book review by John Rim

Many years ago, several leaders of various Christian denominations gathered together for the sole purpose of answering the question of what separates the Christian faith from the world’s other religions. For hours they debated about the characteristics of Christianity, delving into topics such as incarnation, healing miracles, and the Resurrection, and each time they reached the same conclusion that other religions incorporate all these elements in some form or another. Then, unnoticeably, someone with little or no formal theological training made his way into the room and asked what the discussion was all about. After being apprised of the question at hand, he replied, "Oh that’s easy. It’s grace." That person was none other than C.S. Lewis (p. 45).

It’s been said that genius often lies in simplicity and this is certainly true of grace. For those who have experienced it, the simplicity of grace flies in the face of reason, logic and justice, but it inspires us like no other force imaginable. However, sometimes even the simplest of things can be forgotten or altered by the most intelligent and well-intentioned people. In "What’s So Amazing About Grace?" Philip Yancey sets out to reclaim the true meaning of grace by answering the very important question that forms the title of his book. However, Yancey makes no attempt to define grace, nor does he attempt to dissect it down to its smallest parts in order to explain the theological underpinnings of its existence and its relevance to the Christian faith. To do this Yancey explains, would be to destroy it, akin to explaining why a joke is funny – breaking it down may help to understand on an intellectual level, but ultimately the essence is lost. Instead, Yancey attempts to convey grace rather than explaining it, and to this end he has been, at least to this reader, tremendously successful.

One of the most memorable parts of Yancey’s book is the second chapter in which he recounts the story of Babette’s Feast. As the title suggests, the story is centered around a feast prepared by a woman for her church congregation. This brief description may not appear to be very intriguing at first, but that is intentional. It would be a great injustice to give away too much of a story which no doubt will touch your heart and cause you to gain or regain a perspective that should never be forgotten. However, if I may reveal just one thing, the story of Babette’s Feast portrays grace in its purest form, as something that is lavished on the recipient and something so amazing that the recipient can barely, if at all, comprehend what he has received.

Although Yancey’s main goal is to convey grace in all its splendor, his book is not without a few challenging messages. As he does all throughout his book, Yancey tells a true story of a prostitute who came to his friend for counseling. Through tears, the prostitute explained how she had begun to rent out her two year old daughter for sex to support her own drug habit and had lost all hope. After some counseling Yancey’s friend asked the prostitute if she would turn to the church for help. The prostitute replied that she felt bad enough already and that going to church would only make her feel worse. (p. 11)

As Christians, stories such as this must break our hearts – if they don’t then perhaps we must first be heart-broken by the One who gave everything up for us. However, Yancey’s message in recounting the story of the prostitute is not to condemn the church, it’s to awaken Christians as to the reason why church exists in the first place – to proclaim the gospel of God’s grace by bearing witness of His love for everyone. Yancey challenges us to imagine what the world would be like if Christians spent less time debating and defending their own versions of the truth and spent more time carrying out God’s two greatest commands of loving Him and loving others. Again the idea of genius in simplicity comes to mind. As H. Richard Niebuhr once said: "Great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there." (p. 13-14)

Such is the case with God’s grace. From the beginning, grace has always been a part of our lives, whether we’ve actually realized it and experienced the immeasurable joy of it or whether we’ve closed our hearts to it and let it pass us by. Jesus changed the world forever with one single act of grace and that was His plan all along. That is why, as Yancey puts it, grace "contains the essence of the gospel as a drop of water can contain the image of the sun." Yet like a drop of water in the Sahara, grace seems all too fleeting and there is an unquenchable yearning in people to taste it in a world where grace is scarcely found.

C.S. Lewis was right when he said that grace is the only thing that separates Christianity from the world’s other religions but, ironically, the place where people should go to find it is the very place in which they find the opposite. In Yancey’s own words, "I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I could find grace nowhere else." (p. 16) However, the church need not be this way and Yancey’s final message is that in a world which hungers for grace, Christians who dispense it will experience it all the more in their own lives.

I am grateful to Mr. Yancey because "What’s So Amazing About Grace?" has reminded me of my true First Love. I have read many Christian books and each is a blessing in some way, but I was especially touched by Mr. Yancey’s stories and words that have led me back to the simple yet awesome grace that sustains me. But please don’t just take my word for it. For anyone who feels like the road back to grace is a long one, Yancey’s book is one very effective shortcut.