My review of Tim Keller’s “Generous Justice” in PRISM Magazine

I wrote a review of Tim Keller's book, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just for the current issue of PRISM, a magazine that published a cover story of mine last year and which will publish two more of my pieces this year, one on a ministry for disabled and abandoned children near Managua, Nicaragua and the other on the connection between deforestation and poverty and how some are using reforestation as a form of community development. I'll post links to those if/when they become available online, but I do encourage subscribing to the magazine for yourself and also checking out the work of Evangelicals for Social Action, the magazine's parent organization.

The current issue of PRISM is available to preview at Issuu, so you can read my book review there. I've also posted the text of it below. I'd love your feedback, and definitely do check out the book.

Generous Justice
By Timothy Keller
Dutton

Reviewed by Tim Høiland

If you have experienced the grace of God, Tim Keller argues convincingly in his latest book, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just, it is inevitable that your life will be marked by a passion for doing justice among the poor and marginalized.

Keller, who for more than two decades has pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, is well known for his bestselling work of apologetics, The Reason for God, and for his leadership of Redeemer City to City, an organization supporting church planters in New York City and elsewhere.

While Keller is a preacher and has devoted much of his vocational energy to evangelism and church planting, he considers justice an equally essential calling of the church. "The Biblical idea of justice," Keller writes, "is part and parcel of what God is doing in history. God is reconciling humanity to himself -- and as a result of this great transaction, he is reconciling all things to himself."

This argument is rooted in Keller's well-articulated theology of shalom, which he defines as "complete reconciliation, a state of the fullest flourishing in every dimension -- physical, emotional, social, and spiritual -- because all relationships are right, perfect, and filled with joy." He describes shalom as a tapestry, in which thousands upon thousands of interwoven threads are perfectly arranged. Doing justice, then, is an essential part of how Christians begin to re-weave that shalom in the world, as a grateful response to the grace we have freely received from God.

It is no secret that the theme of social justice has enjoyed a renaissance among evangelicals in recent years, but it is clear that Generous Justice isn't a vain attempt by Keller to jump on an already loud and well-crowded bandwagon. Keller points to the genesis of his justice thinking by describing his experience as a conflicted college student forty years ago, seeing that while his secular friends were active in the Civil Rights Movement, the Christians he knew viewed Martin Luther King, Jr. with suspicion and fear. Through involvement with a small group of Christians intent on exploring the relationship between justice and the Christian faith, however, Keller came to see that the Bible provided the very basis for social justice in general and the Civil Rights Movement in particular.

While pursuing a doctoral degree at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Keller studied the office of deacons and how it had evolved over the years. "Deacons," Keller discovered, "had historically been designated to work with the poor and needy in the community, but over the years this legacy had been lost, and instead they had evolved into janitors and treasurers." A short time after completing these studies, Keller was asked by his denomination to start a church in metro New York, providing him an opportunity to test this newfound understanding in a context where injustice and need were in no short supply.

While Keller celebrates the trend of increased concern for the poor and oppressed, especially among young Christians, he notes that all too often it coexists paradoxically with an unquestioned consumerism that "undermines self-denial and delayed gratification." This is why Keller so passionately points to our need for the gospel: it is the beauty of Christ -- not statistics, not guilt, not even flashy do-gooder social media campaigns -- that will compel us joyfully and consistently toward justice and the denial of self for the greater good.

For churches, small groups and individuals in search of a deeper, more generous, more theologically integrated practice of justice, this is a book long overdue.