Why Tell Stories?
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Welcome to Gospel and Life. Are you struggling to find meaning and purpose in your work? We spend much of our lives at our jobs, but our work can often be the area where we feel the most frustration and futility in our lives. Today on the podcast, Tim Keller helps us understand how the gospel frees us to have hope and joy in our vocations. ♪

This isn't a sermon with a nice, with a climax, you know, moving on. This is a string of random thoughts. It's possible you'll get more out of the questions and answers afterwards than whatever I tell you about now. But I think you need to know, if you're a Christian, what is the rationale for being an actor? You know, why should Christians be actors? Why should Christians be actors? What do actors do of any worth from a Christian point of view? That's what I want to talk about. So that's why, I mean, I have a series of

random thoughts on that. But let me start by getting you something out of the New York Times. I was intrigued by the fact that Bill T. Jones, the dancer and choreographer, et cetera, has a new piece called

that he's putting on based on Flannery O'Connor's, one of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Now what's interesting is, here's Bill T. Jones. He says, this is his interview, he says, I'm angry as hell at the Bush administration. I'm not pleased with the fundamentalist leanings in this country. And he's sort of ranting and raging as a sort of normal, typical New York secular liberal person. However,

He was utterly entranced with Flannery O'Connor's short stories. And he comes right out and says, he's just overwhelmed, he says, they're the best short stories. And he wanted to put them on stage, at least one of them. And what's intriguing is, first of all, number one, the stories, the one he used is incredibly overtly Christian.

It's a story about a grandfather and a grandson who are living alone in the hinterland of Georgia, probably in the 30s or 40s. And the boy is just getting uppity, so the grandfather says, I'm going to take him into Atlanta because he wants to go to the big city. And he's almost never seen running water. He's never seen almost anything. And he's, I'm going to take him to the big city until you get your fill of it. And then you'll see, you know, it's nothing special.

And he takes him in, and unfortunately the boy likes what he sees, and he's getting more and more what he would consider uppity. And at one point, the grandfather, when the boy's taking a nap, abandons him, just runs away from him, gets around a corner just to show him, just to teach him a lesson. He's very mean-spirited. Also, all during the, obviously all during the story, the grandfather is showing, you know, tremendously realistic behavior.

But really, venal, racist attitudes everywhere. So you don't like him at all.

And when he abandons his grandson and scares the grandson, there's a terrible incident in which the boy just runs through the crowd just screaming, where is the grandfather, knocks a woman over, the police come. The police want to know whose boy is this. And the grandfather is so scared because he never deals with police, actually denies the boy, denies that he's the boy's grandfather and walks away. And there's this horrible rift. And in the end, in a very enigmatic and fascinating way, the boy forgives the grandfather.

Now, Bill T. Jones, he comes right out and says, this is fascinating to me, and I'll read you the end of it. He says, Flannery O'Connor is a non-ironic Catholic believer. Now, and she is a very strong Christian Catholic believer. And here's what Bill T. Jones said. He says, she believes that there's this thing called grace and that grace sometimes hits us right between the eyes when we are mostly based. Now, she and I may disagree on this. He disagrees with the basic idea.

And while O'Connor seems to make all these connections that I may not agree on, all I know is it's a tremendously powerful, overwhelmingly strong story. And I wanted to put it on stage. In fact, here's how it ends. Let's talk about how overtly Christian it is. The grandfather's name is Mr. Head, by the way. It said, Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him. Because at the very end, the boy forgives him and says, let's go home.

He says he felt the action of mercy touch him, but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that mercy grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood that it was all a man could carry into death to give his maker, and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it.

He had never thought himself a great sinner before, but he now saw that his true depravity had been hidden from him, lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam until the present when he had denied poor Nelson. That's his grandson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own. And since God loved in proportion as he forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter paradise. Bill T. Jones says,

is putting this on. Now, why? It's a tremendously well-told story. It's not an essay, which she could have easily written, on why there is a God, and we are sinful, and God does forgive us in proportion to our sin. And only if we understand we're sinners can we turn and get the mercy. And therefore, the worse we know ourselves to be, the more mercy we get. In other words, she could have written that essay,

And Bill T. Jones wouldn't even have read it, wouldn't even have turned it over, but it's a story. Somebody at one point asked Flannery O'Connor, they said, you know, I'm trying to understand this story I read of yours and it's wonderful. Could you give me in a nutshell what it means? Just in a nutshell, a sentence or two what it means. And you know what she said? Very famous. She said, if I could give it to you in a nutshell, I wouldn't have had to write the story.

If I could have told it to you in two sentences, I wouldn't have had to write the story. Now, what are actors? There's a difference between writers and actors. Actors are, like Jesus, making the word flesh. They're taking a story, which is invisible, and making it visible. Jesus was the word made flesh. There was a word, but it was invisible, and he embodied it.

Now, what actors do is they tell stories, but they don't just tell stories. They embody stories. Of course, you really can't tell a story without acting to some degree. But you are embodying a story, and people need stories. And stories are just about the best possible way to change people, change people's worldview, change people's understanding of things. And that's what you do. Now, let me back up and give you a couple of random examples.

When I say random, they're not totally random because they're sort of logical, but some ideas about what stories are and why they have the impact they have. First of all, what's a story? You might find this odd. The best place I've ever read a definition of a story is in the Harvard Business Review. Two or three Hollywood screenwriters wrote an article because the Harvard Business Review was saying that CEOs, when they're trying to persuade people stupidly,

Use graphs and figures, and they just give you facts and figures. He says that's not what changes people's minds. That's not what motivates people. You need to tell a story. And they have no idea. I don't know. They didn't tell me about stories in MBA school. So they said here's what a story is. Three things. First of all, well, it's actually two things in a way. Something knocks life off balance. You do not have a story unless something has knocked life out of whack.

So, you know, the classic is Little Red Riding Hood took her grandmother goodies is a principle. It's a fact. You know, it's a graph. It's not a story. But Little Red Riding Hood went to take her grandmother goodies. But the big bad wolf had eaten her grandmother and was waiting for her in bed. That's a story. Something has, you know, knocked life out of whack. Then because something has knocked life out of whack, you have and there's been a lot of ink spilled about this for years now. You have protagonists and antagonists.

A protagonist means a pro-agonizer. You're agonizing for something, and the antagonist is the anti-agonizer. And the protagonist is trying to get life back in balance. And the antagonists are the people who are against you, or the forces that are against you. They're trying to stop you from doing that. You don't have a story unless you have protagonists and antagonists. And when I said there's been a lot of ink spilled over the years about this...

I'm going to tell you in a minute that almost everybody from liberal to conservative realizes that the reason stories are so powerful is that there's no way for a human being to attach meaning to anything unless you put it into a storyline. And there's no such thing as a storyline without something being knocked off balance and some people struggling to put it back in balance and some people against them. You don't have a story unless you've got good guys and bad guys, or at least of some sort of story.

And the reason people are pretty upset about that is if you can't attach meaning to something without a story, and if story has got always protagonists and antagonists, there's no way to attach meaning to anything without basically dividing the world into good guys and bad guys.

And every master story that helps you organize reality has to have, quote, the other, capital O, somebody that we see as the bad guy. And that is one of the problems we have in the world right now. And you can ask me more about it if you want. So a story is something that knocks life off of balance. Protagonists try to get it back in balance against the antagonists. And I guess the third thing you would say is the resolution of the story is, is the mission successful or not? Stories don't have to have happy endings.

They can have ambiguous endings, they can have no endings, which of course is really cool and avant-garde not to end it. But the point of the matter is, even if you don't end the story, if you don't end it happily, you know the story should end or you know the story hasn't ended. Because you know that stories have endings. And so maybe the story, maybe the play, maybe the movie doesn't really tell you how it ends, but you know there should be an end. That's what a story is.

Now, I already said this. That's the first thing. That's what a story is. Secondly, I already alluded to this. You cannot attach meaning to anything unless you put it in a storyline. Now, my best examples of this, my favorite example of this is 9-11. There's a liberal storyline, and the liberal storyline is America are the bad people in the world, and the oppressed and the poor are the good.

And there's a conservative storyline, which is America are the good people. We believe in democracy and we're good people. And out there is all sorts of totalitarianism and all sorts of low IQ and all sorts of other people. And so we're the good guys and they're the bad guys as opposed to liberal. And so what happened when 9-11 comes along, what do they do? Some people said, you see, they hate us because we are so big and so bad.

conservatives said, see, they hate us because we're so good, and now we have to do something about it. In other words, what they immediately did was they said, what this means is we've got to do a war on terror. The liberals said, what this means is we've got to admit what we're doing in the world and how people hate us and so on. They took the incident, and they couldn't make sense of it unless they brought it into a storyline. Now, the best storyline was actually Giuliani and Pataki. And what they said was, this tragedy...

can make us a stronger city. If we pull together, we can do it, we can do it. So what they did was they put it in a different storyline, but nobody could talk about it without putting it into a storyline. Nobody could just give you facts. You can't make sense of anything. You can't attach meaning to anything unless you put it into a narrative. You watch newspapers, look at plays. Everybody's got... The assumption behind every story is life ought to be in a certain way. Something has knocked it off balance, and these are the people trying to put it into balance, and these are the people who are against it.

Now, first of all, that means you can't attach meaning to your own life unless you have a master storyline. There's some people who say, my master storyline is I am bringing myself out of very, very humble roots and abusive background, and I'm going to make something of myself. That's their storyline. Other people, it's a quest for true love. There's no doubt about it. That's their storyline.

Other people, I'm a free-spirited artist and I'm trying to make the world safe for free-spirited artists like me. And, you know, it's the oppressive traditional people that really is why the world is bad. Everybody's got a narrative by which they're saying, this is what my life means. And, and this would be in the book, if any of you read that book that I recommended to Luann, what that book says is everybody has a worldview, which is,

You can't operate without a kind of macro story view of what the world story is. In other words, when you look out in the world, obviously the world's not what it ought to be. Something has knocked the world off whack. Poverty isn't a good thing. War isn't a good thing. Racism isn't a good thing. Psychological problems aren't a good thing. What is wrong with the world and what will put it right? So Marx had an idea. He kind of vilified the idea.

in a bourgeois and he vilified the owners of the means of production and he said basically state control of economy will make the difference. Freud had an approach. Everybody's got an approach. Buddhists say the real problem is individual consciousness. You think you're an individual self and you don't see you're part of the whole soul. Plato and the Greeks, they said the real problem is the material world and the way it drags you down. Everybody says this here is the villain. This is the antagonist. This is what's wrong.

And here's what you have to do to put it right. Everybody's got that, and they're called worldviews. No matter who you are, you can't live without one. But a worldview is actually just a master narrative of what you think is wrong with the world, who's on the right side to get it back, who's on the wrong side, who's against getting it back, and what do we have to do. Now, what this means for Christians is this. The biggest problem, of course, that actors have is

unlike writers or maybe other kinds of artists, is generally speaking, unless you, I guess some of you have done this, generally speaking, you're acting out, you're embodying stories that somebody else has written. And you might say, well, as Christians, you say, you know, I never act in a story that I feel like is a great Christian story with a Christian message to it. Well, I want you to consider something for a second. What is the Christian master story? What do we think the world story is?

What do we think the main problem is? What do we think the master story is? Here's... let me give it to you in a nutshell. Everything was created good, but everything has fallen through sin. Everything is broken through sin. And through Christ, everything is going to be redeemed. Now, let me tell you what that means. A Greek worldview says the body's bad, the spirit is good. The Buddhist worldview says the spirit is good, but material reality is an illusion.

You know, Marx would actually say, you know, the capitalists are bad and the proletariat's good. An awful lot of conservatives would say it's the other way around. You know, the proletariat, the great unwashed, we have to watch out, you know, about it. We have to be careful about them. You know, they don't know what's, you know, there's Hobbes as opposed to Locke. Everybody had, everybody said, this is what's wrong with the world. The Christian story...

refuses to vilify any one created thing. We would never say the body's bad and the spirit's good because we believe the body and the spirit are both sinful. They've both been tainted with sin. The problem in the world is sin, not this group of people versus this group of people, not culture versus nature or nature versus culture or anything like that. The Christian worldview never vilifies any one thing, nor does it idolize anything.

You know, so in Marxism there's certain people that can do no wrong and certain people can do no right. But every single worldview tends to paint things in black and white because the protagonists are always these people and the antagonists are always these people. If you believe the Christian storyline, you're sinners. You are not the good guys. And they're out there, even the people who aren't Christians, they're in the image of God. They're not actually the bad guys. Christians have a story that is the most nuanced of all stories.

We should be the slowest to put white hats on some people and dark hats on other people. And it should be the easiest for us to look into almost anybody else's story, no matter, out of any other world view and say, "Yeah." I mean, see, for example, because we believe that every part of the human body has fallen, every part of the human personality has fallen,

If you get a story that talks about the dangers of sexual activity, okay. But if you get a story that actually lifts up the beauty of sexuality, that's okay too. See, we're not like Buddhists or the Greeks who just say, see, sexuality is actually basically a seductive thing. Because we like the material world. We think it's a good thing. We think God created the material world and Jesus has a material body. So...

Christians ought to be able to find elements of their story in almost any other story. I mean, obviously there are stories that you don't want to act in that actually are deliberately trying to lift up the very worst things and celebrate them. But generally speaking, I would think Christian actors would be able to find a good reason to act in an awful lot of other stories. An awful lot of other stories. Because other stories, people's stories tend to tell part of the Christian story themselves.

Because the Christian story is so comprehensive. Everything is good. Everything was created good. And therefore, there's really nothing to be looked at. But everything has fallen, so there's nothing that you should be lifting up. So almost any story that shows you the problem of anything is possible. Almost any story that shows you the goodness of anything is possible. It's all part of the Christian story. One last thing, and then we'll take some questions. At this point, you've got to pretty much act on other people's stories. But if you ever get a chance to...

Put your own together and act them out. What I find fascinating about evangelism, I've come to realize that when I was younger, people said, well, here's how you share your faith. And they would give me, you know, outlines. Yeah, there's various outlines. Let me give you a quick example of the problem with that.

My parents' generation, and they're in their 80s now, the whole generation of my parents had, in a sense, there was, in America, you know, when they grew up, you know, and there was the Depression and World War II, their cultural narrative, their main cultural story was what really matters in life is not what you believe, but that you're a good person, a really good person, that you're decent, you're honest, you're good to your family, you're hardworking. That was the cultural narrative. My children...

who are now in their 20s, early 20s. My kids, I see they're part of a different generation, and their cultural narrative is not the important thing is to be good. For them, the important thing is to be free, and to be free to be really yourself, and not to be enslaved, or not to be oppressed, or not to be controlled by anything else. If you say to my kids' generation, the important thing is to be good, they would say, define good.

If you said that to my parents' generation, nobody would say that. Now, what's the gospel? Well, you can say Jesus died for your sins. Yes, of course. But what is sin? You have to connect grace, sin, you have to connect the Christian story with the baseline cultural narratives of the story of the generation. So, for example, what I would say to my – I still do to older people. I would say, you think you're good, right?

But you're really not good enough. You actually fall down in all these ways. Only through Jesus can you be forgiven. But what I'd say to my kids' generation is you think you're free, but you're really not. Because if you make anything other than Jesus Christ the center of your life, you're a slave to that. And therefore, only through Christ will you be freed. Now, by the way, in the Bible, what's interesting, there's a place where Paul says, he says, the Jews wanted power and the Greeks wanted wisdom. But I preached to them Christ first.

Now, here's what he was saying. What he's trying to say is Greeks were intellectuals, and what they really thought was important was philosophy and understanding and rationality. He said Jews were practicals, and what they wanted to know is how does it work. They wanted power. They wanted results. He did not preach Christ to them the same.

What he did was, on the one hand, he challenged the Jews' story, basic cultural story, and said, Jesus Christ seems nuts to you because he came in weakness. A weak Messiah on the cross. And yet, it's really the strength you've always been looking for. And he says something differently to the Greeks. He says, Jesus Christ is foolish. In other words, he wasn't educated. He didn't go to the right schools. He didn't write any books.

And yet he's got the real wisdom that you're looking for. In other words, what Paul is trying to say is that only in Jesus Christ does the baseline cultural story of any group or generation or society have a happy ending. What your society wants, is it wisdom, is it power, is it freedom, is it goodness? Whatever they want, it'll only have a happy ending in Jesus. Otherwise it'll self-destruct. Because what it'll do is it'll turn something that's

inadequate into the protagonist hero, and it'll turn something which is good and created, though fallen, into the villain, into the antagonist, into the idol. So I would have to say that if you understand the Christian story, and you are basically storytellers, which is what actors are, in the long run, Christianity is so comprehensive that you should be able to appreciate and take part in other people's stories knowing that you're actually bringing about truth into the people's lives who are watching it.

And ultimately, I think it's important to really, really get engaged and really enter in deeply into our own culture stories so that we can understand them and eventually bring Christ to bear. If you don't get into the culture, if you don't get into the stories of the culture, when you do talk about Jesus, it just goes like this because you're actually answering questions that they're not asking. Because ultimately, ultimately,

The gospel is God saved you through a story, not through a bunch of principles. God did not show up with a bunch of principles and said, if you do these things, you'll go to heaven. What happened was God comes into the world through Jesus Christ and saves you by what he did. He saves you through a story, a true story, of course, not through your just being obedient and going to church and obeying. So salvation is through a story. And the story is so comprehensive, it takes in all other stories and resolves them. So

I know it's a little bit mind-blowing and over. It's not exaggerated. I absolutely believe it. But on the other hand, I realize it's a lot to take in. So would you please, where I've been obscure, where you want me to elaborate, where I was actually totally obscure, just raise a hand and let's start talking about what I just went through. So yeah, right here.

What about the issue of holiness for actors? Because even in some of the best of stories, they're asked to do things like kiss a woman who's not their spouse. You know, maybe wear something revealing or take clothes off or even have to act out of lust or, you know, out of cruelty, have these feelings. And that seems to go against, you know, being holy.

we don't really have any kind of standard for this in the Bible. You know, the apostles were never actors or they were never, it seems like they would never put themselves in those kinds of positions where they would make themselves that vulnerable to sin. In other words, do you feel like if you're actually acting out the sin, but you're not doing the sin? Is that what you mean? In other words, if you're acting out something that would be wrong if you were doing it in reality, but you're not actually doing it on the stage, or are you doing it? Like, let's say...

Then don't do it. That's all. I mean, and you have to know your own, you have to know yourself here. You know the book Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis? Okay. Which, by the way, John Cleese, do you know who John Cleese is? John Cleese, though I don't, I understand it's hard to get them anymore. John Cleese has read a selection of them and it's hilarious. He's wonderful.

But, however, it's the letters of a senior devil to a junior devil on how to tempt human beings. And in the beginning, in the intro, there's an interesting place where Lewis said that it was hard. In other words, he says in order to write the book, he had to imagine himself being evil, which isn't terribly hard. And he actually quotes a place in Deuteronomy where he says, my own heart showeth me the way of the ungodly.

Because he says, because he was a professor of medieval literature, a couple of reviewers had said, well, the reason this is so realistic about how Screwtape's knowledge of sin and temptation and seduction is clearly based on Professor Lewis's mastery of the medieval literature on moral philosophy and the Catholic Church and all that sort of thing. And Lewis says, it's just not true. He says, my own heart shows me the way of the ungodly. He says, I basically was able to access in my own heart

all the evil, nasty things and bad things that Screwtape did. But he says, there was a place at which I had to stop. Because, he says, by imagining it, I was, he says, at some point I really felt like I was going to suffocate, so I stopped. Now, you see, he couldn't even write that. Would you have said, oh, he shouldn't write that? He couldn't write that without, he had to be careful.

Because it was, you know, it's sort of the opposite of a quiet time. Where you're trying to get in touch with your best side. And you're trying to fan the flame of, you know, what God has done there by the Holy Spirit. The trouble with, if you're acting the part of an evil person or a wicked person, or even writing, in his case, it was a fiction piece, so it's basically the same thing. He found that there was a limit at one point where he said, I just have to stop this because it's, you know, I'm accessing parts of myself that shouldn't be there anyway.

So, I would say that you have to be very careful, but it doesn't mean that you should never be able to depict badness or sin in this. The Bible depicts it. There's horrible things in the Bible, and I think most people would say, well, I could act a biblical story, right? I mean, wouldn't you want to act out a biblical story? But somebody's got to act the evil people in the biblical story. Yeah.

So, at least, and you say, well, it's in the service of telling people the truth. But see, somebody's going to have to do it. See, watch your own heart. I just know there's certain people that are able to detach and certainly who are not. Now, I know something about the method acting thing, unless that's dead now, or is it not? No, it's not dead. To me, there's a big difference between saying, I know enough about

that I can act this out as, and I think that's very different than people say, I want you to hate, I just want you to fill your heart with hate. You know, you're supposed to be acting out hate, so I want you to feel hate, I want you to hate the person on the stage. I don't think that's acting anymore, I'm sorry. Acting is, you are trying to look like something.

that you're not. I mean, there's John Wayne, as I was talking about. There's people who've made lots of money without acting at all. And there's a few other people I'll name that I won't name, but who clearly don't do any acting. They obviously just get up there and they feel their feelings and they do what they do, and for whatever reason, people have paid money to see it. But I think acting really means I'm supposed to act hateful, but not be hateful. And I certainly know there's acting coaches that want you to be hateful. I don't know what you say. You just smile.

You know, I don't see how you can—first of all, I'm not sure how you can do that, frankly. I even wonder whether that's even possible. So watch out. I'm sorry. I should—let's get to some other questions, but that was a great question. It's estimated that most of us spend half of our waking hours at work. How does the wisdom of the Bible apply to our careers? In other words, how can our work connect with God's work? And how can our vocations be more missional?

In his book, Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller draws from decades of teaching on vocation and calling to show you how to find true joy in your work as you serve God and others. The book offers surprising insights into how a Christian perspective on work can serve as the foundation for a thriving career and a balanced personal life.

Let's keep going, Max.

You made a distinction between Christians acting out of people's works and Christians creating their own. Right. Do you have a vision for Redeemer's role in the second part of that? I'm all for it. Not specifically, no, of course. Who knows? I didn't realize, when did the Salvation Army... Two years ago. Two years ago?

Yeah, you know Ray Kroc's... It was in the paper. Did you see that? The founder of McDonald's, his widow, recently gave the Salvation Army $1.5 billion. For a specific housing situation. Well, yeah, but they're trying to create community centers, 25 community centers. That's a lot of money. Who knows? I'm not sure what they expect to be doing with all that, but if they're able to build small theaters and all that, yeah, that is beautiful. When you see Flannery O'Connor...

What I did was, it had been years since I read the short story, when I said, gosh, what would take Bill T. Jones, who clearly even says he's hostile to Christianity. He doesn't like it at all. But he was overwhelmed by what a great story it was. I said, wouldn't it be great? We don't have many contemporary Christians who create stories that good.

That actually it draws people in because they sense the truth of it even though intellectually, I mean, intellectually they don't believe Christian doctrine. But the trouble is a story flies beneath the radar and hits them in the imagination where the Bible says there is a knowledge of God, Romans 1, where it says they hold down the truth on righteousness. There is a knowledge of God. And stories get to people at that level, frankly. So I would say it's going to take time for us to –

You know, you don't have enough Christians even trying. And it takes, you know, it takes, it seems to take thousands of people trying to get a few people through, you know, and hit it. So we need a lot more people trying. But sure, I mean, I'm all for it, seriously, but I can't say beyond that exactly I know what's going to happen. I'm open to suggestions. I'm sure you're all ready to give me some. Some other, yes. Go ahead. Could you comment a little bit about working the Christian storyline together?

deep down into the fabric of something. The way you do it. Yeah, in other words, the Christian storyline, I didn't mention it because I always thought that actors, I know actors would like to be writers, right? They'd like to put your own stuff together. Well, also, is there anything, another part of the question, is there any...

forms of theater or film or anything that you would cite as a very good example of that, that it's not, you know, purely a sort of a Christian play on the surface? Oh, yeah. You know, I need to access my memory tapes. Yes, the question would be, first question is, and I agree with this, even since I said it, it's nice that I still agree with what I said a year ago.

is that one of the problems that I think a lot of Christians make when they tell the Christian story is they don't bury the narrative deep in, yeah, in the cultural form. So what was, to me, brilliant about Tolkien, here's a guy, he's a professor of Anglo-Saxon, he's probably one of the three or four people in the world at his, you know, in his heyday, who knew the most about Old English, the language and Gothic and Icelandic and Finnish and, you know, Northern European pagan prehistorical roots. And

What he did was he saw, he said, did you know, for example, Northern European mythology, you know what Gerda Demmerung is? You know, you say, well, yeah, it's got something to do with Wagner. Do you know in Northern European mythology, the denouement, in the final sort of Armageddon, is that the gods and the heroes of all the centuries are resurrected together.

to battle against the monsters and the ogres and the demons and all the villains. There's this huge battle on this particular plane to see who's actually going to win the world for the rest of eternity. And the gods and the heroes die. That's what's called Goethe-Demmerung, is the twilight of the gods. The good guys lose. And that's how history is going to go. And...

The Anglo-Saxon, the Northern European mythology was that's okay because nobility is to be good even though you know you're going down to a never-ending defeat. That was nobility. A high doom was before the hero, that I'm going to do what is right. And actually, what's interesting is if you've ever read The Dream of the Rude –

which is an old English poem, but it's a Christian poem because Christianity came. They were fascinated by the idea of Jesus Christ going to the cross. That's nobility. Knowing that the right thing to do was to go down to this terrible defeat.

And that got into the Anglo-Saxon world and sort of, you know, it came in. It wasn't a complete head-on collision between what Christianity said. The pessimism of the Northern European world met the optimism of Christianity, and it changed the pessimism. But the idea of nobility and heroism and valor and doing what's right even though you're dying as you do it was not really changed. It was redeemed. Now, Tolkien tried to imagine...

the Anglo-Saxon mythology, which is all lost because those dirty French-speaking Normans came over across the channel in the Battle of Hastings and wiped out the Anglo-Saxon culture. We have something like 45 pages of Anglo-Saxon ancient literature and all the rest of it's gone. So what Tolkien said is, I want to imagine what all that mythology would be like. I'm going to imagine, and they have to be pre-Christian, but I'm a Christian.

And therefore, what I'm going to do is I'm going to imagine pre-Christian mythology sort of cleansed of a lot of its pessimism. Yes. Even though if you read Lord of the Rings, it's sad. It's very sad. He wanted to keep that.

And he wanted to keep the idea that you can't win without losing, at least as much as you won. And he kept that, because he loved the sadness. And he felt that that was part of... He thought that was Christian. It was pre-Christian. It was common grace. It was general revelation. It was revelation that came to them even though they weren't Christians yet. It was truth. So what he tried to do was he tried to enter into these ancient myths and preserve the truth and actually enhance it a little bit from a Christian perspective. And when it was all done, you know...

He's a great example of this because there's no overt reference of any sort in The Lord of the Rings to Christianity or religion or even God. But when you're all done, you feel cleansed with it. When you read the thing, you say, I've read a holy thing. I feel cleansed by it. How did that happen? He buried the narrative, the storyline. So you have Gandalf's resurrected lord and Frodo's a suffering servant and Aragorn's returning king and you've got it everywhere.

But he doesn't have a Christ figure. He's got so many of them. So if he had a Christ figure, if he had an Aslan or something like that, then it looks like a Christian fable or a parable. Okay, now what was the second part of your question? Is there any other works that you would... No, no, but there are a lot of movies when you're done with them or plays when you're done with them, you say, it's very obvious the person who wrote that is not a Christian, but what they wanted to say was very important for people to hear if they're ever going to be prepared for Christianity.

And I see them all over the place. Well, yeah, I mean, whether or not they actually realize that they're writing something that is profoundly... You know, I used this example in the first movie. It was just like a scene in The Hours when Virginia Woolf's husband says to her, why does somebody have to die? Her answer is, so that others...

will appreciate life more or something like that. And then he says, "Who has to die?" And she says, "The poet, the visionary." Yeah, there's lots of, you know, what Lewis said, that God gave the pagans good dreams, you know, and there's all sorts of clues all through them. You know the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven? Anybody know that movie?

Very violent movie, really. It's just about a guy who goes and shoots everybody. It's kind of interesting. At the very end, this kid sidekick who's seen all this bloodshed, do you remember this at all? He's just chugging down some alcohol, just trying to steady his nerves. And he said, all these people that we've killed, they had it coming. They deserved it, right? And Clint Eastwood says, we all deserve to be killed. We all deserve to die. We all deserve to be shot.

Which, of course, from a Christian point of view is absolutely true in a way. But I don't know what was in the mind of the writer. I mean, I know to some degree you actors have got to pay your dues. You've got to act. You've got to get your...

You've got to get to know people. You've got to hone your skills. And very often you're doing things that you say, what redeeming social value is this? But on the other hand, a lot of preachers spend a lot of time doing that in the early days too. What am I doing for Jesus preaching here in the middle of hot coffee Mississippi to 15 old ladies every Sunday? And a lot of people, that's how you get started. It doesn't seem like you're really changing the world. It's not a whole lot different.

So some other, yes, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I actually had a question. You probably already know this, like in the past, like before a lot of actors, like, well, yeah, like they're excommunicated from the church for acting and it goes back to the whole St. Augustine thing about mendacity of acting and all the aspects. I just like to think, I just like to hear from you a few more examples of,

of acting in the Bible? Would you say like Jeremiah, like portraying something silently? Well, you're asking two good questions. The one question, of course, is the church has been nasty to actors for many years. And I still have some trouble, frankly, and I know something about church history. I have a little trouble understanding the theological justification for excluding acting and drama because I keep thinking one of the things is it's impossible to preach. You don't,

You know, preaching is a form of acting. I don't think they know that. I mean, you're acting out ideas. You're acting out illustrations. Sometimes you're acting out stories. I'm trying to figure out why they would say... I don't quite completely understand. There's no doubt that... So, you're doing immoral things. You're portraying a character who's doing immoral things. Well, yeah, you're portraying. So, you're not allowed... Well, see, if they had said you must never write fiction...

in which you're portraying people doing immoral things, which is, to me, the difference is very, very small. Whether you're writing a story or acting out a story, you are still telling a story. And what I can't quite figure out is what the theological distinction would be between writing the screw tape letters and acting evil on a stage, you know, acting like an evil character on the stage. I don't understand. I still haven't figured that out. Now, second question, though, in the Bible...

My friend Tremper Longman, who has written the best commentary ever on Ecclesiastes, says the book of Ecclesiastes is almost certainly a play. And here's how this works.

He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale on fictional Akkadian autobiography, Akkadian, A-K-K-A-D-I-A-N. Don't write it down, but I just want you to say, what is this? And what he meant is that in ancient times, the Akkadians, which were contemporaries to the Jews and all that, there was a particular form of, I guess you could say it was a literary genre, in which in the beginning you spoke in the first person.

and you said, I'm going to tell you this story, I'm going to do this and this and this, I'm going to be this person, this person, and then you go into character. You say, now I'm this, and I'm doing this, now I'm this, and then we're doing this. At the end, you come out again and say, now what did we learn? And if you actually look at the book of Ecclesiastes, which is notoriously hard to outline,

Because in the very beginning, he talks about Solomon the king in the third person. And then he talks about, I am Solomon the king, and I have seen all these riches, and it means nothing to me. It's vanity. All is vanity. And then suddenly he says, and now I have done learning, and I have gotten all my PhDs, and it means nothing to me. And at the very end, he comes out and says, now what have we learned?

And Tremper pretty much proves by saying this is exactly the kind of literary genre we've had in the past where it's basically a one-man play. Comes up and says, I'm going to do this, and then acts it out, and then at the end says, what have we learned? And he says it's a written-out play which could be acted out. And it actually could be acted out extremely well. The other thing is all the prophets did do acting, as you have already wisely alluded to.

Ezekiel was the worst. I mean, I'm trying to remember what they were. But, I mean, you know, Jeremiah would not just come in and preach a sermon about the fact that you have thrown off God's yoke. He would come in wearing a yoke. And he would say, you've thrown off God's yoke. Or he would take a scroll and cut it up and throw it in the fire as he was talking and so on. So he acted as well. The problem with saying you shouldn't be an actor or you shouldn't do those things is that the line between fiction, writing fiction and acting...

The line between preaching and any kind of storytelling and then going one step further with a – I bring an object. One step further, I bring in a yoke or something. And the next – what are you doing? I mean, I don't know how you can – where do you draw the line and say, that's acting and that's not. That's stage and that's not. It's impossible. And it's legalistic, frankly. Whenever you try to draw lines, the Bible hasn't drawn. So –

So did you get a lot of, well, nevermind. Let's keep going. Yes, go ahead. I just want to ask about, about drawing the line because I tend to look at the whole piece as a whole, like you were saying, if there was any redeeming value in the, in the whole story or the whole play or whatever. And then, you know, whether that's something I'd want to participate in, you know, because any character you do is going to be doing things that are not, not,

righteous and holy, right? It wouldn't be a story. Right. You've got to have antagonists. Right. You're going to be dramatic conflicts. You're going to... Got to. If I'm drawing the line, there's a point where you draw the line in terms of what I would portray and also how I view the whole piece, right? Your conscience. Now, this is the sort of thing that you should be trying to come together as actors in a city and talk about.

And you ought to give one another, here's how I draw the line and here's where I draw the line. And you need to try this out. And maybe you would develop a cumulative wisdom that we don't have right now and that there might be a couple of different theories, guidelines that Christian actors in New York have developed about where you draw the line. But in the end, we have got a – Presbyterians have a confession and there's a chapter in the confession called Liberty of Conscience. Yeah.

That confession says that you mustn't bind other people's consciences where the Bible hasn't. So the Bible says you can't commit adultery, then you just can't. I'm sorry, I don't care what God told you. I don't care what you think the Spirit told you. You can't. But as you say, I can...

I can do this on stage, but I can't do that. I can do this on stage. Common sense, I think, for most Christians would be, no, you can't do that. But we have to be very careful about saying, if you're a Christian, you shouldn't be doing that. Because liberty of conscience is, the Bible hasn't told me exactly where, so we're going to have to use...

Watch your conscience. Do not violate your conscience. See, if you go further than your conscience really will let you go because I need the job or I want the prestige or I want the money, you hurt yourself pretty badly. Don't do it. Don't say, well, you know, everybody else thinks this is all right and I guess it's okay. If your conscience can't bear it, don't you dare do it. It says in James, whatever you do, it's not a faith for you, it's sin. You just cannot do it. So it is important to check your conscience out.

You know, you had your hand up, right? And then, oh, is this on this? Go ahead. What about the weaker brother? Is that part of your conscience? You're talking about what other people think? Well, you know, you're part of a community. You're part of a community. And if you find that you're the only one that thinks it's okay to do that, and, you know, your 25 best Christian actor friends think it's wrong, you probably ought to think twice. What if...

You're just being extra sensitive to that one or a few people that may be offended. You're artists. You're going to be sensitive. Of course. If anybody thinks you've done wrong and they're really disappointed in you, is that what you mean? In other words, you do something and you feel like, here's a person over there.

What's defined stumble? Mad at you, think you're stupid. That's not stumbling. That's true. You're absolutely right. When the Bible says don't cause somebody to stumble, what that really means is you should not be helping someone else do something. One of the troubles is the actual place where this happens is Jews were eating meat offered to idols because in their culture an idol is nothing.

many of the pagan people had become Christians. To them, the idols were really a big deal. They had worshipped them and so on. And when they saw Jews eating meat offered to idols and it didn't bother them, the Gentiles said, I guess I can. And when they did it, they felt cut off from God and terrible and all that. And so Paul said, what you're doing is encouraging somebody else to do something that they just can't do in faith and don't do it. But I'm not quite sure what that would be here.

So be careful. Stumbling doesn't just mean offend somebody or even upset them. Well, I can dance if that may be hard for some people who have issues watching dance. Fine. Right. I mean, you do know from culture to culture what is considered authoritarian in one culture is considered authoritarian.

is considered sort of a normal exercise of authority and what one culture, I mean, it's not what one culture considers lascivious and other culture doesn't. So ultimately you do have to beg one another not to try to bind people's consciences where the Bible's left them free.

And just say, you know, I beg you, if this bothers you or you can't do this, if it gets into your heart to be kissing somebody for eight weeks in a row, then just don't do it. Follow your conscience. But then respect each other's consciences. Don't say, oh, you know, you're a weakling or what's the matter with you? You're not a professional. What's the matter? Can't you be detached? Nor do the opposite and say, look at that person who's clearly going into sin. But keep in touch with each other and ask each other, are you really able to do that?

You had your hand up, right? A minute ago? Yeah, just wanted to mention, Current Hope started Life as an Actor. A really beautiful letter to the artists, Christian artists of the world, about your vocation as an artist and what it means to the Christian community. Yeah, the Catholics right now are vastly better at supporting artists than evangelical Christians. Way, way, way past. I mean, yeah, they may have burned a few of you at the stake over the years, but you know...

Come on. You know, let's bygones be bygones. But they were actually good. Actually, Flannery O'Connor wrote a great book called Mystery in Manners that is wonderful. It's mainly for writers, but you'd learn a lot from it. I haven't. Over here. Yes, go ahead. There's three of you over here. Yes, go ahead. I sing opera now, but I started out wanting to be an actress. And one of the things that I faced was...

was that people at church felt that I was only seeking glory for myself. And I was wondering what your thoughts are on how we can project, what attitude we should have as artists and what attitude, how can we help people? If you were singing in the church, that'd be different. In other words, if you're singing in the church, that's not seeking glory for yourself? No.

I mean, think about this. I mean, have any of you ever been in choirs? Do you think there's any people in choirs around the country that are seeking glory for themselves? Nah. What about preachers? Do you think there's any preachers? I mean, everybody who's up front has got the danger of seeking glory for themselves. I think that's what you have to say. Of course, it's a huge danger, but we don't have any more. You say we have the same amount of danger of that that the ministers do or the Christian singers do.

So, nevertheless, after you've dealt with that problem, it is a problem, by the way. I mean, you know, you do, I have to say, why am I really doing this? You know, if I hone certain skills that are like acting to some degree, I hone certain skills, it's sort of preaching is a combination. In some ways, I've got to be a good writer.

What do you think of sitcoms that I saw?

I would not say to a Christian, "Oh, you can't." Again, the conscience, very important.

Where is the titillization line getting drawn here?

I mean, you know, there's some stuff you say obvious. Everybody knows, you know, there's full frontal nudity. I mean, there's some things you say, okay. So we start where we all agree you're not going to do. But then what happens is we go, what about this? What about this show? What about this show? The next thing you know, we're divided. Some of you say, well, I don't have a problem with that. And some of you say, well, you have those conversations. And then please respect each other's decisions. And over a generation, you...

you could become wise as a Christian community and come to more consensus and work the thing out. Just don't freak out over somebody. There's always somebody to your left and somebody to your right. There's always somebody who thinks you're the liberal, you know, or you're the sellout, or there's somebody who thinks you're the moralist, you're the legalist. I generally feel that you, like I said, just like ministers, you've got to take roles that at least mean, you've got to do some things that at least are probably useless.

You know, they're useless to society. They don't really do much of anything. I just want stuff that is really, you know, really... There is plenty of stuff out there that is just trying to pull away traditional values. It's just after it. They're just trying to do it. And I don't want to be part of that. But how do we know that one's there and there? Talk about it with each other. Try to draw lines. You're not going to figure this out overnight.

You're not going to figure it out overnight. The younger you are, the more likely you are to do things that you just, you know, you feel a little bad in the conscience, but I think you can do it. But watch it and talk to each other about it. And don't violate your conscience very much. Once you know you violated it, pack out. When you're not sure, sometimes I can't tell I violated it until I try, and then I realize I'm over the line. Let's keep going. Yes, sure. This question can kind of apply to any profession, but particularly for acting where it's such a...

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, the problem with acting is that you don't get nearly as much negative. There's almost no other career where you get so much negative assessment. You just don't get turned down. I mean, it's just nuts. You know, once a year, you take a job in one of these high-rise, once a year, you sit down and you get a performance evaluation and they say, well, you're not doing very well. Or maybe even we're going to fire you if you don't stop this. And then six months later, they fire you.

That's a lot better than being an actor where you get all these turndowns and being ignored. It's pretty tough. So I – and actually, I really do think it's because of that a lot – as you all know, I guess, your community is filled with people who have a lot of emotional, well, fragility. Really emotionally fragile, which doesn't surprise me. I don't think – I'm not sure you're emotionally fragile and therefore you want to be an actor. I think you're an actor and next thing you know, you're like – you know. Yeah.

So you do need that, but nevertheless, with any career, you have to say, should I be pushing harder? Is that why I'm not getting any further? And when do I give up and try something else? But on the other hand, when I was in seminary, there was seminaries that trained ministers. They don't care whether you're gifted or called or going to be any good. They just want your tuition.

So they're putting you through, and halfway through or at the end, people are saying, I want to be a minister. And almost everybody can look and say, that person's never going to be a minister. That person doesn't have what it takes. But nobody told them about that. So actually, I spent a good deal of time, because some of you heard me do this before. I came up with a tripod called Ability Affinity Opportunity. And ability means you're good and other people think you're good. Affinity means I'm really passionate and I love it.

Opportunity means God opens the doors. And you might say, how do I know whether or not I'm... You can't mess up your life. You can't. Just the other day, somebody called me and said, I listened to a sermon by somebody, and they seemed to indicate that the reason I'm not married is because I'm not praying enough. And I want to be married, and I'm not praying enough. And so, is it the reason I'm not married because I'm not praying enough, and therefore I'm sinning?

I said, well, you know, Jacob sinned. He dressed up as Esau and he ruined his whole family and created, you know, he just really screwed everything up. And God used the sin to find him the family that God wanted him to have. He wouldn't have found the family, wouldn't have had the children. It was all through the sin. So I said, what about your theory that the reason my life's not going the way God wants it is because maybe I'm sinning?

I personally think God is so sovereign that if you sin, if you do something wrong, there's going to be devastation in your life for a long time, and it's your fault. And yet, if you sin, and if you are his child, and he loves you, then all those promises are going to come true anyway, and he'll bring his blessing into your life through the sin. Now, you know, you'll spend all your life wishing you hadn't done it, and you shouldn't have done it. But you can't mess up your life.

So just don't kill yourself trying to be successful if he's, just don't. However, if after a period of time, and I don't know how long to tell people to wait, the affinity, ability, opportunity don't come together. There's some people who want to do it and everybody says they can do it and the opportunities just don't come. You're just never the right person at the right place and the right time with the right cheekbone structure. Yeah.

You know how that works. So often it has absolutely nothing to do with talent. It's just that I'm looking for somebody your size, your cheekbone structure, the way you wink. That's the way that we want. And next thing you know, the career is made. If that won't make you a Calvinist, I don't know what will. I don't know what will.

So if the opportunity doesn't come, or if you, unless they all come together at once, and after you've knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked, then don't be afraid that somehow you have failed. You've mucked up your life that God wanted you to be an actor and now you can't be because you didn't try hard enough. Just relax a little bit.

So in some ways you are where everybody else is, but I think it is emotionally harder to stay at acting long term if you just don't have those doors open. Other people can work a lot longer at their job before they say, I'm going to try something else.

So you do need to support each other. But in the end, I think acting actually, most people I know who've been actors who go do something else, it enriches their ability to do a lot of other things. Don't think, I put all this time into it. Almost anything else you do, presentation is very important. And your ability to do presentation and to know how to do presenting to people will stand you in good stead for a long time. ♪

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner. That website again is gospelinlife.com slash partner.

Today's talk was recorded in 2004. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.