Making Sense of God

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Collin Hansen
James Eglinton and Michael Keller and I all work together in the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, which was launched earlier this year as a ministry of the gospel coalition. And you’ve, you’ve seen in all of these lectures, and it’s been so wonderful to learn from our Dutch speakers and of how these things work out in their own ministries in their own contexts. But what we’re what we’re all trying to do, we’ve what you’ve seen so far at this conference is, is all of the different ways that the three of us have learned so much from Tim, but also how we are undertaking by the guidance, we pray of the Holy Spirit to be able to build on his work together for the future. I also want to say, just a thank you, I gave a welcome in the beginning, from the gospel coalition’s leadership in the United States. But I wanted to say a special thank you to case and to William, in particular, for all of the amazing work, I have a little bit of experience planning conferences. And so I know just a brief bit of, of how much time you have put in this how much your family has supported you in this and simply put, we’re all here because of that labor. And I just wanted to say thank you before, before we proceed.

So I’ll be talking on the background to what I think is probably Tim Keller’s most helpful book for moving forward in terms of apologetics, and mission in this increasingly post Christian era. I was challenged to be able to pronounce in Dutch the the version of making sense of God, I will not take that challenge. I will simply say, Tim Keller, there we go. There are only two copies of this book. I’ll put the one back. Well, only one or somebody already bought the other one. Okay. All right. This is the last one in Dutch. Okay, there we go. So hopefully I can help to explain to you where what the significance of this of this book, and what it calls for going forward. As soon as Tim Keller published his best selling apologetics book, The reason for God in 2008, he knew it was already obsolete. Even by the time he published it. The reason for God I was I actually did not believe this. But the reason for God does not even devote a single chapter to sexuality. There’s not a chapter on sexuality in that book. But by the time 2008 had come and the book was released, sexuality was just about the only objection to Christianity, at least in the United States. And I know elsewhere, but especially in the United States that many skeptics wanted to discuss it was the one issue they were preoccupied with. But by Tim’s own admission, that was not even the books biggest shortcoming because even the objections addressed in the reason for God still a good book, by the way, even the objections in the reason for God assumed a level of awareness and interest in Christianity that is quickly eroding across much of the West, more recently in the United States, but over a long period of time, in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe. Tim Keller did not discover the shortcomings in the reason for God from talking with readers primarily because they were so enthusiastic people like me about the book that they put it on the New York Times bestseller list, but he realized the problems in his own research and reading, which had begun to chart a different course around the year 2004. It was the year that Keller joined the dogwood Fellowship, which was organized by the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter. If you’re familiar with the English term culture war, then you know James Davison Hunter because he invented that term in the 1990s. So this fellowship the dogwood fellowship included one other pastor and two business leaders and their conversations resulted in hunters ground breaking ground groundbreaking book to change the world. The irony, tragedy and possibility of Christianity in the late modern world and yes, William has a copy back there. I I don’t think he’s selling that’s probably from his own library. But it’s one of the one thing I love about the Dutch edition of my book is that our wonderful publishers put in a list that I created of the most significant books that influence Tim Keller. They put that bibliography in the back, and James Davison hunters book is in there. So in this dogwood fellowship, Hunter shared unpublished handouts, and papers as Keller gained a vision for cultural change and renewal through this network of friends. When we set out to launch the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, we are we have been trying to emulate this kind of model. And as a student of revival, Keller sensed something of what it felt to be like, it felt to be part of the Clapham sect. This was William Wilberforce, his group in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the things that Hunter taught me, and has been significant in my life, the year was 2016. And you may remember some things that happened politically in that year. And I was asking the sociologist about those questions, and he stopped me and he said, I think you misunderstand, you act like my job is to tell you what the weather is, whether it’s sunny or rainy outside, but I study the climate. The bigger long term changes, that’s how I understand culture, interpret culture. And that switch from weather, to climate has been transformative for me, and has helped to shape what we’re trying to do very much in this conference. And exactly what Michael has just done in his previous talk. What happened here is that Hunter taught his understanding of cultures, deep structures. And through Hunter Keller was introduced, you’ve heard some of these names already, to the big four. These critics of secular modernity. Not all of them have angelical Christians are reformed or, or even identifying as Christians, but they are Charles Taylor, Alistair McIntyre, Philip reef, and Robert Bellah, who became staples in Keller’s thinking, writing and teaching. And they provoked Keller has a deeper analysis of the problems that were besetting the post Christian West in his politics and in its culture. So much of Christian apologetics. This is what we’re trying to help to change through the Keller center. But much of Christian apologetics including in some aspects by Tim’s admission, the reason for God operates within the confines of the Enlightenment. The Christian so what Christians do is they offer rational explanations and provide empirical evidence for biblical events and claims. But if you may not, you may not have noticed the Enlightenment is under serious critique, and revision and skepticism. If you If you doubt then you can travel up to Edinburgh and have a walk around town with James Eglinton. And, and he can show you the ways that these cultural narratives that Michael have talked about are competing with one another, and undermining enlightenment assumptions. So the question before us then is what if the Enlightenment has failed? In its aims? What if it’s a dead end for Western culture? What if the Enlightenment can’t deliver meaning, identity, purpose, and justice that Westerners continue to demand from our Christian heritage but without the Christian resources to provide those answers to the secular narratives that so called secular narratives or cultural narratives that Michael has talked with us about? Tim was fond of quoting a cultural observer, and said that the essential problem we face in the West is that we have all as the narrative goes, we have all descended from apes. Therefore, we should love one another. It doesn’t follow. You have descended from apes, therefore, you must love one another. The science and the moral imperative do not follow. And yet we’re still trying to live in habit, both cultural narratives of scientific progress, but also the pursuit of justice. It does not follow without Christianity. Western secularism derived its values of tolerance and fairness from Christianity. But objective and empirical science and reason cannot sustain moral idealism. So the essential problem we have in this post Enlightenment period is that the West wants to be relativistic and moralistic, at the same time. Do whatever you want. And you better do the right things or will cancel you. They don’t, they don’t work together, relativistic and moralistic at the same time. This is what these critics, Taylor McIntyre reef and Bella have been warning about, for decades. Another influence on Tim Keller’s ministry, the sociologist Charles Smith describes the post enlightenment dilemma as a spiritual project in pursuit of a sacred good. Yes, in a post Enlightenment period, we are still pursuing religion, a new narrative that can hold everything together. So listen to this. This is a longer quote from Christian Smith about this dilemma. He starts off by again describing this is our moment this is our narrative to make everything new, to leave behind the past,

to be unbound by any tradition. Michael’s already talked about these so much, to enjoy maximum choice, to be free from any constraint, to be able to buy whatever one can afford to live. However, one desires, that is the guiding vision of modernity is a spiritual, spiritual project. It is spiritual, not merely ideological or cultural, because it names what is sacrosanct, and ultimate concern, a vision for what is most worthy in a sense that transcends any individual life. In other words, the stories we tell in our children’s films, to guide our lives to catechize. Our young people, it is spiritual because it speaks to people’s deepest person. Personal subjectivity is their most transcendent vision of goodness, their definition of ultimate fulfillment. It is spiritual because as a deep cultural structure, it occupies a position in the modern West homologous with salvation in God. Given this is how our culture defines salvation. You follow these rules, you live these narratives, and you achieve salvation. That’s this narrative that was prized in so similar homologous to salvation and God prized in the pre modern Christendom, that modernity broke apart. And it is spiritual because by being sacred, our secularism in the West is sacred. He says because it is worth protecting, defending, policing, fighting for perhaps dying for even killing for that is a spiritual project. The Enlightenment then in our post Enlightenment period, continues to seek to supplant Christianity with a rival spirituality. So the question before us is how can the West returned to or in some ways experience for the first time the genuine biblical gospel? That is the question that Keller set out to answer for nearly the last 20 years? And now the question he leaves with us, going forward. Every three years the Oxford intercollegiate Christian Union, they host a six day mission where they seek to evangelize some 20,000 students. And in 2012, Tim Keller gave these talks that became his book, short book encounters with Jesus unexpected answers to life’s biggest questions. What’s the lesson 12 2015 He tried something different. And he tested what he’d been learning through the dogwood fellowship from Taylor and reef and McIntyre and Bella. Stellar spoke in the evenings on these cultural narratives, meaning, identity, justice. And what he saw was a much more encouraging result in 2015 Compared to 2002 2012, and it was actually on this spot on the spot in the middle of a q&a session in the second mission, that Keller can received one of his most memorable illustrations. Good news for all of us. We don’t have to talk about it because Michael already did the Anglo Saxon warrior. It was that illustration that he used there. Now I had some, some young men asked me yesterday, you know, how did Tim Keller address homosexuality? Well, it was by talking about the underlying assumptions of identity. Only through these assumptions we make about identity. Do you have these questions then about homosexuality. And that response, you can find it in. If you want to read it for yourself, you can find it in Tim’s book, which James has already discussed with us, but preaching, communicating faith in an age of skepticism which also came out the same year 2016. Now what Keller was getting at there was already a concept. I don’t think Michael use the term. But what he was describing for us was what Robert Bellah had termed back in the 1980s, expressive individualism, expressive individualism, this is 1985 Robert Belas habits of the heart, individualism and commitment in American life says this expressive individualism holds, that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition, that should unfold or be expressed, if individuality is to be realized. says all the way back in 1985. So individuality is the goal, the stated the ostensible goal. But as you’ve heard Michael explain, with the Anglo Saxon warrior illustration, identity actually forms in community, it actually forms in community, and community has shaped which values are acceptable, and can contribute to our identity. And so this is one of the most important aspects certainly of this talk. But what we’re trying to get at this tension between expression and community, this tension between the desire to express our individuality, but to not be rejected, and to fit into our community, that is the dynamite underneath the enlightenment, implosion, the Enlightenment has no way to bring these things together. And the post Enlightenment period has not found a way to integrate the individual with the communal and says, Listen to this than from Robert Bellah. Starts with a big statement, what we fear above all, what we fear above all, and what keeps the new world the post enlightenment world, powerless to be born, is that if we give up our dream of private success, for more genuinely integrated community, we will be abandoning our separation and individuation, collapsing into dependence and tyranny. Okay, so we cannot give up our individualism, because then we’ll be controlled. We can’t be controlled by others, we can’t have other people telling us what to do. Here’s what Bella says In response, though, what we find hard to see is that it is the extreme fragmentation of the modern world that really threatens our individuation that what is best in our separation and individuation, our sense of dignity and autonomy as persons requires a new integration, if it is to be sustained. Again, in simple terms, we all feel as though we have to be an individual, the individual erodes the communal. And we think we can’t give into the community because we’ll lose the individual. But the problem is, it is precisely our refusal to find the boundaries, proper boundaries of community that actually threatens us from losing our identity. Ask yourself the simple question, does the internet make people more difficult to control? Or easier to control? I’ve asked myself that question a number of times. And I think actually the the answer is that it makes it easier to control and to manipulate other people. Despite the individuality of it. It actually makes communal control much easier. Just look at the Chinese regime. If you’re wondering if that’s true So Keller’s Oxford talks then contributed to his book Making Sense of God, an invitation to the skeptical. Now this book has not been as popular as the reason for God. But it is the apologetics book that he would have written in 2008 If he knew what he knew later, and I find that the book remains fresh, even forward thinking for us today as it exposes the assumptions behind the objections to Christianity. So, again, you’ve already heard that just from Michael about how we’re trying at the Keller center, and more broadly, to be able to help teach this and to apply it for the church.

Now, Charles Taylor, none of the one of these four major influences did not appear in Keller’s preaching at Redeemer until 2013 2013 is five years after this Canadian philosopher, published his most influential his seminal work, a secular age, killer read Taylor’s book twice line by line over two years. Thanks to Taylor, he began to see why so many deeply secular people do not respond to traditional evangelism and apologetics. Michael is referred to this. According to Taylor, secularism does not only mean that people stop believing in God, in fact, what secularism means and Taylor’s understanding our view of God, for all of us, believers and non believers becomes thinner, God becomes more remote, we don’t need to obey Him or depend on him moment by moment. In a pre enlightenment view, we exist for God, and we serve him but in the modern view, God only exists for our benefit. As a result, for example, one of the entry points of engaging people with the gospel is that suffering. In this post enlightenment understanding becomes unbearable. It is inexplicable, there are no resources to be able to deal with it. We can’t trust God with any purpose beyond our understanding. So Keller relied on Taylor to puncture this self assured, self confident secularism. And Taylor described our world as cross pressured between belief and doubt. So there are some who may pose as never doubting God’s existence and others pose as they never doubted God’s non existence. But really, the rest of us fall somewhere in the middle, either believing in God but doubting from time to time, or doubting God, but actually believing from time to time. The simplest way to put this now is that the need for apologetics is urgent. Those exact way that Michael has has modeled for us, because all of us, your children, your grandchildren, your neighbors, as they come to faith, they come to faith necessarily in this culture, because it’s so cross pressured by secularism through doubting. So when we’re doing apologetics and evangelism now, especially through these cultural narratives, we’re doing something that Tim Keller learned from Martyn Lloyd Jones. We are edifying Christians, IE as Michael described, it inoculating them. We are edifying the believers, as we are evangelizing the non Christians. We’re doing that together at the same time. That’s apologetics not the Christians who have all the answers, telling the people who are clueless, but Christians who themselves are beset by many doubts, walking alongside our non Christians who are cross pressured themselves, neighbors wondering what this is all for. Talking about these cultural narratives and showing them against the alternative of the gospel, and how much more beautiful and meaningful and explanatory the gospel of Jesus Christ is. By acknowledging doubt, Keller actually cracked open the door for belief. He said this, The premise is since none of us can prove or disprove our deepest beliefs, your deepest moral convictions about right and wrong your deepest convictions about what people should be doing with their lives. Belief whether there’s a God or whether there’s no God. You can’t prove God. You can’t totally disprove God. That means all of us have beliefs we can’t prove and yet you can’t live without those beliefs. So Keller in this way modeled how to relate, even sympathize. That’s why this book’s subtitle is an invitation to the skeptical, even sympathizing with the skeptic forming identity. This is so important when you consider the significant rise of anxiety, especially with young people forming identity under the terms of expressive individualism is crushing. Michael talked with us about the differences between a received in an achieved identity. We have told our young people that they cannot depend on any received identity, they must achieve all of it themselves. And we wonder why they feel so desperate, and why they feel so, lonely. Keller in making sense of God offers this hope of the gospel. He says if you believe the gospel and all its remarkable claims about Jesus, and what he has done for you and who you are in Him, then nothing that happens in this world can actually get it your identity. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to believe this. Consider what a sweeping difference it would make in your life. So with Jesus Keller would say you get invincible confidence in your worth. But just like Michael told us about freedom, you have to trade something in. You can get invincible confidence in your worth. But you have to trade in your autonomous independence. You have to give it up, and you’ll be required to serve God at the center of the universe. Here’s Keller again from making sense of God. Through faith in the cross, we get a new foundation for an identity that both humbles us out of our egoism, yet is so infallibly secure and love that we are enabled to embrace rather than exclude those who are different. Only a year, after Tim Keller published making sense of God, he faced the challenge of how he would relate to others in their hostility in their difference toward him. He got to test his own identity in Christ. If you want to learn more about this situation, you can talk to one of the experts here James Eglinton. This came when Tim Keller was awarded the Kiper prize for excellence in Reformed theology and public witness at Princeton Theological Seminary. But then Tim lost the award amid criticism of his views on women’s ordination, and sexuality. Ironically, of course, Abraham Kuyper would not himself have been awarded the Kuyper prize because of his own views on these topics. Well, Keller went ahead and gave the address. He still showed up, he still gave the talk James was there still showed up and gave the talk one of his most important we’re so grateful that instead of talking about the evils of secular academia and sending out a bunch of emails to raise a lot of money to oppose this is accurate, you know, this, this travesty. Instead, he showed up, he gave the talk. He engaged the missiology of Leslie Nijmegen and offered us a seven step program for the post Christian West. Slum gonna walk us through those seven points. The first, it will keep these relatively short. The first step is exactly what we have been doing here. I think I think Tim would be very excited about what we’ve been doing here. Tim saw a need that as with Augustine city of God, he wanted Christians today to challenge the prevailing social aspirations and assumptions. The skeptics who no longer see the need for Christianity must be shown how their inclusivity has actually become exclusive. They need to know that right and wrong can’t be differentiated unless you have a religious source. They need to see that their science is actually based on faith.

This is what Callard argued and making sense of God. When secularists endorse human dignity, rights and the responsibility and responsibility in order to eliminate human suffering They are indeed exercising religious faith in some kind of supernatural transcendent reality, to hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak. But then to insist that nonetheless, every person has a human dignity to be honored, is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary. So we have to be able to use public or cultural apologetics to expose the problems with these cultural narratives to open the door. Just as James talked with us about the Neo Calvinist to open the door for the gospel. That’s number one. Number two, our horizontal and vertical dimensions of the faith must be integrated. We can’t just leave it to the Liberals to solve the social problems and the Evangelicals to solve the spiritual problems. Our justification by faith alone must lead to justice. Third, a critique of secularism and Michel model this for us, a critique of secularism must emerge from with own from within its own framework. James talked about this as well, in his talk about the apologetic method of Neo Calvinism, it has to the challenge has to emerge from within his own framework, not from an outward construct. Tim borrowed this concept largely attributed it to the UK theologian and apologist Daniel strange, who described this process as subversive fulfillment. Or to put it another way, a form of active contextualization, from Center Church, James talked about this in three parts. First, enter the culture. Second, challenge the culture. Then third, appeal to the Gospel, enter the culture, challenge the culture from within, then appeal to the gospel. Fourth, Christian community must disrupt the culture of social categories. The way that the world will primarily see our apologetic is in how we love one another. It’s exactly what Jesus said thriving communities lend credibility to the transforming power of the gospel. one of Tim’s favorite books on this subject is one of my favorites. It’s Larry Hurtado, his book destroyer of the gods. Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world. Hurtado showed how the persecuted early Christian community was not wasn’t only offensive to Jews and to Greeks, it was also attractive to them, at the same time to different people in some different ways. But allegiance to Jesus, that’s what the world needs to see allegiance to Jesus Trump’s our geography, or nationality, or ethnicity in the church. In part, that’s why we do events like this, with a mixture of American speakers and Dutch speakers, and coming together across all these different boundaries of nationality and politics. So as a result, though, of this early Christian movement, this biblical revolution of the early church, Christians actually gained perspective from which they could critique any culture. They were both insiders and outsiders in every culture in ways that were completely new because of Christianity. They learned then also to listen to the critiques from fellow Christians who are embedded in different cultures. I’ll come back to that point and point six but first point five, to point, point four then is about distinctive Christian community. It looks different from the world which is appealing to the world. Fifth, then, our laity must integrate their faith with their work. This is really the specialty historically of the Dutch Church of Neo Calvinism. Discipleship must extend from private to public. Our faith or witness cannot be compartmentalize. non Christians must see the difference that our faith makes in our day to day living. This is the concept when Tim had envisioned the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. The idea was was threefold. The first was to close the back door from which people are leaving our churches, especially young people. The next step was then to open that front door to build spaces where people could enter in and engage with us about the gospel. The third, then, is to send out the scattered church, into our neighborhoods, and into our communities and our workplaces to share the gospel six not have seven the local church must be informed by the global church. Keller admitted this was one aspect then of his limitations he saw for the American church. That evangelicalism in the United States often fail by putting too much faith in our methodology. And we struggled to see the kingdom of God, historically, and in some ways today apart from American national interest, which is one reason why I have spent seven weeks in Europe since June. In part, just being able to see the world from different perspectives, especially in this work learning from you. In this work of cultural apologetics, and seventh and finally, Keller distinguished between, really we’re bringing this back now, to where we started the conference, and really where William had us last night with substitutionary atonement. Keller distinguished between grace and religion. As Richard loveless had first showed Keller in his study of revival missionary encounters, that produce social change, always, always depend on Grace. There are recoveries of the doctrine of grace and the doctrines of grace, not on the rules of religion. It is only grace that can bring spiritual transformation. And apart from the Spirit of God, we are helpless to affect any lasting change in our fallen world. So essentially, in our public apologetics, our cultural apologetics, we’re still going back and marrying it with our spiritual piety. We’re keeping these things always together. So even before this Kiper prize incident, where he lost the award, but gave the lecture, killer observed how the secular West has become one of the most moralistic, not immoral, but moralistic cultures in history where we imagine ourselves as a tolerant refuge from the restrictive Christian past, but instead wielding the power of exclusion against those people we disagree with often evangelicalism, the secular West, but it was which has contributed to increased social enmity, along with increased, especially in the United States levels of cultural and political polarization that we haven’t seen for some time. Keller wrote this and making sense of God, people who are passionate for justice, often become self righteous and cruel. When they confront persons whom they perceive to be oppressors. The only way out is grace, to recognize that we are the recipients of God’s favor in even in our sin. Killer argue that only the gospel can unite tolerance and injustice or tolerance and justice. Remember what we said the dynamite of the Enlightenment? How do we how do we be tolerant, but also just at the same time, only the gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, Tim said in making sense of God provides a non oppressive, Absolute Truth, one that provides a norm outside us as a way to escape the ineffectiveness of relativism, and of selfish individualism, yet, one that cannot be truly used to oppress others. So let me let me end that on. On this note. We want our neighbors all of us are here today. Because we want our neighbors to see that the gospel changes everything. Starting with them, the Gospel changes everything. So I want to conclude then, for what we find in Jesus, as comes from Tim’s short book, How to reach the West again, which is a marvel. This is making sense of God is not the book that you want to read with the lay people or the young people in your church. You may have picked that up in this lecture. But making but how to reach the West again, published by Redeemer city to city is a wonderful, wonderful little book, to do this with all kinds of people in your church.

And he says this in Jesus, we find this list, a meaning in life, that suffering can’t take away, but can even deepen. In Jesus we find a satisfaction that isn’t based on circumstances. And Jesus we find a freedom that doesn’t reduce community to relate or relationships to thin transactions. And Jesus we find an identity that isn’t fragile or based on our performance or the exclusion of others. And Jesus, we find a way to both deal with guilt and forgive others without residual bitter This or shame. In Jesus, we find a basis for seeking justice that does not turn us into oppressors ourselves. And Jesus, we find an explanation for the senses of transcendent beauty, and love we often experience and finally, from Tim’s list, as he showed us himself this year, in Jesus, we find a way to face not only the future, but death itself, with poise and peace. Let’s pray. God, we thank you that the power of your gospel opens all of this and I pray God, that for me and for everyone else here, that the truth of this beautiful reality would be experienced by us. Not just known. Not even just strategized, but truly experienced, for the liberating power. And it truly is. Thank you, God for all the things you’ve been doing. This conference will continue to do in our final moments. We trust all of it to you in Jesus name, Amen.