what God's grace means for practical living.

Substance: excellent discussion of grace, forgiveness, charity, etc. Yancey laments the "gracelessness" of too many evangelical Christians (and others) still fixated on the "letter of the law" than on the spirit of the gospel. I think he unfairly targets evangelicals, but he was brought up in one of the more virulent, racist, bigoted congregations so he has some right to talk. He mentions the demonizing of Christianity by the media simultaneously with the paucity of "graceful" Christians but does not seem to connect the dots: how can we "call to mind" acts of real Christian charity when the main-stream-media relentlessly avoids printing the ones that actually do occur? Politics aside, his gospel points are well-taken.
Style: Yancey is a clear, articulate, informed and very readable author. ( )

A real wake-up call for the "modern" church about their place in society and calling as Christians.

Yancey's writing is always intelligent and thoughtful whilst still being practical, compassionate and confronting. ( )

A very thoughtful book on true grace and self-reflection for fundamentalist Christians. ( )

In What’s so Aamazing About Grace, Philip Yancey, instead of telling us what grace is shows us grace in the lives of individuals through true life stories. So we see grace demonstrated and also its opposite: ungrace.

However he does attempt a definition which I think is so good that it is worth quoting in full:

“Grace makes its appearance in so many forms that I have trouble defining it. I am ready, though, to attempt something like a definition of grace in relation to God. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual callisthenics and renunciations , no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”

Another quote from the book: “Truly it is an evil to be full of faults, said Pascal, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognise them.”

Here is another fine quote from this excellent book: Repentence, not proper behaviour or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.”

Yancey argues that God is a God of love and not hate, of freedom and not of rules, of grace and not of judgement. However, less you misunderstand he is not advocating lawlessness, merely that grace is unmerited and cannot be earned by the good things we may do. He says: it is relatively easy not to murder, hard to reach out in love; easy to avoid a neighbour’s bed, hard to keep a marriage alive (how true!); easy to pay taxes, hard to serve the poor.

In the final analysis Yancey advocates the two principles that motivates the AA: radical honesty and radical dependence. That is when I begin to see myself as a sinner who cannot please God by any method of self-improvement or self-enlargement and then realise it is my human destiny on earth to be imperfect, incomplete, weak, and mortal, and only by accepting that destiny can I escape the force of gravity and receive grace.

Finally, he says, “A graceful Christian is one who looks at the world through ‘grace-tinted’ lenses”.

I highly recommend this excellent book. The stories are interesting, as mini-stories in their own right but illustrate perfectly the author’s thesis. The style is pleasing, non-preachy, but didactic through illustration rather than through a holier-than-thou unapproachable self-righteous attitude. Yancey writes as one who has been there, experienced sin and grace and is sharing that with us. I think this book is incomparably fine. ( )