Tim Keller and Pete Enns
Any reader of my blog has a clue of how much I owe to Tim Keller, but only a clue. I follow his sermons, lectures, and books very closely. I’ve gained immensely from him.
My experience of reading the NYTimes piece where Nicholas Kristof engages Tim Keller with some of his doubts, surrounding the usual suspects of the virgin birth and a bodily resurrection was both heartening and frustrating. Heartening because it was good to see Keller take a shot at articulating reasons for his hope even in an edited, shortened version like he was allowed. Frustrating because, as someone who occupies the same time and space as both of them, I didn’t find the older answers terribly convincing to my own inner skeptic. Many of us share Kristof’s skepticism and doubts simply because we share the same culture and the culture prejudices our conditioned, unconscious, believing faculties in the same way his are.
Peter Enns posted a blog post suggesting that Keller’s approach was pastorally inadequate.
There is both loss in this reality but also grace. Loss because the joy of innocent belief is gone. Grace (costly, not cheap) because our shared burden means we can connect and relate to unbelieving skeptics over similar things. The reason CS Lewis’ apologetics are so powerful are because he himself had to work through the questions for himself.
I fully appreciate that on one hand I am a poor candidate to critique Tim Keller’s apologetics. He’s engaged far more smart, skeptical people and brought them to faith than I have. I’ve been the happy recipient of so many of his apologetic arguments and illustrations. At the same time we all come to these questions from different places and grapple with them in different ways.
CS Lewis and the Fornicators
I was recently going through a number of CS Lewis essays again and came across this portion of “Christian Apologetics” where Lewis shares his experiences mostly of preaching to RAF pilots during WWII.
(3) A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, ‘good news’. We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists’, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’ etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.
In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)
I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and ‘crime’ and bring them down to brass tacks—to the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness and conceit in the lives of ‘ordinary decent people’ like themselves (and ourselves).
Lewis, C. S. (1994). God in the Dock. (W. Hooper, Ed.) (pp. 94–95). HarperOne.
I think Lewis sheds light on two contemporary issues that are challenging the church today.
The first is that of the Christian sexual ethic which is what he addresses directly. It is (pragmatically) useless to dwell on these things or expect people to recognize it as sin until they accept Christianity as a whole. I think he is right on this. This I think offers us some guidance on how the church needs to navigate its times. It may be that we’re getting far beyond the challenge Lewis faced of mere contraception and into the space where unrestricted sexual license will bring even unbelieving people to question the new sexual ethic. We may arrive at a place not unlike the 4th and 5th century in Augustine’s time where a frenzy of fixation on chastity could become fashionable again, but we are not there yet.
This is not the heart of where I’m going with this so I’ll move one.
The second is for Kristof’s area of doubt which is modern “naturalism” as Lewis would call it or “materialism” as we might call it usually shadowed by scientism. What the resurrection and the virgin birth have in common are their miraculous aspects. These cause many of us to stumble. Lewis pays a great deal of attention to this in his book Miracles and many of his shorter pieces. I think Keller deals with it well too in his latest apologetic book Making Sense of God. In his book length treatment he had more space to engage the issues.
I think the same instinct that Lewis felt towards the “fornicators” he was preaching to is helpful for this situation. It will take time for people of our culture to live into their Christianity even before they figure out or exorcise the doubts surrounding these cultural issues. Keller repeatedly makes the point that often people need to WANT to become Christians before they are able to. Christian belief and morality is aspirational before it is actual. This “aspirational before actual” in belief and morality isn’t of course just true for skeptics, it is true of all Christians as well. We grow up into the faith often slowly but sometimes in fits and starts.
We see this often in Jesus’ interactions with people. They want something from him, like someone healed, or they want to be with him, and there is a delicate dance between Jesus and them. Sometimes they make it (see Mark 9) and sometimes they don’t as you can see in Matthew 8.
The challenge of the church is going to be to figure out how to engage and enfold fornicators and skeptics in ways that encourages and feeds them in the process while not losing the high aspirational goals for our behavior and beliefs. I think the church has always struggled with this because we all always struggle with this.
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