There’s recently been a lot of blogononsense about this article recently published by Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/002/9.74.html

Simply put, Keller is advocating that “the gospel” presented in Scripture is multi-faceted, and that trying to narrow it down to one simple statement is antithetical to the way Scripture itself speaks of “the gospel.” He is not by any means advocating more than one gospel, but rather that the way we present the ONE gospel must be contextualized to any given audience for it to make sense. This, to me, is Communication 101, but a lot of the heresy hunters out there want it to be much more complicated and “dangerous” than that.

What made Keller’s article so timely for me was thinking through why the Kingdom of God seems to be the predominant theme of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels, but then Paul doesn’t speak of the Kingdom of God, specifically using that language, much at all. So, did something change between Jesus and Paul? Many would want to say yes, which thereby gives them the permission to rip apart the entire Bible. But, what if they were saying the same essential things, but rather using different language to communicate it?

I don’t think this is simply “defending Tim Keller” but rather I think he’s spot on in how the Bible itself speaks about the ONE gospel - in many different ways. Our shallow, pragmatic culture wreaks of reductionism, and this topic is no different. If something can’t be stated in a soundbite, it must be false, right? Wrong!

What I think Tim Keller has done is take two opposing sides of an argument and tried to bridge the gap. This seems to happen a lot within Christianity, where two people are just talking past each other because each side has their “team” and thus are defined by who they associate themselves with. Rather than simply pick a team and support it unapologetically, we are to be “always reforming” based on what Scripture says, even when that flies in the face of our tradition.