Tim Keller on Personal Prayer

Thursday 02 October 2008 at 8:17 pm This is an outline of the 4th of his talks he gave to his leadership group. In it he works through Eugene Peterson's ideas about Evening and Morning prayer and gives a simply outline on nuts and bolts of doing a simple, personal prayer time. PDF copy. more...

Why Sarah Can't Talk

Wednesday 01 October 2008 at 2:04 pm About two years ago I started listening to Tim Keller. What I found in him was a way to articulate Reformed theology in a contemporary, credible, engaging way. I’ve spent many, many hours listening to his sermons, his lectures, his Q/A sessions. When I first started this process I figured I’d be able to channel him quickly and easily. My background was in Reformed theology, I knew my Bible, I knew the kinds of people he was engaging, I’m an articulate guy, I figured it would be a snap. I was wrong. One of the things I have learned over the last two years is that language is difficult especially when you are engaging complex and difficult realities. You can’t simply memorize key phrases or positions or illustrations and spout them out in a compelling and engaging way and give people confidence that you have a handle on these things. What you have to do is immerse yourself in this body of knowledge, in the new perspectives, working them through yourself in your mind, retracing the steps your mentor has taken, re-inventing the wheel. Within this process of assimilation what you begin to do is selectively adopt what your mentor has given you, add to it some of what you have learned, and what emerges is a new, more helpful, fully owned perspective. This perspective then can be grown, cultivated, and added on to.

Why can’t Sarah talk? Because she simply hasn’t had time to assimilate this world. There is a body of knowledge, there is a community of language, there is a skill and a repertoire out there in this world of national politics that we have all grown accustomed to hearing. We have, from our different perspectives, developed reactions to certain elements with this language world, and we know what we like and what we do, what we believe in and what we do not, what we trust and what we don’t. This isn’t to say Palin isn’t smart. This isn’t to say Palin is dumb. What this says is that she simply hasn’t had the chance to really operate in this field at this level.

Some may say “So what? She’ll learn, give her a chance. Does it really matter that much?”  We wouldn’t say the same thing of an airline pilot. This kind of speaking is an essential part of the job. Part of the job is of course decision making, but another part is communicating trust, confidence, competence to the country that you at least know what you are doing.

Through the financial debacle we are all getting a lesson in the value of trust. Trust matters in terms of leadership. Can you project competence even if you really aren’t sure what to do? Can you engender trust even if you are wrong? These are important skills. America’s great presidents could lead people to trust them, even when they were wrong. Of course we want them to be right, but it is a key skill.

Immediately people will turn and say “Obama lacks experience” and this is correct. Others knock Obama for basically campaigning for this position for the last 4 years. OK, but what he’s managed to do in these last 4 years is learn this skill. He’s clearly got significant gifts, but he now through the primary ordeal has emerged with a mature skill set of sitting down, doing interviews, debating, articulating policy and perspective.

Part of consequence of elevating Palin the way McCain did was (and her agreeing to go along with it) was to place her in this situation. Now it’s time for her to pay the piper. Her performance hasn’t been stellar. The McCain campaign has two bad options from its perspective: send her out there to do the hard work of learning this skill in prime time and possibly doing damage to the campaign effort, keep her sequestered, studying privately and see if she can learn this without doing the damage. The problem is the clock is ticking and her absence is greatly noticed which is also a negative.

Mortgage mess

Wednesday 01 October 2008 at 1:45 pm

1. Years of low interest rates certainly set the stage for a housing bubble. We all know that the equation for buying a house is VERY dependent upon the interest rate. You can buy much more house at 6% than you can at 8%, thus you leave room in a two income budget to have housing prices rise. Just check the math sometimes. If you have 20k a year to spend the house price at 6% is far higher than it is at 8%. This got the housing market rolling upwards.

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Secular grounding for morality

Wednesday 01 October 2008 at 12:03 am I’m doing Tim Keller’s book The Reason for God with my Men’s Group and this week we read and discuss the chapter on the Knowledge of God. This chapter poses the huge question for secularists that usually goes unanswered. To what do you base your notion of human rights? The chapter is compelling. Animals assume no concept of animal rights. The lion eats the lamb because that is the natural order of things. The strong take the weak for their own advantage. We humans object to such a thing, in fact we assert that the animals have rights. Where does this notion come from? I have yet to encounter a person without a sense of morality, one that consistently refuses to describe something as right and another thing as wrong. Keller is right that for all the talk of moral relativism I don’t find it. I find competing systems of morality but never any pure amoralism.

Upon what is a religion-less morality based? Keller’s chapter works through the issues far better than I can (or need to since he wrote it down). What I do find, however, is a deep seated assumption of the cult of progress. Deep within our culture people seem to make a very subtle jump from biological evolution to moral evolution. This of course is explicitly found in those that attempt to explain the universality of moral assumption in humanity on the basis of biological evolution, but Keller talks about that quite aptly as well. People seem to think that there is a linear progression from single celled organisms to protection of women’s rights or abhorrence of genocide. This then becomes the basis for trumping other common notions of moral relativism (right for me but not for you...) when it comes to certain cherished issues. Other nations simply HAVE TO adopt our notions of animal rights, women’s rights, individual freedoms BECAUSE that is the path of development. If we are asked, “can you demonstrate that it is” we can’t, but people would probably appeal to a sense of political, economic, military and cultural hegemony, but be embarrassed to do so. “Can’t you see that our political, economic, and military systems are far more advanced than yours THEREFORE or cultural system of morality is more advanced than yours...” The irony of course is that this same assumption based on power has been used by all cultures. Rome assumed human culture reached its peak in them because they ruled the world. Same for the Islamic empires, and the British empire, and now it’s our turn. It is empire think. The irony with the American empire is that we’re a strange one that is embarrassed (at least the Democrats are) to make the claim purely based on power and performance.

a gospel approach to anti-racism, anti-poverty

Tuesday 16 September 2008 at 11:32 pm

In mulling over both David’s e-mail and our discussion today I thought it helpful to think back to more foundational things in approaching the issue of diversity and justice, or anti-racism and anti-poverty.

Part of why I think it is important to go back to the roots of these things in the gospel is because these are also currently cultural values that have been largely embraced in our society. I think that is in general a good thing, but I think we need to take some care with these values in society because I think their rooted motivational structures tend to run in different ways, usually in service of other agendas with the tools of common virtue rather than true virtue.

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Praying for Glory

Thursday 04 September 2008 at 9:27 pm This is a rough outline of the third recording that was posted freely on the web of an MCM meeting at Redeemer on prayer. Here is a PDF version. more...

Keller quotes Iris Murdoch

Tuesday 26 August 2008 at 11:37 pm In the opening sermon on Worship on the call to worship Keller has a great quote from a philosopher named Iris Murdoch. He uses two quotes from her that are both found on this page. Good stuff.

history of the mainline

Monday 25 August 2008 at 8:25 pm A really meaty article on the history of mainline protestantism in the USA.

Luke 9

Friday 22 August 2008 at 6:02 pm Luke 9 begins with Jesus calling the 12 together and giving them power and authority over demons and to cure diseases. I think I have tended to understanding this in a rather Pentecostal way. In fact, it is a very creation, restorative way. Central here is Jesus restoring the cultural mandate giving in the image of God in humanity's rulership over the creation.

NT Wright on our part in God's plan to save the universe

Monday 18 August 2008 at 10:48 pm But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God's purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context—not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being "fellow workers with God") within that larger picture and purpose. And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question. The question ought to be, How will God's new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world? The choice before humans would then be framed differently: are you going to worship the creator God and discover thereby what it means, to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world itself?
This reflection leads to a further, and sobering, thought. If what I have suggested is anywhere near the mark, then to insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question—to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world—may be to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the first century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescue Israel? What the gospel of Jesus revealed, however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all. If we could reread Romans and Revelation—and the rest of the New Testament, of course—in the light of this refram-ing of the question, I think we would find much food for thought.
pg. 184