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....