Name: A Skeptic's Guide to Faith
ISBN: 9780310325024

Philip Yancey

Looks at both the visible and supernatural to search for faith, offering new perspectives on looking beyond what is visible to find meaning and purpose in life.

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith

Fred Rivett

James Agee once described a human being as "a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings," and some of that fury shows up in the Christian ascetics. They wanted to escape humanity and fly away.*

Abuses arise from regarding pleasure as an end in itself rather than a pointer to something more. "Perfect are the good desires you have given me," prayed Pascal; "Be their End, as you have been their Beginning."

When you have made your eye the instrument of impurity, you cannot see God with it.

If humanity serves as your religion, then sex becomes an act of worship. On the other hand, if God is the object of your religion, then romantic love becomes an unmistakable pointer, a rumor of transcendence as loud as any we hear on earth.

We instinctively recognize the lie when sex becomes a mere transaction. I know of some societies that legally tolerate prostitution, but none that honor the profession.

Every married person I know wonders at times if he or she has married the wrong person. 

Cognitive scientists, he explains, recognize a restlessness in the human mind, a need to do something with our thoughts and to pursue goals. Being human means grasping for something more, just as Adam and Eve did.

Animals seem content living out the singular goal of survival, without the need to reflect on themselves or grasp for more. Yet when God created a being in God's own image, he built in restlessness, along with curiosity and desire, in full awareness they could lead the human to choose the wrong path.

Jesus' famous parable of the prodigal son paints the picture clearly. By any standard of good and bad behavior, the prodigal son failed, squandering his inheritance and cavorting with prostitutes. He deserved punishment, not celebration. But the father, representing God, had eyes only for healing and restoration: "This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." God's method with evil is cure, not prevention.

Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, reached the unshakable conviction, now a canon of twelve-step groups, that an alcoholic must "hit bottom" in order to climb upward.

I used to think, as does much of the world, "If it feels good, it must be sinful." Such a sentiment stems from a tragic misconception of God. The state God desires for us, shalom, results in a person fully alive, functioning optimally to the Designer’s specification.

"Law teaches many things," concludes Stuntz, "but the most important thing it teaches is its limits, what it cannot do.” Where law falters, love steps in.

Rules serve an important function: like training wheels on a bicycle, they point the beginner in the right direction and protect against injury, The ultimate goal, though, is to ride safely on your own, without props.

If only evil did resemble a smoldering cinder that we could locate and stomp out. Instead, we more resemble tiny magnets, with one end attracted to and the other end repelled by the same force. Cut a magnet in half and you geta smaller magnet with the same polarity. Cut it again, and again, into sixteen pieces, and you have sixteen pieces attracted on one end and repelled on the other. In just that way the tendency to yield to evil and also to resist it infuses every part of my body, as a kind of inbuilt cellular tension.

Just as my physical body speaks loudly through pain so that I will attend to the injury site, my conscience speaks in the language of guilt so that I will take the steps necessary for healing. The goal in both is to restore health, not to feel bad.

Guilt is not a state to cultivate or a mood you slip into for a few days. It should have directional movement, first pointing backward to the sin and then pointing forward to change. A person who feels no guilt can never find healing. Yet neither can a person who wallows in guilt. The sense of guilt only serves its designed purpose as a symptom if it presses us toward cure.

Benedict Groeschel puts it this way: "A saint is just a sinner who is more repentant than most of us."

"Adam, where are you?" God called out in the garden. It was Adam, not God, who hid. God takes the initiative to come searching; we are the ones who hide. And Jesus, the Great Physician, sees our sins not as disqualifiers but as the reason for his journey from another world to ours. Rescue is God's business.

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither," wrote C. S. Lewis.

An old Italian proverb comes to mind: "When the chess game is over, the pawns, rooks, kings, and queens all go back into the same box."

A pleasant read with many stand out points, it meanders quite a bit but that is a truthful reflection of the authors own fluctuation between faith and doubt. Not a must read but enjoyed it and gave me food for thought.

Magdalene Lim

Why does this awesome book only have ratings from 15 people?! Haha, I am biased because Philip Yancey wrote this book and having really liked "Where is God when it Hurts", I was eager to embark on it. From the few Christian books I've read(n=5?), I must say Yancey is my favourite for his anecdotal way of illustrating things. While easy to read because it's interesting, some portions were not an easy read, simply because of the stories that touched a raw nerve, such as the story of the Elephant Man and the lady whose son and husband were barbecued by a police officer. Stories like these make one/me pause for a moment.


Well, yay! I found out that I'm not the only one who questions the existence of God despite having been a Christian for 10 years. (Already?!)At certain parts of this book, I forget what the book is about and I am not convinced that this will turn a skeptic into a faithful Christian but it's still a good read. One theme that struck me the most while reading was, "benevolence", and my lack of it.

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith

Reviews

Popular highlights