Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Re-Imagine Law

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

How can practicing the law be shaped by the Christian faith? And how can we reimagine lawyering? If you’re reimagining the legal profession, you don’t want to just be a Christian who happens to also be a lawyer. You want the way you practice the law to be shaped by your faith.  For this reimagining, we need to understand three things from Christian theology: 1) that every human being is called to be a gardener, 2) that the law is a form of gardening, and 3) that you need to figure out your own idols. This talk and Q&A was given by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 2, 2007. Series: Center for Faith and Work. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. If you have a job, it's likely that you think about it. A lot. But how much have you thought about the biblical approach to your work? Today on Gospel in Life, Tim Keller shows us that the Bible has incredibly helpful and practical wisdom we can apply to the work we do, wisdom you may find surprising, even life-changing. Now, actually, it may be, you never know, I suspect that the Q&A may be more helpful than what I'm about to say, so actually I'm going to be careful not to go on too long.

We're talking about a very, very large subject. And it's also, when it comes to being a Christian lawyer, being a Christian artist, being a Christian business person, the problem everybody's got is that nobody's got all the skills and nobody's got all the knowledge. So, for example, I have, you know, I'm a professional in the area of theology and Bible. You're amateurs. You're professionals in the area of law. I'm, I mean, you know, actually, frankly, I'm a bigger amateur in law than you are in the Bible and theology because you go to church if you go to church, whereas I don't go someplace every seven days and hear somebody talk about law. So you're actually ahead of me in a certain sense. You know more about my field than I know about your field. But as you see, you

really can't have a nuanced, wise approach to what it means to be a Christian in a particular profession unless you get more than one kind of person together regularly talking about what are the issues, what's actually out there, what's actually happening. You know your field. And you need theologians, you need ethicists, you need academics, you need pastors, as well as people in the law. And therefore, almost anybody who gets up here and speaks, and if you bring in a law professor, Christian or not, who's not trained in theology, well, that person's going to have a limit. I have a limit. So that's actually one of the biggest issues with this whole idea of the center of faith and work, and that is that there is nobody who's got all the answers. It's going to have to happen in community. It's

going to have to happen like that. When it comes to some things like worship or evangelism, it can be command and control. I'm the minister. I've went to seminary. I'm trained and I know what's going on. And I say, you're the lay people and do what I say and things will go fine. You can't say that about this subject or about any of the areas of Center for Faith and Work. This is collaborative. So I'll be, I'll give you my best ideas and I think in the Q&A you'll probably be educating me quite a bit and I hope I'll be able to give you some wisdom so you may get more out of the Q&A even when you're coming after me to say this is what I really need Tim, you never even talked about it in your lecture

because you really weren't smart enough about the legal profession to address it. And I'm, don't put it like that, but that may be what happens. Okay. Let's talk about reimagining your personal lawyering and reimagining the legal profession. That gets to our subject. And here we go. Three things. I actually might say these are three areas of inquiry, three areas of mastery, three things that you're going to have to get to know or master or learn if you're really going to reimagine your lawyering as a Christian. Isn't that the issue? The issue is you don't just want to be a Christian who happens to be a lawyer. You want to be a Christian lawyer. That is, you want your law practicing, your law, your

lawyering to be shaped by your faith. You don't want to seal it off. So, how do we re-imagine your personal lawyering? First, now this one I won't take too much time on, but what I'm going to tell you right now, I would say to anybody in any profession who's a Christian, you do have to understand the Christian theology of work and especially of culture formation or cultural production. You have to understand that. And here's how you understand that. You go back to the Bible, beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1 and 2. And in the beginning, God makes Adam and Eve the human race and he tells us to do something. And what does he tell us to do? He says, cultivate

the garden. Now, the Garden of Eden is not just a kind of sweet story about the fact that once upon a time the earth was this wonderful paradise of fruit trees and grass and everything. Everybody was frolicking around and everything happened nicely. The word garden is a word that actually means a royal park. A garden was not a wilderness. A garden is actually an urban, by the way, term. You don't have gardens out in the middle of nowhere. A garden is a cultivated area. In fact, this particular Hebrew word that says the Lord planted a garden in Eden, that word garden actually means a royal cultivated area.

You might say a garden in and around the palace of the king. So it's actually an urban term. He didn't have gardens out in the middle of nowhere. He only had gardens in cities. And the purpose of Adam and Eve was to cultivate the garden. And to cultivate a garden does not mean, Adam and Eve were not park rangers. Their job was not just to sort of, you know, walk around and see, and look at it. A gardener's job is not to leave the garden as it is, but to rearrange the natural resources of the garden to produce things, to produce food, to produce

flowers or whatever. You don't leave it as as it is you take the raw material of the garden and you have to skillfully rearrange it to bring about things What things things that human beings need to flourish? now that means Originally God told all human beings. I want I'm giving you the world I'm giving you my creation and I want you to develop it and therefore I want you to build, every human being is asked to produce culture. So, think about it. What are farmers doing? They are literally gardening, that

is they're rearranging the soil and they're rearranging the natural resources to bring about food. We need to have it, otherwise we don't have it. Let's think about music. What are musicians doing? They're rearranging the raw material of sound and producing music, which brings us meaning. Now it's actually a very difficult issue. Why is music so meaningful? Why do we do it?

Why is our life poor without it? And that's another subject another group another evening you know in fact i don't even know where i go on that but you know what are storytellers movie makers and writers doing it taking the raw material of human experience and turning into narratives we can't live without stories what investment bankers doing they're taking the raw material of of human

labor and talent and skill and they're rearranging it. They get a skill aligned with an unmet need and an idea and they get financial capital together and next thing you know you've got some human need being met in a way that wasn't before and creating all sorts of value in the process and jobs and human flourishing again. What do lawyers do?

I'll get there in a minute. That's my point too. But first of all I'm'm trying to say, every human being is called to produce culture. Everybody's called to produce culture to be obedient to God. I mean, that's the primary thing. The fact that we have to, because of sin, the fact that you need church and you need me and you need me to preach the gospel so people are converted, that's fine. That's very important. Because of sin, people need to have their lives put together spiritually and because of sin there's an additional problem that we've all got and that is we not only have to produce culture, we have to renew

culture. I'll get to that in a second. But that's the first thing you have to understand. Everybody's called to do that. We're all called to be gardeners. You can't obey God unless you are doing that. You are not supposed to simply get a job in order to make money so you can just have a life. The Christian understanding of calling is that you take your skills and you get out there into some field of creation and you rearrange the raw material of some area for human flourishing. Your whole purpose is human community, human joy, human wholeness,

and so forth. That's what you're doing. Okay, that's the first thing. Secondly, and actually it's a… By the way, when you dig a ditch, that's culture, you know that. If you dig a ditch so water can come down into the garden, if you dig a ditch so that water will be taken and then you put, you know, stones down there so water will be taken away from the house when it rains so your basement doesn't fill up with water and so your house doesn't flood away, that's culture. That's you're rearranging things. You're not leaving things as they are. You're rearranging the raw material for the purpose

of human flourishing. So, okay. That's the first thing you got to know. Do you know that? Is that a new idea to you? Well, I just gave you five minutes and it needs, you need books and hours and thought on that to understand that. Second thing you need is you need to understand how law is part of cultural production. How how obeying the law and applying the law and producing the law actually helps human flourishing. You've got to understand that. Now this is a big subject I should know more than I do. I don't, but here's, let me tell you from

a biblical theologian's point of view what law is. In the Bible, law is a means for relationship. That's the purpose of the law. So for example, you've probably heard me say this if you come to Redeemer, God does not give the people of Israel the law in Egypt and then say, if you obey the law, then I'll save you. Right? No. He saves Then I'll save you, right? No. He saves them, gets them out of Egypt by sheer grace, and he says, now I want to have a relationship with you. So, he brings them to Mount Sinai and he says, I am the Lord thy God.

And then he gives them the Ten Commandments. Now, what is that word? I am the Lord thy God. I am your God. That's the language of intimacy. The only people in my life that I say are my Kathy, my David, my Michael, my Jonathan, are my family. If you hear somebody talk about my this or my that, you say that's an intimate relationship. When he says I'm the Lord, you're God, I want an intimate relationship

with you and here's how you do it. Obey the law. Now, if there was no sin, you see, when you and I think of the law as basically coercive, you know, there's penalties if you don't obey the law, you're going to get sued, you're going to go to jail. But imagine there's no sin. Do you still need the law? Yeah.

When I fall in love, when I fell in love with my wife, what I wanted desperately to do was I wanted intimacy and I wanted to love her and I wanted to please her. And how do you do that? You actually do research to find out what pleases her. In other words, you're looking for her will. What is Kathy's will? That's my wife's name. What pleases her? What is she like? What makes her happy? What does she hate? And then what you do is you do everything you possibly can to fulfill her will. And then she's doing the same for you if you're both in a love relationship. And by actually, by self-imposed boundaries, you know, she hates that so I won't do that. She loves that so I'm going to do that. That's law. That's

raw law. That's finding out the will of the beloved, what the beloved loves and hates. And if I am discovering her will and I am limiting myself and setting up boundaries and as it were obeying her will and she's doing the same thing for me, we're going to have an incredible relationship. So we're both bending over backwards to serve the other person. We're both bending over backwards to honor the other person. Now when God says, I'm the Lord your God, you have no other gods before me, and goes right into the law, what he is trying to say is, this is my will. You want to have a love

relationship with me? This is what I love. This is what I hate. Obey me. And that's the reason, for example, there's this very interesting verse in Psalm 81 verse 10 where the psalmist says, he quotes the Ten Commandments and he has God saying, I am the Lord thy God, open your mouth and I will fill it. It's very striking because if you know I am the Lord thy God is the preamble to the law, you expect the next thing for God to say is, I am the Lord thy God, so do everything I say. He says, open your mouth and I will fill it. And this brings out another aspect, and that is, what we most need to flourish is love relationship. And therefore, what God is saying is, if you break the law, if you violate my nature, see, if you trample on a relationship with me, you're not going to flourish because you were built for relationship.

You were built for a love relationship with me and a love relationship with other people. Now the reason we were built for that is because we're made the image of God and God is not a unity but a trinity. And we know from glimpses and snatches, especially in John chapter 17, that what God has known is amazing joy and love within Himself because from all eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have been deferring to each other. Each serves the other, each glorifies the other, each honors the other instead of him or herself. So, in other words, each person knows the joy of serving the other person's will instead

of his own will. And if everyone is doing that in a love relationship, if I'm trying to serve your will but not mine, and you're trying to serve my will but not yours, you have human flourishing, you have interdependence, you have harmony, you have love relationship. And so God is saying, obey the law because that will bring you shalom, that will bring you peace, that will fit in with your nature. To obey my law and have a love relationship with me and a love relationship with others, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie. If you limit yourself and serve others instead of yourself, in other words, if you obey the law, everybody's going to flourish. And so you would have law

even if there was no sin. Because if you love somebody, you want to know what is your will, what do you want? What do you hate? What do you like? And so we have a tendency to say, we think of the law in almost completely negative terms, you shouldn't because, listen, there are plenty of countries in this world, are there not, where there's no rule of law at all. You don't need lawyers there, you just need a gun, right? And they're miserable places. They're absolutely miserable places. I know lawyers have a bad reputation, and you know that more than I do. You know how people say, oh lawyers, you're a bunch of sharks and you're always out to stick it to people.

The fact is, if you go to a place where there's no need for lawyers, they're horrible places. And places where there is a need for lawyers because there is a body of law which to some degree approximates justice though always always variant exactly uh... and you've got to have lawyers who uphold it who help people understand what it is who tell their clients this is what the law is and you've got to follow it and that sort of thing

if you have a country in which even under these circumstances, sinful circumstances, broken circumstances, where people are not, they're selfish and they're proud and they don't want to serve each other, it's not natural to us anymore. And yet we need it. Law is here to, to some degree, help us approximate the life of the Trinity. People who have to limit themselves and honor boundaries so they don't trample on other people. Now, because we're in a falling condition, law to a great degree is coercive, to a great degree it's negative. Because we're in a falling condition, the legislatures and the powers that be do not produce always the wisest laws or the most fair laws. And so what I just said

to you can get lost, you know, you can lose the forest for the trees, but if you're Christians and you have to understand that for you to take law, which is in a sense the raw material of human relationships, finding out what people need, how they need to honor each other's boundaries in order to have interdependent, harmonious love relationships is really what it's all about. You are helping human flourishing. You're gardeners too. Do you understand that? Probably not. Actually, until I, until because Catherine asked me to do this thing and I had to spend the last three or four weeks

thinking about it, I never thought about how great it is to be a lawyer. I never thought about how important it is to have law and have people around who are officers of the court who basically are there to say this is what the law is and tell people what the law is. I mean, there's so much junk and there's so much gunk and there's all these ethical problems you're going to talk to me about and when the client's asking you to do something that's legal but it's not moral and we'll'll get to that, and I guess I don't know whether I'll be of much help, but you have to see underneath the health of the very profession what's really going on, what you're really doing.

And therefore, first I said, you have to have some understanding of why God has called all human beings to do cultural production, and secondly, you have to understand why, how law is particularly a form of human cultural production. It's a form of gardening. It's a way of caring for God's creation and rearranging raw materials so that there's more human flourishing. In the situation of sin, we have to talk about not just cultural production but cultural renewal for a second, just for a second. And that's where the image of salt comes. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, you are the salt of the earth.

And people debate what that means, but most commentators and most Bible scholars are pretty sure it means this. You have to put it into context. For us today, salt is almost just flavoring. But first of all, you have to remember back in those days, salt was something you put into meat to renew it, to keep it from going bad. You didn't have refrigerators. And meat would go back, would have gone back like that. You had a salt meat just to be able to store it. Salt was basically kept things from going bad. On the other hand, and this is something I didn't know until I did some research, most

commentators point out that salt really doesn't have a taste. You might say, yes, of course it does. Well, actually, salt brings out the flavor of what it's in. In other words, it actually evokes taste and therefore, to some degree, takes it on. And what does that mean? Christians are supposed to be out in society. Obviously, first of all, salt has to penetrate. We can't just all be together in a holy huddle, right? Secondly, Christians know that because of sin, the world would be a far worse place if we don't get out there, right? We have to get out there and we have to say, we want to work with integrity, we want to uphold justice, we want to do what we can to keep the world from being really, really, really much worse than it could be

because of sin. But thirdly, Christians are not necessarily supposed to go out there and try to take over and say, we're going to do a Christian way of doing everything. Christians aren't supposed to necessarily go into a field and say, we're going to do a Christian way of doing everything. Christians aren't supposed to necessarily go into a field and say, we're going to change the field so that only Christians will feel at home here. Instead, Christians are supposed to actually bring out through common grace, through, we're supposed to look at people who also are made in the image of God and to a great degree have a conscience even if they don't acknowledge God. They basically have very, very similar

views of what's right and wrong. Very often you can talk to an atheist or a secular person and when you ask them, what do you think is, what do you, give me your idea of justice. So often it's so similar to a Christian view, even though they have no basis for it, since they, as far as they're concerned, were here by accident and strong eat the weak and evolution, that's all there is to it, and they have no basis for those intuitions, but the intuitions are there. They have no basis in their worldview, but they're there. Why? Because they're in the image of God. And therefore, you're supposed to go out there and we're supposed to actually bring out the best in the culture. So for example, perfect example of working for justice was the abolition of slavery. And you think about

this. I had a friend who got a doctorate at Yale in history years ago, and he did it on the abolition movement. And he said the one thing that all the professors of Yale, this is in the 1970s, but they all understand, he said somewhere in the 60s and 70s the history, the departments of history came to realize that we have a tendency to think back at slavery and say, how could those people, all those countries and societies, how could they have ever put up with slavery? But historians began to realize that's not the right question to ask. When you have something, an institution of slavery, which all cultures in all centuries

had always just taken for granted that there'd be slavery, the real question is why, after all those centuries and in all those cultures, why did anybody ever come up with the idea that there was anything wrong with it? That's the question. And everybody knows the idea came from Christians, Jews and Christians who believed, who looked at the Bible. That's where the idea came from. But when the Jews and the Christians who had this idea from the Bible went out there and started working for the abolition of slavery, you didn't have to be a Christian to see, hey, this is going

to make the world a better place. This is going to be salt. This is going to make the world a far less miserable place. It's going to bring healing here. It's going to renew. It's going to keep things from deteriorating. It's going to bring justice. You didn't have to be a Christian to be part of that. And to be a Christian lawyer who's doing cultural renewal, I believe it means being salt. It means not trying to make the world a place where only Christians feel at home. But it means clearly and very often openly saying because of my Christian convictions this is what I'm pushing.

And yet you do it in a way that shows people that you're out for the common good. You're out for everybody flourishing, not just my tribe. Okay, third thing, I'm trying to run through these things. To reimagine your personal law you're in, first you need to have an understanding of Christian cultural production, secondly you need to have an understanding of how law is actually a form of gardening and how it leads to Christian cultural production and cultural renewal. But thirdly, you need to figure out your own idols. Now here's where actually I feel like I'm flying blind and I think I'll be happy to deal with this more in the question and answer time.

Because I think it's absolutely crucial for any Christian operating in a profession to figure out what are the besetting sins, the besetting temptations, and the idols of the people in my profession. So now, let me give you two examples of this. If, as I think these are examples, and you say, well, you know, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is our real problem, then tell me about it. But you need to have a list, and you need to be on the lookout for them, and you need to be able to hold each other accountable for them. But for example, here's a simple thing, and that is, if you Christians, because of the

theology, realize that you're actually a servant of justice, not human law, why? Because human laws only approximate justice, right? Everybody believes that, otherwise you wouldn't be able to repeal laws and start new ones. Everybody thinks you have to improve the law. So if you're the servant of justice, not just the human law, and if you're the servant of human flourishing, not just your client, then if you make an idol of human law or of your client's wishes, instead of holding them relatively important, but not absolutely important. If you make an idol of human law or your client's wishes, you'll never, ever, ever say to a client, what you want to do is legal, but it's a really,

really, really rotten idea. It's bad for people, it's bad for you, it's bad for the human community. Now, if you can never do that, ever, because you would, you know, you either think you'd lose your job or you would lose your reputation or you're just scared to death, then you've made an idol out of your career or out of money or your reputation or out of human law or out of your client's wishes. And so, my guess is, from what I can tell, if there are besetting sins for people in the law profession, the irony is on the one hand, I think, the one sin is actually an over fear of displeasing

your client instead of saying occasionally to your client, you know, I want to tell you where to get off, I just can't be your attorney anymore. On the other hand, there's lawyers have spent so much time working on their minds that you over sometimes, I think, trust your minds and not your hearts. But we can talk about that, okay.

But anyway, the third thing is you've got to know what your particular idols are. So if you want to reimagine lawyering, that's what you, those are the three things. If you want to reimagine the law profession, now this is, I'm going to be brief on this because it's just too big a subject and maybe, in some ways I'm not sure that that's quite as important to you tonight. Maybe I'll find out I'm wrong. Because you have to start somewhere and I think for most of us it's like how do I reimagine my own personal law practice. But I think that here's the three things you need to consider and read. In fact,

in some ways I know a little bit more about this than the other part because it's a little bit more of an academic philosophical issue. One is, do you know the history of the secularization of your own field or not? You know, a great place to start would be, this is a terrific book by, it's edited by Christian Smith and it's called The Secular Revolution. It's a University of California press book. It's an extremely important book, by the way, about four or five years old, maybe three or four years old.

It's called The Secular Revolution and it's a compendium put together by scholars who are looking at how it's true that at the time of the Civil War, almost every area where it came to science, law, scholarship, the arts, was pretty dominated by Christian and religious sensibility. And from about 1860, 1870, 1880 through to about 1950, there was a very, very systematic stripping and secularization of every single field. And this book has got a fascinating, for you as people in law, there's two, it's a big thick book and you probably shouldn't be reading the whole thing. But there's two essays you ought to read. The one essay is the one by Christian Smith, which is an overview. It's the first

essay, it's very long, I think it's like 100 or 200 pages. Okay, so. And then there's one by a guy named David, I'm trying to read his, there's one by, well there's one on the secularization of, oh yeah, okay, it's called From Christian Civilization to Individual Civil Liberties, Framing Religion in the Legal Field by David Sikink, with a bunch of K's, S-I-K-K-I-N-K. And what he does is he basically, and here's the main point, I'll be brief on this, the thing you're going to get out of that is that you have heard that secularization of all these fields was basically the inevitable drift of people, of human societies because we've gotten more scientific, we've gotten more sophisticated, we've gotten more pluralistic,

we just have grown up and so we're not as religious. That is, this book shows, an absolute fiction. And he basically points out that professionals, for example, you didn't really have law schools the way you have them now. You didn't really have full-time legal academics until after the Civil War. It's also true you didn't have even full-time scientists. You know that the book will show that almost all scientists also did something else. But that when you developed a set of elite experts after the Civil War, they had to do something in order to accrue their, in order to consolidate their own cultural power and

to get control of their fields from the church and from Christian thinkers and they therefore very, very deliberately, very intentionally and very systematically work for the secularization of their field. And what Christian Smith and this guy show is therefore it wasn't inevitable. It was not an inevitable process and the fact that it's totally secular now It was not an inevitable process. And the fact that it's totally secular now is not also an inevitable endpoint. So that's the first thing. Second thing is you better get down the fact, I guess surely you've been exposed to this, maybe not, is there's no such thing as neutrality. That every law and every argument in all public discourse is based on a set of a religious, basically

religious assumptions about human nature, about God, about right and wrong. Certainly you've heard perhaps in the law schools that basically there was a religious approach to law in which we believed in natural law, we believed in basing law on the Bible, we believed in basing law on religious ideas of natural law, but we're different now, now we have positive law, now we have basically pragmatic law. people come together and make laws that we

think basically work. So the myth is that law is no longer rooted in religion like it used to be. Now it's secular. Now it's practical. Now it's scientific. Now it's empirical. That's just not true. Now if you say, I struggle with that, that's another area in which you need to be reading. I would suggest if you want something a little broader on this very subject, I mean, I suggest three books if you care. One is a book that was edited by Michael McConnell and a bunch of other people called Christian Perspectives on Legal Theory. It's the Yale University Press. And it just shows that all law, whether it's contractual, you know, contract

law or marriage law, it doesn't matter. It's rooted in a certain set of assumptions about human nature. You know, for example, if you decide to privilege individuals over community, you can't prove that in a test tube. You can't prove that empirically. You can't prove that. That is a set of basically religious assumptions about human flourishing, about what people most need. And basically, you'll see in a book like that, that from before 1860, law tended to privilege the community and the family and the body over the individual, right? And since 1860, law has been privileging the individual over the family and the body over the individual, right? And since 1860, law has been privileging the individual over the family and the community and the corporate. Why? More what? Why? Scientific?

We proved it's better? No. It's a set of assumptions about what I need to flourish as a human being. And we live in an extremely individualistic Western society that says, basically it's based on Ralph Waldo Emerson's view of human nature. Go read his essay, Self-Reliance, and you'll understand your own legal profession. So for example, in the Christian legal book, the Perspectives on Christian Legal Theory, for example, there's a really interesting article in there about marriage law. And here's something I hadn't really thought of. It says the enlightenment, which is an individualistic approach to, you know, to reality, sees the purpose of marriage as the happiness of the couple. Whereas, not just Christian, but Confucian, Hindu, Muslim, almost every other worldview sees the basic purpose of marriage and marriage

law, a marriage contract, to create stability for the rearing of children. That's the reason you make it hard to break up. And so the point, if the purpose of marriage law is to create a stable environment in which children can be nurtured, because it's the only situation, we've tried orphanages, we've tried warehousing them, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. The only place that kids can really, really grow up pretty safely is in a happy home with parents who are there year after year after year. So the purpose of marriage law in a more traditional world view is for the happiness of the kids. The purpose of marriage in an enlightenment

view is just for the fulfillment of the individual. What's going to have a huge impact on whether you make marriage laws and divorce laws easy or hard? In other words, it's not a matter of just pragmatism or empiricism. It's all rooted in basically religious assumptions. So don't be cowed when people say, you know, you can't bring your Christian faith or your religious assumptions into this discussion. They are. Now, they don't go to a secular place every seven days and listen to a sermon on secularism, but the point is they are.

See? Just because theirs not organized doesn't mean it's not religious. And I guess one last thing that we really want to take the Q&A. If you are going to reimagine the legal profession, you have to understand the secularization of your field, you have to understand generally the myth of neutrality. And one last thing, I hope you see, and maybe I'm wrong, some of you surely would be closer to it than me, but there's actually a kind of crisis in the area of philosophy of law right now.

There's a new book by Michael J. Perry who's a major constitutional law guy out of, who's been moving around, but I guess he's at Emory now or maybe he's not. Or even Alan Dershowitz's book, Shouting Fire, and a couple books like that. There's a real crisis out there right now in trying to understand how do we root human rights in a secular worldview. It's a huge crisis. And just, when I read the second chapter of Alan Dershowitz's book, Shouting Fire, he had a very interesting chapter in which he said, how do we, you know, what makes us believe in human rights was the question. And he said, Christians used to believe in human rights because, you know, they believed in God and therefore God

made all human beings to be his children and therefore they had rights in the image of God. And he says, the trouble is too many of us are atheists so we can't use that anymore. He says, secondly, people used to say, well, human rights are natural law. There's something in nature that says human beings are valuable. But he says, that's not true. If you look at nature, you've got evolution in which the strong eat the weak and therefore nature is no guide. So natural law doesn't give us a basis for human rights. Then he says, people who believe in positive law say, well, natural rights are created by the majority. If we legislate a human right,

then it's there. And it's there only because we make it, right, as a society. He says the trouble is, the human rights are of absolutely no use if you don't use them against the majority. See, the whole point of a human right is to say, my client has to be honored here, you know, and the majority cannot, you know, trample upon him because it's his right. So if you say that the majority can just simply take, if you really say that 51 percent of the population can by vote take away the rights to live for 49 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, well, you know, you don't really believe that. Nobody believes that. He said human rights are a sense that people have dignity in spite of what the majority says.

So he says okay, so human rights you can't root them in God because we don't believe in God. You can't root it in human in natural law because there's we don't you know there's no basis in natural law. You can't root it in in just the will of majority because that's not what human rights are. Human rights is the dignity of the individual in spite of the majority. So he says, so what makes us think there are such things as human rights? And here's how he finishes. He says, really, if there is no God, there's really no basis for human rights. We just know they're there. That's that. We just know they're there. And guess what? Michael Perry, in his book, Toward a Theory of Human Rights, he's an atheist too, by the

way. He listens to that and he says, when you say, we just know they're there, who's we? Who's we? We academics, we white people, we Western people. Most people don't, in history, have not just known there's such a thing as human rights. That's just basically saying we are the only ones, you know, the royal we, we're the royal we and nobody else is.

And Michael Perry says, really, if there is no doctrine of God, there's no basis for human rights. And he's not a Christian. He's not even a believer in God. There's a crisis going on out there at that level. I don't know whether that makes much difference to those of you working at these great big law firms and are being told to do what the client says even when it's going against your conscience.

That's probably not much help. But you need to understand as Christians, you need to understand as Christians that you've got something a legal profession desperately needs even though it doesn't know it. There we go. We're going to do some questions and answers. I think John's going to ask me some questions that some of you generated. I'll be brief on that so there will be plenty of time for you to ask me the questions you want to get to now. Okay? That's right. Let's start with this one here. You're going to use the mic though.

Thanks. Do Christian lawyers have a special obligation to use their skill set, their special knowledge and qualifications to work for justice and against oppression in ways that maybe other parts or members within the body, within the church do not. Sure. Can you elaborate on that just a little bit? I mean, why do you say sure? By the way, John, for example, you sent along, I think you sent along to me two articles, right? Two PDF articles. One of them talked about the fact that there's a pretty big debate in the legal profession about the obligation of lawyers to do pro bono work

for poor people or people that just can't afford legal fees but need a lawyer. I'm pretty sure it's one of them. Maybe it was something, I mean, I read a lot Get Ready for Night. I thought it was one of the ones you sent me. It doesn't matter. And he said the real problem is a lot of lawyers feel guilty about that. And some lawyers complain that that would – I just say I think Christian lawyers do have to feel a certain amount of responsibility to be at least tithing somehow, giving up a pretty good amount of income to help people that can't afford them. And that doesn't mean, for example, when you're 25 years old and you start in the law profession and you've got to earn your spurs.

I'm not saying that every year you've got to do that, but somewhere in the some, you have to find some seasons in which you are willing to take the skills that God gave you and it is, God gave it to you. And if you're born in the mountain of Tibet in the 13th century, no matter how hard you work, you wouldn't be a lawyer. And therefore, if you've got this place, this skill set, a relatively decent income by comparison with most people in the world, then you really ought to take it in the neck and do a certain amount of work that you know isn't going to pay, or is not going to pay very well.

And I'm talking about over the course of your life. It doesn't have to be right now. But at some point, yes. So that's, I mean, because I think all Christians are supposed to be doing that in some way. Virtually everybody is. I mean, even my blue collar people in my little church in Virginia, they knew that it was their job to be reaching out to their neighbors and doing things that weren't going to pay them anything. We're going to take time out of their leisure, in many cases money out of their pockets. But in your case, you shouldn't probably be doing as much ditch digging and helping people rehab their houses as maybe using your skills

on pro bono work because somebody who's not a lawyer can do the rehabbing of the house. So basically, yes, I do think there's an obligation. A follow-up question on that. In addition to some of the pro bono stuff that is more obvious, I think, for those of us in the profession, that's a great easy way to sort of apply. From your experience in the church, are there other areas or other needs that those of us with a legal background can fill or fit in better, maybe, than some others? Oh, you mean certain jobs inside the church? Dr. Bregman Or responsibilities?

Dr. Larson Yeah. I'll tell you what. See, in the area of evangelism, Redeemer has five ministry fronts. And on the one hand, you have more traditional evangelism and community formation and discipleship. So we're trying to connect people to God and we're trying to get them together, we're trying to disciple them, help them grow in grace. That's the more traditional side. The other side, the other two ministry fronts, the next two are social justice, hope for New York, finding places in the city where there's a, the social fabric's falling, you know, is weak and people

are falling through it, and cultural renewal, you know, integrating faith and work. And I said here tonight that in those areas there's a big difference because clergy and pastors and elders and deacons and deaconesses don't, we can't call all the shots. Nobody has all the gifts. There needs to be a lot of cooperation, collaboration. It's got to be incredibly collegial. And in those areas, which especially is reaching out and renewing the city, yeah, that's where you actually have to have all hands on deck and all kinds of skills. And lawyers fit in an awful lot of places because you have to have a lot of 501c3s, you have to have a lot

of work in which you really need legal advice.1c3s, you have to have a lot of work in which you really need legal advice, or in some cases you actually just need people who have got a certain amount of legal savvy even though it's not direct, direct. It's not like I'm being a lawyer. But you just, you know, we have three lawyers as elders, okay, three right now, or is it four? Several of our elders are lawyers and you know what? Without being lawyers directly, they're being elders primarily, they just see things. For example, we're buying a building, right? And a couple of the elders who are lawyers, not really as lawyers per se, just smelled things and noticed things and thought of things. So even on this side, the sort of traditional evangelism discipleship, coming in and being

just a person at any level in the church and having your legal acumen with you is a big help. But especially in certain areas where you actually need, it's not clergy driven and it's not staff driven. It's sort of lay staff, clergy, non-clergy, ministers, you know, we need all sorts of folks. So that's, so the answer is actually, you're very needed, I think. And I can, I could give you a number of other areas where I've seen people who were, see, in other words, I'm, I'm, you're right about this. There's the pro bono work

where I'm a lawyer for free or for very little money. That's one way to do the social conscious thing and service. The second way is to be part of a Christian initiative in which you are really mainly there as a lawyer. You're there to give legal advice, but you're part of the partnership and it's exciting. You're getting a new ministry off the ground. But the third is you're just there and your primary hat is something else, not as a lawyer, and yet because you're a lawyer, you're actually, why, you're bringing a certain amount of wisdom to bear that otherwise wouldn't be there. So, okay. Q. Another question about your experience in the church. Have you seen any particular behaviors or attitudes that Christian lawyers tend to exhibit that are things we should

be careful about? Yeah, well I alluded to one. I feel a little funny about this because I don't know that this is anecdotal. Lawyers like, you know, one of the things, here's a different, doctors have a lot of pride in their intellect. They've worked very hard. They're very smart. They've mastered a lot of material and they're very, they have a lot of pride in their intellect. They've worked very hard, they're very smart, they've mastered a lot of material, and they have a lot of pride in their analytical ability. So, especially

surgeons, by the way. There's a certain swagger that comes. Some doctors more than others. I think the same thing happens with lawyers. One of the differences is doctors do not have to make public presentations. Lawyers, not all of you do, but some of you have to, well you all have to write pretty much don't you? So you have to make presentations, you have to argue, and some of you have to do it orally. And so yeah, over the years I have seen definitely lawyers. I can't tell whether you have people who are blowhards and kind of arrogant and they like power and they were attracted to the legal profession because they like power or whether the legal profession helped them develop a kind of love of power but that they hold forth in...

But now ministers do too in a very different way. Ministers, we have the answers, we have the doctrine. But anyway, I say besetting sin of lawyers very often is a great pride in their intellect and in some cases a kind of difficulty of acting on a team. Very often, here you are on a team and here's the lawyer and the lawyer knows. I know. And so that's not team. That's not like, here's an idea and I wish this and negotiate, you know, but all lawyers are not alike, just like all doctors are not alike. Like I said, the more arrogant ones tend to be surgeons and I suppose you're going to tell me the more arrogant lawyers go to certain parts of law too, but you know, you can tell me

about that. I'm here to be educated as well. 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. Every good endeavor is our thank you for your gift to help Gospel in Life share Christ's love with more people around the world. Just visit www.gospelinlife.com slash give. That's www.g gospelandlife.com. That's gospelandlife.com. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. Okay, next. Anywhere. Yeah, who wants? Are this being recorded? Oh, so that's why you have to talk in the mic. Here we go. Hi, my question is a follow-up with the issue of lawyers and pride, not withstanding doctors. But sometimes, how do you reconcile pride when C.S. Lewis once said that pride is the

worst sin of all with an effective profession where sometimes you need a little bit of arrogance to be efficacious. Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, that's good. That's very good. Now, there's another person I don't quote nearly as much, a woman, a writer named E. Sock Dennison, who also said, pride is faith in the idea God had when he made you. And isn't that nice? Isn't that nice? That's in Out of Africa, which is a terrific book, by the way. And, see, Lewis would also agree with that, that there's a healthy pride. And the healthy pride is, God's put me here, He's given me some gifts, and by His grace and in gratitude to him I'm going to use them and I'm going to...and also, because of his grace, I'm not totally afraid of failure

here. I'm willing to say, this looks like the right thing to do and I'm going to step out and do it. So, there's an over...pride is like anything else. There's, I said, you should want to serve your client, right? Because you are basically service providers. You are not legislators. You are not creating the law. You are serving people within the bounds of the law. And yet, you can make an eye out of your client and it's too afraid. So same thing with your pride. You have some gifts or you wouldn't be where you are. You've accomplished a great deal. I don't know. You know, my son just got ordained. I don't know to what degree I need to say to him, you really need to be excited. I mean, I can't, you really accomplished something. I mean, you're really, you're good, you're gifted, you know, and to what

degree I need to say, stay humble, stop, don't be arrogant, don't think you know whatever, you know, I don't know. So it's just simply a balance. And maybe that's just, sorry to be so trite, it's a balance. But that's a great quote, isn't it? Pride, righteous pride, godly pride is faith in the idea God had when he made you. So. Somebody else over here. Raise the hand and you can know where to go. When I was in college and not intending to go to law school at all, I figured out that much later, Aster used the word legalistic a lot when describing something bad that Christians do.

Yeah, you're all professional legalists. Yes. And you would say, well, that's so legalistic. It's not really the spirit of what the person's saying or something like that. And I was just wondering, as a non-lawyer who's met a lot of different people in a lot of different professions and as a Christian yourself, from the outside looking in, do you think that it is more difficult for people who,

you know, are legalistic because they have to be in their profession, is it harder for them to live a Christian life? Accountants are legalistic too. I have noticed, I've actually more often noticed that legalistic people, I'd say the answer is no, and I'll tell you why. I think a variety of people are attracted to law. Some of you know, for example, the disc test. It's a personality test. It looks at four basic approaches to personality. One is more power-oriented, one is more approval-oriented, one is more compliance-oriented. So a high C. See, if you go to accountants, they're all high Cs, very big on doing it

by the book. And if you go to artists, they're all Ss or, I mean, so there's, I have a feeling that you don't have one kind of person coming. In fact, even business, I think, you know, Catherine, we know that people who want to be entrepreneurs tend to be people like to influence, they like to get things done, and they tend actually not to like detail. They don't like details. They know they have to hire an accountant, but they stay away from the accountant, because the accountant is saying, you don't have the money for this. Oh, it doesn't matter. The money will be there. So certain personalities go to certain kinds of fields. I actually have seen a real variety

of people go into law. So I'm not sure, that's why I'm a little, I would love to do some research with you all with a group this big about what you think your besetting sins are. I'm being very, I'm being more reticent than I usually am on this. Because when I, Catherine knows, when I talk to groups I usually say, what are your besetting sins and idols? And the more I've thought about it, the harder it is for me to really be sure. So no, I wouldn't say they necessarily tend to be legalistic at all. As a matter of fact, we all know there are some lawyers that we wish they were more legalistic. And I talked to a tax lawyer once that I said, you know, you need to honor the law.

You know, he basically was saying, it depends how much you pay me. I can... No, really. He says, he says, if you pay me this... I remember how we first got here. I went to a tax lawyer and I still owned a house in Philadelphia and he was... I was trying to... I didn't understand how to do my taxes and he said, if you pay me a little bit more,

I can push and sort of bend the rules and Yes, I wish he was more legalistic. So I don't think it's necessarily so, no. Who else? Good, hi. What's your opinion on the thought that What's your opinion on the thought that some people sometimes have that it's more contributing to the human society and to God's kingdom for a Christian lawyer to be a lawyer at a legal services bureau instead of a big firm or working for World Vision instead of at a major corporation?

Yeah, that's a great question. But you know, almost all these problems, when people who are lawyers ask me these things, there's almost always a parallel everywhere else. You hear me saying to young ministers, I say, go to the city or work in the inner city. That's where the great need is. On the other hand, you have to have Christians everywhere there's people. Because you have to have churches everywhere there's people. So even though I think you want to think strategically and there's, you can make a real case that we ought to have a lot of Christians working in legal services.

But no, I mean, you want all Christians to abandon, there should be no sector of culture in which Christians leave because then they wouldn't be salt. You know, you need people with integrity at big firms. At the very least, even though, you know, even though Christians that I know work at big firms are always complaining to me about ethical conscience problems they have, I don't know if I should be doing this, I should be doing that. But you know, just the fact that you're there, just because you, just, we need more tormented, tortured people in big firms. We, we do. Because you, I mean, I say, I know you're there and I don't even know if I'm

giving you the right advice, but I do know that you're not, you haven't done like the tax lawyer did, just thrown conscience to the wind and that's bad for society. It's really bad. So you need Christians absolutely everywhere, even though, yeah, of course I could make a case for ministers going here rather than here and I could make a case for lawyers maybe preferring this, but no, I would never say that as a Christian there's something wrong with you working in a big firm. And you know what, if you're pulling down big money, as opposed to, see when you go work in a legal firm, in a sense, legal services, you're kind of, it's sort of dry tithing.

In other words, you're giving money away that never actually comes into your hands. Right, you're giving away value. You have the ability in the market to pull in a lot more money, but by going and serving people who can't pay as well, you're actually giving away the money before it ever hits you. But if you are somewhere else where you're making quite a bit of money, then you give it away. It comes back to the same thing. It should. In other words, you just shouldn't live all that well as a Christian. In other words, you should look at the lawyer over there working in legal services and you

look at yourself and maybe you say, I really shouldn't be living four times better than my Christian brother or sister who's working for legal services. So in other words, and now admittedly, there's a little bit of emotional payoff to get the money and then give it away. And it can kind of give you a sense of power. So you always have to watch about your motives. When people say, okay, I'm working over here and I'm making a lot of money but I'm giving it away, well, watch your motives. Nevertheless, it should come out the same. You should be, you know, it should come to you and then you should be incredibly generous with it and you're

plowing it out into human beings and ministries and charities and things like that. Or you're giving it away before it ever comes to you. So either way it comes out fine. Nobody else? Yes? Hi. One thing I found like thoroughly refreshing, but at the same time was a huge point of contention with my faith was how much law school heralded rationalism and logical thinking.

And to me, thinking like a lawyer, to learn to think like a lawyer was to really think rationally and logically. And how much, and just growing up in the church as a Christian, anytime I had a question, I just felt like the response was, oh, just believe. You can't rationalize everything in the Bible. And how much would you say that, would you characterize God as a rational being and is that mutually exclusive from having faith? I just feel that Christians mistake God transcending natural law as something that he's acting irrationally,

but so if you could kind of speak on that. Yeah, you know, first of all, I said, when I was hesitatingly talking about besetting sense of lawyers, I said that I do think because lawyers, either the legal profession attracts people who like analytical rational thinking or it actually instills it in you or a combination of both, there is a tendency I have found for lawyers to just love to hear, love to argue and unnecessarily argue when other people are making decisions more by consensus and so there is a danger of you just getting into law mode. It's a problem for everybody. I'm a preacher and when I'm not preaching I shouldn't

be preaching all the time. In other words, I shouldn't be getting on my horse and you shouldn't be a lawyer all the time and you shouldn't be, you know, I was actually thinking I had a church in a small town, but it was right next to a huge army base. And we had a lot of military people in the church. And all the non-military people were always rolling their eyes at the military people who just didn't know when to stop being military. They said, look, we're not military.

We don't do it like that. One of the great insights, I think, that the Bible has given me in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, most commentators point out that when the rich man goes to hell and Lazarus goes to heaven, this is Luke 16, it's extremely unusual for Jesus to use a proper name in a parable. It's like the only parable in which any character has a proper name. It's always a sower, or this, or a woman. So why? His whole point is that Lazarus has a name but the rich man doesn't because that's all he was. Instead of having an identity in God, a personal identity, his riches was his identity. And in a sense, that's hell. You lose yourself.

You don't have an identity. You're kind of a robot. Because if you lose your riches, then there's nothing left of you. And I do see, all of us are like that. All of us have a danger of that, especially if you're a little bit successful, that your identity becomes not your being a son or daughter of the king, the child, the child of the father, you know, in Christ, you know, I'm a minister. You know, don't you know I'm a minister? And so you sometimes get ministerial. And lawyers do the same thing. And military people, everybody tends to do

it. It's a danger. You're a person first and you're a lawyer second. So the rational arguing, I think most, I mean, maybe you've seen it, but maybe you don't, because you know, you don't ask a fish about water because the fish will say, what's water? But just as the non-military people roll their eyes about the military people who continue to be military out in the normal world, people may be rolling their eyes at you. I don't know. They're saying, oh gosh, they're here, he goes again. Having said that, did you know Cardinal Ratzinger, who's now the Pope, Pope Benedict, last year, or is it this year, got in trouble when he said that he was contrasting

Christianity with Islam? And what he was trying to say is that our understanding of God is that God is not above reason because God is, we wouldn't have reason without God and therefore God is a rational God. And he was pointing out, and he's right about this because he does understand Islam, that Islam sees rationality as secondary. It's sort of a, you know, God is super rational, he's above reason and Christians wouldn't see it that way. So I do think you're right for lawyers to be frustrated that they are trained to think and to ask questions and to have people reason and then they go to churches where

the answer is don't question. So I understand that. And I have to say that Redeemer, in the very beginning I was very conscious about the fact that so many churches are authoritarian. And I was trying to set up a different situation. It's not the same thing as saying there's no authority, because I'm saying whenever I preach I say this is not my idea, this is what the Bible says. And yet I'm trying to do it in a way that appeals to your reason without pandering, you know, to your pride. Okay? So the answer is yes, I think God is rational and I think reason is actually important, but beware, beware, beware of lawyerishness, kind of over lawyerishness. Okay.

Yes, okay. Hi. This is a bit of a meta question maybe. So far you've been really encouraging to this group of lawyers, but I'm wondering if you have some challenging words, and in particular, the fact that the gospel is very radical in calling us not to be just moral and good and do what we can, but to learn to progressively die to ourself, die to our flesh, learn to submit our will to God, and so forth.

And the potential conflict between that and the current, especially American legal system with its focus on individualism, rights, this adversarial model of doing things. Yeah. In the Christian, yes, I'll tell you, yes, you're right. In the book, A Christian Perspectives on Legal Theory, it's that Yale University Press book edited by Michael McConnell and some other people. Near the very end, there's one on a Christian approach to legal ethics. And there's a whole page where a guy says, as I read the Bible, as I, and I think he's absolutely right about this. He says, as a Christian lawyer, I actually do everything I can. He says, I wish I could remember that he said it so well. He says, basically, I do not encourage litigation. I just don't do it. I have something of a bias against it, especially

when I know that even though it may be, you may even be successful, I just know the damage it's going to do. He says, I see the damage of so much lawful process and I therefore am thinking about the bigger issue, not just of what is legal, but what is just and what helps human flourishing. So I did kind of talk about this. And the idea of getting my rights, obviously, you see, at the very heart of what it means to be in a good love relationship is that you serve the other person instead of demanding your rights. So you know, the essence of a good marriage is you don't demand your rights.

You serve. But if the other person is doing the very same thing, then it's great. If it's one way, it's abuse and that's bad. Nevertheless, the ideal is not a negotiated back and forth between a husband and a wife that you're both demanding your rights and giving it to each other. The ideal, and I know this because when it goes well, it's great, is both people are forgoing their rights and they're forgiving and they're overlooking slights and wrongs and they're being gracious. And I don't know how, when you see this as a Christian, that that's how relationships work best. I don't know how you, that has to influence the way in which you advise your clients. And you have to say, that's the reason why I think

it was in one of the articles that John gave me. It says a Christian lawyer does have to say how often in my life have I said to my client, this is legal but it would be a rotten thing to do. It would be bad for you, it would be bad for your family, it would be bad for the people around you. And if you never do that, then that's wrong. So I would challenge you on that sort of thing. Nevertheless, you're supposed to be holding justice too. The point is that it's not loving to let somebody get away with something that is probably going

to go do it again. See, that's the other thing you have to keep in mind. It's never, if you see a perpetrator who's wronged someone and you know that person's just definitely going to do it again, the most loving thing to do would be to stop the person, to make restitution, to sort of arrest the person basically and stop, then there really is a place for it. As much as you can as a lawyer though, I think you would not ever want to encourage or inflame the vindictiveness of your client. That's another thing. That's not going to be real easy. And they see, hey, you're my lawyer, you're not my counselor. I'm sure you're going

to get that at some point. But you are, actually. In fact, don't they call you counselors? It's true. So, yeah. That's just a little, you're right. You're absolutely right. I could push more. Maybe somebody else can ask me another question along those lines. Yes, where are we? Okay, hi. Yeah, I'll begin by saying that I'm actually a tax lawyer. I charged fixed rates, so if you're looking for a new one. Actually, I don't work for a law firm. Actually, this is along those lines. Your discussion about the crisis going on in the philosophy of laws is very thought-provoking, and it made me think about the application of justice.

Recently, I think the Supreme Court halted a lethal injection. So I guess to what extent do you notions like punishment for sin, redemption, forgiveness, how do those play in the application of justice? plan and the application of justice. Well, now you're asking me to really meddle here. Are you asking me about capital punishment itself? I'm not going that far.

You're not quite going that far. Well, see, the reason I... But if you want to go there... Yeah, I know. Well, I can tell you, I mean, what... what, and I don't think, I think I do know as much about this. This is ethics and I do know as much about this as anybody, I mean, I'm not saying it's anybody in the world, I'm saying as a minister, I've done some thinking about this. As you all know, capital punishment is not precluded by the Bible, so that's the

first thing. I don't think you can say the Bible's against it. But it's also not necessarily, I don't think it's mandated. Number one. Number two, there's a Chuck Colson, you know, who's not a liberal. I don't know if anybody knows Chuck Colson, but he is not a liberal. But unless he's changed his mind, was against capital punishment recently, and the reason was because he says it's just not being applied equitably. Because you just have, you know, it's very clear that less, not just poor people, but less connected people and less savvy people are more likely to get stuck with higher penalties and are more likely, so in other words, the assembly line

toward people who are getting found guilty of capital crimes are just disproportionately people. He says too many people are getting off, and he says, because it's not being applied equitably he's against it. I have never been all that big a foe of capital punishment, but that has given me great pause, because he is just so conservative in every other way. He's been deeply involved, of course, with the prison system for years. That's what he does, and he was in prison. for that experience to have changed him like that, when he was really a hatchet man for Nixon and all that sort of thing, has really made me say, gee,

maybe he's got a point there. However, I have also been very, very influenced by one lecture by my Old Testament professor in 1973, which is a long time ago, in which he said, you've got to remember that the biblical approach to capital punishment was an incredibly merciful thing. Because what he said was, he says in ancient times, if a rich man killed a poor man, then the rich man paid the poor man's family a certain amount of money. But if a poor man killed a rich man, the poor man's entire family was usually put to death. And I remember my professor said, the reason why God put in capital punishment, say, for murder, was this question, how much is a human life worth? If you say $10,000 is the penalty for murder, then that person's life was only worth

$10,000. If you say, no, $10 million, was it only worth $10 million? Ten years in prison, only worth that? And how much is that? I remember he said that capital punishment was a way of saying human life is infinitely valuable. So in other words, it's God's way of saying human life is so infinitely valuable you can't put an amount on it, a price tag on it, and that's the reason why the penalty for murder should be capital punishment. So I've been stuck to some degree in a kind of, I'm sort of negative about capital punishment but I certainly can't completely, I just can't walk away from it and say it's a very bad idea because I don't think it's a very bad idea. Now the reason I just gave you that, you say, thanks Tim, know, thanks Tim, you know, why'd you tell me that?

It's just to show, you know, like I do know the Bible fairly well, I've thought about this for a very long time, and you don't necessarily get absolutes. In other words, I can't just take what I know from the Bible, and I think the Bible's right, I mean, at this point, that capital punishment is not necessarily vindictive, but it's a way of actually upholding the sanctity of human life. And yet Chuck Colson is right in other parts of the Bible that say justice is very important. And so you can't just pick up the Bible at one verse and set it down on the legal practice of a society and say that's what you've got to do. You've got to be informed by these various parts of the Bible. So Chuck's concern about capital punishment is informed by the Bible. My tendency to see the value

of capital punishment is also informed by the Bible. And so you should be in the same boat. You wrestle with these things and you make your call on the basis of being as informed by the Bible as possible. And you say, well then I'm not getting real clear direction. That's not true. There's all sorts of things that the Bible will just roll out. But the Bible, instead of giving you points and say, you must do this, it'll tend to give you boundaries and say, somewhere in here, your legal practice ought to be. And do your very, very best.

That's a case study that maybe helps a little bit. OK. Yes, go ahead. Earlier, you asked us to be mindful of our idols. I was wondering if you could share with the group sort of ways that you personally sort of get your mind and heart centered, properly centered around God. Well, disciplines, spiritual disciplines and practice. So there should be some periods in your life in which you go into a kind of retreat and sometimes with friends or maybe

with your spouse if you're married or there should be certain periods where you actually spend a pretty good time reflecting on your life. Sometimes it's forced on you, like when you have a problem or a disappointment or a tragedy or you lose your job or something, you know, you have cancer or something like that, then God forces on you. But there will be certain times in your life in which you'll get deeper insights into what your idols are. And every so often you need to revisit and try to go a little deeper and figure out just how they operate and what they are. Then actually you have to have a spiritual discipline by which you, every week or at

least every week and maybe every day and maybe a couple times a day, ask yourself how operative they are. If you think that that sounds like overkill, I can assure you it's not. You know, I don't do as often as I like, but actually I've got my... What I find is helpful is at lunchtime, it only takes about 90 seconds, is to look at my emotions, my emotions, you know, anxiety, anger, coldness, indifference, irritation, and say, to what degree are my, these emotions are kind of negative right now, to what degree are my emotions being driven by my peculiar and particular idols? And I actually try to do that a couple times a week, at least in the middle of the day. I actually try to do that a couple times a week, at least, in

the middle of the day. I certainly try to look at them before I go to bed at night, and try to look back on my day. And the best thing to do is to look at the day and, you know, what did I do right, what did I do wrong, why did I have those emotions that I did, in what way was I driven by my idols, and then I repent. So you have to do it pretty regularly. You can't just once or twice a year sit down and think about it. So, actually, I don't think, I think this is my job as a minister to actually do it in a more heavy duty way than most people do, but I would say 15 or 20 minutes in the morning, 15 to 20 minutes at night, you know, one or two minutes in the middle of the day, reading the scripture, thinking about your particular idols which you should have listed

somewhere, watching how your life is going during the day, catching yourself, repenting. There's just no substitute for that. The reason I went like this when you asked me is I keep my list in my wallet, but I left my wallet in my bag. And I could have pulled it out, though, so I wouldn't let you read it. Just to prove it out though, it's, you know, so I wouldn't let you read it. Just to prove it. Okay, next. Hello. Hi.

As you can probably tell by the way I'm dressed, I'm not a lawyer, I'm just lost to it. But nobody asks this question, so I'll just ask it generally, and I can't draw upon any personal experiences, so I'm sorry, but before you touched upon how like, you know, like two centuries ago, we would lift up the community over an individual and that kind of shifted where we are now and I know you almost you kind of touched upon it on her question I think but what do you really do when what do you really do when it's like you're faced with this and your client you have to actually serve or your serve your client, but it

might not actually have repercussions for the community. When like, I guess like man's law or God's law will collide, kind of like if we are violating fire code or something. Hypothetically. Well, no, no. I think, listen, tell me if I'm getting this right. My sister right there in front of you, she asked me about this a little bit, is because the law is set up more and more over the last hundred years to help the individual get free from the community and basically not... That's

the reason why I think as a Christian, since you think there's something of an imbalance there. You can just maybe don't encourage your client to pull out all the guns and use all the weapons that the culture has given him or her to just basically take no prisoners and shoot everybody dead. Things are set up so that there's all kinds of damage a person can do now. And so that's not asking the person to break the law, you just maybe as a Christian, one of the ways to get a certain amount of balance is just to not necessarily push your client to use all. See, I think I know enough to know, I can imagine a situation in which for your reputation, maybe for your law firm, maybe even for your fee, it would be good to encourage your client to do some stuff that you know

is going to damage a lot of people, and yet it's legal, it's fine, everybody will be happy except the people you're damaging. And maybe as a Christian you say, I just am not going to encourage that. And then if the client says, doesn't it bring it up, then you have actually lost a certain maybe amount of money or prestige or something like that. But you haven't, you've actually helped him in flourishing just by not suggesting that. So that's why I do think we have to be, do our best to try to encourage non-repetitious, non-vindictive, non-scorched-earth policies with our clients, even though the law makes it possible to do it

well what about on the flip side where i'm sure you know lawyers have done this christian or not just for you know morally help the individual by maybe breaking a law or something well i don't see now i don't know about i don't think the lawyer you can't i mean i suppose you might and see that's when i say you might but you can't. I mean, I suppose you might. See, that's when I say you might, but you can't. What I mean is the lawyer's not supposed to do that. Obviously you could get in, and this

is good, you could get in enormous trouble if you are helping your client break the law. And I don't know if there's any country in the world where that's, I mean, you're an officer of the court, so you're not supposed to do it. Now, if you feel the law is unjust, you can say I think the law is unjust but it's still my job to tell you here's what the law is. Because I know this and that is that as bad as it is to have a country with a bad law, it's even worse to be in a country where there's no rule of law, where people just ignore the laws. And actually, I hope you don't think I'm mixing metaphors. I recently read a book that actually said it's, the worst thing for a child is not that the parents are laying down the right rules, but that the parents aren't laying down any rules. It's almost

like if you grow up with parents that have a set of standards and when you get older you reject them, you're still a healthier person than if you actually had parents that never laid anything down at all. So I think even if you feel like the law isn't very good, you've got to tell your client what the law is. You might even say, I think it's a rotten law, but that's what it is and I can't advise you to go against it, I don't know. I think that's right, but you would know better than me. You should never help your client by helping them disobey the law because that is actually not helping. Like I said, in the

micro, it seems like that's the way to help them. But in the macro, it doesn't help the society to make it easy for people to get...places where people ignore the law are horrible places. Now, listen, there's such a thing as civil disobedience, and by the way the Bible actually condones it, you know that. But that still needs to be more principled, it needs to be more thought out. It's not civil disobedience to say to your client, I'm going to help you break this law. That's not only could you get sued for malpractice, I don't think it's right for society, it's bad. It's another thing to say here is a law that is really unjust and therefore I'm going to kind of openly disobey it and get myself arrested for it, but that's my civil disobedience, prophetic witness for justice, that's different.

I think actually that's okay, frankly, but it's not okay to sort of covertly hide the fact that you're helping to break a law. Okay, somebody else over here. I think that right now in the news when the religion comes out and the legal debates, it's a lot about taking religion out of the law, like take down the Ten Commandments that's on the courthouse steps and things like that. And a lot of Christian lawyers that I speak to are very offended by it. Personally, I'm not that offended by it. I actually am not that against it. But I'm thinking what's your view as a lawyer? Do you think it's a Christian cost that you should fight for to keep that in the legal field?

You mean it's like the Ten Commandments in public space? Or in God we trust in every courtroom? Yeah, I wouldn't be offended by it, but I'm a little bit like you at saying I'm not offended by it either way. I'm not offended at all. Because I said that there's a myth to the idea of neutrality, that our laws are not based on religious ideas. They are. They all are. Somebody's religion is going to win. I've got, in fact, I think I brought it with me. If you have never read this, and actually I think this

is an old professor of Bill Taylor's, I believe, but there's a guy named Arthur Leff. Wasn't he a professor of yours at Yale? Before your time? You mean you're not as old as you look? Oh, I'm sorry, Bill. But a guy named Arthur Leff, who used to teach at Yale, wrote an article, yeah, I can see this, Duke Law Journal, I don't know how, December 1979, called Unspeakable Ethics on Natural Law. You know, if you're a lawyer, you've got to read that thing. It's

unbelievable. It's not that easy to find because it's not online. And I only have my own... I lost my Xerox copy of it, but anyway, it's the Duke Law Journal, December 1979, Unspeakable Ethics on Natural Law. And what he actually does is he says, he says, if you don't believe believe in God, then the only question is whose set of faith assumptions gets to tell everybody else what is right and what is wrong. And he says when you put it like that, he basically puts it this way, he says, no, he says when you put it like that you realize there, nobody wants to talk about the fact that there is no alternative. That everybody is basically arguing for an approach to justice that's based on his or her unprovable faith assumptions about human nature, about human

flourishing, about God, about right and wrong. And therefore, absolutely everybody is enshrining their religion in the public square. Everybody's trying to do it. And so, the fact that we have something quite as, I mean, it's easy to see when Christians are trying to do it. It's just more subtle when secular people are trying to do it. That's the reason why I'm really not offended either way. However, I doubt that it gets much done to argue for In God We Trust or the Ten Commandments. It's just not, it would be to me not the best use of my time if I was a Christian who wanted to renew the culture. I wouldn't go there. But I wouldn't be offended by it either. Somebody else? Yeah.

Two more questions. Okay. I actually think you answered this question partially. Two questions back to the gentleman over there. But I just wanted to ask it in a more specific sense, or rather, there's a way to ask it for everyone that's not specific to lawyers, which is how do you deal with a situation where your only choices are sinful? And I was thinking about this particularly in a sense, I'm not a lawyer yet, I was sitting in my law school class on civil procedure and we were talking about the discovery phase of a litigation where you get to ask the other side questions

about what was going on, take depositions and what not. And I was thinking back to actually your sermon on the commandment about bearing false witness. And I liked how you said that's not just about lying. You can bear false witness by telling the truth. It's misrepresenting. Right. Just being very technical in the truth. And in one sense the answer is obvious but hard, which is you shouldn't do it. And I think that covers most situations. But then there is the situation where you do it because you know that if the other side

gets ahold of this, they're going to abuse your client. And in that sense, it seems wrong to take it upon yourself, because you're not representing yourself, you're representing someone else to say, I can't do this because I would be bearing false witness. It's a tricky situation. It seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Well, now, you know, the only real way for me to be a good advisor to you would be if you gave me five or six case studies.

And it would be a little easier for me to say, yes, no, no, no, and I'll tell you why. But I'm actually going back to my brother in the corner when I try to say that in some of these cases you have to be guided by, you have to be informed by places in the Bible and it does give you a direction and it does give you boundaries, but very often doesn't give you an exact point. You're still going to have to use your own wisdom. But let me really throw a monkey wrench in here. Are you as a Christian obligated when you're in the Netherlands and it's 1943 and you're

hiding Jews in the basement and the Nazis have come to the door and they want to know whether you have any Jews in the basement. And if you say yes, they'll come in, they'll take them away and kill them. Are you obligated as a Christian to say yes? And as far as I know, there's like almost no Christian, no matter how conservative, there's no Christian ethicist in the world that believes you should say yes. And the reason is that they have actually, their evil have forfeited their right to the truth at that point. And what you're actually doing by giving them the truth is you're making it easy for them

to sin against the human race and against you and against these people. And that's not loving. In fact, it's really not in the interest of truth. You say, oh my, wow, great. Oh, thank you, Tim. Because now, now I'm back to the place where if I know the other side can abuse my client under any circumstances, I don't have to tell them the truth. No.

See, where do you draw that line? And the answer is, give me some cases. But I needed to say that there is an endpoint, there is a place at which you can look at your client and you can say, it's not even a misrepresentation, but I'm not going to, you know, we're going to do our best to keep that from getting public. That's not the same thing as a misrepresentation. It just means, see, if by hiding something you're really giving people a very false impression of the truth, that's hard, though in extreme cases like the Nazis at

the door, it's okay. But in most cases, I would say, this is what I mean by saying you need to have cases. In many cases, when you say, well, if we keep that from being public, what that does is it keeps the other side from being able to abuse my client, so I'm going to try to keep it back. It's not even a real misrepresentation, though there's no doubt that they're not getting the full picture. And see, what's the difference between that and misrepresentation? Well, it's probably a fuzzy line. But that's what I mean by saying there are, see, the idea of telling the, having the Bible, well, for example, there's a couple of places in the Old Testament where Rahab lies to save the spies.

John Murray taught systematic theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia for many years, an incredibly conservative man. He was part of the... He lost his... He was part of the... He was a Highlander, Scott. He was in World War I. He was part of the Black Watch, which was a really tough bunch

of soldiers, he lost one of his eyes. And all of his students used to say, you see the friendly eye? That's the glass one. And yet he wrote a book, which is a fascinating book of ethics called Principles of Conduct. And in there, he has one called The Sanctity of Truth, in which he comes right up against the fact that Rahab lies to save the lives of the Israelite spies in Jericho. And there's, in fact, even in battle, the point is, God says to Joshua, now here's how you're going to take the city. You guys hide,

you know, two-thirds of your army, go forward with one-third of your army. When they come out to charge, you run, and they'll come after you into the valley, and then the two-thirds that are hidden come on down and kill them. It's a lie. That's a misrepresentation, big time. But John Murray is trying to say, you know, this is a war and they've attacked you. So he actually, it's amazing, he navigates that and then says, okay, is that a slippery slope? Sure it's a slippery slope. Actually, there's lots of slippery slopes, but you don't have to go down it.

And you have to be informed by other parts of the scripture. So the answer is, yeah, there might be some times when you hold it back because you don't have to go down it and you have to be informed by other parts of the scripture. So the answer is, yeah, there might be some times in which you hold it back because you don't want your client to be abused, but it should not be a really overt misrepresentation. I just won't go, don't go there. So there we go. I could take one more though, I was told, no? Yes, go ahead. Hi, pastor.

As lawyers, we all have duties to uphold the law and I think as Christians, we also have certain duties as well. My question is directed at politics. And how far do you think Christian lawyers should be involved with politics of today, especially dealing with conservative Christian issues, for example, such as gay rights, marriage, separation of church and state, and other things that are ultra-conservative and highly controversial. Where should a Christian lawyer stand on these perspectives? Well, I think you need to file your conscience in if you feel like it would be really, really bad for society.

If you think it would be really bad for society, for same-sex marriage to go through, then for you to work against it is actually almost your duty as a citizen. As far as I know, citizens are supposed to be politically and culturally engaged, and if you have a disengaged citizenry, it's bad. And even though if everybody gets engaged and everybody's saying, this is what I think will be best for our society and our people and this is what's best for the common good, and yet they have different opinions of it, it's much better for society for us to be out there working together and contending if we do it civilly, if we do it without demonizing the other,

then for everybody to sort of pull back. However, Mark Knoll, before the last election, pointed out that even though, and it was one of the questions that John actually didn't ask me, it was on there. The Bible says you have to care about the poor. The Bible doesn't say to what degree that should be through private charity or that should be through government redistribution of income through taxation. The Bible doesn't say to what degree that should be through private charity or that should be through government redistribution of income through taxation. The Bible doesn't say anything about that. But we have to care about the poor.

So it's your job as a Christian to decide probably, I think wisdom is that you split the difference, that you don't want a government that doesn't care about the poor, but you don't want the government to sort of create dependency either. So Mark Knoll said there are six or seven things, one of them is marriage and family, but there are six or seven things in which Christians ought to be concerned about justice and equity and human flourishing in the area of law. And some of them had to do with the poor and some of them had to do with the environment. And he said if you actually read the Bible carefully, you'll see that some biblical concerns tend to push you kind of rightward and some tend to push

you kind of leftward. And he makes a really good case that neither the Republican or the Democratic party really address the full range of what most Christians would want to see. So what you do is you inhabit your party, you're going to choose a party, it would actually be a bad thing. It's bad the fact that the average black Christian in this country, I mean 90% of black Christians are Democrat and such a huge percentage of white Christians are Republican, it's not good. If you go to Europe or Britain or other places like that, because Christians are distributed

across the spectrum, they actually have more, I think they actually have more clout and they're also less alarming to people. And therefore, no, it's really true. And they actually do have more clout, as you know, because if everybody decides, you know, if Democrats know that black people are going to vote Democratic, whether or not we, you know, really do anything for them, and if Republicans know, you know, if Democrats know that black people are going to vote Democratic, whether or not we really do anything for them, and if Republicans know white evangelicals are all going to vote, and a lot of you aren't black or white, I know. But nevertheless, you see, the point is be distributed across the spectrum, inhabit your party, realize that it's almost like if I was a Democrat, I would want to, I think, work for some pro-life stuff. If I was a Republican and I was, you know,

opposing same-sex marriage, I would want to do some environmental stuff. Or I'd want to do something for the, you know, something about, you know, justice for the poor in the city that would have to do with the government and being more equitable in some area. So what I'd want to do is I'd want to lean against my own party to some degree, and yet at the same time, everybody's got certain issues that are really dear to you and that you feel like God's put on your heart. And you'll probably be part of the party that most deals with them, even though you may not like some other things that your party does.

So I think you need to be humbly and graciously and generously involved in politics, frankly, and be very careful about demonizing the other side and saying, you know, I'm good and you're evil. That's really careful. Actually, I'm a sinner saved by grace, and you're a sinner, too. So you know, there's a lack of that. You know, in fact, if you're demonizing me, it's obviously you don't know grace, but hopefully you will. That's the only difference between us. So with that attitude, go ahead.

Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. We hope that today's teaching challenged and encouraged you. We invite you to help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. And to find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller, visit GospelinLife.com. Today's talk was recorded in 2007. 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.