Philip Yancey

AUTHOR PROFILE

Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey is described in biographical records as an American author (born 1949) (born 1949). The selections gathered here touch on jesus christ, short quotes, bible. This profile brings the attributed quotations together with their available source information.

FEATURED QUOTE

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

— Philip Yancey

Biography at a glance

Profile: American author (born 1949)
Life: born 1949
Quotes in this collection: 8

Life and work

Biographical records connect Philip Yancey with University of Chicago and Wheaton College. This collection includes 8 quotations credited to Philip Yancey. Each quotation page preserves its own citation, when supplied, so readers can follow the passage back to its stated context.

Reading the quotations

The selections gathered here touch on jesus christ, short quotes, bible. These topic links make it easier to compare these words with other voices in the LDS Flow library. Citations are shown on the individual quotation pages where the source collection provided them.

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Background on Philip Yancey

Quotes by Philip Yancey

8 quotes

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

The Jesus I Never Knew

— Philip Yancey

“In historical fact, we are the ones who have co-opted their Jesus. As I got to know Jesus, the realization sank in that he probably did not spend his life among Jews in the first century merely to save Americans in the twentieth. Alone of all people in history, he had the privilege of choosing where and when to be born, and he chose a pious Jewish family living in a backwater protectorate of a pagan empire. I can no more understand Jesus apart from his Jewishness than I can understand Gandhi apart from his Indianness.”

The Jesus I Never Knew

— Philip Yancey

The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

The Jesus I Never Knew

— Philip Yancey

“Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal – it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being he played by the rules, harsh rules; small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.”

The Jesus I Never Knew

— Philip Yancey

“The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play.”

The Jesus I Never Knew

— Philip Yancey

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey

— Philip Yancey