Daily Tim keller tweet machine

Tim Keller

@DailyKeller New York City

Dr. Timothy Keller is founder and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and bestselling author of The Reason for God. I post his words on Twitter.

http://www.redeemer.com/

R.R. Reno recently wrote a blog post at the First Things: On the Square website that "Culture Matters More than Politics". He points out that, in Marxist theory, economics and political power are the fundamentals, while culture is "epiphenomenal." Literature, poetry, music and the arts are merely the supportive apparatus for power interests. Therefore, politics – who controls state power – is the factor that most sets the course of human life. On the contrary, Reno states, the deeper sources of public life are what we believe about human nature, human destiny, and the meaning of life. These beliefs are carried out into life by religion and philosophy, by high culture and popular cultural domains, by a huge variety of human institutions, the vast majority of which are not part of the government. These shared beliefs shape a people's vision of a good human community and a good life, and politics largely follows on from that.

James D. Hunter has been making the same point for years, though he invokes Nietzsche, rather than Marx. In On the Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche argued that Christian moral claims – of the primacy of love, generosity, and altruism – were really just ways for the early Christians to grab power from the people who had it. Christian morality developed out of the "ressentiment" by the weak of the strong and as an effort to wrest their position from them. This view will also lead to the conclusion that politics is what life is really about.

Hunter argues that ressentiment – "a narrative of injury" – has now come to define American political discourse. Both conservatives and liberals make their sense of injury central to their identity, and therefore in each election cycle it is only the group out of power, who therefore feels the most injured and angry, who can get enough voters out to win the election. Politics is no longer about issues but about power, injury, and anger. How Nietzschean!  Hunter goes farther and argues that the Christian Right, the Christian Left, and even the neo-Anabaptist  (think Dobson, Wallis, Hauerwas) are 'funtional nietzscheans' in the public square, either because they see politics as too all-important, or 9as in the case of the neo-Anabaptists0 they think wielding political power is inherently non-Chrsitian  in each case, hunter says, Christians are being to shaped by nietzsche's view that politics and power is fundamental.

[Why don't we just call them 'hanabaptists,' have the hauwerwasians serve as a metaphor for the entire third of these current trends within anabaptistry --- taken together with its conceptual links to Christian mutual-benefit Anarchism --- and analogous trends among the lot of which we'd like to think there is intercommunication and perhaps on some level hybridization -- why don't we just shrink the terms of the  historiographical apparatus to a less verbose total of syllabels ands sounds in the time-alert word we use to signal one another, or timing prefix, in 'neo-.']

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Thanks to media mogul Steve Bishop, the all-free offerings of whom have tawt me very much, very good, and sometimes very disconcerting or futher-work-requiring info, musings, factoid by factoid, theory by theory, trend by trend, thematic scopes of various websites or blog-entries that, so interesting an info-flow,  his info-management dailies drive me to pursue many of his recommended visits. he builds on a service to 'Read Twitter and Facebook as a daily newspaper.'  So, my procedure;  Read the article in a steve paper.li format, then click up the article in one of his offerings via, say, The steve bishop Daily -- TsbD for short, -- where he selects thinkers-practioners from the general 'neo-' flow within evangelicalism,  as it were, to showcase this set which I have used as a category -- simply on the authority of Steve's picks.  

I 'm thinking, first, the old 'neo-'s  from Carl F. h. henry to Richard hays.  

These newer voices, however, raise questions of how much identity can be attributed to that modernist stream, and how much of the new trends -- missional, emergent, lifeway, a list too long to recall at the moment but one which coud shoud shall include here Dr. Tim kelller's Daily Tweet webpage -- how many of the trends are clones, how many distinct ideationally and practically, how many clones however prove to be quite successful, compared say to the number of efforts in the indicated direction of the originator.  let's face it, looking at this particular ur-trend sociologically, there's an inherent pressure to be new in some allegedly vital sense, regard, feature, etc.  

Well, the reformational movement, reformational-worldview-motivated activities and organizations, are vested in knowing and anticipating change, enuff so as to challenge its philosophical participants at work in other spheres such as the academy, challenging our philosophers to reflect on the theme of change most basically and perhaps universally, but noting the limits, the gravities, the boundedness of change, large and smal.

Well, via TsbD I found his gem on the net in a series of articles on 'politics and culture' -- that series in particular I want to monitor in future, but am simply going to depend on TsbD to consider the latest offering as worth passing on.  okay, Steve

[As you can see i'm having a hell of a time with my keyboard, several keys won't capitalize, and several keys split between signs will only give the bottomost sign, not the top, so essentially that entire key is gone.  The plus sign i use for long 'i's true vowel-dipthongs  is gone.  i don't know when i can repair it.]


-- Owlb