Tag: instincts

Jettisoning Some and Embracing Others

“Keller asked the Oxford students to imagine an Anglo-Saxon warrior in Britain in AD 800. Inside he feels the impulse to destroy anyone who disrespects him. That’s the response his honor/shame culture demands, and so he does. But he also feels sexually attracted to men. His culture demands that he suppress those feelings, so he does not act on them. Now consider a man of the same age walking the streets of Manhattan in our day. He feels just like the Anglo-Saxon warrior. He wants to kill anyone who looks at him the wrong way. And he desires sexual relations with other men. Our culture sends him to therapy for anger management. He will identify publicly with his sexual orientation.

So what does this illustration teach us? Keller explains:

‘Primarily it reveals that we do not get our identity simply from within. Rather, we receive some interpretive moral grid, lay it down over our various feelings and impulses, and sift them through it. This grid helps us decide which feelings are “me” and should be expressed—and which are not and should not be. So this grid of interpretive beliefs-not an innate, unadulterated expression of our feelings—is what shapes our identity. Despite protests to the contrary, we instinctively know our inner depths are insufficient to guide us. We need some standard or rule from outside of us to help us sort out the warring impulses of our interior life.

‘And where do our Anglo-Saxon warrior and our modern Manhattan man get their grids? From their cultures, their communities, their heroic stories. They are actually not simply “choosing to be themselves”— they are filtering their feelings, jettisoning some and embracing others. They are choosing to be the selves their cultures tell them they may be. In the end, an identicy based independently on your own inner feelings is impossible.’”

—Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Viking, 2015), 135-136. Quoted in Collin Hansen, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023), 241.

Worse Than Brute Beasts

“And instead of letting nature do its work of leading us to God, so that we know him and behold him, we are worse than the brute beasts. For although beasts cannot distinguish between right and wrong, they remain within their bounds and limitations. Although they obey their natural instincts, they at least rest once their needs are satisfied; and when they have rested they go back to work. When hungry they eat their food, or else they look for it. Yet how pitiful is man, who tries to hide his instincts and always plays false! We are reckless and impatient in our wants. Not content with rest and comfort, we are happy only when we sow confusion and mingle heaven and earth. In short, because we are entangled in the hear and now and because we never think about the kingdom of heaven, we could not be more depraved…

The brute beasts have a much better life. They fear only for the present; they are immune to worry, are not led by ambition and can foresee no mischief that might befall them. Unlike men they are not jealous of each other; they feel no concern for what might happen a hundred years after their death; they make do with the food that is before them. Men, on the other hand, continually fret, and if God should desert us, where would we be? The world holds us fast; it owns us; we are bound to it—entombed, even, in it! Senseless, we think only of this transitory life. Consequently we see that, in order to draw near to God, we must escape the nature which we inherited from Adam. Above all, we must become new creatures.”

—John Calvin, trans. Robert White, Sermons on Titus (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2015), 204-205. Calvin said this while preaching on Titus 2:11-14.