Culture & Faith: Part 2, Engaging culture with Tim Keller

When Tim Keller spins his vision of engaging culture and how the church will have to adjust to become a missionary culture in a post Christian world, he first acknowledges that some of us are still experiencing the last gasps of Christendom in comparison with a secularized Europe. He sees the handwriting on the wall as more and more of our younger generations label themselves agnostic or atheist by choice.

In a new world, where old categories are being erased around us, many of us are still trying to focus on answering people’s questions and objections to traditional theological issues. More and more people aren’t even walking in the same ballpark. Keller says, “before we try to answer people’s questions, we need to question people’s answers.”

The perception of government and health officials during the Covid 19 protocols betray the reality that many in authority view faith as a personal practice, able to survive without dynamic community engagement, and the public hasn’t rebelled at the thought. Fewer people feel the pressure to go to church regularly even though they genuflect to basic religious ideas and still turn to the church on occasion for weddings or funerals. In the past, when times got tough, people had enough dots to connect to know where to turn for help. Now, the dots seem to be disappearing quickly. How do you evangelize people who don’t believe in sin, in God, in faith or in the afterlife?

How do you evangelize people who don’t believe in sin, in God, in faith or in the afterlife?

Keller calls on believers to follow Augustine’s example in critiquing the culture before trying to explain the gospel with concepts that secularists have no pegs to hang on. He says our culture has been engaged in a project “to free the individual from all restraints.” The old understanding of freedom was that a person was free to do what they had to do, but in modern times when we have disavowed the existence of a transcendent world and embraced the offerings of science, we have cut the anchor to our bodies and claimed that what we feel inside is what matters. We adjust the outside to our interpretation of what is happening inside. We quickly sever community, family and congregation, and drift on the tides alone calling on all to affirm our adventure.

Five disastrous results are sweeping over us as we drift. 

First, all values have become relative. We are rudderless in a relativistic ocean but still call for justice. Relationships have become transactional so that we keep them only as long as we are benefitting from them. Our needs are of ultimate importance, but we have no objective grid to determine who we are anymore. Keller notes that philosopher Charles Taylor recognized that ancient cultures still felt the pull of country, god or family and rearranged whatever was happening on the inside. Our society is jettisoning the traditional for a sense of freedom from these restrictive arenas. “We are irreducibly relational creatures, and we can’t live that way,” says Keller. “The modern self goes inside and then decides who it is and then emerges to demand that everyone accept us as we are. We desperately need affirmation.” In a world that calls everyone to change the world, make money, be beautiful and be powerful, the pressure is crushing.

Keller insists that believers embrace a new evangelism dynamic. In the New Testament times Christians gossiped the gospel with their neighbours in the midst of harsh times and good times. That pattern needs to be repeated in our times by believers who have to quit hiding who they are in Christ. Keller says Christianity is like a suit of clothes that is too big for us and which we grow into as we develop a robust faith. On the other hand, secularists wear a suit of clothes that is too small for them and this suit pinches and rips when life goes wrong. With a world focused on wearing the suits of justice, freedom, identity and beauty, there will be rips and pinches. He quotes David Foster Wallace as saying that no one really is an atheist in an adult world. Everyone worships something and that something will eat you alive. There is never enough money, beauty, power or intelligence to last. We are flawed and someone needs to ask, if we universally long for admiration and affirmation but all we chase leaves us short – why is this so? He says it is clear “we were made for someone who is not of this world.”

We function based on where we get satisfaction, freedom, justice, peace and hope. We need relationship.

Despite the flaws of Ravi Zacharias in his last days, he is still right in saying that all humans have to somehow face the questions of Origin, Identity, Meaning and Destiny. We function based on where we get satisfaction, freedom, justice, peace and hope. We need relationship. Believers need a clear and comprehensive commitment to how Christ is the focal point of their life. When life goes wrong, people need to know that they’ve been trying to save themselves and that what they’ve been trying doesn’t work. They also need to see that their efforts to be good enough only reveal that they’re not good enough. They need to know that they’re not free like they desire. Everything they’re reaching for will fail them – except Christ.

Perhaps the greatest insights from Keller are those he picks up from Larry Hartado – the identification of the marks of the early Christian community and how those marks transformed a pagan society. The church was the “most multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community the world had ever seen.” The church was the “first community who said we must care not only for our own poor but everyone else’s poor as well – they were generous.” The church was “non-retaliatory in a shame and honour culture – they never attacked you back – they forgave.” The church “was against abortion and infanticide – they went out and brought up abandoned children and saved them – they were pro-life and saw no gradations of human life.” 

Lastly, the church set up a sexual revolution. In a society which viewed sex as an appetite to be satisfied and which understood that high class men could have sex with whoever they wanted and whenever they wanted, Christianity posed an unheard of alternative. Sex was a mutual and consensual sacrament only for inside a marriage between a man and a woman. The husband’s body didn’t belong to himself and the wife’s body didn’t belong to herself. “Sex is not for self gratification but for self giving.” Male and female are distinct and only in the merger of mutual self giving is there an accurate reflection of the reality where God enters into a union with someone unlike himself.

Keller says the only way to meet the new cultural trends facing our upcoming generations is to identify the themes streaming through the social media platforms, affirm what you can to a degree, then subvert that theme and show what’s wrong with it before redirecting the heart of that longing toward how Christ alone satisfies.

We must embrace the grace of Christ and step into the stream of culture with a courageous faith

A focus on grace is essential. If we lose this, we will chase after power and control “and the world will reject us.” He says, “religion is the place where the battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place.” If nothing else, we must embrace the grace of Christ and step into the stream of culture with a courageous faith to face what is coming in our direction, knowing that God is not surprised by any of it.