November 18, 2009: Toward A Robust View Of God’s Sovereignty: The Fatal Flaw In Tim Keller’s Grace Narrative

I’m a big Tim Keller fan, and enjoy reading whatever the brilliant pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan writes. For a while now I’ve been recommending his book The Reason For God as the best nonfiction I’ve seen in years. But after reading a bold article by John Piper taking on C. S. Lewis (Hey! Who does Piper think he is?), I’m feeling bold myself this morning, and so will bleat a theological complaint I’ve had for a while against Keller.

I object to Keller’s grace rhetoric. Not that I am against grace – heavens no! I favor magnifying, and oppose diminishing, the role of God’s grace in the salvation of our souls. All I want to do is point out an area where grace rhetoric tends to dismiss - or perhaps just overlook - the claims of divine sovereignty.

In his essay “The Advent of Humility” in the December 22, 2008 issue of Christianity Today, Keller writes,

There are two basic narrative identities at work among professing Christians. The first is what I will call the moral-performance narrative identity. These are people who in their heart of hearts say, I obey; therefore I am accepted by God. The second is what I will call the grace narrative identity. This basic operating principle is, I am accepted by God through Christ; therefore I obey.

The problem here is that Keller ties human obedience to acceptance by God, whether as a motive (“I’ll obey so that God will accept me”) or as a reason (“I’ll obey because God has accepted me”). It seems to me that Keller sets up these alternatives as a binary choice. That is, he does not say there are three narrative identities, or fifty, but two, both of which comprehend obedience as something inextricably bound to God’s acceptance of us. It’s just a question of which comes first, or which drives the other, or which serves as the other’s foundation.

But I believe it is best to take obedience off the acceptance grid altogether, and let “acceptance by God” be irrelevant for determining either the motive for or the cause of our submission to him. God should be obeyed because he is God, because as Creator he has the sovereign right to command (and we have the corresponding obligation to obey) whether or not he accepts us, whether or not he shows us grace. I’ll call this the “sovereignty narrative identity.”

It is possible to embrace the sovereignty narrative as the ground for all of one’s moral obligations. C. S. Lewis did that before he ever became a Christian! In 1929 he reluctantly came to believe in God (though he did not yet believe in Jesus or the afterlife), and immediately recognized that he had to submit to the commands of the Absolute. He bowed the knee to the Ultimate and Personal God even though he knew nothing of grace nor approval nor reward in connection with that God.

Years later in Surprised By Joy Lewis wrote, “The commands were inexorable, but they were backed by no 'sanctions.' God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since,…He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do for us but for what it is in itself…If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’”

That is exactly correct. The answer is not “Because then I will approve of you,” nor “Because I have received you with grace,” but rather “Because I am God.” It is good that we let grace motivate our gratitude and praise and affection, but when we let it motivate our obedience we come perilously close to diminishing - if not dismissing - the divine demand for submission that knows no other foundation than the sovereign rule of God. Obey God even if he hasn’t shown you grace and never will. Obey God even if you are damned! Who are you to hope for (or respond to) some kind of approval before you’ll obey? Obedience must not concern itself with what it can get (or has already gotten) out of God.

Lewis expresses the value of the sovereignty narrative in a wonderfully provocative spiritual exercise where he writes, “I think it is well, even now, sometimes to say to ourselves, ‘God is such that if (though it’s impossible) his power could vanish and His other attributes remain, so that the supreme right were forever robbed of the supreme might, we should still owe Him precisely the same kind and degree of allegiance as we now do.’” That is right. We would have to obey God even if he couldn’t lavish upon us the benefits of his grace.

Think about it in terms of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 – a favorite story of Keller and other “grace narrative” preachers. (See Keller’s mostly excellent book, The Prodigal God, an extended sermon on this parable.) Imagine an alternate ending in which the son returns from his disastrous experiment in loose living and sees from afar that his father’s farm is in ruins. He is told that his father has lost everything and is in poor health. Now he knows that not only will his father not clothe him in finery and throw him a party - he won't even be able to give him a servant's job. What should the son do now?

He should proceed to the house and fall at his father’s feet and beg forgiveness anyway! Why? Because that is his father. It does not matter whether the father chooses to show him grace, or even (contra the story and contra divine reality) he is even capable of showering him with tangible signs of it. It is enough that the man is his father and that he is good. His grace and his power to manifest grace in pleasing ways are glorious things to celebrate, but they are quite beside the point when it comes to the question of why a son should submit to his father’s will.

Permit one more illustration of this idea:

Suppose we ask some men, “Why are you faithful to your wives?” One answers, “Because if I’m faithful to her, then she’ll be faithful to me.” That’s the performance narrative. I do this good thing and have a right to expect her approval and response. Another man says, “I’m faithful to her because she has already been so good to me! How could I not be faithful to someone so kind and dear?” That’s the grace narrative. It sounds a lot better, but I still don’t like it.

Most accurately, a man must be faithful to his wife simply because she’s his wife! That’s the sovereignty narrative. It understands that the institution of marriage itself holds sovereign claim over a man’s obligation to faithfulness. Neither the wife’s anticipated response nor her gracious initiative are granted any relevance in the matter. (They are relevant to a good many other things, but not as motives or inspirations for fidelity.) Thus a good man who is happily married might say, “Well it is certainly true that she is loving and kind and gracious and that she would never cheat on me in a million years. But that’s another matter, and it doesn’t answer your question. I’m faithful to her because she’s my wife. I can’t cheat on a wife.”

Be like that with God. Obey him because he is God.