What's So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey

Week 8: Chapter 7 — An Unnatural Act

Read Chapter 7 of What's So Amazing About Grace?

Yancey presses deeper into the difficult terrain of forgiveness and how it functions — or fails to function — in some of history's darkest moments.

Discussion Questions

7 questions

1.Yancey examines forgiveness against the backdrop of massive historical evil — the Holocaust, apartheid, racial violence. Can grace survive atrocities of this scale? Does extending forgiveness to perpetrators of genocide dishonor victims, or does it liberate them?

2.He looks at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as an imperfect but remarkable real-world attempt to institutionalize grace and forgiveness after apartheid. What made that process genuinely grace-like? What were its limitations?

3.Yancey tells the story of Corrie ten Boom meeting one of her former Nazi guards after the war and being called to shake his hand and forgive him — a moment she described as requiring a supernatural act of will. What does her story reveal about the relationship between feeling forgiveness and choosing it?

4.Is there a difference between personal forgiveness (releasing someone from your own bitterness) and social or legal justice (holding people accountable for their crimes)? How do we hold both without letting one cancel out the other?

5.Yancey raises the hard case of Jeffrey Dahmer, who claimed to have become a Christian before his death. The idea of Dahmer in heaven offends most people's moral instincts. How does Yancey use that reaction to expose how deeply our sense of justice resists grace — and how the gospel's answer to that resistance is the cross?

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Closing Prayer

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Righteous and merciful God, we struggle to believe that your grace is truly without limit. We are glad of it when we are the ones who need it, and offended by it when extended to those whose sins seem worse than ours. Forgive us for that double standard. Thank you that the cross is the place where justice and mercy kissed — where you did not look away from sin but absorbed it at infinite cost. Give us the courage to extend that same costly grace to those who have wronged us and the world around us. Amen.

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