This next section is as short as the last was long and I might have skipped it but it angers me some, so I wanted to write about it.
Keller says that you have to trust the bible enough to let it contradict your beliefs. He says you cannot pick and choose what to believe in the bible. He makes reference to Stepford Wives, saying that if God cannot contradict your beliefs, through the bible, then you cannot have a true, intimate, personal relationship with him. You will create a Stepford God.
The logic of what Keller says here, such that it is, is sound. If you believe that the bible is written by God then you do have to believe everything it says. You can’t pick and choose. But just a few sections ago Keller was picking and choosing, and admitting that it is difficult to tell what is literal and what is poetic in the bible. Choosing to believe that parts of the bible are poetic is equivalent to not believing what it says, since I could interpret any piece of the bible I personally disagree with to mean something poetic I do agree with. Keller offers no acknowledgment or defense of this practice, but I assume he doesn’t think of his God as a Stepford God.
I’m sure Keller believes that what he is doing is accurately interpreting God’s word and what others are doing is distorting God’s word purposely or otherwise, but there is no evidence for this. He has no basis for which to claim he is correct, and I, or anyone else, incorrect. If you follow Keller’s advice, you will never know if you are interpreting the bible as the author’s intended, or if you are projecting your own desires onto an ambiguous text.
And really, which is more likely, that an omnipotent benevolent force that wants to spread his message wrote an incomprehensibly ambiguous self contradictory book, or that you, and many before you, unconsciously interpret a mundane text in a way consistent with ones personal desires?
Throughout this chapter Keller has tried to persuade us that the bible is a text worthy of complete trust. He has told us to ignore any faults we see in it as unimportant, and now as necessary. He has waved some of the fault away as poetry. He has explained some of the faults away as cultural, or temporarily biased. But even if you do all of those things, even if you get past all the objections I have raised, Keller still asks you to trust the bible completely, just because. He has no reason for why you would do this. Given the title The Reason for God one might hope for more. Ultimately, though, it still comes down to the old circle, the bible is true because the bible says so.