Timothy Keller died Friday, May 19, 2023. It’s not hyperbole to say he was one of the most influential pastors and thinkers of this century. His ministry has left a massive mark on countless people, me included. His methods of church planting, cultural engagement, and evangelism has literally made an impact around the world.
In February, I read Collin Hansen’s excellent book, Timothy Keller, which was a biography of Keller, but through the lens of looking at those who had influence him spiritually and intellectually.
In honor of Keller, I’d love to offer you some reflections from the book that highlight what made Keller such an impactful leader. Hopefully, you will be inspired to read it for yourself and dive deeper into the mind and heart of an incredible man.
Intellectually curious, not anti-intellectual
Like many, I first encountered the writing of Tim Keller through his best-selling book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. It blew my mind as Keller effortlessly interacted with the objections that many influenced by the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had about Christianity. While reading that book, I realized that Christianity can be more than just a nice sentiment to hold when you’re sad, but that it is intellectually robust and can stand up to the great thinkers and ideas of the modern world.
This was a belief that had marked Keller all the way back to his years in school. While in college at Bucknell, Tim would stand on campus with another student holding a sign that said, “THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST IS INTELLECTUALLY CREDIBLE AND EXISTENTIALLY SATISFYING.” He and the student would interact with whomever approached them.
Far from believing he had all the answers, Keller loved to learn. And because he loved to learn, he loved to read. I’ve heard world-class scholars marvel at Keller’s ability to read as much as humanly possible. It almost seemed superhuman. “Keller found that if he didn’t read broadly and deeply at the same time, his preaching grew stale and repetitive.” But it wasn’t just his habit of reading that made him remarkable, but his ability to bring his reading together and form unique connections between his readings. This is where his amazing insights came from. “Tim had a natural knack for producing an original synthesis, all while claiming he wasn’t an original.”
“Future generations will honor Keller better by reading his library than by quoting him.”
Humble and Kind
As people who knew and interacted with Keller have written about him these last few weeks, I think one of the things that have stood out to me the most is his enduring kindness, even toward those who disagreed with him. No one was too beneath him for him to take the time to interact with and take seriously. He made time for people and was generous with his life, even in the midst of enduring brutal cancer treatments.
When Tim had been ordained for twenty-five years in the PCA, and Redeemer was flourishing in New York, he and Kathy returned to Hopewell for a reception planned by their friend Laurie Howell. Church members were invited to recall what they appreciated about Keller’s ministry. Not a single person mentioned anything he had preached. No one quoted a sermon. But several members recalled something he said to them privately in counseling and visitation. “To the degree that people knew that he cared, to that degree and that degree only, were they interested in what he had to say from the pulpit.,” Laurie Howell said.
This generous care for other people was reflected in how his church in Manhattan treated other people. “Redeemer sought to foster a loving and hospitable Christian community that welcomed nonbelievers…The Christian community itself would be the evangelistic program of the church.”
Most celebrity pastors isolate themselves, shrinking from community and accountability. Not Keller. Hansen quotes Tim:
“There is no way you will be able to grow spiritually apart from deep involvement in a community of other believers. You can’t live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.”
He was, as
put it, the “anti-celebrity celebrity pastor,” never seeking the limelight and, in fact, eschewing it. The Sunday after the September 11th attacks, churches in New York were packed to the brim. “When The 700 Club sent a truck to broadcast Redeemer’s Sunday morning service, Kathy Keller chased the crew out of the building and told them never to return.” It was never about building a brand or a platform for Tim or his wife, Kathy. It was about humble service.A lot of pastors and leaders want to be the next Tim Keller, thinking it has to do with sounding smart, reading a lot of books, and blowing people’s minds. But it all is nothing if not backed up by his life of prayer, Bible reading, and deep awareness of his own sins. Two quotes from the book really stand about to me about this:
“During college the Bible came alive in a way that was hard to describe,” he remembered in his book Jesus Is King. “The best way I can put it is that, before the change, I pored over the Bible, questioning and analyzing it. But after the change it was as if the Bible or maybe Someone through the Bible, began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me.”
Over the course of three years of interviews with Tim Keller for this book, one theme stood out above all. Tim never stopped pushing for a deeper experience of God’s grace. Amid treatments for pancreatic cancer, Tim told me, “I’m not fighting my cancer; I’m fighting my sin.”
Culturally engaged evangelist
This is probably what Keller is best known for, his ability to “engage with the culture” and reach people with the gospel.
After the Kellers planted Redeemer in Manhattan in 1989, in about two and a half years, the church grew to over a thousand people. Twenty years later, “The number of Manhattan residents attending evangelical churches grew from nine thousand to more than eighty thousand.”
He was told that planting a church in “godless” New York City would be impossible, but he had the heart of an evangelist. He didn’t hate the world and he didn’t hate New York. He trained leaders, “not to see church as an escape from the hated city but a place to learn how to meet the city’s needs, both spiritual and physical…deploying the church in a ‘city growth’ model that helps everyone flourish.”
Yes, the church needs to live differently than others in the city, because the city lives for other gods, but just like the early church who served the Romans even amidst deadly plagues, the church today needs to serve the city. “Keller wanted to shape a congregation that would stand apart from the city, from within the city, while loving the city—a congregation that could meet the city’s physical needs without losing focus on their spiritual plight.” After September 11th, many wealthy people left the city, feeling unsafe. But Tim encouraged “New Yorkers not to abandon the city. ‘It was something God spoke to me,’ [Mako] Fujimura said. ‘Love is sacrificial and painful at times.’”
His vision for church was of one that was active in the community, welcoming to all, and yet distinct—clear in its convictions.
Believers cannot withdraw from the modern world but must engage every aspect, from art to business to politics to family to education with a distinct worldview built on historic, orthodox doctrine…The church must become a place where doubters would be welcome, where questions would be honored, where critics would be answered alongside mature believers. Keller bucked the seeker trend of his boomer ministry peers. He cast a vision for teaching Christian communities that engaged, embraced, and expected non-Christians.
Perhaps Keller’s greatest skill was his ability to interact with, critique, and translate the gospel to those steeped in Western culture. Keller is quoted, “The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth.”
Why do we have to translate the gospel? Why not just say it? Because, every good missionary knows that you need to speak the language of the culture you are trying to reach. You can’t just assume they understand the words you are saying. As America becomes less familiar with the things of the Bible, “Christians can’t count on shared assumptions across the culture about God, morality, sin, or eternity.” Glen Kleinknecht said of Keller, “His preaching was like the most extraordinary litigator you’ll ever hear. They didn’t know how much time he spent, not speaking, but listening to improve his own culturally situated understanding of the gospel.”
Once you understand how to speak to a culture, then you’re able to identify the idols of that specific culture and bring the Gospel to bear on it. “Every culture gets some things right and some things wrong. Every culture succumbs to idols, and every culture tells us something about God. No culture, including the West, can introduce us to the saving gospel without explicit divine revelation of Christ.”
This excerpt from Tim’s amazing book, Center Church, best summarizes his approach to cultural engagement:
In New York City, Redeemer has been a path-breaking ministry, and, if God will continue to bless and use us, there still is much more such work to do. We must find ways to preach the ancient message of the gospel in ways that both defy the illusions of the age yet resonate with the good aspirations and hopes of our neighbors.
That means several things. It means to contest the self-narratives of secularity, especially its claim to inclusivity. It means to appeal to people's deepest intuitions which do not fit the secular view of the world-intuitions about moral truth, human value, and the reality of both love and beauty. It means to expose the secular culture’s idolatry of prosperity and power, even as we humbly admit the church's own failure to operate on the basis of love and generosity. It means to admit the church's historic failures to execute on its own Biblical principles—the imago Dei dignity of every human being love for opponents, universal care for the suffering, and justice for the oppressed—even as it argues that the source of this warranted critique is Christian truth itself. It means to neither dominate nor withdraw from society but to provoke and yet serve. It means learning how to set forth gospel truths in an uncompromising way but also in a manner that directly answers people's most poignant questions in a disarming and compelling way. It means to offer people a meaning in life that suffering can't take away, an identity so rooted in God's love that the world's pressure is off, and a hope beyond the walls of this world. It means to be doctrinally solid but not sectarian, civically active but not partisan, committed to the arts but not subjectivistic about truth.
Grace
Tim understood that one of the most powerful aspects of the gospel was the concept of God’s grace. He was fond of saying that the gospel message “first says, ‘I am more sinful and flawed than I ever dared believe,’ but then quickly follows with, ‘I am more accepted and loved than I ever dared hope.’” Yes, we are sinners, but God is a “prodigal God” who offers his love freely and lavishly.
The parable of the Prodigal Son was one that was close to Keller’s heart. When he heard one of his seminary professors teach on the parable, the lightbulb came on for him. “When Keller heard this message, he felt like he had ‘discovered the secret heart of Christianity.’’ Keller preached about the parable, “It doesn’t just say the elder brother is as lost as the younger brother. This story is actually telling us the elder brother is more lost than the younger brother.” It’s those who think they have their act together who don’t think they need Jesus and his grace. Those who have lived lives as prodigals know they have nothing to offer Jesus, and so they respond to his free offer.
“Jesus shattered the world’s categories when he said you don’t come to God by obeying his law. Neither do you find God when you pursue your own truth to fulfill yourself. The world isn’t made up of good people and bad people, Keller explained. Only the humble enter the kingdom of God. The proud are left out.”
At his brother Billy’s funeral, Keller preached the eulogy. Billy had lived most of his adult life apart from God and only came to truly understand the grace of God. From the eulogy:
He…said that most in the room would understand that Billy spent most of his life as a prodigal. Why bring this up in a funeral? Tim explained that prodigals were attracted to Jesus, and Jesus was attracted to prodigals. That’s the whole message of the parable: the younger, prodigal son was closer to the heart of the Father than the older brother who always obeyed God. Sadly, many churches don’t welcome prodigals, Tim admitted. They’re more like the older brother, and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, than they want to admit.
Hopeful
Lastly, Tim Keller lived a life of hope that was anchored in the resurrection. Yes, death is a painful reality, but because Jesus walked out of that tomb, we know the end of the story.
“The gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take their cues.” … It’s what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, or the “joyful catastrophe, the tragedy that turns out to be a triumph, the sacrifice that turns out to bring joy, the weakness that ends up being strength, the defeat that ends up being victory.”
Speaking of Tolkien, Keller was fond of retelling this story from Return of the King,
“In the last book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee wakes up thinking everything is lost, and upon discovering instead that all his friends were around him, he cries out, ‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?’ The answer is yes. And the answer of the Bible is yes. If the resurrection is true, then the answer is yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue.”
It’s a line that I’ve used in my own preaching about the resurrection. There’s something about it that resonates deep in our hearts.
And again, at his brother’s funeral, Tim preached:
“Is Billy dead today?” Tim asked. “No he’s not!” Dead is when you’re trying to earn your salvation or designing your own, Tim said. Dead is when you never weep with joy over what God has done for you. Dead is when God is never more than an abstraction, an idea. The gospel humbles and emboldens and melts us with understanding what Jesus has done on the cross. Dead is when we don’t know God as Father but only as boss or vague influence. “Billy was dead, but now he’s alive,” Tim said. “He took the robe, and when you take the robe, then what happens to death? We laugh at death.” He quoted George Herbert: “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel made him just a gardener.”
Tim kept reflecting on that hope even as he suffered from stage four cancer and knew that his death was imminent. As reported from his son, Michael, Keller’s last words were, “There is no downside for me leaving, not in the slightest.” He knew the hope of the resurrection. He knew that death is not the end. We will see him again.
Further Reading
If you aren’t familiar with Tim Keller’s writing, then there’s no better time than the present to get acquainted with it. Here are a few places to start.
The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy
It can be read in just one sitting, and yet it punches far above its weight. It deserves multiple rereads.
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Dive deeper into Keller’s teaching on the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work
Since Keller’s passing, I’ve been rereading this one and it’s blowing me away all over again. It offers a vision for how our work can and should be more than just about advancement or to get a paycheck. Instead, our work should be worship to God and service to others.
The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms
Co-authored with Kathy, this book takes you through the whole book of Psalms in a year. It’s a great introduction to Keller’s writing and how he draws out the narrative of the gospel throughout the whole of Scripture. Each devotion is short and ends with a beautiful prayer.
Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World
No list of Tim Keller books would be complete without one of his apologetic works. While not as popular as The Reason for God, this book tackles many of the common things that hold people back from a life of following Jesus. He writes about subjects like morality, identity, self, and suffering.
The Decline and Renewal of the American Church
A series of long but insightful articles compiled into a PDF that traces the history of the American church and offers a path for its possible renewal.
Tim Keller’s Sermon after 9/11
Keller’s church was only 5 miles away from Ground Zero. “Pastor Tim Keller added another service on the spot, asking the musicians if they’d stay and those in line if they’d come back. They did. Normally a church of around 2,800, Redeemer hosted 5,300 worshipers that day.”
What I’m Watching
American Born Chinese - Disney+
While not a perfect show (and very different from the incredible graphic novel1 it is based on), it does a great job representing the tension of being a child of immigrants in America. To be American-born Chinese (or ABC) is to live between two cultures, never feeling like you fully belong to either. You’re not Chinese enough and not American enough. The show captures this experience and packages it into a really unique coming-of-age story that will appeal to all viewers, regardless of ethnic background
Links
Not long before Keller’s death, he and Kathy announced that his ministry, Gospel in Life, had made every sermon he has preached at Redeemer free to listen to. It’s treasure trove of information that dates back to the 90’s.
In Memoriam: Timothy Keller (1950-2023), by Jake Meador - Mere Orthodoxy
Jake Meador’s obituary for Keller is so moving. Hopefully we all can help bear the torch he carried for the gospel.
This is like something Susannah Black Roberts said to me once years ago. She told me that what Tim did for New Yorkers is he made it possible for people who loved New York, who loved the pink light of a setting sun reflected off the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, who loved going to the theatre and the MOMA and Central Park and all the rest, he made it possible for people like that to imagine themselves being Christian. In the mind of many New Yorkers, Susannah said, “evangelical Christians” were people who drove SUVs and lived in McMansions in the suburbs and shopped at Hobby Lobby. None of that was bad, to be clear. It was just very much not them. They didn’t know how to disentangle “being a Christian” from being all those other things. And then Tim showed them how.
50 Quotes from Tim Keller, by Matt Smethurst - The Gospel Coalition
There’s some real bangers in here.
“If the suffering Jesus endured did not make him give up on us, nothing will.”
The Religion of Mammon, by Eberhard Arnold - Plough
This essay from 1923 about Mammon (i.e. the worship of money) still feels as relevant as ever.
Mammon kills; its very nature is murder. It is through the spirit of Mammon that wars have broken out and impurity has become an object of commerce. Nor does it only kill through war. Every day that drives hungry children and the unemployed into villages seeking food, only to be chased out again by farmers with their dogs, shows us Mammon’s murderous nature. We have become used to the reality that numberless people are being crushed to death through our affluence, just as one might grab a bug and squash it; we have ceased to give a thought to those who are destroyed because of us.
‘None of Us Were Born Looking for a Screen. We Were All Born Looking for a Face.’, by Tish Harrison Warren - The New York Times
Andy Crouch, author of The Life We’re Looking For, is interviewed in the New York Times.
Technology often undermines the development of relationships and of bodies. It is a delicious dream that a button press away is whatever I want. But the flip side of that dream is the dwindling of my actual knowledge and capacity in the world.
It was the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award