Keller Wasn’t Always Wrong and He Wasn’t Always Right
Tim Keller seems to have a legacy that is, simultaneously, very good and very bad. Some eulogize him as one of the great American communicators of the Gospel, who pastored his church well and taught sound doctrine. Others claim Keller was subverting and weakening the church while contributing to liberal drift. This ends up with many on the theological right treating Keller as a proponent of “third-way” apologetics, both-sides-ism, and winsomeness at best, or a subversive traitor to the gospel at worst. For their part, the theological left has cancelled Keller for his disagreement with progressive views on sex and gender, and forced the Kuyper Center for Public Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary to rescind Keller’s award of the Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness1.
For my part, I think the entire discourse around Keller misses the point, and the truth lies nowhere in the middle. There is a lesson to be learned from the successes and failures of Tim Keller, but we can only learn those lessons if we understand what he was trying to do, and why he was trying to do it.
As I see it, Tim Keller was attempting to do two things.
The first was to help Christians deal with the new reality that the march of progressive secularism had altered the culture in ways which were making the culture hostile to Christianity. Keller was clear that “The first group of people that actually moved away from liberal democracy into ‘we’re going to impose our worldview on you’ were the progressives. They were the first people to start doing it.”2 He understood that the secular left is not merely some idle bystander while Christians on the right go about ruining democracy. He is quite clear that he thinks secular leftists jettisoned neutrality first, and what the leftists are doing is the imposition of a certain type of politics. For what it is worth, I agree with Keller on this point, and I would go even further and say that neutrality was jettisoned precisely because it enabled the advance of a certain type of politics in a way that could not be done while maintaining neutrality.3 4 Accusations of being a squishy leftist notwithstanding, Keller was also remarkably clear-eyed about just how bad things were getting for Evangelical Christians in America:
“By the way, things are getting bad for evangelicals. It’s very possible. I am not in denial about the fact that ten years from now, if you have evangelical convictions about sex and gender, you may not be able to work for a major university or for the government or for a big corporation.”5
Keller was not trying to accelerate the cultural turn against Christianity, nor was he happy about these developments. As near as I can tell, he just acknowledged them as a fact that Christians were going to have to deal with.
The second thing I think Keller was trying to do was to teach Christians how to communicate in a way which allows them to get a hearing from the secular world. On Keller’s view, the answer lies not just in proclaiming the gospel on its own terms, but in adopting a rhetorical posture that allows one to gain purchase with the audience. Keller didn’t just want the gospel to be proclaimed and then left open to misunderstanding, reinterpretation, or dismissal by a culture hostile to the truth of the Gospel. For this reason, Keller seeks an approach that allows us to communicate the Gospel in a way which will allow the meaning of the gospel to be shared clearly in the public square while gaining a fair hearing.
Keller believes the right way to do things is to demonstrate a full understanding of the other person’s views, then engage with that person’s ideas on their own terms. As Keller puts it, “Never describe the view of an opponent in a way he or she will not own. Rather, describe their view so they say, ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Only then should you proceed to refute the view. If instead you caricature your opponent—you persuade no one.”6 Once you have described your opponent well, the next step is to present the truth in a way which is disarming without watering down the truth you are trying to present. The goal is to tell the truth and to do so without watering it down:
“Right now our culture asks certain questions and we can’t help but respond to them. We do that in the most disarming way, but to some degree we can’t ignore the culture’s questions. We need to give biblical answers to the culture’s questions. You don’t give them the answers they want, you give them the answers they need. You can’t be a responsible pastor if you don’t.”7
Keller also recognizes that we can’t hide our light and keep the truth to ourselves. We are commanded to share the Gospel and make disciples. As near as I can tell, Keller’s view is that bombastic, pugilistic, strident, ardent proclamations of truth are going to be ineffective in the current cultural milieu, so we need to speak in a way which gets us a hearing. The goal is persuasion through mutual understanding and truth seeking.
I think Keller sees the march toward a post-Christian society and the potential for something like what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” in which
“Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.”8
It is the approach of negative world which is motivating Keller to seek some way to express the gospel in a hostile environment which is in part inoculated to Christianity.9
At the same time, Keller does think Christians bear some responsibility for the hostility which is directed toward them by the culture:
“For the last 20 years, the Christian right, though I usually would agree with their positions, I’m pro-life, I still don’t think that same-sex marriage is a good idea for the country or people. So, I would technically be agreeing with them, but you know how they raised their money. For 20 years, they sent out letters talking about how ‘You’ve got to send us money, because the gay people are going to try to come and take your children away, because they’re evil and because the Democrats and the left are gonna destroy your religious liberty.’ They just said awful things and vilified people…… We shouldn’t be crybabies. Nevertheless, having said all that, yeah, we nurtured this. And Christian nationalists use that. And therefore, we brought it on ourselves.”10
Keller believes Christians have engaged with the culture in ways that are antagonistic rather than persuasive, and this informs his view of what will be persuasive. He thinks conservative Christians have played a role in hardening the hearts of many unbelievers, and for this reason we have a lot of work to do in order to show that we can provide serious and meaningful answers to a culture he thinks we have antagonized. The belief that Christians are in some way responsible for negative world informs his ideas about how we can be persuasive.
I myself have argued for an approach that is very similar to Tim Keller’s approach. I have been arguing since 2020 that defeating the woke hold on our culture cannot be done merely through pugilism and rhetorical force: We need to teach our way out of the postmodern world. The truth will set us free, and this requires helping people to understand the problems with the postmodern assumptions that lie at the heart of much of the current Social Justice discourse. The truth is the only thing that can break the spell of the postmodern world, and we need to understand our current world in order to understand how to communicate the truth. This makes me sympathetic to Keller’s approach. Unfortunately, the years since Keller first rose to prominence have revealed a weakness in Keller’s position, and my own, which we need to address.
First, a dialogue goes two directions. It is not enough that you are willing to have an open, honest, and fair dialogue with me. I must be willing to have an open, honest, and fair dialogue with you. What this means is that if we are to have an open and honest, productive dialogue, we must try to communicate our ideas to one another and be willing to listen to each other in a spirit of charity. I always tell people that if they can’t find a compelling and charitable explanation for why a person thinks a given view is persuasive, then they very likely have not understood that view.
This is where the weakness in Keller’s view (and my own) arises. In short, in the culture we now inhabit, it may not be possible for us to get a fair hearing in certain quarters no matter what tone, rhetoric, or posture we adopt. For reasons which we shall get to, in many cases the social mechanisms through which open dialogue is created get disrupted in ways which make open dialogue impossible, and in many cases people will simply refuse to give you a hearing.
The issue that is pressing for this is essay is WHY people refuse to engage in open dialogue with conservative Christians. The fact is that today, people may be unwilling to have a dialogue with you because they believe that your Christian views are so morally odious that they will refuse to engage. A decade ago, Carl Trueman wrote:
“The beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade. You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.”11
The problem that we face today is that many influential people will be unwilling to speak to anyone who holds historic Christian views on sex and gender. There are many people who think “If you have 10 people and 1 nazi sitting at a dinner table and willingly eating together, you have 11 Nazis,”12 and that Christian views on many issues are as evil as Nazism. These sorts of people will not give you a fair hearing, nor will they engage in a good faith dialogue with you so long as you hold to the historic Christian ethic on sex, gender, abortion, the exclusive truth of the Gospel, and many other issues. This fact has enormous ramifications for how we think about transmitting the gospel to a post-Christian culture.
Once a person has made accepting certain views (and not associating with anyone who strongly opposes those views) a prerequisite for open dialogue, then what they have effectively said is that you must accept, adopt, and stay within the conversational boundaries that they have set in order to be given a hearing. This effect of this is to make the adoption of THEIR conversational boundaries by all parties a prerequisite for having any conversation at all. The person who does this is holding the conversation hostage until you pay the ransom of agreeing to their conversational boundaries at all times. The move here is to use the threat of refusal to engage as a way to hold the conversation hostage until one’s own conversational boundaries effectively govern all acceptable social discourse. In this way, a relatively small minority can get a critical mass of people to accept and enforce conversational boundaries that would not have gained traction otherwise. This is attempting to win a debate by shutting out intellectual competition.
When this sort of tactic is employed, you have only two choices: You can either accept these newly prescribed boundaries, or you can forget about getting an open dialogue. If you go along with this ultimatum, you are essentially letting someone else dictate the boundaries of acceptable opinion and association––an utterly unwise move for a Christian. I cannot imagine Jesus saying to a tax collector, a Roman centurion, or a prostitute, “I’d love to speak with you, but I need to preserve my credibility.” If some person somewhere said, “If you have eleven disciples at a table and one tax collector, you have twelve tax collectors,” I do not imagine Jesus would have allowed this to dictate who he was willing to speak to. Jesus may have been willing to pay the temple tax in order to avoid unnecessary offense, but he was not willing to allow the Romans, the Pharisees, or anyone else to dictate to him who he was going to speak to.
The tacit assumption behind Keller’s Approach is that if you do things correctly, the other person will usually give you a hearing. This is no longer the case. In the same way that people don’t give a fair hearing to a polite Nazi, many influential people are not going to give a fair hearing to a polite Christian who opposes gender transition, abortion, and same-sex marriage.
This brings us to the second problem for Keller’s approach.
Social Justice-oriented activists and academics tend to approach those they oppose with a cynical (dare I say postmodern) posture. Accordingly, rather than ask whether or not a given claim is “True” or engage with its substance, Social Justice advocates tend to view the claims, ideas, beliefs, and arguments of those they disagree with as a mask for power plays and hidden motives. They analyze claims in terms of whose interests are served, what incentives are in play, and who benefits, with the goal of unmasking the political ideology, power-seeking, bad motives, cultural biases, and self-interest that they think animate those claims. As such they rarely deal with the substance of the claim on the merits, and instead litigate the motives, interests, biases, and incentives they think lie beneath the surface of the claim.
Inevitably, will tend to view their opponents as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and bigoted; they further tend to dismiss any counterarguments as masks for power, the expression of self-interest, or the product of social conditioning. Thus, we end up with
“political and sociological explainers, including Marxists, Marxist revisionists, Frankfurt School disciples, and ‘power’ archeologists (after the fashion of Foucault). This group specialized in explaining how various kinds of consciousness are shaped or constrained by social, political, and economic pressures, with the result that the ideas formed by consciousness can mostly be dismissed as the bits and pieces of an ideology.”13
Consequently, we face a large number of scholars, intellectuals, professors, academics, and activists who adopt ideas that are recognizably pulled from Critical Theory and Postmodernism while denying their thinking is influenced by Critical Theory and Postmodernism. We are informed that our conservative Christian beliefs are the manifestation of false consciousness, implicit bias, interest convergence, cultural hegemony, motivated reasoning, or the manifestation of an ideology operating below the conscious plane.14
These postmodern theorists draw from a vast lexicon of terms that exists for the purpose of delegitimizing all dissent. At this point any conservative argument is dismissed as mansplaining, toxic masculinity, white privilege, tone policing, epistemic violence, whitesplaining, centering whiteness, white privilege, male privilege, motivated ignorance, “himpathy”…the list goes on.
If all that were not enough, the cynical Social Justice activists will often prevent you from gaining traction in a conversation by poisoning the well. They may attempt to destroy your social standing and moral authority by asserting that you are motivated by power, chasing clout, or complicit in some grave evil (“Silence is complicity!”) They will attempt to polarize you to get people to treat you as a bad faith political operator with a hidden agenda rather than an honest person of good will trying to have an open dialogue. They will claim that what you are really about is “money and power and backscratching and not about humbly seeking truth in community.”15 Or they might use what Aaron Renn has termed, “The Cone of Silence,” and avoid interacting with your ideas altogether in an attempt to shut them out of the discourse. Once you have been pre-emptively denied the benefit of the doubt, they will weaponize your social rejection to punish dissent elsewhere.
To sum up: Once someone decides to analyze what you say in terms of interests, incentives, and motives, they will attempt to litigate your motives, interests, and incentives rather than trying to adjudicate the substantive truth of your claims. When this happens, rather than engaging in seeking truth alongside you, the person turns up their skeptical dials and adopts a critical and cynical posture which shorts circuits the social mechanisms through which open dialogue can be created. Dialogue requires an environment of trust, willingness to listen, and the benefit of the doubt. Without these things, there is no dialogue.
In addition to all this, there are people who don’t want to take a stand on an issue for fear of losing their own place in the conversation, and these types often resort to a litany of other objections to sabotage the conversation. They will pivot to objections about tone, tenor, posture, attitude, boundaries, good faith, platforming, technicalities, credentials, etc. as a way to object to engaging with a person or view. This allows them to preserve their place in the conversation by signalling that, “I think that guy is super icky and embarrassing,” without having to state whether or not the super icky and embarrassing person is actually correct on the issue at hand.
The combination of these problems creates a set of serious obstacles for people (like me!) who admire Keller’s approach (if not his conclusions). We are in a situation where a significant portion of the population will not just deny conservative Christians a fair hearing, but actively try to sabotage any fair hearing we might get anywhere else. This is the place where Keller’s approach (and my own) is no longer helpful.
Keller’s approach assumes that almost everyone is willing to have a good faith discourse if only we have the proper posture, social acumen, and a winsome demeanor. This is not true. We must recognize that not everyone who refuses to engage with us does so because we have done something wrong, behaved poorly, or mistreated them. Sometimes the refusal to engage in fair and open dialogue is the result of people deciding that politics is more important than truth. Sometimes people are not open to having their view challenged. Sometimes people are motivated by a desire to control the window of acceptable opinion. Sometimes people are cynical operators. And sometimes we have to admit that Carl Trueman was correct: In some people’s eyes, being an orthodox Christian means you might as well be a Nazi.
When this happens, we must avoid seeking to open the relationship through moral, social, cultural, or doctrinal appeasement. It is not fair to adopt unequal weights and measures, especially by performatively hammering our brothers and sisters on one side to curry favor with those on the other side.
It’s no secret that I think, at this point, the left is worse at good-faith dialogue with their political opponents. That said, I see failures on the right, in the center, among the libertarians, and indeed across the political spectrum. Our job as Christians is to maintain a proper posture towards Christ and “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” We are required to have an even-handed and fair posture towards everyone: “‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.” Whether we admire the successful for their feats of excellence or empathize with the poor for their plight, our job is to judge people fairly. We ought not to performatively chastise people for the sake of gaining favor with our target audience. This is unjust.
When Paul tells us to become all things to men, that means that we are allowed to change how we present ourselves in order to be received as best we can for the sake of the Gospel; it does not mean that we can change the Gospel so that it will be well received for our own sake. We may become all things, but the Gospel must stay as it is: the unchanging truth of an unchanging God.
As a Christian, I have to be open to sharing the Gospel with both Hugh Hefner and Andrew Tate, with the homeless prostitute and Elon Musk. I am not allowed to treat one unfairly that I may curry favor with another. I cannot sin that grace may abound. Since I cannot throw one person under the bus to gain favor with another, I have to resign myself to the fact that I may be unable to reach some people due to their own unwillingness to engage. When that happens, I need to allow the Lord to work. “In the Lord’s hand the king’s heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him.”
In my everyday life I am friends with atheist liberals, dissident right thinkers, Christians who are gay, former trans activists, people who claim to be transgender, detransitioners, OnlyFans models, Marxists, communists, and a host of others. There is even the odd Bible-believing Christian thrown in. If I attack any one of these people in order to appease another, I am betraying the Gospel.
As Christians, we can be tempted to assume that if someone is unwilling to give us a hearing, it must be on account of something we have done, or that Christians generally have done. This is not true. The heart of all people is deceitful and wicked, and sometimes that wickedness manifests as utter unwillingness to give the Gospel a hearing no matter how winsome, honest, kind, and truthful we may be. We can’t allow the willingness of other people to listen to us to become the standard by which we judge the truth of our message. That does not mean the opinion of others counts for nothing, but it does mean that we are not allowed to compromise the truth in order to gain a foothold in evangelism.
When you are faced with someone who is in part inoculated to the gospel owing to encounters with caricatures, poor explanations, or poorly behaved Christians, but is willing to give you a hearing, then his approach works wonders. However, when faced with the ever-increasing numbers of people who think conservative Christian views are comparable to white supremacy, his approach is not going to work. We are called to speak the truth, we are not called to force everyone to listen.
The lesson to be learned here is that Keller’s approach has its place, but that place is shrinking, and there are no Silver bullets. We will have to reckon with the postmodern age in which we now live. This means that we need to contend with the widespread acceptance of ideas, concepts, worldviews, and ways of thinking about the world which inoculate western audiences to the gospel. There are going to be conceptual and philosophical strongholds here that need to be torn down, and I think going forward to ruthless intellectual obliteration of certain ideas is going to be necessary.
We are going to have to become large enough and influential enough that gatekeeping us from the conversation is no longer effective. At the same time, we are going to have to intellectually obliterate a good number of the sacred cows of American and western culture. I am not asking for needless bombast and pugilism in the name of attention getting, nor am I suggesting that we engage in nasty personal attacks or anything else of that sort. Tearing down strongholds does not mean tearing down people with ad hominem or engaging in needless bomb-throwing. What it does mean is that we absolutely need to make a full force intellectual assault on the intellectual and social legitimacy of the various tactics that are used to poison the conversational well. We must make it so that cynical accusations of bigotry, racism, sexism, and the like are seen for what they are and lose their social traction. This means the rejection of many of the central premises of the current culture is going to be necessary.
Tim Keller’s success taught us that we need to navigate the culture effectively and learn how to disarm the objection of people who disagree with us. His shortcomings teach us that cultural literacy is not enough, and sometimes we are going to have to anger the kinds of people who were never going to listen to us anyway in order to create the conditions in which we get a fair hearing.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Let’s look at two things very honestly. But before that, we need to remember how Christians have been at the forefront of promoting and defending prejudice and discrimination. To show this point, all one has to do is to look at how a disturbing percentage of Christians supported slavery, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Jim Crow, the remaining vestiges of systemic racism in our nation, sexism, and immoral American foreign policies to give a partial list. What is missing on that list is the Christian involvement in the marginalization of the LGBT community which shares all too many similarities with the past, and to a lesser degree, present marginalization of people of color.
To show the last item to be true just think how the passionate embracing of white supremacy, which drove slavery, Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination and segregation, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and the remaining vestiges of systemic racism have never been portrayed as signs of the moral decay in our nation as much as the now more widespread acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism.
And so what are the two things that we need to remember. First is our, meaning us religiously conservative Christians, history of harming and visiting injustices on other people. Second is our insistence that we should control the moral narrative of society and the culture. And by trying to control that moral narrative, we have been promoting a religious ethnocracy despite our history of corporate or social moral failures. With this second item, what we, including Keller, have failed to recognize is that in a society that is trying to move closer to democracy with equality, we have been trying to set up roadblocks and detours that are meant to return society and culture to past when groups were widely and heavily marginalized in the name of Christ. And that is all done in the name of fighting culture wars.
We have been spoiled by Christendom and so anything less than that is seen as an attack on the Church and the Gospel. And in wanting to return to Christendom, we both reopen and pour salt into the wounds that Christendom created. And all of that was unnecessary.
Keller had his successes and failures. His successes included his, what some have called, winsome ways. But when we look closely at those ways, we see almost nothing but the fruit of the Spirit in how he evangelized and taught the Scriptures. But the ‘winsome‘ label became a pejorative by far too many overly rigid thinking conservative Christians.
Keller’s biggest failure was that he was willing to sacrifice democracy with equality while trying to control culture so that it would not be almost impossible to evangelize. If I remember correctly, Keller feared that with the direction that society and culture were going, the Gospel would become unintelligible to more and more people in society.
Most of the current discussion on our culture wars revolve around a wider spread acceptance of homosexuals and the transgendered as equal in society. And so why would such acceptance cause the Gospel to become unintelligible? Also, is it really the Gospel that would become unintelligible with such an acceptance, or would it be Christendom that would become unintelligible.
My personal experiences amount to this. If I present Biblical sexual morality as a choice to accept or reject while evangelizing, my message gets rejected far more times than accepted but I often got invited back to further dialogues and discussions. The rejection meant that they understood what I was saying. But if I present Christendom as a state of being that society should return too while discussing Biblical sexual morality, I am then viewed in the same way that Christians who promoted, practiced, or defending slavery, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and Jim Crow. And that view of me would be well justified.
There is a difference between both practicing and preaching Biblical sexual morality from imposing it. With the former, we should be preaching to those who sexually immoral as equals and peers because of our own sexual and other sins. It isn’t just homosexuals who are judged by the Scriptures, it is also heterosexuals who don’t follow what the Bible says. And, according to Jesus, hardly anyone is without sexual sins and no one is without any sins at all.
But with the imposition of Biblical sexual morality on society comes a presumption of innocence of those doing the imposing. And people see through that presumption let alone a presumption of entitlement by those who are imposing their moral standards.
The shortcomings of the approach are here “In my everyday life I am friends with atheist liberals, dissident right thinkers, Christians who are gay, former trans activists, people who claim to be transgender, detransitioners, OnlyFans models, Marxists, communists, and a host of others. There is even the odd Bible-believing Christian thrown in. If I attack any one of these people in order to appease another, I am betraying the Gospel.”
This sounds very nice and above the fray, but each of these groups has a different receptivity to the gospel and the things of God. Your duties to all these groups differ based on your proximity to them and a number of other factors. If I condemn the sins of transgenderism and homosexuality to my nominal Christian neighbor he may be receptive to the gospel based on the appeal to the moral law, while that would be taken as an attack on the other group.
“Keller had his successes and failures. His successes included his, what some have called, winsome ways. But when we look closely at those ways, we see almost nothing but the fruit of the Spirit in how he evangelized and taught the Scriptures. But the ‘winsome‘ label became a pejorative by far too many overly rigid thinking conservative Christians.
Keller’s biggest failure was that he was willing to sacrifice democracy with equality while trying to control culture so that it would not be almost impossible to evangelize. If I remember correctly, Keller feared that with the direction that society and culture were going, the Gospel would become unintelligible to more and more people in society.”
Winsome became a pejorative because Keller undermined the workings of conservative Christians as the Gospel coalition drifted left, he said the future was with the mainline liberal denominations, incorporated homosexual ballerinas into the church liturgy ,he played soft on sodomy and other sins due to purposeful connections, made vague attacks to the right via his social media account, and was a registered democrat who voted for pro abortion candidates. Keller had some successful ministry and also tore down the ministry of many others to his right. He unfortunately set a standard of compromise in the evangelical culture and solidified the leftward drift. His tongue was soft, but set ablaze many fires behind the scenes. I don’t think this article evaluates him and his legacy clearly.
Kadin,
If TGC drifted left, it escaped my notice even though I read the website 2-3 times a week. I do know that Keller’s brother was gay and died of AIDS. But even without that, what distinguished Keller from many of his Reformed counterparts was his non-authoritarian manner in speaking the truth. Remember that Keller opposed the Obergfell decision and argued against it based on what he saw was the common good. TGC’s first concern about social justice was that God receive the recognition He deserved. TGC did not speak well of Marxism or of social justice advocates. One of its contributors, Joe Carter, came over from the Acton Institute, which is hardly a leftist source of information and opinions and neither is Carter.
In addition, Keller strongly criticized the Mainline churches and included Machen’s critique of the mainline churches in his analysis (see https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/tim-keller-decline-renewal-american-church/ ).
You need to provide some documentation for what you claimed was evidence of Keller’s move to the left. BTW, regarding Keller’s alleged registration as a democrat, I am registered as with the Socialist Workers Party and hold strictly to Machen regarding the distinctions he made between the theological liberalism of his day and Orthodox Christianity which was then called Christian Fundamentalism. Yes, I am politically left, but that doesn’t mean that I am theologically left as my beliefs in the Fundamentals of Christianity defined by people like Machen show. Some fellow religiously conservative Christians have conflated American conservative political views with Christianity and that is most unfortunate.
Well done, Michael!
Great insights.
A danger that I have noticed among some Pastors and Christian leaders is a loss of confidence in the Gospel, despite protestations to the contrary.
This is demonstrated primarily in the lack of evangelism among evangelicals. It’s not really encouraged all that much from our pulpits or other platforms.
Evangelism has been replaced with internal piety.
A confident people will express in the public square what they believe, and they will call on others to believe, as well.
This is a fair assessment. Quite frankly most of the writers on this site would disagree – on X they consider him an unbeliever. Judgement day will not be kind to those who have spoken against the Lord’s annointed.
But no matter.
The only thing I would add is that Keller died years ago – his approach was probably more appropriate in 2011 than it is today, and that makes sense.
Really the only thing the Gospel offers is relief from the weight of sin and new relationship with God.
As a sinner I can speak to those things. But they have no allure to someone who is self satisfied.
Point out past sins of other sinners inflicted on other people is ultimately not persuasive because I am not the one offering relief.
I think, I hope, there will be a big opportunity as people who bought into the false promises of self-identity discover they are victims of fraud. And may Christians be ready with the message that healing is available.
Chris,
Your second sentence is one of the most overlooked truths today.
Michael, good analysis of Tim Keller. I too admired him and still listen to his sermons every week. In the mid 90’s there was a group of people exploring how Christianity should navigate Postmodernism. Some of them wrote in the Mars Hill Review. This was the featured article in the first issue and continues to speak to me. It’s not necessarly a solution to the problem, but may be the approach. Read and enjoy: https://www.leaderu.com/marshill/mhr01/cmas1.html