More Nuggets from Keller

Here's some more good stuff from Keller's The Reason for God:

On Hell:

In short, hell is simply one's freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity. We see this process "writ small" in addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second, there is the isolation, as increasingly you blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior, "No one understands! Everyone is against me!" is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self-absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing -- though a good thing -- becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy.
In his fantasy The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There, they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell--but they refuse.
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others...but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God "sending us" to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE HELL unless it is nipped in the bud.
That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying "I'm sorry! Let me out!" The people on the bus from hell in Lewis's parable would rather have their "freedom", as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom...As Romans 1:24 says, God "gave them up to their desires..."All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from Himself. What could be more fair than that?

On worship:

In Easter Everywhere: A Memoir, Darcey Steinke recounts how she, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, left her Christian profession. Moving to New York City she entered a life of club-hopping and sexual obsession. She wrote several novels. She continued, however, to be extremely restless and unfulfilled. In the middle of the book she quotes from Simone Weil to summarize the main issue in her life. "One has only the choice between God and idolatry", Weil wrote. "If one denies God...one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them."
A life not centered on God leads to emptiness. Building our lives on something besides God not only hurts us if we don't get the desires of our hearts, but also if we do. Few of us get all of our wildest dreams fulfilled in life, and therefore it is easy to live in the illusion that if you were as successful, wealthy, popular, or beautiful as you wished, you'd finally be happy and at peace. That just isn't so.

On grace:

The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life. Is that a contradiction? No, not if you remember the point of Chapters 3 and 9. We are not in control of our lives. We are all living for something and we are controlled by that, the true lord of our lives. If it is not God, it will endlessly oppress us. It is only grace that frees us from the slavery of self that lurks even in the middle of morality and religion. Grace is only a threat to the illusion that we are free, autonomous selves, living life as we choose...The gospel makes it possible to have such a radically different life. Christianity's basic message differs at root with the assumptions of traditional religion. The founders of every other major religion essentially came as teachers, not as saviors. They came to say: "Do this and you will find the divine." But Jesus came essentially as a savior rather than a teacher (though He was that as well). Jesus says, "I am the divine come to you, to do what you could not do for yourselves." The Christian message is that we are saved not by our record, but by Christ's record. So Christianity is not religion or irreligion. It is something else altogether.