Tim Keller is the Drunken Master of Evangelicalism
It’s Monday at 9AM, and I have already seen what is likely to be the dumbest thing all week. I don’t know if the tweet is new, and I don’t particularly care.
Making its way into the annals of retarded things spoken by super sthmarrrt people daily cataloged at Protestia is Tim Keller’s tweet extolling the virtue of the City. As I’ve pointed out since at least 2016, “Tim Keller’s tweets make as much sense as a Jayden Smith tweet read backward.” My co-host at Polemics Report, David Morrill, created a Tim Keller Random Tweet Generator which, although it creates tweets of total nonsense, regularly fools Keller fans into thinking they are indeed his own very profound wisdomisms.
As I have also previously pointed out, if New York City was a person and Tim Keller a dog, he would be humping its leg. His love for “the city” has arisen to the level of fetish, and it’s clear that Socinianism thrives wherever there are more strip clubs than churches. I’ve refuted Tim Keller’s City infatuation, and precisely why it’s the opposite of the Bible’s Theology of the City (as Keller calls it), in a series of articles at Pulpit & Pen.
Keller’s incessant twitter-belches of odorous nonsense continue to earn applauds from men who I assume wear skinny jeans and scarves even when it’s summer time. Yet, if I could summarize Keller in one verse of Scripture it would be this one…
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,” (Romans 1:22).
Those who pretend that they understand Keller’s brain-flatuluence, let alone approve of it, largely fit into two categories of men. The first category are men who generally hate God and the supernaturality of Scripture and the second category is comprised of ignorant younger men who want to appear smart by nodding in agreement with Tim Keller.
Anyway, here’s the dumbest tweet I’ve seen today.
Keller has repeated this line, “…we should recognize how much the city brings the gospel to us,” in numerous tweets over the last several years. It echoes an urban-central evangelism focus of the Young, Restless, and Reformed which has amounted to little more than young Calvinistas pitching their tents toward Sodom.
Mark Driscoll and his Acts29 Network (before he was summarily excommunicated for being what discernment blogs told you all along he was) started this urban infatuation in church planting, and it was later adopted by the North American Mission Board and its SEND initiative. Incidentally, NAMB has been planting almost exclusively “minority” churches with Cooperative Program funds with pastors who do not identify with the Southern Baptist Faith and Message or general orthodoxy (and most call the SBC “RaCIsT” and give the middle finger when they’re done taking the Cooperative Program welfare stamps).
Meanwhile, pastors in rural, frontier and pioneer areas have been treated like they’re wasting their life in cushy little white church houses while the real pastor-warriors are building relationships while reading BibleLogos Reformed Platinum Edition at the corner Starbucks in between race riots. Again, for more elaboration, read A Refutation of the Theology of the City.
In previous tweets, Keller hasn’t explained how the city “brings the gospel to us.” All that I’m aware the little blue dots on the map (by the way, Keller is a registered Democrat) bring us is the wafting smell of bong water, the spread of syphilis, and dirty heroin needles brought in on the ocean tides. Oh, and I suppose it brings us hoity-toity, soul-numbing abstract “art,” dancing fairies as worship accouterments, and a plague of marching hoodrats and spoiled gender studies students setting fires to dumpsters every time a new CRT messianic martyr is made by getting righteously gunned down by law enforcement.
But in this tweet, Keller thankfully explains how the city brings the gospel to us…the images of God it contains.
In typical Keller fashion, his misty folksisms cause fog to set around the Twittersphere. Instantly, clashes develop between people who are (1) pretty sure his tweet means nothing because he’s a senile old Marxist (2) pretty sure his tweet is clever but sinister and (3) those who ask their wife’s permission to like the tweet because, after all, Tim Keller is sthmarrrt.
As I see it, Keller can mean only one of two things, assuming he’s not just a senile old Marxist (the operative word is just, because he is indeed a senile old Marxist).
First, Keller could be referring to the artistic representations of God in the faggy, pinky-extended world of museum life. New York City, after all, boasts 83 museums in its five boroughs. Woke Evangelicalism, going back to the days of the now-defunct Emergent Church, consider “creativity” to be a spiritual gift (newsflash: it’s not) and art to be a means to “reach people” for Jesus.
This is plausible, because Keller has been cited as saying, “The church needs artists because without art, we cannot reach the world.”
Absolutely. Where would we be without The Holy Virgin Mary, which in 1999 graced the Brooklyn Museum of Art and depicted the mother of Jesus bare-breasted and covered in feces, with angels floating around her in the shape of human genitals? Or where would we be with the New York art exhibit depicting Christ being eaten by ants? Thank you, City, for bringing us the Gospel.
I might argue that this definitely is not what Keller means by his tweet, considering he supposedly is Reformed (he is not) and holds to the Westminster Confession of Faith (he does not), which takes a literal view of the Second Commandment that forbids artistic representations of God. At this point, it’s easier to state where Keller does stand with his Confession than where he doesn’t, so this interpretation of his tweet is plausible.
Secondly, however, and this is more plausible in my view, Keller is speaking of people. You know, the Imago Dei, as the hoity-toityists like to call it in order to pretend that they know Latin.
The theological problem here is that despite the fact that every human is made in God’s image, that image is a fallen one. The Bible never speaks of humanity in positive terms, but by a realistic anthropology, negative terms. And the Bible never, ever speaks of humans in large numbers congregating in the same place in the positive.
The first city in recorded history was the Land of Nod, founded by a murderer, Cain. Then came Lamech, the first polygamist, who continued to build cities in the lineage of Cain. And then came Nimrod, who built Babel and Ninevah. Please note that these cities did not preach the Gospel, but stoned the prophets.
The Bible’s view of the city is pessimistic, negative, and dour. My own rule, in keeping with the Biblical view of the city, is to never live in a town large enough to host a gay pride parade. There is probably a better criterion for choosing a place to live, but I don’t want to see Keller’s dancing sugar plum fairies prancing down Central Avenue.
Ultimately, Keller’s love for the city is an outpouring of his love for worldliness. He is infatuated with the modern stylings of God-hatred and is enamored with the fads of a fallen world. Keller has not won New York City, but New York City has certainly won Tim Keller.
Meanwhile, here I am on the Montana prairie, looking out over the seedlings of wheat recently turned green by the spring rain, which will soon become the amber waves of grain in late summer. This week, I have a business trip in Great Falls and will pass through the purple mountains majesty and watch the antelope off the interstate for my entertainment, while being busy avoiding deer like New Yorkers have to avoid potholes.
I don’t see very many images of God outside the city. But I sure see his handiwork, and it makes the art scene of New York City and its track-marked denizens pale in glory by comparison.
Tim Keller really is the Drunken Master of evangelicalism. What he says makes little sense. Its gnostic feel, the uncertainty of what he ever means, and the latent hope that if properly understood it might be esoteric, continues to attract people to stare at his naked frame under the suspicion that his new clothes might just be too glorious to see.
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Amen to Romans 1:22.
Let’s also not forget:
Isaiah 5:21: “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes And clever in their own sight!”
Luke 6:26: “Woe to you when all the people speak well of you; for their fathers used to treat the false prophets the same way.”
John 12:42-43: “42 Nevertheless many even of the rulers believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God.”
1 Corinthians 1:18-20: “18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.’ 20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? “
Who’s the writer of this article?
I’ve spent a lot of time in NYC and the god Keller’s repeatedly seeing in this fetid cesspool of crime and corruption isn’t one I want to have a beer with…
I’m surprised there aren’t more comments on this–I enjoyed his sardonic humor. I have listened to Keller on several occasions and he always seems to be winging it– so many um and uhs. for a person who has been preaching for years, i think he spends more time at conferences and speaking engagements, than pastoring. Keller is a false teacher. Anyone who says Genesis is poetry and a ‘day doesn’t necessarily mean a day’ –when God clearly had Moses write ‘this is the ACCOUNT’. (Genesis 2) the use of this specific word tells us it’s not figurative or symbolic, but FACT. We don’t have to excuse the six day creation–time was irrelevant since God created it OUTSIDE of time. He was not only creating the universe and our world, He was creating TIME. Also, Keller attempts to combine evolution with creation when even science itself discounts this–God of course knows all things, so knew this theory would come about and he cleared it up with one simple sentence: “Everything was made after its OWN KIND. What is science? That which can be observed and is repeatable. Also the discovery of DNA blew evolution out of the water–never mind that no transitional fossils have ever been discovered. In any case, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve read anything, that gave me more insight–how true what the writers says about ‘the City’ and God is revealed in His own handiwork, not man’s. Of course the ability to create art is given to humans by God, but as the writer said there are evil men (humankind) who twist what is beautiful and good. PS Kellers twitterisms are to keep him out there, like a McDonalds or Target commercial–that’s why it doesn’t matter what he says–he says everything in that same way–there’s a formula to it, a ‘the musicality’ and adding the question makes it sound more profound.