Donald Trump, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Tim Keller are some of the figures on social media with whom I have been most amused. While the first two might have a lesser influence over the most sincere evangelical Christians (even if Trump has somehow persuaded plenty of evangelicals that he is actually concerned with ultimate philosophical truths and genuine Christianity beyond using them as tools for personal gain), Tim Keller is a figure held up as a more sophisticated, thoughtful evangelical by some. A quick examination of his Facebook posts from 2021 alone refutes any serious claim to consistent philosophical validity that he has, both inside and outside the context of Christian theology.
For example, Keller, on August 4th, 2021, said on Facebook that religion is about obeying God to get desired things from him, while the gospel is about obeying God to get God. The glaring flaw here is that the gospel of Christianity is part of a religion based on the Bible. There is no such thing as a Christian doctrine that is not an aspect of a religion because Christianity is a religion. Thanks to obvious superficiality, church culture conditioning, and stupidity, there are plenty of evangelical Christians who actually think their misinterpretations of a religious text are non-religious, as if uniqueness among other theological systems means Biblical ideas are not religious in nature. This is not even a particularly deep truth on its own, just one that is surprisingly overlooked and denied in the modern church!
On July 21st of 2021, Keller said that grace is at the heart of all heart and social change. However, it is logically possible for anyone at all to change because there is nothing contradictory about the concept of a person with their own volition changing, for better or for worse, out of a love of truth, after deep self-examination, or for some other reason. One could go on and on providing examples of random, false statements he makes that are quite at home in the midst of evangelical ideology. Part of Keller's problems seems to originate with how he communicates, as he posts generally short messages that are as vague and brief as they are conceptually incorrect. The rest is about sheer philosophical assumptions and presenting ideas that are true as if they go alongside ideas that are not.
Many truths can be communicated concisely, but conciseness is never a sign of truth. Conciseness is also not a sign that an idea is complete--or even worth specifically having or articulating for its own sake. Consider the following brief statement from January 24th, 2021: "God loves cities because there are people in cities and he loves people." This is like specifically singling out that blue is a color, and colors are parts of human experience, and therefore blue is a part of human experience. There is nothing epistemologically, metaphysically, or Biblically pressing about specifying without context that God loves cities because cities have people and God loves people. In fact, there are far more crucial things pertaining to Christian theology and broader philosophy which go unacknowledged by most people, including Tim Keller (the inherent truth of logical axioms, the possibility of absolute certainty, the irrelevance of conscience and tradition to truths about morality, and so on).
The issue is not even just that God loving people is not provable even if there is evidence for it, though Tim Keller almost certainly believes this to be true and knowable as opposed to merely probable. The issue is not that someone is emphasizing the Christian deity's love of humanity. If someone specifically focused on God's love for people in a way that emphasizes cities, they have not automatically become shallow. It is focusing on this ramification of Christianity in vague, non sequitur ways while failing to even stand on a foundation of pure rationalism and theology without appeals to tradition, instead of mysticism or assumptions of any kind, that is the problem. Tim Keller is very proficient at throwing out precisely this kind of vague, incomplete idea as he ignores provable logical facts that are more foundational, important, and all-reaching in their ramifications, and as he ignores so many truly Biblical doctrines like anti-legalism, the rejection of prudery, non-Trinitarianism, annihilationism, theonomy, and many others.
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