What's So Amazing About Grace? (Paperback)

The strength of the book is clearly Yancey's treatment of both the grace of God and living a grace filled life. Yancey recounts personal experiences that stretch across a wide array of circumstances and episodes to bring home the point that our culture is desperately in a mood to find grace, and that this represents an enormous opportunity for the church. One of the key premises of the book is Yancey's belief that the Christian church is the only entity or system with the ability to offer grace to people, since God's grace, when Biblically practiced, turns many societal norms upside down. Yancey is therefore imploring the church to return to a grace system that no other system outside the church can offer, so that the masses in search of grace will find it in the church, rather than not finding it at all. I found this line of reasoning to be quite persuasive.

I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because I felt that Yancey lost control of his subject matter a bit when discussing the relationship between the church and the state. Yancey feels very strongly that evangelicalism's preoccupation (as he sees it) with political issues like abortion and homosexuality have greatly tarnished the reputation of the church among those looking for forgiveness and grace, but not seeing much of it in evangelical circles due to their political activism in these areas. I felt that Yancey was being both unbalanced and inconsistent in this area. First of all, such an assertion makes the false assumption that everybody who has a problem with Christianity or Christians feels the way they do for legitimate reasons that can be traced back to the behavior of Christians, with no ulterior motives. This is not universally true, and should not be assumed as such. Secondly, there are times in this section when Yancey applauds (properly so, in my view) Christian activism in the areas of abolition, civil rights, medical care, and education. But these affirmations come within a section of the book that is generally hostile to Christian activism in political matters. Further, Yancey believes that evangelicalism seems more concerned with more trivial things than major things, and that this is a problem. Maybe so, but as even he says in this book, no sin is trivial to God. So the question Yancey creates for himself is who exactly is going to decide which things are trivial and which aren't? By making this assertion, Yancey is bending dangerously close to appointing himself as the gatekeeper of the exact kind of rule making legalism he writes in such strong opposition to. The bottom line, which Yancey is less than lucid about here, is that Christians have the right and the duty to take their faith beyond the church walls and allow God to use them to change the culture, which includes the political and social culture. This, however, must be done Biblically, which means as Christians, we must conduct ourselves with dignity and love. Yancey, unfortunately, spends about 5 chapters decrying the methods used by some Christians to impact the culture, without sufficiently making a balanced distinction between the Christian's duty to Biblically live out their faith in all spheres of life, versus the mistake of putting the political cause we champion above the spiritual Cause that motivates us, thus tainting our motives and techniques. In his section on the political arena, Yancey greatly emphasizes the latter, but mostly ignores the former, thus generating a perspective that I found imbalanced.

But overall, I think this is a challenging book that hits on many good points and identifies several areas where the church is in need of improvement. In that light, this book is a valuable resource.