We are delighted to have a preacher some of you might have heard before on the show: Tim Keller. He joins us to discuss his (excellent) new book, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical.
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More Tim Keller please
Keller addresses some important issues here. For a while, we’ve recognized the glaring shortcomings of the evidence-demands-a-verdict types of apologetics. That said, the “biblical worldview” approach doesn’t offer much of an improvement. In most cases, the “worldview” approach devolves into a purely subjectivist defense of the evangelical subculture’s talking points, especially on issues concerning human origins and social practices. In this book, Keller seems to point to a Polanyi-inspired apologetic that rejects strict evidentiary approaches and the purely subjectivist approaches.
Even so, I wonder how relevant this is. Are people staying away from church because they just haven’t heard the rightly nuanced defense of the Christian faith? Or are they staying away because evangelical churches embody a subculture that rarely achieves anything more than defending the social hegemony of the bourgeois values of the white middle class? Consider that Keller heads up the Gospel Coalition–an organization that believes that “biblical gender roles” are more central to Christian orthodoxy than the Trinity, that serves up a near-endless buffet of dishonest articles on its website, and that routinely blocks people who proffer even the mildest critiques of its pronouncements. For example, I was banned from commenting on the TGC website after I pointed out several factual inaccuracies in an article on the history of no-fault divorce. Several other commenters pointed out the same inaccuracies. But instead of fixing the inaccuracies in the article, Keller’s henchmen deleted the critical comments and banned me (and presumably others) from commenting further. Jonathan Merritt ran a good column some months ago concerning TGC’s morally questionable conduct on various online and social media platforms.
Keller can write all of the books he wants. Even so, my opinion of him is going to be formed primarily by the conduct of the organizations he heads (The Gospel Coalition) and by the company he keeps (Eric Metaxas). So, despite how cogent the words of his book may be, I still have difficulty seeing Keller himself as anything more than a sham artist. Besides, better books aren’t going to bring cultural elites into the pews of evangelical churches. Most cultural elites stay away from evangelical churches because evangelicalism is largely a social embodiment of a bourgeois culture that views them as the enemy.
I agree with most of what you say here. As a Christian, I too stopped going to church mostly because I don’t consider myself an evangelical anymore. If anything I now believe in ultimate reconciliation of all of humanity (don’t know if are familiar with that). Having said that I really struggle with the moralism and self-righteousness that pervades a lot of the Christian churches of today in the United states. You are right about the evangelical subculture mostly defends social hegemony of white middle class values. I find the Christian Post site defends that social hegemony a lot. I mean they have articles on the defense of capitalism and against socialism. I as a Christian have a hard time being a follower of such, so I am somewhat of an outlier being that I tend to fall more on the eastern orthodox type of faith and I have come to embrace uncertainty in this life, and the we are not God and we don’t have all of the answers.
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