Tim Keller’s Final Exhortation: Notice The Stories That Shape You

Tim Keller spent some of his last days on earth thinking through the stories our culture tells us. In his hospital room during intensive cancer treatments, he used the whiteboard intended to list medications and treatment plans to think about cultural narratives and the gospel. The result was meant to be a coauthored book with his son, Michael, who is senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Lincoln Square.

Tim didn’t get to see the publication of this final project. However, The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will still has his fingerprints on it, as it clearly articulates the narratives we live by, how they quietly shape us, and why the gospel is the truer and better story.

This volume offers a reader-friendly analysis of cultural narratives that helps Christians cling to the gospel and point others toward hope in Christ.

Invisible Stories

In its most basic form, a cultural narrative is a story that reveals what a community believes about fundamental goods like happiness, truth, morality, and justice. These stories are oxygenic for society. Though invisible, they form the atmosphere that supports society’s dreams, plausibility structures, and value systems.

Cultural narratives form the atmosphere that supports society’s dreams, plausibility structures, and value systems.

These narratives are more often caught than taught. As the Kellers argue, “Cultural narratives are not spread primarily through classroom teaching or bullet points in a presentation, nor are they argued for rationally and explicitly. Instead, they come to us as givens, things ‘all enlightened people know’” (16). In Charles Taylor’s framework, cultural narratives are the building blocks for a social imaginary. They’re unspoken assumptions in our public conversations.

For example, one of our world’s primary cultural narratives tells us that our identity is internally constructed rather than externally received. The Kellers write,

Modern identity is achieved by looking inward to our feelings and desires and discovering or creating our identity. Listen to your heart and be true to yourself, to your innermost desires. And don’t let anyone tell you who you are because that is your job alone. (21–22)

We hear these narratives in slogans like “Follow your heart,” “Find your dream,” and “Live your best life now.” Those messages are packaged in endless advertisements. Universities convince high schoolers to spend (or borrow) a hundred thousand dollars by promising, “We will help you achieve your dreams.” Employers encourage talented workers to pull up roots and take a new job in pursuit of a particular dream: “Do what you love; love what you do.”

When these narratives dominate our culture, Jesus’s call to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him seems much less attractive on the surface (Luke 9:23). It’s no wonder that more than three out of four Christians report believing that “the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself.” That’s why Christians need to recognize cultural narratives, especially the seven discussed in this volume.

Subversive Fulfillment

Christians shouldn’t adopt the dominant cultural narratives; we need to be aware of them so we can resist them and use them to reach the culture through subversive fulfillment, a technique the Kellers see Paul employing in 1 Corinthians 1:21–24.

First, we affirm the universal aspiration that gives rise to a cultural narrative. For example, the desire to be accepted by society drives us to try to be on the “right side of history” by seeking to live out the cultural narrative of progress.

Then we can critique that narrative by showing how it’s unworkable in its own terms, because every culture cringes at many customs previous generations thought were cutting edge. There’s no way to know in advance what the next generation will consider the right side of history.

Finally, we redirect people toward the ultimate fulfillment of the underlying desire in Christ. The desire to live rightly as judged by eternity is healthy, but it can only be fulfilled in the cross of Christ. Ultimately, the Kellers argue, “The resurrection assures us of a future that death cannot steal” (167).

There’s no way to guarantee we can live on the right side of history unless we’re aligned with the Author of history. So Christianity offers a vision of the “future that gives meaning to our present” (169). As Christians, we see that the right side of history is the one that has been made good and just by Christ’s redemptive work.

Living the Story

The analysis in The Stories We Live By isn’t entirely new. Tim wrote about cultural narratives for years. He discusses five of them in his book Preaching (2016). There’s also overlap between this book and Making Sense of God (2016). This latest book is a more reader-friendly account of what secularism fails to deliver, written not for the pastor or skeptic but for ordinary people trying to figure out why this world feels so off.

The concluding chapters provide a tool to spot these narratives in the wild and also inside our hearts. That’s what makes Michael’s effort in completing this volume so significant.

Few Christians wake up and tell themselves, “I must decide who I will be and create that identity through my own effort.” Yet the inescapable low-grade anxiety about our performance serves as a check-engine light for the soul. Once we notice ourselves believing a lie, we can remind ourselves of the only story where the verdict on our performance is handed down before the trial.

We can remind ourselves of the only story where the verdict on our performance is handed down before the trial.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this book is that it was written by a son grieving the loss of his father while clinging to the cross. When Michael highlights the failure of cultural platitudes to deal with his father’s death, we recognize the triteness of statements like “He’s in a better place,” “He’ll always be with you in spirit,” and “Time heals all wounds.” Yet Michael shows us the power of the gospel to offer a true and better narrative when he writes,

My dad is gone, but I haven’t lost him. We are both part of the same story. The Author has given us the real happy ending.

The story is true.
The tomb is empty.
Death is defeated.
Love wins. (172)

That’s a story powerful enough to speak to a son’s grief and sorrow. It’s also the story of the entire world, truer and better than any other.