BY PHILIP YANCEY
1988 NY: Walker & Company, 379 pages
A Book Review by Joseph Ng
November 2002
You’ve faith larger than a mustard seed, you’ve a real and urgent need for a miracle, you’re claiming a dozen prooftexts as promises, and you’re waiting for God to respond to His beloved—yea, devoted—child … but nothing happens. Or worse, your problems deepen, and heaven’s silence becomes more deafening than ever. So what’s wrong? We go back to our Bibles, to our memories of sermons on faith, and wonder where is this God of Abraham and Moses, of Elijah and Elisha. Where is the Jesus of Nazareth who raised the dead and fed the 5,000? Where the Apostles who healed the lame to the glory of God? Even poor Job, who lost everything but his diseased skin, got an answer in the end, and a proper restoration! Is God unfair? Is He hidden? Is He silent?
These last three questions Philip Yancey addresses in Disappointment with God, offering perhaps unwittingly the strongest apologetic there is against the Word-Faith, Charismatic, health-and-wealth movements. TV evangelists have always offered miraculous healing and revelations to those with “enough” faith. But not everyone is healed, even if he or she had the greater-than-average faith. And this affects not just the masses enticed by flashy TV evangelists; it affects mature, faithful Christians who call upon their Lord, with little visible or audible success. Obviously, somebody’s expectations need to be reexamined and recalibrated. Disappointment with God offers us a Bible-based view of life and suffering that promises to be a practical guide in these times of complex problems and Bible misuse.
I’m immensely thankful that a pretty detailed summary and outline of the book have already been done at this free site with menacing, if downright infuriating, popup windows (http://bohls.freeyellow.com/y_dwg1.htm).
What stands out in my mind was the example Yancey gives of someone who gave up on God while in seminary. Facing a whole slew of reversals, Richard throws himself one night at God in despair and calls for a sign from Him by morning. As dawn breaks, there seems neither salvation nor signal of any sort, and Richard packs up on God.
Having set the scene, Yancey traces the workings of Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from the Old Testament to the Gospels and then the New Testament Age, showing both God’s whirlwind, earthquake, fire, as well as His gentle hissing in dealing with His people. This he calls “Book I: God within the Shadows.” But it doesn’t end there. In “Book II: Seeing in the Dark,” Yancey points his reader to a present of faith and a future of hope, all the while building his case on the written Word of God. In brief, the book’s contents are:
BOOK I: GOD WITHIN THE SHADOWS
Part One—Hearing the Silence (“The Questions No One Asks Aloud,” etc.)
Part Two—Making Contact: The Father (“Risky Business,” “The Parent,” “Wounded Lover,” etc.)
Part Three—Drawing Closer: The Son (“Divine Shyness,” “The Postponed Miracle,” etc.)
Part Four—Turning It Over: The Spirit (“Changes in the Wind,” etc.)
BOOK II: SEEING IN THE DARK
(Chapters include “Is God Unfair?” “Why God Doesn’t Intervene,” and “Why Job Died Happy”)
This is perhaps Yancey at his best, pouring out his emotion with disarming honesty, such that it would be the odd reader who will not identify at all with his and his characters’ disappointments with God. The riveting prose could translate into a series of frantic late-night reads to find out what the author intended to say.
As usual, Yancey cites questionable sources approvingly and without qualification. Soren Kierkegaard, G.K. Chesterton, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Juergen Moltmann, and Mother Teresa could become role models of Christians unfamiliar with these characters, with spiritually disastrous consequences. Yancey could, at least, have warned against his sources’ sliding into Roman Catholicism, Liberal theological underpinnings, or Christ-rejecting faith—something that he shows himself capable of when citing Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, Yancey is far more willing to take a swipe at the more conservative and orthodox “Bible Belt” Christianity that he blames for being a stumblingblock to his faith although it is still this evangelical faith that he continues to defend, minus its racist and ascetic excesses.
In spite of this shortcoming of Yancey’s in many of his books, Disappointment with God will continue to be a valuable argument for a lasting, persevering, and hope-filled faith. Even if one disagrees with his take on particular passages, as a Google search for “Yancey” and “Unfortunately” would reveal, the book issues a thoroughgoing challenge to popular notions and expectations of how God should deal with pain in the world. I would say it be required reading, necessary caveats included, for anyone at risk of spiritual disappointment. Which probably includes everybody!
Among Yancey’s detractors and critics are the following:
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/exposes/yancey/yancey.htm
http://www.svchapel.org/ThinkOnTheseThingsMinistries/publications/html/pain1.html
An interview with Yancey (with photograph) is available at the Zondervan site:
http://www.zondervanchurchsource.com/inyancey.htm