An Unexpected Message and a Tim Keller Sermon from 1996

I’m working on final edits to The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life this weekend, and so I should not have even been on Facebook to see the message when it came in, but…well, I was on Facebook.

Someone on Facebook I don’t know well, but who seems really wonderful, sent me a message sharing a Tim Keller sermon from 1996, and suggested I would like it.

Well, I did. You should listen to it. I could go on and on about Tim (and I have), but this sermon gets added to the pile of evidence of all that he brought to us in the way of biblical wisdom and insight.

In the sermon, he cites an article from The Spectator that was published in 1987. I have not shared much about The Spirit of Our Politics with you yet, but an excerpt from the Spectator article reminded me of a key idea in the introduction to my book. I’ll share with you here that excerpt in part to perhaps whet your appetite for my book, but also because it’s just such an important point.

This the 20th century, more than all its predecessors, does not understand. Huge advances in areas of knowledge, prodigious technological achievements, theories which claim perfectly to enlighten what previously was obscure, all these combine to dazzle men with their own wisdom and to convince them that it can only be a matter of time before every awkwardness can be 'ironed out'. For the believers in perfectibility and progress, the continuing shortcomings of humanity are due to the malice or ignorance or superstition of opponents, which will eventually be defeated, and not to anything inherent in the human condition. Such believers do not confine themselves to science. Politics, too, will provide the solution. Communists, fascists, libertarians alike believe that if only their theory were accepted and enacted, all would be well. They think that there is a 'correct' analysis of society, as if society were a machine and you only had to be clever enough to remove the spanner in the works for it to function perfectly.

Because of these beliefs, the world lives in a ferment of extravagant hope and bitter disappointment. Every day, politicians promise health and wealth and peace; newspapers announce a cure for cancer, demand an end to crime or a 'crash programme' to stop poverty or sickness or cruelty to children. And every day, politicians and newspapers, forced to admit that people are still poor and ill, still fighting one another and dying, desperately blame their enemies for such wickedness.

I’ve spent the weekend (and the past year) with this manuscript. I’ve said it before, and I mean it all the more now…I can’t wait to be able to share this book with you in just over six months.