A
Reply to Timothy J. Keller
March
10, 2023
My wife just bought me a copy of Eric Metaxas’ book Bonhoeffer:
Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.[1]
The book includes a very brief forward by Timothy J. Keller.[2]
Keller is a best-selling author and was the founding pastor of Redeemer
Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. He is Chairman and Co-Founder of Redeemer City
to City, an organization that works on new church starts. His forward to Metaxa’s
book is less than two pages long. In it Keller makes some theological points
with which I strongly disagree. I want here to set out what Keller says and to
explain why I so disagree with the theology he presents.
Keller first asks how it was possible for the German church
to capitulate to Hitler, as most German churches did in the 1930s. His answer
to that question is “that the true gospel, summed up by Bonhoeffer as costly
grace, had been lost.” This loss led to two developments Keller considers
to have been negative. One is what he calls “formalism.” He says that this
formalism “meant going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives
everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live.” He calls this
formalism cheap grace. The other bad consequence is what Keller calls “legalism,”
which he defines as “salvation by law and good works.” It meant “that God loves
you because you have pulled yourself together and are trying to live a good, disciplined
life.”
Keller then develops these thoughts this way:
Both of these impulses made it possible
for Hitler to come to power. The formalists in Germany may have seen things
that bothered them, but saw no need to sacrifice their safety to stand up to
them. Legalists responded by having pharisaical attitudes toward other nations
and races that approved of Hitler’s policies. But as one, Germany lost hold of
the brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded—‘We
are saved by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone.’ That is, we are saved,
not by anything we do but by grace. Yet if we have truly understood and
believed the gospel, it will change what we do and how we live.”[3]
Keller is able to give only the briefest statement of his theology
in this Foreword of course. Since I don’t know his work except for this very
short piece, I can only assume certain things about his theology that what he
says in the Foreword suggests. He seems to accept the classical theory of
atonement. He says: “But we know that true grace comes to us by costly
sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and
absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others.”
Cheap grace is his bête noir. He writes: “Anyone who truly
understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life. That’s the
gospel, not salvation by law or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly
grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.”
Then comes one of Keller’s most important and most problematic statements:
[M]any Christians want
to talk only about God’s love and acceptance. They don’t like talking about
Jesus’ death on the cross to satisfy divine wrath and justice. Some even call it
‘divine child abuse.’ Yet if they are not careful, they run the risk of falling
into the belief in ‘cheap grace’—a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just
loves and accepts us as we are. That will never change anyone’s life.[4]
In his Foreword, Keller asserts a traditional Christian
theology that I have preached, taught, and written against for many, many
years. He simply dismisses the notion that God loves and accepts everyone. I’ve
said many times that I cannot understand or accept God any other way. Keller’s
theology unavoidably leads to the conclusion that God saves some people and
doesn’t save others. Insisting that God loves and accepts only some unavoidably
makes God far too human, far too small. The way of the world is to require that
a person do something (or refrain from doing something, which amounts to the
same thing) in order to receive some reward or compensation. Making God’s grace
less than universal reduces God to that human way of operating. Yet God infinitely
transcends the human. As we read at Isaiah 55:8-9, God’s ways are not our ways
and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.
The temptation to make God too much like us is strong. We
give in to it frequently, but that we do is a theological mistake with
destructive consequences. It divides people into the ins and the outs, the
saved and the condemned, the loved and the damned. If there is one thing the
world does not need today it is more division. Division invariably creates
strife, and human strife almost always becomes violent. We do a fine job of
dividing people into antagonistic groups on our own. We don’t need God dividing
us even more.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer did indeed criticize what he called
cheap grace. As I understand it, Bonhoeffer insisted that true grace is not
cheap because it cost a man his life. Jesus Christ suffered and died to bring
God’s grace to us. Grace also costs another human life. It costs the life of
the faithful Christian. When we truly grasp God’s amazing grace, we will give
up the old ways of our life, the ways of judgment, antagonism, and violence. We
will live into God’s ways of love, reconciliation, and peace. Keller thinks
that a grace that does not distinguish between those who are in it and those
who are out of it cannot produce that transformation. He’s wrong about that,
something I’ll discuss further anon.
Keller ties two things together that don’t necessarily go
together at all. One of them is talking about Jesus’ death on the cross. The
other is what Keller calls “divine wrath and justice.” It is true that
progressive Christians don’t like talking about Jesus’ crucifixion. Though to
me it is the most important service of the year, few of them attend Good Friday
services.[5]
Crucifixion is ugly. Suffering and death are ugly. Of course it is more
pleasant to talk about resurrection, about new life, and about God conquering
death. Far too many Christians (and one is too many) never enter into or
seriously contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death.
All of that, however, is not true of all of us who
understand the universality of God’s grace. Keller has either never heard of
theology of the cross, an alternative soteriology to that of the classical
theory of atonement, or has considered it and rejected it. The cross is
absolutely central to that soteriology, about which I have written at length
elsewhere. Theology of the cross is a demonstration soteriology. It says that
in the life, suffering, and death of Jesus, God has demonstrated to us how God
relates to human life. In Jesus God entered into the worst that human life can
bring, unjust suffering and state-ordered murder. We see that God does not
intervene in the world to stop bad things from happening. Rather, God is
present in solidarity with us in everything that happens in our lives. In the
good things, yes. More importantly, in the bad things. In Jesus on the cross
theology of the cross sees the divine paradox of God’s presence even in the
human experience of the absence of God.
Keller is both right and wrong when he says, or at least implies,
that the theology I present here and elsewhere says that it doesn’t matter much
how we live. How we live has nothing to do with the presence of God’s grace. God’s
grace is there always, everywhere, and for everyone. We all live in it. Our
problem isn’t that we don’t have God’s grace, our problem is that we don’t know
that we do. How we live does, however, have a lot to do with the authenticity
of our Christian faith. If we really know that we live in God’s universal,
totally unconditional grace, we will respond. There are countless ways we can
respond. I responded by going to seminary (although it wasn’t entirely clear to
me at the time that that was what I was doing). The specifics of how we respond
don’t matter. We all are at different stages of life. We all have our own gifts
and shortcomings. What matters is that we do what we can to express God’s love
in the world. That doesn’t matter because we’re damned if we don’t. We aren’t. It
matters because God calls us to respond to love with love. We gain satisfaction,
contentment, and peace when we do. That’s why it matters.
Theology of the cross does not tie the cross to divine wrath
and justice the way Keller does. God’s wrath never enters into God’s way of
relating to creation. God cares about justice, but not justice for God as it
appears in the classic statement of classical atonement theory, Anselm’s Cur
Deus Homo from the early twelfth century CE. God cares about distributive
justice for God’s people, especially the ones Jesus calls “the least of these.”
Jesus does not suffer and die on the cross to satisfy God’s wrath. Nor does he suffer
and die on the cross to pay God a price for human sin. Jesus was not any kind
of sacrifice. Indeed, he rejected the whole idea of sacrifice as what God wants
from us, so we really shouldn’t be turning him into one. What Keller’s
traditional theology says God did in Jesus is truly divine child abuse. I, and
a great many of us today, cannot and will not love a God who is a child abuser,
indeed, a child killer, which is what the classical theory of atonement makes
of God.
Though he doesn’t use these terms, Keller contends that
Christian universalism and theology of the cross do not have the power to
transform human lives. About that he could not be more wrong. My theology has
the power to transform lives, but it does it in a different way and for a
different reason than does classical atonement theory. Classical atonement
theory works to transform lives through fear. Adherents of that theology strive
to act in Christ-like ways because they fear eternal damnation if they do not. Once
when I was teaching universalism a parishioner of mine said, “Tom, you’ve taken
away every reason to be good!”
Well, no I hadn’t. I had however changed the reason to be
good. My theology does not frighten people into proper behavior. Rather, when
we really know the free gift of God’s grace and the power of that grace in our
lives, we respond not with fear but with gratitude. We respond to God’s
unconditional love for us with our own love for God and for God’s people. We
make our love as unconditional as we possibly can. Not love as a sappy emotion.
Rather, sacrificial love, something Keller says my theology cannot create. My
theology does create the drive to live into such love, but it doesn’t do it by
frightening people into behaving themselves. It grounds the Christian life not
in fear but in love. Its doing so makes the Christian life much more Christ-like
than is a life grounded in fear.
I haven’t read Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer yet. I know of
Bonhoeffers concept of cheap grace. I know a little bit about his contention
that people of faith must now learn to live without God, though I don’t understand
that contention at all. Perhaps I will after I read this book. I have no idea
what Metaxas’ theology is or even if he has one, so I make no comment on it.
Keller gives us at least hints at his traditional Presbyterian theology of
sacrificial atonement. I disagree with that theology profoundly. I’ve presented
some of the reasons for my disagreement here. I mean none of it personally. I
do not know Rev. Keller. Faithful Christians can disagree about theology and
still acknowledge one another as faithful Christians. I have nothing against
Keller personally. I do have a lot against what appears to be his theology. Perhaps
you do too.
[1] Metaxas,
Eric, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The
Third Reich (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010).
[2]
The Foreword is on pages xv and xvi.
[3] I
don’t know that Keller’s formalism and legalism are “urges,” but never mind.
Also, I have no idea what he means by “pharisaical attitudes toward other
nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies,” but his meaning there
doesn’t matter for my purposes here.
[4] I
have no idea what Keller means by “un-holy God.”
[5] Years
ago I preached a Good Friday sermon on theology of the cross, which I discuss
below. Afterwards, a man came up to me and said that for the first time in his
life he felt like wearing a cross. Things like that make all the work we do as
pastors worth the time and effort we put into it.
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