopped me from assigning excerpts from his Federalist Papers in class. Just because Hamilton had deep personal flaws (adultery, I think, was only the tip of the iceberg) doesn’t mean that he didn’t also have deep insights on political theory that make him a giant among American thinkers.

If adultery has stained the reputation of several of our nation’s most famous founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among them), it has also ensnared many of our recent political leaders. By my count, during at least 41 of the last 100 years, the nation’s chief executive has been someone who has been publicly known (either at the time or in retrospect) for having one or more extramarital affairs – most often, while in the White House. That’s nearly half of the last century.

But of course, we might expect Christian leaders to live by a higher standard. Some certainly have. Billy Graham famously went to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of evil in his associations with women – and by all accounts, he was successful in avoiding or resisting temptations in this area. As much as people have lampooned the “Billy Graham rule,” there’s a lot to be said for a man who was as handsome and charismatic as Graham, and who had as much power and influence as he did, remaining faithfully monogamous and avoiding every appearance of impropriety while simultaneously growing in love and respect for his wife.

Sadly, though, we’re so used to Christian leaders getting caught in adultery that Graham’s example seems almost the exception rather than the rule. Faithlessness to marriage vows cuts across all theological and denominational traditions, so there’s probably no theology that can fully inoculate one against extramarital affairs.

That’s true for both pastors and theologians. It’s true of some of the most famous theological luminaries of the twentieth century, such as Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder. It’s true of progressive social justice ministers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, and ultraconservative Bible church pastors like Steve Lawson. It’s true of televangelists and itinerant preachers. It’s true of conservative Presbyterians with strong traditions of oversight by elders and presbyteries. It’s even true of pastors from churches in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition where personal holiness is considered paramount.

And while the vast majority of Christian leaders who commit adultery are men (partly, of course, because the vast majority of prominent American Christian pastors have been male), female pastors are not immune from this temptation either – as the example of Aimee Semple McPherson demonstrates.

But if no theology can fully prevent a Christian leader from falling into sexual sin and violating their marriage vows, it’s nevertheless possible to look back at the theological writings of some who have done so and find some clues as to why they might have succumbed to that temptation. When we do so, we can better assess whether it’s possible to still be edified by their writings even after knowing about their adultery.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Adultery as a Case Study

When I look at Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings and sermons, for instance, I’m disturbed by his womanizing, but I also believe that his adulterous life was not substantially out of harmony with most of what he emphasized in his writing, at least as he understood it. He had a lot to say about love, but after reading many of his sermons, books, and speeches over the past twenty years, I haven’t found anything he said about sexual fidelity.

As I was writing this post, I did several Google searches to see if there was anything King said about sexual sin, and the best that Google could give me was a sermon outline that survives from a sermon on marriage that King preached in November 1961. But when I read through that sermon, I found that it doesn’t include very much scripture – and actually, it doesn’t say anything directly about sexual fidelity. Instead, it talks a lot about psychological adjustment, which was pretty common for King’s sermons.

King, frankly, wasn’t that interested in sexual faithfulness. That doesn’t mean that he wanted the world to know about his womanizing. His close associates warned him that it would discredit the movement if word of it got out, and I think that King honestly worried about that – though I think that he probably thought of himself as dealing with a sex addiction that was difficult to overcome.

In keeping with the view of the other liberal Christians he was associated with, he tended to think of sexual deviancy not as a moral evil but as a psychological problem – which was how he thought of homosexuality, for instance. One of his closest friends (Bayard Rustin) was a homosexual, and based on what I’ve read of King, it seems that he thought of Rustin’s homosexuality as a psychological, not a moral, issue. I imagine that he thought of his own womanizing in the same way, though since he never wrote directly about it, it’s hard to know for certain.

In any case, King’s concept of sin was primarily social, and when he preached on personal morality, it tended to focus primarily on showing love to one’s neighbor in emulation of the Good Samaritan.

I say all of this because I think that it shows that we need to understand King’s series of adulterous encounters (which, based on what I’ve read, were usually one-night stands with prostitutes, not long-term relationships) not as a direct violation of everything that he ever said or wrote, but rather as an area that his own theology and moral witness didn’t really address. King didn’t say that it was acceptable to have sex outside of marriage, but as a recipient of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award and a member of Christian Century’s editorial board, his views on the subject seem to have been very much in keeping with mainstream liberal Protestantism of his era – which meant, in short, that while he didn’t condone adultery, he didn’t seem to think it was a serious moral problem.

I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate that King or other liberal Protestants of his day had the concept that adultery was a direct affront to a holy God and a violation of the symbol that God gave of his own covenant relationship with his people. That simply wasn’t part of their theological vocabulary. Instead of seeing his adultery as deeply evil, King probably would have said that in that area of his life he was “maladjusted” (which was one of his favorite words).

I think that a thorough reading of King would suggest that he really wasn’t very concerned about personal holiness or personal sin, whether in the area of sexual morals or elsewhere. Like other theological liberals, he thought of sin in both social and psychological terms, but only rarely as a matter of individual ethics (which, of course, is how most white evangelicals look at sin). In the rare sermon that King preached about marriage, his concerns seemed to be entirely social. He spoke of the social harms of divorce, but never discussed the idea of marriage as a reflection of God’s relationship with his people. Nor did he mention any of Jesus’s statements about divorce.

In view of that, I think that we can still learn from his social ethics and his vision of a “beloved community” while lamenting the absence of a theology that would have addressed issues of personal holiness. Just as I don’t think that Hamilton’s adultery negates his political insights, I don’t think that King’s womanizing negates the social vision of his theology. I view King less as a rank hypocrite than as a man whose theology didn’t fully equip him to deal with personal sexual sin in his life. So, I think that I can profitably read King on the subjects where his moral witness was consistent while noting the areas where his theology fails.

Applying These Insights to Philip Yancey’s Writings

But what about Philip Yancey? Didn’t his theology equip him to deal with sexual sin?

At first glance, we might be inclined to say that the answer is surely yes. Unlike King, Yancey is not a theological liberal. He views sin as a personal evil, not merely as a social evil or a psychological “maladjustment.” And he knows that adultery is a sin against God.

But I think that the answer is actually a little more complicated. I know that Yancey is aware that his adultery was a grievous sin, and I know that he feels guilty about it and that he has not tried to make any excuses for it. And I commend him for that.

But as I thought about his writings, I realized that none of the ones that I’ve read say very much at all about defeating sin in a person’s life. And that, it seems, is an absence worth noting.

By his own account, Yancey grew up in a legalistic, fundamentalist church in Georgia, and he has spent a lifetime rebelling against the hypocrisy he found there. In particular, he has spent a lifetime fleeing the racism of his family and community and lamenting the hostility that he and they expressed toward Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime.

What saved him from leaving Christianity altogether was grace and the example of Jesus, he has repeatedly said. When he read about Jesus in the gospels, he was struck by the way that Jesus attracted sinners, which he said was so unlike many of the contemporary American Christians that he knew. Yancey sold millions of copies of books about God’s lavish grace, as seen in Jesus.

This is a vitally important message, and it’s one that we need to read and learn from. One of the things that comes through very clearly in Yancey’s writings is the way that our own personal guilt drives us to Jesus and creates within us a “longing for grace,” as Yancey says in What’s So Amazing about Grace.

“Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for ‘real’ people over ‘good’ people,” Yancey wrote. “In Jesus’ own words, ‘There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.’ In one of his last acts before death, Jesus forgave a thief dangling on a cross, knowing full well the thief had converted out of plain fear. That thief would never study the Bible, never attend synagogue or church, and never make amends to all those he had wronged. He simply said ‘Jesus, remember me,’ and Jesus promised, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’”

Jesus “welcomed tax collectors and reprobates and whores,” Yancey reminded us. “He came for the sick and not the well, for the unrighteous and not the righteous. And to those who betrayed him – especially the disciples, who forsook him at his time of greatest need – he responded like a lovesick father.”

I think that we would like to believe that marveling at God’s grace would be enough to keep us from scandalous sin. But paradoxically, I suspect that some of the people who marvel the most at God’s grace are the people who are living perpetually in sin and have no confidence of ever overcoming it – which drives them to marvel at God’s grace to accept them.

When I was re-reading Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace? yesterday, I was struck by the fact that several of the Christians he approvingly quotes about the magnitude of God’s grace are people whom we now know (even if Yancey didn’t) were living in some sort of chronic, semi-public sin.

For instance, Yancey quotes Karl Barth’s famous response to the University of Chicago students who asked him about the “most profound truth” he had discovered in his studies. Barth responded, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” As we now know, Barth gave that answer after a decades-long bigamous relationship with a woman he was not married to, which he carried on while writing his world-famous works of theology and traveling the globe to speak about grace.

He quotes Brennan Manning, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel, a book about God’s love for misfits. “I am the one Jesus loves,” Manning frequently said. Manning himself fought a losing battle with alcoholism for much of his life. He left the priesthood to get married, but then experienced the loss of that marriage in divorce. When he died of a disease that may have been exacerbated by alcohol abuse, he was alone.

Like these other Christians, Yancey spoke frequently of his deep need for forgiveness. He wrote against Christians who were self-righteous and didn’t view themselves as desperately in need of God’s grace.

Paradoxically, I suspect that because of his knowledge of his own sin, he has had a greater love for Jesus than some Christians who haven’t had extramarital affairs and who lived more upstanding lives.

But I also think that by focusing so narrowly on one aspect of grace – God’s forgiveness of us, which in turn motivates our forgiveness of others and our willingness to accept profligate sinners and misfits – Yancey may have downplayed another aspect of God’s grace: transforming grace.

“The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness,” Yancey wrote.

To be sure, Yancey did write of the need for repentance. In his view, he was not offering “cheap grace,” but the scandalous grace of the gospel.

But Yancey also recognized that the people who are most likely to repent and receive God’s grace are sometimes the people who are most scandalous in their fall from respectability. “The scene from John 8 [the story of Jesus’s response to the woman caught in adultery] rattles me because by nature I identify more with the accusers than the accused,” Yancey wrote. “I deny far more than I confess. Cloaking my sins under a robe of respectability, I seldom if ever let myself get caught in a blatant, public indiscretion. Yet if I understand this story correctly, the sinful woman is the one nearest the kingdom of God. Indeed, I can only advance in the kingdom if I become like this woman: trembling, humbled without excuse, my palms open to receive God’s grace.”

I think that Yancey sensed his need for God’s grace, and he longed to be open to it through repentance. In all his writing about authenticity – and in his admiring descriptions of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – I suspect that he longed to come clean and admit his sin to a greater degree than he felt he could. I suspect that he was genuine in saying that he tended to “deny far more than I confess,” and that he wanted instead to be like the woman caught in adultery, whose sin was fully known by Jesus and by others and yet fully forgiven.

Yancey’s confession this month was in character with what he wrote decades earlier: no excuses, but simply an acknowledgment of God’s grace and a statement of contrition. Perhaps Yancey is now experiencing a feeling of God’s grace that is greater than those who have never made such a confession can ever know.

But in this comfort in God’s forgiveness, I hope that he’ll also discover something that barely appears at all in most of his writings: the transforming grace of God’s sanctification. God’s grace not only forgives us but also empowers us to live a new life of holiness (Titus 2:11-14).

And to fully experience that sanctification, I think that we must view God’s moral commands as a reflection of his character. In other words, we need to fall in love not simply with Jesus’s forgiveness and acceptance of sinners but also with the beauty of God’s moral law, as Psalm 119 suggests. It’s that last concept that I find conspicuously absent in Yancey’s writings. I wish that in addition to talking about the beauty of God’s grace, he also talked about the way in which God’s commands – including his covenant pattern for marriage – reflect his character.

It’s hard to hold the ideas of God’s grace of forgiveness and God’s grace of sanctification in tension. It’s easy to make the quest for sanctification become a project of self-righteousness that leads us to the very attitudes that Yancey spent a lifetime writing against. Conversely, it’s hard to avoid making the grace of God’s forgiveness become a cover for an unsanctified life – a life of death that I think people like Brennan Manning sincerely wanted to escape, but which they felt they were powerless to ever transcend.

Perhaps none of us really get this balance right. Maybe many of us err in both directions simultaneously by not really engaging in the repentance that leads to sanctification and not fully trusting in God’s grace of forgiveness either.

Philip Yancey’s writings, I think, were an attempt to address one of those errors. I think they’re just as valuable now that we know about his adultery than they were before we knew about his sin. I think that he was sincere in writing them. In fact, his consciousness of his own sin might have led him to long for God’s grace even more, even while feeling like he couldn’t quite be fully open with others about what was really going on in his heart and life.

But I think that we also need more than Yancey’s writings. Yancey tells us a lot about one aspect of God’s grace, but we may need to look to others to tell us more about another aspect.

My greatest fear, though, is that Yancey’s scandalous “fall from grace,” so to speak, will deter those who most need to hear his message from listening to it – because even if Yancey’s books don’t tell us everything about God that we need to hear, they do tell us something vitally important that too many evangelical Christians today overlook.

I’m actually amazed that conservative evangelicals liked Yancey’s books as much as they did, because Yancey’s message was at odds with much of conservative evangelicalism. He chastised some of his fellow evangelicals for their excoriations of Bill Clinton and their support for Donald Trump. In the 1990s, he wrote at length about his friendship with Mel White, an actively homosexual Christian who was advocating for gay rights. (To be clear, Yancey said that he opposed the sin of homosexuality even while befriending White). Most poignantly, in The Jesus I Never Knew, Yancey warned his fellow evangelicals about the dangers of seeking power, especially in the political realm.

I fear that it will now be easy for politically conservative evangelicals to dismiss Yancey’s message, which is now more countercultural than ever in much of contemporary American evangelicalism. That’s unfortunate, because we need to listen to his warnings about trusting in political power and his exhortations to follow the way of Jesus when it comes to renouncing the temptation to align ourselves with the kingdoms of this world.

Yancey’s personal failings are not a reason to dismiss anything that he said about those topics, just as Martin Luther King’s personal failings don’t negate what he said about racial justice. We need their writings. But in both cases, I think that what they didn’t say was just as important as what they did choose to emphasize. Yancey’s understanding of the gospel of grace was not wrong, but it may have been incomplete. And so, as much as I like Yancey’s work (and as much as I will continue to read it), I won’t read it alone. His books are an excellent guide to the God of forgiving grace.

But when it comes to knowing God and mirroring God’s covenantal love in our own marriages, Yancey’s books cannot be the end of the story. There’s a lot more to God’s empowering grace than Yancey ever told us – and for the rest of the story, we may need other guides. So, I’ll still keep Yancey’s books on my shelf – but I’ll also know when to go to other writers for truths that perhaps eluded Yancey, despite all of his insights.

Photo credit: Neelix / Wikimedia