'"Fear" in the Bible means to be overwhelmed' (p.68, Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage)
Why have I not heard that before?!
I've struggled to work out what fear of the Lord looks like. The Bible makes clear that it is not simply being scared which is too negative, but neither is it simply reverence which is too safe. Overwhelmed/overcome seems to capture it well.
When Jesus Christ went to the cross, he was simply acting in character. As C. S. Lewis, wrote, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us, he did "in the wild weather of his outlying provinces" that which from all eternity "he had done at home in glory and gladness."
(p. 59, Tim Keller quoting CS Lewis who was quoting George MacDonald, The Meaning of Marriage)
The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us. Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us.
(p. 48, Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage)
Interesting to see what Rowan Williams has been reading:
The American Presbyterian writer Timothy Keller has recently published a book on Mark’s gospel, entitled King’s Cross. It is a vividly written and often very moving presentation of the great themes of the gospel (and incidentally offers a forceful defence of substitutionary language for the atonement that might give second thoughts to some who find this difficult); but perhaps its simplest and most dominant insight is that Christianity is not advice but news. The world has changed; humanity is not what it was. We are still working out, often in floundering and stumbling ways, what this means, but the one thing to beware of is reducing the news to exhortation, sound moral or even spiritual teaching, alone. We must always be beginning again with the news that God has shown himself to be a God who does not abandon – even when all the evidence has pointed to his absence, he recovers himself and us in the great act of vindication, homecoming and transfiguration that is the resurrection; a moment so alarmingly beyond all expectation that Mark can only present it with the silence, the fear and trembling, of his famous ending at 16.8. And I suppose that what I am pleading for in our discussion today is a revitalised sense of the news we have, the event we celebrate as having changed everything.
(General Synod Presidential Address, July 2011, HT Todd Brewer in his tasty selection of Christian books in 2011)
Interesting, but more importantly truths to celebrate.
It may sound strange, but I think Tim Keller preaches the best law/Gospel sermons I have ever heard.
He is a great preacher in many ways, not least because most of his sermons take you on a journey. What is not obvious is that this journey is often law/Gospel. It is not obvious because he does it better than the simplified version preached by many who would explicitly say that they are preaching law and Gospel (particularly in including the power as well as the penalty of sin, the attractiveness of the good life that 'the law' describes, deeply rooting everything in our cultural and existential experience, climaxing in Christ but in a way naturally connected to the topic and all without jargon).
The theme of friendship in the book of Proverbs is probably the last place you would expect to see the law/Gospel structure, but that is an indication that we haven't really realised the depth of it. Keller's sermon on a selection of proverbs (17:17; 18:24; 25:17,20; 26:18-19; 27:5, 6, 9, 14, 17; 28:23; 29:5) is excellent for its content alone and I would encourage you to listen to it just for that. But if you do listen to it, consider also the law/Gospel journey he takes you on.
I'll attempt to outline his sermon using his own language in black and then show what lies behind what he is doing in my words in blue:
[THE LAW - describes the way life ought to be. The law is good as it shows the creation standard of how we should live. Therefore we should delight in it and live it out]
1. The Uniqueness of Friendship
Friendship offers something different to other relationships (familial, romantic) but in most societies is pushed out. Particularly in our busy and mobile culture.
2. The discovery of a friendship
Friendship requires a common foundation which is a common object of love. Friendship cannot be forged alone, but must be discovered.
3. The forging of the friendship
Once discovered the friendship needs to be forged (i.e. strengthened)
The 4 marks of true friendship are:
Conclusion of points 1-3
discovery + forging + time = friendship [the law is nothing if not logical, input the works and out comes the result]
[THE TURN - most good narratives have a 'turn' (I think the term exists in plot analysis, although wikipedia refers to it as 'the climax'). I can't think if I have heard this term anywhere talking about law/Gospel, but I think it is helpful to distinguish this moment when the Law ends and the Gospel come in. Keller is a master at this. At this point the law is fully understood and its weight felt. Up to now it has been presented as advice and a model. What this deeply attractive model has been doing to us is then brought to the surface and spelt out.]
Introduction to point 4
Having painted this picture of a perfect friendship two things happen:
[THE GOSPEL: the solution is Christ and his substitutionary death and resurrection for us]
4. The power of friendship
Where then do we find the power to be the friends we need to be to have the friends we need to have?
[Jesus fulfils the law as he lives the perfect life, and he does it all for us:]
John 15: Jesus calls us his friends. But he is the perfect friend who lays down his life for us.
Genesis 1-3: We walked with God (a Hebrew way of describing friendship) but we turned our back on him. Most friends we do this to would turn on us in response but God didn't do that.
[Jesus died suffering the power and penalty of sin so that we could be freed from both:]
The cross: Christ lost his friendship with God so that he could have friendship with us. He went to hell for the sake of his friends.
[As he took our death now he gives us his life to us so that we share in all he has - inc his friendship with God:]
As we now have friendship with God, all our friendship eggs are not in the human basket so we are liberated to be the friend that we ought to be.
[In the church we taste the new creation that he has bought for us:]
God, in Christ, also creates the church where we share a common object of love, and yet are different so have 'constructive clash' (iron sharpening iron), so we can experience rich friendships in the church now.
[Only bit I think Keller is missing is a pointer to the future hope of perfect friendships with God and other people]
There are so many things that we read in the Bible that are difficult to stomach. The obvious things to say when that happens are:
However, I think more can be said about why it is actually not just necessary but also good to swallow what the Bible says, even if we don't like the way it tastes.
1. Not a Stepford God
Firstly, it is an indication that we are dealing with an independent person. And a new personal relationship with our Heavenly Father is what makes the Gospel attractive. Tim Keller says this better than anyone I have read:
“If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.
“For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives? The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.
“Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction.
“Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.
(Tim Keller, The Reason for God, pages 113-114)
2. True Truth
Secondly, as Keller mentions in that final paragraph, it is also an indication that we have come up against true truth. In his brilliant address, The Weight of Glory says the same thing:
The natural appeal of [the imagery of 'glory'] is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.” ... If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.
3. The way to find new vistas we could not conceive
Thirdly, we trust God from experience and his promises that if we go through accepting these difficult truths we will find that actually it opens up even more beautiful and awe-inspiring vistas than we would otherwise have seen. Lewis, having taken us on just that journey in The Weight of Glory, explains how pushing through his initial distaste with the concept of glory led him to discover something that is richer and more satisfying than if he had just rejected it out of hand:
If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connexion at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connexion is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted.
Today I have listened to Rob Bell quizzing Adrian Warnock whether he is happy with the idea of God condemning people to hell. The doctrine is difficult for both to swallow, but Adrian Warnock choses to swallow and Rob Bell doesn't.
But I have also listened to Jack Miller, saying "cheer up, you're a lot worse off than you think." Original sin is a difficult doctrine for many to swallow, but Jack Miller movingly shows how it is only through fully absorbing it that we find freedom and adoption.
Finally, I would say - bring your concerns and questions to God. Wrestle with him, but with the hope that he and not you will prevail.
Christian change is:
According to Tim Keller, in his sermon on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23.
Still listening to Tim Keller on applying Biblical texts. Keller draws out some helpful stuff from Vern Polythress on triperspectivalism in application:
Vern Poythress in [God-Centered Biblical Interpretation] takes John Frame's 3-perspectives of normative (prophetic). existential (priestly), and situational (kingly) and works this out for hermeneutics [...]
Each perspective is true in that it eventually comprises the whole, but each approach begins with a particular 'door' or aspect.
[1. 'Doctrinalist'] The 'normative' aspect I'll call "the gospel of Christ" - stresses objective, historic work of Christ that Jesus really came in time-space and history to accomplish all for us. It will talk much more about the real, historicity of Jesus life. death and resurrection...This view thinks that the problem addressed by Paul in Galatians was a doctrinal heresy.
[2. 'Pietist'] The 'existential' aspect I'll call "the gospel of sonship"- stresses our new identity in Christ as adopted children, liberated from the law. It will talk much of the power of the spirit to renew broken hearts and psyches...This view thinks that the problem addressed by Paul in Galatians was a pastoral one of Christians falling back into legalism.
[3. 'Cultural-transformationist'] The 'situational' aspect I'll call "the gospel of the kingdom" - stresses the reversal of values in the new creation. It will talk about healed community, cultural transformation, ministry of deed and justice... This view thinks that the problem addressed by Paul in Galatians was the lack of 'table fellowship' between Jew and Gentile.
We need all three perspectives, though each perspective is not simply a 'part' of the gospel. For example, the 'kingdom' perspective contains the other two. If God is king, then salvation must be by grace, for if we are saved by works, something else will be our Lord and Savior . Or, if we have a new identity in Christ by sheer grace. then we must not look down at anyone else, and self-justification is the basis of racism and injustice. If you go deep enough into any one perspective, you will find the other two.
In his excellent lectures on preaching, Tim Keller gives his basic outline for preaching to the heart as well as to behaviour. In fact, he describes it as the foundational outline for all the moral reasoning and argument that lies at the heart of application.
a. The Plot winds up: WHAT YOU MUST DO.b. The Plot thickens: WHY YOU CAN'T DO IT.
- "This is what you have to do! Here is what the text/narrative tells us that we must do or what we must be."
c. The Plot resolves: HOW HE DID IT.
- "But you can't do it! Here are all the reasons that you will never become like this just by trying very hard."
d. The Plot winds down: HOW, THROUGH HIM, YOU CAN DO IT.
- "But there's One who did. Perfectly. Wholly. Jesus the---. He has done this for us, in our place."
- "Our failure to do it is due to our functional rejection of what he did. Remembering him frees our heart so we can change like this ..."
We're all preachers, not least to our own hearts, so it is important to think how we apply the Bible to our hearts. This structure is biblical, Christ-centred and packed with grace where it matters. But it is important that it is also a story. This makes it interesting to hear because there's dramatic tension and it is effective because it also takes the Christian on a journey from death to life, law to Gospel and self to Christ. We all want to make that journey, and by starting with the command, and not Christ, you don't just preach the goal but how to get there.
That's why I love the distinction between law and Gospel. It is about a movement. It's not an exercise in chopping up scripture but a dynamic.
Do you remember that pointless bit of 'world news' a few years ago, when we were all informed what George Bush listened to on his ipod?
I listen to MP3s when I jog too, although I mainly listen to sermons and lectures, so it was interesting to hear Tim Keller say he does the same. Even if he jogs every day for 45min which puts me to shame.
He mentioned four preachers he particularly listened to, and in the spirit of the cult of Christian celebrity I thought I'd share:
Yes, they're all British. Jackman is 67, Lucas and Stott are well into their 80s, and MLJ would be 110 if he was still alive. And yet Keller commented that these British pastors have been great models for preaching to a postmodern New York congregation because the British culture is closer to New York than the rest of the States.
What lessons should us Brits draw from that?
It's quite fashionable to describe the Trinity as a dance. CS Lewis does in Mere Christianity, and Tim Keller picks up on this in The Reason for God (p.215):
When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two [...] Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. the early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this - perichoresis. Notice our word "choreography" within it. It means literally to "dance or flow around"
That's great, I love it. But I'm also slightly disatisfied. Maybe it's because I don't really like dancing, but despite all that is said about other-centredness and movement it feels slightly self-contained and static to me. Perhaps it's because I see the dance as happening somewhere over there, and "Jesus...inviting you into the dance" (p.221, ibid). Instead I should see the dance as "Jesus moving toward us and encircling us with an infinite, self giving love" (ibid) and then it would be better. But usually the "dance of God" is a description of the triune life apart from the salvation of the world, and I'm increasingly convinced that we mustn't talk about the Trinity apart from that.
In Luther's hymn "Dear Christians, one and all rejoice", Luther imagines the triune life of God not as a dance but as a conversation about the salvation of the world. Oswald Bayer comments on this hymn:
If the Trinity is a dialogue, if God, within himself, is communication, relationship, a relational three-ness, then he does not allow himself to be conceptualized in any way as a monad, as a monarchical being or subject. Instead, within himself he is in motion: speaking and hearing, speaking and answering, as Father and Son, to whom the Spirit listens, so that what is heard can be communicated to us [cf. John 16:13]. Thus the entire being of the triune God is a unique communication to me and to all creatures, an event of complete giving and a trustworthy, reliable promise.
(p.341, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)
I like that more. Although I must make sure it is not my likes and dislikes driving my theology!
Listening to Julie Fowlis on myspace
I may not have any time to read, but I still make time to run and listen to stuff. Most recently I've listened to some excellent sermons from Tim Keller and a couple of others at The Christian Life Conference (2007) on Cruciformity. Highly recommended... for what its worth.
The other years of the conference look good too.
The TNIV bible set out in single column without verse numbers, chapter numbers or section headings. They have annoyingly messed with book order as well, but overall it is now my favourite bible to read from in chunks. Its dirt cheap too if you buy it from AbeBooks.
2. Tim Keller: Isn't the Bible historically unreliable and regressive?
Probably the best apologetic talk on why we should trust the bible. I particularly like how it focuses on challenging the challenges that those who are not yet Christians bring. I recently burnt it onto a CD and gave it to someone I know who is not yet a Christian. He still isn't a Christian, but he found it quite sensible and helpful.
Luther said that "Life is as evil among us as among the papists" (p. 57, Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil).
Tim Keller who is deeply influenced by Luther's radical doctrine of grace often says the same kind of thing. e.g:
It is often the case that people whose lives have been harder and who are "lower on the character scale" are more likely to recognize their need for God and turn to Christianity. So we should expect that many Christians' lives would not compare well to those of the nonreligious (just as the health of people in the hospital is comparatively worse that people visiting museums).
(p.54, Reason for God)
In a similar vein Alister McGrath says that he sometimes would respond to comments that "Christianity cannot be true because I know X and he is a horrible person" by saying "just imagine how much more horrible X would be if he wasn't a Christian".
I don't quite understand how to hold this together with the teaching of 1 John and the like. I often feel the NT does lead us to expect that Christian's lives should compare well with non-Christians. But maybe my trouble is I'm confusing 'should' with 'will' instead of 'ought to'.
I 'should' read Luther on 1 John, but unfortunately it involves £20 outlay.
Tim Keller recalls recalls how he once met a women who found the promise of free grace 'scary'. When he asked her why she replied:
If I was saved by my good works, then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with "rights" - I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace - then there's nothing he cannot ask of me.
(The Reason for God, p.183)
I remember Mike Cain happily from my Bristol days. I haven't finished it yet but I think this is a great little book. It's winsome and encourages further thought. It is not an introduction to Christianity but more a primer to encourage further exploration. It presents Christianity as full of life and not at all stale.
2. Christianity ExploredSomething else I have not yet finished but which I'm also loving. I started doing this with my church and a friend recently with sinfully small expectations. However it is excellent for at least 3 reasons:
I really have not done it justice. I am loving it! ... and loving seeing what God is doing through it!
3. Tim Keller's talks from The Reason for God website
| From the series "The Trouble with Christianity: Why it's so Hard to Believe It" | ||
| Exclusivity: How can there be just one true religion? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Suffering: If God is good, why is there so much evil in the world? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Absolutism: Don't we all have to find truth for ourselves? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Injustice: Hasn't Christianity been an instrument for oppression? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an angry Judge? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Doubt: What should I do with my doubts? (by David Bisgrove) | Download Audio | Study Guide |
| Literalism: Isn't the Bible historically unreliable and regressive? | Download Audio | Study Guide |
Again I haven't finished them all, and I'm not sure that I agree with everything in the one on Hell, but he is an amazingly engaging and thoughtful speaker. I'm buying the book off the back of them.
It's been a while since I did this.
Tim Keller on the prodigal Son (and the prodigal's older brother). HT Justin Taylor. I love Tim Keller, he really knows how to make you think again about sin, and specifically your sin. Highly recommended.
