What Would Keller Read?

Westminster Bookstore is running a sale on titles on Tim Keller's summer reading list.

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.

Cornelius Van Til: The Man and His Influence

John Muether answers questions about his new biography, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman at Westminster Bookstore's blog. You can read the book's introduction here.

Another interesting interview with a presuppositionalist is this one with Tim Keller and Monergism about Keller's The Reason for God. In it Keller recommends the writings of John Frame (one of Van Til's students) on apologetics and theology "for giving somebody the basic framework for what I do in my book."

Tim Keller on Implicit Religion

Some say [religion] is a form of belief in God. But that would not fit Zen Buddhism, which does not really believe in God at all. Some say it is belief in the supernatural. But that does not fit Hinduism, which does not believe in a supernatural realm beyond the material world, but only a spiritual reality within the empirical. What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing. For example, some think that this material world is all there is, that we are here by accident and when we die we just rot, and therefore the important thing is to choose to do what makes you happy and not let others impose their beliefs on you. Notice that though this is not an explicit, "organized" religion, it contains a master narrative, an account about the meaning of life along with a recommendation for how to live based on that account of things.

Some call this a "worldview" while others call it a "narrative identity." In either case it is a set of faith-assumptions about the nature of things. It is an implicit religion. Broadly understood, faith in some view of the world and human nature informs everyone's life. Everyone lives and operates out of some narrative identity, whether it is thought out and reflected upon or not. All who say "You ought to do this" or "You shouldn't do that" reason out of such an implicit moral and religious position. Pragmatists say that we should leave our deeper worldviews behind and find consensus about "what works"-- but our view of what works is determined by (to use a Wendell Berry title) what we think people are for. Any picture of happy human life that "works" is necessarily informed by deep-seated beliefs about the purpose of human life. Even the most secular pragmatists come to the table with deep commitments and narrative accounts of what it means to be human (The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, 15,16).

Related Posts:
Tim Keller on Leading the Secular to Christ

I Believe in Matter Almighty

Stem Cells and the Myth of Religious Neutrality

Forcing My Religion

Tim Keller and First Things

First Things' Anthony Sacramone interviews Tim Keller about his new book, The Reason for God (already #18 on the New York Times bestseller list (HT: Steve McCoy).

Gospel Coalition Interviews

Interviews with D. A. Carson, John Piper, Tim Keller, and Mark Driscoll, in which they discuss the formation and mission of the Gospel Coalition, the state of American preaching, causes of fragmentation in American evangelicalism, and a number of other important topics, are now available at the Gospel Coalition website. (HT: Between Two Worlds)

Technorati Tags: Gospel Coalition, Christianity, evangelicalism, D. A. Carson, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, John Piper, theology

Tim Keller on Leading the Secular to Christ

Since reading about Dr. Tim Keller’s ministry in the New York Times (and blogging about it here), I’ve gone directly to the source (thanks to Steve McCoy's impressive resource list). So far, I've listened to three of his sermons and read a few of his writings much to my enjoyment and benefit. I want to point to one article I found especially insightful concerning apologetics and evangelism in our postmodern ethos. It’s called “Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs: Leading the Secular to Christ” (pdf).


Dr. Keller defines defeater beliefs as a culture’s “common sense consensus beliefs that automatically make Christianity seem implausible to people.” Because these deeply-entrenched beliefs are assumed to be true, people hastily dismiss the Christian faith since it contradicts them.


If, for example, a culture is convinced that all religions are true, Christianity’s exclusive claims are quickly rejected as ludicrous. Implausibility structures are culturally relative, meaning that “Christianity is disbelieved in one culture for totally opposite reasons it is disbelieved in another.” This is an important point highlighting the sociological dimension of fallen humanity’s suppression of the truth. While it’s accurate to say that depravity is ultimately and universally responsible for unbelief, the “course of this world” that the unregenerate follow is not monolithic but varies across historical period, geography, people group, etc.

Recognizing the inevitable presence of implausibility structures and how they stand as barriers to the gospel has important implications for how we seek to commend the faith to postmodern hearers. Some Christians insist that we abandon argumentation as a means of gospel persuasion and, instead, rely on the apologetic power of Christian community and ministries of mercy to those outside the church. Keller’s reaction to this line of thought is worthy of quoting at length:

"I couldn’t agree more that post-modern people come to Christ through process, through relationships, through mini-decisions, through ‘trying Christianity on.’ They are pragmatic rather than abstract in their reasoning, etc. But the books that are against any arguments at all seem to miss the fact that the extreme pragmatism of non-Christians today is part of a non-Christian world-view. Our post-enlightenment culture believes what has been called expressive individualism. That is – ‘it is true if works for me.’ This obviously is based on the view that truth and right-or-wrong is something I discover within my own self and consciousness.

What then of the claim that ‘post-modern people don’t want arguments – they just want to see if it works for them’? All right – as with any form of contextualization, let us as evangelists enter – adapt partially – to the culture of expressive individualism. Let us show them the reality of changed lives. Let us use narratives rather than long strings of logic. But at some point you must also challenge the sovereignty of individual consciousness. Jesus is Lord, not my personal consciousness. At some point, the idea that 'it is true if and only if it works for me' must be challenged. We have to say: 'Ultimately that is correct - in the very, very long run, obeying the truth will 'work' and bring you to glory and disobeying the truth will 'not work' and bring you to ruin. But in the short run (like - even throughout all the rest of your life!) obeying the truth might lead to ostracism, persecution, or other suffering.'"

Keller goes on to explain that sharing the gospel involves a two part approach, a negative apologetic dimension that consists of deconstructing the reigning cultural implausibility structure, and a positive aspect of sharing the gospel. This communication must be done in a fashion so as to connect the gospel message to what he calls the culture's base-line narratives. He writes, "In short, you have to show in line with the culture's own (best) aspirations, hopes, and convictions that its own cultural story won't be resolved or have a 'happy ending' outside of Christ."

Keller advocates presenting the gospel using a three-layered approach composed of these two aspects. The layers are as follows:

a) Brief gospel summary. First, the gospel must be presented briefly but so vividly and attractively (and so hooked in to the culture's base-line cultural narratives) that the listener is virtually compelled to say 'It would be wonderful if that were true, but it can't be!' Until he or she comes to that position, you can't work on the implausibility structure! The listener must have motivation to hear you out. That is what defeaters do - they make people super-impatient with any case for Christianity. Unless they find a presentation of Christ surprisingly attractive and compelling (and stereo-type breaking) their eyes will simply glaze over when you try to talk to them.


b) Dismantle plausibility structure. ....The leading defeaters must be dealt with clearly and quickly but convincingly. Defeaters are dealt with when the person feels you have presented the objection to Christianity in a clearer and stronger way than they could have done it.


c) Longer explanation of the person and work of Christ. Now, if people find you have at least undermined the defeaters in a listener's mind, you can now return to talking at greater length about creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. If you try to do apologetics before you pull off a quick, attractive presentation of Christ, people's eyes will glaze over and they will become bored. But if you try to do a very lengthy explanation of the meaning of Christ's cross and resurrection before you convincingly deal with the defeaters, they won't listen to you either.

Keller illustrates how this approach looks interacting with two pervasive Western cultural concerns : 1) personal freedom and identity and 2) unity and diversity. He then gives brief but helpful examples of deconstructing six dominant defeaters in Western civilization: 1) Christian exclusivism in light of religious pluralism, 2) evil and suffering, 3) the ethical restrictiveness of Christianity, 4) the record of Christians, 5) the angry God, and 6) the unreliable Bible.

The article concludes with points the unbeliever who's ready to explore the Christian faith must consider, including this one about doubt: "Your doubts are really beliefs, and you can't avoid betting your life and destiny on some kind of belief in God and the universe. Non-commitment is impossible. Faith-acts are inevitable." What Keller is stressing here is that there is no such thing as ideological neutrality. Objections to the Christian faith don't spring from nowhere but are expressions of alternative systems of belief which are themselves in need of a defense.

Part of our evangelistic task, then, is to help our hearers become more aware of their own presuppositions. We must ask them the same question Cornelius Van Til did in his "Why I Believe in God": "Will you not go into the basement of your own experience to see what has been gathering there while you were busy here and there with the surface inspection of life? You may be greatly surprised at what you find there." Then, if we are prepared, we can take their hand and lead them downstairs.