The Sean McDowell Show - Why Grace is Still Amazing (25-year update!)

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

One of the most impactful books in my own personal life is getting an update after 25 years! Millions of lives have been changed by award-winning author Philip Yancey's startling exploration of grace at street level. Grace is the one thing the world can't duplicate, the healing force we need, and the key to transforming a broken world. With powerful stories, rich theology, and practical suggestions, Yancey challenges us to become living answers to a world that desperately needs to know, What's So Amazing About Grace? READ: What's So Amazing About Grace? Revised and Updated (https://a.co/d/6qaFKjg) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

There are a few books that really have shaped my life and have shaped my ministry. Our guest today, Phil Bianci, wrote one from about 25 years ago. It was called, What's So Amazing About Grace? We have an implicit thirst for grace. We're judged constantly by what kind of house we live in, what kind of car we drive, what kind of clothes we're wearing. Underneath, that's a dead-end street. Jesus comes along, kind of turns everything upside down.

I read it, loved it. It was transformative to me, Philip, in many ways. When I saw that you had a 25-year update, instantly I thought I would love to have him back because I have so many questions for you. So thanks for writing the book. Thanks for doing an update. And we appreciate you joining us today. Well, great. I'm surprised you were reading 25 years ago, Sean. Well, I might be a little bit older than you think, but I'll take that as a compliment. Fair enough. So I want to, let's go back 25 years before we get to this update.

What was the original motivation or inspiration for writing What's So Amazing About Grace? The Christian world, especially the evangelical world, was just getting into politics at that time. The moral majority was a big name, and political characters were being judged by not just their theology, but their political stances. And it was a different situation back then, John, as you remember, when Jimmy Carter was elected. I think it was Newsweek magazine did a whole cover story on the year of the evangelical. So evangelicals were actually at their peak in terms of percentage of Americans, just about 30 percent. So a major political block as New York saw it. And for the first time, people like Falwell, Robertson, others, Francis Schaeffer was part of that

movement, were getting evangelicals involved in politics. When I grew up, it was a fundamentalist type church in the South, as you know. And we didn't really dabble in politics at all. The only time it came up was when John Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for president. And then we started talking about that. But we were into legalism. We were into behavior things, not really into even issues like abortion, the homosexual and gender issues hadn't even come up yet. So suddenly those became in the forefront. And a phrase like culture wars came into existence for the first time. And it seemed to be a time when we were cracking apart. We were building walls between each other.

And of course, since then, it's only magnified. Now the divide is great compared to what it was 25 years ago. You know, it's interesting to ask my dad. When he first wrote Evidence, It Demands a Verdict, no publisher wanted it. Nobody thought it was going to sell, ironically enough. And so looking back, there's obviously a deep surprise at how well that book is done. Well, you express a similar surprise 25 years later going, I have no idea. This book has sold 2 million copies plus. That's

incredible. Why do you think this book has done so well and deserves a revision and an update? Brother, I would have to say we have an implicit thirst for grace. It's a society of ungrace. Humans are like that. We're a ranking people. So in the United States, especially, you know, you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. We like being independent. We like to carve our way. And we're judged constantly by what kind of house we live in, what kind of car we drive, what kind of clothes we're wearing. That's how we judge people. What school did you go to? And we're making all these little judgments. And the higher you climb the social ladder, the more intense that begins to be. But underneath, that's a dead end street. It doesn't really satisfy. And you live in

constant pressure about it. And Jesus comes along, kind of turns everything upside down, where he goes to the lower part of the social ladder and says these are my people and including the lower part of the moral ladder you know he was criticized in his day for hanging around sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and people like that and it's it's a different world now because we we're kind of divided into good people like the church people and then those bad people over there. Well, Jesus has two different categories. There are two categories, but the categories are people who are ready to receive my grace and people who aren't. And I find that really if you peel back the layers of competition and all this stuff we live under, there is a thirst for grace. There's

a thirst for acceptance and love, not based on your performance, because we are going to fail that way, but rather based on the foundational love of God. That's what the universe is all about. In many ways, it seems like your book just kind of scratched where an itch was, culturally speaking and within the church. I would kind of describe it as kind of a breath of fresh air, so to speak. I'm an apologist, so I want to argue for truth, and Christianity is true. But there's something about grace that just grabs the heart, and we have to have both of them.

And I get that feeling and that sense and that encouragement when I read your book. I love Vanishing Grace as well. And writers, you quote people like Henry Nouwen. Would you argue that we need grace more now than when you wrote this 25 years ago? If so, why? And maybe coupling with that response, what has changed in culture and or the church over that 25 years? I really would. You hear statements like America has never been more divided. And I kind of sit back and laugh a little bit. You know, we did have a civil war.

And I lived through the 1960s when there were a thousand bombings a year, domestic bombings. And people forget that. And there were hundreds of thousands of people marching in the street almost every day against the war and against Richard Nixon and all that. So we have been through divisions before, but this one seems to be becoming much more a secular religious divide. We've all seen the charts of the nuns, you know, NES, you know, people who have no religious commitment. growing and growing so that now the youngest group of people are right about half and half. About half have some religious commitment, about half have none. That's why they check that box. And there is a division on certain issues. I mentioned the gender issues. They're big all the time. Race issues are still important, and they are important. And globally, we're in a much more fractious state now than 25 years ago.

Communism had fallen. These countries were throwing off the shackles that they'd lived under for 70 years or so, and they were looking to the West for some answers, for some solutions. And you may remember Francis Fukuyama came along and said, it's the end of history. You know, liberal democracy has won. Well, flash forward 25 years and you've got the Cold War, you know, just right back almost where it was. threatening nuclear use of nuclear weapons and involved in a terrible war in Ukraine and China and the United States once again being rivals. So it's a more perilous time that we live in now than 25 years ago. 25 years ago, I went back and looked at the newspapers. What was the number one news in the papers every day? Bill Clinton and a White House intern. That was it. It's a lot

dirtier and a lot meaner now. Fair enough. Well, maybe we should pause. We maybe should have done this at the beginning, but you've written a book called What's So Amazing About Grace. Define grace for us. What is it? Maybe give an example. And the one that jumped out to me, I'd never thought about it like this. You you said for some people romantic love is the closest they get to experiencing grace so define it maybe explain what you mean by that sure yeah i always hesitate to define grace jesus certainly never did that anybody asked him about that he would just tell the story so i do a lot of that in the book in fact i take some of j' stories, the parables, and put them into the 21st century now and, you know,

tell the story of the prodigal son about a girl from Detroit who gets involved with prostitution and sex slavery, which would be a very contemporary example of what Jesus was talking about. But we have these clues all over, don't we? I mentioned, I have a list somewhere of about 30 words where they take something of the root word of grace and apply it in different ways, like grace notes in music, you know, you can do without them before you put them in there. And it's just

a lot better, or giving a gratuity or a grace period. I rented a car one time and came back an hour late and I thought they're going to charge me on a whole extra day. And they said, no, no, we have a grace period. And I kind of stopped. And I said to the woman at the Hertz counter, I said, Grace, what is that? And she said, well, I don't know. I guess it means that even though you were supposed to pay, you don't have to. I said, not bad. That's a good start. Sure. And there is something theological about grace that you don't earn.

There's nothing you can do to earn God's love. There's nothing you can do to make God love you more. God already loves us infinitely as much as God can possibly love his creatures. And that's a welcome message. I think that's the root of the thirst. We want to be loved. Romantic love was a stepping stone for me in getting to that place. Finally, a person came along who didn't just pick out everything that was wrong with me, but everything that was right with me. And what a great feeling that is. And we have these little hints dropped into culture and dropped into our emotions. And we kind of wish, I wish it were true. It's so good, as Tolkien once said, it's so good it has to

be true. And when you taste the little bit of grace that we have in our own competitive society you think what if the whole universe was like that what if it's really true what if god truly does love us in the way the bible says and it can it can transform people it's interesting that grace has the same root as gratuity because you go to a restaurant in the states and people expect a great share right it's not really grace but i was traveling with my wife and we were speaking in new zealand and they told us they're like it's not expected if you leave it it really is an unexpected blessing and a gift for that person they don't expect it so new zealand it's more like grace not in the u.s it's expected expected, interestingly enough. Yeah. Isn't that funny? Here we've taken that gratuity and now receipts will come 22%,

25%, 30%. We're ranking grace. That's true. That's one of the things you talk about in your book is that we have a hard time with grace, and we just feel this natural instinct to add to it. We resist this free gift. What is it about grace that we just can't accept? Is it our nature that God has made us that when we're given, we give back? What is it about grace that in some ways, even though it's free, makes it hard to receive? Well, I think it's that grace is unfair. So imagine the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. I mean, he did everything right. And here his brother comes along, squanders his share of the inheritance, and he comes back.

He should be punished. The father should turn his back and say, I don't want to have anything to do with you. If we're going to have a banquet, we're going to have a banquet for your brother here that actually followed the rules. But no, the prodigal son was the one who was celebrated, and the father was running to meet him and welcome him back and a very economical story or economic story jesus told about an employer who hired some people at eight o'clock in the morning nine o'clock in the morning they worked all day and then he hired some people at five o'clock in the afternoon and at the end of the day they only worked one hour and they got the same pay as everybody else that's not fair

i mean imagine if you were one of those people who worked all day in the sun the middle eastern sun and and jesus gives the moral of the story he says the the landowner the employer or god as it would be said can't i be generous to whoever i want to be generous to? I'm not ripping anybody off. I'm paying everybody exactly what they deserve. But these people, actually, none of you deserve it. And grace is like that. And I am so thankful when someone turns to me and just holds out their hands that I will fill that hand with God's love, with God's forgiveness and grace. You really explain this in the chapter in the book called The New Math of Grace. And by the way, my wife is a math teacher in high school. So I'm always looking for these examples to help her

tie something from scripture and philosophy to teach your students just how to think about math. And I was like, I was reading it to her going, hey, this is good stuff you could bring in. But what do you mean by the new math of grace? I was with the rock star Bono one time, and I had just read a book that he wrote in typical Bono fashion. He didn't go to his Sunday school teacher to write a biography. He went to a French atheist. This journalist knew him well and followed him around. And in that book, which is several hundred pages long, you can see, I don't remember the author's name, but you can see him trying to figure out, you know, Bono's cool and Bono's global and people like Bono, and he's this old-fashioned Christian stuff. He really takes it seriously, and he's trying to understand grace.

And he says, you know, explain to me how this works, that, okay, we owe God something. We've done something terrible that we deserve punishment for, and then God sends his son, and his son dies, and all is forgiven. You know, this just doesn't make sense to me. And Bono says, well, you're right. It doesn't make a lot of sense. That is what grace is. But the alternative is karma. The alternative is for everything to be fair.

The old math, the old math of religion to be judged exactly for what you did. And if you, you know, you go into Hinduism and they've been working on that for what you did. And if you go into Hinduism, and they've been working on that for several thousand years, and they say, you could have several million incarnations before you pay off punishment for the sins that you committed in the previous ones. And Mano at the end says, well, that's the choice, karma and grace. And I'm going to put my lot with grace. I feel much more comfortable there. And that is unnatural. I call it an unnatural act to forgive or to even be forgiven.

We want to punish people. We want there to be justice and fairness. And grace is not fair, but it's not fair in ways that we should be thankful for, grateful for. There's that word again. Because we can't make it any other way. The only way to make it is to hold out our hands and say, they're empty, God. Can you fill them? That's what Henry Nouwen used to say. He said, you can't do anything to earn grace by definition. You can't deserve it. It's just a matter of having your hands open to receive a gift. But if your hands aren't open, the gift will just fall to the ground and be unreceived.

And that was what the Pharisees did in Jesus' day. They're into that ranking thing. I'm better than you are. I follow more of the 613 laws than you do. And then that sinner over there, God will never listen to that sinner. And Jesus turns that on its head every time and says, which of those prayers is God going to listen to? The sinner who says, I have empty hands. I just need help, God. Can you help me? Rather than the Pharisee whoe who says oh i'm doing pretty well better than 99 of people around me right now i love that idea of the new math because

we're talking about the parable of the 99 sheep jesus leaves 99 for the one that makes no sense unless you're the one unless you're the one that's very're the one. That's very true. But kind of this capitalist mindset, we value numbers rather than individuals and this idea of grace. Then we start to see that metric differently. Now, part of my story, I love that you quote Nowen so much because I grew up in a Christian home. You know, my father, for a long time, apologist. But some people might not know as an apologist, just incredibly grace filled and yet still found myself trying to earn my way to God. I remember being in college and I was an RA and I thought, you know what? I'm going to create

a board on the wall for people really committed to Jesus. The movies we watch, the music we listen to, because I have this personality that's like, I'm all in. And then it just hit me. I'm like, what am I doing? I'm like burning myself out. This is not the road of Jesus. So there's something inside that for all of us. In many ways, I'm actually looking at the painting,

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, which is a book that now one has, related more to the older son than the younger son in my journey. And it was grace that really brought that faith home. You had a very different background. Now, we've done an interview and covered in depth this before, but you described kind of more of a fundamentalist Christian background.

You rejected faith for a while because of a lack of grace, you said, but you also said that grace pulled you along the way and you returned to the faith because you found grace nowhere else. Tell us about that. Yes. In my day, as I mentioned, legalism, that was the standard we used. And everybody, every denomination tried to be more strict than the other denominations. So the really loose ones would be like the Episcopalians. They drink wine. There were Southern Baptists who actually grew tobacco. And so you could see them smoking on the steps outside. And in New York, and we were down to kind of a fundamentalist Baptist church.

And we studied things like bowling. Is that wrong? Because they serve alcohol in bowling alleys, you know, and roller skating. Well, it looks a lot like dancing, you know. And that's how we were more spiritual. And I would go to camps, Christian camps, and they'd have the camper of the week. And I knew how to do that stuff. You know, you just sit out on the porch real early in the morning with your Bible open and your eyes closed. Maybe you're sleeping, maybe you're praying, but they don't know the difference, you know.

And you do that in front of people and, oh, he's very spiritual. So they vote for you and then you're camped for the week. And I learned that that can be kind of a game. And I think that was Jesus' complaint against the Pharisees. Pharisees weren't bad people. They were very good people. They were very moral, virtuous people. But I mean they went so far as to tithe their kitchen spices, you know, 10% of my salt, my pepper, my oregano, whatever. That all goes to God. And yet, as Jesus said, you've missed the whole point. You know,

you don't do it. You don't get God's love by impressing God. You don't have to do that. Grace is free. But you've got to hold your hands out. You've got to want it. You've got to be willing to receive it. And I think that's really a temptation that Christians fall for and have fallen for all through history.

You can go back and read Christian history, and there are all these little groups that split off of each other over some way in which they're more spiritual or have more doctrine, more correct doctrine than the other group. And the world looks at that and says, man, I don't want anything to do with that. Jesus said, I want you to be one. I want you to be unified, known for unity. And the church is not known for unity. It's known for disunity. Last I heard, there were 45,000 denominations. And that's what people see.

They say, where do you start? These people can't even agree among themselves. Why should I believe what they believe? And we just miss it. As Jesus says, we look at everybody else with critical eyes when actually we've got this big log in our own eyes keeping our vision from seeing

what God has offered freely to us. I love it. Now, you had a line in your book that jumped out to me, and I thought, I wish you would explain this more. Maybe you just dropped it so we would think about it it's idea that you're at bible college things were very

legalistic wrestling with your faith and you describe first experiencing grace through music what do you mean by grace through music? When I emerged from that fundamentalist type church, the image of God I had was of this cosmic super cop just looking for somebody who might be enjoying themselves so he could squash them. And I really believed the heart of the universe was a frown, not a smile. And I wrote this book we talked about last time I was on the program called Where the Light Fell. And that came from a quote by St. Augustine, who said, I couldn't look at the sun directly because it would scorch me, but I could look at where the light fell. And gradually over time, I followed those beams of light, those rays back to the source, to God himself.

And that was my experience. I had lived through a pretty tough childhood. I had my guard up, trying to keep from being hurt, I suppose, keep the world from hurting me. And then I had this image of God dangling us over hellfire. And, you know, if we do one thing wrong, he's going to let go. And there we go, working forever. We would hear these sermons over and over again. And I identified three things in that book that really changed my perception of God.

One was the beauties of nature. Nature was my perception of God. One was the beauties of nature. Nature was my place of refuge. I would go out into the woods and collect insects and butterflies and birds and, you know, that kind of stuff. And it was just a peaceful place that spoke to me. One was romantic love. And I've mentioned that. And one was music.

So those three things, nature, music, romantic love. What they did, Sean, is they convinced me, my idea, my image of God is completely off base. Wow. A God who could create the monarch butterfly, a God who could create these birds, a God who claims to love us. And this romantic love that I feel is something new, and I have just a glimmer of what a God could provide. I've misjudged God. I've got the wrong idea.

And there was a line G.K. Chesterton uses, and I don't think he actually invented, but he said this. He said, the worst moment for an atheist is when he has a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank. And that's the condition I found myself in. I was deeply grateful for these good things, the good things of earth, the father of all good gifts, the Bible calls God. I was grateful for them, but I wanted to get to know the artist, you see a great work

of art, you want to know something about where they came from, what that artist is like, what his hobbies are, what he reads, what he likes himself. And, and that's, that was a turning point for me. Because I realized I had just grown up with the wrong image of God. You know, it's amazing. These are what some theologians would call common grace. Correct.

So obviously not a sermon or a passage in Scripture or a vision of God coming down and a supernatural intervention, but a flower, a sunset, music, something beautiful that tells us there's something more transcendent than the world in which we see. And it's just incredible to me in a fundamentals background, God used something outside of the church, ironically, to get your attention to what his true character was really like. That's just, that's a powerful thing. Now, when I first read your book, was it 1998 that it first came out? Is that right? It was late 90s, right?

Yes, that's correct. Okay. So I was a senior in college. Two big things stood out to me. First off was the story about the girl who runs away and goes to Traverse City. Yeah. I read that last year at my son's high school graduation after teaching on the product of the sun. And Philip, I just fell into tears.

I just cried through it. I love that story. And second, how you would go ask people, when I say the words evangelical Christian, what comes to mind? And that was one of the first time for me, I thought, this is interesting. People are going to judge God through us. How do outsiders view us? So has that changed in the 25 years? And how do you think we got the rap that we got? So in other words, maybe also include that when you ask people the question, what words come to mind when you think of evangelical Christian? What do they say?

And what do you think they continue to say today? Yes. There's a statement by, I think it was Dorothy Sayers, who said that God has undergone three great humiliations. The first one was the incarnation, choosing to become a person, you know, a God of a trillion galaxies, shrinking down to become a tiny little fetus, you know, who was born on earth and lives here. Second great humiliation was the cross, subjecting God's own self to that brutal and humiliating way of killing

another person. And then the third one, she said, is the church. And she said, maybe that is the hardest of all, to trust God's reputation, entrust that in the likes of us and we don't do a very good job but that was God's plan all along you know God had a body the body of Jesus here on earth and you could shake hands with him you could ask him questions you could argue with him you could crucify him but then Jesus left and he said I've done my work now it's up to you and turned over the mission to his disciples.

And he said, go into all the world. And we're all part of that fulfillment. And Paul calls that that's the body of Christ. That is God's presence in the world. If people are going to know what God is like, the primary way now is through you by looking at you and studying your lives. Boy, that's a scary thought, isn't it? And when I would start asking people, say, in an airport lounge or something, I would say, I'm doing a survey. I'm a writer. I'm writing a book. And you probably heard of evangelical Christians. Oh,

yeah. So when I said that word, what was the first thing that came to your mind? Praise. And they would say, well, let's see, holier than thou. Wow, okay. Hypocrite. Or they might mention some prominent evangelicals who had fallen from grace in the news lately. And I started thinking, holier than thou. What a damning indictment. Because as Jesus said, the only measure that counts is God's holiness.

He said, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Well, nobody can do that. That's Jesus' point. Yeah, that's why you need grace. But instead, we're climbing this little ladder here, and it's easy for us because we don't do some of those things that are self-destructive. We aren't prostitutes. We don't do drugs, whatever. So it's easy to say, well, at least we're not that bad. And we're holier than thou, but that's not the standard. We're less holy than thou. And that's what we ought to just

keep in mind all the time. It's not a competition on who is good. If you probe those people I'm talking to in the airport lounge, if you say, well, how do you get God to love you? Well, you'd be good. They would say that. Don't break the Ten Commandments, do stuff like that. Well, I'm in favor of the Ten Commandments, and they're given for a good reason. We work best that way. We live best that way. That's not how you get God to love you. The way to get God to love you, God already loves you. The way to receive it is just to hold out your hands and realize that that's the source. God is the source, not me. And there's none of this little climbing up that ladder I can do to get somewhere. It's not going to get me anywhere because I'm not as holy as thou. The only way I could do that is through

Jesus, God's son, and who wants to include us in the body of Christ, his body, his presence in the whole world right now. So I played basketball at Biola University in 94 to 98. And my coach, phenomenal coach, one of the winningest coaches in the history of college basketball, just incredible. And he also has a doctorate and four masters and a personal library at home. He's literally brilliant. And he would quote people to us. I remember he gave us a quote one time after practice. He said something like, the greatest theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, was asked, you know, something to the effect of what's the greatest thing or most important message about Christianity? And he says, Jesus loves me.

This I know. And that really stuck with me, stood with me going back 20 some years. Will you also cite Karl Barth on many occasions, but also that specific quote? his life, including an ongoing adulterous affair with his assistant, Charlotte, which put incredible strain on, on Bart's wife. In fact, as far as I understand, he even had Charlotte come live in their home despite his wife's threats. So we look at someone like Karl Barth, brilliant theologian. How do we balance this contribution with the immorality that he clearly lived, especially the scriptural standard that woe to those who teach? Do we just give them grace? Like, how do we balance that in your mind?

Well, let me peel that apart a little bit. I would separate the man and his behavior from the truth or value in what he said and wrote. I think those are separate issues. I mean, Karl Barth can only be judged by one person in his behavior, and that's God. And, you know, God promises to do that. And I only trust God with that. I don't trust anybody else. I wouldn't trust anybody else judging me on that. So I'm sure, well, I don't know this for sure. Maybe you know more.

I don't know if people around him knew about it at the time and tried to confront him about it in a biblical way. You know, Jesus and Paul both set out ways to do that. And I don't know if anybody tried that or if it's some secret that came out later after his death. But I do think it's important that his behavior doesn't make untrue the good things that he said. An example of that, and this is not quite the same because I'm talking about a person in the Bible, but think of Solomon. I mean, we read the book of Proverbs and there's great truth in there,

and Solomon is credited with a lot of those Proverbs. And yet he spent his life breaking those Proverbs. And he had what, 800 concubines or something like that? And yeah. And yet it doesn't invalidate the wisdom in those proverbs. And Barth's behavior by our standard should have disqualified him from positions of spiritual responsibility if people knew about it and it was investigated and all. Evidently, that did not happen. It's a shame. Karl Barth is in the arms of God, and I trust that. It's not my job to judge him, but I wouldn't let that, even if it were completely true, the rumors we've heard, I wouldn't let that even if it were completely true the rumors we've heard I wouldn't let that invalidate much of the truth of what he said in fact you know I I've known people like

I'll use a contemporary example Brennan Manning is a person who has affected a lot of people he wrote a book called all this grace and in, he confessed that he had done some terrible things. He had made up some stuff and was telling it as if it were true. And then he had a constant drinking problem. And he just kind of threw himself in the arms of grace. And you look at it, and it's sad. You wonder what could have been if he was able to really deal with these issues. He wasn't. But he's had a powerful impact on a lot of people, especially people who are addicts and just keep falling and falling and falling because Brennan never let go. He kept holding onto that rope even as he was falling. And so God can use all kinds of people. I often think, who are the greatest people in the Bible? The real heroes. And Moses, who had an anger problem and committed murder.

And David, who had murder and adultery. And Peter, who denied Jesus three times, much like Judas. And the Apostle Paul, who started out by torturing Christians. And this is the best of the crop. These are the giants of faith. And I think God deliberately orchestrated that so that nobody could say, well, God could never use me after what I've done. And look at these guys.

These are the giants. And God can redeem those things. And I would imagine that Karl Barth had many kind of wrestling prayers with God over his flight. And as Brennan said, every time I fell, that drove me back to God's grace. Not everybody goes that direction. Often people go the other direction. I don't know if it's through guilt or shame or whatever. I don't want to have anything to do with God.

But Brennan at least let it push him back toward grace. And I hope that Karl Barth did the same thing. There's a story in, there's a lot of stories in your book, they're going to ruffle some feathers on all sides of this debate. And I can't imagine the letters you've received from folks who even talk about some of them. But one of the stories that you share, I had heard this before, was about Jeffrey Dahmer, the late serial killer. Now, if you were to ask people who are some of the most evil people you can think of, probably you'd have Hitler. And Jeffrey Dahmer, because of a serial killer doing certain things I'm not even going to describe here, would probably be towards the top of the list. Tell us a little bit of the story that you include and why you include it and what you just wanted readers to take away or at least wrestle with in light of his story.

Yes, that came out of a small group I was involved in, and the news was just happening live as we were meeting, Jeffrey Dahmer had been brutally murdered by other cellmates in prison. There are different accounts of how he was murdered, but they interviewed his chaplain, and he said, Jeffrey became a Christian. He was my most loyal and diligent student, and for many months, he would just pour over the Bible. And I would have to say it was real. It was legitimate. And after that, I actually heard from, see if you know this name, Sean, Mark Chapman. Does that ring any bells?

It doesn't. He's the person who shot John Lennon. Oh, okay. So you're dating me a little bit. Yeah, okay. Well, you've heard of John Lennon, I presume. Yes, of course. And he still is in prison in New York. His wife has stayed with him all this time, and he uses his time to spread the gospel. He was mentally ill and was very remorseful and has really turned his life around and publishes his story and gives it out. His wife stayed with him. She lives in Hawaii, but sees him regularly and became kind of pen pals. And that happens with prisoners. And I, what can you say?

I mean, we could say God has some strange taste. God likes, one time I put it this way, that redeemed pain impresses me more than pain removed. And I would say, redeemed sin impresses me more than sin removed. You know, when you get to know somebody like that, like a Jeffrey Dahmer, or, well, there's a scene in The Hiding Place of this Nazi guard who asked forgiveness from Corrie Ten Boom and how hard that was for her to grant it. But he had received forgiveness from God. And we think, well, that's not fair. They don't deserve it. Well, you're right. It's not fair. Grace is not fair. That's

what's so hard about it. But it's a powerful thing. And if you are one of those evil people, it's really your only way out. It's your only chance to have a higher power than you can imagine. Turn your life around and turn you into the kind of person that God had in mind in the first place. It just raises so many questions in the sense of like, I was watching a show on Ted Bundy recently, and one of the detectives or no, journalists who interviewed him said he just struck me as so normal. And this was on Amazon Prime. And he said it started to hit me that Bundy's human and I'm human. What's in his heart is in my heart. Am I capable of that?

And then the show cut that off. I thought, holy cow. Well, from a Christian perspective, that's true for Dahmer. And so the scandal of grace is if you're a Christian and you resist and think he's gone too far, he cannot be forgiven. Maybe we don't understand the beauty of God's grace and the power of God's transformation. On a flip side, if you're not a Christian and you think this makes no sense, he's gone too far, he can't be forgiven. Well, maybe you also don't understand the character of God and the price that Jesus paid. Either way, that story shakes all of us up and makes us ask deep questions about grace.

So I love that you include it in there. Now, another thing you say that I think is going to stir up some folks is you say, I think it's a direct quote. You said, I grew up as a racist and you just own it. And I really appreciate your honesty here, because today sometimes people say if you're a sexual pedophile or racist, those are like the two unforgivable sins. And in a book on grace, you just own your heritage and give some examples of things that I know you look back on are like, man, I wish I could shake my younger self. But what led to your transformation where you look back on that now and see it completely differently? And what role do you think race can play in race relations today? Yeah. You know, while you were talking about Jeffrey Dahmer and some of the

others, I was thinking back to, I spent time reading some of the pages of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that Archbishop Desmond Tutu kind of convened. And the rules there were you had to be brutally honest about what you had done. And the apartheid policy, as bad as it was, was actually invented by the church, the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. And so one by one, these nice white, outstanding citizen, church

every Sunday soldiers would come in to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and confess these terrible things they had done, killing people, putting tires around their neck and lighting them, you know, and just terrible things. And there were some black South Africans who also appeared being accused of great crimes like that. And Tutu would conduct these hearings and sometimes just have to call a break because he couldn't tolerate the horror of what he was hearing. And when I was growing up, South Africa was, they were the good guys and it was the black Africans who were the bad guys. In my church, I lived in Atlanta. Martin Luther King was an imposter. He was a troublemaker. Even though he grew up in Atlanta, he was considered a carpetbagger. He just came down here to make trouble for us. And my pastor would actually call him the name Martin Lucifer Kuhn.

And it was that bad. And, you know, your kid, you kind of absorb the prejudice as well of people around you. The turning point for me, frankly, was just a realization that the church had lied to me. Because we were taught the curse of Ham theory theory that people of color were meant to be a servant race and they could never rise above a certain level it's you can hardly believe that but this is in my lifetime 50 years ago they were still teaching it and i got a fellowship at the center for disease control which was called Communicable Disease Center back then. And I knew that my supervisor was a PhD in biochemistry, renowned, had a lot of papers published,

had patents. And he went to Yale. And I went in, and he's a black man, and I almost dropped my books, my papers, because I was taught you could never reach that kind of level of expertise as a person of color. And then I realized the church lied to me. They betrayed me. So if they lied about that, maybe they lied about Jesus, about the Bible. And that began the period of kind of questioning that I had to go through and didn't know the word back at the time, but deconstructing and reconstructing faith. I went through that period without knowing what it was. And how do you overcome it? Well, repentance is a huge factor. You know, we're not, you use that word unforgivable. We're living in more and more of a canceled culture where if you, if somebody listened to me saying telling that

story to you they could say well we could never have him speaking at our school because look at it he was a sinner well you're right it was the center i was the center but unless you believe in forgiveness unless you believe in in a god how do you get rid of that how do you get forgiveness and our culture is struggling with that mightily. So there's this whole cancel line where you can't appear on campus if you represent this point of view, because that's not, in some cases, politically correct, in some cases, morally correct. But there's just no way to climb back if you have done something wrong on either side, either the conservative side or the liberal side. And grace is really the only hope for bringing those two sides together.

We've got a lot of work to do, and I would hope that the Christian church would be that place, that third place that shows, well, as Paul said, I mean, Paul was a Pharisee, and every day he would pray this prayer. He would pray, thank you, Lord, that I wasn't born a woman and that I wasn't born a slave and that I wasn't born a Gentile. And then later, after he's been converted, he says, in Christ there is no male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile. What a dramatic change.

And in the early church, that's how it stood out, because you've got slaves, former slaves, current slaves, and then you've got rich people over here. You've got women and men all together, which was unusual back then. And you've got Jews and Gentiles. So they're all worshiping together. And the church showed society a whole different way to be. Instead, now we tend to be kind of more tribal.

You know, we hang around our own kind on all sides. And we don't really mix. We don't really get to know the other people in a way where we could have an impact on them and they on us. Philip, I'm curious how grace has changed you since you first wrote this book. Now, let me set it up this way. When I read it in 1998, I was, how old was I? I don't know, 23 years old, 22 maybe, probably a senior in college, maybe right out of college. And it made a lot of sense to me.

It was influential to me. But you're pretty optimistic at 22 years old. Now that I'm 47, 25 years later, I've experienced different kinds of physical pain, relational pain, emotional pain, loss. And so I find myself sometimes literally just hearing a song on grace and I'll just get a tear in my eye and I'll just think about God's grace in a way I didn't. Now, I'm 47, so I anticipate going forward, I'm thinking, wow, there's going to be more physical pain. There's probably going to be more tragedy. Probably, and I hope God's grace will become richer and richer and deeper for me over those next few years. That's my guess and that's my hope. How has your journey shifted from when you wrote this 25 years ago about grace to now? How has it become more real and deep and changed in your own

personal life? I tell a lot of that story in the memoir that I mentioned, Where the Life Fell, because I lived in a small family, just three of us. My father died when I was a year old, so I never knew him. So my mother was a widow, and then two sons, an older brother and me. And okay, small family, three people. Two of those people, my mother and brother had not spoken for more than 50 years. They had not seen each other. He moved to California, no communication for 50 years. And then as I was working on the memoir, when I turned it in, after I turned it in, I actually got them on the telephone together four different times.

And they were real pleasant conversations. There was no happy reconciliation, but I got them talking at least. And shortly before my mother died, she was 99. I turned 99 just a week before she died. My brother sent her a card that had just three words. I forgive you. Wow. And it took me a lot of energy, just emotional energy.

My brother was very wounded. He was easily scared away. He had a hard time with relationships. And I've learned grace in just being aware of what a damaged person he was. And I think I use this phrase in the book called grace healed eyes because Jesus, I mean, Jesus wasn't encouraging immoral behavior when he hung around prostitutes. They were attracted to him. And that's what puzzles me. How did Jesus, being a perfect person, why wasn't he a threat to them?

Why wasn't he the kind of person they would just feel, I want to get away from him, it just makes me uncomfortable. No, they flocked to Jesus. And it was the church people who made them feel uncomfortable. And I keep thinking, why did I write that book? Well, because in church, that's not the first place people think of going when they're deeply hurting. They don't think, oh, I'll go to church. It'll make me feel better. Usually they say to me, I'd never go to church. It'll make me feel better. Usually they say to me, I never go to church. It'll make me feel worse. I'm already feeling bad. You know, my life is a mess.

And churches are people who have it together. No. Churches are people who know they don't have it together. There are a lot of more interesting ways to spend Sunday morning if you have it together. But church is for people who say, I need this. I need the Eucharist. I need the community. I need the prayer. I need the worship. I need God. And church is the place where we keep that flame alive. We keep that message alive that Jesus gave to us. And that's why I keep harping that tune of grace because

John described Jesus as coming full of grace and truth. What a great praise, full of grace, full of truth. And the church has really worked hard on that truth angle. There have been councils and creeds and denominations and all this stuff. I want some churches to compete on the grace deal. We are the most gracious church, grace-filled church. And we're going to risk our reputations by reaching out to people who other churches don't want in their congregation. We want them. There was a church here in Denver, near where I live, with the title, this is the name of the church, Scum of the Earth. Scum of the Earth Church. I like that title. I went there a couple times. You know, that's who we are. It's on common ground before the cross. That is an interesting marketing strategy.

Right, yes. marketing strategy right yes but that's that's fascinating so there's there's kind of two flip sides to grace one is the opposite legalism which you've talked about which is essentially when we take something secondary make it primary and we just die on the wrong hill and i do love that you have a section in your book that says legalism just leads to apostasy. And I see this all the time, Philip. On my channel, I have a lot of ex-Christians on and atheists and agnostics. Just had a buddy on a few weeks ago. And one thing that consistently pops up is just either people saying to know God, you have to have certainty or just legalism and a lack of grace and relationships. The flip side to that is what we might call

libertinism that says all right we're saved by god's grace so why follow the law and of course paul deals with this in romans chapter six but you kind of asked the question in the book i'd love you to flesh this out if people know god will have grace for them. Why not sin and ask for forgiveness later? Right. Well, when somebody asks me that question, I'll say, why don't you go home and read Galatians and 1 Corinthians back to back? Because Galatians was written for the legalists. And Paul, you'll never find Paul more angry, just furious, actually using bad language in there.

I can't believe you foolish Galatians. Go back, go back, don't do this. And then 1 Corinthians, he's not quite as angry, but pretty angry because they're spoiling the communion service. And there's a rumor of some sort of family incest going on. And, you know, they're drinking too much and eating too much instead of worshiping God. It's just one thing after another. So you got these two things where these people,

they're very Judea. So they want you to follow all the laws of the Old Testament. And these people, they don't want to follow any laws. They just want to have a good time. And Paul has a word for both, a strong word for both. But the passage in Romans that you mentioned, as I recall, three different times in those chapters when Paul kind of feels caught in a corner. Well, if grace is that great, why can't we just take advantage of it, exploit it,

and get forgiven later? And you know what he says, the only thing he could come up with was, God forbid. And he says that three different times, God forbid. He doesn't really say, well, the reason that doesn't work is because no, I mean, he's kind of he has painted himself into a corner. And that's that unfairness of grace. Now we're not God, we're not making those judgments. But Paul looks at what God has offered and said, only God can figure this out. I really think Paul doesn't have an argument that solves that dilemma.

It's a true dilemma that you bring up. And he just says, God forbid. If that's what you're after, you just don't even, you don't even want grace. You don't even understand what it's all about. And I use the illustration in my book of a person who's about to get married. And he says, honey, I love you, but you know, I do have this problem. I like other women too. So let's get this straight. Exactly what can I get away with? Is kissing okay? Hugging?

Do we have to have our clothes on? You think, why is this guy getting married? Who would marry this guy? He doesn't understand what love is. He doesn't understand what marriage is. And if somebody has that approach to, what can I get away with with God? Then they don't understand what God wants from us.

They don't understand what loving God, serving God is all about. God forbid. Two last questions for you. Some of the hardest questions I get today, emailed and in person, are how to balance grace and truth. A lot of these are around issues of sexuality and what that looks like to be loving towards somebody, but maybe not embrace or endorse certain beliefs or certain behavior. One of the things I came up with is I wrote a blog and I just said the tension of grace and truth. If you're not living in the tension of this, then you're probably erring on one side or the other.

So if you don't feel attention for truth, you might be giving too much grace. If you don't feel attention to grace, you might be preaching like a prophet, you know, and not given enough grace. You understand the balance if you're preaching too much truth. So I'm curious, how would you say that Christians can uphold good moral values in our secular society? And especially because earlier in the discussion, you said something like, I like the Ten Commandments. They help us flourish. So I'm not talking about arguing for a theocratic state, but certain good moral values in society help us better flourish. So how can Christians uphold good moral values in a secular society while balancing grace and truth?

Yeah. Yeah, that's a very good question. A couple things. I would say, first, be careful when you apply your values to people who don't start where you start. Because we start with the foundation that God has truth, that God has that foundation of moral value. So we believe these things are important because God told us they are important. Other cultures don't necessarily do that. And we have the advantage of living in a culture that has a historic Christian foundation. So, you know, it kind of permeates our society in ways that aren't true in other parts of the world. But as soon as you start kind of taking your values and constructing your legal system based on something from your religion, it gets a little tricky because we live in a pluralistic society.

There are Hindus here. There are Buddhists here. And there are atheists here and there are atheists here. And to, you know, like in Calvin, John Calvin's Geneva, it was against the law not to go to church. Well, you know, no, that's not America. We separate a church and state and the church has flourished in that separation. And what we're called to do is be countercultural.

We're called to be different in our society. And just kind of an easy way to distinguish those, Sean, if you look at the Ten Commandments, I remember there was this judge in Alabama who had a statue of the Ten Commandments and he was getting in problems because you're not supposed to have something like that on government property. I think they made him remove it. I thought, now that's really interesting because best I can figure,

only two of the Ten Commandments involve illegality in the United States. Thou shalt not covet. It's not against the law to covet. Thou shalt not commit adultery. It's not against the law to commit adultery. Thou shalt not, you know, have greed and just go down the list. Murder and theft are the only two that I know are illegal. The other ones are, you know, honoring God, honoring your parents. There's no law against that. So it's kind of funny when we think, well, yeah, every society would work better if they all followed the Ten Commandments. But as soon as you write them into the legal code, it gets a little

tricky here. And so separating out what should be immoral compared to illegal, that's an important thing. And then to realize the world is going to do some things that we strongly disapprove of. In fact, Paul is very clear about that. I think it was another case of incest in 1 Corinthians that he had heard about. And then he said, but what does that have to do with us? You know, he's not part of the church. So we're not responsible for judging people's behavior outside of the church. If that were happening in the church, we would be. But Christians get the reputation of kind of meddling.

And a lot of people think Christians are trying to keep them from doing things they want to do. And in some cases, yes, but not necessarily because of the Ten Commandments, but because we really believe they're destructive to the person and to society. So those are tricky issues, but we need to remember in the United States, we've got this great tradition of the people who truly believe something is important to their faith, they can go all the way to the Supreme Court and they usually win. The Supreme Court acknowledges people of faith traditions have different rules that apply to them compared to the rest of society. So last question. Earlier you mentioned that when you ask people what they think of evangelical Christians,

more often than not, it's intolerant to political, not words like gracious, kind, and loving. About 10 years ago, I was at the Evangelical Theological Society, and Daryl Bach, a New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, said, when people hear that narrative, what will best change their minds is when their next thought is, but I know an evangelical Christian and they're not that way. Relationship. And I've always remembered that and asked myself, who am I in relationship with that sees the world differently? My last question is, what are some practical things we as Christians can do to be agents of grace today? I would say two things come to mind. One is just what you

mentioned, hang around people who are different than you. You don't learn how to, you don't learn how to be a grace person by hanging around people who are just like you. That doesn't take any grace. What takes grace is when you're around somebody who challenges you intellectually, maybe, or is morally offensive to you. There was a great statement by Lee Beach, who wrote a book called Church in Exile. And he said, to really grow in grace, you need to be maybe go to a few less Bible studies and go to a few more places where you're around people who have no idea what grace is. And you can learn just by that diversity. So seek

out that kind of diversity, whether it's racial, or religious, or I'm in a book group, for example, and the only thing we have in common is that we all have a degree from the University of Chicago. I'm the only one who's involved in any kind of church situation. And it's great to be with these people. They're fine, good citizens, family people. But they we read the same books and they see it so differently than I do. And it's important for me to know how they are reading those very books that I'm reading. And I learn how they think and how I can write to them in a way that would make sense. So that's one thing, just hang around people who are not like you politically and every other way. And then the second thing is just that act of service.

The the way to grace is is always bending down. When Jesus spent his last night with his disciples, he gave them that image of foot washing. You're the you're the top guy. What are you doing washing your feet? Well, that that's the motion of grace. It's always one that's bending down. And it may be being a foster parent, it may be being visiting prisoners, you know, people

may be taking a mission trip, but service is how you learn to be like Jesus. I've got a ton more questions for you. And I know you'd have grace for me, but at some point, I would wear out my welcome. So we got to wrap this up, but I do want to encourage you to let you know a significant chunk of what I do in this channel, it's shaped by apologetics, is I really want to treat people with charity and with kindness who see the world differently and be an agent of grace. I know I fall short, but a lot of your writings, including your book that I love as well, Vanishing Grace, has left a significant imprint on me. So I know you get a lot of hate mail. In fact, there's some stories in this book. They're going to stir some folks up. There's a few points I read. I'm like, I don't know if I'm with Philip on this one. We could have that

debate. That's for another time. But love your book. I want to encourage all my viewers to pick up. Even the old one is great, but pick up the new one, What's So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey. Read it, talk about it, study it, work it into your life. It's just, it's so well done. And before you go away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got a lot of other conversations coming up on some really interesting topics of archaeology. We're going to do near-death experiences again. We've got a story of somebody who left Buddhism who came to Christ.

You're not going to want to miss it. Make sure you hit subscribe. If you've ever thought about studying apologetics, we would love to have you in our Biola program. And it is important to us in our program to speak truth, but do it graciously. There's information below. It's all a distance program. If you thought, I know I'm ready for a master's, we have a certificate program. We love to walk through with you how to defend your faith. And there is a very significant

discount below. Get started today. Phil, thanks again for your time. Thanks for writing a great book. And we'll do it again. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Sean.