The Reason For God - Chapter Four Review

Chapter Four of Keller's book is entitled, "The Church Is Responsible For So Much Injustice."
This is taking much more time and work than I expected. For this chapter I am going to bullet point Keller's rebuttals to the criticism and then my thoughts on the rebuttals.

• People are affected by their emotional backgrounds with how they react to Christianity intellectually.

Interesting that Keller would start off with this, seeing how he so often rails against relativism.
I guess when one is critical, you must have met some naughty Christians. It felt like he was saying you could not be against Christianity without having some sort of personal grudge. I found this offensive, mainly because I want the message that I grew up with and loved to be true.

• Many people with harmful pasts, abusive families and character flaws become Christians. Christianity is for people who realize they are sick and need the grace of g0d. Therefore it's to be expected that Christians would be a mixed bag of good and bad.
  

I hear this argument a lot when Christianity fails to live up to its own claims. The problem with this is, either your all powerful g0d changes all lives or he doesn't. I think it's very interesting that you get 'born again' experiences in all forms of faith. The appeal to 'we're all sinners struggling to get through' just makes me sigh and think that it is not really different from any other human created belief system.

• All societies have killed and abused their citizenry. You can't just blame religious thought for this, even the commies did it, and they were atheists!

I guess I would say, again, this just leads one to say Christianity is another human created institution. If you're just like everyone else, and yet claim a supernatural source, where does that leave you? Keller using those evil commies as an atheistic society is interesting. Stalin was taught by the church, and used what he learned there to manipulate his people. He calls his list of societies that hurt people, and were not Christian, "rational and secular". That made me laugh. Secular maybe, rational I don't think so. I can't think of any society in history I would call "rational". I think it's very difficult to make a society rational. The whole "counting bodies" argument always tires me.

• People who are super fanatical and hateful are not fanatical enough. If you were really fanatical about your faith, a 'real' Christian, then you would treat others with love. This is because you would be so humbled by being "accepted by g0d by sheer grace."

This seems to me to be the no true Scotsman fallacy.

• Christ's own teachings have a built in critique against the abuses the church has done throughout history. Christianity teaches against the hypocrisy it has committed. You can't criticize Christianity without using it's own morals.

I think there is some validity in arguing that Christianity has not lived up to itself. I would probably take it a lot further than Keller, and say the argument could be made that Christianity sold out around the time of Paul. I am curious what Keller would make of Jesus being another apocalyptic Jewish teacher. That would change the view of Jesus' teachings.

• Look at all the good that Christianity has done. From abolitionists to Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King Jr. These are examples of 'true' Christianity.

This would work for me if you could not provide examples of the same thing in other faiths. As well, I could be mistaken, but I believe many of the first abolitionists were humanists. Also, King got much of his anti violence message from Gandhi. I don't say this to discount the good that Christians have done, but only suggest that maybe its origin are not supernatural. Christianity is just so very, well, human. The history of its church just makes that more clear.
I also find it very curious that all his examples happen after the enlightenment.

I feel Keller might have answered the criticism in a superficial way in this chapter, but missed the greater point.
Cheers,
Scott