Sermon Archive 2012-2013 by Timothy Keller

Author:Timothy Keller [Keller, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3. The solution to the problem

The hint is right here. Let me just read you the text and give you the issue and then come back to it. Peter says, “If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple …” He had healed that lame man. “… and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel:

It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He is ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone.’ […] When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.”

First, let me give you a little bit more of the problem. I just said that the idea, the view, that there is no truth, that truth is all person specific and culturally relative, that everybody has to decide what is right or wrong for them, that there is no moral truth absolute everybody has to believe, is not only hypocritical, but it makes you helpless in the face of injustice.

You have to look carefully for it. It’s only a trickle right now, but if you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, you’ll find that in the academy, in the media, in literature, in the arts, there is an increasing number of people who are saying, “This idea that there really is no truth, that all truth is culturally relative, that it’s all person specific and everybody has to decide what is right or wrong for them … Do you realize that doesn’t work? Because if that’s true, then you can never denounce injustice. You can never say that this government or this company or this person is doing anything unjust.”

Let me give you three quick examples of this. The first time I read something like this from the academy was from a woman who’s a cultural anthropologist at a university in New England. She wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She was studying various rural societies in Africa. One of the things she was getting absolutely overwhelmed with was how cruelly women were treated in those societies.

She wrote this up. She basically said, “I had a problem, because all of my life as a cultural anthropologist, as a product of the Western academy, I’d always been told over and over again that moral convictions are always person specific and culturally relative. Maybe my evolution has given me certain moral feelings. I may have altruistic feelings because I was evolved that way. My ancestors survived better if they had altruistic feelings.

So I have moral feelings, and I get moral feelings from my genetic hardwiring. I get moral feelings from my culture. But if there’s no God, there may be moral feelings, but there can’t be moral obligation.

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