Engaging Tim Keller on the Doctrine of Sin

The Problem of Discrediting a Work by the Author’s Moral Failure

Hey everyone, welcome once again to the podcast, Conversations That Matter. I'm your host John Harris. We have one subject today and that is the first chapter of this particular book, Engaging with Keller.

Now this book is out of print now. It cost me a pretty penny to acquire it on, I think Amazon is where I found it. It's probably over $100 and if you can find a deal that's cheaper than that, it's actually a pretty good deal.

I don't know fully why it's out of print. I have a suspicion that maybe one of the reasons could be, and I need to talk about this anyways before I get into the whole situation with Keller, is one of the editors of the book, Ian Campbell, and I believe Ian Campbell is the one who also wrote the first chapter, which we're going to go over some quotes from, did not end his ministry very well.

I'm not that familiar. I just know that when I mentioned this book in the past, someone brought up to me that Ian Campbell apparently committed suicide in the wake of the revelation or the potential revelation of an affair and I don't really know anything past that.

And I don't really need to know anything past that. I do want to say this about the book. Most of the chapters are not written by Ian Campbell. I think it might even just be the first one, but because he is a general editor, this has, for some at least, been a point which they, the people who like to defend Keller perhaps, I don't know, but what I'm told is that they use this as a way of discrediting the whole work.

And this is my encouragement to you and this is a good opportunity to encourage the exercising of some legitimate discernment and good judgment. We, in fact, and I'll draw a parallel case to this. I'm now a music director at my church and one of the issues that arises often is what do you do with songs performed by people or sometimes even written by people who did not end well or their ministry has gone off or their band or their, if it's a soloist, their theology has gotten odd.

And I think you use judgment. There is some wisdom that must be applied if it's a very prominent name who is very known for a particular kind of sin or heresy. And if they have the one good song and 90 of their songs are terrible, they're converted to Mormonism and that's what they sing about, I don't know, I'm giving you a hypothetical, then even if it's a good song, you may want to pull it from congregational worship just because you know it's going to distract.

And that's really the issue is it distracts from the rest of the service. However, it doesn't make the song or the lyrics in the song necessarily wrong, especially let's say someone put a psalm to music and then ends their ministry poorly.

Does that make the psalm poor? No. They happen to be artists that put music to it. And what I'd like to suggest without getting too into detail about my grid for evaluating these things is that in a situation like this where you have someone who did not end well in ministry, take the arguments they're making on their merits because that's what this book is about.

This book is about the theology of Tim Keller and whether or not this theology conforms to biblical and orthodox standards. And if there's someone who, surprise, surprise, sins, I sin by the way, and less so hopefully as time goes on as I become closer to Christ, but if someone sins and they end their ministry in a state of sin without repentance, let's say, that does not mean that their arguments or the observations that they had or the just comparisons of faulty ideas to biblical ideas that they pointed out were in error.

In other words, when someone brings something like this up to discredit a work, it ends up being more of an ad hominem. It's against the man. It's actually technically a fallacy. And I'm used to it. That's what the left deals with in this.

That's their main argument is an ad hominem attack. They destroy people who pose a threat to them. And they will do anything. They'll string together a narrative. They'll create a false narrative. And if they have something that's low-hanging fruit, like this, where someone legitimately did engage in some sin and end their ministry very poorly, I think the tendency is to point that out and to make that the issue rather than the arguments that that particular individual brought forward that were legitimate.

So I want to just say that. I also want to say that I also put this book through my own grid. And I wanted to not just take for granted or take the word of the authors as truth just because they said it.

That's not what I'm doing. I'm not doing another logical fallacy, which is an appeal to authority. That's not why we're doing this book. And we're doing it because Tim Keller has some bad theology. I hate to break it to you, and I wish it weren't true.

I really do. I might share some of my personal experiences with Tim Keller theology and seeing it, especially in campus ministry, which I am still involved with and used to be also involved with during the times in which I was introduced to Keller.

And it's grieving because so many, so many, I think I don't even realize the extent to which Tim Keller has been influential, especially in college ministry settings, urban ministry settings. Not just there, though.

It's beyond there. I mean, you have pastors in rural areas trying to implement Tim Keller things. It's just pervasive. And this is, I think, a good, this was a good attempt. This was published, I believe, in 2014, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm going to just make sure of that as I look it up. First published in 2013. So it's now, you're talking nine years ago that this was published. I mean, that's ancient history, John, right? No, it's not.

And I pointed this out before. In fact, my first book on social justice called Social Justice Goes to Church is about this very point that many of the issues that we're dealing with right now have been around.

They just weren't as popular. You didn't see them in your circles as much. But believe me, the people who went to seminary, your pastors, your professors, if you are in seminary, a lot of these guys were influenced by more progressive evangelicals.

And you can go back to writings even in the 1970s and see this. But with Tim Keller, certainly you can go back 10, 15 years, even longer than that, and find what Tim Keller is saying now is what he said then.

And what is coming out of the mouth of his followers now that you didn't expect to hear were the things that he was saying back in the 90s and the early 2000s. And this would not have been a surprise, I think, had people— in fact, this even applies to people in Tim Keller's church.

I had someone I remember from his church say, Well, I never noticed this in Tim Keller, this social justice stuff, until recently. And I started looking through the sermon archives, and I thought, Man, if you were listening in church, you would have seen this.

And there's probably multiple reasons why we choose not to or we just don't see things that are right in front of us. There's levels to this. But I think those who were paying attention did see this. And there were even some blogs back in the early 2000s that were trying to shine a light on some of this and saying, Hey, this Tim Keller guy, he's going off the reservation.

And it wasn't just social justice. It wasn't. And that's what this book highlights, and that's what we're going to talk about, is the ways in which Tim Keller's theology is compromised. Much of this actually does parallel or at least does contribute to the social justice movement in evangelicalism.

But you can separate it from that, and it can stand alone. And the doctrine we're going to go over today on sin, Tim Keller's understanding of what sin is, is much in that same vein. It's something that, apart from social justice, this is a big, big problem.

And when I first read this, I'll give you more of my ideas on this as we go through, but I was really struck with how horrible, how honestly, dare I say, heretical, some of Tim Keller's views seem to be.

And views that are he's clever. Views that you wouldn't notice on a first pass, perhaps, unless you're very shrewd and your ears are very open. Views which, if you're not looking for them, they don't just necessarily jump out at you, because they're subtle.

They're subtle shifts. But these subtle shifts lead to monumental shifts. And we've seen a monumental shift, I would say, in what calls itself the evangelical church, not just politically. But a soft-peddling of a softening of many of the very orthodox, very rooted doctrines that we as evangelicals believe.

Tim Keller has been perhaps the chief architect of the evangelicalism we live in today. He's not a detached observer. He is the builder in some ways. He is the architect of this. So as we go through this series, and I'm going to just go through each chapter.

That's the plan, at least, and how many chapters are there? I think there's seven or eight. As we go through each chapter, I'm just going to give you what I think is a fair summation. I won't give you everything.

You have to get the book if you want everything. But I'll give you what I think is a fair summation. And then you can draw your own conclusions. That's the goal here. You draw your own conclusions. And I think this is going to be beneficial.

I really do. I think not just if you're someone you may be someone, actually, who has already dismissed Tim Keller. You say, yeah, he's not really orthodox, or he's not helpful. And I would encourage you, listen anyway, because if it's not coming out of Tim Keller's mouth, it's coming out of someone else's mouth, someone that he might have discipled, even if he doesn't realize it, people following his example, and they're going to say some of the same things.

And so you're going to need to know what's wrong with that. How do I respond to that? How do I even notice that there's an error there? So tremendously helpful book, and not because of the people necessarily involved.

In fact, I am unfamiliar with the writings of, I'd say, most of them. I think the only one, if I look through this, the list of authors here, that I thought, oh, yeah, I know who that guy is. Might have been D .A. Hart, because I read another book of his.

As far as the other authors of this particular work, yeah, I can't tell you. I don't really know much about most of them. Yeah, I don't even, I didn't even recognize, I think. And it's because they're coming from, I think, the Presbyterian world, and I'm just not as in that world.

But yeah, D .A. Hart, I did recognize, D .G. Hart. See, I didn't even get his name right. It's D .G. Hart. I did recognize his name. So anyway, let's go through it. We're going to start with the chapter on sin and Tim Keller's view of that versus the biblical Orthodox view of sin.

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And I'm going to start with the introduction to this particular work and some quotes from it. So we're not in the chapter yet, but we'll get there shortly. In the introduction, which is by Ian Campbell and William Schweitzer, they say this on page 17.

We gladly acknowledge that Keller intends to teach the orthodox truth. The question is whether or not he fully succeeds in this good intention in the specific cases considered below. We think that the root of the difficulty arises from the very challenging task that Keller has assigned himself to communicate the old orthodoxy in relevant ways to a contemporary postmodern audience.

They say on page 21, the problem comes in the way he chooses to express his orthodox faith. So here's what I want you to listen to what they're saying, the editors, versus what I think the conclusion that I'm drawing and what many of you will draw.

The editors of this book are saying Keller's not a heretic. Keller is not a false teacher. Keller is just a bit confused. He has such a challenging task. And it's understandable that someone would get a bit off when they're trying to undertake this task.

He's assigned himself here. He didn't have to do it, but someone had to do it. Keller's doing it. And wouldn't you know, he got off a bit. And he has an orthodox faith, but he just chose to express it in the wrong way.

So the song makes sense. The lyrics make sense, perhaps. But the mode or the music, it just doesn't fit these lyrics. You can see why some might start reading this book who have an issue with Keller and just put it down at this point and say, well, whatever.

Like this is,.

I clearly am not going to get the truth. And I would encourage you to keep reading because I think what, I came to the conclusion at the end, I just thought the case that they're making is pretty strong against Keller here.

And it's, in fact, it's so strong. I don't know how you draw a conclusion other than this guy is a subversive element in the church and he's peddling false doctrine. I don't really know how you get around that with all the things that are revealed here.

And so I don't know if this is playing politics. I don't know if this is, you know, I'm sure they legitimately believe this in some sense, but I don't know why they chose to say this because listen to this.

This is two pages down from page 21. Page 23, in the introduction, they say this, we are concerned with the way Keller conveys some specific doctrines, such as teaching on creation that seems to legitimize theistic evolution, a teaching on sin that seems to overemphasize the impersonal effects of sin in this life and underemphasize sin as disobedience to the law of God, a doctrine of hell that seems to minimize God's role in condemning sinners to hell or meeting out wrath, a divine dance teaching on the Trinity that seems to undermine the eternal begetting of the Son as the procession of the Spirit and a teaching on the mission of the church that seems to say that our given task is to transform the culture.

Now you read all this and you think, man, these are a lot of issues and pretty fundamental problems Keller has. I mean, the Trinity, really? The divine dance, the teaching that undermines the eternal beginning of the Son as a procession of the Spirit.

I don't really know exactly how to read it other than you have a false teacher in front of you guys. I'm open to people trying to convince me.

Otherwise of this,.

But the more I read Keller, the more I think, man, this guy is good. This guy is clever, but what road is he taking you on? Is it the narrow way? I think someone can be saved through, I've met people saved within the Roman Catholic Church even.

There's enough exposure to Jesus and to the gospel and to the Bible somewhere along the line, or at least there's enough there to try to get someone curious about those things that they end up finding, through God's drawing, of course, Jesus Christ, and they become saved.

I think that can happen. I think there probably are a number of people who have been saved, perhaps even out of atheism or other things, and what God used to draw them perhaps could have been a Tim Keller book.

I think that's, there's nothing that tells me I have to say that all of the fruit of Tim Keller is, that it's an either or, whereas every single thing Tim Keller touches turns to dust and it's horrible.

I think in general, yes, I think Tim Keller's effect on Christianity has been horrific, but God uses sometimes means, I mean, and in fact, he always uses means that are weak. Preaching the word, I mean, fallen humans preaching, that's a weak means that God uses and he gets credit for it, and so if he can use Balaam's donkey, if he can use Pharaoh, I think he can use Tim Keller.

So I just want to kind of head that off at the past that for those who have found some truth in Keller, because there is some truth in Keller, the problem is it's mixed with error, and the error is what we are going to be focusing on today and throughout this series.

Sin as Idolatry Rather Than Law-Breaking

So let's start with the doctrine of sin. The doctrine of sin. Keller wants to move his readers, says Ian Campbell, who authored this chapter, away from the idea that sin can be defined merely in terms of breaking divine rules, that is in breaking the commandments of God.

He instead defines sin as that which replaces God in giving a person his or her identity. By identifying ourselves with race or status or ethnicity, we invariably develop enmity and hostility towards others, other expressions of race, status, and ethnicity.

So this is Keller's rebranding of this doctrine of sin. And you can tell right away, this dovetails with what the world is telling us, this egalitarian impulse the world has, this globalist impulse, this sexual anarchy impulse to erase any line that might exist between people groups, between even gender, between nations, and when it comes to eroding borders and gaining more international oversight, even over medical decisions made in our country, you can see so many examples.

Almost everything that's going on right now has to do with this, doesn't it? And what Keller is saying is that that whole identity, seeing yourself as a particular race or status or ethnicity, that's a problem.

What happens is you start to then, you start to quibble with other races, statuses, and ethnicities. And of course, CRT kind of sidesteps this whole issue by claiming, the people who advocate it, that race is just a social construct.

And so really what's happening in that is it's purely an argument against oppression and oppressors when you identify yourself as a minority. It's not saying anything concrete about you. It's not rooted in anything that's physical, tangible, real, created.

It's simply an artificial construction that people use to divide people up so they can oppress them. And Keller right now is, what he's saying dovetails very nicely with that, that these identities are the barriers.

These are what's getting in the way of human flourishing, of the world that we could have if we just didn't have these identities that cause confusion and mistrust and war and violence and feuds. Why can't we just see ourselves in a more bland way, a general way?

We're humans.

I don't know.

Keller doesn't say that here. But that would be the implication I would draw, is that, hey, if those things are all problems, then how should I see myself? I mean, you could say that even seeing yourself as a Christian would be divisive, wouldn't it?

I mean, under Keller's logic. But this appeals to the zeitgeist today. Keller wants to move his readers from the idea that sin can be defined by breaking divine rules. So it's identity issues, not your action necessarily.

It's not the fact that you're lying and stealing and murdering. All those are sins. It's something, in Keller's mind, that goes much deeper. And that is that you got an identity problem. And guess what?

Most of the people in our culture today have identity issues. They moved around a lot. They have broken families. They don't know who they are. They, especially if they're straight white males, they're being attacked constantly.

And they try to distance themselves from who they are. And we just have a lot of problems with identity issues. I mean, it's actually something that I don't think that the church, you know, it's time for the church to step up.

Well, sure it is. But we're going to need a miracle from God because the church is not able to bear the strain of all the issues that are going to be coming upon at the feet of the church, at the door of the church.

And it's already putting a strain on pastors. It's, I think, a great strain on counselors. And there's just a lot of issues out there right now. And to come into this environment and to start saying that, you know, you have an identity problem, that's the issue.

It resonates. It resonates. And Keller knows that it resonates. Well, let's get off on a good foot here. This is the issue with Keller already, that he is defining sin differently. The rule-breaking is very much in the background if he talks about it at all.

The identity issues are very much in the foreground and it's palatable today.

But what does the Bible say?

Does he get this from the Bible? Now, the biblical definitions of sin, there's many of them, many passages that talk about this, at least. But we could start it with Leviticus 5 .17. It says, Well, there you have it.

What is sin? Well, doing things the Lord has commanded not to be done. James 4 .17. For him, it is sin. It's not doing the right thing. 1 John 3 .4. This is the dismal condition of humanity apart from Christ.

There's not even an ability to keep God's law, to please him in that way. Now, I know that some have gone overboard with this doctrine to the point where they say things like, we're so depraved that we can't do anything good.

And what they mean by it is from a temporal, earthly perspective. And this just doesn't comport with the biblical text because Jesus talks about even the ungodly, even the unrighteous, if their son asks them for a fish, do they give them a snake?

No.

And that's the obvious answer to that question.

No.

There are some natural instincts that God has placed in man, self-preservation being one of them. And these are good things. In fact, there is a law of God, as we see from Romans 1, written on the hearts of humans.

And the thing is, humans suppress that. They go against it. But there's a wiring that they have, despite the fact that we live in this biblically sinful world. And so when we're talking about mankind being thoroughly evil, not even being able to subject itself to the law of God, we are talking about doing so with right intentions, doing so for God himself, so the right reasons, motive plays into this.

And this is what happens in the court of heaven when you go before him and you say, Lord, I protected my family. I led a good life. I didn't murder anyone. And the Lord says, and why did you do it? Your righteous deeds were filthy rags.

So this is what we're talking about here. Motive is very important. And apart from the working of the Holy Spirit, salvation in Christ, there's no way that humanity is capable of doing anything good. This is what the Bible talks about.

Everything that we do is going to be missing the mark somehow, in some way. It's going to be breaking God's law. There's going to be mixed motivations, and evil is going to be right there. So this is what the Bible, crash course here, this is not exhaustive, but this is what the Bible says about sin.

It's very different than what you even have seen already from Tim Keller, but we're going to get into a lot more. Tim Keller says this in his book, Center Church. He says, when I first began ministry in Manhattan, I encountered a cultural allergy to the Christian concept of sin.

I found that I got the most traction with people. However, when I turned to the Bible's extensive teaching on idolatry, sin, I explained, is building your life's meaning on anything, even a good, very good thing, more than on God.

Whatever else we build our life on will drive our passions and choices, and end up enslaving us. So you can already see this shift. Tim Keller is saying, look, I'm in Manhattan, and I start talking about sin, and I talk about you've broken God's law.

If I go down that path, I talk about what the Bible says about sin, people just turn me off. But I found that if I talked about idolatry, and then framed it in such a way that, look, you're enslaving yourself when you do this.

When you commit acts of idolatry, don't you feel enslaved? In Manhattan, this is easy. You're enslaved to your job. You might feel enslaved to certain passions and sinful tendencies you have, and maybe they're not even sinful necessarily in and of themselves, the motives perhaps could be.

But you might even feel trapped in family situations that you should be in, but you don't want to be in. I mean, the idea that people feel constrained, and they want liberation, they want freedom, I mean, that is all the rage right now.

Everyone feels like they're oppressed or enslaved by something, and so if you can just tell them, look, you're enslaved to something. It's the cops. They're the ones keeping you down. You fill in the blank.

Then that resonates. People are like, yeah, I want to be free, and I want my liberation, and I just don't feel it. And newsflash, no matter what happens in this life, and I'm talking about the greatest totalitarian regimes, which we want to avoid as much as we possibly can, to the most laissez-faire situations in human history, human beings, you could always drum up this sense of dissatisfaction in humans, that there's something outside their control, even if it's just the march of life and how we're going to die one day.

I mean, there's something outside our control that's negative, that we wish wasn't there, that we feel constrained by. And so if you start on that foot, then Tim Keller's saying, look, I get more traction, and he would, I would think, if that's his message, that, look, you're damaging yourself.

Instead of starting with, you sinned against God. You see the difference? He says this. This is an article in 2008, an interview he gave, I guess, to USA Today. He said this. They do get the idea of branding, of taking a word or term and filling it with your own content.

So I have to rebrand the word sin.

He literally said that.

I have to rebrand the word sin. Around here, and this is in his Redeemer Network churches, it means self-centeredness. So what is sin to Tim Keller? We talked about what it means in the Bible, but what to Tim Keller, sin just means self-centeredness.

The acorn from which it all grows. Individually, that means I live for myself, for my own glory and happiness, and I'll work for your happiness if it helps me. Communally, self-centeredness is destroying peace and justice in the world, tearing the net of interwovenness, the fabric of humanity.

And I think, in general, people can get behind this. Even now, it's like, yeah. Even selfish people sometimes will readily admit that the issue that they face is some kind of a selfishness. It's funny to me how many people could correctly identify Trump's narcissism.

He's so self-centered. Sure he is. He's Trump. He's always been that way. But they neglected to see the ways in which they themselves were very self-centered. It wasn't perhaps as gaudy. It wasn't as flashy.

But it's right there. Just go on your Instagram profile and see what you see. The focus is very much on self. It's very much on one's own. And look, I'm not saying I'm exempt from this. I don't really get on Instagram.

I technically have one. I post every once in a blue moon. But I have other social media accounts. And look, I want to look good. I want people to think well of me. That's a natural human tendency to some extent, I suppose.

But if I can even artificially make myself look good, that can be tempting. I'm thankful I lived for most of my childhood and then my early to mid-teen years without much Internet access. Or I didn't have a smartphone.

Anyway, I'm not getting on a whole thing about smartphones. But I think that's a tool that has greatly amplified this ability, at least to make obvious one's concern for their own self, their own reputation.

And it's not wrong. Again, these things, in their proper context, being concerned for your reputation is not necessarily a bad thing. But when it becomes the driving force of your life, that you live through the opinions of others about yourself, and you're not focused on how do you help others, how do you love God and neighbor, then you have a problem, right?

Biblically speaking, because it's against the law of God. I think, though, self-centeredness today, the way that many people look at it, they only see certain shades of it as being authentically selfishness.

And there's a celebrity kind of self-centeredness that's just not viewed that way by the world. And so this is a concept that has some range to it and some, I would say, vagueness to it. Enough that people in general will still assent to saying they're against that kind of behavior.

I'm against selfishness, sure. I think that people who only care about themselves, and CEOs that get golden parachutes and buy themselves yachts, but they don't care about the hunger in the world, I mean, that's selfish.

That kind of thing, the world responds to that. And they consider that to be selfishness, and they hate that. So it's a particular kind of selfishness, but if you start the conversation off there, you can kind of hide in the vagueness.

And Keller's not saying he's doing that, but I think that's probably what ends up happening. I'm going to show you at the end of this kind of how Keller, even when he talks about the sin of homosexuality, how he maneuvers that whole conversation.

And I think one of the things is he kind of hides in a vagueness. He says things, they sound like they're fortune cookies, they sound very wise, but they're very confusing. And he understands, I think, he's made a study of people in Manhattan.

He understands how they think. And reifying words or taking words that are negative to them, which I think is probably what's happening here, taking a concept or a word that is negative to those people, and then seeing where's the parallel in scripture.

Oh, scripture also talks against selfishness. Man, we can use this. We can use this to communicate, to inject. Without them maybe even knowing an understanding of sin. He says this in Center Church, page 128.

Depicting sin as an act of misplaced love, not just a violation of law, is more compelling to many people in our culture today. Of course, a complete biblical description of sin and grace must recognize our rebellion against the authority of God's law.

So this is where I think the problem comes in with Keller, is the of course here. Of course, yeah, of course, you have to recognize rebellion against God's law. I mean, that's, of course, that's part of it.

But why take that for granted? Why just, you know, it's not just a violation of law. You can see the priority that Tim Keller places on this. And we're going to get into this more as we unfold what the exact move that's happening is.

Because this isn't all vague. There's a real move that's happening, which is that there's a replacement. There's a switching out of consequences with causes. And we'll get into it. But he shows that he understands.

He understands the Orthodox teaching, to some extent at least. He understands sin is a violation of God's law, the biblical teaching. He understands where people are at in Manhattan and how they're opposed to the biblical teaching.

And so he comes up with his own term, or his own, he fills the word sin with his own content. He rebrands it. He switches things up. And this is, at the very least, I would say, unbiblical methodology, praxis.

You could say this is unbiblical theology, but even if you don't want to go there, you can at least say, well, this is a wrong application, which is what the authors, that's the case that they're making.

Just a wrong application. He says in King's Cross, the book King's Cross, if you center on anything but God, you will suffer a loss of identity. You don't really know who you are. In the darkness, you can't see yourself.

Now, this is the kind of language that I think Keller uses a lot, a lot. And I've gone over a number of his sermons on this. He constantly talks about how people are essentially alone at sea, without any bearings.

And it's true, and people resonate with it, and they're just looking everywhere. I saw this at the county fair this year, witnessing to people that so many of the younger people, especially, they're just open to anything.

They'll go to the Christian booth, and they'll go down to the witchcraft booth or something. They just, they're looking for something, because they're so ungrounded. And so if you approach it the way Tillman Keller approaches it, I think you will probably see, at least a receptivity initially, that you would not see if you start with just what the Bible says.

And maybe the allure here is we can improve upon the Bible. That's what I keep thinking through all these issues with Keller, is, man, he thinks he can improve on what the Bible says here. How can he say that?

On a practical level, I will say this. If you start attracting someone in the wrong way, and you spend a lot of time with them, and then you reveal the real truth to them, and they reject it, you've wasted a lot of time.

It's better to reveal the truth, and then see who God's drawing, and then work with them. Inadequate definitions of sin. Here we go. This is what Tim Keller says about sin. And some of this is partially true, but again, inadequate.

In The Reason for God, he says, Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity apart from Him.

He says, on the same page, sin is not just doing bad things. They're doing bad things. But the making of good things into ultimate things. So what he's doing is he's taking idolatry, and he's making that the center.