Pt. 5 of The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
Making My Calvinism More Emergent
As I worked on the intended “Epigenetics” post last night I had to face the question of how much stuff I’m reporting of is Tim Keller’s and how much is my own.
In my last post I gave some of the background of why Tim Keller is influencing the theology of the Christian Reformed Church, especially the young pastors. I should probably tell a bit of my own story.
Even though my cluster cohort and I met Tim Keller and visited Redeemer in June of 2006 my interest in him really didn’t become significant and earnest until that August. I was in a sort of a box in my ministry and personal life and I knew something needed to change and I stumbled across some MP3s from the Resurgence Conference and it rocked my world. What I heard was a synthesis of of a lot of what I was feeling, with some deep connections to my own roots in the earlier urban, black and reformed movements of the 70s and tapped into my own theological tradition with a new perspective on “the gospel”. Some of what I was feeling was also well summarized by Belcher’s list that I posted in part 3 of this series.
Over the next two years I listened to over 100 sermons, lectures and recordings from Tim Keller. If you look back in my blog during those years there are plenty of posts on Keller’s stuff. I began to outline some of his sermons that I thought were helpful to me. I began to try to reverse engineer some of his theology to try to figure out what made it tick. I’ve now been doing this for six years. Since I’m primarily an auditory learner the audio content was easy for me to digest and to remember.
I remember my church history professor at Calvin Seminary recommending to us the value of choosing a theologian to study in depth. His list was Augustine, Calvin, Luther or CS Lewis. If you study Keller you get Luther, Edwards and CS Lewis along with a lot of other Puritan thought.
Keller also in one recording (part of the weakness of learning from recordings is that it is hard to track down quotes, that’s partially why I blog) suggests (following Lewis if I recall) that in order to find your own voice you need to study deeply the voices of others. Don’t try to be original, just keep listening to others and in time your own voice will emerge.
I write this not just to give you a window into my noodle but also to make a disclaimer that I’m both indebted to Keller for a lot of what I’ve learned over the last 6 years but also that you shouldn’t necessarily hold him accountable what I write even if I’m exploring what I think he’s doing. I’ve had enough experience with pastors to know that often they are the least aware of what they are doing as anyone. We can’t see our selves so as I’m processing this stuff I’m aware that there will be some transference, projecting, etc. involved.
My hope is that as a community we can learn together. My goal is that we as a community can better know the gospel and communicate it to this amazing world we live in. What I think Tim Keller has helped me with is to rework some of my language to address a postmodern context. This isn’t a matter of just using new language to communicate old concepts. This was what the Seeker movement did. Again and again they insisted that their theology wasn’t changing, just the deployment of it. Many saw that as disingenuous and untrue. The work of the church in doing theology doesn’t change. New concepts need to challenge new contexts. The question is whether the new concepts are in faithful continuity with the old.
Culture and the missionary
The wikipedia definition of “plausibility structure” is a pretty good one. A “plausibility structures are the sociocultural contexts (or bases) of systems of meaning, action, or beliefs which are basic and tend to remain unquestioned by individuals in a given society.”
Every missionary needs to find a way to appeal to the target culture. There is a plausibility structure that must be encountered and adequately addressed if the appeal of the missionary is to get a hearing.
David Watson reminded me after my last post of another PCA pastor who influenced the CRC, and all of North American missiology: D. James Kennedy. He’s a terrific illustration of the speed of cultural transition missiologically in North America. My denomination, and many others followed his lead in his popular evangelistic tool “Evangelism Explosion”. Evangelism explosion was most famously known for their evangelistic one liner “If you were to die tonight and God were to ask you ‘why should I let you into my heaven’ what would you say?”
Now I’m sure that if you go cold calling with this question you will still find people who will give an expected response but many won’t be moved or anxious about the conversation. Why not? Because common plausibility structures have shifted for many into a post-Christian framework. Many are simply not anxious about the threat of hell so some Christians then switch operations to first try to convince people about the threat of hell. See again the NT Wright quote on seeker-modernity framework.
This isn’t to say that hell isn’t a real threat nor that part of what Jesus delivers us from are the everlasting consequences of our rebellion, but that the way the picture is framed reduces a far broader narrative into a binary judgment with some large unexplored assumptions. We’ll see in a moment why this has all shifted and why this particular approach is defeated by the postmodern plausibility structure. We’ll also see how Tim Keller’s change at the “epigenetic” level addresses this shift.
Epigenetics
Most of us are aware of our DNA, the coding that is the building blocks of life. What we are less aware of is the layer above our DNA called Epigenetics. (For a couple of popular treatments of the subject check out the NOVA episode and a sermon by John Van Sloten.) Our DNA may be fairly fixed, but how those genes are expressed is determined by our epigenetics. Epigenetics determines which DNA gets activated and which DNA stays dormant.
Why bring up epigenetics in this discussion? Think about the Bible like DNA for the Christian community and think about epigenetics as the layer above that responds to environmental changes to determine which elements of the DNA get activated.
The Bible is a large book and we have long known that different parts of the Bible get a lot of attention during different periods of Christian history and in different places of the world. A modernistic approach called “Biblicism” by Christian Smith received very rough treatment in his book “The Bible Made Impossible”
The very same Bible—which biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest. Knowledge of “biblical” teachings, in short, is characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Smith, Christian (2011-08-01). Bible Made Impossible, The (Kindle Locations 481-483). Baker Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Smith’s point that when the Bible is viewed as some atomistic vat of nuggets of truth the assumed compilation of these nuggets has historically yielded interpretive pluralism. The Bible isn’t a syllogism inconveniently packaged in narrative, poetry, lists and epistles when what we needed was a database looking more like a book of systematic theology.
What we have instead is something more analogous to a genetic code for the church but at different points in history different readings, passages, ways of interpretation, etc. get activated. It is within the life of the church, conflict within the church, conversation among peoples of diverse cultures and times within the long term story of the church that the DNA gets applied to different contexts and times as is needed.
Some will of course object that this isn’t orderly and secure enough but I’m hard pressed to see what in fact they wish to assert. If you look at the New Testament’s view of prophecy in the Old Testament you’ll see that things weren’t catalogued like we would imagine it should have been according to our assumptions. Readers today might look at Old Testament citations in the New Testament and object that the citation doesn’t demonstrate the point it wishes to make. The point is that the authors clearly read the Old Testament text through a different contextual filter and for us to understand the point they were making we’ll have to do a bit of work to understand their filter.
What happens over the history of interpretation is that things do in fact migrate, positions change, and assumptions about prooftexts for particular positions change, even if there is long term harmony and continuity within the tradition.
What the missionary does is appropriate the theological tradition and the text and try to make it intelligible to the present context. In the process the outcomes may or may not seem in continuity with the old. Over time the new interpretations are tested by the community. Some will stick, some will not.
Augustine and Wisdom
We live with the same Biblical text that Augustine did. Modernistic American evangelicals of the late 20th century may try to reduce that Bible to “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”. The Bible is the guide to get to heaven when you die. That is the great good that the Bible is sometimes reduced to as witnessed in the evangelistic shortcut used by Evangelism Explosion. Getting to heaven after you die is the great goal.
What we will find in Augustine, however, is that what he sought and the value he found from Christianity and the Bible was not hell avoidance primarily but Wisdom. Here is a quote from Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine.
“Cicero had urged Augustine to seek Wisdom: ‘I should not chase after this or that philosophical sect, but should love Wisdom, of whatever kind it should be; that I should search for it, follow hard upon it, hold on to it and embrace it with all my strength. That was what stirred me in that discourse, set me alight, and left me
The precise form of ‘Wisdom’ that Augustine might seek, would, of course, be very different from what Cicero would have recognized as ‘Wisdom’. Augustine was a boy from a Christian household. In an age where only the writings of adults have survived, it is extremely difficult to grasp the nature of the ‘residual’ Christianity of a young man. One thing, however, was certain: a pagan wisdom, a wisdom without the ‘name of Christ’ was quite out of the question.’ Paganism meant nothing to Augustine. In Carthage he will watch the great festivals that were still celebrated at the great temple of the Dea Caelestis: but he will do so in the manner of a Protestant Englishman witnessing the solemn Catholic processions of Italy — they were splendid and interesting; but they had nothing to do with religion as he knew it.
Moreover, Augustine grew up in an age where men thought that they shared the physical world with malevolent demons. They felt this quite as intensely as we feel the presence of myriads of dangerous bacteria. The ‘name of Christ’ was applied to the Christian like a vaccination. It was the only guarantee of safety. As a child, Augustine had been ‘salted’ to keep out the demons; when he had suddenly fallen ill, as a boy, he would plead to be baptized.’ These Christian rites, of course, might influence a grown-up man’s conduct as little as the possession of a certificate of vaccination; but they expressed a mentality that had cut off, as positively ‘unhygienic’, the pagan religion of the classical past.
In Carthage, Augustine had remained loyal to the Catholic church. He had already grown to love the solemn Easter vigils of the great basilicas.’ A stranger from the provinces, he would, of course, go to church to find a girl-friend, much as another stranger, the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, will meet his wife in Seville Cathedral.
Above all, the Christianity of the fourth century would have been presented to such a boy as a form of ‘True Wisdom’. The Christ of the popular imagination was not a suffering Saviour. There are no crucifixes in the fourth century. He was, rather, ‘the Great Word of God, the Wisdom of God.” On the sarcophagi of the age, He is always shown as a Teacher, teaching His Wisdom to a coterie of budding philosophers. For a cultivated man, the essence of Christianity consisted in just this. Christ, as the ‘Wisdom of God’, had established a monopoly in Wisdom: the clear Christian revelation had trumped and replaced the conflicting opinions of the pagan philosophers; ‘Here, here is that for which all philosophers have sought throughout their life, but never once been able to track down, to embrace, to hold firm. . . . He who would be a wise man, a complete man, let him hear the voice of God. ” Peter Brown “Augustine of Hippo” pg. 30,31.
Same Bible, different culture, different mindset, different goals, same religion. Calvinists have long saw themselves in the Augustinian tradition but I have never heard a Calvinist evangelistic appeal based on wisdom. Evangelism Explosion does not go door to door offering wisdom.
The Bible is the DNA, current theological application and appeal is the epigenetics.
Challenges of Postmodern Culture
Is it difficult to see the postmodern critique of Evangelism Explosion? Surely there are latent power interests behind trying to gather people to your tribe and doing so based on fear. By suggesting that all others except your special group are facing everlasting torment you are presenting and unfair and powerful means of coercion against your neighbor.
But wait, it gets worse. The larger narrative assertion that the creator God of the universe would send people to hell for not signing up with his most favored group on earth (if you can sift between them) seems also like an illegitimate use of power. Such a god is morally objectionable and therefore certainly must not be a true god. If such a thing as god exists that god would be morally pure and would be beyond using power to coerce human beings into anything, much less threaten them. Listen to a young man on youtube essentially make this argument.
A system in which a god uses power against the will of people is automatically immoral in such a system. A moral god would not punish or judge but rather understand the limitations of the creatures and act in a therapeutic way towards them, that is if any god exists.
When Christians wade into the public conversation about their god and lead with a traditional narrative about the fact that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and have hell to pay for wrongs they didn’t even know they were doing, it simply is beyond the comprehension of many hearers, including many raised in the church.
How talk of hell has changed
“So are you saying they’re going to hell?” In a modern conversation this is dealing with a question primarily of selection. “What are the criteria that your god uses to assign either pleasant or painful afterlife accommodations?” For postmoderns “so are you saying they’re going to hell” is a conversation about the morality of your god. Modernism shifted the question to a binary end-of-time judgment, postmodernism reject the narrative as self-evidently immoral based on the use of coercive power.
The Task of Emergent Calvinism
Mark Driscoll’s Calvinism lines up more cleanly with a lot of traditionalists. When you listen to a conversation about hell many of them will dutifully go through the traditional narrative of “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, therefore you have hell coming to you unless you appropriate for yourself through faith the forgiveness earned for you by Jesus Christ on the cross.” They come by this narrative honestly. I grew up on the Heidelberg Catechism. It is certainly in there. (Later we’ll get into messing at the epigenetic level of the Heidelberg Catechism to help it address a postmodern context.)
For someone to embrace this confession they need to deny a basic assumption of a postmodern culture. If you’ve studied any missiology at all you know that the missionary’s goal is to not ask people to immediately violate their culture to come to the gospel. The gospel critiques all cultures but the gospel must also be incarnated within all cultures. You can’t begin missionary work by complaining about a culture and asking people to abandon it. Evangelism still happens with people embracing the traditional narrative, but the cultural divide will limit the number of people who can make the journey.
The cross cultural missionary crosses over the divide and recasts the terms (changes the epigenetics) into the terms of the target culture.
Tim Keller is a conservative, but he’s changed the epigenetics of the traditionalists. He’s done it to speak to postmoderns, but he’s also a sharp enough theologian and reader of the tradition do it in a way that is intelligible to many traditionalists. He has, in a sense, built a bridge between the cultural groups.
Keller also knows his own tribe well enough to understand their system of shibboleth check boxes. I’m not saying that there’s anything disingenuous about it. I have no reason to believe he isn’t fully and wholeheartedly subscribing to all that he claims he does. What he is is bilingual culturally and theologically, like a good missionary is. What Keller has managed to do is appropriate the DNA of the Bible and his tradition, apply a postmodern epigenetic system to talk in terms that cause people who out of hand rejected more traditional formulas to listen to what he has to say.
Part of my thesis is that the seeker movement tried to change behavior without changing theology. That itself was a very pragmatic move because the last thing that Willow and others wanted to do was to ignite more theological bickering, which we will always have with us. Their assertion was that “the gospel” was set (they basically borrowed off the shelf 4 spiritual laws, evangelism explosion, etc.) and asserted that what we needed was primarily a new delivery system.
Given that the boomers are considerably more modern and more Christendom haunted than following generations I can understand their tactic. With the arrival of the emergent movement it basically fell apart. Theology could not be ignored.
Keller is doing theology as he goes. Conservatives might not like to admit it but Keller is doing the job of adjusting a Calvinist (and Puritan) theology for a postmodern context with a lot of help from CS Lewis. The big question that we will need to wrestle with is not different from what the confessionalists struggled with in contending with the seeker movement. Does reworking theology change theology? I think it always does and it is the healthy, natural process, but not one without risks.
Next: Understanding self-righteousness as law breaking in addressing a postmodern culture.
Tim Keller’s Gospel
Pt. 6 of The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
Homosexuality as Justice Litmus Test
This video of Tim Keller handling the question of homosexuality nicely illustrates both our postmodern context and how Tim Keller’s theological adjustment of Reformed theology differs from the traditional approach.
First the postmodern critique of inclusion, exclusion and sexual ethics.
The questioner here notes that he wrote a book on the gay rights movement because of the oppression of homosexuals in his America. What does the church have against homosexuals?
There is a logic behind the critique that the oppression of homosexuals has been fueled by the condemnation of gay and lesbian practice supported by Christian religious texts and tradition. That’s pretty hard to argue against. The Christian meta-narrative is suspect because it tilts the world in favor of the powerful heterosexual majority.
The questions get pointed as “is homosexual behavior a sin?” and “are homosexuals going to hell?”
Note how these questions line up with the Evangelism Explosion questions. Modernistic American evangelicalism has in fact trained its audience and communicated to its audience what its reduced narrative accomplishes. The religion is a strategy for hell avoidance.
The question also understands Christianity within the terms of what I call “common religion” which understands the purpose of religion to be moral human improvement and the purpose of moral human improvement to be to earn the reward of a divine judge towards an advantageous post-death existence, rather than a painful one.
The Usual Evangelical Response
Most evangelicals will wish to first challenge or attempt to correct the assumption of “common religion”. They will say something like “we are saved by grace, not by works”. This is usually simply dismissed by what is to follow partly because of how grace is understood in the “God of love” vs. “God of justice” exchange but I won’t go there now.
If you look at Evangelism Explosion approach and the “if you were to die tonight” approach the expected answer in the conversation with someone who possesses an assumption of common religion is “I’m pretty good. I haven’t killed anyone. etc.” The task of the evangelist is then to use the Sermon on the Mount or Romans 3 (leveraging an assumed shared authority of the Bible, assuming the person who opened the door is sufficiently Christ haunted to value “the good book”) to demonstrate that they are not good enough. God requires perfect obedience, perfect compliance, a flawless record and since all of us fail that the only way to enter into God’s heaven is to have your sins already paid for by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. If you believe that Jesus died for you to forgive your sin and if you start to follow him (Jesus as Lord and Savior) then all of your sins are forgiven and you get to go to heaven when you die.
Now when an evangelical approaches the question of homosexuality the better standard response (there are worse ones you can find easily on youtube) homosexual behavior, just like sex out of marriage, is a sin. The adulterer and fornicator are no better than someone who practices homosexual lust or behavior, sin is sin. The church is being evenhanded.
“No it’s not the same…”
Many people are simply not buying the modernist evangelical treatment either of the narrative for sin forgiveness and especially not its application for a person who has persistent same sex attraction or can’t find their peace within traditional sexual norms.
A great example of “it isn’t fair” is on this youtube from Matthew Vines. Within this system a heterosexual person can find an expression of their sex drive affirmed by the church and a homosexual cannot. It fails the fairness test. Christian sexual ethics should be about exclusivity in a committed relationship and the sex of the partners is irrelevant to the morality of the relationships.
Doubts About the Standard Evangelical Salvation Narrative
There is also a skepticism about the broader narrative of sinners and “salvation”. The critique usually goes like this. “Do you mean to tell me that just because someone prays the sinners prayer, starts going to church, starts calling himself a Christian, even though they continue in their bigotry (racial or sexual), even though they don’t really behave substantially like anyone else (or worse) that God gives them preferential treatment on judgment day? This smacks of tribalism. Any judge who operates this way is not a fair judge. What about Gandhi and lots of other moral people who live good lives but either didn’t have a chance to go to church or for whatever sociological reasons didn’t want to associate with Christians? Will they fry for ever? Such a God who would do this is a monster!” If you want to hear a sharp young man make this argument see this video which I’ve outlined.
The evangelical apologist will hear the common religion narrative reemerge and usually double down on the formula “all have sinned and fallen short…” and “Jesus’ sacrifice pays for sinners…”
Why doesn’t this work? Remember that the religious narrative is suspect because it is designed to favor the powerful (Christianity has been given preferential treatment in the West and via colonialism the world.) and this narrative smacks of a convenient tribalism that favors the church at the expense of her enemies. The narrative and the God imagined by it is unjust, an oppressor of those outside His tribe.
How Tim Keller talks to Postmoderns
Listen to the video at about 4:30. “What sends you to hell is self-righteousness, thinking that you can be your own Savior and Lord.”
Common religion says that your quality of moral performance earns you a preferential position in the afterlife if there is one. Christianity is heard by postmoderns as asserting that a tribalistic relationship grants an individual a preferential position in the afterlife. Keller here says “self-righteousness sends you to hell.”
Self-righteousness as self-evident evil
To the degree that a postmodern is willing to accept an afterlife, the quality of that afterlife evaluated by a judge needs to be based on a quality available in this present life. This is a point where there isn’t a dispute between many postmodern Americans and many Christians.
Deep within the suspicion of meta-narratives designed to advantage the powerful authors at the expense of others is an acknowledgment that self-righteousness is unseemly and dangerous. Those who construct systems of power for their own preservation and back them by moral assertions are commonly self-righteous. The wrongness of self-righteousness seems self evident in our context.
Keller here in this piece, commonly in his work, most clearly in his hallmark sermon on Luke 15 sharply critiques moralistic Christianity. Keller sides with critics of the church on condemning this behavior.
If you scroll down to the bottom of this post you’ll see how much of Keller’s approach I’ve internalized. I find it cohesive, coherent, attractive and compelling.
The Ego in Affluent, Cosmopolitan Urbanites
People sometimes confused postmodernity with relativism. It is hardly the case. Affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites have a highly developed if not fully explored system of moral justice. There is evil in the world and many are activists ready to oppose the evils they see. For many the ego is the source of evil in the world and they have a high regard for religions that attempt to address the ego.
There is an irony with this group. Even though they have a highly tuned sense of justice and fairness and are suspicious of those who wield power, this class of people have incredible power. This class of people are in many ways the elite of the West and the masters of many of the institutions and thought landscape of our culture. These are the movers and shakers.
If you have a lot of power in your life, if you can solve problems in your life with money, medicine, influence, knowledge you begin to realize that in some ways your chief adversary to your own thriving and future is yourself. If there are few things around you that constrain you, you will begin to see that you are the greatest threat to your own existence.
If your own out of control appetites, blindspots, ego are your problem, where can you find relief?
A lot of affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites are looking to westernized quasi ascetic eastern religious practices for help in curbing their egos. Those who are viewed with esteem of being “spiritual” are often those who display a certain zen-like quality of tolerance, acceptance, semi-detachment often gained through some combination of gentrified modernized diverse spiritual pursuits.
Keller and CS Lewis
Tim Keller is an unabashed disciples of CS Lewis. When he talks about self-righteousness sending you to hell he is following Lewis in his classic “The Great Divorce”. A sin left unchecked over the course of everlastingness will change us into monsters. A grumbler in time will become a mere grumble. With the help of Lewis Keller can target the ego and communicate a narrative that is intelligible to affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites. The ego if left unchecked is their most felt serious threat to their envisioned preferred future. If you listen to Tim Keller talk about Hell he takes a page right from CS Lewis.
Keller and Kierkegaard
Keller noted early on that if you define sin as law breaking to postmoderns you get lost in a morass of pluralistic cosmopolitanism. Since different cultures have different laws, and all historical religious moral codes are simply human codes imagined to be divine (postmodern assumption) appealing to a specific law is an invitation to tribalism. Keller saw that explaining law breaking as violating identity got traction.
If all meta-narratives are suspect all we are left with is the self and its identity. Postmoderns are free to construct their identity in any way they chose because there are no impinging meta-narratives besides their own. Keller asserts that identity constructed on any other foundation other than God creates idolatry which is a form or subtle or overt addiction. He appeals to Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death”.
This makes real sense to affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites who are trying to self-construct. Self-constructing an identity at first seems like a fun project but in time becomes a burden. More on Keller, Lewis and Identity
Is Keller Reformed?
I believe if you asked Tim Keller to affirm the modernistic gospel I articulated above he easily would do so. He’s part of the “trinity” of the Gospel Coalition (Keller, Piper, Carson) which is pushing substitutionary atonement as hard as anyone today. He would also assert that it is essentially the same as understanding self-righteousness as taking you to hell. Is this fair? I think so.
What’s fascinating is that you can easily read a document like the Heidelberg Catechism and articulate it in a modernistic way. The catechism lays this out pretty clearly. The catechism also, I think, can be read along the lines of what Keller is doing with it. Here is is epigenetic move.
The Heidelberg Catechism begins by talking about the fact that humanity is under the judgment of God for failure to keep God’s law. Sounds modernistic and moralistic. If you read how the catechism explains the law however, using Jesus’ summary of the law, loving God and loving your neighbor, the catechism can also be understood as addressing the ego. The Ten Commandments isn’t treated in the Catechism until the Gratitude section, not the Misery section.
Keller will also repeatedly appeal to the Puritans who did a considerable amount of work on the will (close to what we call the ego) and how it needs to be mastered by Christ otherwise it will become subject to the things of this world through the idolatries of our hearts.
The contribution Tim Keller is making is that he is able to translate the resources of the Reformed tradition in a way that is accessible to affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites in a way for them to see how it can be moral and attractive. Tim Keller has managed to re-tune his epigenetic layer above his Reformed DNA to address his context.
Love
Affluent, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites have more Christianity embedded in their culture than they wish to admit and more than their evangelical critics wish to concede. Deep in the postmodern critique of meta-narratives is an acknowledgment of “love your neighbor” and “the strong should protect the weak”. Even while postmodernity critiques traditional Christianity it often embodies its most cherished value.
Christians have long espoused the law of love but failed to live it out both as individuals and in their structures. The current debate does not center on whether or not we should love our neighbor, but rather how can we truly love our neighbor? Love is a far more complex thing than niceness or blanket acceptance of the expressed desire of your neighbor.
If you hear the conclusion of Keller’s response to the question of the church’s approach to homosexuality you’ll hear that love must take priority over condemnation and the church has failed at this.
The question then becomes, where can we find the resources to truly love and how will it be expressed in community? For a Heidelberg Catechism Christian this is part of the joy of the grateful life, not the burden of a project of moral qualification.
Buying Keller’s Approach?
Not everyone will buy Keller’s approach. If someone is already settled on a checklist of shibbolethic outcomes you may find Keller wanting. The irony of this is that a long term and not unfounded critique of conservative Christians have been their shibboleths. We all have them.
He may be criticized both for being soft on homosexuality or injustice against women or he may be criticized for being exclusivistic on those matters. His central questions regarding the stewardship of the self and the path to love I think are questions that people on different sides of many divides have to face.
Emergent Calvinism
The central thesis of this series has been that the brands of Calvinism making headlines today have been shaped by our postmodern context and are attempts to appeal to it. In time, just as we later began to question how the modernist/fundamentalist fight changed both groups, we’ll have to evaluate how the changes to the Reformed tradition by this latest cultural movement have changed it. Is Piper’s “Christian Hedonism” a legitimate contribution? Is the Driscoll cussing preacher adding something besides colorful language? Can CS Lewis so easily be employed in traditional Reformed theology? Will these movements bring a long term impact to the North American religious landscape?