Philip Yancey is a popular Christian writer who teaches a facile doctrine of cheap grace. He is not a theologian and has no formal education or training in Bible study.
Since Yancey believes our salvation is assured and cannot be lost no matter what we do he needs to explain why Christians should be motivated to live in a way that pleases God, without conceding that obedience is a necessary part of our relationship with Him. Here’s how he does it:
If I had to summarize the primary New Testament motivation for “being good” in one word, I would choose gratitude. Paul begins most of his letters with a summary of the riches we possess in Christ.
If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live “worthy” of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because he already does. As Paul told Titus, it is the grace of God that “teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives.”
In her memoir Ordinary Time, the Catholic writer Nancy Mairs tells of her years of mutiny against childhood images of a “Daddy God,” who could only be pleased if she followed a list of onerous’ prescriptions and prohibitions:
The fact that these took their most basic form as commandments suggested that human nature had to be forced into goodness; left to its own devices, it would prefer idols, profanity leisurely Sunday mornings with bagels and the New York Times: disrespect for authority, murder, adultery, theft, lies, and everything belonging to the guy next door …. I was forever on the perilous verge of doing a don’t, to atone for which I had to beg forgiveness from the very being who had set me up for trespass, by forbidding behaviours he clearly expected me to commit, in the first place: the God of the Gotcha, you might say.
Mairs broke a lot of those rules, felt constantly guilty, and then, in her words, “learned to thrive in the care of” a God who “asks for the single act that will make transgression impossible: love.”
The best reason to be good is to want to be good. Internal change requires relationship. It requires love. “Who can be good, if not made so by loving?” asked Augustine. When Augustine made the famous statement, “If you but love God you may do as you incline,” he was perfectly serious. A person who truly loves God will be inclined to please God, which is why Jesus and Paul both summed up the entire law in the simple command, “Love God.”
If we truly grasped the wonder of God’s love for us, the devious question that prompted Romans 6 and 7 – What can I get away with? – would never even occur to us. We would spend our days trying to fathom, not exploit, God’s grace.[1]
Yancey commits three logical fallacies in this passage: (a) argument from anecdote, (b) false dichotomy, and (c) appeal to emotion. This is typical of his style.
Notice how he draws on the memoir of Nancy Mairs, using her experience to derive an emotional response from the reader. Notice also that Mairs describes an extreme situation; her experience was not normative. It does not reflect a typical Christian experience.
Yancey does this to make his own approach sound even better by comparison. He never compares his ideas to those of moderate Christians, or an everyday experience of that sort that anyone could have.
He presents you with a victim (it’s nearly always a victim) who has suffered from a very bad situation reflecting whatever viewpoint or attitude he particularly wishes to criticise. Then he presents you with his own viewpoint, and it’s tempting—even natural— to say ‘Yes, I agree!’ without stopping to consider alternatives or implications.
This is the classic false dilemma fallacy: you’re presented with two options and led to believe they’re the only possible options. In Yancey’s case he hooks you with an appeal to emotion, offers a limited range of options (usually a choice of two extremes) and moves on quickly before you remember there’s actually a wide range of possibilities between the attitude/theology he’s criticising and the one he’s offering.
Yancey’s proposals look better than they actually are because they’re always—or nearly always—contrasted against a worst case scenario. When juxtaposed against moderate theology or a mild experience, the flaws are easier to spot.
Yancey’s hyperbole can’t withstand careful scrutiny. He quotes Mairs as saying that love makes transgression impossible. Nobody who has ever raised children will accept this claim. Even the most loving child disobeys.
Yancey says if we truly appreciated the love of God we will never seek to exploit His grace. Yet every Christian who’s ever lived has sinned. Following Yancey’s logic, this means there has never been a Christian who truly appreciated the love of God.
Final point, and it’s an interesting one: the title of this excerpt is ‘Why Be Good?’, but although he spends 431 words writing about love he never once uses the word ‘obedience.’ Biblical passages addressing this same topic are radically different. Obedience (specifically, loving obedience) takes centre stage in such passages.
A welcome antidote to Yancey’s theology is found in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian of the 20th Century. Bonhoeffer’s outstanding dissection of cheap grace is just as powerful and relevant today as it was when first published in 1937:
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing…
Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins… In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin…
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. ‘All for sin could not atone.’ Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin…
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us…
Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
On two separate occasions Peter received the call, “Follow me.” It was the first and last word Jesus spoke to his disciple (Mark 1.17; John 21.22). A whole life lies between these two calls. The first occasion was by the lake of Gennesareth, when Peter left his nets and his craft and followed Jesus at his word. The second occasion is when the Risen Lord finds him back again at his old trade. Once again it is by the lake of Gennesareth, and once again the call is: “Follow me.”…
In the life of Peter grace and discipleship are inseparable. He had received the grace which costs.[2]
Yancey wants to make us feel guilty about serving God. He wants us to believe we’re legalists, cringing in fear before an angry Father. He does this so he can come along afterwards and offer cheap grace as the solution.
If we’re sucked in by this we’ll grasp at it with both hands. But it’s a con. Yancey is pressuring us to make a flawed choice in a false dilemma filtered through an appeal to emotion. The correct response is to dismiss his offer and point out the Biblical alternatives.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)