Engaging Tim Keller on the Trinity

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Jon continues a short series on Tim Keller's theology. PowerPoint: https://www.patreon.com/posts/75878827

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Welcome once again to the
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Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris. We have an episode today that some of you have been looking forward to and others feel you probably feel like you've already seen it.
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And I'm going to explain that to you for the few hundred of you who watched the podcast last night.
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I've done something that I don't normally do, in fact, I don't think I've ever done it. Maybe once in the last three years,
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I decided to re -record a podcast. And there's a few reasons for it, but the topic is on Tim Keller's view of the
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Trinity. We've been going through this book, engaging with Keller, we're up to chapter three, which is on the Trinity, and Tim Keller's view.
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And the purpose, of course, is for you, if you're a layman, if your pastor's advocated Tim Keller, you can at least have an educated conversation.
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You can identify the working issues. You can do so in a laser -focused, clarifying way, and have just a very intelligent, helpful conversation instead of a muddled one where,
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I think, as often happens, someone who's against Keller can call
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Tim Keller a name. Someone who's for Tim Keller calls the people who are against him names, and things devolve from there.
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And the goal of this podcast is to give you some real meat, something you can sink your teeth into, something you can point to and say, here's sources, here's what
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Tim Keller says about this, here's what the Bible says, and here's how those two things don't line up.
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Here's how Tim Keller is acting in a heterodox fashion or teaching unorthodox views.
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And this has been helpful, and I'm realizing more and more as we do this series, as I read comments that come in, how helpful this really is.
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This has an evergreen quality to it, and because of that, I've decided to rerecord the podcast last night.
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I don't always listen to my podcast, but I did happen to listen to this one, and I just thought it could be more clear.
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I mean, I could have left it up there, but I just thought this is a very tricky subject,
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I think, for many evangelicals. It's a very, we're talking about the Trinity in general, has us in an abstract world in some ways, because we're trying to make sense of something we don't see.
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It's unique, we don't see parallels in the physical world that we inhabit that I can point to and say the
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Trinity is just like water in the various forms water takes, because then I would be committing a heresy.
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I would be committing, in that case, I guess that would be the heresy of modalism. And I wouldn't accurately represent the biblical teaching, which is that there is one
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Godhead or one essence, divine essence, and there are three persons, so one being three persons.
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And there have been so many issues through the ages when cults arise with aberrant teachings on the
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Trinity. That's usually one of the first things that a cult does. Not all the time, perhaps, but more often than not,
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I can think of three off the top of my head right now in my area who teach on the
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Trinity, and they're, or at least they give you a view of the Trinity that is not orthodox in the least, and it's dangerous because at the very least, what you end up having at the end of the day is a different God that is being advocated to worship.
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And a false God can't save you. So I think this is a serious issue, and because of the serious nature of this and how confusing this can be for people,
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I wanted to just give a better episode. And the other thing is I wanted to give you information that I didn't include in yesterday's episode, information
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I was unaware of. There was an email sitting in my inbox from one of you, and I appreciate, I haven't asked for anyone's permission, so I won't name the person, but I appreciate the person who sent it to me, and I wish
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I would have read it before I did the podcast, and in the providence of God, I didn't, and I read it after, and it has some information on it that blew me away and made me really realize,
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I think, what Tim Keller is doing here more than I did. And I'm gonna start the podcast off with some of that information.
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So if you already are a part of that 300 or so people who watched the podcast yesterday, then you can watch the first 10 minutes of this, or 15 minutes, and then you could probably go on and do something else.
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But if you're new to this, I would just encourage you, listen to the whole thing through. This is boldly going, as Star Trek says, where no man has gone before.
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That's probably not entirely true. I'm sure there's other people who have seen this issue with Keller other than the author,
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Bidwell, who is the author we're gonna be talking about today, who's critique Keller, or Kevin Bidwell.
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But there's a connection that he doesn't even make, I don't think, in this chapter, that I want to also make, and that's gonna be the first part of this video, to Keller being part of a larger movement that I have not seen.
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I haven't been, I just, I don't know what it is. I'm not reading a lot of Christian self -help books, I guess. I'm not in that world as much.
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If I read anything that's Christian -related, it's usually a history or maybe a theology, and it's old, usually, if it's a theology.
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I'm not reading, or it's woke stuff. I'm reading a lot of stuff I disagree with, but it's woke, and so I need to understand it.
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But there has been, apparently, in the last few decades, really, but mostly the last 15 years, a movement within evangelicalism to advocate what
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I'm gonna call, at the very best, a less -than -helpful construction or understanding of the
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Trinity, and at the very worst, a heretical view of the Trinity. And I think this view collapses into a heretical view, and I think what
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Keller advocates collapses into a heretical view as well. And that's the concern I have. It's amazing to me that you have so many theologians,
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Bible -believing pastors out there who advocate for Tim Keller, and maybe they've read his book on marriage,
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I don't know, but they look at something that they see that they like, and they're unaware of these major issues.
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And this is one, I'm gonna just put myself in this category, I was unaware of his teaching on the Trinity.
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I just listened to an entire sermon that Tim Keller preached on the Trinity. I wanted to make sure that I really understood where he was coming from as to the best of my ability.
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And all I can say is, wow, just wow, how come the alarm bells aren't being sounded on this?
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Well, they are now, and they have been by some, but I'm also going to join the chorus, the few people that have been sounding the alarm,
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I'm gonna join them and sound the alarm on Keller's view of the Trinity. So in order to do this, though, we have to start,
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I think, somewhere else, which I don't usually like doing. But in this case, I think we have to be aware that there is,
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Keller's part of something bigger than himself, and as is often the case, but it's something that, it's not like the social justice movement where you kind of know what that is, okay,
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Keller's part of, this is something that many of us may not know, and I think we need to know, and it's called social
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Trinitarianism. I had never heard the term, I don't think, maybe I did in seminary and I just forgot, but I don't recall ever hearing this until yesterday, and it was after the podcast.
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So I wanna give this to you, I've been reading and listening to things this morning to try to understand this, and this is a
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Catholic theologian named Karen Kilby, and because the Trinity, in both
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Catholic and Protestant circles, there's an understanding of the Trinity, an Orthodox understanding, that would be something that Protestants would share in common with Roman Catholics.
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I'm not endorsing, just so people know, I'm not endorsing Karen Kilby, I'm not endorsing Catholic theology,
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I'm just saying, here's someone who is defining what social Trinitarianism is because she's seeing it within her circle, which is the
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Roman Catholic Church, the same things happening there that's happening in Protestantism, just like with the social justice movement, or a lot of other movements, ecumenicism, the same thing that's happening in our circles is happening in other, even religious groups that are totally different, but it's happening at the same time.
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And so this idea is, according to theologian Karen Kilby, and I'm just gonna quote her, the chief strategy used to revivify, so revive, the doctrine of the
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Trinity and establish its relevance has come to be the advocacy of a social understanding of the
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Trinity. Okay, so a lot of the books on the Trinity have this, in the introduction or the first chapter, this understanding that the
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Trinity's been long neglected, long forgotten, we need to revive our understanding of it.
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And so that's what she's saying here, she says, the strategy used to employ, to revive though the
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Trinity is to advocate a social understanding. Now I've noticed this in a lot of fields, history being one of the main ones, where people don't really write on diplomatic history as much, young undergraduates don't go into the historical field because they really want to understand something like how farm aid or the economic history, how farmers benefited from certain policies in the 1930s, they generally aren't looking at economics or diplomacy or many of the,
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I'm trying to think now, many of the other fields that are intrinsic to history, they generally are looking at social history.
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And this has been something in the last 50 years that has been such a transformation of the historical discipline.
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And it's happened in a lot of other places. What are the social implications is always the question, what are the social implications of this particular belief or this particular study or field?
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And that becomes the barometer we use to measure whether or not it's important.
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So the Trinity seems to be no exception here. And I shouldn't be surprised, but I was,
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I was like, what in the world? There's a view advocated now that's becoming popular that the
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Trinity has this social dimension, social for not just the Trinity itself, but for us as humans.
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And that social dimension has become the important thing to know about the
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Trinity, the relevant, the useful, the applicable thing to take away from the concept of the
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Trinity. And this isn't something you're going to find in ancient writings on the subject. In fact, I'll show you that more as we go through it, but this is somewhat innovative.
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This is somewhat new, even though they're pulling from theologians of the 20th century and supposedly pulling from theologians before that of the 8th century.
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But I think a lot of that is, as you'll see as we go through it, grasping at straws.
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This is more of a 20th century phenomenon than anything else. And that shouldn't surprise us because in the 20th century, a lot of fields, a lot of disciplines, a lot of concepts started becoming only relevant insofar as they had a social utility.
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So I realized I'm being like John MacArthur here. I've read the one sentence and I'm giving a full exegete here, but here let's go to the second sentence of this definition.
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This line of thought has been gaining momentum, especially since the publication of Juergen Moltmann's, The Trinity and the
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Kingdom of God. And by now has achieved in many, and by the way, that was written in 1980, I believe, or released in 1980.
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So we're talking not long in theology, that's not long.
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And by now has achieved in many quarters dominance. Okay. So from 1980 to 2020, or whenever this was written, 2016,
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I think, she's saying that this view, the social
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Trinitarian view has achieved ascendancy. It's the dominant view now. Now that's amazing. That's amazing.
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Is it now? I think, and she's aware this is happening in Protestantism too. Now I think she's writing though more as a
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Roman Catholic. So she's saying in the Roman Catholic church in that particular, and maybe she's saying beyond that, but at least in the
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Roman Catholic church, this has become a dominant view. And I thought, wow, this has become a dominant view.
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And I haven't even heard of it. In many quarters dominance, she says it has become the new orthodoxy.
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Most basically social theorists propose that Christians should not imagine God on the model of some individual person or thing, which has three sides, aspects, dimensions, or modes of being.
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God is instead to be thought of as a collective, a group, or a society bound together by the mutual love accord and self -giving of its members.
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And I've said this before, you think about it though, in our day and age where everyone's moving around, families are breaking up, instability at home, no place of belonging, identity issues.
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I don't even know what gender I am. I don't know where I belong. Race baiters all over the place trying to get you to, depending on your genetics, value yourself in a certain way, think of yourself in certain ways.
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That shapes identity. There's so many different things today that are causes for insecurity in people.
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And people want a community. They want a place to belong. They want a place they can call their own, a place they identify with, a group.
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They are looking for that kind of thing. Humans have always done this, but it's at a fever pitch today.
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And so in this doctrine, you have an advantage in the minds of someone,
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I think, people who would want to try to make Christianity palatable and to meet that need that people have, that felt need.
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And Tim Keller is a master at doing this. And I pointed out how he does this with the doctrine of sin.
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He does this with the doctrine of hell to some extent. What he does is he downplays the characteristics or the attributes of God that are seen as negatives in our world today.
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Wrath, justice, those are things people don't like. They want a
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God who's just all loving. And loving in their conception of loving, which at this point has become very watered down, and it is one in the same with acceptance, really, because they want acceptance.
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So there's a couple things working together here, but this is my construction on this or my understanding. You have a group of people that happens to be fairly large that are really searching for acceptance, for a place of belonging, and they want inclusion.
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They want to be part of something, but because they're not grounded in the tangible things that used to be local community, church, family, even a local area that you've been at for decades and your family has a memory of, and the landmarks are kind of familiar to you, those things are kind of gone now for many people, especially the suburban dweller who's moved around quite a bit for the job or whatever.
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And they don't like, there's obviously loving your sin is related to this and so forth, but I'm saying on a social level,
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I think they just really want acceptance. They want a place to go that they know they walk in and it's, man, they're home.
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They're accepted, they're loved, and I don't want to hear about any of that wrath stuff. I don't want to hear about how
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I'm not approved of, and I didn't, I wasn't approved of much by my parents either, and boy,
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I want to feel approved now. And Keller, I think, understands this. He understood this before even other people who live, pastors who live in rural areas perhaps because he was in New York City and he was seeing the trend setting.
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He was seeing what was on the horizon, and he got out in front of it in some ways, and that's why
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I think his template is being copied, which is why we have to do this, which is why this book's so helpful, even though it was written in 2013, because this template is the world we live in now.
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Keller is the forerunner to what we live in. He tilled the soil that produced what we, what's growing in evangelicalism at this point and, or what was formerly called evangelicalism.
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And so this is one of those doctrines. So sin, hell, let's downplay those attributes of God that don't make you feel accepted, that don't, that make you feel inadequate somehow, and let's, with the doctrine of the
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Trinity, let's elevate a concept of God, love in this case, and make that so important and fundamental to what the
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Trinity is and what the essence of God himself, that people feel,
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I think, more secure, accepted, they like that God. So Keller is actually doing something
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I think that is dangerous. He is playing fast and loose here. He is, he is shaping, reforming an understanding of God himself to people, and you can see with all the different doctrines that we're going over here, you can see how he does it.
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Some attributes get downplayed, others get uplifted, and he does a contortion that brings him into either less than orthodox or heterodox teachings, or just super unusual, niche, innovative teachings.
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And in this case, I think what we have, honestly, is what inevitably collapses into a heterodox teaching of some kind.
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So this is social Trinitarianism. Now before, I've given you kind of where I'm going with Keller, but before we get to his quotes and everything,
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I want to just show you, this is not unique to Keller. Steve McVeigh, and this is not exhaustive either, there's a number of other people that we could point to, but Steve McVeigh, Beyond an
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Angry God, is a book he wrote, and if you look at this book, it's the same exact template that Tim Keller uses.
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Same exact template. There's a divine dance, and you're going to find, Tim Keller talks about the
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Trinity as a divine dance. This is part of the language that social Trinitarians use, apparently, and that the dance has been going on since before creation, but now we can be part of the dance, this
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Trinitarian dance that's going on between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can be part of that, and part of the fall into sin ends up being losing the dance.
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That we're not part of this loving, fulfilling relationship that the Trinity has, and we can become part of that again through Jesus.
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So you can see how this affects more than just the Trinity. This is very monumental. This is affecting our understanding of the fall into sin, the curse, and then redemption itself and what it means, and you'll see, though, with Steve McVeigh, and with a number of the others
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I'm going to show you, they get into heterodox territory real quick. In fact,
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I'll read for you. This is from Steve McVeigh. He says, I'm going to start, let's see.
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He's quoting someone else, and this person says, I must practice the same principle of transferred believing, transferred to who each person really is, a created and loved human in the being of God, really, therefore, a form of God, a human expression of God gone wrong.
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So that's what we are. We're a form of God. We're a human expression gone wrong, that he may be made right, and God in his spirit of love is as busy working in him, disturbing his false beliefs.
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So what they're saying is, this is part of the dance we've lost, as you see earlier in the book, but we were this form of God, and we still are.
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We've just lost this human expression. So this is what Steve McVeigh says about this quote. Loving people, that's what it's all about in this world.
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So what it's all about is loving people. Mankind's inclusion in the finished work of Christ doesn't mean that everybody has received it or is experiencing the benefits of it now or will necessarily experience the benefits of it when they die.
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The gospel message, however, is that we are all included in him and what he has done on our behalf.
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The gospel we proclaim isn't a message of what can be, but is the good news of what already is in Jesus Christ.
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We don't bring a sales pitch to the unbelieving world. We are ambassadors for Christ, and we tell everyone
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God was in Christ reconciling you to himself. Is this the gospel, or is there something missing from this?
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And I think you can see there's something missing from this, and there's something missing from Tim Keller's sermon on the
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Trinity as well. See if you can find the words that aren't here in trying to explain the gospel message.
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The gospel isn't a message of what can be, but is good news of what is already in Jesus Christ.
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Well, without the context, if I only heard that quote,
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I might say, okay, maybe this person's trying to say that Jesus has already accomplished the payment for our sins, and so that redemption is there if we—there's the contingency, right ?—if
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we repent and believe, and God must draw us to do that work. But there's a context to this, and even that sentence,
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I'm putting a very charitable reading on it. The context is that we're included, that we're good, we're good enough, we're a form of God, and yeah, there's something that's gone wrong in us, but what's really gone wrong?
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Is it that we violated his law, that we've sinned, we've offended a holy God, his attributes are holy, and justice must come down on us, and so Jesus paid the penalty for our sin?
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Or is it that we just don't realize something? We're just forgetting something.
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There's something we're not participating in we should be. There's another work that we failed to do. Yeah, it talks about the finished work of Christ, sure.
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The problem, though, is that man, in this construction, lost something—the dance, the relationship.
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Mankind just needs to realize that Jesus has already done this.
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It's not something that is already in Jesus Christ, or rather, it's not something that can be in Jesus Christ, contingent on repentance and faith, it's something that's already in Jesus Christ, and we need to realize that.
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So even when we evangelize, we can't bring a sales pitch to an unbelieving world. God's always been reconciling you to himself.
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You see how this softens the sin component, that problem that we have, and it elevates this acceptance, this love, this love that doesn't even require us to stop sinning and repent, to turn the other direction, turn back to God, and reject our sin.
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Admit it was wrong and turn from it. That's not a part of this equation, and you might say,
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John, you're just—they're just soft in their approach, but that's not necessarily heresy, and this is what
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I would say about that. This is one of the more mild, I think, examples, and Tim Keller is certainly one of the more mild examples of this social
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Trinitarian view, but it gets into dicey territory, and once you go down this path, this is what my contention is.
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I don't see how you—you leave the impression with people that there is kind of something good in them.
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There is something really that is already—they just get to realize they're already redeemed in some way.
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They're already part of this dance. They just kind of—they misstepped, they fell, they lost the dance, and now time to get back up and start dancing again instead of, you know, you've offended a holy
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God, violated his law, on your way to hell. Of course, we know Tim Keller's view of hell, so all this stuff works together to give you a different view.
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I think it collapses into a heterodox position, though. It collapses into a man -centered understanding.
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It collapses into an understanding that attacks the character of God, really, that makes him out to be more or less the kind of example you might see in something like The Shack.
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Speaking of The Shack, C. Baxter Kruger, who wrote The Great Dance—or, sorry, he wrote that, but he also wrote
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The Shack Revisited, there is more going on here than you ever dared to dream, and the author of The Shack wrote the foreword to his book on this, on The Shack.
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So you can't really have a more rousing endorsement of The Shack, which, for those who don't know, is a heretical understanding of the
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Trinity, one I think Tim Keller would reject, I would think. I don't know if he's ever spoken about it. C.
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Baxter Kruger, though, endorses it. He also wrote a book called The Great Dance, the Christian vision revisited.
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How about that? He buys into this social Trinitarian view. He says this in his book on The Shack Revisited, The Spirit's passion is to bring his anointing of Jesus to full and personal and abiding expression in us as unique persons, and not only in us personally, but in our relationship with the
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Father and Jesus, and in our relationships with one another, and indeed with all creation. And so the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the
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Triune God. That sounds so beautiful, doesn't it? Everything, the whole creation, is just part of this great dance, this beautiful dance.
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And we, we're part of that. That's what makes us, we're special in that way.
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It's our relationship with Jesus and with one another and with all of creation that is made better through participating in this divine dance.
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The divine dance is the Trinity. And this, it just strikes me as hitting right exactly where people who have been alienated from Christianity, traditional religion, as they might say, this is the need they want fulfilled.
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This is what they, I think, expect out of a religion that they would be more open to is, yeah, I mean, that sounds pretty good.
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All creation's a dance, and I'm part of it, and this benefits my life, it'll benefit my relationships, it'll benefit everything else, and yeah.
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And here's the thing. The true gospel will benefit your relationship with others, won't it? When the
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Lord does a work in you, that will benefit your relationships. There's no doubt about that. It is a byproduct, though, of a work that God does, and that includes repenting and putting your trust in Christ.
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And you can't skip over this. You can't skip over that important necessary element, that we've offended a holy
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God, we've broken His law. It's not right to say that we, as even fallen human beings, because it doesn't seem to make the distinction here, are just part of this great dance, or can be part of it, we're just going to realize we've lost it or something.
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That's not going to save you. Daryl Johnson. I'm not going to go through all these for the sake of time, but another one you can look up,
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Experiencing the Trinity, Living in the Relationship of the Center of the Universe by Daryl Johnson. Same thing, same formula. Don't you want to live in the relationship of the center of the universe?
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Sure. I'll just read a little clip.
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And we, when we human beings foolishly turned away from the purpose of our existence to strike out on our own,
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God did not give up. The Father so loved the world in the fullness of time that He sent
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His Son to deal with our foolishness and rebellion and sin at the cross.
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Now He said sin, good, but what's the root of this? The problem that humans have is they foolishly turned away from the purpose of our existence.
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The purpose of our existence. Now did we foolishly turn away from the purpose of our existence when we sin?
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I suppose you could say that. What's really though going on? What's fundamentally happening?
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We broke the rules. We broke the law, knowingly. Our conscience condemning us.
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We went against what God clearly said we weren't to do and we offended a holy righteous God. Turning away from the purpose of our existence.
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You know, for those who are vessels of wrath as Romans 9 says, they have a certain purpose for their existence.
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And it's not to go to heaven and dwell with God in eternity.
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They serve as an example to show forth the attributes of God, of wrath, of justice, and then of love for those who have broken
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His law but have repented, put their trust in Christ and are redeemed. So this is,
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I mean you could even find I think people going into universalism which sure enough, guess what, a bunch of universalists like this as well.
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We have examples of feminist theologians who like this divine dance view of the Trinity. We have one that I want to focus on here,
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Richard Rohr who's a Franciscan monk who wrote a book literally called The Divine Dance, The Trinity and Your Transformation.
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And let's just say Bono from U2 and I think Eugene Peterson if I'm not mistaken, Rob Bell, guys who are heretics love this book, really love this book.
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And here's some quotes from Richard Rohr and ironically I'll say this, the Gospel Coalition has a good article on this.
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I don't recommend the Gospel Coalition much so don't get used to it but here's an example of where the
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Gospel Coalition got something right. They wrote a book, they had a book review posted there on Richard Rohr's book which is that I just showed you,
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The Divine Dance. And I just, it was good. I mean they're saying we can't accept this, we have to separate from a guy like this.
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I thought wow, Gospel Coalition, I mean hey, I'm glad you'll fight on this. Now the thing is though,
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I think if Tim Keller, him and D .A. Carson founded the Gospel Coalition, I think if you look at their view, it is different in ways as far as the conclusions they draw are different but the assumptions that they bring
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I don't think are that different. I'll show you that in a minute. So here's what Richard Rohr says, the interweaving of the three always, and this is the three, the three persons of the
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Trinity, always produces a fourth on another level. So great, so you have three people in Richard Rohr's view, three persons in the
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Trinity but there's also a fourth so it's not a Trinity anymore I guess. Sure, this may sound like heresy especially to a contracted heart that wants to go it alone, he even knows.
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Yeah, that does sound like heresy and it's because it is but what he's trying to say is our participation in this divine dance is just of the utmost importance, that we're the fourth, all creation is the fourth.
32:57
It's the participation of creation in this divine dance ends up being the fourth being and that or the fourth person,
33:06
I don't even know how you, being person, at this point it's so esoteric, it's new agey.
33:12
I don't even know what to say about it but it's not biblical. Trinity was not a belief but a very objective way of describing my own deep experience of transcendence and what
33:22
I call here flow, flow. Flow occurs like hundreds of times in this book and flow,
33:30
Tim Keller says dance, it's this beautiful tapestry that oscillates and just continues on forever and it's the
33:44
Trinity dancing with themselves, the persons in the being of the
33:49
Trinity but we somehow can become part of this and that's how we, a generation that wants to experience transcendence is attracted to this.
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But you know what I believe, he says, I think the spaces in between the members of the Trinity are unmistakably feminine. The forms of manifestation strike me as masculine and the diffused, intuitive, mysterious and wonderful unconscious in between, well that's feminine and that's where the essential power is, the space between the persons more than the persons individually.
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Now this is rank heresy here but listen to what he's saying and I think this is the key to understanding
34:27
Keller too. I'm not saying Keller got this from Richard Rohr, I had this observation independent of reading
34:35
Richard Rohr but when I saw the Richard Rohr quote and realized he's also advocating the social
34:40
Trinitarian view, I thought wow, that is what all these guys have in common. We are in a generation that doesn't like masculine figures, a masculine
34:49
God is scary. We want a maternal, feminine, kind of comforting, inclusive
34:57
God in our generation. That's the world we live in and Westerners at least and the people who are bucking against this, who are converting to Islam or more aggressive forms of Christianity, they're seeing that there's no substance to it.
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You know, it's not, there's nothing for men in this too. Men tend to be more
35:23
I think along these lines but the whole attraction to this
35:33
I believe is in that quote I just read. That there's, it's a way of keeping biblical orthodoxy in a sense or at least you give the impression you're keeping biblical orthodoxy because you're not saying
35:45
God's a woman, you're saying it's three men, masculine I guess pronouns that are applied, it's masculine figures here.
35:53
So the three persons are masculine but you can still say but the space in between them is feminine. So come to God and by the way that's more powerful, that feminine, that loving inclusive part, that's the dance, that's the poetic part.
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And you know that wrath and injustice stuff, that's, we can kind of take our eyes off of that and put it on this particular understanding.
36:17
So here's the spectrum. I just made this little line I guess to help illustrate the social
36:24
Trinitarianism spectrum. Now I don't know, you could put other people in this but I don't have enough time and I'm not probably familiar enough with all the different nuances here.
36:34
I just know this, Richard Rohr is on one side and Tim Keller is on the other.
36:40
So you have Tim Keller but they're both in the social Trinitarianism view, they both have this view. But Tim Keller's view is basically love is essence and I'll talk about that in a minute but God's essence is the way that we understand the unifying factor in the
36:59
Trinity, that it's his essence. His attributes are love and justice and all the other things that we see as in the
37:09
Bible is describing, you know, God's, his activity, his nature or his characteristics he has.
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So God is, has communicable attributes that we can emulate.
37:24
So we're supposed to emulate Christ, right? There's also non -communicable attributes, things that God uniquely has that we can't.
37:33
And love is one of these attributes that, I mean, God can do it in ways that we're not capable of, but we're, this is an attribute that would be communicable.
37:40
We're supposed to love others, right? This is something we can copy Jesus' example in. And Tim Keller takes this attribute and he makes that one in the same with, or he makes that the unifying principle that defines what the
37:57
Trinity is. So instead of, you know, you have three persons, one Godhead, one essence, the essence is equivalent to love.
38:07
Love and the essence become the same thing. So he takes an attribute and he elevates it to the point of it's now equivalent to the essence of God.
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That's what I see in what Tim Keller has going on. And I'll show you the quotes in a moment. So love is essence.
38:19
Well, Richard Rohr doesn't, he goes farther, way farther. Tim Keller wouldn't go where Richard Rohr goes, but Richard Rohr says, well,
38:25
God's an activity, basically. God is an activity. It's not just that God is, that love is this essence that is fundamental to God and we can elevate it to the level of his essence, of who
38:41
God is at a root level. Ontologically, Richard Rohr will say that love, that activity, that the loving is
38:51
God. Now you say, well, what's the difference between that and Tim Keller? Well, there is a difference.
38:56
Tim Keller's not going as far as Richard Rohr, but that's it. It's a matter of degrees, I think.
39:02
Once you elevate the attribute, I mean, you could do this with wrath if you wanted, I suppose. You have God as wrath and you see the different elements of the
39:09
Trinity participating and convicting and condemnation and judging and all that.
39:14
And I mean, you could make the same argument that Tim Keller's making that love is the Trinity. You could say that you could put in holiness, you could put in wrath.
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And, of course, scripture says God is love, but there's also other attributes that God has. And so what
39:30
Tim Keller does is arbitrarily choosing this one attribute to make this is the activity that God engages in and it's fundamental to the same, it's his essence, it's who he is.
39:43
It's the very being of God is love.
39:49
That can very easily collapse into, well, God's an activity. And I don't see how you really escape it in the long run.
39:56
Tim Keller says God is, well, Tim Keller's view, he doesn't say this, but in his view, God is presented as less masculine.
40:02
Well, guess what? In Richard Rohr's view, God is also presented as less masculine. Now, Richard Rohr goes further. Richard Rohr talks about this feminine in between.
40:12
Tim Keller doesn't talk about that. But because Tim Keller emphasizes this love dimension so much and downplays these other attributes and other doctrines, his view can easily collapse into what
40:23
Richard Rohr is saying here. Tim Keller basically says that man's great problem is losing the dance.
40:30
We lost the dance. That's the fall. Well, Richard Rohr says the Trinity is incomplete without man. Now, Tim Keller would never say that.
40:37
He would never say the Trinity is incomplete without man. He wouldn't go that far to elevate man to that status. But when you say that the problem man has, and that you even evangelistically present the great problem man has as being losing a dance, this dance of love, and we just happen to, we stumbled and we're not a part of it anymore, then what conclusions can you easily draw from that?
41:00
Well, there's this dance going on, and we're just incomplete. And I think, and I don't know that this one necessarily has to collapse into Richard Rohr's view, but you could easily go into, you could easily lead into Richard Rohr's view.
41:17
It could be a gateway to Richard Rohr's view, which is that, well, before we lost the dance, that would have been a complete picture of what the dance was supposed to be in God's mind and in his intention, right?
41:29
And so without us being part of it, wouldn't that mean that it's incomplete somehow? We could easily go into Richard Rohr's view here.
41:37
So I think that the social Trinitarianism is the problem now, and that's what I was missing from the video yesterday.
41:44
And someone like Tim Keller is just, he's so mild on the spectrum that it's kind of unnoticed.
41:51
But if you realize that he's part of something bigger, and his view could easily collapse into these other views, then
41:58
I think you realize the threat more. And that's what I wanted to explain. And so now let's get into Keller's actual quotes and quotes from this book,
42:06
Engaging with Keller. So Kevin Bidwell says this, and he summarizes the reason for God where it is teaching on the
42:14
Trinity, where Keller says this, or where he summarizes Keller's statements.
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And this is what Keller says. In the beginning, according to Keller, was the dance of creation. The fall was mankind apparently losing the dance, the fruit of which was becoming self -centered, salvation supposedly becomes the way back of returning to the dance and getting out of the self -centeredness.
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The eschatological conclusion in the new heaven and new earth is summarized as the future of the dance. And this formula is seen throughout all these social
42:45
Trinitarians, as far as I've seen so far. Whenever they use the dance imagery, they say the same thing Tim Keller's saying here.
42:52
So it's big stuff. It's beyond even just the Trinity. It's the whole redemption story, creation even, is part of this.
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Now, what does the Nicene Creed say about the Trinity? Well, the Nicene Creed says, we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, and one
43:09
Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very
43:15
God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the
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Holy Spirit till the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.
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He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the
43:38
Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.
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And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and the giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the
43:49
Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And we believe one holy
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Catholic, and it means universal, and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins, and we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
44:03
Amen. Now, in this Orthodox teaching, I'm not going to go through a lot of Scripture just because of the time, but this is what godly men of the past have distilled from the
44:14
Scripture. You have an ordering. It's not a hierarchy. It's an ordering. And we can think of orderings even in the natural world.
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We have one, two, three, four, five. You have a sequence. There's an ordering without a hierarchy.
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And in this particular ordering, which is beyond what we can perhaps grasp completely in our world,
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God the Father—well, I should say Jesus—Jesus Christ proceeds from God the
44:46
Father in a way. It says, begotten of the Father before all worlds. So there's—so
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I will correct my language here—begotten of the Father. And you see that the
44:58
Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. And so there is an ordering in which the story of redemption is carried out.
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And really, the whole story we see in Scripture, the
45:16
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have different roles, three persons with different roles, even in redemption, and yet co -equal, co -eternal, part of the same
45:27
Godhead, same nature. So this is what the Trinity is. This is what we teach biblically as sound
45:35
Christians. Westminster Confession says, In the unity of the Godhead there are three persons of one substance, power, and eternity,
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God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Father is none, neither begotten nor proceeding. The Son is eternally begotten of the
45:47
Father. The Holy Spirit eternally proceedeth from the Father and the Son. And there you have the ordering again. The Father's not begotten nor proceeding, but the
45:55
Son is eternally begotten. Holy Spirit eternally proceeding. So these are our realities that Scripture gives us that Tim Keller's analogy—and this is the analogy of the social
46:07
Trinitarians who try to use this concept of the dance—miss. They don't have ordering in their particular description.
46:14
That's big. That's important. And I listened to a whole sermon that Tim Keller preached—I think it was from 2006, but they just re -released it recently—on the
46:22
Trinity. And let me tell you, it was not really about the
46:27
Trinity. It was about, I think, the felt needs that people have and their lack of fulfillment and identity and their issues and how the doctrine of the
46:37
Trinity, if we conceive of it in this divine dance way, will give them all those things that they're missing. It reconfigures, though, it emphasizes,
46:47
I should say, a different—it reconfigures the Trinity to emphasize an attribute of God that people find palatable.
46:58
Here's Keller's description of the Trinity from Reason for God. The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self -centeredness but by mutually self -giving love.
47:06
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.
47:12
That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the
47:17
Bible tells us, each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him.
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Each voluntary circle, the others, too, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them.
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Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love.
47:37
The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this, perichoresis. Note the root of the word choreography within it.
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It means, literally, to dance or flow around. He also says this in King's Cross.
47:50
According to the Bible, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit glorify one another. Jesus says in his prayer, recorded in John's Gospel, I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.
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And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory that I had with you before the world began. Each person of the
48:06
Trinity glorifies the other. It's a dance. So Keller buying into the same dance logic of the social
48:13
Trinitarians. Now, the problem with Keller's view, according to the author, is that his evidence is lacking.
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It's false, it's fallacious, and it's incomplete. It's lacking because Keller references the baptism of Jesus, the teaching of the
48:25
Lord Jesus Christ that whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will save it, and Christ's high priestly prayer, while the baptism of Jesus is indisputably teaches the
48:36
Trinity. Overall, these passages do not present the slightest hint of a dance. So he's just saying that, you know, all these passages are using to back up your view of it's a dance.
48:44
None of them say that. That's the problem. It's also just false because the early Greek fathers did not use perichoresis to explain the
48:51
Trinity. It is believed that it was first used in the reference to the Trinity around the 8th century by John of Damascus.
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When it was used, it was used to preserve the teaching of the Nicene Creed to uphold the unity of one
49:02
God and the distinction of three persons who have their being in each other without any coalescence. Keller quotes
49:08
Robert Latham in a discussion on T .F. Torrance's concept of perichoresis for his argument. So he's quoting someone who's quoting someone else.
49:16
Yet Torrance explains that mutual movement as their differentiating qualities, instead of separating them, actually serve their oneness with each other.
49:24
Bidwell, the author of this section on Keller, observes that one can immediately see how some sort of mutual movement is suggested in eternal begetting and eternal procession.
49:33
So what he's saying is that in Keller's dance analogy, you don't have eternal begetting. You don't have eternal procession, the sun begetting, the spirit proceeding.
49:41
You don't have that or the sun being begotten. What you have in the explanation, though, that Tim Keller is trying to draw from to support this analogy that lacks those things is an admission that that's what they're talking about.
49:59
So in other words, to clarify further, the people that Tim Keller is relying on as sources to help him bolster the argument that the
50:07
Trinity is this divine dance themselves don't actually believe it's the kind of, it's not a divine dance that Tim Keller is making it out to be.
50:16
It's just not there. So you go and you look up the quotations from the sources, and you won't find what
50:22
Keller's saying. And instead, you actually find ideas that contradict
50:28
Keller's, his analogy. It's also a fallacious,
50:33
Keller's view, to assume that the supposed etymological connection, which is tenuous anyway, then equates to a theological truth is an etymological fallacy, meaning that these words, that's etymology, the study of words, these words that Tim Keller is trying to use that, hey, it's translated this word today, the root choreography, and he just playing fast and loose with the dictionary.
50:55
This is not a fair representation of how this term can be translated or thought of today, perichoresis.
51:04
It's also incomplete. Keller decides to focus exclusively on love to the exclusion of other attributes.
51:10
He more or less assumes that there is a divine dance and labels it the dance of love. And I pointed this out before. It's the dance of love.
51:16
But why can't you have a dance of wrath, a dance of justice? You can't because I'll tell you why.
51:22
Because Tim Keller wouldn't have people coming to his church if he preached a sermon like that. That's one of the reasons.
51:28
But it's just also not what the Bible presents. There's, you can't take one attribute and say that that is
51:35
God's essence. And that's really, I think, one of the main issues with Keller's view. Keller also relies on C .S.
51:43
Lewis and Alvin Plantinga and quotes them quite a bit. I noticed some of these other social Trinitarians do the same thing.
51:49
The author, Bidwell, goes after these two guys, basically, and says that they were wrong.
51:56
And you don't even necessarily find Keller's complete view in Lewis. But it's interesting.
52:04
I'm going to, I think, play for you, if I'm not mistaken, in a Keller sermon. Well, maybe I won't.
52:09
I'll just read for you the Lewis quote, then. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit glorify each other at the center of the universe. Self -giving love is the dynamic currency of the
52:16
Trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt, commune with, and defer to one another. When early
52:21
Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being.
52:28
In constant movement of overture, acceptance, each person envelopes and encircles the others.
52:35
And so, actually, that might have been Alvin Plantinga. In Christianity, God is not an impersonal thing or a static thing, nor even just one person, but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will.
52:48
And this is Lewis here. If you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The pattern of this three -personal life is the great fountain of energy and beauty spurring up at the very center of reality.
52:58
So what I find interesting in all this is that Lewis himself says, if you will not think me irreverent. He's even recognizing, when
53:05
I'm trying to appeal to this example in the physical world of a dance, you might think
53:12
I'm irreverent here, because this is so beyond us. There is a mysterious component to the Trinity, and it's supposed to be that way.
53:18
And every time you try to come up with a parallel on this physical world, you're going to fall short.
53:25
So there is an irreverence to it. So even there, though,
53:33
I mean, it's not great. Again, we talked about Lewis last time, that Keller relies on Lewis for his doctrine of hell.
53:39
Lewis has some interesting philosophical ideas. He has some interesting fantasy novels. There's some good stuff about Lewis.
53:45
But you can't get all of your theology from C .S. Lewis. And that's what
53:52
Bidwell tries to make the case, that these guys, again, 220th century guys, too. Keller can't seem to get before the 20th century, because these are innovative novel ideas in theology.
54:04
Here are the implications of Keller's teaching on the Trinity. According to Bidwell, he says, the divine dance does not uphold the unity of the
54:09
Godhead based on essence. God's essence is redefined as being love instead of the same substance. Thus, love replaces the substance as the premise for divine unity.
54:17
And we've already talked about this. The divine dance movement portrayed the wrong kind of motion within the Trinity.
54:23
And we talked about this, too. But I want you to hear Bidwell say it. These movements do not portray the being of God as static, but that of one who is outward moving.
54:32
Calvin states that the Father is the beginning and source, and also the fountainhead and beginning of deity. And this is done to denote that simple unity of essence.
54:39
These divine movements are not captured by voluntary circles or orbits, but the clear pattern of order is from the
54:44
Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. So, in other words, there's an ordering, as we talked about. And the
54:49
Father, and then the Son, then the Holy Spirit. The Father begets the Son, the
54:55
Son, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. And this is how they accomplish their purpose, as presented to us from the
55:02
Scripture. In a divine dance, where you have these beings, these self -contained beings acting in an autonomous fashion, voluntarily deferring to one another, you don't have that ordering.
55:16
And that's what he's saying, is that this movement portrays the wrong kind of motion. It's not this circular motion where they're circling each other.
55:21
It's actually an outward motion where they have, there's a purpose here. There's intention. The divine dance does not promote a balanced presentation of the
55:31
Trinity as found in the Nicene Creed. Keller's portrayal of the three persons is a pulsating dance of voluntary orbits, where it is impossible to distinguish who is who among them.
55:39
Any reference to a divine substance or anything that might distinguish one person from another. And so, this lack of distinction is a big problem.
55:48
And when you get rid of the ordering, which Tim Keller's dance idea, there's no ordering here, then you lose the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
55:57
They're just, they could be three of the same exact carbon copy persons, and they're not in the
56:06
Trinity. One essence, but not carbon copy persons.
56:14
Implications of Keller's teaching on the Trinity. Three more. The divine dance undermines the divine order between the persons of the
56:20
Godhead. The ordering of persons of the Triune God can be distinguished upon the basis of their properties that distinguish the three persons.
56:28
Whether Keller realizes it or not, his account of the divine being constitutes a denial of ordering within the
56:33
Godhead. So, this is really not too different,
56:38
I suppose, than the last two we read. He's still concerned about this lack of divine ordering within the
56:45
Godhead. The divine dance has the danger of tritheism. One of Keller's primary sources, Cornelius Plantinga, believes in social
56:52
Trinitarianism. This is where it comes up in the book, but I wanted to give you more on social
56:58
Trinitarianism because I see Keller as being part of this movement. Anyway, in the book, engaging with Keller, Bidwell says, well,
57:08
Cornelius Plantinga is a social Trinitarianist, and Keller relies on him, and in that view, each divine person is thought of as a center of consciousness.
57:15
That can give you the danger of tritheism. And that's because these three persons inevitably can collapse into them being like three beings.
57:30
Because you have three beings instead of one being three persons. The divine dance undermines the authority structure that is directly related to redemption.
57:41
Now, this is a big one. Keller states that the theologian Cornelius Plantinga develops this further, noting that the
57:47
Bible says the Father, the Son, and the Spirit glorify one another. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, and defer to one another.
57:54
No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him. Rather, each of them voluntarily circles and orbits around the others.
58:07
So it's not just that there's lack of distinction and ordering. It's that actually the ordering in the
58:12
Trinity that we see presented in Scripture is for the purpose of redemption. And what does that do to redemption when you get rid of that ordering?
58:21
The notion that the Trinitarian persons defer to one another is inadequate to handle the teaching that Christ is sent by the Father and that the
58:27
Son is mediator, obeys the Father. He does not defer to the Father. So think about it this way. I could defer to my wife if there's a decision that I'll just let her make, let's say.
58:36
And I say, well, I don't care about that. I'll defer to you. You have an opinion on it. And I'll just go with that. It's a lot different than me obeying my wife, right?
58:44
If I was going to obey my wife, which is not language we even use as Christians.
58:53
I mean, it doesn't have to be a wife or a husband, or it could be your co -workers, your boss, or whoever, what human relationships you have, that you recognize the difference between deference and obedience.
59:04
And the biblical language is obedience, not deference. But when the language of deference is used instead of obedience, then you miss out on the ordering.
59:14
It becomes a passive thing, that these three members of the
59:22
Trinity are then giving each other deference in the same way it is presented, instead of actually
59:31
Christ is obeying the Father. There's a unique relationship. The Father isn't obeying Christ. Christ is obeying the Father. When you start to go into deference, you can then create an understanding that doesn't actually exist in scripture.
59:44
They're just all giving themselves deference. If we were to join with Plantinga and say that each person encircles one another and defers to one another, in what sense could we affirm that Christ was specifically ordained by the
59:53
Father? In what sense could we say that the Father gave him commandment to execute the office? I mean, you couldn't. Jesus was active in his role.
01:00:01
1 John 4, 9 -10, and 14 says this, By this the love of God was manifested, that God has sent his only begotten
01:00:08
Son, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his
01:00:14
Son to be propitiation for our sins. We have seen and testified that the Father sent the Son. The Father has an active role in this, sending the
01:00:22
Son. It's not a deference that he's giving to Christ. I mean, that's just unbiblical. He's not deferring. He's sending.
01:00:29
Christ isn't deferring. He's obeying. The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself, according to the
01:00:35
Westminster Confession of Faith, which he, through the eternal Spirit, once offered up unto God, hath fully satisfied the justice of his
01:00:41
Father, and purchased not only reconciliation, but an everlasting inheritance that the
01:00:46
Father hath given unto him. So again, active roles here. I want to play for you now, in closing, some stuff from a
01:00:57
Tim Keller sermon, if I may. I'll minimize myself here.
01:01:03
This is a sermon specifically on the Trinity. Then we're going to watch a dance performance from Tim Keller's church,
01:01:20
Redeemer Presbyterian Church. We're going to ask, as we look at this, whether this is a good analogy for the
01:01:26
Trinity. Let's first start just with a few things. I want to start, let's see, around 19, if I can.
01:01:34
Unless you're willing to put relationships first. You're out of touch with reality.
01:01:40
You're going to come up empty. It's going to be ashes. You're going to be dashed on the rocks of reality. That's the implication, that this world was not created by an individual
01:01:49
God, that it's not the process of an impersonal God that's an illusion, it's not an accident of violent random forces, but it was made by a
01:01:57
God who is a community of persons who know and love each other from all eternity. This world is a divine dance.
01:02:09
My wife and Peter Kreft, Peter Kreft, a Boston College philosopher, and my wife,
01:02:16
Kathy Keller, have both said, if they get a chance, and they probably won't, but if they get a chance and they can read something just as they're dying, they want to read the last pages of Perilandria, C .S.
01:02:29
Lewis's second novel in his space trilogy, in which Lewis describes the universe as a great dance.
01:02:36
Because what do you think the solar system is? What do you think the stars wheeling around are? What do you think the world, the planets spinning around are?
01:02:44
What do you think the sea is, back and forth? What do you think the birds are whirling around?
01:02:50
What do you think the seasons are? It's a dance. We're made in the image of God. And God is not just an individual, but he's a community.
01:02:58
I want you to hear what you just—there's so many things we could point out in this sermon that are problems.
01:03:04
But what you just heard sounds like—Richard Rohr, when he writes about this divine dance, it collapses into what sounds like some kind of New Age, pantheistic,
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Buddhist kind of idea. All creation is part of this. Tim Keller says stuff very similar, very similar.
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It's not as aggressive, not as radical, but he says all creation is a divine dance.
01:03:34
Everything we see, the stars, everything in the physical world is just a big divine dance, and that's what the
01:03:39
Trinity is too. What are you supposed to draw from this? And we're supposed to be part of it. And we stopped.
01:03:46
It's our problem. We stopped dancing. We got to start dancing again. That becomes man's great issue. That's what sin becomes.
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We're just not dancing. There's got to be a very firm separation between the creator and the creation.
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And that's what I'm not seeing in Keller. The door is being opened right here to making a tighter connection than there ought to be between creator and creation.
01:04:18
It's one of the dangers of this view. Man, there's so many other things.
01:04:23
For the sake of time, I don't know if I should play them all. Let's go to about 32 minutes in or so.
01:04:33
I want you to listen to this and ask yourself, do you think this is the reason Tim Keller is presenting the Trinity this way? You can look at Adam and Eve and say, what idiots?
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Why do they listen to Satan? And yet, you still have Satan's lie in your own heart because we're afraid too. We're afraid of trusting
01:04:48
God like that. We're afraid of trusting anybody. We're stationary because Satan told us to be stationary.
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He says it works. It hasn't, of course. Because when our relationship with God unraveled after the
01:05:01
Garden of Eden, all other relationships unravel, relationships politically between nations, relationships socially between races and classes, relationships personally between friends and even family members are always blowing up.
01:05:13
They're always blowing up. Why? Because we all want to be little centers. You know, a solar system in which every planet insists that everything revolve around them isn't a solar system, it's a solar cataclysm.
01:05:26
And a world in which everyone says, everything's got to revolve around me is a world in which the dance is impossible. But God did not leave us there.
01:05:35
The Son of God was born into the world, the second Adam. And now think about this.
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God says to the first Adam, obey me about the tree. God says to the second Adam, obey me about the tree. Only this time the tree is a cross.
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God says to the first Adam, obey me about the tree and you will live.
01:05:57
And he didn't. And God says to the second Adam, obey me about the tree and I'll crush you to powder.
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And he did. And I want you to consider this.
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When Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins, what was He getting out of it?
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Oh, you say He was getting worshipers, self -glorifying, you know, He's getting glorifying love from us, you know, that later on we were going to pray.
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He's the Trinity. Let's remember the Trinity. He already had that. He already had glorifying love.
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What did He get out of us? What did He get from dying for us? What was the benefit? Nothing, which means at that point
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He began to glorify us. He circled us. He orbited around us. Jesus Christ.
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Now, it's what He was doing from all eternity with the Father and the Son, but now He moves out to do it to us.
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And He honors us, and He centers on us, and He unconditionally loves us. He loves us not because He gets anything out of it, but just for who we are.
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If you see that, really, and if it becomes a beautiful thing to you, you have begun to enter the dance.
01:07:11
Because, see, when Jesus died on the cross— Okay, so there's so much—there's a mixture of so much good truth with error in this, and that's what makes it so hard,
01:07:19
I think, for some people. Some of the things Kim Keller just said, amen, right?
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That there is—if you go to,
01:07:30
I think, John 17, there is a sense in which Jesus—in fact, I want to read.
01:07:36
I think I have it open here because I was looking at it earlier. He says, "...the glory which you have given me
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I have given to them, that they may be one just as we are one." Talking about His followers,
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Jesus' followers. And Kim Keller's trying to say that Jesus, He glorifies us.
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He centers on us. He does what He was doing with the Trinity to us. And doesn't that make you feel good? I mean, yeah. I mean, this is the altar call moment.
01:08:03
However, if you look in the context of John 17, this is residual, I believe.
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The glory isn't—it's not that He's glorifying us in the same exact way that God glorifies
01:08:16
Jesus. It's that, in the whole context, it's that we will have unity.
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We'll have a communicable attribute that the Trinity possesses—unity in purpose. We will have that same unity as believers with God and with each other.
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And so there are aspects of the Trinity that are examples to us. Jesus says so.
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Or at least He prays to God that that kind of unity would be there. The verse surrounding it, though, says,
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I do not ask—let's see—verse 21. I ask that they would be one, even as you,
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Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. And then
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He says, the glory which you gave me, I've given them, that they may be one, just as we are one, I in them, and you in me, and that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you sent me and love them, even as you love me.
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Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory, which you have given me, for you love me before the foundation of the world,
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O righteous Father. Although the world does not know me, yet I have known you. So Jesus is—He's not giving them the exact same glory in every single sense of the word glory that God gives to Jesus.
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Otherwise, He wouldn't be asking if we could come and see the glory in heaven that He has with God.
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That's unique to Him, that we don't possess. The context specifically is related to being one.
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It's to the unity. The glory which you have given me, I have given to them. It's a residual kind of sharing.
01:10:00
And we see this, actually, in the ministries of the apostles. The power, the ability to do miracles, the success of their mission, all these things.
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I mean, Jesus even talks about His apostles, His followers, having a greater ministry in ways.
01:10:21
Well, in what way? In what sense does that make sense? That Jesus had the greatest—Well, He's saying that the accomplishments, that they're going to—as generation and time continues, generations continue, they're going to go further into reaching the world, fulfilling the
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Great Commission, and these kinds of things. If you don't read it in context, though, and you just insert it right here, where Tim Keller just inserts it, you are left with a different impression.
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You are left with the impression that Jesus is circling us and loving us and giving us glory in the same way
01:10:53
He does the Father and the Holy Spirit. He doesn't need our glory, the reverence that we give, because He has it in the
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Trinity, so the whole purpose is centered on us. Wow. This is the altar call moment.
01:11:13
This is the man -centered gospel right here. And He said the word sin, so you can't complain, right?
01:11:19
I think it's so brilliant in my mind. The more I look at Keller and how he navigates these things, it's so brilliant, because he kind of leaves himself these safety checks where he says that Jesus died to pay for our sins or something along those lines, and so you can hide behind that quite a bit.
01:11:37
But then everything else he says, it's kind of like that's what he has to say to get to the real meat of it, what really lights him up and what he wants to emphasize, which is that we lost the dance and we got the dance back, and the dance is the important thing.
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Don't you want to be part of this dance? And in this dance, you're going to be glorified by Jesus.
01:12:01
All that's the great stuff that the Trinity is giving to itself, all that stuff's going to be, you're going to become a part of that.
01:12:07
So now you're part of the dance, which again, Richard Rohr is the one that says, oh, there's a fourth element to the dance.
01:12:13
Tim Keller's not saying that, but you can see how easily it is to walk away from this sermon and think,
01:12:18
I guess I'm part of it too, all creation is, I guess. That's part of the dance, and it's not just the three persons in the
01:12:27
Trinity, there's another element here, and it creates so many theological knots.
01:12:36
I think maybe Tim Keller wants his audience just to not take it to these conclusions or to think too deeply into it, but to just relish the feeling that you have, because it's a nice feeling to think that Jesus is doing all this for you, and he's just crazy about you in this way.
01:12:57
And we're really turning the dial down way on the wrath and the sin and the judgment, and then you walk out with kind of a pretty good feeling.
01:13:08
So I think that's all I wanted to play from Tim Keller. I forgot to show you this, but maybe
01:13:14
I was going to show you this earlier. This isn't Tim Keller.
01:13:20
This is another website, though, that teaches the same thing, this divine dance concept.
01:13:29
And I don't have the reactions to Tim Keller's sermons, but this is the same message, pretty much, that the gospel starts here, you know, the good news, and we celebrate that God created out of love, not need.
01:13:43
We celebrate that God created out of goodness, not loneliness. We celebrate that God created out of joy, not boredom. And we celebrate that we bear
01:13:49
God's image. The next time you think about the gospel or share it with someone, put on your dancing shoes and consider the
01:13:55
Trinity orbiting and self -donating loving relationship. The gospel starts with God, and so should we. And it goes through the
01:14:01
Lewis quote, I believe. Yeah, it's right here. It's the same argument that Tim Keller gives.
01:14:09
So what are the reactions to this? And this is what I found fascinating. The people who are reacting or commenting on this and saying what they think.
01:14:18
Here's what Sherry says. It should make me realize that I am good enough, that I am strong enough, and that I'm pretty enough, and that I am loved enough.
01:14:25
But sadly, I still struggle with this. My self -worth should be higher, but I will continue to tell myself that I'm a child of God.
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I am worthy. I am made in His likeness. I am who He says I am. I am enough. Here's Sarah.
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When I think of how God made me in His image and out of love, everything else melts away. And all my insecurities and self -doubt no longer matter because I realize how
01:14:46
He is and how He beautifully He made me and all of man. When I think about how beautiful Niagara Falls is,
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I think that I'm even more beautiful in His eyes. I'm astounded and overwhelmed. One more, Sheila.
01:14:57
It gives me a sense of calmness and validation knowing that God made me from love and goodness. God loves me for who as I am eternally.
01:15:05
You can see why this is appealing. You can see why this is appealing. You're a child of the
01:15:12
King. I mean, you're so important and loving and good and beautiful. And it's the man -centered stuff.
01:15:20
You say, well, it's not as man -centered as Oprah. Of course not. It's being marketed to—it's pulling in people from the outside world, sure.
01:15:29
But it's also being marketed, I think, most especially in formerly orthodox circles.
01:15:38
And it's a new message. So people who grew up—sometimes, maybe legitimately so—they have gripes about overly legalistic contexts they grew up in.
01:15:50
That could be very well the case, that the love of God wasn't even focused on. It was all wrath and justice and follow the rules.
01:15:56
And you might get God's love. And so you have that. And then just to the orthodox,
01:16:03
God is love, and God loved the world, and God also is judging the world.
01:16:09
And so 1 John 3, 16, and 17. And you have that biblical balance there. So people who grew up in either of those traditions, when they hear this, this is a temptation,
01:16:21
I think, for—especially if they're unconverted and they grew up in those traditions, because now they're being told that, you know, man, we're special.
01:16:29
That it's just—it's so man -centered. It's so appealing. And it sounds so much better than what I grew up with, doesn't it?
01:16:35
Because I get to be good. I get to be special. I get to—now, of course,
01:16:41
I think if you really understand you're converted and you understand the true gospel, that we were alienated from God because of our law -breaking, because we hated him, we hated his law, we wanted our sin, and that Jesus Christ came and paid the penalty that we could not, lived a life we could not, and then made a way for us to be right with—be in a right relationship with God through giving of himself, his death, burial, resurrection, conquering death, and sin.
01:17:08
I think that that is way better than what Tim Keller's giving us, especially if you think deeply into what
01:17:14
Tim Keller's giving us, which are these unspecified persons that don't work in this order, this beautiful order that we see in Scripture.
01:17:26
That beauty is what's cast asunder in Tim Keller's view. I think that you're trading in something that's very good for something that, if you really think about it long enough, it's not as good.
01:17:41
It's not as beautiful. And it leaves out—I mean, look at this even first comment
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I just read. I am pretty enough. I am loved enough. But sadly, I still struggle with this.
01:17:53
My self -worth should be higher. I am worthy. I am made and is likeless. Well, guess what?
01:18:00
Maybe your self -worth shouldn't be higher. Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what the actual true gospel can rectify here, is that you're really not worthy.
01:18:09
You're really not strong enough, good enough, pretty enough. In fact, there's this ugly thing called sin, and Jesus is enough, not you.
01:18:18
You're not enough. Jesus is enough. That's—I think once you actually—that clicks, that is much more beautiful.
01:18:24
But Tim Keller is giving you something that is more palatable, I think, if you want to hold on to,
01:18:30
I'm enough, which is the natural state of man. All right, let's look at this video.
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I want to show you this. And I'll probably just minimize myself here.
01:18:42
So you can see this. This is at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 2017.
01:18:49
It's called Life Together. Now, I don't know if this is specifically supposed to be about the
01:18:55
Trinity. Some people seem to think it is. Either way, I will say this about it.
01:19:03
There's three guys. They're going to do ballet. This is at Tim Keller's church. And if it's not about the
01:19:12
Trinity, Tim Keller thinks that we should be taking our cues from the Trinity for how to do life together.
01:19:18
So I can still see kind of a connection. Either way, though he does not specify what kind of dance is going on in this divine dance he talks about, this is probably the most,
01:19:29
I don't know, highbrow, dignified type of dance you can think of. They're not breakdancing on the street saying, that's the
01:19:36
Trinity. They're doing ballet in a concert hall or in a worship hall, whatever this is, at his church with classical music.
01:19:44
And you tell me whether you think this is an accurate depiction, a good representation of what the Trinity is. All right.
01:20:36
I had it on mute. Sorry about that. So I can't take it anymore. Is this the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit right here? Would this be a good analogy for what the
01:20:46
Trinity is? When this made the rounds a few years ago, I remember people were criticizing it because they said it was too effeminate or the regulative principle wasn't employed.
01:20:56
But there is only one thing I read of someone who said, hey, I think this seems like it might parallel Tim Keller's teaching on the
01:21:04
Trinity. And when I was reading through this, my mind went back to this. And I thought, oh, maybe it was.
01:21:09
Now, I don't know. I don't know. But even if it wasn't, this is the analogy that Tim Keller wants to give us. And I would just submit to you, it's kind of offensive to think that you can make this an analogy for—this is what
01:21:25
God is. This is God's essence. It's a dance like this. It's just like this ballet dance with people circling each other.
01:21:32
And it's three people, in a sense. And we just got to get up and we got to join them in the dance. It's lacking.
01:21:38
It's subpar. And it's not orthodox. And that's my two cents on this whole issue of Tim Keller and the
01:21:45
Trinity. All right. Well, I hope that was beneficial for you in some way. God bless. More coming.