More from Tim Keller's book

I'm devoting several blogs to explore the deep insights Keller has in Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. Here's some more:


When Christianity came along, how it dealt with sorrow helped its appeal. It offered a greater basis for hope. Earlier, stoics had said after death people continued as part of the universe, yet not in an individual form. Christianity shad a new message: we will be saved as individual selves. John 1:1 says, like the Stoics, that there is an ordering structure behind the universe, but that it was not an abstract, rational principle that could be known only through high contemplation by the educated elite. He said the logos of the universe is a person-- Jesus Christ, who can be loved and known in an interpersonal relationship by anyone. Christians, unlike Stoics, were not to stifle tears and cries – they are natural and good. Suffering was not to be dealt with primarily through the control and suppression of negative emotions by using reason or willpower. Salvation was through humility, faith, and love rather than reason and control of emotions. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope . . .

In modern times the West has become much more secular. According to the modern Westerner, because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be. Deism became popular. A huge earthquake in Lisbon (1755) caused many philosophers and thinkers to see this as evidence against the existence of the loving God of the Bible. This began the "problem of evil" discourse. Virtually no one on record had previously argued that evil made the existence of God impossible . . .

During the early 19th century, American culture began losing its grip on the Christian doctrines of the evil of human nature and the reality of Satan. Today we see ourselves as able to control our own destiny, able to discern for ourselves what is right and wrong, and we see God is obligated to arrange things for our benefit, especially if we lived good enough life according to our own chosen standards. Some call this " moralistic, therapeutic Deism" . . .

Christianity has superior beliefs for facing evil, suffering, and death: belief in a personal, wise, infinite, and inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world, God came to earth in the form of Jesus and suffered with and for us sacrificially, through faith in Christ's work on the cross we can have assurance of our salvation, there will be a bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe . . .

Keller argues for the failure of the secular viewpoint. He says secular humanism fails to provide any theology (larger explanations of life that makes sense of suffering) and its adherents do not offer community (forged only when there is something more important than one's own interest in which I'll share a higher allegiance). You can't make the case that atheism has inspired more movements for social justice than religion has. Without a theological worldview, defining moral and just behavior become an enormous difficulty. The deeper question for secular thinkers is what to base standards on so they are not purely arbitrary. David Hume and others have pointed out that science and empirical reason cannot be the basis of morality since they tell us how people live but not how they ought to live. Hume wrote that reason alone "is incompetent to answer any fundamental questions about morality, or the meaning of life." Secularists say we should not fear death because we are nonexistent. But this is a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning to life. That's not much consolation to the Christian view of the resurrection. The intuition that we are not just a collection of matter and chemicals but also a soul is one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today. Research and experience tell us that a majority of people reach for the spiritual to help them interpret and bear up under hurt and suffering. You have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness. So, the secular view of life does not work for most people in the face of suffering because human suffering comes in such enormous variety of forms, and the Western approach oversimplifies the complex causes of suffering reducing all to victimization; another problem is that the Western view is naïvely optimistic about human life (the secular person can't find meaning in evil and suffering, can't prepare to triumph over it in some future life, but has to make the world better right here). To live with any hope, secular people must believe that we can eliminate most sources of unhappiness for the majority of people, but that is impossible. The causes of suffering are infinitely complex and impossible to eliminate . . .