Reading Time: 8 minutes Eventually, one after another, various Christians have become completely positive that they know exactly how to save their religion from utter irrelevance. A recent New York Times op-ed post represents only the most recent of the tribe’s guesses about how to do it with evangelicalism. Today, let me show you some of the previous guesses. Then, let’s check out this most recent one. And then, let’s explore why it won’t work either–and why it can’t.
Tim Keller
Posted inThe Secular
Christians need their faith to be true
Reading Time: 7 minutes When you leave the Christian faith, people come out of the woodwork to impugn your motives for leaving. First I was informed that I did it so that I could have more sex, then I was told I did it to make money. Someone else said I must have a problem with authority because I […]
Posted inGeneral
Why the gospel doesn’t work on exvangelicals
Reading Time: 8 minutes People like me are like flies in the ointment of evangelical theology. We did all the things they told us to do, we gave our hearts and our lives entirely over to Jesus, yet in the end we still found their belief system lacking. It’s not supposed to happen that way. We must have done […]
Posted inPolitics
Four ways Tim Keller’s gospel falls flat
Reading Time: 11 minutes In the penultimate chapter of his Reason for God, Tim Keller attempts to pull together all the loose threads strewn about this apologetic work, weaving them together into a coherent vision for the world. He offers his belief system as a superior alternative to the one the rest of the world wants you to accept, […]
Posted inReligion
But why does there have to be blood?
Reading Time: 8 minutes With only three more chapters to go in Tim Keller‘s The Reason for God, it appears the pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan has abandoned the central thesis of the book. Perhaps we came to this with unrealistic expectations, but halfway through the book Keller confesses he believes everyone really knows there is a God, then […]
Posted inReligion
Why everything you do is wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two-thirds of the way through a book entitled The Reason for God, Tim Keller confesses he doesn’t intend to provide you with evidence that God exists. Why not? He says it’s because you already know that God exists…all of you, atheists included. He’s just trying to make you see that you already do. Then as if […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Tim Keller and the argument from morality
Reading Time: 10 minutes Reformed pastor Tim Keller devotes Chapter 9 of The Reason for God to regurgitating the Argument from Morality, which essentially states that without a belief in a Supreme Being, there can be no basis for moral restraint among human beings. This argument typically takes one of two directions: Argument 1: People who don’t profess faith in a […]
Posted inScience
The argument from misunderstanding evolution
Reading Time: 7 minutes In my last post, we looked at four (bad) arguments for the existence of God presented by Tim Keller in Chapter 8 of The Reason for God. I call them the Argument from Inexplicability, the Argument from Fabricated Probabilities, the Argument from Wishing, and the Argument from Regularity. As I’ve often pointed out, not only are […]
Posted inReligion
Four (bad) reasons for God
Reading Time: 8 minutes When I first picked up Tim Keller‘s The Reason for God, I did not expect that out of fourteen chapters he would devote only one of them to offering arguments for the existence of God. I’m not sure what I expected, but after all the hype from my Christian friends and their pleading with me to read […]
Posted inReligion
Changing gods midstream
Reading Time: 7 minutes “You can’t ride two horses with one a**, sugarbean.” —Earl Smooter, Sweet Home Alabama Halfway through his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller pauses for an intermission in which he pivots from his previous discussion of “the seven biggest objections…people in our culture have about the Christian faith” to lay the groundwork for part two […]