Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and author of a number of books including The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith and Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex and Power and the Only Hope that Matters. In fall 2009, White Horse Inn co-host Michael Horton talked with Reverend Keller about his best-selling book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Your subtitle suggests that we're living in an age of skepticism. First of all, why do you think that is; and secondly, do you think it's necessarily a bad thing, especially in the light of a civil religion where everybody assumes that because we're Americans we must be Christian?
In some ways, belief in an age of skepticism is a Manhattan perspective, because I don't think you can necessarily look at the entire country and say we live in a skeptical place, that belief in the orthodox Christian faith in such a skeptical culture is difficult, or that this is what it takes. But I think you can say that Manhattan is a skeptical culture, so I was really talking about those center city/university areas where people are very skeptical about Christianity. When I arrived in Manhattan twenty years ago, I was expecting evangelism to be more difficult. It actually has not been–humanly speaking–more difficult, because people are so overtly skeptical; whereas other places I've lived, such as Pennsylvania and Virginia, there was the veneer of civil religion and it was harder to get traction with people.
Do you think a lot of people in New York–perhaps the most virulent or the most unlikely to give Christianity a chance–were raised in a kind of unreflective, unthinking, don't-ask-questions Christian background?
A large percentage of the most virulent anti-Christians come from conservative backgrounds. I couldn't prove it–it's anecdotal–but most of us here in the city find that when you're talking to someone who is furious, very often their father was a Baptist minister or something.
You also write that the world is getting more religious and less religious at the same time. How can that be?
I'm glad some of the studies that have come out in the last couple of years since I wrote the book have proven this to be the case–that you have stronger, more orthodox kinds of faiths and evangelicalism growing. There are growing percentages of people saying, "I have no religious preferences." What's actually going away is the mushy mainline middle. When I think about my in-laws, for example, they went to a Presbyterian church all their lives, and they would never think of not going. They had generally conservative, traditional Christian morality, but their own beliefs were very nebulous. They went because it was expected. That mushy middle is going away. I still see it everywhere. So people are either more conservative or more liberal. They're more into orthodox faith or they're more secular. Things are polarizing, and there's a fair amount of evidence of this with the studies on people's religious preference.
If that's the diagnosis, what's the cure?
By and large–and nobody at the White Horse Inn has paid me to say this!–I think the church does need to be the church. In New York–a very skeptical place where there's more anger and anti-Christian sentiment than in most places–when people have tried to set up what I call a traditional megachurch with a slickness or a consumer orientation, it just has not flown here. There needs to be more theological rigor and liturgy. Non-Christians are fascinated with listening to somebody expound the Heidelberg Catechism–because it's old, it has roots, and it's brilliant in many ways–rather than just being given a short talk on how they can overcome worry. Honestly, this sounds very strange. I believe in contextualization, but I also feel that if there is an answer it's frankly getting back to confessional evangelical Christianity and not thinking that you can somehow engage the culture with the latest, more shallow versions. Nobody paid me to say this–I just want you to know that!
But there is a kind of sit-on-your-laurels confessionalism that doesn't actually talk to non-Christians.
That's what I meant by contextualization. You're really trying to engage the baseline cultural narratives and answering questions they're asking and so forth. It's not just that you don't have anything like a traditional evangelical mega-church in New York City; you don't have anything like that in the metropolitan area. The traditional megachurch we think of–with a certain kind of music and presentation–just hasn't worked here.
Why do you think that is? Is it just aesthetic–the slickness and pop culture rather than high culture? Or do you think it's more than that?
I think they feel as if they're being sold something. Honestly, a lot of these folks are hardened to the idea of sales. They really don't like the polish. It's also true, by the way, that this is a place where people go to the theater rather than to a movie. In our church we have no screens or overhead projectors–we don't have a big screen picture of me preaching next to me being there. There are some theological reasons why I wouldn't do it anyway; but certainly culturally, it would never connect here. People do not go to great big screens; they go to the comedy club, to the theatre, to off Broadway. They eat out on the street. It's not a suburban culture, and the megachurch model is incredibly suburban.
So someone might say, "Don't try to sell me anything; but if you have an honest response to some of the biggest questions of life, then I want to hear it." What are the big questions you have been hearing as a pastor?
Questions about evil and suffering of course. Pluralism: How can you make such exclusive truth-claims? Freedom: Isn't Christianity a straitjacket; isn't any kind of confession a straitjacket; don't we have to be free to figure out our own beliefs and our own path? Then there's the problem of Christians being involved with injustice. And there's another one that says you can't trust the Bible. In the last four years, I've heard people say you can't be a good citizen in a democratic society if you believe your truth is the only truth.
That basically you're going to have a Christian version of the Taliban and terrorism?
For fifty years, the big enemy against our way of life was atheistic Communism, so the average American saw secularism and atheism as attached to a hostile force. Now the forces arrayed against our way of life are religious–militant fundamentalism. Now the average person in our society attaches the idea of religion with being antidemocratic. That has really gained a lot of traction with the average non-Christian in a place such as New York since 9/11.
What do you say to that?
I think the answer is rooted in my first chapter of The Reason for God where I respond to the statement that if you say Jesus is the only way, that makes you narrow. I try to show that everybody has exclusive beliefs; that if you say that all religions are relative, then that is an absolute belief. Everyone who makes any claims in the public square is basing them on unprovable faith assumptions about human nature and spiritual reality and therefore, frankly, everyone is basically exclusive in their truth-claims. Everyone has religious underpinnings to what they're saying.
In your chapter on resurrection, I like especially your comment: "I sympathize with a person who says, 'So what if I can't think of an alternate explanation? The resurrection just couldn't happen.' Let's not forget, however, that first-century people felt exactly the same way. They found the resurrection just as inconceivable as you do. The only way anyone embraced the resurrection back then was by letting the evidence challenge and change their worldview, their view of what was possible. They had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you. Yet the evidence, both of the eyewitness accounts and the changed lives of Christ's followers, was overwhelming to reconsider." How important is it for us to say, let's not start with what's relevant; let's let the resurrection create its own relevance and overwhelm objections?
There are three things going on in that paragraph. One is I'm trying to strike a blow against "chronological snobbery," according to C. S. Lewis– this idea that somehow we feel ancient people were superstitious, and they didn't have problems with all this religious stuff, and we do; so I'm trying to say that they had as big a problem.
Secondly, it's a way of saying: I don't care whether you think this is relevant or not. If this happened, it changes the way in which you've got to live. That's one of the reasons why the resurrection is a great way to show people what Christianity is about. It's not about self-improvement. It's about God breaking into history and now I have to adjust to him. It's not as if he's going to adjust to meet my needs. You now have to adjust to deal with the fact that he's here.
However, the resurrection also is an awfully hopeful thing. On the one hand, you're being tough, and you're saying you've got to believe it because it's true, and we're not here to meet your needs. And yet the resurrection gives us a hope. It's hope for the world. It's not just going to heaven someday; it means this world matters. So it's actually both a stick and a carrot. The carrot is that if this is true, then we don't have to be afraid about the future; God is really going to do this. But if the stick is that this is true, then you've got to change. You can't just expect God to come and meet your needs. It works both ways.
The whole idea is that you have two worldviews: The world is just sort of giving in to entropy and ultimate catastrophe versus this world is going to be transfigured one day and the resurrection is the first down payment on that. Which worldview actually affirms and gives meaning to our lives?
It gives you a basis for caring about justice and things like that. But the reason the resurrection is so wonderful is that it is hopeful and, at the same time, it is challenging. Because if it's true, that now you finally have this fulfillment of your deepest desire, which is to see a world in which sickness and death will be gone, and disease and injustice and poverty will be gone–that's the good news. But that also means now I can't live the way I want, because Jesus is Lord and the resurrection shows that Jesus is Lord. It's a one-two punch.
How do you explain the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins in a culture that looks at this as a holdover from primitive crude cults of blood sacrifice?
I was very, very careful here, but in the earlier part of the book, I defend the idea of judgment and hell. One of the chapters is, "I can't believe in a God who would judge people and send them to hell." I make my case that if you care about a world that is unjust, how could you even want a God who includes and loves everyone? I make my case there for the wrath of God and for the fact that anyone who loves gets angry. Because God loves his own glory and loves his creation, he gets angry at what destroys his creation and what dishonors his glory. If you're a loving person, you will get mad. If you never get mad, you're not a loving person.
When I get to the cross, I've found there is this caricature of Jesus as the Son whom the Father crucifies–child abuse, etc. What I do in this chapter is stress the idea of unity of God, because if you don't, you do have this idea of a helpless son and a vindictive father. Instead, you say it was God substituting himself, not just the Father substituting the Son. Both of those are true, but I'm just trying to get my foot in the door with an unbeliever. I just think it's easier for them to see immediately that God substituted himself. That's a John Stott statement: God substituted himself.
Westminster Seminary professor Robert Strimple rocked my world with something he once said, with tears in his eyes, "Please don't ever get out there and preach John 3:16 as if you have an angry abusive father who is taking his anger out on his son. God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."
Yes, and I absolutely stay true to that in that chapter. There's another chapter at the very end that I call "The Dance of God" in which I bring out the Trinity and the fact that God is three, not just one. But in the chapter on the cross, I stress the oneness.
I also give the example of forgiveness; that if you forgive someone who has wronged you, you have to absorb the debt rather than make the person that wronged you pay it. I use a very simple illustration: if somebody knocks over your lamp and ruins it, you can ask them to pay for it or you have to forgive them; but if you forgive them, you have to replace the lamp yourself. I've found this has worked very well with non-Christians. When a wrong has been done, either the perpetrator pays for it or the forgiver pays for it, but the debt does not go away. So when someone asks, "Why can't God just forgive us? Why does he need a sacrifice?" I say that there's no such thing as just forgiving. When you forgive even small things like a lamp, you absorb the debt or you make the perpetrator pay, but the debt doesn't go into thin air. What you see on the cross is God absorbing the debt for our sin. This is something you do even in the smallest of transactions when someone wrongs you, so you shouldn't be surprised that this is just the way it is.
So in that chapter, I stress the unity of God and I stress the debt. As you know, there are other atonement models–biblical models and metaphors and other ways of doing it–but, at least for my secular listeners, that's my way in, and later on I can fill them in with the rest of the whole counsel of God.
Do you find in your ministry that justification is an alien term that people just can't get their arms around?
No, I work awfully hard on that, because I love to preach justification. And it's true that I can only go so far in the book, and therefore I don't actually treat justification much in there.
It comes through throughout.
That's a good way of putting it. Somebody once asked J. I. Packer why there wasn't a chapter on election and the sovereignty of God in Knowing God. And he said: Well, you know what? It's like salt. You don't have your peas and your mashed potatoes and your steak, and then your salt. You put the salt on everything, so it's there–it's just scattered through everything else. So, he said, I didn't have a chapter on that, but it's all through there. It's the same with justification. I actually think the idea of righteousness, though, is something you can get across to people. As long as you work on the right relationship, it's not that hard.
Having been a pastor for so long, you have seen all kinds of tragedies– being a pastor during 9/11 and also just seeing what any pastor in America sees in any given week. How do you counsel somebody who's struggling with evil and suffering, not just existentially but really wrestling with how this could possibly allow for God?
The first thing I do pastorally is say: I want you to know that God is pretty patient with us when we are angry and upset over this subject. Psalm 39 and Psalm 88 end on a terrible note, with the psalmist basically saying to God, "Look away from me so I can have a little bit of peace before I die." So it's obviously very despondent. Derek Kidner, in his little book on the Psalms, says that the presence of such psalms shows the patience of God with us. He says, "He knows how men speak when they are desperate." That's a wonderful statement. The fact that they're in the canon shows that God says, "Look, I know that sometimes people pray and pray, and they don't land on their feet like most of the psalmists do." Kidner says, "I want you to know that you're not saved by your patience, and you're not saved by your perfect prayers and perfect attitude. You're saved by what Jesus Christ has done for you. So if you're struggling with this and feeling kind of guilty–like, 'I should trust God, but I'm mad at him, I don't understand'– he's patient with you; you don't have to have perfect feelings." They're kind of used to ministers sitting there listening and then giving the right theological answers; the impression they get is, "Unless I have my attitude just right, God's going to get me."
I'm actually talking about justification, saying that we're not saved by right attitudes. But then I do what I do in the book. I say there's a philosophical answer to the problem of evil: if you have a God big enough to be mad at for not stopping evil, then you have a God big enough to have reasons why he hasn't stopped evil that you can't conceive of. In other words, if you've got a God who's that infinite, that omniscient, that he's big enough that you're mad at him for not stopping it, then he's got to be able to have reasons for letting these things go that you can't think of–you can't have it both ways. I know that's a philosophical judo move, and I know it's not really doing anything other than to say that you can't disprove the existence of God from evil. The premise is that, because I can't think of any reason why God would let this happen, therefore there can't be any. Look at that syllogism–that can't be, and because I can't think of a reason therefore there can't be any–that's a non sequitur. But then you very quickly have to say that in other faiths, God is apart from suffering. All we know is that although we don't know what reasons God does have for allowing evil and suffering to continue, it can't be that he doesn't love us or care, or he wouldn't have actually, through the incarnation, become enmeshed in it himself. Whatever the reasons are, it can't be that he doesn't care, because he's proven that by the incarnation and the cross. And that's what we've got in Christianity–not an answer, but a personal involvement.
So the gospel's not just about one question that we have in our existence, but we go back to the gospel for all of these big questions that we have.
Don Carson has a paper on the Gospel Coalition website where he looks at 1 Corinthians and shows that every time Paul deals with a problem–whether it's ethnic strife, or questions of sex and marriage, or partisan strife inside the church– he uses the gospel on everything. He doesn't just say, "Here's a rule" or "Here's something out of the law." Obviously, adultery is wrong because of the law. But adultery is also wrong, because in the gospel Christ is our spouse; he was completely faithful to us, and now we need to be faithful. Don shows how the gospel affects absolutely everything.
I encourage people, if they haven't already, to get The Prodigal God because you especially emphasize that point. It's a parable that a lot of us are familiar with–the parable of the Prodigal Son–but it's really God who becomes flesh for us, and all of us elder brothers who are in as great a need of redemption as the prodigal. Can you give us a little bit of taste for why you wrote The Prodigal God?
Again, in a sense, this is a way of trying to get the idea of justification across–the idea that both the younger brother, who is an irreligious person, and the elder brother, who is a religious person, are equally alienated from God, just as the brothers are alienated from the father. As different as they look on the surface, underneath they really don't love the father; they were just trying to get his money. One person tried to get the money and get control of his own life by being very bad; and the other one tried to get control of the money by being very good. This is a way of understanding that the most moral, religious people–those who think they're saved by their works–and the most irreligious, licentious people–those who are out there living any way they want–are both actually trying to be their own saviors. They're not letting Jesus be their savior. As different as they are, they're exactly the same.
This is my way of deconstructing legalism, which then makes justification the only answer. I've found that in New York, even though we don't have a lot of legalists around, the average person who has rejected Christianity is a person who cannot distinguish Christianity from legalism. And so unless I deconstruct legalism, if I just say, "Invite Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, and then live for him," they're going to think I'm simply inviting them into a moral paradigm. Unless I actually tear apart the legalistic paradigm, they're not going to know what I'm inviting them into. I actually now say to pastors, "You can't just say, 'Receive Jesus as your personal savior'; you have to actually do a law-gospel distinction." This is my version, by the way, of law-gospel. It's my way of saying, "Do you see the difference between the law and the gospel?" That's what the whole book is. It's basically taking the parable as a way of getting across, in a very vivid way, the difference between law and gospel that a seeker would understand right away, and that a Christian who is confused would understand. What brings revival is when Christians–who are still living in a kind of moralistic paradigm–get the gospel of grace, they understand it, and all that spiritual deadness that comes from the insecurity and moralism of their life falls off. Seekers see the gospel more clearly, and they become Christians– then you have a revival.
And that's what we need to be communicating week in and week out, not just assuming that people already know it.
Yes, and in fact weirdly enough, several people in my church read your book Christless Christianity and The Prodigal God together. They said, "Hey, these two books are saying the same thing." I find this kind of interesting, though I have read your book and you say a whole lot more. My book is very short and is trying to say just one thing. But they understood that the core of the two books is really the same.
Thank you for helping us figure out that wherever we are–whether we're in a nursing home in South Dakota, in a Midwestern church, in Southern California, or in New York City–the gospel is the same. People's deepest needs are the same.
