Recovering Evangelicals #199 – Season Seven’s scandalous opener!
Yancey’s Confession Reframes His Work
- Philip Yancey admitted an eight-year extramarital affair and immediately retired from public ministry to seek counseling and salvage his marriage.
- The revelation reframes his recent public work and provokes cognitive dissonance for readers who once found him a moral voice.
Earlier Interview Now Haunts Hosts
- Luke and Scott had interviewed Philip Yancey two years before his confession, and re-listening made parts of that interview take on new meanings.
- Scott felt statements lost their punch because the speaker was not living what he preached.
Prior Experience With Bruxy Cavey
- Luke previously interviewed Bruxy Cavey before his affair became public and resisted follow-up episodes or deleting the archive episode.
- That history influenced Luke's reluctance to immediately pile on after Yancey’s news.
We begin with a really hot-potato topic, one that blew up the Evangelical Christian community a few weeks ago!
Recovering Evangelicals are back from hiatus!
When we took a break from podcasting last summer, we wondered if there even would be a 7th season … and if we did return, whether we needed to re-brand. Well, we’re back … and we’re keeping the name. Although we may have to give up on one of the interpretations of the name … at least until the impending collapse of the American empire!?
And we’re starting the season off with a bang. Next week, we’ll release a real bomb-shell episode! The outcome of the recent news in the Evangelical world about Philip Yancey: his recent public confession to having been involved in an extramarital affair for the past eight years. This, coming from one of the best-selling (17 million books, translated into over 40 languages) Evangelical authors, with numerous awards to his credit and a massive fan-base of people who have found his books to have been hugely influential on their Christian faith and practice! Scott and I reminisced about our interview with Philip two years ago, which we now realize occurred while this reputation-busting relationship had been going on: he even talked about other hugely influential Christian speakers/authors leading a secret life and betraying the public trust!? It’s very unsettling to feel how these and other things he said now take on entirely new meanings!?
For the first two week’s after Philip’s announcement, I had no intention of piling on to the on-line outrage that was unleashed. And for the same reasons that I always resisted doing a follow-up episode regarding Bruxy Cavey, whom we also had on as a guest four years ago, coincidentally also two years before it came to light that he had been in an extramarital affair. But it was one particular element that kept coming up in the public outrage over both scandals, and every other scandal like this, that motivated me to do this episode. It was the immediate call to burn their books. Cancel their contributions to Christian thinking.
Is this a knee-jerk response? Too much, too fast?
If we do that with Philip and Bruxy, what do we do with the books and ideas given to us by Karl Barth, who also had an extramarital affair … for forty years? And what about King David, the author of the Book of Psalms, who not only had an extramarital affair: he also arranged to have Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle in an attempt to cover up his secret?
All of these thinkers/authors have given important tools and resources to the Christian community … are we now throwing out the baby with the bath water? Are we impoverishing our intellectual base? The scandal of the Evangelical mind indeed!
We talked to friends, family and podcast listeners about how this news —regarding Philip Yancey in particular, as well as many other high profile Christian leaders (Ravi Zacharias; Bill Hybels; Bruxy Cavey; King David) —impacted their valuation of the writings and teachings of those leaders. We obviously got a range of thoughts and opinions on this.
This central question — what do we do with the books, sermons, and videos of authors who have breached traditional Christian sexual ethics? — will be the topic for next week’s episode. And we’re going to bring in two guest experts: one who wrote a scholarly article a couple years ago in a reputable Christian philosophical journal on this exact question, and another who is a high-profile speaker, author and thinker in the Evangelical world.
Stay tuned for next week’s deeper dive into this hot potato topic!
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