Book Announcement and Tim Keller Defends Moderation

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. This is a super quick episode, guys, but I needed to make an announcement.

So I'm making an announcement, and then because you expect from me some analysis of some material of some kind,

I decided someone had just sent me a Tim Keller post, and I thought, I'll go over this, because I read through it, it's really short, and I thought at the end,

I thought maybe he watched one of my videos. You know, Tim Keller, it's possible. Tim Keller's been interacting with a lot of, if you wanna call it little guys, little guys on social media, and it could be.

I mean, he uses the term third way to defend himself against attacks that he's supposedly a moderate, which

I mean, I don't know if other people probably have used that term too, but I've used the term third way, so, and about Tim Keller, so let's talk about it.

But first, the announcement, that's the important thing. That's why I'm making this video. Behind me, I have a lot of boxes.

I was sweating earlier. 700 books came in, copies of Social Justice Goes to Church.

So those of you who've been waiting for now, like I'm over a month, some of you, to get a copy of Social Justice Goes to Church, the wait is over, and those are the autographed copies.

You can go to socialjusticegoestochurch .com, and I'll sign it, I'll send it to you. If you order now, you should be able to get it before Christmas.

I have them now, so over the next week, I'm gonna be doing a lot of visits to the post office, but I wanted to let y 'all know that.

I guess COVID was keeping them from printing everything. They got it done, though. So we are now, as Duck Dynasty would say, cooking with butter.

So now, let's get into this, though, now that you've lent me your ear. This is a

Tim Keller post just recently, and I just, I wanna, I kinda skimmed this earlier.

I just wanna read it for you, and then react to it. Because I don't think Tim Keller gets it. So he starts off, political, so it's political, right?

This isn't religious conservatism or liberalism. It's political. It says, political advocates for both the right and the left devote great energy to criticizing moderates, centrists, as people who are selling out to the culture and refusing to take brave stands.

That's not true. His first sentence is just not true. Actually, political conservatives and liberals spend a great deal of time and energy and money can try to convince moderates, so people who are either unprincipled, or they're inconsistent, or they just have certain issues that have sort of a range of what they put the emphasis, or the value they put on maybe one issue that's an issue of the right.

They want border security, but they want abortion or something. Maybe there's an inconsistency there, but they fall somewhere in the middle because of,

I don't know, I'm thinking of like a Tommy Lauren, right? I don't know a lot about her. I know she's supposedly conservative on a lot of issues, but she's pro -abortion.

So how does that make, I mean, that's totally inconsistent, but conservatives would want to garner the support and try to,

I mean, to get a political victory, they're trying to make the tent as big as possible, and both sides are doing that.

Conservatives do it more, I think. Liberals tend to make these strict walls kind of a little more as far, they seem to be more interested in doctrinal purity.

Just my assessment, but either way, this statement is just false. They expel a lot of money in political ads to try to woo as many people as possible, including moderates and centrists.

They don't go attacking them. I'm not saying it never happens, but that the left and the right devote great energy to criticizing moderates, yeah, please, no, no, they don't.

But then he says, he's gonna tell a story. Let me tell you a story. Here comes the preacher in me. When I was teaching at Westminster in Philadelphia, I got to know

Chip Stonehouse, who was a son of one of the founding faculty members. He served for years with John Murray. Ned died in 1962.

Chip told me that he was approached by John Murray who expressed love for his father, but concerned that he died watching TV on a Sunday, which in Murray's view was breaking the

Sabbath. Tim Keller says, I asked Chip if he was offended, and the good natured Chip said, not at all. John was just the strictest person he knew regarding the

Sabbath. Yet consider this, as a young man, John Murray had been studying for the ministry in his denomination.

When he became involved with the controversy over Sabbath traveling, his denomination called for disciplining church members who use public transportation.

A minister named, on a Sunday, William Matheson then publicly opposed this ruling. He argued that if a person had no other means of getting to Sunday worship, it was not a sin.

John Murray supported Matheson, who eventually was expelled from the denomination. Murray then, what did

Murray do? He changed his views, was told that unless he changed his views, he would not be ordained. So Murray instead entered the

American Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Okay, so notice the first sentence is about political, left and right political views, and then he goes into something that, this isn't even a political thing.

Okay, that's fine, but just, it seems like he picked the example that 99 .99 % of people in his audience would agree with, right, because there's really,

I don't know really of anyone who would think like, oh, taking public transportation is a sin. I'm sure there's some people out there that still believe that, but it is, let's just say you're pretty safe in keeping your popularity if you're gonna take that kind of a stand or use that as your example.

I mean, he's not talking about abortion here, right? So he says this, this is an example, and he says, the point, no matter how strict and conservative or progressive you think you are, there is always someone stricter than you who thinks you have sold out your principles.

Is that true? There probably is someone, probably someone you don't care what their opinion is.

There's always someone that can criticize you, and that's not even conservative or liberal, that's just a human thing.

You put peanut butter on your sandwich and you cut it differently, you're gonna find someone who's capable of criticizing you for the way that you did that.

So he says, everybody in the world except the single most extreme person on the right and left, there has to be one of each, is a centrist compromiser.

So, you know, the right and left are, I'm trying to think of how to phrase this.

Tim Keller oversimplifies this in a way because it's not like you have team red and team blue and it's just kind of like there's, you can form a line and there's the most extreme person on blue and the most extreme person on red.

There are a plethora of issues and everyone is going to have slight different valuations on what issue they're concerned about and those kinds of things.

But political parties aren't just a check the box kind of thing, I should say political philosophies, that's really the issue here.

They actually come out of, there's principles underlying political philosophies which then build political parties.

And those issues are, flow out of moral questions and the answers to them.

And we do have on the right, at least traditionally we've had in the United States, if you're, you know, I'm still kind of a paleo conservative,

Russell Kirk's conservative mind, that kind of thing. Burkean, if you want to call it that. There's a tradition over hundreds of years that has been shaped by English common law but it's distilled principles really from scripture ultimately that have been distilled through tradition that have come down to us.

And there are certain answers to questions that cannot be shaken. And I'll use abortion as one of them.

It's either wrong to kill a child or it is okay to kill a child. There is no moderation in that.

It is either, you either think the Great Reset is a good thing or you think that it, you know, challenging civil liberties because of Great Reset policies is a bad thing.

Now you can maybe say, you could be a moderate and maybe try to say that, oh, there's a mixed bag.

There's some good, there's some bad. But ultimately, if you start peeling back the onion layers and you start asking questions like, well, should we have freedom of speech and freedom to assemble and freedom to bear arms and these kinds of things, you're going to have to come down on a side.

And there are two sides in this country. And like I said, one of them, I think is a biblical foundation.

The other one, and it's distilled by tradition. The other one, I like to go back to Rousseau.

You can go back before that if you want. But Rousseau, up through Marx to where we are today, has a very optimistic view of man.

Man's not a sinner, like the paleo -conservative position would be, man's a sinner, he's fallen.

It's man that's corrupt. It's man that has to be constrained. That's why you have checks and balances. That's why you want local authority.

And then there's this other philosophy that says, no, it's structural institutions, systemic issues.

It's all, the collective needs to come together and address these real structural problems in institutions.

And the greater the central authority and the power of that central authority to address these issues, the better that we can make sure that we can have really a utopia.

And these are two diametrically opposed political philosophies. There isn't any really wiggle room there, not much.

There's people that can be inconsistent. There's people that can be unprincipled. There's people who can be confused. But you're gonna kind of broadly go into one or two channels, all right?

And so Tim Keller reduces this whole thing to something kind of trivial. Taking public, in our minds today it would be trivial.

It wasn't necessarily in Scotland at the time. But taking public transportation to get to church.

So he's kind of making out like this is something that really isn't that important.

He ignores the underlying political philosophies. He ignores the diametrically opposed position some of these philosophies bring up.

Then he says, let criticism drive you to the scripture so you can be more deeply grounded in the word. I have no problem with that, but that's exactly what people have been doing with Keller.

That's why there's a book that came out a couple years ago from a number of Presbyterians challenging

Keller on his beliefs. And a number of them. His belief, you know, what he thinks about hell.

What he thinks about cultural, quote unquote, engagement. There's a whole plethora of issues in that book.

But people have been doing this with Keller for a while. They've been trying to go back to the word. If someone says you are being less biblical, always take that seriously.

Well, okay. I don't know if Keller has taken it seriously. I don't know.

I mean, I haven't seen any evidence of that. But think of these questions. Is God one or three?

That's what we call a false dichotomy, in a sense. He's both.

And the reason he's both is because we have actually a standard in scripture. The question is, is

God a trinity? And there's no moderation on that. It's one or the other. He's either the trinity or he's not.

No moderation. You gotta take a side. Now, if it's the extreme right -wing position, I guess, that takes the

Bible seriously, then what do you do? You're not a moderate anymore. But look how he sets it up. Is God one or three?

False dichotomy. Is Jesus divine or human? Another false dichotomy. Is God sovereign over history or are we responsible free agents?

Another false dichotomy. Is poverty the result of individual irresponsibility or of oppression and injustice?

Now, this one is interesting because this one's the only political question on here, really, and this is actually not necessarily a false, or it could be.

It could be a false dichotomy, I guess, because you could say that there is a specific situation.

You could think of an individual, maybe even in your own life, who you could put a name to it, right? Is Bob poor as a result of individual responsibility or was he robbed from?

Was there an oppression against him? Someone take his stuff. And if you know Bob and you know he wasn't robbed, then you know the answer to that, right?

But in a very abstract, esoteric kind of way, poverty can be caused by both.

You could have a country that comes in and rapes the landscape, clean, bare. People starve because of it.

A lot of communists have done that. And those people aren't impoverished because of what they did as individuals.

They're impoverished because an army came in and this is what the army did. And you see examples of both in scripture.

So it's kind of a dumb question, to be honest with you, because the question can only make sense in a particular setting.

In a certain setting that we're talking about, what, so in America, in this specific area, what's the general reason people are impoverished, all right?

And then you can actually gather evidence and try to figure it out. Oh, there's been a lot of crimes in that area.

A lot of people from other areas are coming and stealing. That could be part of it. Oh no, people are, and primarily in America, that's not usually the issue.

The issue usually is because there's some underlying problem. Broken families can contribute to it, a lot of other things, but ultimately it comes down to are people working or not?

Are they seeking employment? Are they able to get employment depending on where they are and what opportunities they have and all those kinds of things?

Are they traveling to get it? I mean, America's probably the place, or has been, where it's the easiest place to find employment, to be able to work for oneself.

So are people putting in that effort? And that's more of a question that's actually practical.

That actually gets you at answers to real people and real questions. Not esoteric, not abstract, real people, real situations.

And the, so this is what Tillich says. What's he trying to say with all this? He says the biblical answers to each of these questions are going to look like some kind of third -way centrism.

And here's why I thought he might've watched my video, because he uses that term third way. And I know I use that in a title of a video about Tim Keller about beware of the third way.

And I think I used abortion as my example of like, hey, it's either one or the other. You can't have a third way on political philosophies.

And that was just one example of an issue that political philosophies come down differently on. Third way though.

So here's the funny thing about third way, using that term. I used it specifically because in some, well, at the time

I hadn't done all this research, I knew a little bit about it, but I've done some research since then. And third way has an origin that, and I believe it is in the third way magazine, which

I think was a British Christian magazine in the 80s. Now, maybe it was used before then, but that's when I think it was made popular. And it was a progressive leaning magazine.

It was, I mean, this is where I remember reading this article about Ron Sider, where I got a lot of Ron Sider's, basically communist sounding quotes from third way magazine.

And this is what, you know, you heard Jim Wallace. I mean, you get my book, social justice goes to church. They're in boxes where I'd show you a copy.

I talk about this quite a bit, that there's this idea that the kingdom of God, biblical principles somehow transcend political principles, but they transcend them on the left.

And Tim Keller like fits this to a T. So even using the term third way, this actually has kind of a progressive origin to it.

That's what, that's the Hegelian dialectic. That's the, we're just the moderates. We're just, we're not what you think we are.

We're not progressives. But then they move the needle in a progressive direction, and then they create a new moderation.

I mean, the Overton window just keeps shifting. I mean, now you're a moderate. You could be for same sex marriage, but you're not for, you don't think transgenderism is a thing.

So you're now a moderate. Maybe now you're a conservative. If that, I mean, I don't even know, it's changing so quickly.

So here he says, he says, the biblical answers to each of these questions are going to look like some kind of third way centrism.

No, they're not. No, they're not. The questions that he just brought up, the biblical answers don't look like third way centrism.

The biblical, these are dumb questions. These are false. Most of these are just false dichotomies.

And so he says, though they are not, they are actually off the spectrum of human thought category.

So don't let the bare critique of centrism bother you. Everyone is a centrist in some way, except for those two people.

It's just, how do you even quantify this? It's just kind of like a dumb way of even just approaching life constantly.

Some of these evangelical elites, I think they seem to approach it this way. They take pride. David Platt, for instance, if you read his last book, they almost take pride in the fact that they're shot at by liberals and conservatives.

They want to like show that off, like, oh, look, I must be right because both sides, extremes disagree with me.

So I'm in this comfortable middle. I mean, people, I call it the rush for the middle. People love to be moderates.

Moderates, moderation just seems so winsome and you can appeal to both sides and you can have a church that's big because you're just welcoming everyone of all political persuasions.

And so, I mean, it's an appeal to be a moderate. I mean, that's the thing. Everyone really wants to be an acceptable polite society.

I'm a moderate. I'm open, I'm objective, not too far to one side, too far to the other side.

But that shouldn't be our pursuit. We shouldn't be constantly calculating where we line up on a political spectrum.

He got close to the truth here when he said, let criticism drive you to the scripture so you can be more deeply grounded in the word.

If the word is gonna make you align, make you sound like a right -wing nutjob, then so be it.

The truth is the truth and that's the pursuit we should have. Not trying to line up on an artificial human scale.

And that's kind of my concern for a lot of these evangelical elites is I think because so many of them want to appeal to the world and they're trying to also guard their right flank because a lot of evangelicals have been traditionally conservative politically, they end up doing this thing where they just sound unprincipled.

They try to make themselves sound like so winsome and moderate and vague if they ever have to nuance the leftist ideas to death.

And then they strawman a lot of right -wing ideas and in their minds what they think are right -wing ideas and they punch them out.

And that's being winsome, I guess. So this is a trend I've noticed and Tim Keller is just one person who does this.

But look at all the reactions on this. 3 .7K likes, 369 comments, 589 shares.

This is on Facebook and this was only 11 hours ago. So this is getting quite a few people this is resonating with.

I'm looking at the comments now. John Varghese, centrism is a euphemism for liberalism.

There are things in scripture, I like that one. I haven't read the whole thing actually. I read that first sentence.

I should probably, affirming the divine and human nature of Christ is not a centrist position. Bingo, that's exactly right.

I'm glad I liked this comment. It's the correct position. Likewise, affirming the sanctity of life and marriage is not a political position nor a centrist position.

It's the correct biblical position. Any person or party that opposes that is by definition wrong and immoral. However, there are non -essentials like ecclesiology and eschatology that we don't need to divide over.

But there are essentials that don't allow for a centrist position. Bingo, bingo. And so many of the fundamental moral issues that are expressing themselves in political ways don't have an option to be centrist, to be moderate.

It's pretty black and white. Either men are men and women are women or there's a whole, however many genders,

I can't remember, 600 and something genders, whatever. I mean, what's the centrist position? There's 400 genders?

Matt Johnson, I mean, I'm like, hey, I like the fact that these guys are saying some of the things that, I didn't even read this one.

Why be concerned about the continuum? It seems that left and right are reflected of man -made perspectives and systems, and real question is always what is true?

Now, look, the right and left, right, these are designations of French legislature, but they do represent, underlying them are principles that are at least, hopefully, for those on the conservative side of this, they're not appealing, they're appealing to transcendent truths.

They're not appealing to hopefully man -made things that traditionally they haven't been. Anyway, he's spot on right about that.

I'm gonna like that comment. Let's see there, what else? On a side note, there should be a distinction between being in the middle and being passive, being firm and clear with what you believe is wrong, yeah.

So, anyways, a lot of reactions to this. Actually, a lot of these are, surprisingly, very good reactions. So, I haven't read all of them, but there you go.

There's Tim Keller and his position, or his little thoughts after either watching one of my videos or seeing something that probably criticized him or criticized someone, using the term third way.

Third way means the way that it's used by conservatives, theological conservatives, especially.

The way I've experienced it, at least, is they're talking about someone who's either unprincipled or doesn't wanna take a stand or wants to usually promote this idea, and this is where it goes back to the progressive leftists of the 1970s, that the

Bible is this third way that transcends right and left. But then you look at all their positions and they're all on the left, just about.

So, there you go. I don't really have anything more to say about this. I don't know, I'm trying to think, what more can

I tell you guys, and there isn't much. That's it. So, what else?

This is a very short episode, 21 minutes. I've never done an episode 21 minutes. I can't end it now. Man, what can

I say? I hope y 'all had a good Thanksgiving. In the comments, let me know how your

Thanksgiving went. Was it good? Did you have more than 10 people, if you're in a state that didn't allow that?

Some states aren't even allowing anyone to meet. You have to just, you're a nuclear family. So, I hope the police didn't come.

If they did, I hope you have a video of it and you recorded the whole thing, because we certainly don't want that.

That's something we don't want happening in this country at all. But looping back around to the announcement,

Get Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism. You can go get an autographed copy at socialjusticegoestochurch .com