Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

love and autonomy as antithetical to each other.

Isn’t it in a love relationship, where people are not exploiting each other but serving the other’s needs and giving themselves to the other? Here we see the cultural contradictions within the modern ideal of autonomous freedom.

Philosophers have distinguished between positive and negative liberty.

Negative liberty is freedom from—refusing any barriers or constraints on our choices. Positive liberty is freedom for—using your ...

Our modern culture’s idea of freedom is wholly negative. We are free as long as no one is...

The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life.

Freedom is a good only if it enables you to actually do something good.

By itself, autonomy is incomplete.30

Freedom should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

we look to good but created things for our deepest satisfaction, rather than to God. However, this truth about the human heart explains not just our failure to find contentment, but also the human struggle to find freedom.

When you love someone,

it makes you a kind of slave.

you have to live for some thing.

everyone looks to some thing for their meaning in life and whatever that is becomes their supreme love.

Something else is always mastering you. Modern people are simply in denial about this.

But actually you are fully committed to something—your own independence.

it forces you to stay uncommitted and, probably, pretty lonely.

David Foster ...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as . . . not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In other words, whatever is the source of your meaning and satisfaction in life is what you are worshipping,

We are all worshipping and serving something. The better question is this: Which “master” will affirm, cherish, empower, and honor us, and which ones will exploit and abuse us?

If there is no God, you will have to turn some created thing into a god to worship, and whatever that thing is, it will punish you with inner fears, resentment, guilt, and shame if you fail to achieve it.

God, and if, as the New Testament declares, he came to earth to die for our sins on the cross? Then there is one Lord who, when we fail him, will not punish us but forgive us.

If you live for your career and you fail, it will crucify you inside with self-loathing. But Jesus was crucified for you.

Christians answer that if we are living for the one who both created us and redeemed us, we are by definition taking on the liberating constraints.

First, if there is a God, he created us. This means there is what novelist Marilynne Robinson calls “the givenness of things.”

reality is not infinitely malleable. It imposes itself on us, and freedom comes only by living into that givenness.

We were built to know, serve, and love God. If we try to live for anything else, it leads to slavery, but when we begin to live for God and follow his will, we find that we are actually becoming who we were meant to be, realizing our original design.

Key summary

This is how Christianity says our ultimate relationship works with God. When a Christian grasps how Jesus saved us at infinite cost to himself, how he emptied himself of his glory and took on a humble form to serve our best interests, it creates a grateful joy that inwardly moves us to want to please, know, and resemble him. Our happiness gets put into his happiness, and serving him becomes our perfect liberation.

To have the law “written on our hearts” means that we are freely doing what we most want to do. We are loving our redeemer through following his will.

Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before; Since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more. . . . To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and hear his pardoning voice Changes a slave into a child, and duty into choice.35

directives come from your designer. And therefore they aren’t busywork. To break them is to violate your own nature and to lose freedom, just like a person who eats the wrong foods and ends up in a hospital.

“The best way to be free, to ensure that the wrong he has done to you does the least damage, is to forgive him.”

The claim is that Jesus is the only master, the only thing to live for that will not exploit you. And here is why.

both parties must give it up together.

Christianity is the only religion that claims God gave up his freedom so we could experience the ultimate freedom—from evil and death itself.

He sacrificed his independence for you, so you can sacrifice yours for him. And when you do, you will find that it is the ultimate, infinitely liberating constraint. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

identity, which is to answer the question Who am I?

It consists of at least two things. First, it consists of a sense of self that is durable.

something sustained that is true of you in every setting.

identity also includes a sense of worth, an assessment of your own value.

Self-knowledge is one thing, but self-regard is another.

The sense of self and of worth together compose your identity.2

Identity formation is a process that every culture pushes on its members so powerfully and pervasively that it is invisible to us.

In this chapter I am going to try to make the process in our secular culture a little more visible and then show you the radically different Christian resources for this...

In ancient cultures, as well as in many non-Wester...

Charles Taylor called the older concept the “porous” self, for it was seen as being inextricably connected not only to family and community but...

Modern Western identity formation is the very reverse of this.

a “buffered,” contained self.5 This approach to identity formation has also been called “expressive individualism” in the classic Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah and his sociologist colleagues.

“each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality [or identity] is to be realized.”6