What Yancey did certainly WAS sinful and evil. It is one thing to sin this way for 8 weeks or 8 months, but 8 years really is alarming. It does show how believers can so easily deceive themselves and think they can get away with murder.

All Christians are sinners, and all can fall big time without God’s grace:

There are always sad cases of well-known Christian leaders falling into sin and scandal. It happens all too often. The most recent example involves a Christian writer and speaker beloved by millions of people worldwide. I just looked, and I happen to own 10 of his books. Over one particularly rough Christmas holiday period I had read through 2 or 3 of them in a row.

I refer to Philip Yancey who has just been publicly found-out about an 8-year-long affair he had. Christianity Today just published an article on this story. It begins:

Christian author Philip Yancey said in an emailed statement to CT that he had engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and would retire from writing and speaking.

Yancey started his writing career in 1971 at Campus Life magazine, which became a part of CT a few years later. He wrote for CT for decades, reporting and later becoming a regular columnist and editor at large. His books, including What’s So Amazing About Grace?, have sold more than 15 million copies. He often wrote about faith in the face of pain and suffering.

Yancey, 76, has been married to his wife, Janet Yancey, for 55 years. He said he was sending the news “due to my longstanding relationship with CT”. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/01/author-philip-yancey-confesses-affair-withdraws-from-ministry/

When I first read this, I could see the whole piece, but it now seems to be behind a paywall. So let me add a few more quick details. He says he is retiring from all Christian ministry. He has come clean and acknowledged his sin, and his wife also offered a brief statement about this.

The bulk of the CT piece can be found here: https://churchleaders.com/news/2211627-philip-yancey-confesses-to-8-year-extramarital-affair.html  

So what are we to make of all this? The reality is that only God fully and perfectly knows the human heart. Only God knows where he is now at, if his repentance is genuine, if he is on the right path in dealing with all this, and so on. So I will not be his jury, judge and executioner. What I can and must do is pray for him.

Indeed, when I posted about this on the social media, all I said was this: ‘I chatted with him briefly when he came down under years ago. Sad news. We can keep him and his family in prayer. See link below.’ Plenty of comments came in all rather quickly as soon as I posted that. And sadly, some infighting broke out among various believers as they shared their thoughts.

The commentators were roughly of three camps. The first was made up of those who basically shared my take on this and also thought it to be quite sad and that prayer was the order of the day. And then there were two other camps – both on opposing ends of a spectrum. On the one hand there were some believers upset by this and calling him out and saying how terrible he was. And then there were those who more or less went with the ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ camp.

The truth is, there is some truth in both of these two seemingly opposing viewpoints, but only when held together in biblical balance. Either stance, when pushed to extremes, becomes harmful and unbiblical. Let me speak to each one in turn.

Judgment without mercy

The first of these two responses, in its extreme and unbiblical form, is really just that of the Pharisees. It says: ‘I am holier than you are. You are a terrible sinner. You stand condemned. I could never sin like this. Stone him and her!’ It is the result of pride and a lack of understanding of the basic truth that we are all sinners and except for God’s amazing grace, we ALL can fall in this or in similar ways.

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