Philip Yancey’s Temptation—and Ours
Author: Stan Guthrie
January 15, 2026
Years ago, Christine and I went to a small, local book fair. At one point, a woman with stars in her eyes came to our table and asked her, “What’s it like to be married to a famous author?” I can’t remember how she answered, but we both laughed about it later. Me? A famous author? Hardly!
And yet, I have to admit that secretly I liked the fact that someone thought I was famous, that I had influence, and that it must be amazing to live with me. Such adulation (as minor as it was) was catnip to my needy soul.
It also, I realize now, had the potential to be extremely dangerous.
I’ve been thinking about these things since learning that Philip Yancey, the Christian author who is orders of magnitude more famous than I could ever be, committed adultery with a married woman for eight years. Philip, a former colleague at Christianity Today, is merely the latest in a string of celebrity Christian authors, pastors, and musicians who have brought devastation to their families and disgrace to the name of Christ via sexual sin.
Some of Philip’s books were formative in my faith journey and in my understanding of writing as a Christian vocation. When I was in college, I attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author of Night, the unforgettable autobiographical account of how he was shipped to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Afterwards, I thanked Wiesel and handed him a copy of Philip’s book, Where Is God When It Hurts? I have prayed through the years that perhaps some of Philip’s profound insights about suffering would assist Wiesel on his journey back to God. I know they helped me during some of my own struggles.
So Philip’s fall is a clear reminder that knowing the right answers is not enough for Christian communicators—or for anyone else. In fact, knowing what God says about a subject without doing it only brings greater condemnation.
The question rattling around in my writer’s mind is Why? Why did Philip—who knew so much and who expressed what he knew so beautifully—do it? While I can’t look into Philip’s soul for the answer, I can look into mine.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis discussed people as having three loci of action, using three corresponding parts of the body: the head (reason, rational thought); the chest (rightly ordered affections, virtue, trained sentiment); and the belly (the appetites). The head knows or learns what is right but cannot make us do it. The belly is the seat of desire, impulse, instinct, and raw emotion. It can focus on good or bad things. The chest is what enables us to love the good and hate the evil. It serves as the indispensable liaison between our reason and our appetites. Lewis wrote, “The head rules the belly through the chest.”
Lewis spoke of “men without chests.” In other words, without the chest—trained moral sentiment—our reason becomes powerless, and our appetites take over. Yes, we know what to do, but our accumulating longings, emotions, and feelings can suddenly rip through our head knowledge as if it were an old cobweb.
This truth has much to say about how we are to grow in the faith. Yes, head knowledge is vital. But it is worse than useless if we are not also training ourselves in virtue in Christian community.
Again, I don’t know—and don’t need to know—what caused Philip Yancey to turn his back on all he knew about God, sin, and his marriage. Like other famous people, he probably faced more temptations through adulation than I can ever dream of. But I do know that I need to watch my own heart, training myself to love the good and hate the evil.
Especially when someone other than my wife flatters me with a pinch of emotional catnip.
Stan Guthrie is Director of Outreach and Mobilization for New Covenant Church of Naperville.
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