Community, culture, and economic development Book

It has taken me a long time to review this book because I had a hard time stomaching it - I could only read so much before I had to put it down so I could calm down - and because I wanted to let my thoughts and feelings settle a while, reconsider them, and be careful that what I am saying is truthful and not just an emotional reaction.

This review is rather long, but since it's serious and pointed, I thought it appropriate to give facts and not simply level accusations. First I'll give some bullet points that highlight what I saw in the book, and then I'll summarize my thoughts.

Highlights of the book:
• Occasional tidbits of truth - which makes it all the more dangerous and difficult in trying to find the safe places to land while avoiding the hidden mines

• Confusing and discouraging for those seeking to know the real Jesus
– Celebrates doubt and questions as a virtue
– Rarely declares truth clearly
– Doesn't look to scripture for answers

• Degraded view of scripture
– Essentially making the Old Testament and the epistles of lower authority than the gospels
– Reliance on secular, even non-believing sources for interpretation of the Bible rather than the Bible itself
– Significant amount of unsupported speculation, many times contradictory to scripture

• Extremely critical of other Christians

• Essentially a liberal form of legalism - the rules are different, but there are still rules
• Criticizes moral standards of holiness
• Makes social activism and charity the required "must dos" of faith
• While claiming to look at Jesus as if in the first century, actually significantly interprets him by 20th century liberal theology

• Profoundly selfish – even the title is based on how he knows Jesus
– What HE thinks God should be
– What HIS doubts and questions are
– Over emphasis on supposed free will, even higher than God's sovereignty
– Over reaction to his upbringing in a legalistic, fundamentalist background, which he admits

• Sets the groundwork for false belief
– Universalism
– Social gospel
– Equating love solely with charity
– Substandard view of scripture
– Misquoting and misinterpretation of scripture

Summary:
Just to get to the point, I believe Yancey is a prime example of the false teachers that Peter and John warned the church about in their letters, and I would caution against consuming anything he writes. Scripture indicates that false teachers are dangerous because they either ignorantly or knowingly pervert the gospel and grace in the guise of teaching it. I realize that’s direct, but that’s my observation by evaluating his message based on scripture.

Related to this point is the church-bashing that is increasingly popular among him and other "progressive," so-called evangelical authors – the approach is something like, “the way traditional churches have done ‘X’ is all wrong, but now I’ve found the key or the new revelation.” This approach turns the Bible into a Rubik’s Cube to be solved rather than the complete, written, inerrant word of God that is interpreted to all believers through the Holy Spirit. And it obfuscates and discourages us from knowing God better by knowing His word, which is knowable and understandable and truthful.

I've found this method is really just cover to justify rejecting unpopular Biblical truth. Specific to this approach is an agenda against a subset of the church simply because it teaches holy living and is audacious enough to call sin what it is; he expresses this philosophy implicitly and explicitly in his writings. In this regard, his misuse of scripture is egregious - he either selectively quotes out of context or completely ignores scripture that contradicts his points. And using secular films as the basis for teaching the sermon on the mount in a college course?

Based on his popular book about grace, how he handles scripture in this book, and his overall spiritual “philosophy,” I don't believe Yancey has anything biblically sound to communicate. I have read enough of his writing so that it’s pretty clear to me that what he means by grace is not the Bible's definition, but being nice, tolerating anything except intolerance, denying the exclusivity of the gospel of Christ, failing to call people to repent of sin and believers to live holy lives, and bashing the evangelical church that sticks to the Bible. I imagine, by his definition of grace, that I am not being gracious, but I’d rather be true to God’s word than a 20th-21st century reinterpretation of what the Bible says grace really is.

After reading this book, perhaps the title should be "The Jesus I Still Don't Know," because what he presents is not the Son of God revealed in scripture, but rather a 20th century distortion. His apparent God is not the God of the Bible, but a combination of (fallen) human reason, approval of others, intellectual questioning, and license rather than holiness. That’s a false gospel, one that makes people comfortable in their sin, promotes doubt about God’s word, and ultimately leads to destruction. Therefore, he’s off my reading list, and I strongly caution my friends against his writings.