"What is your biggest problem with Christianity?" That's the question Dr. Timothy Keller has been asking people in New York City for the last 20 years. On the next HAVEN Today, Charles Morris is joined by the Manhattan pastor for the second part of a program called 'The Reason for God".
The Reason for God, Part 2 w/Tim Keller
There are questions and doubts that even the most ardent believers in Jesus Christ have today about God and what is the reason for him. Who is he? And why is he here? Welcome to Haven Today. I’m Charles Morris sharing the great story that’s all about Jesus and in the next few minutes we’re going to continue our conversation with Dr. Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church on the east side of Manhattan in New York City. He’s been a pastor there for over 20 years and in these next few minutes we’ll be talking about what he encounters from people who are asking questions like, “Why does God allow suffering in the world? How could a loving God send people to hell? Why isn’t Christianity more inclusive? How can one religion be right and the others wrong? Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?” If you missed our program yesterday when we started talking to Tim Keller about the reason for God, we have that posted on our website. Our homepage is haventoday.org. You might also want to check out the video we have with Tim Keller where he talks about what his new book is all about, belief in an age of skepticism. And if you’d like a copy of his book and a bonus CD with the interview programs with Dr. Keller we have those as well on our home page or by calling 1-800-654-2836. Get ready; we’re going to talk about “The Reason for God”. We open now with a song with amazing lyrics, “Immortal, Invisible” sung by Laura Story.
Song: Immortal, Invisible
Performed by: Laura Story
Tim Keller with us here on Haven Today. He is the author of the book “The Reason for God: belief in the age of skepticism” and he’s coming to us from his office in New York City and he’s the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Tim, you’ve had many conversations with doubters over the years. You were having conversations back in Philadelphia when I knew you before you ever got to New York and I got to LA. How do you approach these conversations with doubters that you come in contact with?
TK: Well, I mention this in the book too, though not as directly maybe. When I give my own little testimony I talk about these three factors. Doubts and faith have 3 factors. I call them the intellectual, the personal/emotional and the social or the communal. So some people doubt Christianity largely because they can’t find a body of Christians that they respect enough to want to be a part of or they’ve been burned by – that’s the communal – they‘ve been burned by churches. Then there’s the personal which is people who they’ve suffered or maybe there’s something about their own internal life and desires and practices that they can’t square with God or maybe they feel so rejected by their parents that they can’t see God loving them. So that’s the personal/emotional. And then you have the intellectual which has got the objections about, you know, what about all these other religions? What about the people who never heard about Jesus? I certainly want to make sure that I push all around to all three to find out a little bit more about what has caused the doubts.
CM: Tim it’s been a long time since you and I spoke. The last time I think I spoke to you was just a couple of hours after the first airplane hit the first tower at the World Trade Center. And you were in New York City and you lost a lot of people, you lost more people than any other pastor of a church in those World Trade Centers. There’s this whole question of how can God be good and still allow suffering? And I know it’s affected your church deeply. How is Jesus the best answer to that question?
TK: I actually got a chance to preach at the 5th anniversary of the, at Ground Zero, the 5th anniversary of 9/11 and it was right at the church right there, right across the street from where the towers went down and it was quite an honor. I had 8 minutes. Actually I had 7 minutes I took 8 minutes, I was wrong. I was bad.
CM: that’s the preacher in you sure.
TK: Yeah I know, and you know, the place was absolutely packed with family members of people who died so it was a huge responsibility. And I’ll just tell you what I said. It’s very, very similar to what I say in the chapter of my “Reason for God” book on suffering and basically I say that unlike any other world religion Christianity says that God did not just simply sympathize with our suffering but he came down, became a human being. I said, you know what, if you’re here and you lost a son you know, in the great tragedy you have to realize that our Father in Heaven lost a son. We’re the only faith that actually says God has actually experienced evil and suffering too, the same evil and suffering that we’ve experienced, unjust terrorist attack, as it were. And I said, now what does that say? I’ll tell you, it’s important but that doesn’t answer why God allows evil and suffering to continue? We don’t know what the reason for the continuance of evil and suffering is but we do know now what it isn’t. We know it isn’t that God doesn’t love us or that he doesn’t care or that he doesn’t have a plan or that he’s just remote or indifferent. You see the cross shows me that whatever the reason is that God has allowed it to continue isn’t because he doesn’t have a plan. He must or he wouldn’t have, you know…So in a way I say the resources are there, not intellectual resources to answer the question why this happened, but the spiritual resources to move forward in hope knowing that God’s got a purpose and he loves us.
CM: How did they receive it?
TK: Well, I don’t know. I mean, listen, first of all, since the President was there and everybody else it was, I’ve never seen such security. However believe it or not, 5 or 6 family members came up to me afterwards, got through the security, came up to me, and at least the ones that came forward to me, many of whom were not believers I think, one of which said wasn’t a believer, were very moved and helped by it. That’s all, they were helped. A couple people said, “This makes me really want to believe in God again.”
Cm: My goodness. Tim Keller, who’s the author of “The Reason for God: Belief in an age of skepticism”, he’s a New York City pastor, Tim, one of the hardest subjects to talk about in today’s climate, today’s world, not just in New York City but in Dubuque, Iowa, is sin. But yet you do use that word sin. I’ve heard you use it before, many times through the years. How do you approach it in a way that makes sense to people, even in New York City?
TK: The main way – now I’m not just trying to plug my book, I’m just trying to say, if you want to hear more -
CM: No, I’ll do that too though, afterwards.
TK: If you want to hear more about it, well there’s a chapter in there on the problem of sin
CM: Yes
TK: And what I try to say, I found for most people that, you know, here you have, here you have some places in the Bible that talks about sin is breaking God’s law and that’s right. But there’s other places in the Bible that tell us why we break God’s law. I mean, you know sin is, we break God’s law. Ok but why do we break God’s law? You say, “Because we’re sinners.” OK, but why do we want to break God’s law? And I think the ultimate answer of the Bible is idolatry. The ultimate answer is, it’s in Romans 1, we don’t want to honor God. We feel like, as God, we feel like we’ll lose control. We don’t want to glorify him as God so what we do is we choose other things and we serve them and live for them and put our hopes in them. And so it might be money, it might be power it might be family, anything else. And the reason we break God’s law is because of idolatry, so idolatry is sort of a deeper, you know, definition of sin. I’ve found that if I talk to secular people and say, “Sin is breaking God’s law” like you show them not to commit adultery, they’ll say, “Well, you know what, you have your rules and I have my rules and rules are relative.”
CM: Yes, yes. We’ve all heard that.
TK: But if you go to the deeper definition, the deeper definition is, you’ve put other things in place of God and you give your life instead of serving God, to serving money, serving approval, serving power and when you do that, because you were built actually to serve God and not these other things it creates tremendous strains in the world. It’s the source of war and poverty. It’s the source of psychological breakdown, it won’t work. And you know, when I say that sin is making a good thing into an ultimate thing and taking good things and turning them into the ultimate things more than God and that brings breakdown to life they get quiet. Because they know that when you live for you know, romance or you live for power, you live for approval or success that it does create these stresses. And so they can’t argue with it, in a way. You know, they still may not believe in God but they don’t disagree with that understanding of sin and they get kind of quiet and convicted. So if I go to the deepest biblical definition of sin which is idolatry I find that people actually resonate with it but if I, I press them and start arguing about the moral law and they start to give me relativistic answers we just go around in circles and they never get anywhere. And so I like to talk about idolatry and that seems to help.
CM: Well and in your book you talk about “barriers to faith”. What is the difference between “religion” and then the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
TK: Well, that’s probably the biggest barrier to faith because religion is a system of salvation in which you give God a good record and then he saves you, takes you to Heaven.
Cm: That’s what everybody wants, right?
TK: Right but the Gospel is the opposite of that. It’s a salvation system in which God gives you a perfect record because of what Jesus Christ has done, you receive it by faith. And so, I say this in the book, the principle of religion is, “I obey, therefore God accepts me.” The principle of the Gospel is, “God accepts me through Jesus Christ, therefore I obey.” They’re totally opposite. If you believe you’re saved because of your good deeds it turns you into a self-righteous, grumpy, nervous, insecure self-righteous Pharisee. If you believe the Gospel, that is that you’re saved by sheer grace that tends to humble you, it tends to give you a new joy, it takes the pressure off you. Now if you have a whole church, and there are so many churches filled with Pharisees, filled with people who say they believe the Gospel but the way their heart works is with religion. Then the churches are very nasty places to be, the people are very condemning. They’re not very loving, they’re, there’s a lot of biting and scratching. And so many non-believers are non-believers because they see religion rather than Christianity and the Gospel in these churches and as a result they turn away. And unless you tell them the difference between religion and the Gospel they won’t even listen to what you have to say because they think all Christianity is just religion. When you say that there’s a difference then they’ll give you a second hearing.
CM: There going to perk up a little bit then.
TK: They sure will
CM: wow. Let me ask you a very basic question Tim. The cross, why did Jesus have to die?
TK: In order to forgive us, Jesus had to die. And the illustration I would use there, it’s a simple one, I think is that if somebody breaks your lamp, you know by being irresponsible, you know, and gets angry and throws the lamp on the ground and says, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, that was so wrong of me. I’ll pay for it.” Now there’s two things that can happen. One is, you can say, “Yes, thank you. That’s $50 please.” And they pay. The other thing you can say is, “I forgive you.” But guess what? If you forgive them, then what happens? You have to pay.
CM: I, yeah, I have to pay something, yes.
TK: Or, you can say, “Well, I don’t buy another lamp” in which case you’re still paying because now you’re paying for running around without a light. But the point of the matter is that when this sin is done either the perpetrator pays the debt or you absorb the debt but either way the debt has to be paid. Either you pay it or the perpetrator pays it but it doesn’t go into thin air when you forgive it doesn’t go into thin air. And this is, by the way, frankly true even if somebody hurts your reputation. You know, and you forgive them, then you absorb the loss of reputation that this person has created you know, because you don’t go around and slander the person and vilify and pay them back. And you know what? If we at our human level can’t forgive without actually paying, without costly sacrifice, without pain, then we’re just, we’re in the image of God, we are a reflection of God’s divine greatness and justice and therefore a just God cannot forgive us without absorbing the debt himself. And on the cross that’s what you have, you know, God was in Christ, you know, paying for our penalty, absorbing the debt, you know, taking on the penalty in himself. That’s why we call him the substitutionary sacrifice. Rather than making us pay for it, so that’s the shortest answer I’ve got.
CM: Wow. One other question I’ve been wanting to ask you. One of my favorite chapters in your book “The Reason for God” is about the Trinity and usually we think of the Trinity as a doctrine that’s a little hard to explain but you say you see it as very good news so why is that?
TK: I don’t know, modern secular people love it when you, because the Trinity is a community, and modern people, contemporary people are really hungry for community and when you tell them that our God actually is a community and within God there has been communication and love, you know, mutual self-giving from all eternity, that’s great. I mean, St. Augustine said that if you have a unipersonal view of God then love cannot be intrinsic to God because God would not have originally been love. God could not have loved until he created another being. So love wouldn’t have come in first, it would have come in second. But if you have a Trinitarian view of God, the biblical view of God, then you have God who was love from the beginning, as it were. And therefore love is the meaning of the whole universe, it’s intrinsic to the universe, it’s not secondary or it’s not a discard-able thing. And just to talk about that makes people feel pretty good.
CM: It does, I think it does. Tim Keller, I know we’ve got somebody listening, because we’ve got a lot of people listening and some people have been listening very intently to what you’ve had to say and they may have never heard a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ speak in the way you’ve been speaking right now. Dr. Timothy Keller, pastor in New York City, Janet sends her best to you and Kathy and thank you so much for being on the program with me.
TK: Glad to do it. Thanks so much Charles.
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This is Haven Today and you’ve been listening to a conversation with Dr. Timothy Keller in New York City, I’m Charles Morris in Los Angeles and the program is called, “The Reason for God”. As I said when we opened our program together today, if you missed the first part of our conversation with Tim Keller yesterday we have that posted at haventoday.org. I’d like you to hear it. I’d like to also suggest that you get a copy of the book that Tim Keller has written, “The Reason for God: Belief in an age of skepticism”. It’s still listed on the New York Times Bestseller list, it has been since last spring. And it’s there along with books by famous atheists that a lot of people are reading today as well. Well, we have Tim Keller and “The Reason for God” as a thank you for your gift, your financial support to this listener supported ministry. Just go online at h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org, check out the video clip we have with Tim Keller and you can also let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch on our website or when you give us a telephone call to make your gift and get your copy of “The Reason for God”. Our toll free number in North America is 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. And when you get in touch with us you could get a copy of “The God Delusion Debate” DVD with Dr. John Lennox and professor Richard Dawkins. It’s amazing, this hour and a half debate between a famous atheist and another fellow Oxford professor who just happens to believe in God and believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. A lot of people have gotten a copy of that DVD from us. We have more copies available and if you’d like we can get you one out right away when you call us at 1-800-65-HAVEN or go to haventoday.org and you’ll see it there on our homepage under the specials. If you want to send this program that you heard today or part one which was yesterday, to a friend, just go to our website and there, near the “Listen” button you’ll see a little place where you can fill in an email and tell a friend that you want them to have a copy of this important program to listen to. It’s an easy way for you to share something that someone you know needs to hear. Well, I’m Charles Morris and I want to thank you for being with me. I want to thank you for supporting us too. And I want to ask you to come back again tomorrow. We’re going to be talking about meeting God in an unexpected place in an unexpected time and we’re going to do that together as we tell the great story that’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.
