What's So Amazing about Grace? by Phillip Yancey

Go read it.

Yancey's theme is grace. What is unique about Christianity among all religions? Grace. What breaks cycles of violence and bitterness? Grace.

The book is a plea for Christians to remember reaching out with grace and worry less about hedging themselves about with protective rules to keep sinners away. And he brings up example after example of grace in action and what happens when “ungrace” abounds.

He describes his own childhood, growing up racist. We all like to think we're independent, but I sometimes wonder what I would have been like if I'd grown up in an environment like his. And he describes the legalism of his Bible college years (not that the rules were bad but that they were an end in themselves). And he writes of what he sees now. He tells the story of Will Campbell, who became a kind of “missionary to the rednecks” when his friend was murdered by a racist, and of “Big Harold,” a kindly stand-in father when Yancey's own father died—and what became of him as he tried to live out a legalist life.

Grace is not just a response to repentance; it can be a call to repentance. Forgiving the undeserving and unrepentant can be grace. And of course if God can't forgive Stalin, God can't forgive anybody. It doesn't help to think about all the horrors someone has committed. They are not beyond God's grace—if they want it.

Our small group has been studying Romans, so I've been thinking a bit about the law. Paul said, and common sense affirms, that law is prior to grace.

In fact, in the sort of culture I find myself in, the law is good news: the world actually has some meaning and structure to it. Of course the good news is accompanied by the bad news that we've broken the law of God and broken ourselves on that law.

Fortunately it isn't necessary to have received the full clear revelation of the Law of God to experience grace—because as Paul notes, the image of that law, however maimed, is built into us. We already know enough of the law of God to condemn ourselves. And so we can know what grace is when God or man shows it to us.

One minor nitpick: Yancey quotes the results of a study that showed that Christians are just like everybody else in society—maybe even more likely to divorce than average. The book is from 1997, and the study has since been reanalyzed more carefully, adjusting for economic class (divorce rates are higher among the poor and the rich are less likely to be Christian) and using self-reported church attendance rates rather than self-identification as “born-again.” The new analysis reversed the original conclusion: active “Christians” are less likely to get into trouble, divorce, and so on than their peers.