First Episode: White Christianity and Racism-the Story of Elward Ellis
The first episode is about Keller’s seminary days back in Gordon-Conwell. While he was a student at Gordon-Conwell, Keller met an African American seminarian named Elward Ellis, along with his future wife Kathy Kristy. At a dinner table, Ellis gave them (who were not married yet) a shocking advice, which was basically that all whites are racists. Dumbfounded by the remark, Keller came to his sense, asking Ellis why that was so, to which Ellis’ response was even more shocking. “Oh, you don’t mean to be, and you don’t want to be, but you are. You can’t really help it.” He said, for example, “When black people do things in a certain way, you say, “Well, that’s your culture.” But when white people do things in a certain way, you say, ‘That’s just the right way to do things.’ You don’t realize you really have a culture. You are blind to how many of your beliefs and practices are cultural.”
Through this conversation, not only was Keller shocked, he also could not help agreeing with Ellis, as he made a personal confession in the book. As it were, Keller went through a kind of self-examination for his own culture through this particular conversation. To say nothing of the fact that the American evangelical culture back in the 70s was not astute enough to see through its own biases, I would dare to say that for those of us living in the 21st century not much has changed. The way of the gospel examining our lives enough to subvert its ways of doing things, exhorting us to see things afresh through the gospel, thereby restoring the organically subversive vision of the gospel, is far from coming true.
The Second Episode: The Gospel of Justification and Its Inherent Vision for Social Justice-Easely Shelton’s Grace
Before Keller planted the now Redeemer Presbyterian in 1989, he pastored in a small rural town called Hopewell in Virginia. Here Keller experienced firsthand through a man named Easley Shelton that there is a direct relationship between a person’s grasp of God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor. Of course this came inadvertently to Keller, for he said in the book that all he did was preaching the classic message of the gospel. Thus, the change in Shelton’s life was also an unexpected gift to Keller, for he witnessed how a person changed when God’s grace touched him or her as deeply as possible. This is how the story goes. When Shelton began to grasp the gospel of grace, he immediately was able to get out of his moralistic tendency which controlled his life by then. No longer was he passing judgment on people by how moral they were, nor by how passionate they were about ‘living up to God’s standards,’ for he finally began to see that the gospel had nothing to do with such things. Seeing this much change is already shocking (imagine yourself as a pastor in a church seeing someone who used to be moralistic and pharisaic going through such drastic changes!), yet Keller heard even more shocking confession coming out of his mouth: “You know, I have been a racist all my life.” To this unexpected confession, Keller said that he was even more surprised, for at that time Keller never preached on the inherent connection between the gospel and social justice. In other words, Shelton himself put together by the grace of God how powerfully driving the gospel is toward social justice. To be more precise, it was through the aid of the Holy Spirit. On a personal note, I would like to point out that Keller connects such experiences of grace to something aesthetic, i.e., the beauty of God’s grace. As some of you might know, I submitted in my doctoral statement of purpose that I hoped to study theological aesthetics more deeply, which came from Keller. (Of course now I go beyond Keller, focusing upon Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose theological aesthetics spearheaded in pioneering contemporary theological aesthetics.) One of Keller’s theses here in the book is that when a person is fully grasped by the beauty of God’s grace, that experience itself will cultivate in her a desire to pursue justice.
Now, I will examine how Keller argues for the inherent connection between the doctrine of justification by grace and motivation for social justice work. Afterwards, I will give some thoughts to why the doctrine has been abandoned by both conservative and progressive camps (for the conservatives, while they still seem to take the doctrine seriously, yet blind to its more profound implications, being only interested in defending what they see as orthodox teachings, which is, according to Keller, not really orthodox at all. On the other hand, for the progressives, since they thought of the doctrine as outdated, they literally abandoned it.)
The gospel of being justified by grace and Social Justice? The gospel of being justified by grace = Social Justice?
As he said before, Keller argues that the doctrine of justification has been abandoned by almost all Protestants, regardless of the conservative or progressive camps. While the conservatives might wish to refute this claim, what they do with the doctrine is never fully cognizant of the doctrine’s implications on the Christian life in community, but confined only to the dimension of an individual Christian life, Keller declares the doctrine to be dead in both camps. As Keller makes his case, he draws upon a conversation between a Yale theologian and evangelical Miroslav Volf and an urban ministry worker Mark Gornik. Gornik says to Volf, “The doctrine of justification by grace contains some untapped resources for healing the blight of the inner citis.” Working in Sandtown, an inner city of Baltimore, for the past decade or so, Gornik came to see how the doctrine was able to pull off such healing. I am borrowing here Volf’s saying quoted in Keller. “They deem it generally useless or at least unhelpful when it comes to healing even lesser social pathologies than the cycle of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.” Keller continues, “Others retain their belief, and in fact fiercely defend it, but Volf had not heard any proponent of the classic teaching apply it as Gornik had. And here is the reason why from Gornik.
Imagine that you have no job, no money, you live cut off from the rest of society in a world ruled by poverty and violence, your skin is the “wrong” color—and you have no hope that any of this will change. Around you is a society governed by iron law of achievement. Its gilded goods are flaunted before your eyes on TV screens, and in a thousand ways society tells you every day that you are worthless because you have no achievement. You are a failure, and you know that you will continue to be a failure because there is no way to achieve tomorrow what you have not achieved today. Your dignity is shattered and your soul is enveloped in the darkness of despair. But the gospel tells you that you are not defined by outside forces. It tells you that you count; even more, that you are loved unconditionally and infinitely, irrespective of anything you have achieved or failed to achieve. Imagine now this gospel not simply proclaimed but embodied in a community. Justified by sheer grace, it seeks to “justify” by grace those declared “unjust” by a society’s implacable law of achievement. This is justification by grace, proclaimed and practiced. A dead doctrine? Hardly!
Keller’s logic, Volf’s logic, and Gornik’s logic are all crystal clear. If the doctrine of justification by grace is rightly proclaimed, and people like Easley Shelton pop up everywhere in many cities, then those cities will be renewed. Restoration will happen, as if God spoke to Jeremiah in Babylonian exile, “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7). This is Keller’s, Gornik’s and Volf’s vision of urban renewal through the doctrine of justification by grace, within which the doctrine is deeply embedded. As is shown here, the proclamation of the gospel always goes beyond one individual’s decision to attend church. The problem is, as Keller has pointed out, how much pastors and church leaders see the magnificent vision of the gospel, for the degree and depth of their grasp of the gospel will be directly proportionate to the degree and depth of lay people’s grasp of the gospel. Of course there is always an exception, like Easely Shelton. If this is the case, why has the doctrine of justification been abandoned by the church? Despite its explosive potential, why has the church set the doctrine aside to the corners? This is one of my research topics in the future.
A Historical Brief Regarding the Abandonment of the Doctrine of Justification by Grace
In the preface to the book, Keller briely goes into explaining how the doctrine of justification has been abandoned by both conservative and progressive Protestants (at least in the American context). He begins with Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement. A German Baptist minister, Rauschenbusch pastored in 1880s New York, being deeply disappointed in the traditional evangelism and its practitioners’ indifference to the poor, while focusing only upon saving their souls. Thus, determined to minister to both “body and soul,” Rauschenbusch initiated the Social Gospel movement. Despite such positive change, the implications of his theological renovation was enormous. Rauschenbusch ended up rejecting the doctrines of Scripture and atonement, attributing the primary blame to them. To make matters worse, the conservative Christians who saw this had an impression that “doing justice” would necessarily lead to distorting the sound teaching and losing spiritual dynamism, wrote Keller. However, as Keller has shown so persuasively, this is not necessarily the case. Rather, the problem consists in not contextualizing doctrine and interpreting it in that particular context. In response to Rauschenbusch, Keller brings up Jonathan Edwards (as always!), particularly his sermon “The Duty of Charity to the Poor.” Keller’s explanation of Edwards’ understanding of social justice is quite intriguing, which I will not go into detail here, recommending my readers to read it themselves. What I am interested in is the part Keller did not go into more closely, which he could not do because of his circumstances as a pastor, and that is how the doctrine of justification has come to be understood as it does now. Keller simply devotes one or two pages to explaining this, yet the history of the doctrine itself goes way beyond one or two pages. While Alister McGrath’s masterpiece Iustitia Dei could be a good resource, I personally would like to do research the fundamental motivation which the doctrine provides to the Christian from historical and practical theological perspectives. And that is where I think I need to fill in, where pastors like Keller is unable to delve deeply into. For my next review, I will continues my series on Keller, reviewing his Encounters with Jesus. Thank you!