Theology

Review and Reflection: Preaching by Tim Keller

An excellent book for Christian communicators in cities

I am starting a little project I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I hesitate to say that it’s to get me into a better writing habit. Rather, and more specifically, it’s to get into a blogging habit because all my writing is happening elsewhere. One place my writing is happening is doing very brief book reviews on Instagram that I then copy to Goodreads. The space limit and the mobile medium of Instagram are limiting, but helpfully so in the sense that it gets me to just crank something out and ship it, which is something I find helpful. It also gives my students an extension to the classroom as they stalk me for gossip. That said, I’ve been wanting to edit those reviews, revisit those old reads, and add to them when time allows. Before 2016 ended, and after taking a Strengths Finder test and getting “Input” as my top strength, I read that something helpful for me would be to generate and not just collect information. So starting with my first read and review in January 2017, here we go.

Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller is not an average preaching book. I’ll go a bit beyond saying I enjoyed it and recommend it. What set this book apart in my mind was its emphasis on apologetics. At times it read much more like an apologetics textbook than a preaching guide, which I guess feels very Kelleresque if you are familiar with him and his style. It sets out to do what the subtitle suggests, which is communicate about Christian faith in an era of deepening skepticism, and in my opinion he achieves this. Even in my contexts at international Christian schools in Asia this is very helpful, as many of my students are very skeptical of Christianity for varieties of reasons. Many Asian societies are secularizing in general as well. This book was a helpful guide for various ways of communicating about faith in such a context.

When I first read Preaching I had not read, nor was familiar with, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. That work along with others like it, that nuance the formation and impact of secularity in the West, are deeply influential in Keller’s thinking and his writing about Christian ministry. It’s always a bit shocking how resistant cultural Christianity is to seeing their own context as a mission field, which explains the often heavy resistance to Keller and others like him doing exactly that. Some are finding the best communication tools they can to speak the Gospel to the secular West with deconstructive nuance to unpack the culture’s lies, and constructive clarity to believe God’s truth, in ways that are so familiar to the culture that they seem foreign to Christian subculture. This is mistakenly taken as syncretistic instead of incarnational or contextual. I would offer it is also an indictment on how isolated much of the Christian West has become from the neighbors they are called to know, love, and serve. I’d recommend this book first and foremost to Christian communicators in urban settings, but any preacher will benefit from a careful read.

320 pages or 6 hours of preaching well in a secular age. All links are affiliate.

Mental Malaise in a Fragmented Age

A reoccurring issue in both the books I’m reading and in the schools I’ve worked at, is that we live in an age of particular fragmentations and on a scale that is unique. Reasons for this vary, but the internet age is part of it. How we have utilized the internet is another factor, such as social media, and the ubiquity of mobile internet devices in the hands of increasingly younger people is perhaps the biggest. It’s the amount of info, including targeted ads and messaging, in the hands and drawing the eyes of a critical mass of young people that has led to a kind of fragmentation of identity and a malaise that follows it. Students are overwhelmed with information and then with the the task of making sense of it. Adults have the issue as well, and while they have tried, or not, to figure out this new life, they have certainly failed to pass a serviceable amount of wisdom to the next generation.

In my own experience of being a student when the internet first really popped, and mobile technology quickly followed, there was a fragmentation of knowledge, how to interpret it, how to act on it, and confusion was a very common feeling. At the time I didn’t appreciate any of this as a global phenomena or anything beyond my own experience. I took it as a problem of fitting in on my part as an individual. It wasn’t long before I went to university and realized the issue was a bit bigger than me, and then further into life to see a larger impact, especially as I traveled and worked around the USA and the world. Now the market is flooded with books, talks, consultants, and all manner of attempts to sort it all out. We no longer have a unified story, or identity, and with the loss has gone a basis for agreed upon virtues. We are well marketed into consumerism, but very poorly discipled into humanity.

I say none of this as a technology naysayer. I’m largely for technology and its utilization in education. But I also can’t deny what I and the market at large are seeing, and that is a real dearth of wisdom, perhaps a specific kind of wisdom in the form of information literacy. With incredulity towards metanarrative comes the absence of the kinds of norms that support any harmony between an intellectual and a virtuous life. There is only left a life of distraction and whim. Happiness is quick to fade as well. Suicide becomes a common thought, and slowly a more common practice. Fragmented attention, fragmented stories, fragmented lives and malaise are all that’s available under this worldview rubric. And to this end the materialistic cultures rush headlong.

As a Christian I have to acknowledge the fragmentation of my own tribe. It’s well beyond good apostle’s warnings to not “be of Paul, or Apollos, but of Christ.” It’s also beyond schisms and reformations and three major divisions. We’re well into thousands of expressions of faith, some quite close, others may as well be from different galaxies. The debate about doctrinal and practical norms will perhaps never cease until time’s end. And yet, in my experience and in my intellectual explorations, I can find no greater answer to the problems of our age than the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Bible in which its contents are found. While the various traditions squabble over what the Bible is, and how it is to be used, and what other sources of authority to draw from and how precisely to do that, at the end of the day it is the Bible and it is the life and work of Jesus that are the center of the Christian story. While we have much to overcome, we have so much to offer. I for one draw a great deal of purpose from this effort in my context. There is a wholeness to be had amidst the fragments, and a healing calm more powerful than the malaise.

What does Hyderabad have to do with Jerusalem: a reflection on spices and catechesis

Perhaps the most interesting thing I ate before attending college was a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s. I grew up in the central parts of Kentucky and the southern parts of Indiana. I’m not saying food wasn’t good in my life, just that from a global perspective it certainly wasn’t topping the list of foodie “must-go-to” places. We had a rotation at home, taco night, lasagna night (sides of the dish hardened, and topped with some mini sausage that tasted like a hotdog), pizza night and so on. Sometimes my dad would make chili, and that was good. My grandparents on his side did a lot of farming, and we always had fresh meat, veggies, and succulent desserts, but there wasn’t much in the way of variety a spice or flavor. Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food, at least in their Americana variety, were regular features. However, there was really nothing that made me any more excited then a good slice of pizza, or a burger or something else in a fairly plain variety. When Wendy’s came to my small hometown in Kentucky, there was a line of cars down the street for about a week. Never mind the fact that we had other fast food joints in town, it was still a big hit. It was new, it was different-ish, and now it was close. And for my group of friends, we had never so consistently desired a spicy product over a non-spicy one like that before. It held our attention, and captured our imagination. It was different and it was also more, more flavor, not just more content, but better content. We were in high school. Life was simple, like a fast food menu.

This group of friends I would usually go to Wendy’s with, they were friends from my youth group at church. And while we were discovering the wonders of regularly adding spice to our culinary experience we were also in the process of engaging the complexities of life with our faith. We had grown up attending Sunday school and learning a children’s version of all the great narratives contained in the Bible. How Adam and Eve came to wear clothes. How Noah had a floating zoo. How the old geezer Abraham still managed to crank out a family line. Moses the white wizard and his magical staff. The Game of Judges. The horny David, who had a heart for God but a libido for something else, contain thyself bro. And a generic mass of prophets who had tripped out visions, and hard lives, and seemed angry and harsh. Then of course Jesus and the 12 dwarves, followed by the odyssey of a man named Paul, followed then by Kirk Cameron and the end of time. I’m poking a bit of fun to highlight that we were in the process of taking what we had been taught as kids, in a kid like fashion, and applying it to adulthood in a teenager like fashion as we engaged what we were learning from and about the world around us from school, TV, the internet, and our friends. To be honest, we weren’t always sure how it fit. We knew it probably could, somehow, but more often than not at youth group we were more or less encouraged in a method of not engaging when we were confused. If a new idea might be poisonous, we were told to avoid, and that avoidance was holy, and mature, and growth in our faith, and it was the method by which one would add any complexity available to our simple faith as we aged. In answer to what Athens had to do with Jerusalem, our answer was largely… nothing. Faith was simple.

My mouth had never experienced anything that had coated it in flavor that was simultaneously peak pleasure and peak painful before, but as the plastic spoon exited my lips, having delivered a mere few grams of tomato pickle-infused-basmati white rice, my entire being went into a reaction. I wanted it to last, I wanted it to end, I had questions, and yet had also received some answers. All I knew is that I needed water, and I needed to do it again, whatever I had just done. But please notice my choice of the word “coated.” Less the idea of covering (covering your mouth is a different idea), but coating, filling, anointing, removing all other sensations with itself, the way fresh flowers fill a room, the way love fills the heart, the way a fire dispels the cold, and the way the Holy Spirit fills the soul. I had never encountered food to this effect. All other food became irrelevant. What was this concoction, why was it called pickle, why did so little of it cause such a magical experience? It was my freshman year of college, and the one Indian student who attended our tiny follicle in the Devil’s armpit of eastern Kentucky had received a package from his mom. He made some fragrant, long grain, white basmati rice, and added a mere dollop of this red lava called tomato pickle to a styrofoam bowl of the rice. I later learned that “pickle” was used to capture the idea that this was highly preserved, “pickled” in that sense, but really in no other sense familiar to the western hearer of said term. It was indeed a highly concentrated version of a spice saturated tomato curry. Oily, spicy, packed with flavor. Years later I would behold my friend’s mother making this in our kitchen where we lived while going to seminary. Tons of tomatoes, whole spices, powdered spices, and chilies, chilies, chilies, praise the good Lord, chilies, cooked down to a paste and then canned (pickled) for use as a side dish or a snack mixed lightly with rice. She had shipped it from India, and God in his good grace, had blinded all customs agents such that it had arrived in our small eastern Kentucky abode. The shadows of the Appalachian mountains may have protected us from the rays of the sun, but nothing could protect us from the fire of tomato pickle, and for that we were thankful. I ran down the hall of our dorm to the water fountain. I shielded my face from those I encountered on the path, for I like Moses coming off of Mount Sinai, was radiating the Shekinah glory of God, and was too bright to gaze upon. As I drank the water, the thought entered my mind, I had been impressed with spicy chicken from Wendy’s all the while this flavor was available. I would go on to discover many of the wonders of global cuisine and rediscover much of what makes my own native food magical in it’s own way. But something forever changed in that season of life. Life was no longer simple, but something complex that I must simplify through hard work and discipline. One of the ways I learned this was by learning all the building blocks of Indian cooking, a very complex thing. Years later I would be cooking for my family as they visited me in Washington state before my wife and I moved to Korea. I was making them curry at the request of my sisters. I was cooking in their rental cabin overlooking the Bellingham Bay and as time passed my dad looked at me and commented on how I had been cooking and talking to them for two hours and the meal was still not ready. I honestly hadn’t even thought about it. I was going off instinct, and it felt effortless and simple, like breathing. However, I had used more than a dozen spices, near a dozen other ingredients, all added at different times to achieve specific aromatic and/or flavor goals for the dish. In the end it sat there, as simple as a pot of water, but with all the complexity of a culinary heritage of thousands of years of innovation and iteration.

By the end of Bible College I mostly felt beat up and wounded, spiritually and emotionally. I had learned from some fantastic mentors and professors, enough to know that the God I had learned about as a kid was real, and in fact, profoundly true and great. I also learned the Bible I had grown up studying was a document that could encounter me at my weakest point and it could lift me up, and at my most probing and skeptical and stand up. I had learned in community with other genuine followers of Jesus but also through private prayer, and the means by which God will speak to and train someone individually. I was grateful for this, but there were still many lurking problems for me integrating this faith with the world around me. Connecting the dots you might say, between the secular and the sacred, finding the contours of theological realities in my church life and making sense of them in light of science, culture, and how I was supposed to not only live in the world, but challenge it, even dare to change it, when I had seen it do so much to change those in my church life. It wasn’t clear to me how to, in practice, authoritatively encounter the world knowing what to condone or condemn, how to tell the truth in love, because I had witnessed so much compromise and inconsistency and I knew I too would be prone to simply hide behind false religion and I couldn’t accept that. At my graduation party an old man who had supported my Indian friend and his family came to celebrate with us. He was a professor at a small seminary and he inquired about the details of our education. By the time I finished he stopped and then began to expound on the theological method we had been instructed with, and then shared his own, using the entire scope of scripture and systematic categories of doctrine, and appealing here and there to relevant case studies from church history, even locating our school’s faith tradition in that narrative in a way our school had failed to do. Many Christian traditions have Sunday school for children like mine did. However, some of them are more intentional and somewhat formal, and this school is called catechesis, which trains the young and new believers in all the essentials of the faith, both the content and the meaning. As I sat there I realized I had been taught but not catechized, and many of those serious about their faith in low church traditions seek out formal theological education, not because they are called to formal ministry, but because they were never catechized. They had the meal of their faith, but something was missing. We didn’t know what any of the ingredients were. We didn’t know how to reproduce it. We had a fast food version of a faith that had thousands of years of heritage, depth, innovation and iteration. A year from this moment I would visit India, and when I saw the children eating their local cuisine I remember thinking, I’m so jealous, I only started when I was 18 and you’ll be eating the best food on earth from the time you’re a baby. We had catered our party using our favorite Indian restaurant in West Virginia, (that’s right, an Indian restaurant in West Virginia), and as I sat there eating it listening to him I thought, this is like the first time I’m actually tasting the complexity of my faith, and I had questions, but I had also received some answers. All I knew is that I needed more, and we all went to study under that professor and many other mentors, and now we’re scattered in ministry around the world making curry and teaching the Bible to this day.

EPILOGUE: There is and will always be much discussion on the best way to teach the Christian faith and disciple each other to follow Jesus in the world we live in. My big idea here is that simplicity of content is not the answer, even while simplicity of delivery might be. In both East and West there is a move away from the complexities of the mind, and away from theological discipline, in favor of and often exclusively to more solely experiential expressions of faith. I see this killing my students and others in my life who are laboring under similar convictions at the moment. No one school, or church, or book, or professor is going to nail this down. However, I do believe there are those doing it better than others. I think theological discipline happens at various levels and to different degrees depending on an individual’s calling and context. But the Bible itself presents a deep well of content to draw from, and encourages a simple life of virtuous discipline from which to engage and fully embrace the depths and complexities of God in our otherwise simple spiritual journeys. I’ve been reading through various confessions of faith from church history as I revise and update my Bible curriculum, and studying the historic backgrounds. These confessions are deep, and designed to take around a year for the young or for new believers to process. There is much more that can and should be learned than what is contained in any one faith statement, or catechism, or confessional document, but it is a suitable starting place and foundation. To deny this is a great disservice, and an illusion really, because while accepting the Christian faith can happen quite simply for many, that initial encounter can in no way encompass it’s depth. Who among us who truly loves something wants less of it? Wants it simplified to the point of infantile milk? One of the great heresies of Indian cooking is “curry powder.” It was created when the British East India Trading Company threw a bunch of spices into one barrel to ship back to England and is itself not a real thing, but a dumbing down of many great things. Western faith has attempted to create a “curry powder” out of the great ingredients of the Christian faith, and the youth and the new believers aren’t being taught how to make it their own, but just to consume it, and to do so with blander flavor. Many are spitting it out. Obviously I have found a preferred metaphor for talking about these issues of faith in the realities of Indian cooking. My Indian friend is from Hyderabad so it serves as a symbolic stand-in for everything I have learned about the cuisine of the great and diverse country of India. Just more than a century after Christ an early church father posed a question that I find sad, though I respect this historic figure on many other counts. Tertullian asked “what Athens has to do with Jerusalem” in a book he was writing against heretics. For such an early intellectual figure, this is a surprisingly anti-intellectual statement. He’s asking what human philosophy has to do with religious doctrines. Paul in Acts 17 in his encounters with philosophers in Athens seems to set a more proper foundation for engaging such an issue. I find that many are still putting up such fearful borders to Christian engagement with complexities presented from the world because there are those, and always will be, who compromise. I understand the dilemma, as it’s all to real as a Bible teacher at a school accredited by a Korean government that doesn’t much care for religious education. But is a full retreat called for, or something else? So for myself, I’ve changed the question and the answer just a bit. What does Hyderabad have to do with Jerusalem? For me…..a great deal. Faith is complex, like a curry.