Uncommon Ground Quotes

“Loving your neighbor is easiest when there’s very little difference. Loving your neighbor is easiest when there are no contentious issues between you. Loving your neighbor is easiest when their lifestyle matches yours. Loving your neighbor is easiest when they believe like you do, vote like you do, shop where you do, have the same economic status you do, and send their children to the same schools you do. The smaller the gap between you, the easier the bridge is to build. The biggest need for bridge building, however, is where the gap is the biggest. Where you don’t understand the other person or when you feel the other person might be your opponent or is even someone who hates you. Yet the degree of difficulty in loving our neighbor doesn’t excuse us from loving that neighbor.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“The ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes requires humility, and the impetus for doing so requires patience rooted in hope and tolerance grounded in love. This is increasingly difficult at a time in which, as Sherry Turkle argues, social media and other technology significantly reduce our ability to exercise empathy.11 Indeed, we have seen a sharp decline in our ability to sympathize, understand, and talk face-to-face with those who have different views and beliefs. If our culture cannot form people who can speak with both conviction and empathy across deep differences, then it becomes even more important for the church to use its theological and spiritual resources to produce such people. The Christian calling is to be shaped and reshaped into people whose every thought and action is characterized by faith, hope, and love—and who then speak and act in the world with humility, patience, and tolerance.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“Jesus doesn’t tell us to tolerate our enemies. He says to love them. And thank God that Jesus does not merely tolerate us—he embraces us across difference and welcomes us into his arms.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“I often wonder what Christians in the United States will need to leave behind in order to embrace the adventure God has before us. I wonder what God might be stripping away so we can cling, desperately and helplessly, only to him. How does the longing for power, privelege, and position freeze us in place? How do our financial resources, technologival tools, and cultural arrogance insulate us from an honest encounter with God and with the world?
What might it look like for us to travel lightly today?”
― Tom Lin, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“The first of these practices, humility, recognizes that in a world of deep differences about fundamental issues, Christians and non-Christians alike are not always able to prove why they are right and others are wrong. Christians are able to exercise humility in public life because we recognize the limits of human reason, including our own, and because we know we have been saved by faith, not by our moral actions and goodness. That confident faith anchors our relationship with God, but it does not supply unwavering certainty in all matters.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“It is not enough for me to not want to be racist and to try to treat everyone with dignity—though of course that is a necessary start. I must, rather, ask myself—and, more importantly, invite others to ask of me—how my life has been shaped within particular racial structures and assumptions and how my actions and inactions either perpetuate or heal deep structures of racial injustice and inequality.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“And this constant access to innumerable words can lead us to see them as both too important and not important enough. On one hand, we give too much weight to words. We confuse the pursuit of justice—the slow work of building or transforming institutions and systems—with using the right hashtag or rattling off an opinion on social media or venting rage or virtue signaling. It’s not that hashtagging or using social media are irredeemable practices. But social media is never a neutral tool; it shapes how we see the world—and how we speak and act in it. Ironically, it can lead us to greater disengagement even as we consume more and more information about the world. We can become too quick to speak or write, and too slow to listen, understand, and respond with depth and creative action. The omnipresence of words can also cheapen them and render them weightless. Now, with blogs and social media, almost anyone can be a published writer, on any subject, with the simple stroke of a key. Mass communication is constantly at our fingertips, and with it comes a temptation to rush too quickly to respond—in public, with words—to any and every event. All of us, each day, every moment, can be buried under the weight of thousands of hot takes. But in the midst of an abundance of words, we can lose our care with words; we can lose meaningful argument and wisdom.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“If the ultimate goal is to speak the truth in love, I must evaluate my heart. Do I love the people I’m engaged with? Do I long to see them flourishing in the Lord, or do I simply wish to be right? If they’ve said something hurtful, am I working toward forgiveness?”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“A herald’s words do not actually save anyone. Rather, a herald’s job is to be a messenger, to proclaim someone and something else. Heralds are stock characters—archetypes—in literature. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Hagrid is the herald; his arrival announces that reality is nothing like Harry thought and a new story is about to begin. In “Cinderella,” the herald carried an invitation to the ball. In ancient Greek mythology, Hermes was the herald of the gods. In ancient Rome, a herald would come into town to announce a new king or a new law or an important event—a royal wedding, a battle won, an enemy defeated. Heralds announce a new reality. Writers seek to proclaim truthfully what is and what can be. Christian writers are heralds; we understand our task as heralding the new reality of the kingdom of God—the wedding feast of the Lamb, a battle won through resurrection, death defeated. We herald that another reality has crashed into our own. We announce the end of the story. We whisper, speak, shout—in sentence and verse—that all things are wrecked and all things will be made new.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“We are members of families, employees of businesses, and citizens of countries whose goals and aspirations are frequently sub-Christian. When those differences are unjust or evil, we need to distinguish ourselves from them. But where possible, we should gather near, identify common ground, and draw lines as sparingly as possible. Salt should not remain in the saltshaker. A lamp should not be placed under a bushel. Christians should not fail to affirm the good, true, and beautiful wherever we see it, even if it emerges from sources with whom we would otherwise disagree. We need to travel together, even in our differences. Living in the world means seeking common ground with people and pursuits that are not always gospel-centered. For the adventurer, this is welcome news, because it allows us to ask different questions. What might God be doing in this situation? With what struggles can I empathize? What bridges can be built? Where might the kingdom of God be manifesting?”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

“In addition, we learn from the Hebrew Scriptures that the people of God were often in exile, forcibly removed from their homeland. While in exile, they were permitted to grieve and lament that they were not yet home—that the world in which they found themselves did not acknowledge their God and was not designed to support their way of life. But they were not to give up their way of life or cease to acknowledge their God. Rather, they were called to remain and live distinctively as God’s holy people (as evidenced by such things as their worship, their ways of eating and dressing, and their love of God and neighbor). But neither were God’s exiled people called by God to turn the nations in which they lived into Israel. They were not, for example, to try to establish Babylon as God’s holy nation or to think that its laws or ways of life would reflect their convictions. Nor were they to abandon the places in which they found themselves. God did not call them to be so secluded as his holy people that they lacked concern for the cities where they were living or the peoples around them.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference