THE famous but sadly inaccurate quotation of G. K. Chesterton has the apologist writing to a newspaper: “Dear Sir, What is wrong with the world? I am. Yours etc. . .” This would be a suitable précis of Tim Keller’s book on sin.
Keller was an understandably popular writer on core Christian subjects before his death in 2023. Here we have a series of sermons on sin preached in the 1990s, covering, with Evangelical panache, sin as predator, as self-deception, as leaven, mistrust, self-righteousness, leprosy, and slavery. The two last chapters are on the healing of sin.
Keller is obviously right that sin is an ever-present reality in everyone’s life. He writes in an easy style with sharp illustrations and homely application. There is much to take seriously and much practical advice. He points out how sin spreads insidiously through our lives, how persistently we justify our wrongdoing and relativise it, and how avidly we maintain that we can handle life — until we can’t.
Among his vivid images, he writes of repentance as minesweeping the heart, without which it will blow up at some point. He won’t let us blame our circumstances for what we do wrong. “Circumstances might shape our sin, but they never cause our sin.” The lessons (from predominantly Old Testament texts) are neatly arranged and clearly spelt out.
But here I am approaching my unease and some of the reasons that I fail to be won over by the book. Its thinking is rigidly binary: grey areas are not allowed. Everything is appallingly clear, with the result that a perfectionism pervades every chapter, and the reader can feel he or she is in the arena of law and not of grace.
Where grace comes in is through an underlying understanding of the cross as a substitutionary transaction, which will be a difficult door for some readers to use.
A more fundamental lapse is a failure to allude to structural and social sin through the entire book. After decades of important theological study of society’s failings, it is surely too simplistic to ignore that dimension and to collapse everything that’s wrong with the world into the realm of individual choice.
This is an important subject, and I know I could be too keen to play down my many failings; but I am left wanting a more serious, subtle, and wide-ranging wisdom.
The Rt Revd John Pritchard is a former Bishop of Oxford.
What is Wrong with the World? The surprising, hopeful answer to the question we cannot avoid
Timothy Keller
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
(978-1-3998-2964-9)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29