Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Tim Keller

Some Practical Counsel for Marriage Seekers

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Tim Keller has been pastoring Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City since he planted it in 1989, and the church reflects the city’s demographics: over 80% of the people are single. So Keller has a lot of experience shepherding singles.

His new book The Meaning of Marriage  includes a chapter entitled “Singleness and Marriage.” It concludes with “some practical counsel for marriage seekers,” which unpacks eight guidelines (pp. 207–18):

  1. Recognize that there are seasons for not seeking marriage.
  2. Understand the “gift of singleness.”
  3. Get more serious about seeking marriage as you get older.
  4. Do not allow yourself deep emotional involvement with a non-believing person.
  5. Feel “attraction” in the most comprehensive sense.
  6. Don’t let things get too passionate too quickly.
  7. However, also don’t become a faux spouse for someone who won’t commit to you.
  8. Get and submit to lots of community input.

Related:

  1. “You Take Me the Way I Am”
  2. “My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me.”

You Take Me the Way I Am

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I recently heard Ingrid Michaelson’s catchy pop song “The Way I Am”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt1Ny_rLp74

It encapsulates the “I love you because you make me feel good about myself” idea that Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage  repeatedly refutes (see especially chapters 1 and 3). Keller rejects the contemporary idea that love means finding your perfectly compatible thrill-inducing soul mate:

[S]exual attractiveness was not the number one factor that men named when surveyed by the National Marriage Project. They said that “compatibility” above all meant someone who showed a “willingness to take them as they are and not change them.” “More than a few of the men expressed resentment at women who try to change them. . . . Some of the men describe marital compatibility as finding a woman who will ‘fit into their life.’ ‘If you are truly compatible, then you don’t have to change,’ one man commented.” (pp. 30–31)

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It would be wrong to lay on men the full responsibility for the shift in marriage attitudes. [Read more…] about You Take Me the Way I Am

Sin Is Suicidal

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Tim Keller preached on the exodus-story at The Gospel Coalition’s 2011 National Conference: “Getting Out.”

Here’s the sermon’s basic outline:

  1. Salvation is about what we’re getting out of: bondage with layers.
  1. Christians were objectively in bondage to the law but are now freed from it.
  2. Christians are subjectively in bondage to the law, and they default to works-righteousness.
  3. Christians are in bondage to their sin nature.
  4. Christians are in bondage to idols.
  • Salvation is about how we’re getting out: crossing over by grace.
  • Salvation is about why we can get out: the mediator.

    • The following adapts what Keller says re §1.3 (from 17:38 to 19:25): [Read more…] about Sin Is Suicidal

    Beginning with God

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    Why does The Gospel Coalition’s Confessional Statement begin with God instead of Scripture or epistemology?

    D. A. Carson (who drafted the statement) and Tim Keller explain in Gospel-Centered Ministry (The Gospel Coalition Booklets; Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), p. 6:

    We also thought it was important to begin our confession with God rather than with Scripture. This is significant. The Enlightenment was overconfident about human rationality. Some strands of it assumed it was possible to build systems of thought on unassailable foundations that could be absolutely certain to unaided human reason. Despite their frequent vilification of the Enlightenment, many conservative evangelicals have nevertheless been shaped by it. This can be seen in how many evangelical statements of faith start with the Scripture, not with God. They proceed from Scripture to doctrine through rigorous exegesis in order to build (what they consider) an absolutely sure, guaranteed-true-to-Scripture theology.

    The problem is that this is essentially a foundationalist approach to knowledge. It ignores the degree to which our cultural location affects our interpretation of the Bible, and it assumes a very rigid subject-object distinction. It ignores historical theology, philosophy, and cultural reflection. Starting with the Scripture leads readers to the overconfidence that their exegesis of biblical texts has produced a system of perfect doctrinal truth. This can create pride and rigidity because it may not sufficiently acknowledge the fallenness of human reason.

    We believe it is best to start with God, to declare (with John Calvin, Institutes 1.1) that without knowledge of God we cannot know ourselves, our world, or anything else. If there is no God, we would have no reason to trust our reason.

    Tim Keller on Preaching and Ministry

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    I love listening to Tim Keller preach or explain how he preaches and ministers in Manhattan. I don’t always agree with his exegetical steps, but I always learn from his penetrating insights and stimulating observations.

    I recently listened to two thought-provoking lecture series that Keller presented at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary:

    1. Evangelism and Church Planting in Postmodern Cities (2003)
    2. Preaching to the Heart (2006)

    The CDs (which aren’t cheap) include extensive PDF handouts.

    Related:

    1. Preaching Christ in a postmodern world (a 22.4-hour D.Min. course)
    2. Preaching to the heart (two lectures in 2008)
    3. Three central emphases of Keller’s preaching
    4. Reason for God DVD and other related resources

    Get Out of the Way

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    Yesterday The Atlantic interviewed Tim Keller “about how his success as a writer has affected his church and the process he went through to write his latest book, The King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus , which comes out this week.” The final Q&A includes an outstanding illustration about humility when preaching and teaching God’s word:

    [Question] As you were writing King’s Cross, was there anything you learned about the Gospel of Mark that you hadn’t noticed before?

    [Tim Keller] No one thing. I’ll tell you, the thing I struggle with is doing justice to it. When I’m preaching I don’t quite get the same— When you’re writing a book, you feel like you’re putting something down. It’s a little more permanent. And therefore I actually struggled just with a feeling like I’m not doing justice to the material, which is the Gospel of Mark, or more directly, Jesus himself. There’s a true story, evidently, of [Arturo] Toscanini. He was director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra years ago, here in New York. And there was some place where he had just conducted—actually it was just a rehearsal. He conducted a Beethoven symphony. And he did such an incredible job with it that when it was all done, the musicians gave him a standing ovation. And he started to cry. He literally started to cry, and he actually had them sit down, and he wouldn’t let them applaud, and then he said, “It’s not me, it wasn’t me, it was Beethoven.”

    Now, what he’s getting across there is a feeling like, “I’m just trying to do justice to the material.” And usually I don’t. And if occasionally I do ok, you shouldn’t be applauding me. It’s just, I got out of the way. I just got out of the way and we actually heard how great the music was. And I feel the same struggle. I’m just trying to get out of the way. And you can’t. [Read more…] about Get Out of the Way

    Three Central Emphases of Tim Keller’s Preaching

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    Dennis E. Johnson summarizes three central emphases of Tim Keller‘s homiletic approach to illustrate how “the gospel changes everything” in “an approach to evangelistic, edificatory redemptive-historical preaching” (Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007], 54–61):

    1) What both the unbeliever and the believer need to hear in preaching is the gospel, with its implications for a life lived in confident gratitude in response to amazing grace. Christians are constantly tempted to relapse into legalistic attitudes in their pursuit of sanctification, so we never outgrow our need to hear the good news of God’s free and sovereign grace in Christ. . . .

    [Read more…] about Three Central Emphases of Tim Keller’s Preaching