Tim Keller und Don Carsen erklären in diesem Video, was die Teilnehmer der Konferenz erwarten wird:

Mehr Informationen hier: thegospelcoalition.org.

• Timothy Keller: Warum Gott?: Vernünftiger Glaube oder Irrlicht der Menschheit!, Brunnen Verlag, 2010, 288 S.

wird im August 2010 erscheinen und 14,95 Euro kosten. Ich gratuliere dem Brunnen Verlag zur Veröffentlichung des Bestsellers Reason for God und hoffe, dass das Buch bei vielen Seminaren auf der Lektüreliste landet.

If you just go to towns like New York and spend all your time ministering, you never learn to pastor. You just learn how to do public communication. Ultimately, your preaching will be worse if you do not know how to pastor because you have not gotten involved in the hurts of people’s lives. I learned a lot from Hopewell and if I had not gone there, I would not know a lot of that. It makes me a much better preacher today, way, way better than if I had never been there.

Hier: www.worldmag.com.

There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don’t need arguments any more because people aren’t rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons. First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years—how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in Western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‘post-modernism’) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious Western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins’ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

Kellers zweite Anmerkung zur »Höheren Theorie« deckt sich mit meinen eigenen Beobachtungen. Im Buch Die Postmoderne habe ich 2006 geschrieben (S. 61):

Während die Postmoderne im Kulturleben und in der Politik westlicher Gesellschaften allgegenwärtig ist, verliert sie im Raum des Denkens allmählich ihren Einfluss. In Frankreich, wo der Dekonstruktivismus seinen Siegeszug begann und Andersdenkende geradezu paralysierte, gibt es bereits brillante Entwürfe gegen die Diktatur des Dialogs.  Seit Jahren sind in den Feuilletons Grabgesänge zu lesen, die erklären, die Postmoderne habe sich in Illusionen verzettelt und sei inzwischen Schnee von gestern .

Hier mehr von Tim Keller zum Thema: theresurgence.com.

Anyone who is strongly influenced by the imaginative world of The Shack will be totally unprepared for the far more multi-dimensional and complex God that you actually meet when you read the Bible. In the prophets the reader will find a God who is constantly condemning and vowing judgment on his enemies, while the Persons of the Triune-God of The Shack repeatedly deny that sin is any offense to them. The reader of Psalm 119 is filled with delight at God’s statutes, decrees, and laws, yet the God of The Shack insists that he doesn’t give us any rules or even have any expectations of human beings. All he wants is relationship. The reader of the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Isaiah will learn that the holiness of God makes his immediate presence dangerous or fatal to us. Someone may counter (as Young seems to do, on p.192) that because of Jesus, God is now only a God of love, making all talk of holiness, wrath, and law obsolete. But when John, one of Jesus’ closest friends, long after the crucifixion sees the risen Christ in person on the isle of Patmos, John ‘fell at his feet as dead.’ (Rev.1:17.) The Shack effectively deconstructs the holiness and transcendence of God. It is simply not there. In its place is unconditional love, period. The God of The Shack has none of the balance and complexity of the Biblical God. Half a God is not God at all.

Hier seine Eindrücke: thegospelcoalition.org.

Ich empfehle das Interview sehr. Besonders spannend finde ich, was Keller über die Zukunft des konfessionellen Christentums sagt.

Ich habe mir gerade Kellers Predigt über Galater 2,4–16 angehört und kann sie sehr empfehlen: Absolutism: Don’t we all have to find truth for ourselves?

Hier das Predigtarchiv: sermons2.redeemer.com.

Look at your daydreams. When you don’t have to think about something, like when you are waiting for the bus, where does your mind love to rest? Or, look at where you spend your money most effortlessly. Also, if you take your most uncontrolled emotions or the guilt that you can’t get rid of, you’ll find your idols at the bottom. Whenever I hear someone say, »I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,« it means that person has something that is more important than God, because God forgives them. If you look at your greatest nightmare—if something were to happen that would make you feel you had no reason to live—that’s a god.

Das Buch:

• Tim Keller: Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, Dutton Adult, October 2009, 240 S., ca. 14,00 Euro

gibt es hier:

• Timothy Keller: Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, Dutton Adult, 2009, S. 192, ca. 15 Euro

beschäftigt sich mit den leeren Versprechungen der Götter von heute: Geld, Sex und Macht.

Das Buch kann vorbestellt werden:

VD: HB

1. Zwei Wochen vor dem Predigttermin: Vier Stunden Bibelstudium und Exegese sowie Erstellung einer Gliederung.
2. Drei Tage vor dem Predigttermin: Vier Stunden Aktualisierung von »Was sagt der Text?« zu »Was bedeutet das für mich« (also Verbindungen zum Leben herstellen).
3. Einen Tag vor dem Predigttermine: Sechs Stunden Predigt ausarbeiten und Notizen niederschreiben.
4. Am Sonntag: Vier Mal hintereinander (im Gottesdienst) die Predigt halten.

Hier kann man ihn selbst hören:

Neugierig, wie die Predigtnotizen von Tim Keller aussehen? Kein Problem, hier ist ein Beispiel: keller_ms.pdf.

VD: TBFP

The Kellers became absolute enthusiasts for the city. Artist Makoto Fujimura had returned from years of study in Japan to join the New York art scene, but he lived with his wife and young children in a safe New Jersey suburb. »Tim was the first to say, ›Live in the city.‹ That was really compelling. I’d never heard that before. It was a crazy idea.«

Keller’s reading of Scripture fueled his enthusiasm. Conn had taught him a positive biblical view of cities. As he studied New York, he began to draw out that understanding. Surely God’s command to exiled Israelites applied to Christians in New York: »seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you« (Jer. 29:7). Long before that, God had designated cities as places of refuge when Israel entered the Promised Land. They remain so today, Keller noted—which explains why poor people, immigrants, and vulnerable minorities such as homosexuals cluster in cities. They attract people who are open to change. Paul did most of his missionary work in cities, and early Christianity flourished within them. Revelation portrays the final descent of the kingdom of God to earth as a city, although a garden city, with fruit trees and a life-giving river at its center. Keller suggests that, had Adam and Eve lived sinlessly and obeyed God’s directions, they would have made Eden into just such a city.

Hier der vollständige Artikel: www.christianitytoday.com.

Empfehlen möchte ich hier auch das Buch:

• Timothy Keller: The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Dutton Adult, 2008, 293 S.

• Tim Keller: Preaching the Gospel
• Tim Keller: The City
• Tim Keller: Cultural Transformation

Eintrittskarten kosten £ 10,00 und können (noch) bestellt werden unter: conferences.newfrontiers.xtn.org.

Informationen über Tim Keller gibt es hier: www.stevekmccoy.com. Besonders empfehlen kann ich sein Buch:

• Timothy Keller: The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Dutton Adult, 2008

VD: AW

Tim Keller gibt in einer Predigt über Jesaja 6 eine Antwort: download.redeemer.com.