First Half of "The Reason For God"

 

Click here to find Tim Keller's "The Reason for God" on Amazon.com

I'm half way through Tim Keller's defense for the existence of God, specifically the trinitarian God of the Bible. The book is split into two parts. The first half rebuttals a lot of the common complaints about God/Christianity and reasons why He/it isn't correct. The second half goes on the offensive and argues for Christianity and the God of the Bible, now that the main rebuttals of our post-modern culture have been addressed. I don't want to get into any of the specific arguments, but I do want to talk about a couple of the big points that I got from the first half of the book.

The first point is that Christianity's stigma for being intolerant while liberal/secular viewpoints are tolerant of all, is bogus. I don't think you have to believe in God to see this, just use logic. Both sides tolerate certain things and don't tolerate others. Keller uses the example of a homosexual who is going to his gay/lesbian activist meeting. If that person gets saved and professes Christ and turns from homosexuality, it won't be long before he is asked to leave the group of activists. In the same way, if a pastor of a conservative, evangelical church is caught having a homosexual affair, he will more than likely be asked to step down from his post. Just because evangelicals hold a different viewpoint from the liberal secularists on a issue doesn't mean that Christians are intolerant and liberals are tolerant. They are just tolerant and intolerant of different things and often opposing things.

The second point that came up several times is that believing in ANYTHING takes a certain amount of faith. It takes a certain amount of faith to plan my day tomorrow since I am not positive if I will even be alive tomorrow. I takes a certain amount of faith to believe that the sun will come up tomorrow because even though we have a history of data to let us believe it will, there is still always that chance that it won't. Now, these are obviously extreme examples since as a young healthy adult, I will more then likely be in perfect health tomorrow and I will likely wake up due to the fact that the sun is beginning to rise. However, many people seem to want to hold the Bible to a standard that we don't hold anything else to, and then use that inconsistent standard to "prove" that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. There is a ton of historical evidence for the truthfulness of the Bible, specifically surrounding its central figure, Jesus Christ. I don't want to get into all the nitty-gritty of those arguments here, but if you have any specific questions that have been holding you up then post a comment and I'll do my best to answer it. Anyway, all that to say that just because it takes a certain amount of faith to believe that Jesus Christ is God, that he lived a perfect life, bore the wrath of God for sinners in their stead, was literally resurrected back to life and ascended to heaven to be with the Father, doesn't mean that it isn't true.

I want to end with something Keller didn't talk about in this book, but that he did talk about in his sermon entitled "Who is This Jesus?". Before anyone should go dismissing Christianity as a bunch of wives tales, they should take a serious look at how huge the magnitude of the claim that Christ makes is. He clearly claims to be God in the Bible from passages like John 8:58 (...before Abraham was, I Am) among many others. He claims that no one gets to heaven except through faith in Him and following Him (John 14:6). These claims are outrageous. Not only that, his closest followers all were EXECUTED for refusing to speak against Him. Either Jesus, his disciples, and millions of people from vastly differing cultures throughout the last 2,000 years are all completely crazy, or there is something to the claims or Christ. It's not a claim that can or should be taken lightly by anyone.