Tim Keller is Preparing the Church for Something

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna get right to it today. I have a video that someone sent me.

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A dear brother on Facebook actually sent this to me. And I should probably plug his stuff.

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I've never done that before, I don't think. But he sends me things all the time. He actually, he's an elderly man and he's written so many good, just really wise things.

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Has a very interesting life. He sent me his life story. His name is Lambert Dolphin. Lambert Dolphin. You can go to ldolphin .org

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to find his writings. And you may just wanna go there and look at some of the things he said because I think he just has so many good, wise things to say from a life of experiences.

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But he sent me something that I thought was super interesting. And it's a

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Tim Keller speech that I have never seen. Now, if you wanna know more about Tim Keller, my book, Christianity, no, sorry,

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Social Justice Goes to Church, the first one about social justice. Social Justice Goes to Church, New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism.

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I talk about Tim Keller in a whole section. And I read and listened to so many things. Well, this though, I didn't see because, well, it was a private link.

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And so May 2nd, 2019, this is at Dallas Theological Seminary. And most of the stuff that he says,

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I've heard versions of this before, but he says a lot of them all in the same talk. And I just wanna listen in with you because I think it explains so much.

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I wasn't expecting to focus this much on Tim Keller this week, but I think, hey, as long as I'm doing it, I'll do a bunch of it.

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And people have been helped by it. And I see that people are being helped by it. So I think there's some really actually super good things.

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Sometimes you listen to like Keller and you think like, oh man, like this, there's so much to like. Now, sometimes there's really not much to like on some of his things he said.

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I'm like, I really don't like that. But sometimes you just, you empathize. This is one of those things I actually empathize with. And I was listening and I was like, actually,

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I like a lot of the things he's saying. But then I think he reveals, now this isn't a social justice thing really, but he reveals,

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I think why he leans in that direction. Why, the whole kind of behind his thinking.

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We already talked about 2008, his book, The Prodigal God. We talked about how he has this whole strategy of like he wants to attract really what amounts to the worldly people and then detract the

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Bible believing religious right type folks. But, and you can go back to the video as I talk about all this.

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But in this one, I think it's a step even behind that. Like why does he want to attract those people?

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Like why, what's his main purpose here? And one of them thing is, and I think this is where a lot of people have respect for Keller is, he seems to genuinely want

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Christianity. Now, maybe it's not, sometimes it's not in my mind the really biblical

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Christianity. It's a type of Christianity, but he wants to massage things too because he wants to preserve

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Christianity. He wants it to remain. And he sees all these threats that are against it and that to navigate this, like the religious right's done a really bad job of it.

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And he wants to do a better job. And so anyway, this is, I think, it says so much about him.

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So this is a talk that he was at. We're gonna just kind of skip around it.

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It's only 35 minutes, but it's THC Gala Keynote Tim Keller, which is at Dallas Theological Seminary.

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Became a Christian at my college. Not too, and I knew people who just packed up their bags and went looking.

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So these are introductory remarks. We're gonna skip forward a little bit here. This is not a sermon.

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This is a talk. Sermons, you should preach your certainties, not your doubts. But when you ask me to come here,

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I'm gonna tell you some things that I'm not totally sure of. As a matter of fact, some of my staff from Redeemer City to City, having heard me talk about this subject before, are gonna say, hey, some of that's changed since October.

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And the answer is, yeah, because I'm not totally sure. But I'd like to give you the broad answer.

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Now this is attractive. I think this is why Jordan Peterson is attractive to some people too. Part of the reason is he's admitting weakness.

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He's admitting, yeah, you know, I don't have all the answers. And people that are unwilling to do that, we don't tend, they're arrogant.

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We don't tend to like them. And I don't have all the answers. But Tim Keller, Tim Keller often wants to explain himself in like, he doesn't seem to accept some of the critiques about him that seem in my mind to be legitimate.

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But there is something about him that I don't always see with some of the other evangelicals. He doesn't come across to me,

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Tim Keller, as someone who thinks he has every answer for everything. I'm not saying he's not arrogant, but I'm saying like he doesn't, his arrogance doesn't approach what in my mind

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I see in someone like an Al Mohler or any of these Southern Baptist professors that seem to not want to ever admit they do anything wrong ever.

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And maybe they might make a general statement, but they can't ever specifically admit anything. Like this is, this is just, there's a moment of kind of some realness, or if I can say that, some genuineness, some just being open.

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And he's letting people in a little bit to like what he's really thinking, that he doesn't have all the answers.

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And so there's a little pinch of humility here, but I think there's arrogance that comes in later in this, but there's a pinch of humility though, that just, you like that, and I like that.

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So I just wanted to note that. Outlines, or maybe what I really want to do is just tell you how to ask the right questions.

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Vulnerability, that's the word I was looking for, vulnerability, so anyway. Because many years ago, one of my

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Bible teachers told me that you, the Bible's true, absolutely the word of God, but you only get out of it answers to the questions you're asking it.

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So for example, for centuries we've asked, who is God? You go to the

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Bible and you find out who is Jesus Christ. You go to the Bible and find out. How do we lead the church in the first post -Christian society in history?

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Well, I don't think we've been asking that question until very recently, so we have a lot to learn as we go to the

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Bible and say, ask that question. So in some ways, I'm gonna give you maybe the right questions to ask rather than the right answers, but here we go.

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Let me say in a nutshell, what is the context? What time is it? Then secondly, what are the challenges to the church?

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And then thirdly, I'll give you five things I think the church is gonna have to accomplish to meet the challenges, though I don't know how.

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One is, what time is it? What is our time and context? Throughout history, all cultures believed that truth was something outside, out there.

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Truth, capital T, was something out there. And in here, we had feelings, just feelings.

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So when you found out what the truth was, you brought your feelings in line with it. So if the truth is, thou shalt not commit adultery, but my feeling is

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I'd like to commit adultery, then I bring my feelings in line with the truth. No. If the truth is, you should be willing to fight for your country, and my feelings are,

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I'm scared to do that, then I bring my feelings in line with the truth.

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So every culture always said, truth is out there, feelings are in here. We are the first culture in the history of the world in which we are being told, no, truth is in here.

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And outside are nothing but culturally constructed feelings. You find truth inside.

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You go inside to find truth, and then you come out, and you tell everybody, you have to accommodate me, because I've found the truth.

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This is who I am. This is what's right or wrong for me. There's never been a culture in history like that.

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It's the complete reverse. Or another way to put it is, if you would go, as a

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Christian missionary, to a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Confucianist, or to an animist, or any other place, there at least was some agreement, and that is the truth was out here.

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We would argue on what the truth was. We would argue about it. But there was some concept that the meaning of life was to be good.

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The meaning of life was to align yourself with that truth or that sacred order.

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Now, we all disagreed on what the sacred order was. We all disagreed on what the divine, the transcendent was.

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But at least we all said, yes, the meaning of life is to sublimate your selfish desires and to align with the truth.

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We live in the first culture in the history of the world that says exactly the opposite. They say the problem with this world is telling people they need to be saved, telling people they need to align with the truth.

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The solution, what'll make the world is great, is if every single person is free to define right and wrong for themselves, and to live as he or she seeks to live.

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It's the opposite. In the past, every culture's always said the problem is the selfish, autonomous individual, and the answer is connect with the truth.

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We live in the first culture that says the answer to our problems is the autonomous individual.

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And therefore, if you tell an autonomous individual there's a truth that you need to. All right, I'm gonna stop it there because he's kind of getting a little repetitive.

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But the point I wanna make here is that he's identifying what I would consider to be a legitimate problem.

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This would be a problem I would think someone would talk about maybe in 2010. 2015, this is in 2019 he said this.

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So this is right before everything that happened in 2020. And I wonder if he would give the same speech now, knowing that we do have what the elites would determine to be a capital

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T type truth. These statues are racist. This treatment is forbidden.

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You must take this experimental medication. You must shut down your business.

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Your church is not allowed to be opened. You need to comply with our guidelines.

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This, I don't know, just between the BLM narrative and the anti, or I guess

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COVID, I don't know what you wanna call it, the big pharma narrative. There does seem to be a here's how you love your neighbor.

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Here's how you comply and here's where you line up with the truth.

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They are the ones who determine the truth, but it's not God. It's not some transcendent standard. It's a deification of man.

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And that's certainly nothing really new. And Keller's saying, well, this whole postmodern project is something very new.

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And yeah, in some ways it is, but in some ways, no. I mean, like the first culture. I mean, what about book of judges?

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Every man does what is right in his own eyes. It was chaos. That's what Keller's talking about. But right now we're not really dealing with that.

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That's all led to the postmodernism of today is more of the standpoint theory of the social location.

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And there's a hierarchy of knowledge. And so it's a shift in who makes the determinations.

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It's not transcendent being. It's not God, it's man.

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So man, as he's constructed himself in the state and the state will determine.

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So that's actually I think more of the challenge is statism. How do you deal with that?

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And the state gives you a barrier by a region of your life in which you can operate.

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That you have certain things that yeah, you can go live any way you want. No one should question how you wanna live, but it's within parameters.

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As soon as you wanna take the mask off, right? Or you don't wanna get the jab in areas in which the state has control, then you are targeted for elimination and cancellation.

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So I don't know if I agree with the assessment, but I think it's like as far as like where we're at right now, but I do agree there's some legitimate problems he's talking about.

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Because there is a big space for, it's kind of like I heard the quote once that the left wants you to have the freedoms that you can exercise in an eight by 10 jail cell.

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And the freedoms the right wants you to have, you can't exercise in a jail cell. So I agree, like there's still problems with it.

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Someone can do whatever they want sexually apparently. And even Fauci was saying, well, wear a mask while you are swapping fluid between each other in that way.

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It's just amazing. Just, you might wanna make sure whoever you're sleeping with has a

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COVID check to see if they don't have it. Like it's just crazy because you wanna preserve that sexual freedom, but it's not like they give that freedom in every area.

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You don't have medical freedom. So anyway, Tim Keller though, the whole point, trying to approach a real problem.

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And he's saying, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is exactly, but here's my way of thinking about it.

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We're gonna skip ahead a little bit. Go to, let me see if this is the area in which I wanted to go. We're gonna have to do if we're gonna address these challenges.

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They're pretty big. The first one is, I guess I'll just say it's the evangelism challenge. This shouldn't surprise you, but let me get specific.

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Statistics like this are, you have to take them all with a grain of salt. And yet if you have enough people doing these kinds of studies, you start to at least be able to say round numbers.

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At least two thirds of all churches in America are declining and another 15 to 20 % are plateaued.

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This is, every generation that comes along has a higher and higher percentage of people who say, no religious preference, agnostic, atheist.

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Surely you know that. The youngest generation, Gen Z, for example, or whatever they're gonna finally call them.

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The various marketers and sociologists are arguing, saying, no, they want their label to stick and then they can say,

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I came up with that label. I'll call them Gen Z. These are young people under the age of 21.

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Generally, if you go through baby boomers and even Gen X people and you say, how many of you are atheists?

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They'll usually get three or 4%. You get to Gen Z, it's 14%. Some of you may know, if you ask them, are you gay or lesbian or transgender?

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Traditionally, it's been three or 4 % and the Gen Z is like 12 to 14%.

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And so you see something coming, do you? What's coming in America is

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Europe. And the kind of deep secularism and post -Christianity that you have over there.

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But let me actually get even. So he's absolutely right about some of these problems. He's identifying some of these are gonna be challenges.

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He's right about this, right? And this is where I think we are all like, yeah, nodding our heads, absolutely. So how does he deal with it?

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And a little more specific about the challenge to evangelism.

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Let's use the term Christendom. Christendom was. Okay, so he goes through this whole thing about Christianity and he says that it used to be people, you could invite them to church, they would come.

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That's not gonna be the case anymore. Right, we got it, more secular. I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit,

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I think, here. And you believe in moral absolutes.

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The average evangelistic presentation basically assumes, in a sense, it sits in there.

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What do I mean by that? Well, here's how you do it. You say, you believe in God and you know that when you die, you wanna be all right, you wanna be sure that you would go to be with God and with your loved ones.

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But you also know you're supposed to be a good person but you're not really good enough. You know deep in your heart, you have not lived up to moral standards.

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You haven't lived up even to your own moral standards. So how can you be sure when you die you go to heaven? I can show you how.

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Jesus Christ died for your sins. He paid that penalty. And if you believe in him, then you can be sure that when you die, you go to heaven.

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I mean, this is evangelism explosion. This is steps to God. I mean, it's all the evangelistic presentations

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I've ever heard in my whole life as a minister. They always assume the furniture. But what if you go into the room of that person's belief system and there is no furniture?

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There's nothing to sit in. They don't believe in an afterlife. They don't believe in God. They don't believe in moral absolutes at all.

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They define truth themselves. Now what do you do? And increasingly, we're gonna have to answer that question.

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What do you do now? They won't come to church. Why would they come to church? It'd be a social cost to come to church. And if they did come to church, they wouldn't understand a sermon.

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They couldn't because they don't have the furniture that the sermon assumes in most cases. What are we gonna do?

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We need a new mission paradigm. We need a way of doing evangelism for a post -Christian culture.

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And Leslie Newbigin pointed out, and he was a missionary to India for years. And when he retired and came back to the

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United Kingdom, he realized it is easier to figure out how to evangelize a pre -Christian culture which still has, to a great degree, that furniture.

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Still think that there is something besides this world. Still believe in an afterlife. Still believe in moral truth. He said the biggest challenge the

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Christian church has had in centuries now is how do you reach post -Christians? How do you evangelize post -Christians? That's the first challenge.

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Second challenge, how do you do formation? How do you really form kids, let's say, or people as Christians in this?

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All right, this whole point is that they're gonna be catechized into the post -modern paradigm.

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And so we need to kind of have our, this is the New City Catechism. This is the catechism he says that we need to, we need to try to figure out a way to keep kids from thinking this way.

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Now, there's so much to love about this. I wanna say that. For people who think that everything

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I say about Tim Keller or any of these social justice guys, I just disagree with everything, it's all bad. It's not all bad.

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There's actually, he's saying some good points here, but the question is how does he rise to meet these challenges?

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And so I think this is one of the keys to understanding him is what he just said about we need a new evangelism paradigm.

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I think this is what drives him. He's trying to work on a problem he sees. And I think so many of his books are about this.

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He's working on, oh, he's working on a problem. And my camera just died, but you can still hear me, so I'm gonna just continue the podcast this way.

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He's working on a problem. And the problem is that things are becoming more secular, more post -modern, and what do you do about that?

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How does the church rise to meet it? The old way of doing evangelism isn't gonna work. And so I think what

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I've seen Keller actually do though, and he doesn't always, he doesn't explicitly like say this necessarily, but what

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I've seen him do is he soft pedals some of the things the world doesn't like and then creates, kind of opens up categories in Christianity for things the world does like to try to make it more palatable.

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That's what I've seen in Keller so often. But he's, in this talk, he seems open to ideas.

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How do we do this? And my suggestion is we don't stop, like we do what the apostles did.

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We have a template, we have the Bible. We have what Paul did at Mars Hill. You go to these pagan cultures, even if they're,

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Tim Keller wants to say it's so unique, it's so different. Well, yeah, there's certain, we have technology, we have certain things that are different, but people aren't different.

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People always have, they have pride, they sin, they have the same problem, the same solution exists.

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And so we just have to preach. You violated God's law, you have a conscience.

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They can't program that all out of you. They can certainly try to fine tune it and change it, but you still have that.

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And so my suggestion is we go and we get persecuted. And just like the early church, we, persecution may involve our examples being used to save people as they see the power of God in our lives as we're persecuted.

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That's one way. There might be some political friction. There may even be a war, who knows what happens?

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And there may be an attempt to try to, in some of these states that are not gonna go along as much with the postmodern secular project, they try to carve out their own space of freedom for Christians to operate.

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I don't know. But for Tim Keller, he never, as far as I know, has ever received any solution like that.

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He doesn't talk about, hey, maybe the Christian should kind of, we should look for some political remedies where we can secede or nullify or have a place that we carve out for Christians to live and operate.

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And then from that mothership, if you will, we go and from that base camp, we go and we evangelize.

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He doesn't really talk about that. He doesn't talk about maybe what we ought to do is just be bold and say unequivocally, this is, you will die in your sin and go to hell without Jesus Christ.

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Here, I can tell you what Christ has done. And here's the gospel. Jesus Christ has taken the sins of those who would believe in him.

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He's the perfect lamb, unblemished, never did anything wrong in his life. His life is in exchange for your, his righteousness is exchanged for your righteousness when you repent and put your trust in Jesus Christ.

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And the thing is that would require just believing, you know what, the spirit of God's gonna honor the message.

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And that's what I don't see in this. I don't see that faith. I don't see, it's all, I'm not saying you shouldn't strategize at all, but it's all like, oh, the church is gonna have to go to the drawing board to come up with something completely new.

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The church, we already have a book. That's the thing. And I don't want you to miss that. There's answers to these questions.

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And I think he's bringing up some legitimate points, but we're on solid ground still.

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Okay, so what? So what if 15 % of the next generation are homosexual? So what if most of them are gonna be atheists or secularists?

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Yeah, that's really bad in some ways. It's gonna have great political ramifications, great societal ramifications.

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What do we do? Well, we keep doing what God told us to do before poor Jesus left the earth. He gave us a commission.

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We're gonna do it. And we have models. We have stories in the Bible that show us how to do it. And we have a

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Holy Spirit that says he'll honor that. So that should be the encouragement is, yeah, it's gonna be a rough ride.

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We'll get through it. But that's not really what we see here. So I'm gonna skip ahead a little more here. Well, culture, there's a cultural economy.

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And what James would say is, Christians have got to form an alternate cultural economy. In his book,

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To Change the World, he points out that there's three approaches to, there's three approaches to how

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Christians should relate to culture that he thinks are wrong. He talks about purity from, let's stay out.

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He talks about relevant to, let's try to make ourselves as much like the cultures of people like us. He talks about defensive against, that's the hostile, angry, let's take it over.

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And instead of any one of those three, he says faithful presence. Christians, which is what the

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Hendrick Center is about, by the way, which is being thoughtful. How do you train Christians to be thoughtful and distinctly

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Christian and not over assimilate, but also not withdraw, but get right into the entire cultural economy and create an alternate

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Christian cultural economy in this country? So you've got people in the media, you've got people in the arts, you've got people in the academy doing this.

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Number four, the fourth thing we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to reclaim the early church social project.

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Now the term social project I get from Larry Hurtado, who in his book, The Story of the

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Gods, is looking at the early church and he says the early church was marked by five things, which were category defying then and they're category defying now.

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He says they were the first, multi -ethnic religion. Secondly, they were committed to the poor.

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Thirdly, they never retaliated. If you killed them, they didn't come and kill you. Fourthly, they were pro -life.

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They were against infanticide and abortion. And fifthly, they were a sexual counterculture because they said sex is only between a man and a woman in marriage.

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And Larry Hurtado hints at what I'm gonna say right out here. Look at those five things.

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Commitment to racial diversity, commitment to justice for the poor, commitment to civility and peacemaking and forgiveness and reconciliation, pro -life, traditional sexual values.

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The first two sound Democratic, the last two sound like Republican and the middle one doesn't sound like anybody. Civility, remember that one?

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So this is interesting. This is where he gets, or one of the things that has at least bolstered his view, that Christianity's not of the right, it's not of the left, it's something else altogether and we need to recapture this.

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This is part of forming this alternative Christian culture of some kind that is going to help it survive and flourish or at least survive in the coming paradigm of secularism.

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And so the thing is, he's making some jumps here.

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Commitment to diversity. It's not like they had a commitment to diversity. They had a commitment to the

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Lord and the Lord called people from diverse places. It wasn't like they put that in their writings as this is one of the chief things we're about or this is fundamental to who we are that we put that out in front as something that we are.

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No, it was more just, our community is based around something other than our nationality.

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So you can have Romans and you can have Jews. And so it's not like today's diversity, which is an end in and of itself.

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It's something that you're striving to achieve as a goal. That wasn't the early church. Justice for the poor.

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Well, they committed charity. They engaged in charity. Well, that's not anything close to what the left is doing today in stealing from some people and giving to others.

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Not even close. But Tim Keller makes these, he attaches them to those things and says, well, that's like what the left is today.

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That's just not true. And yes, they were pro -life and they were pro -traditional ethics when it comes to sexuality.

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So this is where I think Tim Keller is, he's trying to create an attachment between the early church and today's progressives that just does not exist.

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It's not there. That dog don't hunt, but that's what he's trying to do desperately and to appeal to both sides.

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Now he goes on and he talks about, I'm not gonna play it because of the sake of time, but he talks about his whole thing about how the right is, they're secular and the left is secular and one's idolizing one thing, one's idolizing another thing and Christians cannot be attached to either one.

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We have to transcend this. And so that's gonna be part of how we navigate this.

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And the problem is that some Christians are listening to political conservatives and some are listening to political liberals and that's just dividing the church up.

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That's a horrible thing. Rather than, and this is, I think, an ethical problem. This isn't like a, right now we're not talking about like a quote unquote, something that's directly related to the gospel.

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We're talking about an ethical, problem in Christian ethics where Keller is misunderstanding the early church or misunderstanding modern society either way and modern progressive ideas in society and he's conflating them.

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And then he wants Christians to be able to value these progressive things and these sort of conservative things, but not be secular and not idolize blood and soil on the one end and then the state and the all powerful state,

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I guess, on the other end. And so it's this third option that we're just so detached.

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We're not of the world. And I think one of the things with this that does bother me is that if you're gonna try to reach the world, you have to go where they are.

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You have to be in the highways and the byways. I think Keller wouldn't have a problem with that, but when you have the freedom to operate, which

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Christians still do in the Republican Party, I don't know that they do in the Democrat Party, except maybe in some very special places on the local level because you certainly cannot take the

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Democratic Party platform and put your name on that and say, I agree with that. There's no way. But in the

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Republican Party, there's still a window of opportunity there that Christians can actually operate and gain position and gain influence.

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And to say that, to kind of rain on that parade, that, well, you have your right -wingers are, they're idolizing something.

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You know, Tim Keller might even say that you can get involved with these parties, but I'm saying the effect of his teaching though here is raining on that parade.

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It's like, oh man, both sides are bad. I'm in this kind of middle ground. I don't even know what to do.

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And very clearly, the Republican Party and the conservative party in my state and the conservative movement in general is that Christians have a seat at the table.

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They uphold public morality. And it's not like the progressives are upholding any kind of public morality.

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Stealing and pursuing some kind of quota, diversity quota are not what the early church was about.

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Those are actually bad things. And Keller wants to make those out to be good. And this is all part, remember the context of this whole thing.

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This is all part of, we have this looming problem of secularization and we need to somehow do something to combat that and fix that.

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And I don't have all the answers, but here's something that we should do. Create an alternative Christian culture that's neither left nor right, but just Christian.

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And we've seen that with TGC. We've just seen that throughout like evangelicalism in general, in the elite circles, that's exactly what they believe.

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That we're just this other thing. We can't really endorse either side. We have to be something that's really politically just inconsequential.

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Just it takes any voice that Christians had, like the religious right had an influence on the Republican Party. The Republican Party wouldn't win without religious conservatives,

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Christian conservatives. It takes that away. And it takes out the conscience of the country in my mind.

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And it's not like Tim Keller is trying to create this third party necessarily. Now, maybe he is. He was on the end campaign for a little while as an advisor and they're not a party, but that's kind of where they wanna go,

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Christianity and social justice. And they kind of adopt this platform. But the effect of what he's teaching is that Christians just kind of lose their influence in the politics.

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And we need to be salt and light, even in that arena. So I just thought this was an interesting video.

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THC Gala Keynote, Tim Keller, May 2nd, 2019. And it was sent to me, like I said, by Lambert Dolphin.

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And he said, hey, this seems to explain Tim Keller. And I think it does. I think that's behind what

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I read from the 2008 book, Prodigal God. Like this is part of the reason he wants to try to attract people who are on the left and who are more secularized and more worldly and he wants to change the image of the church.

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Why does he wanna do that though, to survive something that's coming, that he knows is coming? And something that we're even in to some extent, but something that's gonna get a lot worse.

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He wants the church to be able to ride that storm out. And so this is his way of thinking that he can help the church be stronger.

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And in actuality, what he's doing though is he's weakening the church's influence. He's weakening their ability to be salt and light in politics.

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He's misunderstanding the ethic of the early church. You have to compromise to kind of get to this position.

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And the long and short of it though, to me, the big thing is there's really not a faith here that God and the

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Holy Spirit in particular can move, just using this, telling the old, old story of Jesus and his love, that we have to do something really creative in order to maybe change, change the whole strategy, change the whole way we do it, rather than just doing it kind of the old way and just letting the spirit move.

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And so that's the big thing. There's no encouragement in that. And when you see people saved who walked in darkness because the

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Lord changed their heart and drew them to himself, that's something that is a miracle.

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It's not something you can, you can't strategize or create a situation in which we're gonna win because we got the right plan.

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Not gonna happen. And you have to trust God. You have to cry out to God. And then yeah, you do some level of,

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I mean, you don't wanna be foolish, but you wanna try to, in the context, and we are at right now, we wanna be as faithful as we can to doing what

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Jesus and the apostles did. That's really it. That's what you gotta do. They're the example. And so we have a strategy already.