Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

To walk with someone, in Hebrew idiom, meant to befriend someone and to journey with him or her face to face.

entails both accountability,

as well as security and...

God, your creator and designer, alone has the right and the wisdom to show you those things in your heart that, if they are embraced and enhanced, will help you become the person you were made to be.

Walking with God, who always sees us and loves us, brings a new integrity and sense of self.

So who am I? If I am a Christian, I am who I am before God. Those things God affirms are the true me; those things he prohibits are the intrusions of the foreign matter of sin and not part of the person I was made to be and the Spirit is bringing about.

There is nothing more valuable than this new identity.

The great paradox is that we “find” our selves, this unconquerable identity and confidence, only through humbling ourselves, giving up the right to self-determination, and following Christ.

The Christian Gospel offers us the most invincible, confident assurance of our own worth and yet at the same time requires humble service and the loss of our autonomous independence.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Much philosophy, sociology, and literary theory today recognizes that identity ordinarily is created through the “exclusion of the Other.”11

We can’t create “Us” without also creating “Them.”

He argues that identity in society depends on creating dichotomies or “binaries.”

Theologian Miroslav Volf summarizes the four ways that we can assert and bolster our self-worth by excluding others.

The reason we indulge in these attitudes and practices is that by denouncing and blaming the Other it gives us “the illusion of sinlessness and strength.”15

Postmodern thinkers call us to stop thinking in binaries and avoid all value judgments.

radical autonomy.

But Terry Eagleton, in The Illusions of Postmodernism, shows that dichotomies in identity making are impossible to avoid.

So the effort to blur all distinctions and erase moral value judgments creates a new “good guys and bad guys” binary, in which the postmodernist is the hero and all who hold on to outdated views of identity and morality are the villains,

“For all its vaunted openness to the Other, postmodernism can be quite as exclusive and censorious as the orthodoxies it opposes . . .” needing “its bogeymen and straw targets to stay in business.”19 Ironically, even an effort to avoid these distinctions becomes a way to construct our own selves at the expense of others.

if the feelings of loathing toward the opposition are not there, it might be concluded that my political position is not very close to the core of who I am.

As the postmodernists rightly point out, this condescending attitude toward the Other is part of how identity works, how we feel good and significant.

So the question is, as Volf puts it, “What kind of selves [do] we need to be in order to live in harmony with others?”

answer that the unique identity with “the Cross at the center” is the way forward.21 How so?

According to Volf, the two constituent aspects of exclusion are, paradoxically, overbinding and overseparating.

the ordinary identity responds to wrongs and injustices with exclusion rather than forgiveness.

To forgive and embrace, rather than to exclude or subjugate, requires a self-image that does not strengthen itself through drawing such contrasts.

requires a combination of two things.

radical h...

at the same time there can be no insecurity,

What will create a different kind of identity in which humility and confidence grow jointly?

the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah

Christians are simul justus et peccator—simultaneously perfectly righteous in Christ and in the Father’s eyes yet in ourselves very flawed and sinful.

This leads to a security and humility that live together.

John Stott argues that this is a cross-shaped identity, one that leads to self-affirmatio...

the ...

so flawed and guilty

highest and strongest expression of his love for us

a “de-centered center,” a self that is so humbled by the cost of its salvation yet so affirmed by it that it cannot exclude others, nor does it need to.

An experience of Christ’s grace strikes a fatal blow to our egocentricity.

Through faith in the cross we get a new foundation for an identity that both humbles us out of our egoism yet is so infallibly secure in love that we are enabled to embrace rather than exclude those who are different.

wonder about the evidence that Christian identity is so unique. There are some remarkable examples

the modern view of the self and expressive individualism does not give us the cultural resources for forgiveness and reconciliation,

“Almost certainly Christianity exhibits more cultural diversity than any other religion,

It is no longer a Western religion (nor was it originally). It is truly a world religion.

Lamin Sanneh writes that Christianity is less culturally imperialistic than secularism.

It answered the challenge so that the existing African “framework was reconfigured without being overthrown.”

A reading of the Bible shows that it respects the African belief that there is a vast supernatural realm, full of evil and good spirits, but it also tells us that there is one who by the cross has “defeated the principalities and powers,” because he has procured forgiveness and the favor of God (Colossians 2:12–25), and by the Resurrection he has “[broken] the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free[d] those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14–15).

What makes Christianity less culturally imperialistic than many other great worldviews? The crucial reason is that Christians are saved by grace alone.

The Christian who makes Christ and his love the core of his or her identity, then, discovers that we need not completely reject other identity factors.