Recently, I was asked by a dear friend to comment on an article written by Larry Alex Taunton primarily about Tim Keller, the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and an influential thinker and writer in conservative evangelical circles. I am not familiar with Taunton. Nor have I kept up with Tim Keller’s communications in recent years. So, I will share my thoughts mostly on just the article linked above, as I read it, with a few detours along the way. Before I do that, I offer the following disclaimer as the first of my promised detours.
I believe that, generally speaking, conservative evangelicalism in America has academized the Christian life to a degree that has stripped it of much of its culture saturating, heart transforming power that only exists when the doctrines of Scripture are applied to an active and vibrant ministry directed toward culture. If you consider the model that Jesus employed; He clearly infused His twelve disciples with mountains of biblical teaching. Yet, He did it in the context of an active “boots on the ground” ministry that was always reaching toward the lost. Contrast that with some of our modern American conservative evangelical churches, where the high-water mark of our week is the classroom and sanctuary setting where biblical theology is disseminated and transmitted to us. Meanwhile, works of outreach and evangelism are relegated to personal projects of individual Christians and an occasional structured activity by a fraction of the congregation.
I bring that all up to make this point. I think that any time a Christian stands for culture oriented ministry that serves both the physical and spiritual needs of their community they are derogatorily labelled as social justice warriors who have lost their grip on the “true gospel”, which obviously only the elite Christians who spend all their time in the classroom can possibly understand.
I have read Tim Keller’s book “Generous Justice”, recommended to me by my good friend Ken Harer. I found it to be an insightful and fully biblical call to arms to shake Christians out of their academized lethargy and into the streets to preach the gospel while, at the same time, seeing to the needs of the marginalized in society. He sourced it straight out of Isaiah, where the Lord condemns Israel for their failure to see to the needs of the marginalized, and the ministry of Christ, where Jesus unashamedly went after the poor and disenfranchised, both physically and spiritually.
As to Taunton’s article, in the very first paragraph I got my first red flag. When he off-handedly mentions “what parades as social justice”, and immediately links social justice to the ridiculous extremism of BLM and Antifa, he deliberately contextualizes any modern attempts at social justice as being worthy of ridicule.
He goes on to quote Keller, as follows: “when it comes to taking political positions , voting, determining alliances and political involvement, the Christian has liberty of conscience. Christians cannot say to other Christians ‘no Christian can vote for…’ or ‘every Christian must vote for…’ unless you can find a biblical command to that effect." I fully agree with Keller's statement. In fact, I think that the Pauline principle of following one’s conscience has been trodden down and beat to death during this political season. The Christian “right” has come out in force to condemn and demonize any fellow believer whose conscience has directed them to do anything other than vote for President Trump. This is a textbook violation of the instructions Paul gives in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 and 10. I do support Trump and I did vote for him. I reached a position on this that I could rest on back in 2016. But it was not an easy decision, I wrestled with it for weeks, and I do not believe it is a black and white issue. Furthermore, I would never attack a fellow Christian for arriving at a different conclusion on this horrendously difficult and complex political issue we are faced with. I do think a vote for Biden and the Democrats would be tough to defend biblically. A vote for a third party or even to abstain is more understandable in my opinion. But regardless, I am not going to beat up another Christian because they, while sharing my allegiance to Christ, have chosen a political view that differs from my own.
Next, I took issue with Taunton’s dismissive effort to discredit Keller for attempting to offer complex answers to complex issues. He praises Keller for his previous simple attempts to preach the Christian message. But then castigates him for acknowledging that life is rarely black and white. This is a hollow argument. The Christian message, by which I assume Taunton means the gospel, is indeed so simple a child can understand it. However, the full range of doctrine, theology, and matters of life are anything but easy to process and understand. Scripture is full of parallel truths that require one to accept the “both…and” rather than the “either…or”. A former pastor of mine, Don Pfleger, referred to this as Scripture being in tension with itself. It is not that EITHER man is responsible to repent OR that God is sovereign in election. The Bible rather teaches that BOTH man is responsible to repent AND God is sovereign in election. I think this is exactly what Keller was getting at in the quote Taunton uses in the section entitled “Keller’s Biblical Methodology.”
At this point in my reading I am already forming an opinion of Taunton as a card-carrying member of the Christian “right” that I referred to earlier. For people of this mindset, to disagree with them is to be in error. There is only one correct response to every situation in life, regardless of how complex it is. Furthermore, to choose a different solution to a problem than they would is tantamount to turning traitor and going over to the other side.
A little further on, Taunton contradicts his own attack on Keller. Previously, as I mentioned, Taunton accused Keller of unnecessarily complicating things to further his own presumably leftist agenda. But then a few paragraphs later he says Keller goes too far “in treating the rich and poor as absolute categories: powerful vs. powerless, oppressors vs. oppressed, guilty vs. innocent.” Which is it Mr. Taunton? Do you want Keller to be complicated on some issues while remaining simple on others?
I do not know enough about Keller’s overall position on socialism to be able to speak at length about it. Interestingly enough, this is one area where Taunton uses few or no quotes of Keller’s. He simply mentions that Keller said that socialism was "benign" in an op-ed for the New York Times. Having nothing else to go on, I read Keller’s NYT article that Taunton did at least link. In the first place, nowhere in the linked article does Keller actually make that claim. I assume what Taunton is referring to is an anecdote Keller shares about a man he knew who visited Scotland and became great friends with some Christians who lived there. One day this man discovered, to his alarm, that his new friends were basically socialists in their thinking on government and the economy. The man went home “humbled and chastened” because his Christian socialist leaning friends were not the bogeymen he had assumed any socialist must automatically be. You could certainly take Keller’s point here to be that socialism is not the ugly hydra most western capitalists believe it to be. But to reduce Keller’s whole point down to an uncontextualized “it’s benign” is disingenuous at best. If there is more evidence to support Keller’s support of socialism Taunton should have provided it. But regardless, even if Keller is a card carrying socialist, he is still my brother in Christ who is worthy of respect and consideration.
Further, in the NYT article Keller says “increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.” This sounds like exactly what Mr. Taunton is doing to Keller. Because, apparently, Keller does not agree with Taunton on the issue of socialism, Keller must therefore be considered dangerous and worthy of ridicule. This is exactly why, in the article, Keller argues against Christians identifying with any political party. It breeds this sort of zealous defense of the party line rather than faithful adherence to Scripture. There is an undercurrent of a refusal to see issues through another person’s eyes that is running rampant through Mr. Taunton’s writing.
This is precisely the kind of narrow-minded tunnel vision that John Piper was warning about in the article he has been vilified for (and not coincidentally Taunton attacks him for too later on) where he says that the pride and hubris of a leader will spread to those he leads in time. Taunton’s reductionist black and white position on the complicated issues he is attacking Keller for smack of the condescending, aggressive, and narcissistic personality and behavior of Donald Trump. Again, I voted for the man. But I find his personal behavior reprehensible and I increasingly see it filtering throughout American culture and society; particularly in the last four years.
In conclusion, I call attention to a statement Taunton makes early on in his essay. He says that “many do see it—and rightly, I think—as a means of preserving the lives of the unborn; their way of life; and their personal, economic, and religious freedom and that of their posterity.” The “it” Taunton is referring to is, essentially, allegiance to the Republican party and a vote for Donald Trump as president. This statement reveals clearly what Taunton’s agenda is. He does state that Keller is correct that we should not hold allegiance to either political party. But then he turns right around with the quoted line and unmasks his real intent. It is not to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the farthest reaches of the world, while looking to the next life in the eternal state rather than the current life in this temporal existence. Rather, it is to protect and promulgate the personal, economic, and religious freedom that American Christians have uniquely (and frankly bizarrely from a historical standpoint) enjoyed for the past couple of centuries.
Taunton and those like him preach their gospel of Christianity under the auspices of its American incarnation primarily through fear mongering and personal attacks against those who disagree with them (such as this entire article). The final paragraph that Taunton writes is a case in point: “The forces of darkness threaten to engulf this land as they have engulfed so many before it. They cannot be allowed to succeed. But if good men and women do nothing, how can we expect a different result? Let us exercise our freedom to choose our leaders judiciously as we pray for our nation.”
I agree fully with his last sentence. And undoubtedly, he is correct that Satan is behind the unrelenting assaults on biblical truth and Christian religious convictions. But the way to war against our enemy is not through belittling those who hold different opinions, trampling on the consciences of fellow heirs of Christ, demanding allegiance to the Republican party of the United States, or sewing seeds of fear and paranoia among the faithful. The biblical strategy, that Jesus employed, is to engage culture on a person to person level, fully aware of one’s inability to see the big picture while down in the trenches with the marginalized, but also fully confident in God’s ability to take care of the grander scale far better than we ever could.
