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16 Apr, 7 tweets, 2 min read
I gave the podcast a listen. Ironically the "takedown" was filled with "binaries." Reminded me of this Terry Eagleton quote from 'The Illusions of Postmodernism that shows binaries and moral dichotomies in identity-making are unavoidable. Here it is: 1/7
“For all its talk of difference, plurality, heterogeneity, postmodern theory often operates with quite rigid binary oppositions, with ‘difference’, ‘plurality’ and allied terms bravely up on one side of the theoretical fence as unequivocally positive—and whatever their 2/7
antitheses might be (unity, identity, totality, universality) ranged balefully on the other….For all its vaunted openness to the Other, postmodernism can be quite as exclusive and censorious as the orthodoxies it opposes…[Like any other] form of identity [it] needs 3/7
its bogeymen and straw targets to say in business.”

In other words, identity-making is irreducibly moral and non-relativistic. (See Taylor, Sources of the Self, Part I- “Identity and the Good”) We need to feel we are on the side of the ‘good’. 4/7
Christians and secularists have different visions of that good and set up different binaries. You are right now! But while binaries and exclusive language—(“I am right and you are wrong—my view will help human thriving and yours will not”) are unavoidable--abusive, coercive, 5/7
shaming language and behavior IS. PLEASE stop talking about who is exclusive and narrow. Everyone takes exclusive positions based on faith in some vision of the good. You're excluding right now! 6/7
Everyone sets up binaries and consigns some people to being on the right side and others on the wrong. What matters is that when we do it we do it with humility, care, love, and respect for everyone’s personhood. 7/7

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Timothy Keller Profile picture
17 Apr
New thread: On Morality, Design, and Humanization.
A summary of Alasdair MacIntyre’s “master argument” in After Virtue:

Imagine trying to hammer a nail with a wristwatch and finding that the watch just breaks apart. Should you call it a ‘bad’ watch? 1/8
No-because its purpose is not to hammer nails but to tell time. Unless we know the “telos” or purpose of something, we have no way of evaluating it as good or bad. So how will we know if a human is bad or good? Such terms are meaningless unless we know what human life is for. 2/8
Why were we made? Why are we here? The Enlightenment Project was to “bracket God out" and seek a morality without reference to a telos for which humans were created. This project has failed—thus the fragmenting of western society over what is a good human life. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
Timothy Keller Profile picture
16 Apr
Hey Chrissy. Though we are all doing "binaries"--that doesn't mean all binaries are equally true. The first way to judge between binaries is, "does your binary lead you to love those you disagree with and speak humbly and respectfully, or does it lead you to exclude them?" 1/6
If you can’t speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) even to the oppressors--even when you are simultaneously demanding justice—your quest for liberation often will replace one set of coercive power-brokers with another. 2/6
Christian churches have famously failed in doing this, but there are resources for this within Christian theology. See scshub.net/wp-content/upl…

This great Bauckham essay says : On the one hand, you can’t have a program of justice unless you have some moral absolute 3/6
Read 6 tweets
Timothy Keller Profile picture
14 Apr
Ok. Next thread: Purity culture.
Some say that ‘sexual abstinence outside of marriage' is identical to ‘purity culture’. This is simply not the case. The early church’s revolutionary sex ethic was that sex was only for within a mutual, whole-self-giving, super-consensual 1/8
life-long covenant. Sex is not for people who only give only a part of themselves (the physical, or maybe the emotional), but the whole self to the other—legally, economically, socially, emotionally, spiritually. The Greek word porneia (‘sexual immorality’) was infused with 2/8
new meaning by New Testament writers. It meant any sex outside of marriage. It was based on a radical egalitarian principle that the husband’s body belonged to the wife, and the wife’s to the husband (1 Cor 7:4). That meant that anyone who within marriage exploited or abused 3/8
Read 8 tweets
Timothy Keller Profile picture
12 Apr
Lots of people are like, "You aren't reading Foucault (or at least you aren't reading him right), I'm reading him right!" I've been reading him for 40 years, which at least means I've been reading him! 1/4
The modern view says this: look at your desires in order to "discover" yourself. This assumes that a) desires are stable and b) they are the source of your identity. Foucault says desires are (a) unstable and (b) to a degree the product of power relations on you. 2/4
Therefore, you must create your identity—not discover it. Even to see ‘sexual desire’ as a category is being formed by power relations. We can’t totally escape power relations this way, but we can resist them and critique them. So create yourself. 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Timothy Keller Profile picture
12 Apr
I've seen over the last 2 weeks lots of criticism and discussion around sexuality. So over the next few days- I’ll give a series of tweet threads that interact with some of the critiques, mainly from the Left.

1. The Therapeutic Self:
1/11
The modern therapeutic self is a recent approach to identity. We are to look within at our desires—especially our sexual ones--and then determine (Freud) or create (Foucault) who we are, not allowing anyone else to validate or define us or make us feel guilty. 2/11
We are then to demand that the world affirm our expression of ourselves. Anyone who questions our self-view is by definition doing violence, questioning our very existence, and denying us agency. But why should we believe and accept this understanding of identity? 3/11
Read 11 tweets
Timothy Keller Profile picture
2 Apr
Thread: Because of the more-than-usual antipathy toward my tweet about sex only within marriage, I think some response is warranted. 1st, many disagree with the term ‘dehumanize’. We obviously mean very different things by this term & lots of my critics disagree among themselves.
So I won’t defend my use of the word. It’s not crucial. But much of the pushback is about more substantial issues.

I do need to respect the expressions of anger-because of the background experiences of abuse that may be behind them. Yet here are reasons for the sharp 2/11
conflicts in viewpoints we are seeing:

1. Many of the hostile responses assume a highly western, white, individualistic, therapeutic understanding of the self—in which sexual expression is a key part of authenticity. It is the reason one finds sexual boundaries oppressive. 3/11
Read 11 tweets

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