Keller’s Formation: Richard Lints on Theological Vision

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Collin Hansen
The Gospel coalition’s foundation documents include a theological vision for ministry, originally drafted by Tim Keller. I’d never heard of theological vision before I read this statement in 2007. Soon I learned that the concept originated with Richard lens in his book The fabric of theology. theological vision is the space between your doctrinal beliefs and your ministry programs. theological vision helps you adapt your ministry to changing conditions, while keeping centered on the unchanging gospel. Well, Richard Lin’s has published a new book, uncommon unity wisdom for the church in an age of division, which includes a foreword from Keller and this book lens exposes problems with the inclusion narrative of democracy, and offers a better way forward to find unity amid unprecedented cultural diversity. In our day, he writes this, the main thing I want to do in this book is to view the Gospel story as the interpretive lens through which we understand the telos of creation, as a rich, deep and complex unity, indifference. In this special season of gospel bound, we’re exploring in depth several key influences that appear in my book, Timothy Keller, his spiritual and intellectual formation, lens is himself one of those influences.

He is senior consulting theologian at Redeemer city to city in New York City. Previously, he served as Andrew much Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and South Hamilton, Massachusetts, Alma mater of Tim and Kathy Keller. So I’m grateful for this chance on gospel bound to talk with him about unity, diversity, theological vision, and much more. Rick, thanks for joining me on gospel bound.

Richard Lints
It’s good to be with you, Colin. Yeah. Looking forward to the conversation.

Collin Hansen
Let’s just start with the basic question, how did you develop your concept of theological vision?

Richard Lints
I started the the investigation thinking out how you get from reading the Bible well, to applying it. And it struck me that much of the Evan Jellicle community talks about application in largely arbitrary fashion, you had much about how to read the Bible, for less how to get from the Bible, to the context in which you were doing ministry. So trying to build a bridge, it was engaged with lots of wider conversations about method in theology, but at the end of the day, it was trying to build a bridge between what it meant to read the Bible well, and apply it the Bible. Well, against the backdrop, then, of this language, one of these big themes across the scriptures of having eyes but not seeing and the language of vision came to the fore, it may well have been in the background, the vision language that was current in the political discourse at that time in the bush Clinton campaign. But I’m not sure that factored significantly in the US. But but But it seemed to give to me a category to think about the bridge between these two contexts that, that the gospel that narrates for us is narrated for us in the scripture, and then how it interprets our context. And it strikes me that one of them, callings of every missionary is to understand their own culture and the culture into which they go. And we’ll get further into this along the way. But to learn the language of Scripture, and the language of your cultural contexts, is at the heart of what a theological vision does. There’s no magic to it. There’s not it’s not a mechanical process is living in that world of redemptive history of the story of the Bible. And reckoning with how it’s both overlaps and challenges, the world you live in. And I think that language of sight is so significant across the scriptures. It just popped out, if you will, and I ran with it.

Collin Hansen
Tell us just a little bit more about how you develop this concept of theological vision. I’m also detecting some maybe some influences and newbiggin. There because he talked about missionaries and contextualization. But that’s not typically how American evangelicals have seen their own context. That’s for going overseas. So was that an influence? And then just how do you how do you develop clip this, how do you? How do you begin to see rightly, what’s that process look like?

Richard Lints
Yeah, Newman became an influence after I kind of landed into this language of theological vision. And he reinforced so much of what I was after gave me some new language to speak about it for sure of what it meant to be a missionary, in your own context, rather than thinking about the missional, calling at a foreign land, in a different language. So thinking out loud, then about the challenge every pastor faces, and I was a seminary professor, at the time thinking about how do you prepare pastors? But there’s no doubt every pastor, every church leader grapples with how the Gospel speaks into their context. How do you give it legs? How, how do you shape the ministry, the programs of the church, and this language of theological vision then gave me categories to think about the that particular challenge. And it then leads into lots of other very interesting issues, for sure. So to a particular, just concrete examples, in the book, I tease out at some considerable length, the way in which late modern democracy influences how we speak about diversity is part of the air that we breathe, it’s part of the influences part of the tradition into which we have come. And so I argue in the book that it is, it includes an inclusion narrative, and an exclusion narrative. That is, it includes far more than ever been included to give them the right to vote, but it also excluded by virtue of majority rule, those who were not allowed to vote. Now, I think there’s an enormous overlap with those concepts with the inclusion narrative of the gospel, and its exclusion narrative. So understanding how you move from one to the other, and then back again, seems to be very interesting. One last concrete example. A theological vision holds on to the centrality and the permanence of this great story of the gospel, while recognizing that it’s always moving into changing context. This is thoughts, John socks language of preaching in two worlds and the light. So what, what one does in a small New England village, enacting a ministry, that is to be contextually important, significant, it looks very different than what Tim is doing in Manhattan with Redeemer and then with city to city. But it’s striking, they both are speaking out of a theological vision and not simply a doctrinal set of convictions. That is they both are trying to interpret their context. In light of the gospel. They happen to be very different contexts, though. So it looks quite different in those two settings.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I mean, I find the concept so helpful, because you often wonder why two ministries seem so incompatible despite their doctrinal agreement, or perhaps why different churches may end up doing the same things in terms of program despite having wildly different theology? And theological vision explains a lot of that, because we’re never doing theology out of context. Right? Whenever we’re doing it in isolation, I want to turn to more of your book, uncommon unity. And there’s a lot that stood out, we’ll cover a fair bit of it. But this line, I think, requires a little bit of explanation. You right, Christians of all stripes should recognize that a prophetic presence in politics, rather than a new political order, more nearly captures the missionary task of Christians in their own culture. Just going to ask you to defend that view there. I mean, I do think this is a question that comes up fairly often because I just had a friend yesterday, tell me, Well, what would the early Christians do? Well, I guess they couldn’t really speak to these issues. Because how do you situate this in that original context? And how do we treat the the Biblical words as timeless as inspired by God, even though they were written to a specific people in a specific place under certain political conditions that are so different from ours?

Richard Lints
And one can update that example thinking about The remarkable growth of Christianity in a place like China, where there’s no chance at all that Christians, no matter whether it’s 50 million or 100 million, are going to exercise political power for a long time to come. So what is their role, and it strikes me curious that the connection between the early church, the Chinese church and our setting, in late modern democracy in America, that is to say, we’re, I think we’re trying to live out that sense in which the gospel is both a powerful presence in all those different contexts, without being embraced by any of those political orders. What gives its power is not its protection by established political authority, but in, in essence, still a must retain a prophetic voice to speak into and oftentimes against the reigning political order of the day, it does it in a host of different ways might might put it that speaking truth to power is different than using power to defend the truth. And I think that’s true in every age, many have made this case that the church flourishes and most across the centuries across the millennia, when it’s not established. And it strikes me, we’re seeing that again, and again, in our own times, and it strikes me that was the message of the early church as well. So I think we lose, the church loses its vitality, when it’s after political authority or political power.

Collin Hansen
In the last 10 years, Rick, I would say that one of the clearest differentiating points I’ve seen on politics, is whether somebody says, We have to get our political protections, or else the church will be destroyed, versus somebody who says, The church is going to continue to be okay, so long as it preserves its witness, regardless of the political situation. It’s Do you sense that same thing? That’s, that’s a major divide that I see underlies almost most of the divisions I see among evangelicals,

Richard Lints
right? No, I think that’s exactly right. The seeds of it were planted, I think, in the West in the American context anyway, in the 90s it with the culture wars, taking over culture in the last decade, I think you’re exactly right, that has meant taking over some sort of political authority to protect the church. And I think history teaches us but also the gospel teaches us that strategy is bound to fail. And so the, again and again, when, when the quarters of power, are the vehicles for the protection of our deepest convictions, they lose a vitality.

Collin Hansen
Well, can you? Can you think Rick of a more protected a church more protected by the government today in the world and the Russian Orthodox Church? And yeah, and yet, look, they’ve been willing to compromise.

Richard Lints
Everything Exactly. And, and tragically,

Collin Hansen
tragically, to the, to the cost of their own souls, not to mention the death of countless others. And that’s not an isolated incident in history. That is, as a constant refrain. Now, I do wonder, though, I don’t want this to imply that the political order doesn’t matter. If only as a matter of common grace, it matters. And you say something a little bit later, as well quote you again, later, modern democracy lacks a common moral tradition that would give it the convictions to keep these sorts of behaviors restrained, and quote, and the behaviors are referring to here our greed and power, essentially just saying our current political system does not allow us to restrain greed and power. So I’m just wondering, how exactly can we get back to a moral order that would be able to restrain greed and power without introducing some sort of new political order to be able to incentivize those things? Explain how that would be possible?

Richard Lints
It’s a challenging question. There’s lots of layers to it. So I’m, I’ll speak from a couple of angles, recognizing that I’m not a political scientist. And so I speak more as a from the vantage point of attachment than a politician. So being careful here to suppose that politics is not a moral or neutral on moral questions. I think that was Rawls his mistake that there could be a secular political order that was neutral on all these big ticket items. But then the question becomes, well, what’s left? Is it every man for every man? Is it every woman for every woman? Is it? Is it just chaos? Well, there surely are those trajectories in the present moment, that would suggest we are entering more and more chaos, because there is no consensus about a common good. Now, a common good doesn’t mean an all encompassing religious worldview. That won’t happen. But I do think that even the discussion of what we have in common, and what our aspirations might lead us to think, would be satisfying. That’s a dangerous question in late modern democracy, because of the suggestion that it oppresses individuals against their own understanding of the good. I think that we have to not simply resist that, but persuade folks that there is something missing in their flourishing if they don’t seek the well being of others, more important than their own good. There is, I think, the moral order that I’m talking about, and we could talk about it as the common grace of the gospel, that that created nests of our humanity at all the like. So there are some things which the law ought to prohibit. But not necessarily all immoralities are going to be prohibited and greed among them, I think, once we start legislating against greed, that gets us in trouble. But now, back to the thickness, the complexity of the question, where’s the boundary between what we can enact by law and what we cannot? And therein lies the question of wisdom. We just have to be wise about the context in which we live. And its its fundamental values. So in the first three centuries of the church, how that was lived out was spoken against the Roman context of deep hierarchies, and oppressions that house lived down in China is different than how it’s going to be lived out in the Democratic West, recognizing the core values, the cultural values that are in our context is important as we kind of seek into raise that raise the answer to that question.

Collin Hansen
Let’s continue on that on that same theme here. You mentioned John rolls, pretty prominent figure in your book, which is only makes sense given his tremendous influence whether or not people have ever heard of him. A lot of my questions while reading your book, return to whether or not this political order, which we could describe technically, as classical liberalism is viable. And you criticize you just criticize Rawls there. But you say this, putting it’s similar to what you’ve already articulated. Putting religious convictions on the sidelines in the hope of avoiding religious conflict simply sets up other ideological conflicts arising from diverse secular claims to justice. I think the simple way to put it is that if you don’t borrow your definition, from a religious tradition, you’ll be making it up. And who’s to say that your definition is going to hold? Except if you enforce it by power? Ie then you are tempted toward injustice? I’m wondering, Rick, how can Christianity affirm the good of classical liberalism, while helping to mitigate against the worst? And ultimately, its demise, which I would say is the tendency of classic liberalism, to divorce itself from its Christian origins, and to become basically every man, woman and child for themselves?

Richard Lints
Right? It leads to a kind of bare individualism, that is a dangerous for every individual, we do need each other. And the ties that bind us together, are part of the fabric of the created order, and so recommend with that sense in which we have to affirm as classic liberalism does, the universal dignity of every person that’s absolutely central. But what’s often missing in modern secular notions of liberalism is that the intrinsic dysfunctions that are also part and parcel of human nature in the world we live in. So it is important to recognize the sad history, that is part of our own story with regards to the emergence of democracy of classical liberalism. At one in the same time, we could affirmed that universal dignity of everyone by virtue of being created, and at the same time, engaged in the political compromise over slavery, where we excluded large parts of humanity up from that affirmation of dignity. How do you account for that I think secular liberalism doesn’t have the resources to account for both the dignity and the dysfunctions of human nature. And they’re in it seems to me is the door that opens up for us as Christians, in speaking into this present cultural moment of ours.

Collin Hansen
I think one of the things I write about in the in the, in the book about Tim, is people might be surprised by how much of an interest he has in the same topics that you cover in uncommon unity, mainly because he hasn’t written a book on it. And it’s not the kind of thing that you’d preach about often. But one of the things he comes back to consistently, in at least the last decade plus is the idea of the central problem of the Enlightenment that it demands universal justice. But without universal morality. And you simply can’t have both. If you’re going to have justice, you have to have a moral grounding. And right now we are left the cultural crisis we’re in is we’re left dangling between the two of them, a longing not only because we’re made in the image of God, but because we didn’t reared in a Christian informed culture for a universal justice, but a resistance because of our sinful nature and because of our expressive, individualistic culture, to resist any outside influences and authorities on our lives.

Richard Lints
Right, so we need to be careful of a nostalgia that supposes once upon a time always well. But we also can’t avoid saying about the present moment, there are some good things among our secular neighbors and friends, the protection of for example of the freedom of conscience, the freedom of community, freedom of speech, those are all products of classic liberalism. And I sure think that’s a better way to go than alternative realities. So Ben Franklin’s wonderful phrase, democracy is the worst of all forms of governance except all the rest. That is to say, it has a great danger, hardwired into it, without some sort of moral interpretation of it. On the other hand, the alternatives, not strike me as not too attractive in the present day as well.

Collin Hansen
Now, part of the paradox we’re dealing with here you observe in relation to politics among Christians, that we both believe, politics can corrupt. You hear endless references, especially among Christians, to the negatives of politics, but we also believe seemingly at the same time, that politics is the key to cultural influence and change. I’m just wondering, Rick, how are we supposed to reconcile these twin truths.

Richard Lints
And it’s a, it’s a great event, and there are 1000 sermons to come on this one. I think the Easy, easy kind of children’s story, the Bible account of it is to say that we take seriously other people’s corruptions, less so our own corruptions. And the challenge here is to see not only in us what God has done, that is good, but also the goodness of the created order. And we probably need to emphasize more what is present in our own dysfunctions, and less so in the dysfunctions of those around us. So it’d be another way to put it to be self critical, and also critical of the world we live in without giving up hope. We all know it’s easier to be critical of somebody else than ourselves.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, well, we, we published an article about one of the great abolitionist heroes, Granville Sharpe, who was also an amazing student and teacher of New Testament Greek and And many may be familiar more academically inclined about Granville sharp Granville sharp rule about technical Greek, but one of our writers Steve Bateman suggested through his through Grandville, sharps abolitionism another move another rule, which is this one asking God for protection from the injustice that comes to you, repent of all the injustice that comes from you. Yeah. And that’s exactly a summary of what you just said, right there. EBS be as concerned about the corruptions that you manifest and enable and incentivize as the ones that you decry in your opponents. A couple more questions here with Rick lens, we’re talking about his book on common unity, wisdom for the church in an age of division. You write this, Rick, he said, quote, The church is not constituted as a political entity, or an economic organization and will lose its prophetic role in the culture, if it too readily equates its voice with a specialist understanding of politics, or economics, or art. I’m all I’m all for that. I wonder what’s the happy medium between engaging these topics as part of our theological vision, without prescribing views that go beyond biblical warrant?

Richard Lints
This is a theme that’s been running through the conversation and rightly so. Where’s the happy medium? And there is great mystery in the world God is created, and we ought not be ashamed of it. We recognize that God is three in one that the deepest parts of reality, is this unity in diversity. So just as backdrop, I’d like the question because that’s exactly what ought to run through all of our cultural conversations. It’s not simply deciding I’m a little bit left a little bit right. So I must be in the middle. That’s a dreadful understanding, is God three? Or is God one? Well, maybe he’s two. That is we find that middle No. We fully embrace God’s three nests and his oneness at the same time. That’s just a methodological point to the question itself. The challenge is to see the church as fundamentally a movement, a gospel movement, it to reflect the grace and the generosity of the gospel in Word indeed. Now, there are lots of individuals in that community, however, that have specialist understanding of vocations, whether it’s in art or politics, education, mechanics, whatever it might be. And they ought to be encouraged to speak into those specialized disciplines specialized vocations, with the grace and generosity of the gospel. So the whole history of the faith and work movement is in view, in my mind behind this question, and we’ve come up pretty late to the to the issue, to be honest as evangelicalism how, how does God relate to what goes on on Monday morning, and that simply Sunday morning, there is a great challenge for pastors to step out of their own sense of calling. And maybe just a concrete example, if every example you use in a sermon comes from your vocation as a pastor, right? It’s going to fly over the head of the vast members facet, number of members in the congregation. So we ought to be able to speak wisely into the vocations that are represented in the church without supposing the church itself as become a specialist organization.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, that makes sense. And Alaska question here, Rick about the book. That’s just just a fun little question you asked toward the end, which was, you describe that when we bump into wisdom, our hearts are strangely warmed. And you encourage us to ask who are the wisest persons I know. I love that perspective, it really brings things to a point. But ask you, who was the wisest person, you know?

Richard Lints
A quick comment on wisdom. And then let me talk about the wisest person. I know that every time I think about this, as I go to one person in mind, in particular, wisdom, captures the tensions that we’ve been talking about the mysteries that are hardwired into creation because of the depth of richness, the complexity of our Creator. And so wisdom knows when to speak to a fool and when not to speak to a fool proverbs 26. It recognizes the difference of circumstances. So it’s very different wisdom is than information, or what we might call knowledge as well, and it’s in it is in short supply because you can’t teach it. It often comes through the experience of suffering. Now Not always, but often, and it often attaches to age as well. What you live through you learn from so the lies is person and I could go on write a whole book I should 80 year old farmer from a small Midwestern town in Missouri. He did not like to talk about himself. He was also the local bank president, he had a tanning factory, he was a farmer. And both of his sons had died early from cancer. He was about to lose his daughter to cancer as well. He outlived all three children in enormous amounts of suffering in his life and tears, his wife long time in, in hospital with a variety of ailments, He never complained, I never heard him complain once in my life, he took in immigrants during World War Two of Chinese origin that was not exactly the popular thing to do. He built a built a whole addition to his house. He was my my wife’s grandfather, the only Christian on that side of the family that I knew. And he was just always generous, and, and gracious, and, as we said, rarely talked about himself, but always thought about others. So all these vocations he had, when he talked about them, was not about his role, but about how others in the town flourished because they had employment during difficult days. And so there was just something, you bump into them and you don’t forget them. i Yeah. One little side note here, my grandson, just born two months ago, my third grandson was named Porter. That was, that was his name, his great, great grandfather’s name. And so you, you realize wisdom has a legacy. Now, that’s not the only wise person I’ve ever met. But it just it strikes us mostly when we bump into you just know it. And there’s something written, as I’ve said, heartwarming about it.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. And I want to end on a great note and, and as well, this quote, and what we’re doing with along with this book on Tim Keller in this series with gospel bound, is we’re also launching and introducing to the world the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. And you did a great job of explaining, with a quote in the book exactly what we’re trying to do through this center. And it’s this quote, Christians must learn to stand in the grand tradition of Augustine by resolutely resisting the criticism that religious conviction is the source of our present cultural problems, while also affirming the possibility that religion can contribute to those problems, when it is used as a political hammer to keep unbelievers outside the corridors of cultural power. It’s the same themes we’ve been talking about here. That, that we don’t we defend the faith, against unjust criticism, deploy the faith, to pursue justice and our age, but also deploy that same faith to examine the places where we need to repent, ourselves. All of them must, must take place together for a faithful public witness. The book here is uncommon unity wisdom for the church in an age of division, the author and my guest on gospel bound this week. Richard Lentz, Rick, thanks for the time.

Richard Lints
Thanks for having me, Colin. Wish you the best