Is Tim Keller the new C.S. Lewis? No, but…

I’m on vacation, and here’s what I’m reading…

Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God is awkwardly named. It is also well-organized, pithy in its arguments, and broad in its array of references to literature and scholarship. Many in evangelical circles have been comparing Keller’s book favorably with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, but the comparison doesn’t work for me, and it’s not because Keller’s book isn’t good.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Keller examines seven common objections to the faith, running from a chapter titled “There can’t be just one true religion,” to “You can’t take the Bible literally.” In the second part of the book, Keller makes the argument for Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of the human condition in chapters ranging from “the Clues of God” to “The Reality of the Resurrection.”

Keller’s own writing is workmanlike–sturdy and at times not inelegant. His style is very much as I imagine his sermons are: built insightfully around quotes. His real strength is his ability to bring other’s thoughts to bear on the issues at hand as he leads his reader through them. He quotes from a smorgasbord of skeptics and believers: Nietzsche, Sartre, Augustine, Lewis, and my own favorite, Flannery O’Connor.

I read an interview with Keller in which he said that he wrote the book partly because educated members of his congregation were having trouble following the extended argument that is C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (thus, unfortunately, legitimizing the comparison with Lewis’s book). So, in an age of information bytes and attenuated attention spans, the chapters of the first part of Keller’s book are more like a list, and could be read independently of each other. (I was, however, glad to see that in the last half of the book, where he makes the case for the Christian gospel, Keller’s chapters unavoidably build on each other, mirroring the narrative of salvation itself, which is, as Keller says, a drama in four parts: creation, fall, redemption, restoration).

This, to me, is why the comparison with Lewis is awkward. Keller’s book is useful and intelligent, but it is not literature. I found the book, not surprisingly, very easy to read because of its independent chapters. Obviously, despite my arrogance, I am more a product of my own ADD age than I like to admit. Further, where Lewis depended on extended argument, on a narrative, Keller depends on the soundbyte of writing, the block quote. Where Lewis depended (mostly) on his own reasoning, Keller depends on the summarized arguments of others. Keller’s utilitarian book is as appropriate to New York City as Lewis’s was to Oxford.

But the strength of Keller’s argument and the value of his book derive exactly from this difference, a difference that makes one-to-one comparison unfair. Where Lewis depended on his own masterfully constructed and beautifully expressed arguments, Keller humbly but deftly depends upon the learning and erudition of a host of other writers to support his assertions, lending them a different kind of credibility. Think morality is possible without God? Not so, say Nietzsche and Sartre. Think all religions contain a little bit of truth, or that they’re all relative? You are gently reminded by a bevy of philosophers that this judgment is impossible unless made from a “superior” and alternate truth position of its own. Think sin is committed by crossing a line? Not so, says Kierkegaard. Rather, sin is attributing divine attributes to anything but God. Indeed, Keller the pastor is more of an academic than Lewis the academic–Keller is always footnoting someone else.

It’s unfair to blame Keller for not being Lewis. His book has its own purpose and style. Where else will the people reading Keller’s book encounter these writers and their arguments? The average person that I know in Presbyterian circles (I am a member of the same denomination as Keller) has read C.S. Lewis, but probably not Kierkegaard or Augustine, let alone the array of recent writing that Keller cites. I have read barely half of the writers he quotes, and I came away with a list of people that I want to read, such as Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. That’s a good thing.

Keller’s book may be an appropriate counterpart to Lewis’s Mere Christianity for our age–but only for our age. While Lewis will still be read in a hundred years because of it’s timelessness and independence of argument, as will many of the other writers that Keller cites, The Reason for God will be read for a decade before parts of it begin not to make sense. Keller understands this, I think, when in the introduction he locates the book at a specific historical moment in which both belief and skepticism are rising in influence. It will not always be so. Soon, as well, the list of objections that Keller responds to in the first part of his book will be different, leaving only the second part, the gospel narrative, as timeless (his explanation of the trinity, in particular, is wonderfully written).

This is the reason Lewis should still be read and is, indeed, irreplaceable. Instead of grappling with contemporary objections first and then sending the gospel through the breach, Lewis weaves his answers to skeptics into his narrative of the gospel, a story which is the only timeless answer to all skeptics of every age. The beauty of Lewis’s book is in itself an argument for its truth.

The Reason For God is a one-stop shop for the contemporary intelligent inquirer, written at a time when people are, indeed, as Keller argues, taking religion more seriously. It is a department store full of available arguments against common contemporary objections. This is what it is meant to be, and it accomplishes it admirably…for now.