Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Sep 17th, 2010 at 12:01 am
Book: The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
Author: Timothy Keller
“Whether your consider yourself a believer or a skeptic, I invite you to seek the same kind of honesty and to grow in an understanding of the nature of your own doubts.” pg. xxiv
Could it be that many of the people who reject Christianity do so using one set of rules against it while employing a different set of rules for their own beliefs? Have skeptics, cynics, or aggressive opponents of Christianity been as logically fair about their own affirmations as they have their objections to the teachings of Christ? Can Christians hold to the claims of Christ and truly be consistent with logic, history, and the nature of things as they appear?
Dr. Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York, has provided a resource that is helpful in wrestling with these issues.
The book almost feels like a two-volume set. In the first part of The Reason for God, Pastor Keller discusses several common objections to or charges against Christianity that he has encountered through his years in ministry. They include issues like the exclusive claims to truth that Christianity makes, the seemingly contradictory issues of the goodness of God and the reality of suffering in the world, the hypocrisy of the Church throughout history, the conflicts between Christianity and science, and several other dilemmas.
Though I will leave Pastor Keller to address these issues in his own words, I do appreciate the fact that he is careful to apply one set of rules for both the prosecutor and defendant. As is often the case in public debate, opponents of Christianity will pose questions to Christians that seem impossible to answer or to confirm the weakness of the teachings of Christ. However, when the logical assumptions that drive such questions are investigated, the person asking the question is discovered as being incapable of both asking the question and remaining logically consistent according to their own assumptions.
For instance, a person who believes that truth is not absolute is not being consistent when he/she asks questions with intent to falsify Christianity. Falsehood, after all, would be as absent as truth if their claim, which ironically is an absolute proposition, were to be accurate. Another example would be an evolutionist who opposes Christianity because of the “evil” acts committed by Christians or religious proponents. Evolution, by its very nature, cannot produce any universal set of morals with which to levy against any religious system, let alone Christianity. What Pastor Keller does in answering these objections to Christianity is to hold both his response and the person posing the question responsible for being logically consistent, and he does so without creating straw men in his argument.
The second part of the book is designed to help Christians wrestle with the claims of Christ in order to confirm why Christianity passes the test of logical consistency, historical reliability, and correspondence to reality (what the Bible says about mankind is accurate with what we see in mankind). His arguments do refer to the Bible, but he will use several argumentative means to make his point as he writes the book to people who may not initially believe the Bible at face value. Therefore, if you want a systematic theology book, this would not be the meatiest one on the shelf in terms of straight conversation from Scripture.
The reason why The Reason of God would be useful for men of God is its introduction and attention to the larger questions and concerns of life. God’s men need to have wrestled with the ultimate things in life, and looking into the doubts that seem to assault the claims of Christ is a healthy exercise. Men of God will be forced to exercise their own minds, and though the need for faith is not removed (for all people have faith in something), the confirmation that Jesus is God and the consequences for such a confirmation are important to us as well as those we lead.
This resource is an introduction, but it scans two great arguments that are often not addressed in the same book: why attacks against Christianity are softened by their own internal ineffectiveness, and why Christianity is the most reasonable worldview due to the person, work, and sovereignty of Christ Jesus.
p.s. you can peruse Pastor Keller’s site based on the book at www.thereasonforgod.com.