Keller on Salvation Outside of Christ

Editor’s note: Last week Justin Taylor featured a 2008 interview Tim Keller gave Martin Bashir related to the release of The Reason for God. Keller clarifies and corrects one of his responses in this article. If you’d like to learn more from Keller about the need to believe in Jesus Christ for salvation, watch this brief clip (also embedded below) and listen to his sermon “Exclusivity: How Can There Be Just One True Religion?” preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

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This interview from three and a half years ago was the first public event like this I had ever done, and a number of my responses were less than skillful. One in particular—the one about whether there is any way of salvation outside of faith in Christ—was misleading and unhelpful.

Then and now, when people struggle with something the Bible says, I sometimes invoke the principle of Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” The thought that God doesn’t tell us everything there is to know, and that if he doesn’t we don’t need to know it, is helpful at a number of points in life. It’s helpful when people are struggling with the difficult doctrines—of the Trinity, or how God can be sovereign and yet human beings be responsible for their decisions, or over why God allows suffering to continue. At those points it’s helpful to say, “There is more truth than God has told us, and maybe when we get to heaven he’ll show it to us. That may shed new light on things that we find difficult. Til then, we go with what we are told. That’s all we need.”      Continue Reading....

Tim Keller and the Exclusivity of Christ

Earlier this week Justin Taylor posted a 2008 interview of Pastor Tim Keller by Martin Bashir at Columbia University. The interview was spring-boarded by his then-newly released book, The Reason for God. During the interview, which was designed to ask the hardest questions about Christianity, Bashir asked Keller about the eternal destiny of those who don’t believe in Jesus Christ. You can watch part of his answer in this video, with the relevant portion being from about 13:20 to about 15:10. I’ve also transcribed that portion below:

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Bashir:  So where does that leave the millions of Muslims, Sikhs and Jews?  Are they sadly and completely deluded? 

Keller: People who never heard about Jesus, or never really got a hearing about Jesus… 

Bashir: I’m not talking about them, because some of those people have heard (about Jesus). I’m talking about the millions of Muslims, Sikhs and Jews who have heard about Jesus. Where does your thesis leave them? 

Keller: Where they are right now, it means that if there’s never any change, they don’t get Jesus. If he is who he says he is, then, long term, they don’t have God. If on the other hand…all I can always say about this is God gives me, even as a minister with the Scripture, a lot of information on a need-to-know basis. And a need-to-know basis means, “Here’s all I can tell you: unless you get Jesus Christ who created you to start with, unless you are reunited with him sometime, there is no eternal future of thriving.” It just makes sense. Again, I’m trying to go back to this idea that, that, if he is who he says he is, you’ve got to have him. If right now a person doesn’t have him, he or she needs to get him. If they die and they’ve never, if they die and they don’t have Jesus Christ, I don’t know.    Keep Reading...

Two Cents, and Not a Penny More, on Love Wins.

I have  mixed feelings about putting this post up, mostly because I don't think very much else needs to be said about Rob Bell's book Love Wins.  If you haven't seen Martin Bashir's interview with him on MSNBC, you need to.  It tells you everything you need to know about the book and Bell's approach to these issues:  He clearly has about six highly-crafted and exquisitely ambiguous things to say, and is doggedly determined to avoid---at all cost---giving straight answers to any questions about what he really believes.  Bashir calls him out on it, and it's a service to the church and the world that he does.

Several friends have already done a great job of reviewing the entire book.  Both Tim Challies's and Kevin DeYoung's reviews are helpful pieces of work.  So this isn't going to be a full review.  That said, I do think it might be useful to point out a couple of details that I haven't seen talked about much, and that Bell simply got flat wrong.  You know the old quip about lawyers?  "Always confident, sometimes right."  That's an almost perfect description of Bell in Love Wins; he writes with amazing confidence about certain facts (word meanings, Jewish backgrounds, historical issues), and yet if you just pick up a dictionary or google a quote, you realize that what he's saying is simply wrong.  Pointing these things out isn't just a matter of "picking on" Bell, either.  It's a matter of doing our best to make sure little errors don't become part of our atmosphere.  Otherwise,  before we know it we'll have people in our churches saying, as if everybody knows it already, that Luther was a universalist and that the Bible doesn't have a concept of "forever."  So in the interest of preventing that, here are just a handful of the things that Bell gets flat wrong in his book. Keep Reading>>>

Call it a Comeback: Evangelicals, Liberals, and the Problem of Hell

In his 1971 IFES addresses on "What is an Evangelical?" Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones referred to the tendency of denominations to so lose their way that they end up becoming institutions whose beliefs, values, and practices run counter to the convictions and vision of their founders.  Lloyd-Jones summed it up in the epigrammatical words of Dean Inge, "institutions tend to produce their opposite."

At first blush the thought that evangelicalism could prove itself capable of reproducing, under different circumstances, the virulant strains of liberal theology seems, frankly, implausible.  How could those committed to the authority of Scripture and the supernatural Christ of the Bible descend into a world where long held dogmas were routinely thrown overboard?

Part of the answer is in understanding liberalism as a mood, and a mindset, as well as a particular set of denials.  Another part of the answer lies in the tension evangelicals constantly feel when they relate the "scandal of particularlity," all those non-negotiable hard edged truths of the Christian faith, to the desires, aspirations, and intellectual and moral boundaries of contemporary culture. Keep Reading>>>