The Old Testament prioritizes lineage, family, children, liturgy, feast days, priests, rituals, buildings, and land. The New Testament does not abolish these things. On the one hand, it actually further emphasizes their importance; the realities are more plainly manifested and understood. On the other, they are shown to be penultimate realities, for the telos is Christ Jesus. All of these wonderful things find their end in Him. How else could they matter? And how else could they matter more?

The Church’s encounter with Marcion in the 2nd century taught her many things. When this innovative heretic-to-be suggested that Christianity existed in opposition to the Jewish Scriptures and the Jewish God, the Church quickly showed him the door. In this process, above all, she learned that her identity and the identity of the Gospel which she was given is dependent upon the Jewish Scriptures, this Old Testament (or, “OT”). This, of course, goes back to the words of the Apostle Paul himself. When narrating to the Corinthian Christians the matters of “first importance,” he roots his statements in the testimony of the “Scriptures,” i.e., the OT (1 Corinthians 15:3 ESV). That “Christ died for our sins” is “in accordance with the Scriptures”; so also the fact “that he was buried” and “that he was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). When Marcion suggested that the Church of Christ cut the umbilical cord to those Jewish texts which, in his view, chained her to their religious immaturity, the Church noted, aptly, that the scissors were not aimed at any cord, but at her legs.
The Old Testament, then, is here to stay. To the extent that it vanishes, so do the people of God whose name is written in its language. Removing the Old Testament from Christianity would be like removing color from a sunset; it makes up the base material by which such a glorious sight is constructed. Anyone who misses this has yet to put the Synoptic Gospels and 1-2 Kings side by side, or perhaps has ignored all the miniature footnotes in his Bible when reading the book of Revelation. Birdwatchers have tuned their ears to distinguish the calls of a vast array of species amidst what most people (including myself) hear only as a cacophony. Reading the books of the Old Testament tunes the Christian’s ears to hear the Lord Jesus, to recognize nuances of sound and harmonic allusions.
Approaching the Old Testament, therefore, is no mean task. Quite the opposite: the way one approaches this body of texts will determine his slant on many issues of Christian theology. So often, the hermeneutical lens with which the OT is read ends up, whether intentionally or not, sifting various texts into categories of “Use” or “Do Not Use” for the purposes of the Christian Church. This twofold systematization is built upon a certain dualistic reading of the Hebrew Scriptures.
This primary dualism—the one dualism to rule them all—is a physical/spiritual dichotomy. We must discuss this in detail, because matter matters, and so matters about matter matter. This dualistic principle, in general, states that the OT contained physical promises, physical worship, and physical rituals which have now been surpassed and superseded by a truer and more spiritual version of all these things. There is certainly some truth to this. When asked if worship should take place on the mountain of Jerusalem or of Gerizim, our Lord stated that true worship would exceed the worship in Jerusalem (which heretofore was the correct answer), and that God’s people would worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). In this way, Jesus relativizes the specificity of worship. In the Old Testament, God ordained that worship would occur in Jerusalem. In the New, He has restructured the liturgical system such that Jerusalem is no longer central. This example is crucial, but this principle could be extended to other themes (e.g., inheriting Canaan to inheriting the whole earth, sacrificial system to the sacrifice of Christ, etc.)
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There is only good news when you consider Jesus, for what you see is that the most wonderful person loves you like a husband loves a wife. As great as your sin may be, it is swallowed up by the greatness of your husband’s love. He has committed himself to you, and he has sworn to be yours forever.

A Relationship with God
How do we carry out a relationship with God the Son? While John Owen argues that we live out our friendship with the Father with his love at the center, when it comes to the Son, it’s all about his grace. That isn’t something that Owen came up with on his own; we often see the grace of Jesus highlighted in Scripture as a particular gift to be experienced on a regular basis by his people (e.g., Rom. 16:20; Gal. 6:18; 1 Thess. 5:28; 2 Thess. 3:18). As believers we have communion with Jesus when we delight in the grace of his person (who he is) and when we live in light of the grace he has purchased for us (what he has done to save us and make us his own).
Owen continues his meditation on that first aspect of Jesus’s grace—the grace of his person—by unpacking the Bible’s use of marriage imagery to describe the way Jesus and his people relate to one another. The New Testament speaks of Jesus as a groom and his people, the church, as a bride (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:25–27).
You don’t have to work too hard to get the sense of what that word picture is meant to describe—marriage is supposed to be the most intimate and personal of all our relationships. Owen describes the way Jesus and his bride (that is, us!) relate to one another by saying, “There is a mutual resignation, or making over of their persons one to another. . . . Christ makes himself over to the soul, to be his, as to all the love, care, and tenderness of a husband; and the soul gives up itself wholly unto the Lord Christ, to be his, as to all loving, tender obedience.”1
We would never dare to think about Jesus this way if the Bible didn’t tell us that we should. It is hard to imagine that Jesus would love us this much, that he would give himself to us in the way that a perfectly loving husband would give himself to his wife. But just because it’s hard to imagine doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Jesus is a husband to us. That means that our communion with the Son of God begins with him moving toward us in tender care and personal affection. He looks at us like a smitten man looks at the woman of his dreams.
Now, if a friendship (or marriage, in this case) is a two-way street, then what is expected of us? You can see why that is an important question. Jesus is always a perfect husband to us; his love and care never fail or diminish. That means that if we are not enjoying a happy relationship with him, we can be sure that the problem is on our end. But what are we to be looking for in our response to him? Owen lays out two ways that Jesus’s people should respond to his love: “the liking of Christ, for his excellency” and the “accepting of Christ by the will, as its only husband.”2 As we commune with him, we learn to see Jesus in all his beauty, and we begin to increasingly prefer Jesus over every other thing in the world. We turn our backs on everything that competes with Jesus for our affection, things like the promises of sin, the pleasures of the world, and the allure of self-salvation through religion and hard work.
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Looking over the last twenty years, it becomes clear that Keller-movement Evangelicals built platforms, brands, and messages in order to be found winsome by the blue communities they sought to reach. As with the old-line liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, exquisite sensitivity to target audiences will shape the message delivered far more than its deliverers intended. 

Tensions churning within the Keller-led Reformed resurgence among Evangelicals eventually found articulation among the movers and shakers themselves. In March of 2021, North Carolina pastor Kevin DeYoung acknowledged that the once nationwide, cross-denominational Calvinist party was effectively over:
On the other side of Ferguson (2014), Trump (2016), MLK50 (2018), coronavirus (2020–2021), George Floyd (2020), and more Trump (2020–2021), the remarkable coming together [of Reformed evangelicals] seems to be all but torn apart…We won’t be able to put all the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again…
DeYoung accurately identified pressing political realities as key factors in the break-up of the movement. We could add to DeYoung’s list of political flash points: the emergence of critical race theory (CRT), the crisis at the Southern U. S. border, Black Lives Matter, identity politics, and the stunning Biden-supported transgender rights campaign in the nation’s K-12 schools.
More fundamentally, however, are the political sensibilities that precipitated Humpty Dumpty’s fall from his wall. With such a promising start, the movement that put so much stock in being found winsome by its target audience found itself divided over branding strategies that could not please the full spectrum of Reformed evangelicals [1] Indeed, as a winsomeness campaign targeting blue communities not red, it resulted in a politically-subtle “seeker sensitivity” movement and a church growth model that aimed to please the so-called political party of “compassion,” not “conversativism.” In what follows, I will outline the fruit produced by Keller’s “Third Way,” and I will show how it has impacted Evangelicals.
Keller’s Third Way
Once again, the genesis of this commitment to winsomeness goes back to Tim Keller’s Third Way. As noted in my last essay, Keller encouraged Christian engagement with culture both as the path to clear communication of the gospel and as a necessary protection against compromise of the gospel message through unwitting capitulation to cultural rather than biblical norms. But Keller never called for and never modeled serious engagement with politics. Politics was treated as a dangerous threat to the gospel message and as a temptation to an idolatrous attachment of believers to one political party or to one politician. Accordingly, Keller tried to position his movement between the political parties and above politics writ large in a quest to avoid ongoing responsibility to weigh in on thorny political debates.
The attempt to inoculate his movement from a perceived political minefield appeared in Keller’s first book, the 2008 bestseller, The Reason For God. There Keller outlined for evangelical leaders his so-called “Third Way” whereby Christians could allegedly fly between and above liberal and conservative political loyalties.[2] According to him, Republicans got some things right; Democrats were better on others. Between the two, however, there exists a rough moral equivalence and a freedom to vote as one pleases—or so the argument went.
Nestled in the heart of New York City, Keller’s Third Way appeared to have evangelistic traction in his secular locale. And many young, Reformed evangelicals followed his political example.[3] Unfortunately, Keller’s commitment to winning blue communities with winsomeness broke through his supposed political neutrality. Keller and his followers offered too many reductive caricatures of the political left and right that incentivized critique of conservatives and showed openness to the contemporary social justice movement the Democratic party cherishes.[4]
Keller credits the left with what they want but don’t deserve—the supposed reputation of compassion for the poor and love for justice.[5] He then reductively defines conservatives as primarily concerned with eternal souls, the unborn, and money—a caricature that the left is happy to declare and then impugn.[6] The Third Way means to make it kosher for ostensibly pro-life Christians to vote Democrat while giving an edge to Democrats on the compassion front. Although he identifies as pro-life, Keller recently tweeted, “The Bible tells me that abortion is a sin and great evil, but it doesn’t tell me the best way to decrease or end abortion in this country, nor which policies are most effective.” Really? It is possible that support for the Democratic party might offer “the best way to decrease or end abortion in this country,” when this party not only celebrates abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy but looks to punish anyone who refuses to publicly celebrate such abortions? I think not!
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