Tim Keller Talks Apologetics and Evangelism with CT

Some friends and I had the pleasure of attending Tim Keller's Veritas Forum lecture at Northwestern University, part of his The Reason for God book tour. While he was in town he sat down with Christianity Today assistant editor Susan Wunderink. You can read the interview here.

Since my last two posts have dealt with marketing approaches to evangelism, I took particular note of what Keller sees as a major flaw in this way of thinking:

Marketing is about felt needs. You find the need and then you say Christianity will meet that need. You have to adapt to people's questions. And if people are asking a question, you want to show how Jesus is the answer. But at a certain point, you have to go past their question to the other things that Christianity says. Otherwise you're just scratching where they itch. So marketing is showing how Christianity meets the need, and I think the gospel is showing how Christianity is the truth.

C. S. Lewis says somewhere not to believe in Christianity because it's relevant or exciting or personally satisfying. Believe it because it's true. And if it's true, it eventually will be relevant, exciting, and personally satisfying. But there will be many times when it's not relevant, exciting, and personally satisfying. To be a Christian is going to be very, very hard. So unless you come to it simply because it's really the truth, you really won't live the Christian life, and you won't get to the excitement and to the relevance and all that other stuff.

And here's a nugget for emergents and other skeptics concerning the role of rationality in leading people to faith:

Perhaps there was a day in which Christians thought that you evangelized largely through intellectual argument, but now I hear people saying, "No, it's all personal. If you're going to win people to Christ you just have to be authentic. You have to just reach out to them personally. You can't do the rational." In other words, Christians are saying the rational isn't part of evangelism. The fact is, people are rational. They do have questions. You have to answer those questions.  Don't get the impression that I think that the rational aspect takes you all the way there. But there's too much emphasis on just the personal now.  Maybe you know I'm a 57-year-old man. You'd say, "Of course you'd say that." But I'm knee deep in 20-somethings. So it's not like I don't know how people are today.