Tag Archives: Timothy Keller

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March 1, 2014

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Keller, Passive Wrath, and Understanding the “Fearful Symmetry” of Judgment

KellerMy twitter-buddy Tony Reinke (content strategist for DG and prolific memer) had an interesting article about Tim Keller today. In the past (and apparently in the present), Keller has been criticized by the conservative Reformed for his apparent weakness on the issue of wrath. Based on The Reason for God, and a couple of other works, people have said he’s de-emphasized or sidelined the issue unbiblically. Now, as someone who has podcast a couple hundred of his sermons, I never really saw it. He talks about judgment, penalty, and wrath all over the place–certainly not with the raised and rumbling voice some might like, but it’s there nonetheless.

Well, now the proof is more than just anecdotal. I don’t know where he found the time, or how he pulled it off, but Tony went ahead and found, catalogued, and gave us some statistics on Keller’s sermons over the last 35 years of preaching, using Piper as a control on preaching on wrath. The stats:

The easiest way to search for this theme is to find every mention in a sermon to an explicit mention of “wrath” near the word “God.” No two terms, in such close proximity, better stress God’s activity in judgment, and in this particular search we find all the references to phrases like “wrath of God,” “God’s wrath,” even “wrathful God,” “God poured out his wrath,” etc.

I’ll start with a search of Piper’s manuscript archive (1980–2009). From this collection of 1,232 sermon manuscripts, 244 sermons appear in the search result — 19.8% of his sermons making at least one explicit mention of God’s wrath.

Next, I use this identical search query in Keller’s sermon transcript archive (1989–2009). From this collection of 1,212 sermons, 159 sermons appear in the search result — 13.1% of his sermons making at least one explicit mention of God’s wrath…

Second, the gap between Piper and Keller isn’t nearly as wide as I originally expected, and the gap between Spurgeon and Keller is much narrower than I would have guessed. The gap between Piper and Keller narrows even further in a search for references where “God” appears near words for “judge” (“judge,” “judgment,” etc). In this search it’s Piper 25.2%, Spurgeon 24.5%, Keller 22.1% (though for a variety of possible variants, this second search is less conclusive).

Now, again, I’ll admit, this is an odd search for Tony to conduct. But hey, a man with a lot of archived data and quick research skills can get a lot done, apparently.

On a more serious note, I get the concern. To some it might be odd to be so fixated on getting the stats on wrath-preaching, but the deeper concern is biblical-preaching. The desire, as I see it, is the desire to preach on things at least as much as the Bible talks about them, or as it is appropriate to understand the various themes connected to it. As Keller himself said the other day “the greatness of Christ’s sacrifice is diminished if you minimize the wrath of God.” If we want to hold up Christ’s humble, sacrificial work (among all the other things he does and is) as glorious, you inevitably have to address wrath.

(Interesting side-note: John Piper talks about wrath in only 1 out of 4 sermons. That’s actually low for what I thought it was going to be. I mean, not low overall or anything, but, ya, surprises everyday.)

Passive Wrath. Beyond that, the interesting thing that caught my eye was Tony’s observation that while Keller speaks to God’s active wrath decently often, he tends to focus on God’s passive wrath in his writing. As Reinke explains:

…the Reformed tradition has affirmed a fourth dimension of God’s judgment, a passive judgment, whereby God allows the sinner to self-harden and self-condemn (Romans 1:24–28). God, from his position of “righteous judge,” can choose to withdraw his sin-restraining power from sinners; thereby he “gives them over to their own lusts . . . whereby it comes to pass that they harden themselves” (WCF 5.6). Keller knows this, too, and chooses to stress this “passive judgment” in his books.

In other words, you worship Money, a fitting judgment is for God to let you be consumed with greed. You worship Sex, then it is a fitting judgment for God to let you be consumed with lust. You worship Power and it is a fitting judgment for God to let you chase that down until it destroys you. In that sense, the judgment is self-imposed, organic, flowing from one’s own behavior, and yet still God’s active choice to give you over to it.

Now, that established, Tony says that his study of Keller’s sermons “still does not answer every question I have about why he prefers to stress God’s passive judgment in his books.”

Fearful Symmetry. I think I have a bit of an answer for Tony. Aside from the fact that it is Biblical as he affirms, I suspect that the reason Keller has spoken more often of God’s passive wrath, giving us over, more often is that it functions as a helpful heuristic tool for understanding the nature, justice, and reality of God’s wrath for postmoderns. Most people in contemporary culture function with a tacitly Zeus-like understanding of wrath and judgment. If they know God as a judge, he appears to be an arbitrary one, applying lightning bolt punishments that don’t fit the crime. Beyond that, it’s all very far-away and distant from our contemporary experience. The passive wrath of God, though, that we can begin to see.

a. It’s Terrifyingly Real.  We’ve seen addiction in our souls. We’ve seen friends become colder as they pursued career to the destruction of family, health, and friends. We’ve seen the misery of self-imposed obsessions with power and manipulation. We know the darkness of our own hearts that can seem so small, so hidden, but then is powerfully exposed at those terrible moments when it rears it’s ugly head and we say to ourselves “Oh, I wasn’t myself then.” But, thing is, deep down we know that it is our self–our deepest self. It is at that moment that we begin to fear what Edwards spoke of:

There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell fire, if it were not for God’s restraints. There is laid in the very nature of carnal men, a foundation for the torments of hell. There are those corrupt principles, in reigning power in them, and in full possession of them, that are seeds of hell fire. These principles are active and powerful, exceeding violent in their nature, and if it were not for the restraining hand of God upon them, they would soon break out, they would flame out after the same manner as the same corruptions, the same enmity does in the hearts of damned souls, and would beget the same torments as they do in them. –Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

To preach judgment this way isn’t to minimize it’s fearfulness for postmoderns. Instead, it’s actually probably the only way of conveying how truly terrifying it is.

b. It Fits. Beyond that, the passive judgment of God exposes the justness of all of God’s judgments. When you hear Keller tell it, you begin to see all of God’s judgments as more than the irrational outbursts of an angry tyrant, but as the fitting punishments of a Just God. What injustice is there about giving you what you’ve chosen? You choose idols, then receive the terrible dehumanizing degradation that idolatry leads to. Choose violence? Get war. Choose self-centeredness? Get the terrible loneliness, anger, and despair that narcissism leads to. Choose adultery? Get divorce.

When you begin to see this, then you begin to see that principle at work even in his active judgments. I believe Ray Ortlund Jr. has called this a “fearful symmetry.” So, for instance, when Israel decides to cheat on God with the idols, his active judgment through the nations is the historical manifestation of the spiritual reality they’ve chosen. All of the blessings of protection, life, beauty, and goodness are connected with relational wholeness with Yahweh. Reject Yahweh’s covenant and you’ve essentially rejected these things. When you reject God, he gives you not-God, and that is a terrifying, but just judgment. Roll that principle out into the rest of the Bible and you begin to see the way this helps us understand even those more active, seemingly-extrinsic moments of judgment in the Scriptures.

Final Word of Judgement– Let it be clear, I’m not a wrath-obsessed guy. I don’t think all Reformed Calvinists are wrath-obsessed either. The reason I’ve written about it as much as I have (which, honestly, isn’t much) is simply because I see it is a prominent theme in the text, it’s crucial for understanding much of the biblical story-line, it is currently down-played by many, and, most importantly, it is the necessary dark background against which much of the Glory of the Gospel shines.

That said, preachers need to be careful about how you handle this theme. Be careful how much you emphasize it. Be careful that your parishioners know that wrath is not the fundamental reality when it comes to God, but rather the loving holiness of the Triune one who reaches out beyond wrath with redeeming grace to restore and redeem his creation to himself.

Soli Deo Gloria

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December 18, 2013

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Top Five Reformedish Books of 2013

AD: I use Grammarly to check plagiarism because what if I go on the Janet Mefferd Show? 

Once again it is time for my annual “Top Five Reformedish Books” of the year. This is actually a horrible post to write. I read a lot of good books this year. Many of them deserve to be on Top Five book lists somewhere. For me, though, these particular five distinguished themselves. Now, unlike some other lists, I am not simply choosing from books published in 2013, but rather from ones that I’ve read in 2013. I am still catching up on 20 centuries of thought, you know. Well, without further ado, here they are:

death by livingDeath By Living: Life Was Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson – I’ve already reviewed this over at the Gospel Coalition where I said:

For return readers looking for quick comparison between Notes and Death, I’d say that if the last one changed the way I thought, this one might change the way I live. Notes invites you to embrace God as the sovereign, beyond-imagining author of this ridiculously unexpected universe. Death challenges you to live as a character, or rather, as a sub-writer of enfleshed, breathing words. Big ones. Interesting ones. Once again, you’ll find yourself in a well-shaken cocktail of poetic memoir, philosophy, theology, sharp wit, polemical fisticuffs, hilarity, and exhortation in the form of a paean to the grace of a life well-lived in the shadow of eternity. For the newcomer, you may want to strap in first.

walking with GodWalking With God Through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller – I’ve read a number of books on the subject, especially in my undergrad in philosophy, and I have to say, it is going to be the new classic on the subject. Unlike other works on the subject, it is not only pastoral, or only philosophical, or only theological, but approaches the issue of suffering from all of these angles and more. Keller brings sociology, literature, theology, philosophy, and, of course, the Scriptures, to bear on the seemingly intractable burden of suffering and evil. I’ll go out on a limb and say this is his best book yet. Given that you and everyone you know will encounter pain and suffering in this world, everybody should go out and pick up this book.

people and placePeople and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology by Michael Horton – This is the fourth volume of Horton’s dogmatics examining traditional doctrinal loci from the standpoint of a retooled covenant theology. Building on the work of Farrow, Volf, and others, Horton offers an instructive treatment of the origin of the Church, the sacraments, the classic marks of the Church, and her mission in the world. Of course, eschatology figures prominently in the discussion, and there is an excellent discussion of Scripture and tradition towards the front-end. As always, Horton is in constant conversation with Roman Catholic ecclesiologies, Barth, Radical Orthodoxy, Stanley Grenz, and general Evangelicals setting up a clear, irenic, and charitable contrast. While some discussions are a bit thick for the non-specialist, I highly recommend it to anybody interested in the ecclesiological discussions of the day, especially if you’re looking for a Reformed account that can play alongside the big boys like Ratzinger (RC) and Ziziouslas (EO).

athanasius leithartAthanasius by Peter Leithart – I decided to get down to business and read Athanasius’ Four Discourses Against the Arians this year, so I picked up Leithart’s volume as a bit of a guide. As usual, I was not disappointed. Paying close attention to Athanasius’ metaphysical categories and scriptural exegesis, Leithart cleanly and clearly expounds the good bishops’ beautiful Trinitarian and Christological theology, bringing it into living conversation with theologians at work today. Not only is Leithart an able interpreter of Athanasius’ polemical and pastoral theology, he sets the discussion in lively account of his theo-political controversies. For anybody interested in Athanasius, or the conversation around the ‘theological interpretation’ of scripture, it’s a great place to take the plunge.

paul and the faithfulness of GodPaul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright – I’ve waited for this book for a few years now. While I’m only through the first volume (weighing in at 570 pages), I can safely say this is the Paul book of the decade. It will be impossible to write about Paul from now on without engaging Wright’s arguments in this sprawling masterpiece. Beyond that, what can I say? It is the most grossly comprehensive thing I’ve ever seen on the subject. It’s Wright at the height of his powers: asking the big questions, giving even bigger answers; setting Paul in his 1st Century context against various backgrounds (2nd Temple Judaism, Roman, Greek); engaging New Perspectives and Old Perspectives; telling stories and arguing for stories; close exegesis and sweeping overviews from 20,000 feet; actantial analyses for days. No, you don’t agree with everything he says, but that isn’t why you read Wright, now is it?

Honorable Mentions:

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor

The Word of God for the People of God by J. Todd Billings

Union with Christ by Robert Letham

Soli Deo Gloria

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December 17, 2013

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‘The Philosopher’, ‘The Theologian’…A Reformedish Lexicon

Thomas Aquinas famously referred to Aristotle as ‘The Philosopher’, throughout his writings, not because he followed him slavishly on every point, but because for the Angelic Doctor, Aristotle was the philosopher. More than any other secular thinker, Aristotle’s questions, formulations, and answers shaped and were re-shaped in Aquinas’ thought. For myself, I’ve realized that there are a number of intellectual influences that have played similar roles for me. Their thought has so penetrated the warp and woof of my own that I decided to create a Reformedish lexicon of key figures, both for fun and to encourage others to drink deeply at the wells of wisdom found here:

I don't know what he's thinking right here, but it could probably serve as a Ph.D. thesis.

“The Theologian” – I’ve already documented Kevin Vanhoozer’s greatness. Though he is a theologian’s theologian, his humble, eclectic, and faithful approach to God, Scripture, and doctrine in general has deeply shaped my own and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Lewis“The Apologist” – C.S. Lewis was one of the first Christian prose writers I ever encountered. Like most, he took me in with the clarity of thought & expression, marvelous knack for making complex doctrines seem quite reasonable, accessible, and even more, beautiful. In college, Lewis let me grapple with the big toughies like hell, sin, and evil with intellectual dignity. What’s more, he saved me from thinking apologetic philosophy had to be boring and dull, or, even worse, disconnected from the proper worship of God.

kierkegaard 2“The Thinker” – Soren Kierkegaard is a hard one to pin down. He is a philosopher, but even more than that, he is a thinker-of-life who pressed me into the depths of my own darkened heart during my angstiest college days. I can safely say that if it were not for encountering his works Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death in college, I probably would not be married to my McKenna today. Also, his epistemology hustled me along the way to embracing the proposals of…

plantinga 4“The Philosopher” – Alvin Plantinga is my favorite living philosopher. Working in Anglo-American Analytic tradition, it is hard to estimate the impact Plantinga’s had on modern philosophy and especially philosophy of religion. The man single-handedly refuted the logical problem of evil in the 1970s, kicked classic foundationalism in the face, and made it safe to be a Christian in a philosophy program again. Plantinga gives not only good answers, but teaches us to ask the right sort of questions in the face of aggressive skeptical attacks on the faith.

Keller“The Preacher” – Timothy Keller falls under so many different categories (apologist, thinker, etc.), but at core, he is a Gospel-preacher. All of the other hats he puts on serve to accent his main call, which is to preach the Gospel to the Religious and the Irreligious alike. His several books and lectures on preaching have deeply shaped my own approach in various areas of ministry, but it may be hundreds of sermons exposing my idolatry and pointing me to Christ that have played the deepest formative role in my own spiritual theology. God has used Keller to shape the core of my understanding of God’s transforming grace through the Gospel.

Wright again“The Scholar” – I loved Paul before I read N.T. Wright, but I don’t think I knew Paul until I read Wright; the same goes for Jesus. While I don’t follow him everywhere he goes, more than anyone else Wright has introduced me to the vibrant, dynamic, pulsating historical reality of the Gospel in the New Testament. Whether it is Jesus facing off with the Pharisees, or Paul shepherding his flocks in the shadow of the Roman Empire, Wright simply will not allow us to imagine we are dealing with anything less than a full-orbed social-historical-political-theological-cosmological Jesus whose kingship has implications for everything.

john-calvin“The Reformer” – I’ve written a good amount on John Calvin over the last few months, and given a number of reasons to dig into his commentaries. Like most of these men, Calvin wore a number of hats, including scholar, theologian, and preacher. For me, he has been The Reformer. While I do love me some Luther, standing in the Reformed tradition as I am, it has been Calvin’s programmatic vision for the reformation of preaching, theology, and the Church that captured my imagination more than any of the other Magisterial Reformers. Indeed, a number of my other influences have openly paid tribute to Calvin’s influence on their own thought.

If you find yourself having never read someone on this list, I’d encourage you to do a quick Google on one, pick a work that seems interesting and go for it.

Soli Deo Gloria

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December 9, 2013

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Somersaulting for Jesus

somersaultThe metaphor of “walking” features prominently in the Bible as a way of describing our life with God. It’s also a key theme in Tim Keller’s new book.  Keller gives a great little description of what it means to “walk with God” towards the middle of the book:

Walking is something nondramatic, rhythmic–it consists of steady, repeated actions you can keep up in a sustained way for a long time. God did not tell Abraham in Genesis 17:1 to “somersault before me” or even “run before me” because no one can keep such behavior up day in and day out. There are many people who think of spiritual growth as something like high diving. They say, “I am going to give my life to the Lord! I am going to change all these terrible habits and I am really going to transform! Give me another six months, and I am going to be a new man or new woman!” That is not what a walk is. A walk is day in and day out praying; day in and day out Bible and Psalms reading; day in and day out obeying, talking to Christian friends, and going to corporate worship, committing yourself to and fully participating in the life of a church. It is rhythmic, on and on and on. To walk with God is a metaphor that symbolizes slow and steady progress.

–Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, pg. 236

So what is walking with God? The slow rhythms of a live built around him. It’s not the flashy, quick-result, 7-day diet fads we’re all about, but the regular, steady patterns of wisdom that develop health. It’s not just the romantic weekend getaway, but the daily chats, kisses, date nights, and time spent in the ordinary that keeps marriages strong. “Walking”, in this sense, consists of the lovely, but ordinary disciplines of grace.

Soli Deo Gloria

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November 29, 2013

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Tim Keller: 4 Doctrines You Need To Know When You’re Suffering

walking with GodI just began Tim Keller’s monumental new book on the problem of evil Walking with God through Pain and Suffering and it’s, well, it’s monumental. I’ve read a number of books on the subject, especially in my undergrad in philosophy, and I have to say, though I’m only a couple of chapters in, it’s going to be the new classic on the subject. Unlike other works on the subject, he’s not only pastoral, or only philosophical, or only theological, but he approaches the issue of suffering from all of these angles and more. Sociology, literature, theology, philosophy, and, of course, the Scriptures, are brought to bear on the seemingly intractable burden of suffering and evil.

While we can’t logic ourselves out of pain, making meaning of our suffering is inevitable, and the framework through which you view life reveals itself most clearly in our approach to pain. Without doing a full review, I wanted to simply highlight a key little section towards the beginning where he, in short order, lists four key doctrines of the Christian faith that give deep resources for dealing with pain, suffering and evil over and against the secular or deistic view (numbers are mine):

  1. “The first relevant Christian belief is in a personal, wise, infinite, and therefore inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world–and that is far more comforting than the belief that our lives are in the hands of fickle fate or random chance.
  2. The second crucial tenet is that, in Jesus Christ, God came to earth and suffered with and for us sacrificially–and that is far more comforting than the idea that god is remote and uninvolved. The cross also proves that, despite all the inscrutability, God is for us.
  3. The third doctrine is that through faith in Christ’s work on the cross, we can have assurance of our salvation–that is far more comforting than karmic systems of thought. We are assured that the difficulties of lie are not payment for our past sins, since Jesus has paid them. As Luther taught, suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you. Secularity cannot give you that, and religions that provide salvation through virtue and good works cannot give it, either.
  4. The fourth great doctrine is that of the bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe. This completes the spectrum of our joys an consolations. One of the deepest desires of the human heart is for love without parting. Needless to say, the prospect of resurrection is far more comforting than the beliefs that death just takes into nothingness or into an impersonal spiritual substance. The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal, disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine. Jesus’ resurrection was corporeal–it could be touched and embraced, and he ate food. And yet he passed through closed doors and could disappear. This is a material existence, but one beyond the bounds of our imagination. The idea of heaven can be a consolation for suffering, a compensation for the life we have lost. But resurrection is not just consolation–it is restoration. We get it all back–the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life–but to knew, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss…”

—Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, pp. 58-59

Note clearly: this is no mere theism with general platitudes about everything working itself out, or karma, or what-have-you, but concrete consolation grounded in deep Gospel truth revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even the first doctrine of God’s inscrutable wisdom is one grounded in fact that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), for our salvation.

Clearly we could expand on all of these (and Keller will), but these four thick truths of the Christian faith are the key doctrinal pillars upon which any properly Christian response to suffering will rest. This is how the Christian begins to deal with the problem of pain and suffering. Once more, this is why doctrine matters for real life.

Soli Deo Gloria

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September 3, 2013

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False Freedom and the Slavery of Autonomy (The Gospel Coalition)

@JeffersonBethke You are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear.

— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc) July 29, 2013

teenager-texting-kamshotflickr-300x199I hate going to restaurants with large menus. As dish after dish stares up at me, with tempting descriptions following one upon the other, the thought of choosing only one paralyzes me. I usually narrow it down to one of two options, and then, when the server finally arrives, I glance down and impulsively order something entirely different that just caught my eye. Or, if it’s a restaurant I’m familiar with, I just end up playing it safe with my regular meal. I dread committing myself to a food choice, making the wrong one, and losing out on all the other good meals that I might have had that night.

My restaurant anxieties are, I think, a small, admittedly ridiculous, microcosm of the problem with choice-making in our generation (millennials) in general. It’s not that we make bad choices (although, we do), it’s that we are bad at choosing. Period. Why? We have a screwy view of the relationship between freedom of choice and happiness. Americans value freedom and choice in general, but being the iPod generation who grew up with thousands of choices at our fingertips the problem’s metastasized a bit (which, incidentally, is why it takes me 4 minutes to choose an album to listen to on a 5 minute drive).

Now, taking too long to choose a song is annoying, but not really that big a deal. The problem comes with the larger issues in life, especially relationships. Being a millennial myself and working with them every week, I see this all the time. An inability to choose inevitably leads to an inability to have the real community we were created for.

You can read the of my analysis of  our cultural fear of community and what true freedom looks like over at The Gospel Coalition. 

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April 19, 2013

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Top 8 Personal Highlights from #TGC13

TGC13This last week I had the privilege of going to the 2013 Gospel Coalition National Conference. While there is a grip of things I could say about the spiritual blessing it was to attend, I thought I’d limit it to 8 personal highlights:

1. Good times with friends. – First off, I was blessed to be able to go with a couple of ministry buddies of mine, Sean McLeish, and Jon Nitta. They’re excellent men to drive around in a rented car, eat too much BBQ, and talk about the Gospel with.

2. Finally getting to hear Tim Keller preach live. -I’ve listened to hundreds of Tim Keller sermons over the last few years. I honestly was kind of worried that it wasn’t going to live up to my expectations. Yeah, he pretty much killed it. I think I he made 4 points within his four points, each of which could have been a sermon on its own, and yet it didn’t feel forced or crowded. And I loved Jesus more at the end of it.

3. Getting a physical copy of Michael Horton’s lecture notes. -Yup. I got to listen in a Michael Horton’s lecture of feasting and hospitality in the Gospel of Luke, which was expectedy brilliant. Afterwards I caught him in the hall and asked him for his lecture notes which he kindly obliged me with. Turns out he is a splendidly humble man in person, beyond being an exemplary irenic theologian in print.

4. Finding out People are Actually Nice. – Following off of that point, it was nice getting to know that people are actually nice. I’ve managed to “meet” some bloggers online before, but at this conference I was able to face-to-face connect with them. The lovely thing was finding out that they’re actually as nice as their Twitter handle pictures. I would go into names, but I hate the idea of name-dropping. The only one I’ll mention is Greg Thornbury: hands-down the most surprising and interesting guy I met at the conference. Brilliant, delightfully humble, and a fabulous appreciation for the proper use of the bow-tie.

5. Books – I bought books for cheap. I think we all knew that was going to happen.

6. Getting Faked Out by Voddie Bauckham – All I’m going to say is, if anybody who knows him is reading this, call him “Joe Nitkowski” next time you see him.

7. The Holy Land Experience – We were too close not to go, so we visited. We didn’t go inside or anything, but experiencing the cheap animatronic animals outside, well–as Jon Nitta put it, “I’ve been born-again again.”

8. Gospel Everything – Seriously, no joke, it was all about the Gospel. The preaching and teaching, break-out sessions, and workshops were all about understanding and seeing the Gospel go forward in our the lives of our congregations, cities, and world. After a bit of a season of discouragement, and honestly, just exhaustion, I was convicted, blessed, and encouraged through the preaching and teaching, the conversations, and the worship to be humbly confident about the Gospel in my ministry. It really is that good of news.

Well, as always, there’s more to say, but all in all, I was truly blessed to by God through TGC13. God willing, TGC15 will be even better.

Soli Deo Gloria

PS. When the sermons start getting posted, I recommend going and downloading or listening to them. I’d particularly direct you to the sermons by Kevin DeYoung on Luke 15 that was convicting and quite humorous, Gary Millar on Luke 22 who killed it, and, of course, Tim Keller’s on Luke 24 and the resurrection.

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February 12, 2013

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The Promise of Covenant Love: Pt. 2

Meaning of Marriage

Seriously, I cannot recommend this book enough whether you’re single, dating, married, newly-married, divorced, or an infant. Read it.

I ended the last post asking “What does love have to be if it’s something I can promise?” How is it different than the poetic love that Kierkegaard is speaking of? In this post I’ll lay out three differences between poetic and covenantal love, largely drawn from Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage.

1. More Action than Emotion – If poetic love is primarily an affair of the emotions that just sweeps you up in a passion, covenantal love is primarily an action. Paul assumes this when commands husbands to love their wives. (Eph 5:25) You can’t command feelings, but you can command activities. Saying “I love you” or “I do” with a covenantal love in view, is committing yourself to “BE” and “DO” certain things for a person. It is a decision to sacrificially commit yourself fully and wholly in loyalty to another person, putting their welfare, joy, and life above your own. When I promised to love my wife, I didn’t promise “I will always feel warm fuzzies towards you.” I promised, “I will be a husband to you–I will care, pray, show affection, be there when you need me, support you, cling to you, and will your good.”

Now, of course it does involve emotion, but often-times what I find is that these emotions can actually flow from the actions. For example, it might be a date night with my wife bit I’m tired and just want to stay home and watch TV to decompress after a long week. Making the decision to go through the trouble of getting ready, getting dressed, shaving (my neck–because neck beards are unnacceptable), and getting in the car when I don’t really feel like it, surprisingly can lead towards actually feeling like it. The loving action stirs up my loving emotion so by the time we’re on the road, I’m actually excited for the night out with my wife. That’s a microcosm of what can happen in marriage as a whole, when the decision to act in loving ways is made independent of a current emotional basis, the emotion often follows.

2. Other-centered not Self-centered –  The next difference is what love is centered on. Aside from the fact that it’s unstable, our culture’s understanding of love is essentially self-centered. It’s consumeristic in that it basically says, “As long as you fulfill me, please me, tickle my fancy, then I’m here. As soon as the buzz fades, I leave.” If love is primarily about an emotion felt, then you only ‘love’ the person when they are producing feelings in you. Actually, that’s why you’re loving them.  The point is, in this view, love is a potent emotion that the other person inspires in you because of what they do for you, who they are–it’s primarily a selfish experience about you, your wants, your desires.

By contrast, in the Bible love is not primarily about what I get out of the person or what I feel about the person, but about what I am willing to give to the person. Am I willing to give them time, faithfulness, exclusivity? I know how much I love someone by how much I am willing to put their needs ahead of my own, not necessarily how much I “feel” about  them. In consumer love, the self is placed before the relationship: the point is you’re in it to get something out of it. In covenant love, the relationship is placed before the self. In fact, the point is, covenant love is a union where I so identify myself with you, that your needs become my needs, your wants are my wants even when they’re not what I personally want. I am so bound to you that I desire to serve you just like I serve me. Covenant love doesn’t tally. It doesn’t keep records because when I give to you, in love I have identified your needs as my own. Now, how beautiful is this? Two people who have so placed the needstrying to sacrifice, two people trying to out-serve each other, two people out for each other’s joy instead of two people out for their own joy.

3. Vertical v. Horizontal– This brings us to the final difference. If love is primarily an emotional thing, if the reason I go to the other, serve, the other, etc. give emotion to the other is because of the way we make each other feel, then this is essentially a consumer transaction. We are paying each other in warm fuzzies. If that’s the case, then it makes sense to think about marriage as basically something that’s just happening between you and your spouse and to be honest, I don’t know if that’s going to work out for very long. Unfortunately, in most marriages there comes a time when I just can’t say, “I love you” because I don’t feel it. In the hardness of my heart, I’m going to be tempted to say, “You’re not worth it” or “I just don’t have the strength.”

This is where Kierkegaard’s “love transformed by the eternal” comes into play–what if love was not just between two people, but between two people and God? See, when we promise, when we say “I do”,  we’re promising God not our spouse. So, when I’m serving my wife, I’m serving my God. When I’m loving my wife, I’m loving God. I can’t separate the two. Of course, the inverse means that to break faith with spouse is to break faith with God at the same time. This is at the core of why God has something to say about divorce and marriage–as a covenant partner it is His business.

At first this sounds threatening, but in reality, it should be encouraging. If it’s not just me and the sinner I married, then I have a shot. When that day comes when you look at your spouse and you, in the hardness of your heart, might say, “You’re not worth this”–putting my relationship in the context of my relationship with God gives me the strength to love when it’s hard, stick it out when it’s painful, and be faithful anyways. When it’s not just me and another sinner trying to tell each other we’re worth it, it’s a lot easier: Why? Because God is always worth it. Even more than that, it’s not just me and another sinner trying to pull this off on our own strength. If you understand that love has a vertical dimension to it, it means that you can call on God to sustain your love. He has a vested interest in this because ultimately, at the core of who God is and what God has done is the reality covenantal love.

Good News, There is Love
This is something we cannot let our hearts forget: the Gospel is a story about covenantal love. Since we live our lives, and even our marriages, out of the stories we tell ourselves, we need to remind ourselves daily that there is story above all stories–a true story about one, Jesus Christ, who saw his bride and said, “It’s not about me.” He was not drawn to her because she was so awesome that she created all kinds of warm feelings in him out of her own worthiness. Instead, He decided to love her despite her unworthiness. He decided to bind himself and make a covenant with her; to put her needs ahead of His own; to serve her and not himself; to give rather than receive; to be trustworthy and faithful when she was untrustworthy and faithless;  to unite himself with her so much that her needs became his needs, and her sins became his sins, and in order to keep the covenant, her death became his death, so that His life could be her life. It is this story that needs to set the framework within which we understand love and marriage. Once again, as in all things, the Gospel of a God who proves his own covenantal love for us in the death of Christ for sinners changes everything. (Rom 5:8)

Soli Deo Gloria

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February 11, 2013

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biblical studies, cultural commentary, spirituality, theology

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Kierkegaard, Keller, La Dispute, and the Promise of Covenant Love – Part 1

Regine Olsen

Sadly, everybody remembers her as Kierkegaard’s fiance and not the wife of her husband…that guy.

February is here and love is in the air–or maybe that’s packaged chocolates and commercial opportunity. In either case, the subject of love and romance will be coming up again, which is why I must once more bring up my favorite philosopher: Soren Kierkegaard.

For those of you who know a little of his biography, he seems an odd choice to turn to on the subject of love–he was one of my philosophers who failed at it. Tragically he broke off his engagement with the lovely Regine Olsen because he felt his depressive melancholy made him unsuitable as a husband. What could we possibly learn from him about love?

Well, for one thing, he’s experienced at failure, so that gives you some insight. Still, Kierkegaard, for all of his Danish weirdness, has this going for him: he’s easily one of the most biblical, prophetic thinkers of the modern period. Under both his own name, and through pseudonyms, he made it his aim to present Christianity anew, true Christianity, with force to a culture that thought it already understood it.

Works of Love and La Dispute
In his Works of Love he turns his meditations to the biblical concept of love. The first half is an extended exploration of the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). The piece that captured my attention was the focus he gives to the “you shall” in Jesus’ command–the fact that Jesus commands love at all. Kierkegaard emphasizes, “You shall love–this, then, is the word of the royal law.” Again, “the mark of Christian love and its distinguishing characteristic is this, that it contains the apparent contradiction: to love is a duty.” (pg. 40) Later he writes, “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.” (pg. 44)

Against the popular, romantic “poetic” conception of love that dominated the intellectual scene of his day, Kierkegaard pressed the idea that the highest form of love was not the “spontaneous”, sudden, seizing form of love that sweeps over a couple of lovers, but rather love as duty–love as something secured by the eternal, the command of God. The love of the lovers is beautiful, yes, but it is fleeting–it can change. Even if it lasts, it’s not to be trusted entirely. It can leave. La Dispute gives us one of the best, contemporary expressions of this kind of love on their album, “Somewhere At The Bottom Of The River Between Vega And Altair“, exploring the dynamics of a failed marriage, rent asunder by the wife’s affair.

Speaking in the aftermath, the wife sings, “I know I tore two worlds apart but I can’t change the way I felt./Love swept in like a storm and ripped the hinges from the doors./Love poured in like a flood, I couldn’t stop it anymore. I will not be drowned” (Sad Prayers for Guilty Bodies), or, even more poignantly:

Oh husband, I could not control it
Husband, I could not abstain
One cannot stop the wind from blowing
Nor refuse the falling rain
Love stirred up a storm inside me
Wrapped its arms around my waist
I failed you dear, I’m sorry, oh I’m sorry
There was nothing I could do
No, there was nothing I could
Sure as the rain will fall
Some love just fails without reason

(Last Blues for Bloody Knuckles)

Poetic love is that inherently unstable, emotional chaos that sweeps over us with great passion, and apparently can leave us as quickly. Matt Chandler calls this the “naked angel in a diaper” theory where basically, at any point, cupid can show up and strike you. It has no rhyme or reason, like the blowing of the wind or the falling rain.

Kierkegaard points out that the poets instinctively know this; note how often their lovers swear, make promises, and bind themselves to each other in their love. Still, if they only swear by themselves, it is an insecure promise because humans are changeable, unstable. Only when you swear by something higher, something eternal, duty, God himself, can love be something secure. “The love which simply exists, however fortunate, however blissful, however satisfying, however poetic it is, still must survive the test of the years. But the love which has undergone the transformation of the eternal by becoming duty has won continuity.” (pg. 47)

Kierkegaard, Keller, and Covenant Love
Kierkegaard was pointing his culture to a love “transformed by the eternal”: covenantal love. When we hear the word “covenant” today, we mostly don’t know what we’re dealing with. Contracts are closest thing we can imagine, but that’s far too impersonal for the biblical notion of covenant. The concept and language of covenant in the Bible is that of a legal bond, a union based on promises before God and humans of fidelity, friendship, love, exclusivity, and trust.

Now to us this “legalizing” of the relationship seems to drain all of the emotion, the passion–the love!–out of things. For moderns, it’s either love or law, not both. Tim Keller has recently pointed out that, in fact, the law, the promise, especially the marriage promise, doesn’t kill emotion and intimacy, but actually is a testimony to it and increases it. (The Meaning of Marriage, pp 84-85) Marriage–the public, binding promise–is the ultimate expression of romantic love because its the giving of the whole self. Someone who doesn’t want to eventually get married to the person they’re dating is basically saying, “I don’t love you enough to curtail my freedom for you.” How intimate. Ultimately, only when romantic love is set within the framework of a binding obligation do the lovers truly have space to reveal their true selves, without fear of abandonment or rejection. Until then, you’re still on the performance platform, constantly under pressure to put your best foot forward to make sure the other person doesn’t bolt. Ironically, only when you give up your “freedom”, your romantic autonomy, are you able to be truly free to be with the other.

Love, it turns out, hangs on a promise.

So what does love have to be if it’s something I can promise? How is it different than the poetic love that Kierkegaard is speaking of? In my next post, I’ll lay out more clearly the difference between this covenant love and the poetic love.

Soli Deo Gloria

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February 6, 2013

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3 Cruddy Reasons No Christian Should Ever Use to Deny Aid to the Poor

generous justiceThe other day I wrote a piece in which I outlined 3 ways Christians could reasonably disagree on what to do about helping the poor politically. It was essentially an explication of how someone could look at all of those Bible verses about helping the poor, believe them, want to put them into practice, and yet still find themselves voting against politicians and policies that attempt to enact long-term redistribution and aid to the poor via governmental programs. It was a plea for mutual understanding between economically left-leaning and right-leaning Christians, especially for the former not to assume bad-faith motives such as greed or heartlessness on the part of the latter in their voting patterns. Again, often-times these patterns are rooted in legitimate concern for the poor and a genuine difference of opinion on what is actually helpful to them.

Unfortunately, these good-faith reasons aren’t the only ones that people, even Christians, use to justify their voting, or even their giving patterns. Often-times there is a deeply un-Christian sensibility that informs our attitudes towards aid to the poor, rooted more in American, middle-class self-righteousness than in the Gospel or sound political theology. It’s easily spotted when the subject of taxes or charity comes up–certain platitudes and memes are tossed about having to do with “rights” and having “earned” our way of life, so on and so forth, implying that the poor simply deserve their lot and not our help. To a certain extent, I get it. There’s biblical warrant for connecting work with wages, property rights, etc.  Still, these truths often get used to justify callousness and are turned into opportunities for spiritual-economic pride that just cut plainly against the grain of Scripture.

Now, I originally planned to write a more substantial post in which I dealt with a number of these attitudes myself, but I ran across a brilliant quote by Robert Murray M’Cheyne that about sums it up:

Now, dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving…”Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor”

Objection 1 – “My money is my own.”
Answer: Christ might have said, “My blood is my own, my life is my own”…then where should we have been?

Objection 2 – “The poor are undeserving”
Answer: Christ might have said, “The are wicked rebels…shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving.

Objection 3 –“The poor may abuse it.”
Answer: Christ might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood.

Oh Dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

-quoted in Generous Justice, Timothy Keller, pg. 108

Note, you may still hold that governmental redistribution of economic goods is unwise, stretches beyond the government’s actual scope of authority, and is actually unhelpful for the poor–that’s fine. But God forbid that ever bleeds into an overall attitude of disregard for the poor. Objections like these should never be at the heart of any Christian who has received and understood the Gospel. The Gospel is about a God who saves by sheer grace, giving freely of himself to the undeserving. That needs to sink down deep into our minds, our souls, and reshape the way we approach even our own heart-motives for taking the economic positions we do.

If you don’t think the government should be the main source of aid, then make sure you are giving yourself, either directly, or through a church body. If you’re arguing for what you deem to be a wiser fiscal policy, beware that any of these creeping self-righteous attitudes infect your logic and your rhetoric, especially if you’re going to talk about your Christian ethics in other areas of political concern. The bottom-line with everything is: when it comes to the poor, don’t forget the Gospel.

Soli Deo Gloria