What’s so amazing about the body? Alan Meban caught up with author Philip Yancey at the end of his UK tour promoting his updated book, based on two titles he co-wrote with Dr Paul Brand in the 1980s. The author of classic books like Where is God When it Hurts? and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Yancey is no stranger to these shores having spoken at New Horizon in August 2018 and previously appeared with New Irish Arts in the Belfast Waterfront. At the heart of Fearfully and Wonderfully is a metaphor about diverse but interrelated parts of our body cooperating together to keep us functioning and healthy, and how we should be working together like that as the body of Christ. Is this something you think the church needs to get a firmer grasp of ? Not just the church, but society in general. In the preface I talk about the difference between an organisation and an organism. Organisations, like governments and businesses, are very hierarchical. We pay the top people the most and treat them with special perks. And then we just ignore the people at the bottom. In 1 Corinthians 12, the fullest treatment of the body analogy in the Bible, Paul turns that upside down. He says the body can get along fine without the parts to which we give special attention, such as the eye. But the
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parts we treat with special modesty, the unpresentable parts, are the most valuable of all. The body wouldn’t work without them. And when I ask doctors what Paul is talking about, they say, probably kidneys and colons because if those stop working you will die within just a few days. I think the church loses sight of that because we have become an organisation, like the society around us. Much of church hierarchy is topdown; people at the top exert the power.
…the body can get along fine without the parts to which we give special attention…But the parts we treat with special modesty…are the most valuable of all.
I understand Jesus describing something that grows organically from the bottom up and the body image shows how that can work because cells are very diverse. They’re judged not on where they fit in the hierarchy, but they’re judged by their worth to the rest of the body. Loyal, faithful Christians who stick it out in tough [situations] or are prayer warriors because they’ve had a stroke and can’t get out very often. Those kinds of people may be the most valuable members of the body because our measurement is loyalty to the Head. You’ve written about us needing grace over doctrinal unity. It is not about agreeing on everything, but how do we treat people who strongly disagree or are morally offensive. Even the most holy people like the Pharisees were morally offensive to Jesus because they were missing the whole point of the gospel. Then he got the reputation of hanging out with sinners and prostitutes. In his parables, the hero is usually unexpected, the wrong person, not the holy guy.
