The Gospel Coalition

Tim Keller’s book The Reason For God will be out in February. Tim was kind enough to send me a copy about three weeks ago and it’s excellent. My hope and prayer is that God will use this book to give Tim a public platform with the secular media. He is an able and winsome defender of the Christian faith.

Anyway, he just sent me some of the blurbs (endorsements):

“Tim Keller’s ministry in New York City is leading a generation of seekers and skeptics toward belief in God. I thank God for him.”                                                                                                                                                               -Billy Graham

“Keller mines material from literary classics, philosophy, anthropology and a multitude of other disciplines to make an intellectually compelling case for God. Written for skeptics and the believers who love them, the book draws on the author’s encounters as founding pastor of New York’s booming Redeemer Presbyterian Church…[The Reason for God] should serve both as testimony to the author’s encyclopedic learning and as a compelling overview of the current debate on faith for those who doubt and for those who want to reevaluate what they believe, and why.”
-Publishers Weekly

“Fifty years from now, if evangelical Christians are widely known for their love of cities, their commitment to mercy and justice, and their love of their neighbors, Tim Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians.”
-Christianity Today Magazine

“Unlike most suburban megachurches, much of Redeemer is remarkably traditional.  What is not traditional is Dr. Keller’s skill in speaking the language of his urbane audience…Observing Dr. Keller’s professorial pose on stage, it is easy to understand his appeal.”
-The New York Times

“With intellectual, brimstone-free sermons that manage to cite Woody Allen alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Keller draws some 5,000 young followers every Sunday.  Church leaders see him as a model of how to evangelize urban centers across the country, and Keller has helped ‘plant’ 50 gospel-based Christian churches around New York plus another 50 from San Francisco to London.”
-New York Magazine

Read all about it here.

“The Church’s manner of speaking the truth must not be alligned to the techniques of modern propaganda but must have the modesty, the sobriety, and the realism which are proper to a disciple of Jesus.” Lesslie Newbigin

Parenting is no easy task. I have three kids: Gabe (12), Nate (10), and Genna (6). Like every other parent, I want what’s best for my children. I want them to grow up loving God more than they love anything else. I want them to grow up hungering for God, thirsting for God, longing for God, more than they hunger and thirst and long for anyone else. Is there a way that parents can guarentee this for their children? I’m afraid not. But, at the same time, God has provided us with helps and guidelines which can show us how to point our children in the right direction. 

This article by Vern Poythress is a great help. It is filled with practical wisdom and insight. I hope it serves you well.

I’ve had this interview with Os Guinness in my favorites since my seminary days. Reading through it again tonight made me realize once again why I’ve kept it there.

Here is one of my modern-day hero’s, John Piper, up to his ‘ole greatness again.

Here’s a great article by David Powlison on our culture’s fascination with, and pursuit of, physical beauty.

“Affliction is the school in which great virtues are acquired, in which great characters are formed.” Hannah More

O Lord, help me to believe this today!

Historian, Martin E. Marty, offers this interesting counsel regarding how Christians ought to think about, and respond to, the rise of this “new atheism:”

Keep cool. America has seen cycles like these before and has managed to survive.

Send cards of thanks. These authors bring up differences in an age of indifference.

Don’t sneer. Many of these authors sneer. Where does that get us? I quote William Paley: “Who can refute a sneer?”

Don’t sound triumphalist. Some say “we” have “them” outnumbered 97 to three. If true, that represents a comfort margin for believers, but what does it prove?

Converse, don’t argue. No one wins arguments—which are determined by one’s knowing the answer—about the existence or nonexistence of God, but everyone can profit from a conversation that tries to pose good questions and respond to them.

Read better books by these authors (e.g., Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene), from which you might learn something, as opposed to their sensational polemics on a subject they are not well versed in.

Try to find a positive review—sooner or later there has to be one!—by any atheist or radical humanist who is an expert in science, since most or all such reviewers have been embarrassed by these books and trash them as hurting their cause.

Agree with the authors that in the name of religion horrible things have been done and are being done, but point out that that’s not the whole story of religion. Criticism of religion from within is more searching and matters more.

Save your money and your time by not reading books by or attending debates between religious fundamentalists and scientific fundamentalists.

Show regret that religious communities have been ineffective at presenting positive rationales, thus leaving people hungry for clarification as well as gullible in the face of misrepresentations.

Hold up the mirror if you are a believer, and ask whether anything anyone in religion is saying or doing gives legitimate grounds for antireligion to voice itself and creates a market for books like these.

Mention downsides of antireligion in the social sphere. Some of these authors protest or redefine terms when the names of mass murderers are brought up, but most of these murderers are public about being nonreligious themselves and antireligious toward others.

Ask for a better use of energies. These writers envision a happy world once all religions have died or been killed off, but religions are not going to die any more than science in all its reaches will die and disappear. A better use of energy would be to call all parties to find more positive and creative ways for members of different religions to coexist with each other and with those represented or misrepresented as scientists.

Read a good book. For more profit, read a novel, a volume of poetry or a sacred scripture. And relax.

In going back through the book No God But God: Breaking With The Idols Of Our Age (Moody, 1992) edited by Os Guinness and John Seel, I rediscovered this quote:

The call to believe (as obedience to the truth) includes the call to break (being in the world but not of it) and the call to behave (being holy as God is holy).

As I say in this book that I’m currently writing, Unfashionable: How to Live Against the World for the World, Christians make a difference in the world by being different from the world. We don’t make a difference by being the same.