Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

It is not true that you could complete this exercise and design a society using only some kind of neutral, objective reason.

The idea that “we should not bring moral or religious convictions to bear on public discussions about justice” is frankly impossible.

This approach has been used for a generation and has not worked.

Our culture is split and fractured by warring factions with fundamentally different visions of justice and social good.

The appeal to human rights strictly on the basis of “reasonable self-inter...

He argued that segregation was not simply impractical for the overall good of a society but that it was a sin.

precisely because every man is made in the image of God.17

The Bible gives us the strongest possible foundation for the idea of human rights.

human rights have a troubled relationship both with phases of secularism, the first of which is called modernity, and the second often called postmodernism.

came to see how both capitalism and socialism, both Right and Left, could be oppressive.

This critique that grew out of the Frankfurt School became what is now called postmodernism and poststructuralism.

Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

include Marxism in this group, with its belief in the inevitable triumph of the working class,

also opposed the claims of capitalism, of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. That metanarrative dictates that people can best be understood as rational actors and consumers, and that only free enterprise will inevitably lead human beings to the most rational and efficient allocation of all assets.

third metanarrative in this category is neo-Darwinism, which purports to be a comprehensive explanation of all of human behavior and history. Everything about us can be understood in terms of evolutionary biology and neuroscience.

would undoubtedly view the claims of Silicon Valley to also be a totalizing metanarrative—both its day-to-day claims to be “changing the world” to the predictions that technology will solve povert...

Postmodern thinkers argue that modern metanarratives are inherently authoritarian because...

postmodernism denied any universally true values, any ability of reason to penetrate and comprehend all of reality.

So all claims of “truth” are now perceived as being a rhetorical move by those in power to marginalize and dominate those whose criticism might diminish their hold on power.

promote a crowd of contradictory and contending “micronarratives.”

The great irony is that postmodernism creates its own metanarrative.

is just as prone to divide the world into a binary of “white hats”—those promoting plurality, multiple, local, changeable micronarratives—and “black hats”—those espousing universal values, absolutes, and metanarratives.26