Hah! I've had pleasant interchanges with several wokefolk persecuted by universities, though others have ignored my friendly emails. I didn't get any comment from the subject of my "In Defense of Professors Who Want To Kill People" though. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-professors-who-want
Now that Tim Keller has met his Maker, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect on his long-term legacy. My conclusion is this: "If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire." This may seem critical, but is perhaps the most that can be realistically asked for, out of present-day American evangelicalism.
Tim Keller was not a great evangelist, and not a great church planter. His church in NYC was comprised of yuppies who grew up evangelical Christian and wanted to comfortably, gradually convert from evangelical Christianity to Progressivism, rather than make a sudden lurch.
Tim Keller was not a great intellectual apologist of Christianity. Evangelicals got excited about The Reason for God, but not because of any arguments contained therein. Rather, they just wanted to stare at and talk about a big, thick apologetics book written by someone in a tweed-and-turtleneck suit. But did they miss anything by not actually reading it? Was there anything original that he had to say?
Tim Keller was not to blame for the woke turn within American Evangelicalism. The French Revolutionaries invented a memorable slogan, “No enemies to the Left!” The Revolutionaries spiraled leftward because they were unwilling to criticize extremists on their own side. Evangelicalism, defining itself in contrast to Fundamentalism on its right, has always had a policy, “All enemies to the Right!” The bogeyman of Evangelicalism has always been someone to the right — the self-righteous Pharisee, the repressive Catholic, the un-winsome Fundamentalist. Tim Keller brought the supply to meet this demand. In the form of lectures and books like The Prodigal God, he argued that Christianity’s bad PR was the fault of those on the Right — which he labeled as “religion” not “Christianity”. None of this was new or original, though. Hipster evangelicals were determined to find anyone who could offer them this tired message, and trumpet it as something fresh and revitalizing.
Tim Keller was not a bad person. It’s true that he betrayed Josh Butler, but this habit is so deeply ingrained within American conservatism that one could not have expected otherwise. It’s true that he was lacking in courage, and devoid of loyalty to the rank-and-file not-hip Boomer evangelicals who actually funded his various enterprises. But this is simply how American church leaders think about their flock. The flock exists to be sheared and lectured at, and not to be fed. The flock implicitly knows this, which is why there have been ongoing efforts to arrange cancellation insurance: it is taken for granted that churches won’t lift a finger in support of a member who has been cancelled for standing up for an official doctrine of his own church. At least Tim Keller, unlike prosperity gospel preachers and the Catholic hierarchy, did not exploit and abuse his parishioners. As far as we can tell, despite his fame and success, Tim Keller avoided scandalous behavior. In the Year of Our Lord 2023, this is in itself praiseworthy.
What, exactly, is wrong with his analogy? It IS THE PRECISE BIBLICAL VIEW OF SEX in marriage. I couldn't find a single thing that I disagreed with or that contradicted scripture.
And, what was "cringe" about it?
Here is the problem. We live in an age of LIES. TOTAL LIES! We tolerate the evil, demonic practice of allowing agents of Satan to destroy the innocence of our children but are offended by straightforward language on sex. People, allegedly "Christian" people, can't tolerate TRUTH.
Reading Dreher's piece on Josh Butler, this jumped out at me:
'A female Evangelical reader writes to say that it's not the Puritans who canceled Josh Butler, but the sex abuse survivor community among Evangelicals. "Nobody wants to be in their crosshairs."'
How does one push back against that "community", which tends toward the same harms as every other movement that seeks to weaponize victimhood? (Aside from the obvious harm of treating accusations as equivalent to convictions, there's also the harm of ignoring sexual violence that doesn't result in long-term trauma or distress.)
Victims of abuse do have more legitimate grievances than most grievance communities. Though my understanding is that the psychology of trauma is such that dwelling on it at some point becomes unhealthy.
When it comes to victimization, maybe it's my tendency towards fatalism, but I don't think a broad culture can long stay situated in a happy medium between ignoring victims to the point of callousness and overindulging them. When society finally goes back to being less coddling (in 20 years or 200 or 2000), I would expect it will probably do more ignoring.
Though on a personal or micro level, navigating that middle ground seems like something that wise and conscientious people ought to be able to handle much better than the median person or organization.
I also think a lot of conversations that would be interesting if kept to a confined audience can become derailed if they are taken out of context and extended to a wider audience with less appreciation for sober thinking and nuance. And the Internet has made this phenomenon much more common than it once was.
I think of this piece by Scott Alexander. Frustrated by his enemies' repeated efforts to take him out of context, he tested a practice of adding N's between every word in a statement that he expects them to take out of context, in order to make himself harder to quote without readers of the quote asking questions about why it looks so weird (either leaving the N's in place or adding a flurry of ellipses). Not sure if he's done this since, or how it's worked out for him.
That was written only this past January? Kinda cute that Alexander thinks there's still such a thing as "journalistic ethics" that would prevent MSM type sites from massaging his quote to achieve some desired end.
Yeah, I think he's aware of that, but I also think, in practice, he's right. The MSM can paraphrase him but can't quote him directly. Also, anyone who jumps to his blog to look for the quote will instantly see that something's not right. It's not about eliminating all risk, it's about damage control.
Nothing is stopping them from writing it without the N's as if they were quoting him directly. 10 years ago I wouldn't have thought this, but now I do not think it is unlikely that they would try this.
I think the most frustrating reading of the entire thing to me is the real lack of substantive arguments against Josh Butler’s theology. It was “Do you REALLY support THIS?!”, and Butlers supporters blinked. For the scattering/smattering of tweets/articles I read, everything read as mere shock butler had written it, not why it was wrong.
I wish I had an answer to the victimization question but I’m not sure. I think we need to be able to delineate between being a victim and being “in the arena”. If you want to speak/engage, that’s fine, but you have to be open to criticism? Idk, but you’re asking a good question.
I just read the excerpts... and I'm kind of shocked. People went crazy over this? Did this make people blush? I'm a bit out of the loop, but this stuff seems pretty basic and tame to me.
Your link to the original article in the Wayback Machine no longer works. Did you save it any other way, e.g. printing it to PDF?
As they say on Twitter: If you want to discuss a tweet, you have to grab a screen capture or save it in some other way. Nothing on the internet is permanent, not even the Wayback Machine.
Agree with basically all of this. Let's also note that Butler had been writing for TGC for years, posting pretty generic apologetics takes. He goes out on a limb one time and that might be the end of that career for him, at least from where things look today. I suppose my thought would be that if you want to start a new apologetics center, you should be prepared to take risks and try some things that aren't being done in the apologetics space today. We can be assured there won't be any more of that from the Keller Center.
I suppose my only question is, how much better were things in the 20th century, really? It's not like the scapegoat and the fall guy were invented 15 minutes ago. Nor was the empty suit bureaucratic corporate functionary.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Well-known words, written over 100 years ago. Are our "best" really that much more cowardly?
In what may have been a response to this article and The Gospel Coalition's weak defense of publishing it, Trevin Wax posted a column there last week essentially blaming the whole thing on the internet. This is a similar argument to the one Jake Meador is making in the piece SlowlyReading links to as well. Having more face to face discussions will make a difference for people who want to hide behind screens, but it does nothing about the actual and real disagreements that are happening. I doubt many of the people calling Andy Stanley a heretic would hesitate to do it his face.
I watched a few of the TGC's Good Faith Debates the only decent one was when Jake Meador got crushed trying to argue that Christians have a duty to capitulate to climate change zealots. The "should Christians send their kids to public school" one where Jen Wiken hand picked her opponent who barely challenged her was embarrassing. I would say the feminization of the discussions is a bigger factor than social media.
But what the woke mob never explains is: why is it not sufficient to make constructive criticisms and have a productive dialogue? Why must the offender be expunged and eradicated? The only explanation for that dynamic is a religious one IMO.
You’re are right. Courage is in short supply and I’m not exactly sure why. Many times those in charge search for boogeymen that doesn’t exist so as to not do the right thing.
Hah! I've had pleasant interchanges with several wokefolk persecuted by universities, though others have ignored my friendly emails. I didn't get any comment from the subject of my "In Defense of Professors Who Want To Kill People" though. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-professors-who-want
What is Josh Butler doing now? Does he need assistance?
I'm not sure. However, he's made it very clear that he doesn't want people like me defending him.
Now that Tim Keller has met his Maker, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect on his long-term legacy. My conclusion is this: "If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire." This may seem critical, but is perhaps the most that can be realistically asked for, out of present-day American evangelicalism.
Tim Keller was not a great evangelist, and not a great church planter. His church in NYC was comprised of yuppies who grew up evangelical Christian and wanted to comfortably, gradually convert from evangelical Christianity to Progressivism, rather than make a sudden lurch.
Tim Keller was not a great intellectual apologist of Christianity. Evangelicals got excited about The Reason for God, but not because of any arguments contained therein. Rather, they just wanted to stare at and talk about a big, thick apologetics book written by someone in a tweed-and-turtleneck suit. But did they miss anything by not actually reading it? Was there anything original that he had to say?
Tim Keller was not to blame for the woke turn within American Evangelicalism. The French Revolutionaries invented a memorable slogan, “No enemies to the Left!” The Revolutionaries spiraled leftward because they were unwilling to criticize extremists on their own side. Evangelicalism, defining itself in contrast to Fundamentalism on its right, has always had a policy, “All enemies to the Right!” The bogeyman of Evangelicalism has always been someone to the right — the self-righteous Pharisee, the repressive Catholic, the un-winsome Fundamentalist. Tim Keller brought the supply to meet this demand. In the form of lectures and books like The Prodigal God, he argued that Christianity’s bad PR was the fault of those on the Right — which he labeled as “religion” not “Christianity”. None of this was new or original, though. Hipster evangelicals were determined to find anyone who could offer them this tired message, and trumpet it as something fresh and revitalizing.
Tim Keller was not a bad person. It’s true that he betrayed Josh Butler, but this habit is so deeply ingrained within American conservatism that one could not have expected otherwise. It’s true that he was lacking in courage, and devoid of loyalty to the rank-and-file not-hip Boomer evangelicals who actually funded his various enterprises. But this is simply how American church leaders think about their flock. The flock exists to be sheared and lectured at, and not to be fed. The flock implicitly knows this, which is why there have been ongoing efforts to arrange cancellation insurance: it is taken for granted that churches won’t lift a finger in support of a member who has been cancelled for standing up for an official doctrine of his own church. At least Tim Keller, unlike prosperity gospel preachers and the Catholic hierarchy, did not exploit and abuse his parishioners. As far as we can tell, despite his fame and success, Tim Keller avoided scandalous behavior. In the Year of Our Lord 2023, this is in itself praiseworthy.
What, exactly, is wrong with his analogy? It IS THE PRECISE BIBLICAL VIEW OF SEX in marriage. I couldn't find a single thing that I disagreed with or that contradicted scripture.
And, what was "cringe" about it?
Here is the problem. We live in an age of LIES. TOTAL LIES! We tolerate the evil, demonic practice of allowing agents of Satan to destroy the innocence of our children but are offended by straightforward language on sex. People, allegedly "Christian" people, can't tolerate TRUTH.
It is all upside down.
Reading Dreher's piece on Josh Butler, this jumped out at me:
'A female Evangelical reader writes to say that it's not the Puritans who canceled Josh Butler, but the sex abuse survivor community among Evangelicals. "Nobody wants to be in their crosshairs."'
How does one push back against that "community", which tends toward the same harms as every other movement that seeks to weaponize victimhood? (Aside from the obvious harm of treating accusations as equivalent to convictions, there's also the harm of ignoring sexual violence that doesn't result in long-term trauma or distress.)
Victims of abuse do have more legitimate grievances than most grievance communities. Though my understanding is that the psychology of trauma is such that dwelling on it at some point becomes unhealthy.
When it comes to victimization, maybe it's my tendency towards fatalism, but I don't think a broad culture can long stay situated in a happy medium between ignoring victims to the point of callousness and overindulging them. When society finally goes back to being less coddling (in 20 years or 200 or 2000), I would expect it will probably do more ignoring.
Though on a personal or micro level, navigating that middle ground seems like something that wise and conscientious people ought to be able to handle much better than the median person or organization.
I also think a lot of conversations that would be interesting if kept to a confined audience can become derailed if they are taken out of context and extended to a wider audience with less appreciation for sober thinking and nuance. And the Internet has made this phenomenon much more common than it once was.
I think of this piece by Scott Alexander. Frustrated by his enemies' repeated efforts to take him out of context, he tested a practice of adding N's between every word in a statement that he expects them to take out of context, in order to make himself harder to quote without readers of the quote asking questions about why it looks so weird (either leaving the N's in place or adding a flurry of ellipses). Not sure if he's done this since, or how it's worked out for him.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological
That was written only this past January? Kinda cute that Alexander thinks there's still such a thing as "journalistic ethics" that would prevent MSM type sites from massaging his quote to achieve some desired end.
Yeah, I think he's aware of that, but I also think, in practice, he's right. The MSM can paraphrase him but can't quote him directly. Also, anyone who jumps to his blog to look for the quote will instantly see that something's not right. It's not about eliminating all risk, it's about damage control.
Nothing is stopping them from writing it without the N's as if they were quoting him directly. 10 years ago I wouldn't have thought this, but now I do not think it is unlikely that they would try this.
I think the most frustrating reading of the entire thing to me is the real lack of substantive arguments against Josh Butler’s theology. It was “Do you REALLY support THIS?!”, and Butlers supporters blinked. For the scattering/smattering of tweets/articles I read, everything read as mere shock butler had written it, not why it was wrong.
I wish I had an answer to the victimization question but I’m not sure. I think we need to be able to delineate between being a victim and being “in the arena”. If you want to speak/engage, that’s fine, but you have to be open to criticism? Idk, but you’re asking a good question.
I just read the excerpts... and I'm kind of shocked. People went crazy over this? Did this make people blush? I'm a bit out of the loop, but this stuff seems pretty basic and tame to me.
Your link to the original article in the Wayback Machine no longer works. Did you save it any other way, e.g. printing it to PDF?
As they say on Twitter: If you want to discuss a tweet, you have to grab a screen capture or save it in some other way. Nothing on the internet is permanent, not even the Wayback Machine.
The link is working for me. I just tested it.
OK, I retried and it worked. I should have grabbed a screen capture of the error message "This page is not archived" per my own advice!
Agree with basically all of this. Let's also note that Butler had been writing for TGC for years, posting pretty generic apologetics takes. He goes out on a limb one time and that might be the end of that career for him, at least from where things look today. I suppose my thought would be that if you want to start a new apologetics center, you should be prepared to take risks and try some things that aren't being done in the apologetics space today. We can be assured there won't be any more of that from the Keller Center.
I suppose my only question is, how much better were things in the 20th century, really? It's not like the scapegoat and the fall guy were invented 15 minutes ago. Nor was the empty suit bureaucratic corporate functionary.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Well-known words, written over 100 years ago. Are our "best" really that much more cowardly?
In what may have been a response to this article and The Gospel Coalition's weak defense of publishing it, Trevin Wax posted a column there last week essentially blaming the whole thing on the internet. This is a similar argument to the one Jake Meador is making in the piece SlowlyReading links to as well. Having more face to face discussions will make a difference for people who want to hide behind screens, but it does nothing about the actual and real disagreements that are happening. I doubt many of the people calling Andy Stanley a heretic would hesitate to do it his face.
I watched a few of the TGC's Good Faith Debates the only decent one was when Jake Meador got crushed trying to argue that Christians have a duty to capitulate to climate change zealots. The "should Christians send their kids to public school" one where Jen Wiken hand picked her opponent who barely challenged her was embarrassing. I would say the feminization of the discussions is a bigger factor than social media.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/dont-weaponize-good-faith-disagreement/
Meador's lengthier post was good, not sure if it is linked above:
http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/jake/stop-engaging-swarms/
I'm partly persuaded by a couple of the critiques of Butler on substance (linked by Meador), basically "you can't simply equate marriage and sex."
https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-sex-as-an-icon-for
https://danielletreweek.substack.com/p/ok-lets-do-it-lets-talk-about-that
But what the woke mob never explains is: why is it not sufficient to make constructive criticisms and have a productive dialogue? Why must the offender be expunged and eradicated? The only explanation for that dynamic is a religious one IMO.
You’re are right. Courage is in short supply and I’m not exactly sure why. Many times those in charge search for boogeymen that doesn’t exist so as to not do the right thing.
The Butler saga was just more evidence the gynocracy is real
and crazy.