Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

But doesn’t Christianity have its own problems with justice? In particular, isn’t Christianity itself a “totalizing metanarrative”? Doesn’t it purport to hold the true, universal values, and hasn’t that truth been used to marginalize and demonize all difference and dissent as heresy? The answer, of course, is “Yes, but not so fast.”

What our survey has shown us is that the denial of universal moral truth, characterized by both modernity and postmodernism, has not necessarily led to peace and freedom but to new forms of domination and marginalization.

Without any belief in objective moral facts, there is no way to build a program of justice. And yet it is also true that many religions, with their absolute claims, have abuse...

“We need a story that once again affirms universal values while resisting their co-option by the forces of domination.”38 In short, we need a “nontotalizing metanarrative,” a nonoppressive absolute.

So we need universal values, but we also need something that undermines the natural, powerful human inclination to dominate others.

What are those aspects of the Christian faith that can provide a ground for doing justice yet at the same time prevent us from becoming oppressors ourselves?

First, metanarratives try to explain all reality, which can lead to the hubris that sees all opponents and dissidents as antirational or dangerously deluded. But the biblical story, while giving us many fundamental insights about human nature and purpose, nevertheless leaves much “intractable to comprehension.”

God alone has the full perspective on things. We see only in part. So the biblical story is not the kind of neat, “comprehensive explanation of reality” that leads believers to the proud position that they have all the answers.

Second, metanarratives offer the prospect of solving all the world’s problems. And indeed, unlike postmodernism, the Christian story gives hope for the righting of wrongs and the redemption of all things through God’s saving action in Jesus Christ. But unlike modernity, Christianity does not teach that this is a redemption human beings can bring about.

metanarratives through their claims of truth can lead to domination, but the biblical plotline reveals “a story of God’s repeated choice of the dominated and the wretched, the powerless and the marginal.”

The Bible begins with the book of Genesis, written when primogeniture—the passing of all the family’s wealth and estate to the eldest son—was the iron law in virtually all societies. Yet the entirety of Genesis is subversive of this cultural norm.

God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege.

Genesis 25 where God prophesies through an oracle that he will be working with the younger of two sons, Jacob rather than Esau. He explains that the lesson of Genesis is that “the oracle is against all conventional wisdom.”

This God does not align himself only with the obviously valued ones, the first-born. This oracle speaks about an inversion. It affirms that we are not fated to the way the world is presently organized.

That is the premise of the ministry of Jesus: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry . . . are the heirs to the kingdom (Matt. 5:3–7).

But readers have pointed out how often the man God raises up—Jephthah, Gideon, Samson—is someone from a smaller tribe, a low-status family, or even the class of social outcasts. David the king is the youngest and smallest of Jesse’s sons

Then in the New Testament, when Jesus Christ encounters a respected male and a socially marginal woman (John 3 and 4) or a religious leader and a tax collector (Luke 18) or a religious teacher and a fallen woman (Luke 7), it is always the moral, racial, sexual outsider and socially marginalized person who connects to Jesus most readily.

Along with this narrative of the reversal of the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, there is a wide and deep river of ethical teaching and appeal to all believers to live ju...

It is because the ultimate example of God’s working in the world was Jesus Christ, the only founder of a major religion who died in disgrace, not surrounded by all of his loving disciples but abandoned by everybody whom he cared about, including his Father.

Jesus Christ’s salvation comes to us through his poverty, rejection, and weakness. And Christians are not saved by summoning up their strength and accomplishing great deeds but by admitting their weakness and need for a savior.

Most metanarratives say: “Here’s how to win through. Pull yourself together, master yourself. Master the situation. Be strong. You can do it.” But Jesus says, essentially, “You can’t do it. You must rely on me.” “Except ye be converted, and ...

The Bible is not primarily a series of stories with a moral, though there are plenty of practical lessons. Rather, it is a record of God’s intervening grace in the lives of people who don’t seek it, who don’t deserve it, who continually resist it, and who don’t appreciate it after they have been saved by it.

In the Old Testament the Israelites are constantly warned not to oppress immigrants and racial outsiders “because you were foreigners in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). The memory of their salvation from slavery not by their own power but by God’s grace was to radically undermine their natural human inclination to domination. But, Bauckham writes, “the cross is the event in which the cycle [of the oppressed becoming oppressor] is definitively broken.”

Yes, of course, believing in universal moral truths can be used to oppress others. But what if that absolute truth is a man who died for his enemies, who did not respond in violence with violence but forgave them? How could that story, if it is the center of your life, lead you to take up power and dominate others? Remarkably, then, we can conclude that a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God, whose Father “executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry”

People who are passionate for justice often become self-righteous and cruel when they confront persons whom they perceive as being oppressors. However, believers in Christ are taught to confess that they have wronged God by wronging others who are made in his image. We have not loved and honored our neighbors as we wished to be treated. In other words, every Christian who understands the Gospel admits that he or she has been an oppressor.

Christians know they have the hearts of oppressors, yet have been saved by grace nonetheless. Therefore, even when they confront an oppressor, they may do it with steely and courageous determination, but the gospel teaches to do so also without self-righteousness or bullying. They cannot hate haters, or justify oppressing people they think are oppressors.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a nonoppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside us as a way to escape the ineffectiveness of relativism and of selfish individualism, yet one that cannot truly be used to oppress others.

He believes that “what it adds to common morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.”

Neither religion nor secularity can be demonstrably proven—they are systems of thinking and believing that need to be compared and contrasted to one another in order to determine which makes the most sense. That is, which makes the most sense of our experience, of things we know and need to explain? Which one makes the most sense of our social experience and addresses the problems we face in living together? And which of these is the most logically consistent?

In short, we need to ask which of these views of reality makes the most sense emotionally, culturally, and rationally.

six givens to human life, things we cannot live without. They were meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, hope, and justice. In each case there are competing narratives—there is both a secular and a Christian way to understand and address the needs.

Finally, in each chapter, I looked at Christianity’s unsurpassed offers—a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.

So believers in God have argued that God’s existence cannot be proven empirically, as if he were a physical object. Instead, many religious philosophers have argued that God’s existence can be inferred logically. Many scientific theories, especially those in physics, are established this way.3 Theory X is more reasonable than theory Y if it explains the data (what we see) better than theory Y. This, of course, is not final proof of the kind that can be concluded in a laboratory. But most of our theories about waves and particles, about light and molecules, are established like this. In a similar way, the arguments for God contend that belief in God makes more rational sense of the world than nonbelief because it accounts for the data—what we see and know about the world.