Tim Keller Weighs in with his Mind Reading Abilities and Ad Hom

Alright, so I wanted to do a video about this Tim Keller thing that everybody's sharing and it is very remarkable,

I will say. But before I do, I wanted to talk about how smart God is, how amazing his word is and how if you just read it, oftentimes you'll get the refutation of your errant position in the same section as the verses you quote to promote your errant position.

So this is a perfect example of this. This is the passage in Leviticus, Leviticus 19, that Jesus quotes when he talks about loving your neighbor as yourself.

So many people know this already, but some people don't, that when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself, that's not a new thing.

That's something that God has been telling his people all along and it comes from Leviticus chapter 19. This is the same passage that talks about homosexuality being a sin and things like that.

Anyway, here's what it says in Leviticus 19, verse 17, it says you shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I am the Lord. That's where it comes from. So God has been saying to his people, you shall love your neighbor as yourself all the way from the beginning.

And so when Jesus says it to the people in the New Testament, it's not a new thing. They should have known this.

In fact, many of them did know about this and they considered this the second greatest commandment. So Jesus didn't come up with that either.

And so here's the thing. The social justice advocates out there love to say, well, all we're advocating for is to love your neighbor as yourself.

And then they say, well, we're, and we're advocating for justice being equivalent to giving poor people stuff and things like that.

And many of them strongly imply, even if they don't outright say it strongly imply that if you don't promote welfare programs or if you don't promote a state intervention, state funds being given to the poor, given to people of oppression, things like that, then you're not loving your neighbor as yourself.

In fact, many people would say, if you're voting Republican, you're not loving your neighbor as yourself because they oppose some of that stuff.

They don't really oppose all of that stuff. But anyway, that's, that's what some people would say. And the best part about God's word is that if you just read it, you'll get the refutation of social justice, even in this passage.

So yes, this is a great passage. Love your neighbor as yourself, but right before it says this in verse 15, the very, so two verses prior, or I'm sorry, three verses prior to love your neighbor as yourself.

Here is what it says. You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor.

Full stop right there. You shall not be partial to the poor. Then it goes on and says you or defer to the great.

So you shouldn't be partial to the poor or the rich or the, you know, the powerless or the powerful.

But in righteousness, you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor.

I am the Lord. Here is the point. If you're loving your neighbor, you cannot slander your people and you cannot do it in favor of the poor.

Do you see what I'm saying? So what we're about to watch is Tim Keller slandering his, uh, the people slandering the people of God and saying things about them that are provably untrue and saying things about them as if they were true.

And he does it because he shows partiality to the poor. In fact, he, he twists

God's justice in favor of the poor. God specifically says here in the very same passage where it says, love your neighbor as yourself, that you shall not be partial to the poor.

Why do you think he says that? Why do you think he says that? Who would be partial to the poor? Well, I know an entire political party that is partial to the poor.

I know tons of Christians who are partial to the poor and to the weak and to the powerless and to the oppressed.

They would say that the same standards of evidence don't apply to the, the quote unquote oppressed. And I say quote unquote because I don't think they're really oppressed.

Here's the thing. If you see people, Christians talking about how we should just believe women when they have accusations, that's showing partiality to the poor.

That's an application of showing partiality to the poor or the oppressed. When you hear people say things like, well, well, well, black people shouldn't be called out on their racism because they can't be racist.

That's showing partiality to the poor. You see what I'm saying? When you see people promoting socialist welfare redistributions, things like that, that's showing partiality to the poor.

That's not loving your neighbor as yourself. And so let's, uh, let's watch this video and, uh, let's talk about this.

Now let me say before I even start that, uh, this gives me no pleasure to, uh, to, uh, to watch

Tim Keller's face plant like this. I love Tim Keller. In fact, I've said many times on video that Tim Keller's book, the prodigal

God, I wept over that book. That was one of the first times that the gospel was real to me. And so that book drove me to the scriptures and drove me to what

God actually says and drove me to, to, uh, to my knees, really worshiping God because of his gospel.

So I have, I owe Tim Keller a weight of gratitude, a debt of gratitude because of that book.

Um, it drove me to read the scriptures and take God seriously. I've said this many times, so this is, this is a hero of mine.

This gives me no pleasure to talk about this, but here we're going to have Tim Keller doing the exact thing that I predicted that social justice advocates would do.

My prediction is that actually a significant number of social justice minded Christians either will sign it or would won't sign it because they know the intention, but say that they would sign it because there's a lot of, uh, of Christians out there that think that they believe everything that this statement says.

The problem is that their rhetoric proves otherwise, that they would do one of two things with the statement on social justice.

I said that they would either sign it and pretend like they believe all of it, even though they clearly don't, or they would say, it would say something like this.

Well, you know, I would sign it, but I'm not going to because I know the heart behind it as if they know, uh, what's in my heart or the, the, the people who wrote it's heart.

Let's, let's just listen to this and we'll, we'll kind of go from there. There's a thing called speech act theory and speech act theory, which is, which is

I think very helpful. It says you can't just analyze words by what they say. You also have to analyze words by what they do.

So, uh, they've got, they've got technical terms for it. They talk about, uh, now this is, let me just say this.

This is a strategy that I've seen, uh, other people say as well, people saying that we don't really want to just analyze the statement.

We want to analyze the statement behind the statement, what they end up meaning, what they end up doing rather than the words themselves.

And so this is a, this is a, a, a very highfalutin hoity toity white, uh, white tower, what's it called?

Uh, ivory tower, uh, type of analysis of the statement of social justice. It's slippery. It's sneaky.

Um, but let's just hear him out. You know, there is, you, you can say, um, uh, you know,

I, you know, I love the way you look and that may be perfectly true, but it depends on what you're trying to do.

And there are certain circumstances that could be a rather, um, it could be a, that could be a kind of coercive statement.

So in other words, there's what it says, is it true? And then what is it trying to do? So when

I go through there, if you go really, really strictly, I think just about anybody would take about 80 % of it.

You say, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. I'd be very interested to hear the 20 % he doesn't agree with, because as far as I'm concerned, all of it is basic level

Christianity. So I'd be interested to hear. I mean, maybe Tim Keller will have the courage to tell me what 20 % of it.

Not me. Tell us what 20 % of it he doesn't agree with. I'd love to hear that because that would be very revealing.

And then there's even some places that you really put extremes. I kind of see why they would say that. It depends on how, and things like that.

But in the end, what, what concerns me most about it is not so much what it's saying, but what it's trying to do.

Yeah. Why don't you tell us what it's trying to do, Dr. Keller? I mean, here's the thing. I'm sure that you have some kind of revelation inside of you that tells you what people are really thinking instead of what they're actually saying.

I'm sure that you have that. Yeah. There's a lot of people out there that criticize it this way, where they, they know what's really being said.

And I guess the Holy Spirit is revealing it to them. I think that's ridiculous. I think that's sneaky. I think that's slippery.

Let's continue. At this point,

I feel that the Christian church is being, because our country is so polarized politically, that increasingly the church is becoming an extension of the various political parties.

So I, this is, I've said this before and I'm going to say it again. You know, if you talk about the evangelical church, for example, there's now becoming a red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism.

It's almost like there are churches that are sort of lining up to become more extensions of a particular political party than they are really looking at what the word of God says.

Because I actually do think that if you really take a look at, there's a lot of things the

Bible says about sex and gender that really come out pretty, sounding politically today conservative.

And a lot of things the Bible says about race and justice and the poor that today come out sounding extremely liberal.

Yeah. So let's, let's, let's analyze that for one second. So, um, does the Bible say things that sound liberal to today's ears?

No, no, because the Bible talks about giving to the poor. Yes. Everyone agrees with that.

Red Christians say that the Bible talks about giving to the poor, just like blue Christians say that.

But here's what the, the Bible also says. The Bible also says, if you do not work, you do not eat.

That's not liberal. I don't know what kind of planet Tim Keller lives on, but that's not a liberal sentence.

You see, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Conservative fundamentalist Christians who I know very embarrassing to Dr.

Keller. I get it. I know that we're very embarrassing to you, but we take all of the scripture and we say we got to apply it all.

So we have to give to the poor, but we can't steal to do it. We can't Robin Hood people. Do you understand what I'm saying? We can't do that because that's liberal, but that's not biblical.

It doesn't sound, the Bible doesn't say anything about the government taking from some and given to others. That's stealing.

The Bible condemns that. That's a liberal idea, not a biblical idea. So it only sounds liberal if you're assuming that it is liberal.

If you have assumptions that don't come from the Bible, that's the only way it sounds liberal. And so Dr. Keller, I think is being very revealing here.

He is very much influenced by Marxist and socialist ideas. In fact, I've heard that he's admitted this in places.

I don't have, I heard that he admitted it in the reason for God book. I have read that book.

I don't have it anymore. I've been looking for it and I don't have it. I must've given it away. And so, so anyway, no, that's not true.

And therefore the church has to, at the very end of my talk, I try to say the churches cannot identify so completely with one part.

It's not so much what it says, it's what it does. It's trying to marginalize the people who are talking about race and justice.

It's trying to say you're really not biblical. And it's not fair in that sense.

Yeah, it's not fair. Okay. So yes, what he said, it's trying to marginalize people talking about justice and racist.

I talk about racism and justice all the time. And that statement was not marginalizing me.

It wasn't marginalizing me. It was actually referring to a specific perspective that is unbiblical.

Not talking about giving to the poor. Let's, let's actually, let's let him finish. We've got 30 seconds left. Let's hear the rest of this before I continue.

If somebody starts to go down it with me and say, would you agree with this? Would you agree with this?

I would say you're looking at the level of what it says and not at the level of what it's doing. And I do think what it's trying to do is it's really trying to say don't make this emphasis.

Don't worry about the poor. Don't care about the injustice. It's not really that important. That's what it's saying.

Even if, even if I can agree with most of it, I don't, I don't like it. So that's, that's what it means. It's what it's doing that I don't like.

I think that's absolutely preposterous, preposterous. Here's the reality. He just said here that the people who signed that statement, the people who wrote it, what they're trying to do is say, don't care about the poor.

Don't care about justice. That is not at all what it's doing. And, and, and, you know, if there are some people who signed it that actually think that, okay, well then they're being unbiblical.

But the reality is that there's a very specific way to care about the poor that the Bible talks about and a very specific ways that it says you shouldn't do it.

And here's the reality. When you care about the poor and loving your neighbor as yourself, this is their favorite verse.

I like that verse too. What it says is you shall not be partial to the poor right before it. If you are being partial to the poor, then you are not loving your neighbor as yourself.

Let me repeat that. If you are being partial to the poor in your politics, in your social life, in your church, in the court, any of those areas, if you're being partial to the poor, you are not loving your neighbor as yourself.

You're breaking the commandment and taking the Lord's name in vain. You're saying that God is behind something that he's not.

If you say, and I'm going to say this very directly to the camera here, if you say that it's unchristian to not support welfare programs or affirmative action or all of this kind of socialist liberal stuff, you are taking the

Lord's name in vain and you need to repent. You're in sin. You're in sin because the Bible specifically rejects that idea.

If you say that if you don't support government wealth redistribution or anything like that, socialist kind of ideas, and that's unbiblical, then you are in sin.

You're taking the Lord's name in vain. You're not loving your neighbor as yourself. That's what the Bible says. It's not about it sounding liberal.

That's another thing. A lot of people have said, well, you're saying it sounds liberal and that's why you want to own the libs.

No, I'm saying it's unbiblical. Not that it sounds liberal. I don't care what it sounds like. Look, I believe things about immigration that sound liberal, but only if you accept liberal definitions, liberal presuppositions, liberal foundations, liberal ideas.

That's the only way they sound liberal. So again, this is just more of the same that we've been seeing from this camp.

This is just a willingness to slander people they don't have any idea about, just to assign evil motivations to them.

They did the same thing during Trump's election. I had a pastor who basically, like I said, he started calling everyone who voted for Trump, white supremacist, motivated by hatred, motivated by fear.

Matt Chandler does this. He says the people who voted for Trump, they were motivated by fear and mean spiritedness and evil and things like that.

This is just all the same nonsense. You guys need to step your game up. You got to do better than this.

You got to do better than this. There's no reason to slander people pretending you know secret things about their motivations that nobody could possibly know.

Why not just respond to what was said? Not the hidden message behind what was said that you're just making up because it sounds good.

It's good rhetoric for your base. I'm sick of this kind of stuff. I really am. However, I have come to expect it.

And so as sad as it is to see Tim Keller do it, it is expected. Chandler's been doing it. Keller's doing it.

Lots of people do this on Twitter every single day. And it's really pathetic. I find it disgusting. I find it unchristian.

And you really ought to repent for it. And so this kind of a presentation here, Dr. Keller, is not going to cut it.

This is so frustrating because you're judging motivations based on things that aren't even in the document itself.

In fact, the document says that we should live justly. It says it. The words say we should live justly. And here you are saying, they're saying don't care about justice.

That's a lie, Dr. Keller. You're going to have to answer to God for that. And I think that most people that aren't completely zealots or just completely bought into this can see this kind of presentation for what it is.

It's empty. It's empty. And I know this is why you do your little monologues. You don't want to have debates because people could call you out on that.

This is sinful. You know, if you're promoting this kind of a perspective where you're judging motivations and you're saying, well, you know, you guys are mean.

You guys, you're saying don't care about the poor, when that's clearly not what we're saying. You're lying.

You're in sin and you need to repent. Anyway, that's what I have to say today. I hope this was helpful.