This book is the second of Tim Keller’s on the topic of apologetics. Tim Keller has been dealing with topics as personal as marriage, prayer, the self-identity of Christians, reaching to the topics as public as justice, idolatry, and preaching. The first book of his on apologetics is Reason for God, which directly jumps into a host of important questions over the relationship between suffering/evil and the Christian faith, that between faith and reason, and the like. This second book deals rather indirectly with apologetics through engaging with modern secularism. In particular, the book aims to show why the Christian faith is more “rational” than secularism as a comprehensive system of life.
The book is largely divided in three parts. In part one, Keller embarks on defining what secularism is, moving on to point out the loopholes of secularism. In part two, in light of the overview in part one, Keller goes into the following seven important topics: the meaning of life, happiness (satisfaction), freedom, identity, hope, morality, and justice. What Keller does is a comparative analysis between secularism and the Christian faith (or any religious faith that acknowledges the transcendental world). In part three, building on the previous discussions, Keller surveys a contour of the Christian faith. Since this book is not a detailed introduction to the Christian faith, but an invitation to think through secularism vis-à-vis Christianity (or religion in general), part three is rather brief.
In part one, Keller points out the limit of secularism to be its understanding of human rationality as scientistic and reductionistic. As is well known already, for secularism human rationality is rational only insofar as it is scientistic and reductionistic, yet the problem with the secular thesis of human rationality is that such thesis cannot be proven through scientistic and reductionistic means. What’s worse is that it can lay out little explanations for such “belief” in science and reductionistic method. In contrast, the Christian faith encompasses the human rationality in all its functions rather comprehensively.
In part two, Keller explores important topics of public character in a comparative fashion. Regarding the meaning of life, if there is no God, then the human person has to create her own meaning of life. While Keller does concede to the practical effects of meaning creating, ultimately it falls short of coming off as something genuine, making such meanings valuable enough to risk people’s lives. In the past, people have been risking their lives over what they believe is true and right, but will this happen to those who know that they have created the meanings of their lives? Keller doubt it, and so do I. “You might decide to simply have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately… you can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time,” but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live” (68). Keller does the same argumentative work as regards morality.
Keller makes his case very proactively all throughout the book, ranging from happiness (satisfaction), identity, and freedom, all comparatively analyzing the views held by secularism and those by Christianity. As for happiness, secularism says that fulfilling all your desires will make you happy, yet no other philosophy or religion says something close to that. For Christianity, the disordered loves in the human heart is what is problematic, so the solution for true satisfaction would be setting our orders of love right, all the way from God to created things, according to importance.
When it comes to identity, the secular theories say that building one’s identity has to set up an other against whom I build my identity, so such theories necessarily presuppose exclusion. However, Christianity says that you have to base your identity not in anything else but the love of God, which does not exclude anyone or anything. Rather, such love of God shown in the life and death of Jesus Christ is that which was pushed to the corner, i.e., excluded from the center. If anybody professes to believe such a God, then she cannot build her identity around excluding others. (Of course this is not to say that Christianity has never excluded anyone. What Keller is saying is if one is to be faithful to the gospel message, then one’s identity cannot be built around exclusion.) The same goes for freedom. Secular understanding of freedom has been widely criticized among sociologists and other social scientists. In their understanding, freedom is always freedom to do something, yet secularism understands freedom as in being free from. That means that members of a particular society operating in such principle cannot find out what the human good is for them. This is why Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, says that contemporary society has an extraordinary inarticulacy.
In part three, Keller suggests the possibility of accepting Christianity. What Keller goes over in this part is not uncommon in other books dealing with similar topics, so readers familiar with introductory contents of the Christian faith might as well skip this part. Overall, this book will be a good guide to those who set out to survey the relationship between secularism and Christianity.
Lastly, I will suggest two imports of this book, ending with a potential weakness of the book. As for the imports of the book, personal growth in faith and public faith are on the table. As for the potential weakness, Keller significantly lacks in exploring other religious faiths. Let me lay out one by one here.
Second, this book is important in terms of the defense of public faith. Many contemporary churches (especially Korean churches) are losing their places in the public realm. Taking pride in God’s grace and the gospel righteousness, Christians tend to look down upon non-Christians. The world no longer looks up to the Christian church as a respectable dialogue partner, and the church isolates itself from the world on its own will. But the public character of the Christian faith compels us to go out to the public realm and to engage in dialogue with non-Christians. It is in this regard that Keller’s book stands out. Discussing at length such topics as Keller explored here is in and of itself of paramount importance.
This book is all the more important because it is not written just to be celebratory about our faith, but a product of real engagements between Christians and non-Christians. Public faith is increasingly becoming a necessity, as the Christian church is losing its credibility in the public realms of society.
Last but not the least is Keller’s analyses in the book do not devote sufficient space to inviting other religious faiths. Keller himself seems to be aware of this weakness, since he explicitly mentions in the beginning of part three that he does not engage with other religions enough. Despite such weakness, this book is worthwhile reading if the reader is interested in surveying secularism vis-à-vis Christianity.