Tim keller1/8/2023 ![]() Light can only push darkness because it’s different than it. It’s the same with the metaphor of light and darkness that Jesus used. ![]() But salt only works if it’s chemically different from the meat, but at the same time is very involved in the meat. Lacking refrigeration, you put salt in meat to keep it from spoiling. Salt at the time of Jesus was an agent of preservation. He observed that Saint Augustine’s book The City of God rejected both conservative and liberal perspectives.įrom Outreach Magazine Matt Carter: Becoming a Church for the City If the root conservative movement is to look to the past and the root liberal movement is to look to the future, is the Christian work then the work of the present? Even Lilla, who is not a believer, noted that Christianity had a different story than either. Liberals and progressives have the opposite perspective. He says conservatives have a nostalgia for the past. Mark Lilla has written a couple of interesting books, one on the conservative mind and one on the liberal mind. It seems like we have a hole in our cultural eschatology.Įxactly. Although there was a small uptick, it went on life support as decades passed. Instead of seeking to ground that optimism in the fact that God has the future in his hands, we collectively said, “No, we’ve got the future in our hands.” That particular story about the human race, which is a modern and Western story, started to lose altitude in the first part of the 20th century. ![]() Nisbet said that this idea came originally out of Christianity, but then during the Enlightenment it had been secularized. Nobody thought that humanity’s best years were ahead. Most ancient peoples either saw history as cyclical or as declining from a past golden age. It is not the way most people in history have understood their times. That was a very new idea, this idea of progress. We felt that advances in science, technology and ingenuity would lead to a better world that every generation would live a better life than the one before. Nisbet wrote about our Western idea of progress. In the last chapter of Hope in Times of Fear I engage this a bit. There is a very famous book by Robert Nisbet called History of the Idea of Progress. It strikes me that at the center of that growing fear is the collapse of a story we once believed about ourselves. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. There are plenty waiting for us at home too. Add to that whichever looming disasters you’d like: the human and environmental crisis of climate change? Global terrorism? The knowledge that there are hackers who could bring down governments, nuclear security or banking systems?Īnd those are just the society-level anxieties. Until suddenly, the reality was upon us, and things changed very quickly. As only one example, the COVID-19 pandemic was something very few people ever thought could happen. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. ![]() You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Almost nobody reads it today, but it captured the spirit of the time. Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948. Can you paint for us the contemporary landscape of fear? The title of your book is simple: Hope in Times of Fear. So we invited him back on to talk about it - all of it: the Christian Mind Project, the “second-generation” problem, the notion of “diagonalizing,” and much, much more.In this interview, Keller talks about the book, our present wrestling for hope in a culture of fear and how the way of Jesus brings light into our darkness-including the difficulties of personal suffering and uncertainty. Possibly missed in the brouhaha was an unusually detailed plan of action for saving evangelicalism, provided by none other than legendary Mere Fidelity guest (and honorary host) Tim Keller. A recent New York Times essay by David Brooks, “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself,” kicked up quite a stir.
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