Why does Tim Keller think the Cross is all about giving up power?

Opening Announcements and Book Promotion

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. It is a beautiful day here on the 20th of December, 2021. As I look outside, it could be a spring day, aside from the fact that the leaves are either dead or fallen off the trees, but it's sunny.

And I know it's lying to me. I know it's lying. You ever get that impression? You look outside, you think, oh, this is gonna be a nice day in the winter, and you walk outside and you chill to the bone.

That's kind of what's going on here. So I'm very satisfied being inside, looking at it from the outside. Though, I do need to run some errands. I need to ship some books later. And I'm doing that now every day, because I wanna make sure you get the books on time.

Now, if you have any problems for those who have ordered books from me, let me know. Okay, let me know if you didn't get the book in time, or I've had a few instances. The post office, let's just say, isn't what it used to be.

And I have had some destroyed packages, some packages that never showed up, some packages, the tracking says it never left my house. That does happen. It's rare, but it definitely happens, probably more often than it should.

So wanted to just, in the announcements, let you know, you can still get Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, you can still get Social Justice Goes to Church, New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism, and A .D. Robles' book as well, which is Social Justice Pharisees, Woke Church Tactics and How to Engage Them, all at worldviewconversation .com.

I'll try to remember to put the link in the info section. And there's some deals running today. Today's the last day. Tomorrow, they end. And the deals are on all three of these books, reduced prices.

I think the most expensive one is the newest one, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, normally for a signed copy. This is autographed copy, 25 bucks. I'm selling it for 19. Social Justice Goes to Church, autographed copy.

I think I'm selling it for, trying to remember now, I think 13. And then A .D. Robles' book is 11. Now, that ends today. Tomorrow, it's gonna change. And I'll let you know how it changes right now. I had a conversation with A .D. because I still have some copies of his book.

I got a whole bunch of them when he first came out with it. I just ordered in bulk. And, because I think it's a really good book. In fact, I think my name is in here somewhere. I know, yeah, it is. I said, A .D. Robles has written a wonderful and very accessible primer on the woke church movement filled with helpful examples and biblical engagement.

If you have to pick one book to give to your Christian friend who is attracted to the social justice movement, this is the one to give them, a necessary and important work. And I still believe that. I really think, and this is specifically for Christians.

If you have a Christian who accepts Christianity and they're attracted to this, A .D. Robles' book is just phenomenal on this subject. It's very accessible. Really, almost anyone can understand it. And so, I talked to A .D.

And what I've decided to do is tomorrow, starting tomorrow, everything's gonna change. These two books, my books, are gonna go back to their regular price, all right? 25 bucks for Christianity and social justice.

Social justice goes to church. We'll be 15 again for signed copies. And what I'm gonna do is, if you order both of my books, okay? Doesn't matter if you order six of each, right? But if you just order one of each, right?

Christianity and social justice and social justice goes to church. Just those two. I'm just gonna throw in social justice Pharisees. You don't have to say anything. You're just gonna get it. Now, this is while supplies last.

And I'm only gonna run this until the new year. So, this is post-Christmas, but I'm starting it before Christmas because I realize that there's a delay in shipping. So, more than likely, if I ship stuff out tomorrow or the next day, you're probably not gonna get it in time for Christmas.

I just, you could, but you're taking a chance. So, today is the last day, I think. I can be pretty certain that you'll get it in time for Christmas. But starting tomorrow, things are gonna change. And this is only while supplies last.

I only have, I don't even know, probably social justice Pharisees. I might have 50 copies or so. I don't know. But anyway, that's the deal. Starting tomorrow. And there's nothing that's gonna say that on the website, but I'm keeping note of it.

So, if someone orders these two, I'm just throwing this in. You're gonna get it. You can give it to the library if you don't want it, but you are gonna get it. Okay, now that that's out of the way, I wanna talk about this tweet from Tim Keller.

This is getting a lot of comments, and some big accounts actually were going after it. But this, I just pulled up on my phone the tweet, or my Facebook newsfeed, and immediately this came across it. And so, I just thought I'll use this as the example.

This is kind of, there's so many statements like this about this tweet, but I'll just use this as one example. This is a friend on Facebook who says that she's aware Tim Keller is dying. By no means is she reducing the tragedy of it, yet she believes that it is very important to not sweep his false teachings under the rug.

And she will not presume to know the condition of his soul, whether he is truly the Lord's or not, but she will say that she's heard and read enough from Tim Keller to conclude that he is not qualified to be a teacher, and he's consistently promoted many heretical teachings that are opposed to scripture and the gospel.

He is one to be avoided, and she sincerely grieved and hope he repents before it's too late. Excellent, excellent way to look at this, in my opinion. That's the way I look at this too. We grieve, we want to see repentance before he dies.

We want to see correction to this false teaching. And sadly, I don't know if that's the case. There's rumors going around. I've heard some rumors that he's doing a 180. He recants the things he said about social justice, but there's nothing public out there.

In fact, if anything, I see things that are doubling down on his teaching. So here's a very short tweet, and this is all he said. He said, the heart of the gospel is the cross, and the cross is all about giving up power.

Tim Keller, New York City, 1230 PM, December 19th. The heart of the gospel is the cross, and the cross is all about giving up power. Now, a lot of people were speculating, what does this mean? Well, we don't know what it means because Tim Keller doesn't give us anything else other than this.

It's just, it's a fortune cookie that doesn't really mean anything. And you could actually approach this and think of it in, if you bring certain assumptions, it can be really bad, that you could just think that that's, the heart of the gospel is giving up power somehow, and that you don't find this in scripture.

This sounds more like liberation theology, but we don't really know if it's liberation theology because he doesn't expand on it. I want to bring some interpretation to this because Tim Keller actually does expand on this.

It's just not in this tweet. He doesn't have a tweet thread here expanding on it. Tim Keller, though, does expand on this. So this is from my book, Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism, which came out in, I believe the end of, now I'm trying to remember when I actually came out with my book.

Was it 2019 or 2020? Anyway, yeah, a little over a year ago, I know that. So I think it was in 2020. So anyway, Social Justice Goes to Church. There's a whole section on Tim Keller, and it's in the appendix at the end.

So it's called Tim Keller and Progressive Evangelicalism. And so this is a chapter or an appendix in which I go through his biography, talk about his political philosophy, and you really get a sense of who Keller is and why he thinks the way he does after you read this.

Michel Foucault, Power, and Keller’s View of Truth

Now, there's a section in here, though, on Michel Foucault, because, or as Keller uses Michel Foucault's thinking. You know, Foucault is a postmodern philosopher, French deconstructionist. I've read many of his writings.

I haven't certainly read all of them. The last one I read was his book, which is his most famous one, Discipline and Punishment, I believe is the name of it, where it's all about the prison system and the power dynamics that are at play in our society, or in his society at the time, that led to trying to take people who are different and put them away from society because they were different and to exert some kind of a power over them.

And, you know, there's some things that he says that you even think, and I believe, were probably legitimate in some ways. I actually don't think the prison system is really the greatest thing, the most just thing.

I believe in swift justice. I believe that what we find in scripture is much preferable in the Old Testament example of Israel. We don't have a prison system there. I think that's much preferable to what we have today.

That being said, I'm very pragmatic about, I realize you don't have a perfect world, and I realize we can't just stop the prison system like right now, okay? Some people think that. No, that would be a major catastrophe.

And we're finding out in California, in New York to some extent, where they've gotten rid of bail, but in California, where they've let a lot of prisoners go, it does not help things. And so there would have to be, any reform would have to be gradual, okay?

And this is, I think this way about a lot of things. If it's not something that's expressly sinful in the Bible, it doesn't say it's a sin, but it's just really unwise, or it leads to sin, or it's just really detrimental, then you wanna look at the situation and you think, okay, what can we do to get out of this bad thing that we're in, but not cause more harm in the process, okay?

So this really has nothing to do with the Keller tweet, but anyway, that's just some thoughts I had when I was reading Foucault. But Foucault's, the main thing that people get from Foucault is that knowledge and power are these interrelated things, that how we frame something, how we think about something is very much a powerful force.

And narratives are filled with all kinds of bias language that exert or reinforce power relationships in the minds of those who read them. And so you deconstruct things, you deconstruct literature, you deconstruct in Foucault's case, you deconstruct the prison system or other social conventions that have developed over time or traditions that are really at the root, all about power and exerting power over weaker individuals or that kind of thing.

So anyway, Foucault is postmodern. He views knowledge isn't something that's objective, that is rooted in a truth that is just there and immovable and in the real world. Knowledge is something that it depends, again, on your perspective.

It depends of the social discourse, what kind of discourse is being used to frame the characters in the story, whether they're the oppressors or the oppressed. So all that to say, just a little bit on Foucault.

There's more actually, if you get the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, I talk about Foucault. Keller admires Foucault to some extent. And I'm gonna read for you some of that here.

This is from, again, the book, Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism. And we'll then come back around. We'll read Tim Keller's tweet that everyone's talking about after we read this.

Keller's analysis for helping Christians battle disparities went deeper than just economic factors. Power relationships were also unequal. In his suffering, Jesus identified not only with the poor, but also the marginalized and oppressed.

The substitutionary atonement involved Jesus losing his power, which in turn inspired Christians to be radical agents for social change by giving up theirs. The people of God were commanded to administer true justice to groups which had no social power, which in modern times, Keller expanded to include refugees, migrant workers, homeless, many single parents and the elderly.

Much of his sermon on power relationships incorporated the teachings of Michel Foucault, who according to Keller was a postmodern theorist, socialist and French deconstructionist. Keller stated that the problem with the world was the way we use the truth for the purpose of getting power over other people.

He thought Foucault was not only right, but put it better than anyone else. When he said, truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint and it induces regular effects of power.

Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth. That is the types of discourse, which it accepts, the means by which each is sanctioned, the status of those who are charged with saying what counts is true.

So here what, Keller's quoting Foucault and he's agreeing with it. He's saying, yeah, that's right. What Foucault's saying is right. That's what truth is. He's the thing of this world. It's depending on, people use their version of the truth to exercise power on others.

So the powerful in our society today, they're using what they think is true to exercise power on others. And of course, usually people who are influenced by Foucault, they put the Western white man, heterosexual man in that seat of power, that that's who's exercising this power.

Now, there's a weird, so in my mind, I feel like you could turn this around in a way and just be like, okay, if that's true, then like who's got all the power right now? Hollywood, the media, educational system, medical establishment now, isn't that, they're all a bunch of social justice advocates, right?

So aren't they, wouldn't they be the ones that are the potential, have the potential for oppression, but they don't apply it that way. So anyway, I continue, Keller summarized Foucault's theory by stating that truth is a thing of this world and every person who claims to have the truth is really basically doing a power play.

He even quoted Jesus as stating, truth claims in general are power plays. Now, Jesus never said that. In reaction to the Pharisees, who were guilty of using the Bible to get the right places in society, the high status and to keep people down.

Keller, along with postmodern thinkers, saw the connection between truth and power everywhere from discriminatory hiring practices to media narratives. In fact, from the Beatitudes, Keller believed Jesus taught that the quest for power, success, comfort and recognition dominated the kingdom of this world.

Like Foucault, the new left thinkers like Foucault saw in Hegel's concept of the other, a substitute for the alienation which took place at the fall. Identity was not organically inherited or part of the fabric of duty and design, but rather created through struggle against the other, which represented a negative, usually social standard.

Keller stated in Reliance on Foucault, that when we form an identity, we get a sense of self-worth by despising the people who don't have it, which is the same as bolstering a self through exclusion of the other.

Simply put, people use their chosen identities based on things like their work, religion, political affiliation to exert power by vilifying others who are not like them. Only in Christianity did Keller see a basis for accepting different people.

And then he goes on. Now, this is the thing to take away from all this. Tim Keller, what Tim Keller is doing is he's taking a concept from his readings in philosophy that he's already accepted, I think.

And he's then imposing this on the scripture that this is what Jesus' fight with the Pharisees is over. It's really just about the Pharisees want to use the truth to get power. And Jesus says, no, you shouldn't do that.

You shouldn't use the truth, which we would agree with. Right, you shouldn't abuse something. You shouldn't just for self-servicing to serve yourself for those selfish purposes. You should not corrupt, which is what the Pharisees did, corrupt the gospel, corrupt biblical teaching, corrupt the law of God, subvert it for the sake of their own traditions.

And then he's taking that, what the Pharisees did, and he's trying to say that the difference in Jesus is he wasn't trying to get power for himself. And that's the example of Jesus. It's the only escape hatch we have.

It's totally inescapable that you're going to live in some discourse in which you're either being used or you're using someone else. But there is an escape hatch from this in which you can have the truth and also not be exerting power on someone else.

And that's what Foucault didn't realize. It's what Jesus brings us. Okay, so he accepts Foucault's analysis of society of reality. And identity too, by the way, that we are the way we are simply because of what we're against, basically.

Kind of like Orientalism, right? The essay that tried to frame, it's sort of the first really big kind of statement or the popular statement in what we call, referred to as decolonization or the effort to root out things that are from Western man and that you've been colonized into thinking because of some social discourse.

And what Keller is trying to say here is that we see the other, we see what we're not. We see the enemy. We see someone who's different, right? And we define ourselves against them because there's a power relationship now.

We have to exert power now over them, over the mysterious, over the unexplained, over the threat. And so that makes us who we are. That's kind of, that's an identity formation thing. So he accepts Foucault's thinking on all these things, but then tries to put Christianity in a place of Christianity isn't like that.

Christianity, true Christianity, which by the way, all these guys are going after true Christianity. Foucault going after Christianity. The post-colonial thinkers going after Christianity. And I can't remember, for some reason, it's on the tip of my tongue.

It's Edward, is it Edward Syed? I think, yeah, Edward Syed is the one who wrote Orientalism. So Edward Syed too, going after, in a sense, Western culture, Christian culture, Christianity would be part of this.

So Keller's trying to stave off all that. It's like, you guys are misreading that, at least. He's not saying that directly, but he's saying Christianity is exempt from this. True Christianity. I don't know what you're talking about with all the other Christianity.

Christian civilization, we can throw under the bus, but Christianity, he's making a separation and saying that that is not about a power play. That is not about exercising dominion over anyone else or trying to rule society in a certain way.

It's actually just about giving up power. So it's a way to make Christianity acceptable to the modern academy. And they've pretty much accepted Edward Syed. They've accepted Michel Foucault. And he's trying to make it, for them, something that they'll be attracted to, perhaps.

Christianity is attracted because it's, all these problems you're talking about in Christian civilization, and perhaps, by extension, other civilizations, but really they go after Christian civilization.

It's not true of authentic Christianity. And this goes along with everything we talked about last week. Keller sees a problem coming. He sees post-Christianity. He sees secularization. And so he thinks, the way we're gonna deal with it, we're gonna make a separation.

Hey, you can go after that all you want, but let's put a shield up and say Christianity, true authentic Christianity, isn't that. This is a game that's played that's not going to work, though, because in, well, there's a number of reasons, but in some cases, in many cases, the other side is going after Christianity, true Christianity.

And even if they critique a false version of Christianity at the same time, they still don't like true Christianity. They don't, they hate it. It's really just like what Jesus said, men love darkness, right?

So they're coming up with all kinds of ways to justify the state of affairs that we're in, including sin. People are the way they are because of, they're the victims of this or that. And the oppressors are the ones that really, and Christians will be part of that, are the ones that, they don't have an excuse, right?

And the effort is to try to knock them off whatever pedestal they're on. The assumptions that society operates by, they need to be undone. They need to be deconstructed, decolonized, and then we can possibly get to a state of true justice, maybe.

And Keller, to his credit, seems to signal that that's kind of, you can't really have that. You're only going to replace one tyrant with another, but Christianity is the only one that doesn't do that.

Why Keller Says the Cross Is About Giving Up Power

And so that's the whole reason I think he did this tweet. To go back to the tweet here, that's the whole reason he says what he says, that the heart of the gospel is the cross and the cross is all about giving up power.

Because in his gospel, he wants to make it attractive to these people. The gospel is now something that he, that they will recognize in their language, being influenced by Foucault, being influenced by Said and in Derrida and James Cone and all the rest, they're going to recognize this and they're going to think one thing about it.

And hopefully the evangelical Christians will think kind of another thing about it. The evangelical Christians, right? Let's read this in its best possible light. This is Philippians. This is Jesus, not counting equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but making himself out to be a bondservant.

And we can try to say that, maybe that's what Keller is talking about here, that Jesus made himself out to be a bondservant, submitted to the father. Now here's, can I tell you what the problem with this is though?

Yes, Jesus did condescend. Jesus did temporarily, now I got to be careful how I phrase this, right? Certain attributes were not, he did not utilize them. They were not things that he demonstrated or accessed when he was here on earth.

There were certain things that, certain things he had to give up. And this is taught in scripture. But here's the big thing. It was for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. Now he is glorified at the right hand of the father.

He's coming back to judge the quick and the dead. He is going to have a double-edged sword when he comes back. He is going to reign for a thousand years. Some of you think he is reigning now. He is, this is the thing.

The story doesn't end with Jesus on the cross. He rose and he's a conquering king. That's the part that makes this whole thing fall apart, in my opinion. Jesus is glorified. God the father is well-pleased in his son and gives him dominion over all.

He says this in the great commission, all dominion has been given to me in heaven and on earth. So Keller tries to make this, this is the good news, the gospel, the good news is the cross. Well, yeah, the good news is the cross in the sense that this reconciled God and man.

What Jesus has done is he's glorified God by redeeming a people for himself. And the cross is all about giving up power. Cross is not all about giving up power. That's the problem here. If the story ends with the cross and the suffering of Christ, that's liberation theology.

And it's up to us now to somehow institute the kingdom. That would be very consistent with liberation theology. The cross is not all about giving up power. Yes, no doubt about it. Jesus gave up things, but to say that that's what it's all about is not the full picture.

No, Jesus did this for a specific purpose, to seek and save the lost, to glorify his father. And it was for the joy set before him. In other words, there's something coming. There's delayed gratification.

There's something after this, which is so much better. You could make the, okay, look, someone could come along and say, oh no, Jesus, actually the cross is a symbol of power because Jesus sacrificed himself so that later on he would be powerful and respected and have a people for himself that he would now be able to, they were, literally, it says in the Bible, we're slaves to Christ.

Now we're his slaves, we're also his friends, I know, but that doesn't mean we're not his slaves. So he's taking this people and he's making them slaves to himself. Yeah, look at that. That's Jesus exercising more power because of the cross.

And Tim Keller, there's nothing you can say to really defeat that argument, I would think, if you're gonna go down this path. It is flimsy. It is, frankly, it's dumb. And in the long run, it's not gonna attract the people I think Tim Keller thinks he's attracting to this.

I think they'll probably be able to see through this kind of charade. But it just, again, it shows the influence of him, of Foucault on him. And so when I first saw this quote on Twitter and then on Facebook and on Gab, it's getting around everywhere, that's the first thing I thought.

I thought, yeah, okay, it's Tim Keller showing that he knows what Foucault says and he wants to somehow reflect Michel Foucault's thinking into Christianity. And I know most of you wouldn't know that or think that.

You'd probably be confused over it. Hopefully, that alleviates some of your confusion. So that's the show for today. Again, link is in the info section, worldviewconversation .com forward slash shop. And you can check out the books if you want.

And again, you will get, if you order, Social Justice Goes to Church, Christianity and Social Justice. I'll just throw in A .D. Robles' book, Social Justice Pharisees for free as supplies last up until January 1st.

So you can take advantage of that. I'll make an announcement on here if they run out before then so that you don't make a mistake and order it thinking you'll get it when you won't. I will let everyone know that.

But it will, I think it'll last until January 1st. So I don't think we're gonna have a problem there. So take advantage of that. God bless. Hope the rest of your day is fruitful and have a Merry Christmas.

More coming later this week and some Christmas stuff coming, not just social justice. We're gonna take a break from that. We're gonna do some Christmas stuff. So hope you're ready for that. God bless, bye.