The Reason for God

Spirituality Column #80
May 20, 2008
Current! in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

The Reason for God
By Bob Walters

This week I am writing to recommend Tim Keller’s excellent new plain-language book on Christian apologetics, The Reason for God.

“Apologetics.” It’s too bad we don’t have a more culturally intuitive word for this honored intellectual exercise. It does not mean, “I am sorry for what I believe.” It means, “This is why I believe it.” It’s from the Greek verb “to defend.”

My guess is that in a very short time The Reason for God will ascend to the top of Christian “must read” lists. I’m reading it now. Let’s pray that more than a few skeptics will read it as well.

Keller is a well-known graduate of the prestigious Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. For nearly 20 years he has been successfully delivering the true message of Christ in perhaps the most unlikely of geographical regions and cultural demographics.

Keller is pastor of the thriving Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a church Keller started from scratch in 1989. Today five services in five separate locations total 5,000-6,000 worshippers every Sunday in the uptown area near Central Park.

Manhattan is sophisticated and hip; filled with non-religious skeptics, critics and cynics. The middle class family, backbone of the church market, has long ago fled the city’s high cost and crime. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast, so to speak, way back in the 1960s.

What Keller has done for Christ and Christians in New York, hopefully his book will do for other places as well.

Keller presses at the great big, skeptical questions of the Christian faith posed by atheists, doubters, skeptics, seekers and heretics in the great secular maw of relative morality and New Age spiritualism.

The Gospels? They are just legends.

The Church? Full of injustice.

Christianity? A straitjacket.

Jesus? A good man, but, c’mon … resurrected?

God? He hasn’t helped me lately.

A Good God? Can’t be; too much suffering in the world.

Answering the knotty problems of Christianity in smart and accessible language is Keller’s special talent and the great gift of this marvelous book.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends you look into the book’s group study guides as well. They look superb.