Recently my wife, Judy, and I attended a wedding officiated by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City. His wedding message was, as usual, succinct and powerfully resonant.

Tim began with Kierkegaard, who stated that at the end of history, we will have to take our masks off, as in the midnight hour of the masquerade, and reveal who we really are. "Marriage," Tim reminded us, "is a radical endeavor. It is radically discomforting and radically comforting at the same time. And the Christian gospel is the only paradigm that can bring these opposites together."

Unlike the Kierkegaard metaphor, Tim continued, a marriage forces us to take our masks off; we are completely vulnerable. Marriage, therefore, can give us strength and confidence to move into the world, or it can devastate us from within.

In his new book, The Reason for God, Tim writes:

"God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were made to join in the dance. We were designed, then not just for belief in God in some general way, nor for a vague kind of inspiration or spirituality. We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go on eternally, increasing unimaginably (p. 219, The Reason for God, Dutton)

The cosmic dance is also a nuptial dance. The Church, as the Bride of Christ, is invited to a Feast. But in order to fully respond to this invitation, we have to get beyond the general sense of "faith" and move into God's banquet hall, a center room of his mansion. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that that mansion is in a city: The City of God. "The Bible begins at a Garden," Tim noted often, "and ends in a City.
Judy and I had the privilege of sitting with Tim at the banquet following the wedding.

As we ate our splendid meal, I asked Tim about his new book and the response he was getting. Tim has been on a book tour of sorts, speaking at various universities in Veritas Forums and debating atheist professors. I told him that I participated in one at Columbia University, being pitted against feminist artist Coco Fusco.

"So what was that like?" He asked.

"Well, it really never went anywhere," I said as I licked my sorbet, "because she kept on wanting to go back to the culture war days. I wanted to talk about being stewards of culture and creating a new language for culture, but she wanted to talk about governmental censoring of art. I told the organizers, that these debates may no longer serve us well anymore. We need a tri-alogue, not a dialogue, a mediated conversation that can create a third language to speak about an issue."

Tim asked me what I meant by a "third language." I explained that there is a huge gap in culture where the split between rational and emotive, between reason and the intuitive, has caused dialectical opposition. But now, because of the dehumanization this has caused, people are hungering for mediated conversation. "Obama is speaking that type of language, and that's why he is gaining ground," I pontificated.

Of course, it was only after I got home and began to read Tim's book that I saw his section on the "third way." In the introduction chapter, he notes that the entire book makes the case that authentic Christianity is "a spiritual third way" to mediate the current divides in culture. So at the wedding banquet table, a student was telling the master what the master already knows. I suppose the greatest reward of a teacher is when a student reshapes the thoughts being taught and thinks they are his own.