The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 3
Oct. 1st, 2014 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimixThis is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 2, we examined the argument from evil.
Chapter 3
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Keller tries to defend the squelching of individual thought in Christianity. (As my book club friend puts it, "Thinking is hard, so we did it for you. You don't have to think anymore.")
pp. 36-37. Keller presents the common view that people must figure out their own purpose in life, and sets up Christianity in opposition to that view, in preparation for defending that opposition.
My book club friend points out that Christians have to figure out their purpose, just like everyone else. ("Dedicating your life to god" doesn't solve everything. You still have to decide what you intend to accomplish, and the manner in which you will do it.)
p. 37. "Inspired by Foucault, many say that all truth-claims are power plays."
This vague attribution appears to be missing context. A religion or demagogue claiming truth is different from a scientist or logician claiming truth (excluding those who have been bought to lend authority to products and ideologies). I find it unlikely that "many say" it in the broadest possible sense (an easily targeted straw man), which is the only sense in which Keller addresses the statement. Note that Keller still knew better than to attribute this sentiment to Foucault, who wrote the book on truth and power (literally).
p. 38. "If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement."
This is the same mischaracterization that Keller committed in Chapter 1, p. 9-11, where he pretended that "claims about religion" were self-referential due to being an instance of "religious belief". (Note that I do not support the sentiment attributed to Freud; I simply note that Keller has failed to disprove it.)
pp. 38-40. Keller addresses the criticism that Christianity isn't completely inclusive, because "Christianity requires particular beliefs in order to be a member of its community." He spends a while explaining that all communities require some bond of belief.
My first thought went thusly: "I have no problem with his reasoning; I just don't see why it's necessary at all. Who even makes that criticism? I don't know anybody who would think it wrong that a community defined by its beliefs requires its members to hold those beliefs. If you don't hold those beliefs, then you have no reason to desire inclusion, and thus no reason to resent exclusion."
But that was an overly simplistic knee-jerk reaction, made from the privileged position of someone who holds none of the defining beliefs of Christianity, and whose need for community is satisfied elsewhere.
A story goes that, upon being told that the Faro game he was playing was crooked, "Canada Bill" Jones replied, "I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town!" Just let that sink in. The need to participate in a community can be stronger than the knowledge that the community will cheat you, or revile you. What about homosexuals who believe in Jesus? What if they live in a town where both churches are run by bigots? It seems a shame that they should be excluded from the only game in town just because they enjoy some good, old-fashioned sodomy, when that same church will welcome abusers, embezzlers, and people who eat figs.
When a church member is convicted of a crime, does the church kick them out? Of course not. They garner sympathy for their ordeal, along with prayers that the whole affair will bring them closer to Jesus, or at least blow over quickly. It doesn't matter whether the criminal acted against the teachings of the faith: The church is there for them. Unless the crime is sodomy. (Well, it's okay in the church's book for a priest or bishop to have a predilection for altar boys, but any parishioner who screws a consenting adult of the same sex is cast out and banished to hell, occasionally with an express ticket courtesy of someone's pickup truck or baseball bat.)
The point is that, when someone objects to Christianity excluding people due to religious beliefs, they probably aren't objecting to the church not welcoming non-Christians. They are objecting to the church using the pretext of religious belief to barely mask bigotry, in order to exclude certain Christians. (No matter their differences, people are by definition Christian if they accept the Nicene Creed (God made us, Jesus died for us, yada yada). Butt sex is not a religious belief.)
Because this is a more specific criticism than the pointless one that the book explicitly addresses, I will understand if the reader finds it, although related, ultimately irrelevant to the topic of Keller's logic.
p. 41. "At the current rate of growth, within thirty years Christians will constitute 30 percent of the Chinese population of 1.5 billion."
I have no copy of the book cited in the footnote, so I can't see where he's getting his numbers, but there are no numbers that would reasonably support this. (Unreasonably, one could start with the old and discredited official census, which grossly underestimated the number of religious believers of all types, followed by any later survey, to make a case for any religion at all undergoing explosive growth in China.) Recent estimates that I've found for Christianity in China range from 3.2% (2010 survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) to 5.1% (current CIA World Factbook, date of estimate not stated). With such small numbers, and such a wide margin of error, there can no basis for deducing a rate of growth anywhere near 1% per year. (Also, that rate would imply that there were no Christians in China until about five to seven years ago.) Somebody had to fudge the numbers in an utterly unrealistic way in order to make this claim.
pp. 41-42. "Sanneh argues that secularism with its anti-supernaturalism and individualism is much more destructive of local cultures and 'African-ness' than Christianity is. In the Bible, Africans read of Jesus's power over supernatural and spiritual evil and of his triumph over it on the cross. When Africans become Christians, their African-ness is converted, completed, and resolved, not replaced with European-ness or something else."
This boils down to "Africans are right to be spiritual but wrong in how to do it, so we fix them. This is way better for preserving their culture than converting them into atheists would be." I suppose the insult to African religions is unavoidable in a Christian context: It's a case of "I'm just calling it like I see it."
Keller's (and Sanneh's) contrast between the destructive influences of Christianity and "secularism" fails in many ways. First, "secular" doesn't mean "anti-supernatural". It just refers to things that have nothing to do with religion. Keller is stretching the definition in order to make it easier to attack.
In a footnote, Keller mentions (but then downplays it and asserts the opposite) that "Sanneh and Andrew F. Walls do not deny that missionaries from one culture (e.g., European) usually impose their own culture's form of Christianity on the new converts." The word "usually" is slippery hedge language here: Missionaries cannot possibly convert people to the amalgamated form of religion that those people will eventually create, before it is created. They can only impose whatever form of Christianity they already know.
Next, becoming secular, or even atheist, doesn't destroy a culture. Do you know what happens when a Jew stops believing in god? They become a secular Jew. They continue to participate in Jewish culture, do Jewish things (including discussing theology!) and eat Jewish foods (plus the occasional ham sandwich, if they're so inclined). They don't have to worry about what god thinks anymore, but that was always secondary to worrying about what their parents think, anyway.
More unfortunately, Keller downplays the destructiveness of Christianity in Africa. For a reprehensible example, Saving Africa's Witch Children is a documentary that describes the horrors inflicted upon children by evangelical priests controlling superstitious congregations: Thousands of children have been denounced as witches, and abandoned, tortured, mutilated, burned, and/or killed.
To be fair, The Reason For God was published in the same year that "Saving Africa's Witch Children" raised popular consciousness of these atrocities, so it is possible that Keller was unaware of them. However, the Lord's Resistance Army, a group originating in Uganda with beliefs in African mysticism and Christian fundamentalism, has been committing mass atrocities since 1995. From Wikipedia: "The LRA has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery, and forcing children to participate in hostilities."
Finally, for purposes of logic, all of these contrasts pale next to the simple fact that atheists do not send out missionaries to convert people. How can secularism or atheism destroy a culture more thoroughly than Christianity does, if people impose Christianity but nobody imposes secularism on that culture?
p. 43. Keller spends a while bragging about his church's unexpected appeal in Manhattan. He describes his churchgoers explaining that appeal to a stranger: "Not only that, but beliefs were held here in charity and with humility, making Manhattanites feel included and welcomed, even if they disagreed with some of Redeemer's beliefs."
This means that Keller gets what I said above, about how a church could accommodate people despite a difference in beliefs, thus belying his earlier assertion that it couldn't.
p. 44. Keller's talk of Christianity in Africa and Manhattan has been playing up its adaptability to local cultures, in order to downplay its role as "an enemy of pluralism and multiculturalism" (p. 40). Here, he claims that the things that his church emphasizes in order to appeal to Manhattanites are "grounded in historic Christian doctrine," and therefore "they are not simply marketing techniques".
My first thought: If those emphases are tailored to the local culture in order to win and keep members, as he has asserted, then their use is indeed a marketing technique. In fact, since nearly any value could be "grounded in historic Christian doctrine" (of which there is an awful lot), that historic quality cannot give us any information (such as advertising use) regarding that value.
My book club friend points out that Keller may have been trying to contrast his church's marketing techniques (which are incorporated into Christianity as he presents it, and thus are something more than "simply marketing techniques") with rock music, flashy signs, and other gimmicks employed solely for the purpose of attracting young people via pretense at modernity.
I concede that this is entirely plausible, though if it were indeed Keller's intention, he should have made it clear. (Several of Keller's arguments, so far, have been sufficiently disorganized that it was not immediately apparent what point he was trying to make.)
pp. 45-46. "Christianity is supposedly a limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our own beliefs and practices. Immanuel Kant defined an enlightened human being as one who trusts in his or her own power of thinking, rather than in authority or tradition." He counters by asserting that "... in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation." He describes a person diligently practicing piano, to the exclusion of many other activities, and explains that the loss of the freedom to do other things is what enables mastery of the piano.
This isn't an example of loss of freedom at all: It is an example of opportunity cost. In practicing piano instead of playing softball, the student is exercising the freedom to choose their activity, according to their own interests and judgment.
Keller makes a similar example of a fish, whose freedom to move and live is destroyed if we put it on the grass, thus proving that its restriction to water is what gives it freedom. I would sooner say that not being manhandled and "put" somewhere by humans is what gives it freedom. Fish have the freedom to choose water or land, despite the fact that one of those options is clearly superior. A restriction to the water, in taking away that freedom, would remove their ability to jump out of a drying tide pool and flop back into the sea.
So, Keller's attempt to dismiss concerns over freedom, by demonstrating that freedom requires restriction, falls flat.
My book club friend points out that Keller fails to present any of the many possible examples of good restrictions to freedom, such as laws against stealing and killing. (Which is not to say that these would in any way help his case regarding restriction of intellectual freedom.)
p. 47. "Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn't we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?"
That is a deceptive use of the word "discover," likely meant to make indoctrination sound more palatable. Discovery is an active process, which happens when one is free to explore. It would take a mind in a very unfortunate state to mistake indoctrination for discovery.
p. 47. "One of the most frequent statements I heard was that 'Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.' I always responded to the speakers by asking, 'Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?' They would invariably say, 'Yes, of course.' Then I would ask, 'Doesn't that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is 'there' that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?'"
My reaction was that, yes, some people clearly get morality wrong, but this is no refutation of the idea of individual morality. Some religions clearly get it wrong, too.
My book club friend points out, more aptly, that the rules people impose on each other — laws — are different from personal rules. The presence of one does not relieve us of the need for the other. I will add that, while we may wish to curtail people's freedom to harm other people, that is different from wishing to curtail their intellectual freedom to decide on their own morality. One is about actions, and the other is about thoughts.
pp. 47-49. Keller describes loving relationships as an example of gaining freedom through accepting restrictions. "If you want the 'freedoms' of love -- the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings - you must limit your freedom in many ways."
Here, he repeats his mistake regarding opportunity cost, and renders the whole section meaningless by referring to benefits as freedoms. His use of quotation marks indicates that he knows that he is using the word incorrectly.
p. 49. "At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be 'one way,' God's way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God -- there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me. While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us -- in his incarnation and atonement." (He refers to Jesus dying on the cross.)
Adjusting to humanity (itself a questionable interpretation of the story of Jesus' death) is different from adjusting to an individual. This argument does nothing at all to address concerns of a domineering, dehumanizing relationship with god.
pp. 49-50. Keller compares willingness to serve god with "your" willingness to serve your beloved, who is referred to as "her" throughout the paragraph.
Apparently, people (of either gender) who do not fall in love with women are not his target audience. (My book club friend suggests that this is just an unintentional expression of implicit sexism and heteronormativity. I expect she's right.) It is otherwise quite a lovely, if flawed, analogy. It illustrates an emotional justification for enjoying the lack of freedom that Christianity imposes. However, the "freedom" given up to serve a loved one is again just opportunity cost: You haven't lost your freedom; you simply choose to serve them because you'd rather do that than anything else. Christianity's restriction on intellectual freedom would, in a relationship, be a clear sign of abuse. (If you respect someone, you don't give them orders about what to think.)
Next week: Christian injustice.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 2, we examined the argument from evil.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Keller tries to defend the squelching of individual thought in Christianity. (As my book club friend puts it, "Thinking is hard, so we did it for you. You don't have to think anymore.")
pp. 36-37. Keller presents the common view that people must figure out their own purpose in life, and sets up Christianity in opposition to that view, in preparation for defending that opposition.
My book club friend points out that Christians have to figure out their purpose, just like everyone else. ("Dedicating your life to god" doesn't solve everything. You still have to decide what you intend to accomplish, and the manner in which you will do it.)
p. 37. "Inspired by Foucault, many say that all truth-claims are power plays."
This vague attribution appears to be missing context. A religion or demagogue claiming truth is different from a scientist or logician claiming truth (excluding those who have been bought to lend authority to products and ideologies). I find it unlikely that "many say" it in the broadest possible sense (an easily targeted straw man), which is the only sense in which Keller addresses the statement. Note that Keller still knew better than to attribute this sentiment to Foucault, who wrote the book on truth and power (literally).
p. 38. "If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement."
This is the same mischaracterization that Keller committed in Chapter 1, p. 9-11, where he pretended that "claims about religion" were self-referential due to being an instance of "religious belief". (Note that I do not support the sentiment attributed to Freud; I simply note that Keller has failed to disprove it.)
pp. 38-40. Keller addresses the criticism that Christianity isn't completely inclusive, because "Christianity requires particular beliefs in order to be a member of its community." He spends a while explaining that all communities require some bond of belief.
My first thought went thusly: "I have no problem with his reasoning; I just don't see why it's necessary at all. Who even makes that criticism? I don't know anybody who would think it wrong that a community defined by its beliefs requires its members to hold those beliefs. If you don't hold those beliefs, then you have no reason to desire inclusion, and thus no reason to resent exclusion."
But that was an overly simplistic knee-jerk reaction, made from the privileged position of someone who holds none of the defining beliefs of Christianity, and whose need for community is satisfied elsewhere.
A story goes that, upon being told that the Faro game he was playing was crooked, "Canada Bill" Jones replied, "I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town!" Just let that sink in. The need to participate in a community can be stronger than the knowledge that the community will cheat you, or revile you. What about homosexuals who believe in Jesus? What if they live in a town where both churches are run by bigots? It seems a shame that they should be excluded from the only game in town just because they enjoy some good, old-fashioned sodomy, when that same church will welcome abusers, embezzlers, and people who eat figs.
When a church member is convicted of a crime, does the church kick them out? Of course not. They garner sympathy for their ordeal, along with prayers that the whole affair will bring them closer to Jesus, or at least blow over quickly. It doesn't matter whether the criminal acted against the teachings of the faith: The church is there for them. Unless the crime is sodomy. (Well, it's okay in the church's book for a priest or bishop to have a predilection for altar boys, but any parishioner who screws a consenting adult of the same sex is cast out and banished to hell, occasionally with an express ticket courtesy of someone's pickup truck or baseball bat.)
The point is that, when someone objects to Christianity excluding people due to religious beliefs, they probably aren't objecting to the church not welcoming non-Christians. They are objecting to the church using the pretext of religious belief to barely mask bigotry, in order to exclude certain Christians. (No matter their differences, people are by definition Christian if they accept the Nicene Creed (God made us, Jesus died for us, yada yada). Butt sex is not a religious belief.)
Because this is a more specific criticism than the pointless one that the book explicitly addresses, I will understand if the reader finds it, although related, ultimately irrelevant to the topic of Keller's logic.
p. 41. "At the current rate of growth, within thirty years Christians will constitute 30 percent of the Chinese population of 1.5 billion."
I have no copy of the book cited in the footnote, so I can't see where he's getting his numbers, but there are no numbers that would reasonably support this. (Unreasonably, one could start with the old and discredited official census, which grossly underestimated the number of religious believers of all types, followed by any later survey, to make a case for any religion at all undergoing explosive growth in China.) Recent estimates that I've found for Christianity in China range from 3.2% (2010 survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) to 5.1% (current CIA World Factbook, date of estimate not stated). With such small numbers, and such a wide margin of error, there can no basis for deducing a rate of growth anywhere near 1% per year. (Also, that rate would imply that there were no Christians in China until about five to seven years ago.) Somebody had to fudge the numbers in an utterly unrealistic way in order to make this claim.
pp. 41-42. "Sanneh argues that secularism with its anti-supernaturalism and individualism is much more destructive of local cultures and 'African-ness' than Christianity is. In the Bible, Africans read of Jesus's power over supernatural and spiritual evil and of his triumph over it on the cross. When Africans become Christians, their African-ness is converted, completed, and resolved, not replaced with European-ness or something else."
This boils down to "Africans are right to be spiritual but wrong in how to do it, so we fix them. This is way better for preserving their culture than converting them into atheists would be." I suppose the insult to African religions is unavoidable in a Christian context: It's a case of "I'm just calling it like I see it."
Keller's (and Sanneh's) contrast between the destructive influences of Christianity and "secularism" fails in many ways. First, "secular" doesn't mean "anti-supernatural". It just refers to things that have nothing to do with religion. Keller is stretching the definition in order to make it easier to attack.
In a footnote, Keller mentions (but then downplays it and asserts the opposite) that "Sanneh and Andrew F. Walls do not deny that missionaries from one culture (e.g., European) usually impose their own culture's form of Christianity on the new converts." The word "usually" is slippery hedge language here: Missionaries cannot possibly convert people to the amalgamated form of religion that those people will eventually create, before it is created. They can only impose whatever form of Christianity they already know.
Next, becoming secular, or even atheist, doesn't destroy a culture. Do you know what happens when a Jew stops believing in god? They become a secular Jew. They continue to participate in Jewish culture, do Jewish things (including discussing theology!) and eat Jewish foods (plus the occasional ham sandwich, if they're so inclined). They don't have to worry about what god thinks anymore, but that was always secondary to worrying about what their parents think, anyway.
More unfortunately, Keller downplays the destructiveness of Christianity in Africa. For a reprehensible example, Saving Africa's Witch Children is a documentary that describes the horrors inflicted upon children by evangelical priests controlling superstitious congregations: Thousands of children have been denounced as witches, and abandoned, tortured, mutilated, burned, and/or killed.
To be fair, The Reason For God was published in the same year that "Saving Africa's Witch Children" raised popular consciousness of these atrocities, so it is possible that Keller was unaware of them. However, the Lord's Resistance Army, a group originating in Uganda with beliefs in African mysticism and Christian fundamentalism, has been committing mass atrocities since 1995. From Wikipedia: "The LRA has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery, and forcing children to participate in hostilities."
Finally, for purposes of logic, all of these contrasts pale next to the simple fact that atheists do not send out missionaries to convert people. How can secularism or atheism destroy a culture more thoroughly than Christianity does, if people impose Christianity but nobody imposes secularism on that culture?
p. 43. Keller spends a while bragging about his church's unexpected appeal in Manhattan. He describes his churchgoers explaining that appeal to a stranger: "Not only that, but beliefs were held here in charity and with humility, making Manhattanites feel included and welcomed, even if they disagreed with some of Redeemer's beliefs."
This means that Keller gets what I said above, about how a church could accommodate people despite a difference in beliefs, thus belying his earlier assertion that it couldn't.
p. 44. Keller's talk of Christianity in Africa and Manhattan has been playing up its adaptability to local cultures, in order to downplay its role as "an enemy of pluralism and multiculturalism" (p. 40). Here, he claims that the things that his church emphasizes in order to appeal to Manhattanites are "grounded in historic Christian doctrine," and therefore "they are not simply marketing techniques".
My first thought: If those emphases are tailored to the local culture in order to win and keep members, as he has asserted, then their use is indeed a marketing technique. In fact, since nearly any value could be "grounded in historic Christian doctrine" (of which there is an awful lot), that historic quality cannot give us any information (such as advertising use) regarding that value.
My book club friend points out that Keller may have been trying to contrast his church's marketing techniques (which are incorporated into Christianity as he presents it, and thus are something more than "simply marketing techniques") with rock music, flashy signs, and other gimmicks employed solely for the purpose of attracting young people via pretense at modernity.
I concede that this is entirely plausible, though if it were indeed Keller's intention, he should have made it clear. (Several of Keller's arguments, so far, have been sufficiently disorganized that it was not immediately apparent what point he was trying to make.)
pp. 45-46. "Christianity is supposedly a limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our own beliefs and practices. Immanuel Kant defined an enlightened human being as one who trusts in his or her own power of thinking, rather than in authority or tradition." He counters by asserting that "... in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation." He describes a person diligently practicing piano, to the exclusion of many other activities, and explains that the loss of the freedom to do other things is what enables mastery of the piano.
This isn't an example of loss of freedom at all: It is an example of opportunity cost. In practicing piano instead of playing softball, the student is exercising the freedom to choose their activity, according to their own interests and judgment.
Keller makes a similar example of a fish, whose freedom to move and live is destroyed if we put it on the grass, thus proving that its restriction to water is what gives it freedom. I would sooner say that not being manhandled and "put" somewhere by humans is what gives it freedom. Fish have the freedom to choose water or land, despite the fact that one of those options is clearly superior. A restriction to the water, in taking away that freedom, would remove their ability to jump out of a drying tide pool and flop back into the sea.
So, Keller's attempt to dismiss concerns over freedom, by demonstrating that freedom requires restriction, falls flat.
My book club friend points out that Keller fails to present any of the many possible examples of good restrictions to freedom, such as laws against stealing and killing. (Which is not to say that these would in any way help his case regarding restriction of intellectual freedom.)
p. 47. "Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn't we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?"
That is a deceptive use of the word "discover," likely meant to make indoctrination sound more palatable. Discovery is an active process, which happens when one is free to explore. It would take a mind in a very unfortunate state to mistake indoctrination for discovery.
p. 47. "One of the most frequent statements I heard was that 'Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.' I always responded to the speakers by asking, 'Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?' They would invariably say, 'Yes, of course.' Then I would ask, 'Doesn't that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is 'there' that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?'"
My reaction was that, yes, some people clearly get morality wrong, but this is no refutation of the idea of individual morality. Some religions clearly get it wrong, too.
My book club friend points out, more aptly, that the rules people impose on each other — laws — are different from personal rules. The presence of one does not relieve us of the need for the other. I will add that, while we may wish to curtail people's freedom to harm other people, that is different from wishing to curtail their intellectual freedom to decide on their own morality. One is about actions, and the other is about thoughts.
pp. 47-49. Keller describes loving relationships as an example of gaining freedom through accepting restrictions. "If you want the 'freedoms' of love -- the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings - you must limit your freedom in many ways."
Here, he repeats his mistake regarding opportunity cost, and renders the whole section meaningless by referring to benefits as freedoms. His use of quotation marks indicates that he knows that he is using the word incorrectly.
p. 49. "At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be 'one way,' God's way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God -- there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me. While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us -- in his incarnation and atonement." (He refers to Jesus dying on the cross.)
Adjusting to humanity (itself a questionable interpretation of the story of Jesus' death) is different from adjusting to an individual. This argument does nothing at all to address concerns of a domineering, dehumanizing relationship with god.
pp. 49-50. Keller compares willingness to serve god with "your" willingness to serve your beloved, who is referred to as "her" throughout the paragraph.
Apparently, people (of either gender) who do not fall in love with women are not his target audience. (My book club friend suggests that this is just an unintentional expression of implicit sexism and heteronormativity. I expect she's right.) It is otherwise quite a lovely, if flawed, analogy. It illustrates an emotional justification for enjoying the lack of freedom that Christianity imposes. However, the "freedom" given up to serve a loved one is again just opportunity cost: You haven't lost your freedom; you simply choose to serve them because you'd rather do that than anything else. Christianity's restriction on intellectual freedom would, in a relationship, be a clear sign of abuse. (If you respect someone, you don't give them orders about what to think.)
Next week: Christian injustice.
The whole series.
