The Christmas season, at its heart, is about giving. We spend days—even weeks—searching for thoughtful, personalized gifts to bring joy to those we love.
For Christians, the ultimate gift was given on Christmas: God becoming human in Jesus. This wasn’t an abstract idea, but a deeply personal act—one that changed the world forever.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear a conversation between pastor and author Tim Keller (1950 — 2023) and Yale law professor Anthony Kronman about gifts, grace, and gratitude. Drawing from their Christian and humanist worldviews, they explore the character of God and reflect on how our understanding of the divine—personal or not—shapes the way we live today.
This forum was held at Yale in 2017. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
If I have a relationship with God, it's all grace. It's not like, I've earned part of this, but God tops it off. It's all grace. And if you actually believe in the atonement, if you actually believe that the Son of God came into the world and died for you at infinite cost to himself to get you, then your gratitude gets enormous.
The inherent dignity of every individual makes a great deal of sense in a universe in which God is a personal god.
The doctrine of the incarnation raises the stakes for gratitude — not just a little bit, but infinitely so.
You have from all eternity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, knowing and loving each other. Why would a God like that create other beings? The Jonathan Edwards answer, and the Augustine answer, is to share the love that they had. So love comes before power, not power before love. Love is more basic.
Just being a moral person and having a generic belief that, if I'm a good person, God will bless me somehow, just doesn't work. On the other hand, if you believe you're saved by grace, if the classic Christian idea is that my salvation is secured through what Jesus does, not through what I do, faith in Christ means I already have my relationship with God. It's secure. It's not rooted in me.
The Christian idea is that God loves me for my own sake. He got nothing out of it. The idea of God coming to earth, going to the cross—he got nothing out of that. We do not benefit him in any way; he loved me for my own sake. Now, I naturally want to love other people for their sake. I'm not loving them for my sake because I'm not enhancing my salvation.
One characteristic of human love is that, when it's really genuine, it's a love of the other person for his or her own sake. It just stops with them. It isn't because of this or because of that. They are the final target of your loving.
