“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.
S.W.F. Knecht 