From his book ‘The Reason for God”, Timothy Keller shared:
When you come out into the public square it is impossible to leave your convictions about ultimate values behind. Let’s take marriage and divorce laws as a case study. Is it possible to craft laws that we all agree “work” apart from particular worldview commitments? I don’t believe so. Your views of what is right will be based on what you think the purpose of marriage is. If you think marriage is mainly for the rearing of children to benefit the whole society, then you make divorce very difficult. If you think that marriage is more primarily for happiness and emotional fulfillment of adults who enter into it, you will make divorce much easier. The former view is grounded in a view of human flourishing and well being in which the family is more important than the individual, as is seen in the moral traditions of Confucianism, Judaism, and Christianity. The latter approach is a more individualistic view of human nature based on the Enlightenment’s understanding of things. The divorce laws you think “work” will depend on prior beliefs about what it means to be happy and fully human. 26 There is no objective, universal consensus about what that is. Although many continue to call for the exclusion of religious views from the public square, in increasing numbers of thinkers, both religious and secular, are admitting that such a call is itself religious.27
Christianity Can Save the World
I’ve argued against the effectiveness of all the main efforts to address the divisiveness of religion in our world today. Yet I strongly sympathize with their purpose. Religion can certainly be one of the major threats to world peace. At the beginning of the chapter I outlined the “slippery slope” that every religion tends to set up in the human heart. This slippery slope leads all too easily to oppression. However, within Christianity—robust, orthodox Christianity—there are rich resources that can make its followers agents for peace on earth. Christianity has within itself remarkable power to explain and expunge the divisive tendencies within the human heart.
Christianity provides a firm basis for respecting people of other faiths. Jesus assumes that nonbelievers in the culture around them will gladly recognize much Christian behavior as “good” (Matthew 5:16; cf, 1 Peter 2:12). That assumes some overlap between the Christian constellation of values and those of any particular culture 28 and of any other religion.29 Why would this overlap exist? Christians believe that all beings are made in the image of God, capable of goodness and wisdom. The Bible doctrine of the universal image of God, therefore, leads Christians to expect nonbelievers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs could make them. The biblical doctrine of universal sinfulness also leads Christians to expect believers will be worse in practice than their orthodox beliefs should make them. So there will be plenty of ground for respectful cooperation. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2008), 18-19
