Philip Yancey

What's So Amazing About Grace?

Philip Yancey opens What's So Amazing About Grace? with a question a friend once posed to him: "Why is it that Christians are known more for what they are against than for what they are for?" That question haunts the entire book. Yancey's thesis is both simple and scandalous: grace — God's love freely given to the undeserving — is the church's one great distinctive, the thing the world cannot manufacture and craves more than anything else. Yet Christians, of all people, often dispense ungrace with more ease than grace. Drawing on stories ranging from a prostitute dying in a Chicago alley to Gordon Wilson forgiving the IRA bombers who killed his daughter, Yancey presses us to ask what grace actually looks like when it walks out of the sanctuary and into the street.