Revival itself is a confusing metaphor for spiritual life. It suggests someone who was alive, died, and is now brought back to life. How helpful can it be to use this image with reference to a person who is not regenerate?
D. G. Hart at OldLife.org has a post critiquing Tim Keller’s support of “revival” and “conversion” as biblical, “Charles Finney Wasn’t the Only New York Pastor to Defend Revivals.” As it is, Hart questions not only the soundness of the terms, but also the validity of its theology:
Revival itself is a confusing metaphor for spiritual life. It suggests someone who was alive, died, and is now brought back to life. How helpful can it be to use this image with reference to a person who is not regenerate? And just as pertinent, can it ever be used for a saint? Do saints die spiritually and then need resuscitation? If so, doesn’t revival imply that saints won’t persevere? This might explain the appeal of revival to the likes of [Charles] Finney.
He says that revivalism, far from building up the church, has actually undermined it. Reformation, not revival, is what the church needs today:
I am interested in the ways in which revivals have undermined reformation. I would contend (and have) that the better word to use for improvement in the church is not revival but reform. The rise of Protestantism was not a revival. It was a reformation. Meanwhile, the interior turn that experimental Calvinism nurtured and that gave rise to revivalism, acted as a solvent on those marks of reformation by which we identified a true church — proclamation of the gospel (creeds), rightly administered sacraments (liturgy), and discipline (polity). If revivalists were not inherently anti-formalists, they might be more willing to consider the importance of these formal aspects of church life. But ever since George Whitefield, revivalists have been more concerned with “the heart†than they have with the churchly qualities that manifest the heart and unite believers to the body of Christ.
Hart mentions two of the great preachers of the so-called First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who attempted to return the church to its Reformation roots through revivalism. Alas! Their brand of incipient revivalism was followed by the so-called Second Great Awakening led by Finney, a Pelagian heretic, who plunged the church into the bottomless pit of emotionalism and doctrinal bankruptcy of Arminian revivalism.
Today, as much as the church is in dire straits needing a Second Reformation after the First Reformation in the 16th century, a Second Reformation should not be unlike the First: a return to the Five Solas of the First Reformation. But unlike the First, it should be directed not primarily against Romanism, but against Arminian, dispensationalist neo-evangelicalism and revivalism.
6 thoughts on “Are You Sure You Like Tim Keller?”
Just an update on Tim Keller: He’s at the forefront in advocating women deacons in the PCA. So Philip Ryken.
Someone said I should be nicer to my brethren. Poor me. Just a poor hatchet man for people like Calvin, Luther and D. G. Hart.
Nollie, I appreciate your position, while I cannot agree with all of it. I have been reading your posts now for a good while, and taking everything into consideration, I have to pose one query. Do you ever say anything good about anyone? Virtually every post you offer that deals with another person in the church is negative. I understand the need for sharpening one another in a theological sense, as I delve into that quite often myself. However, I have to say that if there are any unbelievers reading your posts, the only impression they could come away with is that those of us in the Church spend far more time belittling each other then finding opportunities to find places of unity.
It might be of value to recall Jesus’ words….(John 13:35) “The world will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” I recognize that love includes discipline and occasional confrontation, but those activities are intended to be held within the family. I am sure I can find something to disagree with, no matter which individual is in consideration. But every once in a while, wouldn’t it be an appropriate expression of being “salt and light” to let the world see those things we stand together on? Even if you limit your posts to only those you consider to be friends and members of the family of faith, there will ALWAYS be tares among the wheat. If those outside the regenerate see far more that we disagree with than what we can agree on, (the fundamentals), what will they come away with?
We are not brought into the family of the elect in a vacuum. The Great Commission is still valid. How about saying something nice and affirming about someone every once in a while?
Scott, it looks like you need to think a bit more. I’m commenting on an article by D. G. Hart, which is most critical of Keller. You’re like a Catholic whose idea is that the Pope could say and do whatever he wants, and no one should even criticize him because he’s the pope. And that goes, in your thinking, with critiquing celebrities like Piper, MacArthur, and Keller.
Ya, I have to be nice like everyone else.
Looks like someone’s miffed over Hart’s (an my) criticism of Finney and Keller and their revivalism. Did I say anything else, other than proposing a Second Reformation? Apparently, another Reformation is not needed because all’s well in the contemporary evangelical world’s fun and games?
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