The Write Place

The late Tim Keller once said “Do not represent anybody else’s beliefs in a way that they would not say, yes that is what I believe.”

Nobody is sitting on the fence, and we can’t assume people are acting in good faith. As much good as Dr. Keller did, his naivety in this regard (born of a mistake that dominated a different era and persists) he has done much harm. His mistake owes much to the influence of the myth of neutrality.

Tim Keller grew up in the secular era, witnessing the rise what Aaron M Renn In First Things about The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. The first being the Positive age, where being Christian was a social positive. The second was the so-called neutral age. This supposedly spanned the era from about 1994-2014, ending with Obergefell v Hodges. In this second neutral era, we had a so called neutral public sphere. All sides could be heard and evidence would be weighed. In such an environment, you could expect honesty and a fair hearing.

This was not my experience. I shared this earlier on my social media and would do best simply to repeat it here.

“Maybe it’s because I grew up with it seeing what was coming, but I don’t buy the whole “neutral world” theory.

What we had was pluralism not neutral world, and pluralism is still fundamentally opposed to the Gospel. Everything but Christianity was really welcome, but in the name of all truths were declared secularly equal and acceptable, it was tolerated to a point.

Lip service was given to the myth of neutrality so long as Christianity didn’t really affect the public sphere. There was still fear about it, the villain was still a conservative Christian. You could see this in media of all kinds, the villain was always the close minded, backwards, bigoted actual Christian who acted like one in all of life. Not the enlightened Christian who kept the faith between the ears, who made it merely one truth of many, and adopted whatever the culture did. I grew up in this, always labeled the bigot, always the nazi, the backwards phobe, the fool, the Christian whose ideas were a threat because I actually believed them. My experience and education were anything but neutral.

Now the gloves are off as the culture is trying to normalize their paganism, a paganism I saw my friends growing up practicing and they were handed down from the New Agers. It’s just a different stage in the revolution. The “neutral/plural” phase was just one steppingstone on the apostasy path. We never had a neutral world, what we had was another notch on the stove as they increased the heat to a boil in the frying pan.

Part of our awful position as the Church generally has been our failure to understand we were in a war, it’s nature as a war, and that there is no neutrality, and even that our enemy lies about their intentions.”

Deceivers have existed outside and inside the church for as long as it has existed, hiding what they really teach. Jesus identified the devil and the pharisees as his children John 8:44, Paul noted there were wolves hiding among the church in the book of acts Acts 20:29-30, and John provided a test to discover hidden false teachers coming to them 1 John 4:2-4.

Christ put it simply

Matthew 12:30 
“Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

We have seen the end of the myth of neutrality. “Neutrality” is often a step on the way to open apostasy, it is not possible, and not desirable. There was no neutrality in Eden, there is no neutrality today. The unreality of the myth of neutrality has hamstrung the church and given wicked men an open door to deceive.

So, no Dr. Keller, the unbelieving often won’t always admit to what they believe. The myth of neutrality has always been just that. There is no sitting on the fence, there is no neutrality. Either we will love and honor God and embrace the truth, or we will deny him and exchange the truth for the lie (Romans 1:25). Human nature drives us to lie to hide our wickedness.

The very call for neutrality was a nice sounding cover. Think about it.

Does anybody even want neutrality? Do you want neutral on moral issues like murder and the holocaust? Of course not.

It is not even possible to have a neutrality, as ironically people have to fight for the supposed neutral public sphere. Neutrality always opposes the supposed non-neutral. This is what we had in the era of “neutrality.” This pluralism that opposed the Gospel was an orthodoxy all of it’s own.

You don’t need a neutral public sphere to have civility. You can have an open forum and free speech, in fact only with a biased public sphere that favors it.

There is always an overton window, the acceptable boundaries of public discourse. You might as well have the right one. You will always have a public orthodoxy. It might as well be the one God has written, otherwise it has to be chaos.

What we need is to bias the truth, and there is one who called the truth (John 14:6), who is the author of all truth, and who alone is a sufficient foundation for all things. That is God himself.