The book of Job is the last episode filmed by Tim Keller for the “Discovering the Gospel in Every Book of the Bible” video series.
In light of scripture, and with the night of painful isolation all around, I want to argue that we need to reimagine three things: First, how we operate at church; second, how we conceive of family; and third, how we relate to singleness. The loneliness pandemic is severe. We Christians know the cure. And we are disobeying Jesus if we fail to administer it.
While this series was still being filmed, Dr. Keller completed a few additional episodes that will be released in the coming months. In this series Dr. Keller shows how each book of the Bible has threads of the gospel.
When I asked Tim to speak about the importance of porches in American culture, he said, “there are those who see that the forecourt provided by the culture has gone away and now the culture mainly creates hostility to Christianity.”
In this new video series Tim Keller looks at each book of the Bible and finds threads of the story of the gospel.
For almost twenty years after the end of WWII church attendance surged to its highest levels in history, and Christianity seemed to be thriving in the U.S. But it was in the last 15 years that what Kuyper foresaw and what Europe experienced seems to have begun here. Church attendance began to decline across the board, especially among younger people. And the cultural institutions began to take an overtly hostile and adversarial stance toward traditional Christian faith.
If you think of a jar of pebbles being shaken, the shaking unsettles the status quo. It creates space, at least for a time, until things settle again. Similarly, when we are shaken there’s a kind of metaphysical space, a shaking up of ideas and deeply-held desires. I think we are seeing this all around us in this cultural moment, post-pandemic, but also in the midst of the shaking of the other major cultural events we have experienced, people are reevaluating where they live, how they work, and their relationships.
It is clear that for some people ‘faith deconstruction’ is just that. They have come to see the historic teachings and doctrines of the church as crafted to make us pawns and suppress our personhood. They are walking away from both the church and the traditional Christian faith altogether. For them, deconstruction—a dismantling—is the end-point of the process.
A short talk from Tim Keller on How the DNA of the Gospel Applies to Cultures All Over the World and how global leaders are using the DNA to share the gospel globally.
The vision cannot be simply for a restoration of churches and Christian institutions to their former states of strength. That is to mistake means for ends. Our vision should be that the astonishing biblical possibilities for the church as the community of the Spirit would be realized in U.S. society in ways it never has before.