Dark Brightness

Read the whole article and then buy all his books. Now. Throw some Tolkien in if you haven’t already read it…

Redeemer holds high moral standards, but Keller puts all 10 commandments under the first one—to have no other gods. Preaching about idolatry—the sin of putting something or someone else in the place of God—enables Keller to communicate with relativists, who would respond to Christian moral standards by saying, “That’s just your opinion.”

“When you say the ultimate sin is to put things in the place of God,” Keller says, “you take that argument away. You find that they say, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if there is a God.’ When I describe sin in such a way that people wish there were a God, I’m making progress.”

Redeemer doesn’t participate in culture wars. It aims to focus on Jesus, and on the incredible good news that God is not, in fact, the worst taskmaster in the world but the one who died for us.

via How Tim Keller Found Manhattan | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.