cannot be explained but only shown.
Jake Meador has two posts up at Mere Orthodoxy worthy of a response, but I will just focus on one here. [1] I never met Tim Keller but due to a friendship with Jake I was once able to be a small zoom call with him where he responded to younger writers and leaders thoughts about his recent work. Because I was determined to be that annoying guy, I read to him the Hauerwas quote Jake shares here to get his thoughts. At the opening of a sermon on doubting Thomas, Hauerwas writes:
Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So, we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained. As a result, we end up saying more than we know because what we believe—or better, what we do—cannot be explained but only shown. The word we have been given for such a showing is “witness.”
When I first heard this quote on audio from Duke chapel, I wrote it down and thought about it constantly. To me it sounded like where things have gone so wrong for the church today and with the word, Witness, how we might become the church again. I once downloaded the sermon to my Zune and because the audio was off the voice of Stanley Hauerwas blew out the speaker our Jeep Cherokee as I played for my wife.
Given that in my limited reading so much of Keller’s apologetic work was precisely making sure that we believed could be properly explained and that if the secular person might hear that they would be open to faith I wanted to hear his thoughts on a quote that formed the bedrock of my ministry.
Because Tim Keller is infinitely kind, he let a small church pastor from nowhere stumble through reading the quote and ask him what he made of it. I do not remember clearly what he said because of time past but he asked which book it was in and challenged that showing was enough. He pressed that if he had more time, he would give examples of how words worked on some the most controversial subjects Jake talks about in his post. But I would disagree with Jake that Keller took this into his later project. He continued to believe that the battle between ideas was one of convincing and explanation and narration. He gave his life and time to work of the local church but it was the community of showing that often seemed missing from his apologetic.
I am grateful for the life and work of Tim Keller as someone far outside his circles. I am grateful for the time he gave young leaders and writers during the pandemic. But we need to be honest that his public apologetic project diverges from what Hauerwas describes as witness here and as we look forward to the future consider the path might look different than it did in the past. Or to put it another way, I’m not sure the solution for today is to be found in doing what Tim did, as Jake argues.
[1] The other is one misjudging what might be gained by exploring the connection between John Mark Comer and Rob Bell.