Steven Colbert, This is Why You Never Mess With God

Stephen Colbert, Faith, and Comedy in the Viral Interview

Stephen Colbert needs no introduction, but he has won anyways. Colbert hosted the incredibly popular Colbert Report from 2005 to 2014, and now he hosts The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Recently, a clip from The Late Show has been floating around Twitter, and the responses to it have been quite shocking.

Let's watch the clip, look at some of the responses, and then make some comments. First, here's the clip.

Is there any, you know, does your faith and your comedy ever overlap? And does one ever win out?

Us all being mortal, the faith will win out at the end. But I certainly hope when I get to heaven, Jesus has a sense of humor. So if there's some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it's that no matter what happens, you are never defeated.

Tim Keller, Public Witness, and the Danger of Calling Colbert a Christian

The most notable response was from Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

Keller tweeted, This is a brilliant example of how to be a Christian in the public square. Notice the witness, but in a form the culture can handle. We should desire to have more Christians in these spaces and give them grace as they operate.

Two notes here.

First, Keller identifies Colbert as a Christian. Of course, Colbert says he is a Christian and a Catholic. I'm a Christian and a Catholic. But there are numerous problems here. First, Catholicism officially teaches a false gospel that does not save.

We believe that the gospel is the issue. That has created a real division with the Roman Catholics because we're not preaching the same gospel. And so I asked him, we're standing outside a clinic, and someone walks up to us and says, what must I do to be saved?

Will you say right here and now on this program that our answers would be fundamentally different? They would be contradictory answers.

And he said yes. And second, even if Colbert were not a Catholic, Colbert supports ending the lives of unborn humans in the womb.

Yesterday, Alabama lawmakers passed a bill banning nearly all of That, that is either an overreach by the Alabama GOP or some pretty intense viral marketing for the new season of Handmaid's Tale.

As well as the LGBTQ agenda.

It's June, which of course is Pride Month, the time of the year when we all celebrate the LGBTQ community.

Clearly, Colbert does not submit himself to the Bible's teachings, nor even to the Roman Catholic Church's official teachings. So Keller calling Colbert a Christian is extremely dangerous and misleading.

Since this will give countless people who follow Keller a false and unbiblical view of what a Christian really is. And second, Keller praises Colbert for being a witness in a form the culture can handle.

Contextualization Versus Compromise in Acts 17 and Colossians 4

In several follow-up tweets, Keller doubled down on this position.

The recent post I made about Stephen Colbert's partial answer about his faith and the ensuing comments has shown me American Christians still have a long way to go on understanding Colossians 4, 5 -6, how to be wise in the ways you act towards outsiders.

This is called contextualization.

But there is an enormous difference between communicating the gospel in a way people can understand and not communicating the gospel at all. When Paul spoke to the Gentiles in Acts 17, he altered how he communicated, but he still communicated the concepts of sin and repentance.

He still offended many. Is it not amazing to you that people go here and argue for cultural compromise? People go to Acts 17 and look at Paul, you know, here before the Areopagus and basically make an argument for look like the world, sound like the world, smell like the world, taste like the world, so that perchance you can get in there and get an opportunity with the world, then you can spring it on them.

Now, not only has Paul not compromised in order to get here, but once he's here, he says, your worldview is wrong, your philosophy is wrong, it's not just wrong, it's an affront to God, you ought to know better, you're in sin.

In contrast, Colbert never mentioned sin, repentance, what faith is exactly, salvation or Christ. He just gave a generic answer to a generic question. Colbert may have given a nice answer with nothing too objectionable about it, but it certainly wasn't the gospel or a Christian witness.

It seems that Keller has such a strong desire to present Christianity to people in a form that they will like and not be offended by, that he will look past the countless red flags around people like Colbert without giving any qualification or warning.

Theistic Evolution, Evangelical Language, and the Missing Gospel

This is also likely why Keller supports theistic evolution, since it's a position that is more acceptable to the world. Anthony Bradley, author of Liberating Black Theology, tweeted,.

It just shows how intellectually superior Catholics are at articulating their faith. A Protestant would not have been able to do that. Anglicans could. Most evangelicals would say, there's no gospel in his answer.

But again, there really was no gospel in Colbert's answer, and his answer really wasn't an intellectually superior answer. Any Protestant who could communicate the simple biblical truths of sin, repentance, justification through faith alone, new life through the Holy Spirit, and salvation from hell would have given a better answer.

But of course, the world doesn't want to hear this kind of answer, and it would rather hear a generic, nice-sounding answer that isn't offensive to anyone. So it praises Colbert for giving the answer he gave.

Cosmic Reconciliation, Individual Repentance, and Salvation in Christ

Kyle Howard, a Christian racial trauma counselor, tweeted,.

It was a great response and a demonstration of the Christian faith. When one moves beyond a Western hyper-individualistic conception of the gospel to the historical gospel of cosmic reconciliation and damp reunification of all, things brought out of order by evil occur.

Once again, Colbert didn't actually demonstrate the Christian faith. And Howard's language here obscures the simple command all over the New Testament to individually repent of sin and trust in Jesus' atoning work alone for salvation.

Sure, individual repentance and faith are a part of the historical gospel of cosmic reconciliation and reunification of all things. But they're also where every individual needs to start, and without them, there is no salvation and no Christianity.

The degree of confusion regarding Colbert's supposed faith and the answer he gave in this interview, even from a prominent evangelical teacher like Tim Keller, is quite shocking.