In the following two-and-a-half-minute clip, CTM podcaster Jon Harris provides an excellent example. He’d recently had a cordial Twitter exchange with Dr. Keller, and he commended Keller for being gracious. Even so, Keller demonstrated that he was an expert at playing “dodgeball.” This clip comes from this CTM podcast (posted on You Tube on August 21, 2020):
This is a Twitter conversation which I had with Dr. Keller. I think it’s Dr. Keller, right? I quoted him. Because I’ve been reading his sermons; I’ve been reading his articles and his books. And I came across this quote that was just interesting to me. He says,
The people I read who were the disciples of Marx were not villains. They were not fools. They cared about people. . . there are vast populations . . . where there’s no upward mobility. See, the people who read Marx said, ‘We have to do something about this.’
Tim Keller in 1997 said this. And so I just posted that — as kind of like, interesting, like, Wow! Look at what I uncovered! This is…I wasn’t expecting language quite that radical coming from Tim Keller. And, of course, I mean I was called all sorts of names, and, you know, I’m sure Tim Keller probably got called names, too. I didn’t see that, really, but I’m sure on his wall he did. But I got called all sorts of names, and [people] said that I was making an argument. I really wasn’t making an argument. I was just quoting him. I had made sure to say that Tim Keller does critique Marxism; he’s not a Marxist. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks Tim Keller is a classical Marxist. I think when people say he’s a Marxist, they’re saying that he uses Marxist ideas. They’re not saying he is just like Karl Marx. Obviously! Karl Marx wasn’t a theist. Tim Keller is a theist. So there’s that big gulf. And Tim Keller critiques Marxism by critiquing atheism and materialism. So, so obviously that is not what I was trying to communicate.
But he basically responded, and said that Marx is a problem. He doesn’t agree with Marx— which, yeah — clearly, we knew that he doesn’t agree with Marx on everything. But then…this is…so here’s the curious thing. This is what he says here, he goes,
Talking about oppression, justice, etc doesn’t make one a Marxist. It makes one a student of the Bible.
OK, but that’s not the issue here. Right? No one I know of thinks talking about oppression makes someone a Marxist. It’s not the talking about oppression; it’s the way in which someone talks about oppression. Conservatives talk about oppression. Right? Capitalists talk about oppression. Capitalists talk about it all the time — the oppressive national government, and what the government does to businesses. That’s oppression, right? So, there’s, there’s, oppression’s talked about; that’s not the issue. So, to me this just muddies the water. It’s not clear at all. It’s not the nature of the conversation; it’s the assumptions brought to the conversation that are the issue.
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