Philip Yancey is one of the most compelling and popular Christian authors of our time. But faith has not always been easy for himβgrowing up in Atlanta included absorbing the confidently racist doctrine his childhood pastor distributed from the pulpit. He is not free from the pangs of doubt and disappointment today, but he gathers courage from the selfless love played out in people like Dr. Paul Brand, a medical doctor who dedicated his life to treating leprosy. For more on his longtime friend and co-author Dr.
Paul Brand, see Dr. Additional help from Nate Mulder. I hope every Christian is disappointed. Welcome to Language of God. He acknowledges the difficulties and the messiness of faith. We talked about some of those difficulties and the messiness, starting with the church itself and the all-too-familiar fact that many of our church communities have poorly presented the Good News.
But then our main topic of conversation went back to his book, Disappointment with God. It is just as relevant today to wonder about the seeming silence and inaction of God when we think he ought to be speaking and doing things to relieve the suffering around us. One of the subtle ironies that comes out in our conversation is that God has chosen to work primarily through the church, which so poorly represents him and often frustrates us, and so our disappointment with God might be more accurately understood as disappointment with ourselves, for our failure to be the people of God.
This is not a quick and easy answer and takes some sorting out. Hi, my name is Philip Yancey. Your lance is not assigned to anyone in particular. Is that a fair characterization? Jim here from the studio in post production. When you hear that sound, it means we want to share some background and fill in a gap. Here, Philip Yancey refers to the curse of Ham. Unfortunately there have been people who have tried use this as a Scriptural justification for slavery. And yet it was taught to me as truth.
I was told, uh, the curse is that the children and family, the descendants of ham, are good for servants, but they could never be a CEO of a company. And I walked in. I had studied my mentor for the summer, I had studied his papers. And suddenly, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding. I realized my church lied to me, they are wrong.
