The furore over Tim Keller's promotion of third way-ism is just another glipmse into the corruption that is mainstream evangelical Christianity in America. After David Wood wrote a sympathatic critique of Keller, the liberal David French, a political commentator who claims to be conservative while corrupting the faith, has attacked such criticism of Keller's compromise as "moral devolution" of the "new Christian right." Rod Dreher in turn criticized French as misreading American society and for creating a false dichotomy between love of enemies and truth.
As a non-American, I try not to comment much on American social issues. However, insofar as it deals with morality, it is an issue that transcends national borders. On this, there is a larger issue than politics here. The issue is what intellectual sin looks like, and what repentance looks like as it pertains to intellectual sin. That sadly has been missing from the discussion so far.
Sin is any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God (WSC Q14). The human person is a whole person, involving the intellect, the will, emotions, and actions. We are to worship God will all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Lk. 10:27), precisely because we are whole human persons. Sin affects all our faculties, thus affecting the intellect, the will, the emotions, and our actions. Therefore, it stands to reason that repentance ought to affect all our faculties too, including the intellect.
Intellectual sins therefore are sins that ought to be repented as the person turns to Christ. On intellectual sins, there are sins due to ignorance, and sins due to sloth. But there are also grievous sins due to extreme rebellion. Just as in practice, there are sins that would call into question one's profession of faith (e.g. incest e.g. 1 Cor. 5:1), so likewise there are grievous intellectual sins that would call into question one's profession of faith. An example of grievious intellectual sin is belief in any system that denies Jesus is God.
Intellectual sins are present when one holds to systems that expressly rejects biblical standards and supplant biblical morality, regardless of whether one goes all the way into full-fledged conversion to that system of belief. In fact, holding to anti-biblical systems while paying lip service to the true God is the very definition of syncretism. Anti-biblical systems currently in vogue are fascism and communism, or a fusion of the two - corporate wokeism. These systems are so anti-biblical they call good evil and evil good. For example, what God calls abomination, they celebrate as virtuous under the vacuous slogan "love is love."
What does repentance and faith look like therefore for a fascist or communist? Given the extreme anti-biblical nature of theses systems, part of being a Christian is to repent of these anti-Christian sysytems of beliefs. There is no way one can be a repentant Christian and still hold that homosexuality is good or neutral in society. Therefore, a Marxist or woke person who has undergone the new birth will renounce their fomer beliefs as false, and turn in new life in the life-giving truths of Scripture.
The furore over Keller "third way-ism" obscures this most important fact: What currently goes under the label progressivism is sin. The solution is not conservatism (a sociological conversion), but true biblical repentance from all these anti-biblical ideologies. When David French promotes Drag Queen Story Hour, his main sin was not going against the sensibilities of conservatives, but in normalizing wickedness in the eyes of God. The issue is not sociological, but harmatiological. That is why Keller's third-way, and French's "moral winsomeness" fails, because they ultimately rejects what God says as sociological and political, rejecting the final authority of God's Word for their own political positions. Just because one side politicizes biblical morality does not mean God's standards suddenly become political, and attempting a compromise with an anti-biblical position under the guise of "third way" and "not being political," "not being partisan," moral witness," and all other empty slogans, is sin. The key issue is not "Is it political?," but "What does God say."
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