6 minute read
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.
Philip Yancey
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 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.
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.
What can we do about those we find morally offensive?
Speaking in my home church, I said that, to me, one of the hardest things about prayer is the command to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. I realised I’d never done that. I showed a picture of Al Qaeda and Isis terrorists, and I asked what would happen if every church in north America chose one of these people, learned to pronounce their name, and started praying for them. Didn’t Jesus tell us to do this?
A colonel from the US army [attending the service] got quite convicted. He had served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d tried to kill people before, but never thought about praying for them. He started the ‘Adopt a Terrorist for Prayer’ website (atfp.org) where you can sign up, choose a terrorist, read a biography and agree to pray for them.
We can know what God is like because God treats us, his enemies, with love, grace and forgiveness. That’s counterintuitive. It’s not human. It’s not the way the world works. The mission of the church is to show what God is like and if it doesn’t differ from the world around us, we’re probably doing something wrong.
One section in the book powerfully deals with chronic pain. Have we immunised ourselves from hearing and responding to cries for help from a society in pain?
With modern media, we’re aware of every cry for pain around the world. It becomes almost numbing and you just can’t take it anymore.
Dr Brand talks in the book about his leprosy patients. A healthy body is a body that hears the pain and pays attention to the weakest part. I see that in response to the persecuted church, and disasters around the world. The church does respond, but the individual person in the church needs some help in prioritising and making choices. We can’t each bear all the world’s suffering at once.
When a baby has some sort of abnormality or is born out of wedlock in South Korea, there is a shame culture and parents will abandon the baby. Every day in Seoul, babies are discarded in garbage bins. One pastor was appalled and installed a box in the side wall of his church. When a baby is deposited on the soft blanket and the door closed, a warning light goes on, an alarm sounds and the pastor comes down and collects the baby.
I visited that place. He has saved over 1,000 babies that would have been thrown away. And he finds new homes for them, not just in his church, but other churches across South Korea. Some have such difficult health problems that no one is willing to adopt them. The pastor has adopted 23 babies himself.
That’s an example of standing out from the surrounding culture. Some people believe their calling is to protest or to legislate, and I understand that. But I use him as an example of what an ordinary person can do, a common pastor of a medium-sized church, dealing with the reality around him. He gets quite a bit of publicity in Seoul and that makes people think before they throw away their baby.
We are to bear God’s likeness so that when people look at us, like when people look at this pastor in South Korea, and see that God cares for all these children, God cares for the weak and for the marginalised. In the same way my military friend said God says love your enemies. We should be doing that. We should be standing out from culture around us in a provocative way that shows people what God is like.
President Carter – who still teaches a weekly Sunday school class in his local church – named you as his favourite modern Christian author.
I didn’t know until somebody sent me a clipping from the New York Times!
So many people either tilt towards practical politics or take a co uple of issues like abortion and homosexuality and only focus on those. President Carter took his faith very seriously and even after his term in office he intentionally looked at human rights, basic human dignity, care for the weak and marginalised, and equality of races through [the lens of] his faith. He tried to combine both what he believed was biblical and right, along with what was possible politically.
In 2016, you expressed your amazement at the evangelical support for the policies of the then Republican candidate Donald Trump. Are you surprised, disappointed, or do you understand why some church leaders and members are so uncritical of President Trump?
It’s a question of style. I know that some of the issues, like abortion, are important to evangelical leaders. And for that reason, they have strong support for the current president compared to Democratic alternatives.
But at the same time what President Trump has done to the office, the profaning of the office, these angry petulant tweets that come out and the way he treats other people, the way he treats women, it’s one thing to support his policies, it’s quite another to say he’s God’s man for our time, because I don’t see qualities described as the fruit of the Spirit in abundance in President Trump’s style. We Christians are called to demonstrate those qualities, the fruit of the Spirit, as well as standing up for principles that we think are important politically.
You’ve more books in the pipeline?
For the last couple of years I’ve been working on a memoir that tells some of my own family background stories that have not been told in print before. Most of my books are a combination of narrative and essay. But this one is not. It’s pure narrative, but explains a lot about why I ended up writing about the things that I did.
