First up on my list of book recommendations (which also make great gift suggestions) are two from a man a friend calls “the conscience of evangelicalism,” Phillip Yancey. I personally have never read a Yancey book that did not challenge and/or teach me greatly. These are two of his best.
Concerning Disappointment with God, one reviewer said, “This is, hands down, the best treatment on the subject of the problem of pain that I have ever read. Yancey uses the book of Job in a way that many of us may never have seen to present God’s case. He gives gentle answers; very important and human answers to these very human questions and hurts. He doesn’t pretend to know all the answers and he refuses to give any canned or cliched replies. But he does give his best, and his best is remarkably worthy.”
Another reviewer writes about a second Yancey award winner, The Jesus I Never Knew: “In The Jesus I Never Knew, Yancey explores the life of Jesus, as he explains, ‘”from below,” to grasp as best I can what it must have been like to observe in person the extraordinary events unfolding in Galilee and Judea’ as Jesus traveled and taught. Yancey examines three fundamental questions: who Jesus was, why he came, and what he left behind. Step by step, scene by scene, Yancey probes the culture into which Jesus was born and grew to adulthood; his character and mission; his teachings and miracles; his legacy–not just as history has told it, but as he himself intended it to be.”
