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In part 4 of Tim Keller's (click here for his bio) series on the decline and his proposed renewal for the American Church, he sets out a vision for where he would like the Church, if it was renewed in the direction of the historic Protestant faith, to be. There are 16 parts to his vision for such a Church. His vision for the future Church includes the following (click here for part 4):

• 'Cities become filled with flourishing neighborhoods that point to the churches within them as a crucial source of their life and strength.'
• 'Every U.S. community is honeycombed with home fellowship groups and house churches that build up the Christians within them, welcome non-believers, and serve their neighbors.'
• 'New churches are being planted twice as fast as churches are closing, and 2/3 of the people in the new churches are formerly unchurched and non-believers.'
• 'Christians would become famous for being the ones who show up in force first to help victims whenever there is any disaster.'
• 'Christian churches would be known as the most racially and culturally diverse institutions in society. The ‘face’ of the renewed Christian church toward society—its leading voices—are highly diverse ethnically, and the American church is tightly connected to the global church.'
• 'The church would become publicly recognized as a refuge for sufferers, known for its ability to help people through grief, pain, and loss.'
• 'There would be a robust, respected, and growing community of intellectuals and scholars that hold unashamedly to historic Christian doctrine who are (a) active in every academic field of inquiry, producing scholarship that contributes to and alters the field, (b) a growing presence in universities, and (c) an entire alternate intellectual economy of study centers, think tanks, academies, periodicals, and publishing.'
• 'Christians would be known for their just use of power, so that:
• In business, Christians are known to be less selfish and ruthless and more generous to peers, employees, and customers.
• In social entrepreneurship, Christians are known to be fueling an explosion of creative and effective nonprofits that target every social problem, leading to a measurable decrease in the poverty rate and improvements in other statistics of social well-being, and that Christians would be famous for being those most given to charitable giving and volunteering their time for those in need.
• In politics and government, Christians would be known for seeking the common good rather than their own electoral interests, and for being cognizant of the importance of government policies for a just society.
• A growth in church planting and church renewal among the poor would occur, supported non-paternalistically by the broader church and led by the poor themselves. This would be seen by society and credited with improvements in social indicators.'

Keller's vision for the Church is really a Church utopia. And though I respect and very much appreciate the sentiments expressed in his vision and his deep concern for both America and its Church, I feel that there are some logical flaws that are deeply engrained in Keller's vision and approach.

One of the logical flaws is that the goals expressed in Keller's vision becomes a standard of measurement that we should be working toward and use to determine if the American Church is being renewed. But as Keller correctly said in an earlier article in the series, revivals and revival movements are at the discretion of God's Spirit. And so while we flawed and sinful humans can contribute to revival and renewal, we do not have sufficient control to reach the goals Keller has laid out. Thus, it is possible that we can become so focused on Keller's goals in Keller's vision, other ways by which the Church is being renewed will fly in under our radar and thus we would be missing out on how God is already changing us.

This leads us to a problematic statement made by Keller. Before laying out his vision, Keller said the following:

'Our vision cannot be simply for a restoration of churches and Christian institutions to their former states of strength. That is to mistake means for ends.'

His statement is problematic in part because Keller's vision is simply an updated and improved state of what our churches and Christian institutions once enjoyed. And when we look at what has happened to the American Church and the fact that God's Spirit is sovereign in determining when and where revival movements occur, perhaps our means should be our ends as we trust God to do with our means what He has purposed to do.

There is another logical problem in Keller's vision for the American Church. When one scans the abbreviated above list, what seems to be the case is that Keller has placed the Church in a competition with secular people, institutions, and ideologies to prove which one more true and relevant. The ones who contribute the most to the common good win. Of course those who win also get the most followers. So we Christians are, according to Keller, by our actions, prove the Gospel to be true by our actions of out performing unbelievers.

There are problems with that approach. The more we are competing with secular people, institutions, and ideologies, the more we are prone minimize the contributions of those not in our group while exalting our own. Basically, the more we compete, the more tribal we become. And the more we  do that the more harm we bring to the reputation of the Gospel. But not only that, the Gospel is proven to be true not by our works, but by the works of Christ--especially His crucifixion and being raised from the dead. It is what God did that proves the Gospel. As for us believers, we are mixed bags when it comes to acting in ways that bring honor to the Gospel. But regardless of our failures and whether we contribute more to society than unbelievers, it is what Christ did on the cross and His being raised from the dead proves who He is.

There are some analytical problems with Keller's approach. In earlier articles, Keller laid out why the American Church has been in decline and he has some good observations and insights in doing that. Those reasons include magnifying the importance of political issues at the expensive of theology, embracing a faulty political ideology or agenda, sharp divisions in the Church and society over political ideologies, anti-intellectualism, a growing individualism and secularism inspired by the Enlightenment, racism, rigidity in how people react to differences in interpreting the Scriptures, insularity, and the secularization of society. In all of that, Keller gives an insider's view of why the American Church has been in decline. 

But he fails to give an outsider's view of why the American Church has been in decline--an outsider being an unbeliever? To sum up an outsider's view, we could simply say Church History is the reason why the American Church has been in decline. But such is too general a statement to be helpful. In particular, we need to look at the American Church, and American History for that matter, from the perspectives of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and Post Modernism. Those approaches have very helpful models of thought that can fallibly tell us religiously conservative Christians part of why our Church has been in decline. 

While Keller, from an insider's point of view, is content to blame the Enlightenment for the what is called 'excessive individualism' of today has a problem, the question becomes whether our society's excessive individualism has been more the result of our own consumerism and Free Market System. 

Here we should note that the Enlightenment emphasized reason and science over faith  and authoritarian religions in interpreting the world. Part of that was due to the role superstition played in the exercise of faith. Replacing faith and reverent submission to religious leaders with reason does not mean that one is encouraging more individualism. Rather, emphasizing reason is emphasizing logic and the mathematics behind logic. Conservative theologians have been perhaps overly critical of the Enlightenment because it freed people from being compelled to submitting Church authority especially when the exercise of that authority was abusive.

From an outsider's view, we should note that the rise of "excessive individualism" started in the 1960s and served as part of a protest against the automatic submission to authority figures and past traditions that could also be oppressive and abusive. The protests were against racism, an immoral war, an overly-materialistic society, the subjugation of women, and the marginalization of the LGBT community. 

In addition, by the time of the 1960s, consumerism was all the rage. As consumerism grew, one's personal significance became more and more tied to what one consumed and how one consumed it. And as the desire to consume more grew, the concern for and connections with others which would move us to serve and help them, grew less. In his book, Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized capitalism because of how it enabled people to measure their lives in terms of what they earned and consumed and less by how they were connected with and helped others (click here and see pgs 94-95). The introduction of Neoliberal Capitalism only made consumerism hotter.

Neoliberalism or Neoliberal Capitalism was the form of capitalism that followed the Bretton Woods System, which lasted from just after the end of WW II to the 1970s and 1980s. The Bretton Woods System of Capitalism allowed for much more government control and intervention into the financial world. But Neoliberal Capitalism sought to cut as many social responsibility ties as possible between the business world and both government and society. This freed businesses, especially publicly owned companies and corporations,  to pursue maximizing its profits to benefit the ROI of shareholders. Such an ethic removes concerns for others as well as other external factors because the sole focus for maximizing profits is one's own welfare. And as business principles were applied to other areas of life during this current stage of Neoliberal Capitalism, so too were a growing disconnection with and lack of concern for the welfare of others.

So how is it that Keller, and other religiously conservative Christians scapegoat the Enlightenment for the individualism we see today? It is because the Enlightenment challenged the religious authorities of both its day and today. All of that is part of why I wrote that there are analytical problems with part of Keller's views on the causes for the decline of the American Church.

Another analytical problem with Keller's assessment of what caused the decline of the Church is that verboten theories, like Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Marxism, theories that are adamantly rejected by religiously conservative Christians like Keller, sometimes give a better analysis of Church and American history than Keller and other religiously conservative Christians have. Now Keller has a point in warning us about those theories because their plans for solving the problems provided by those theories are often inadequate if not harmful. But at least their analysis is often on target and insightful.

Those  theories, such as Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and Post Modernism shed much light on the failures of the Church and the Western Civilization. If we look at what the Frankfurt School said about authoritarianism or authoritarian personality type, we see a partial description of how religiously conservative Christians too often interact with each other as well as society and the world. Marx's analysis of the form of Capitalism during his lifetime serves us well to understand our current economic system that revolves, for the most part, around the whims and desires of wealthy shareholders. Such shareholders serve as the business world's equivalent of absentee slum landlords because, for the most part, their only concern is for what return they can get out of business while showing little to no concern for the other stakeholders of a given business. Stakeholders here could include the environment, employees, and communities in which those employees live.

We could go on, but perhaps it is time to offer an alternative solution to Keller's approach. It would be nice if the solution presented here would help satisfy some of the parts of the vision Keller provided, but doing so should be treated as unintended achieved benefit.

If we want to stop the decline of the Church, we must do damage control. As mentioned before, the Church has directly, and indirectly through Western Civilization, failed humanity in major ways. We have to come clean with our failures in a more expansive and pervasive way than Keller has pointed out.

One of the ways in which we can come clean with some of our failures is to admit that we don't consider our nation's democracy to be an important factor in how we hope to fix the Church and the nation. Here we should note that democracy is more than majority rule through elections. Also included in democracy, because of what the word means, is what Jefferson fallibly hinted at in his 1801 inaugural address (click here for the source):

'All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.'

Democracy, according to Jefferson's words, but not necessarily by his actions as President, involves a certain egalitarianism that goes against the grain of authoritarians because the latter prefer hierarchical societies. Thus, what we Christians must consider to be social justice should be guided more by Jefferson's statement than what some of us would call Biblical justice or by what Keller often cites as the common good. We should note that many a dictator has appealed to the common good when mandating abusive policies. That was true of both Hitler and Lenin.

We should note that the New Testament itself recognizes that the Church lives in a different setting than the Old Testament people of God did. For the latter lived, for the most part, in a religiously homogeneous society while we Christians have often been living in religiously heterogeneous societies. And thus, unless we want to lord it over others by gaining a privileged place of supremacy in society over others, we need to pursue equality even for many of those with whom we disagree the most. For example, we need to pursue and defend full equality for the LGBT community while adamantly holding to Biblical sexual moral values in our evangelism and within the Church.

Because of our religiously heterogeneous democratic society, we need to collaborate more with unbelievers regarding what social justice is and how we should pursue it. For social justice must be society's response to its injustices. Yes, there are some issues on which we can't agree with many unbelievers on. For example, we cannot agree with the legalization of elective abortions. However, we can commit to collaborating in creating social and governmental policies that significantly reduce the need for abortion in addition to making elective abortions illegal.

In short, we can't isolate ourselves from the world to forge a "Christian" vision for social justice and then try to force that vision on unbelievers in society. 

In addition, we must address the different forms of tribalism that are in our midst. Tribalism occurs when there is a high degree of loyalty to a group regardless of the identity of the group. That high degree of loyalty indicates that a person gets a great sense of significance from identifying with the group. Thus that high degree of loyalty eventually moves us to pursue a moral relativism with regard to the groups we are tribal toward so that a what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. Nationalism, which would be tribalism based on national identity, is a major culprit that causes Christians to embrace moral relativism when it involves evaluating and even supporting the policies of one's own nation. The result of tribalism is that the Christian starts to lose the ability to condemn immoral actions practiced by one's own nation. Ideological and political tribalism does something similar only for a given ideology or political party. The solution here is for us Christians  to base an overwhelming majority of our personal significance on the fact that we are sinners who are saved only by God's mercy shown through Christ alone. All other sources of significance must be very limited in comparison to the significance we gain by belonging to Christ.

If we want to battle anti-intellectualism, the we Christians have to break up with our use of authoritarianism. On a political level, authoritarianism is anti-democratic. On an apologetic and personal levels, authoritarianism is anti-rational. For authoritarianism believes that what is right and wrong depends on the tribal credentials of a given source more than on the facts and logic used by that source to make one's case.

Are there more things we can do to do damage control in order to help the Church? Certainly. But this article has already gone on too long to list them.