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Category Archives: Moralism

Moral-Performance Narrative

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Keller Quoter in Humilty, Humor, Moralism, Religion, The Gospel

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Tim Keller

Another mark of the moral-performance narrative is a constant need to find fault, win arguments, and prove that all opponents are not just mistaken but dishonest sellouts. However, when the gospel is deeply grasped, our need to win arguments is removed, and our language becomes gracious. We don’t have to ridicule our opponents, but instead we can engage them respectfully.

People who live in the moral-performance narrative use sarcastic, self-righteous putdown humor, or have no sense of humor at all. Lewis speaks of ‘the unsmiling concentration upon Self, which is the mark of hell.’ The gospel, however, creates a gentle sense of irony. We find a lot to laugh at, starting with our own weaknesses. They don’t threaten us anymore because our ultimate worth is not based on our record or performance.

Martin Luther had the basic insight that moralism is the default mode of the human heart. Even Christians who believe the gospel of grace on one level can continue to operate as if they have been saved by their works. In ‘The Great Sin’ in Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, ‘If we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the Devil.’

– Tim Keller

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Two Lost Sons

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Keller Quoter in Jesus, Moralism, Religion

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The Prodigal God, Tim Keller

Throughout the centuries, when this text is taught in church or religious education programs, the almost exclusive focus has been on how the father freely receives his penitent younger son. The first time I heard the parable, I imagined Jesus’s original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. We sentimentalize this parable if we do that. The targets of this story are not ‘wayward sinners’ but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them. It is a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells this story primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.

No, the original listeners were not melted into tears by this story but rather they were thunder-struck, offended, and infuriated. Jesus’s purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories. Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation. His story reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it also condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms. Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.

– Tim Keller

 


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Purifying Your Heart with the Gospel

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by Keller Quoter in Love, Moralism, Religion, The Gospel

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Tim Keller

Here’s how you know you’ve purified your heart with the gospel. You love other Christians without deceit, without hypocrisy, without envy, and without slander of any kind. That’s how you know. Let me put it a couple of ways. The reason love is the acid test of whether or not you believe the gospel is it is very possible to have both doctrinal purity and moral scrupulosity for other motivations and out of other forces besides the gospel.

It’s quite possible to be moral out of tradition, out of nostalgia, out of loyalty to your family, out of temperament, out of fastidiousness of conscience. There are all kinds of ways in which you could look at a person who’s very moral, and a person could say, ‘Well that proves that person is a Christian. That person really understands the message of Christianity.’ What Peter is saying here, and what the Bible says is no. A loving spirit is a far better acid test of whether you understand the gospel than moral scrupulosity.

– Tim Keller

 

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