Justified True Belief

(●) The pastor who took historic Christianity into one of the least churched cities in America and made skeptics feel understood before he asked them to believe anything. + In the spring of 1989 a Presbyterian minister who had spent nine years in a Virginia mill town stood up in a borrowed hall on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and preached to a congregation you could have counted from the platform. He was fifty-seven when the book came out that made him famous, sixty-six when he handed the church on, and by then the congregation he had started ran to more than five thousand people on a Sunday, most of them young, most of them professionals, and a great many of them people who had walked in expecting to disagree. Keller matters to Christian apologetics for a reason that has little to do with the size of the church. Apologetics is simply the work of giving reasons for the Christian faith to people who do not hold it, and what Keller worked out, week by week in front of a highly educated audience that had come in ready to disagree, was how to do that without the argument ever sounding like an argument. His method had four moves and he ran them in the same order every time. Take the objection first. State it better than the objector had stated it. Grant everything in it that is true. Only then show where it leads. He borrowed the habit from C. S. Lewis, sharpened it on Jonathan Edwards, the New England preacher, and on Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish writer who spent his life on the question of what it is to be a self, and then tested it every Sunday on New Yorkers who would have walked out on anything less. One more fact about him is worth carrying into everything that follows. He did not set out to plant that church. Planting, in the trade, means starting a congregation from nothing: no building, no members, no mailing list, only a man and whoever he can persuade to turn up. Keller was sent to New York to find somebody else to do it. He spent months looking, watched his two candidates turn the job down, and came home from a trip to England to a message saying that it was Tim Keller or nothing.

(●) 1950 AD: Born in eastern Pennsylvania, and taught what felt like two different religions in a single confirmation class. + Timothy James Keller was born on 23 September 1950 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a steel and textile town in the eastern half of the state. His father worked in television advertising. His mother came from an Italian-American family. He was the eldest of three children, and he grew up in a mainline Lutheran congregation. Mainline is the American shorthand for the old, long-established Protestant denominations, the Lutherans and Methodists and Episcopalians and Presbyterians, and in the America of the 1950s belonging to one of them meant a respectable Sunday morning and not much argument. The argument arrived in his teens, and it arrived from inside the church. Every teenager in that congregation went through confirmation class, which is the two-year course a church runs to hand its beliefs on to the next set of children before they are received as full members. Keller had two teachers, one for each year, and they did not agree about anything. The first was a retired minister of the old school who spoke about hell and about the greatness of the faith a person would need to escape it. The second was a young cleric fresh out of seminary, a social activist, full of doubts about the very doctrines the first man had spent a year teaching. Keller later wrote that it was almost like being instructed in two different religions. He came out of it with the problem that would set the shape of his working life. One teacher had a God of holiness with no warmth in him. The other had a God of love with nothing left to say. A boy sitting in that room was being asked to pick, and Keller spent the next fifty years arguing that the choice was a false one and that the cross of Christ is where the two things meet.

(●) 1968 AD: He arrived at Bucknell University in the middle of the campus revolts, became a Christian there, and came out seven years later with a seminary degree and a wife. + Bucknell University is in central Pennsylvania, and Keller arrived in 1968 into the loudest three years American campuses have ever had. In May 1970 the National Guard opened fire on a crowd at Kent State and killed four students, and Bucknell went out to protest with everybody else. Keller went too, and what he noticed while he was standing there stayed with him for the rest of his life. The students around him were morally certain. They were also relativists, meaning they held that right and wrong are not fixed facts about the world but whatever a person or a society happens to decide. Those two things will not sit together. If nothing is really right or wrong, then what happened in Ohio was not really wrong either, and nobody in that crowd believed that for a second. The Christians he met were the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a student ministry that works by small groups reading the Bible together rather than by rallies. He became a Christian in 1970. What changed was not that somebody won an argument with him. It was the book. He had gone over the Bible for years, questioning it and taking it apart, and then, in his own description of the change, it began to work on him instead. In the summer of 1971 he spent a month at Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado, an InterVarsity camp in the mountains, and heard Barbara Boyd, who had built InterVarsity’s Bible and Life course and spent decades teaching students to read the text for themselves, give the talk on the lordship of Christ that she was known for. Keller said long afterwards that more than anyone else, in person or in print, she had taught him how to study the Bible, and that she had given him the tools of his trade. He never described it as a decision he made cleverly. He took his degree in 1972 and went straight to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. A seminary is a graduate school for people training to be ministers, and he spent three years in this one. He studied under Meredith Kline in Old Testament, under Roger Nicole in theology, and under Richard Lovelace, whose work on the history of revivals gave him a framework he used for the rest of his life. He also met Kathy Kristy. She had her own claim on the history of Christian apologetics: at twelve she had written to C. S. Lewis about the Narnia books and the small doings of her world, and Lewis had written back in November 1962, the first of four letters, one of them taking her side against her English teacher in April 1963 and the last of them written eleven days before he died in November 1963. They married in 1975, the year Keller graduated.

(●) 1975 AD: He took his first church in a Virginia mill town and stayed nine years, preaching two or three times a week to people who were not impressed by cleverness. + He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, a small conservative denomination formed two years earlier, and then he received a call. A call, in Presbyterian usage, is the formal invitation a congregation makes to a minister asking him to come and be its pastor, and the one that came to Keller was from West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia. Hopewell is a chemical and paper town on the James River, and the congregation was made up of people who worked in the plants. He was twenty-four. He stayed nine years. Those years are the reason the later ministry worked, and Keller said so himself whenever anyone asked him how a man ends up preaching to Manhattan. He was preaching two or three sermons a week, week after week, to an audience that had no interest in a display. If a sermon did not connect with a man who had spent his day on a factory floor, the man’s face said so, and there was nowhere for the preacher to hide. Nothing sharpens plain speech like that. He also did the ordinary work of a small-town pastor: hospital visits, funerals, marriages coming apart, people out of work when the plants cut shifts. Their three sons were born in Hopewell, David in 1978, Michael in 1980 and Jonathan in 1983. In 1981, while still pastoring, he finished a Doctor of Ministry at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, under Harvie Conn. The Doctor of Ministry is the working pastor’s doctorate, taken part-time and written on something the man is actually doing rather than on a question in the library, and Keller wrote his on the work of deacons and the care of the poor. Deacons are the officers a congregation appoints to look after people in need, which in the New Testament is what the office was created for. That subject was not a detour. The conviction that a church which preaches grace will end up spending money on its neighbourhood ran through everything he did afterwards, and the first book he ever wrote came out of it.

(●) 1984 AD: Westminster Seminary put him in a classroom, and a colleague home from the mission field taught him to see the city as the place a Christian goes rather than the place he leaves. + In 1984 he joined the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to teach practical theology, which is the side of a seminary’s curriculum that covers the actual work of a minister rather than doctrine: how to preach, how to counsel, how to run a congregation. The courses he was handed were preaching and pastoral leadership, the ones Edmund Clowney had been teaching until he stepped down that year. At the same time his denomination made him its part-time director of mercy ministries, which is the churchly name for a congregation’s practical relief work, and in practice the job meant travelling to congregations and asking them what they were doing about the poor on their own streets. The research he did for the denomination became Ministries of Mercy, his first full-length book. Harvie Conn is the name to know from these years. Conn had been a missionary in Korea, and he came back convinced that most American Christians thought of the city the way a farmer thinks of a storm, as something to shelter from. Conn argued the opposite, and his case was not complicated: that cities are where the people are, that a missionary goes where the people are, and that American evangelicals had therefore spent a century retreating to the suburbs and calling it holiness. Evangelicals, in this sense, are the Protestants who hold to the authority of the Bible, the necessity of conversion and the duty of telling other people about it, across a great many denominations and none. Keller took Conn’s point and never let go of it. Two other men shaped him in Philadelphia. Edmund Clowney, who had been the seminary’s first president for eighteen years and left the post the year Keller arrived, taught him to preach every passage of the Old Testament so that it arrived at Christ rather than at a moral lesson, which is why a Keller sermon on Joseph or on Jonah always turns a corner somewhere near the end. And Jack Miller, whose church at Glenside the Kellers attended for those five years, preached grace to Christians as hard as most preachers preach it to unbelievers, on the ground that Christians are the people who most quickly forget it.

(●) 1989 AD: He was sent to Manhattan to find somebody else to start a church there, and ended up starting Redeemer Presbyterian Church himself. + Terry Gyger ran the home missions work of the Presbyterian Church in America, meaning the denomination’s effort to start new congregations inside the United States rather than overseas, and what he wanted was a church in Manhattan. He had tried once already and failed. So he asked Keller to take it on, and Keller said no. Gyger then asked him for something smaller: come up to New York regularly, do the research, and find out enough that whoever did take the job on would know what he was walking into. Keller spent months at that, riding the subway and asking people questions, one of them being what a New Yorker would count as the worst thing that could happen to him. Two Presbyterian ministers emerged as candidates. Both turned it down. Then Keller came back from a trip to England and found a message waiting: it was him or nobody. Kathy was against it, and her reasons were not silly. They had three sons, none of them yet twelve, and New York was in the worst stretch of killing in its modern history, with the murder count climbing towards the peak it reached in 1990. Her own mother told her the boys would all be in gangs by the end of the first week. She came round in the end on the plain ground that if God was sending them she would go, and she said afterwards that she had concluded she would live in a cardboard box if that was what it took. The family moved that June to Roosevelt Island, the narrow strip in the East River where the rent was survivable. The new congregation, which they named Redeemer Presbyterian Church, met first in a hall belonging to a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, and its entire method of gathering people was that the people already there invited somebody. There was no advertising, no mailing, no campaign. Kathy remembered the feeling of those months exactly: every single week, they wondered whether anybody would come. By the end of 1989 about two hundred and fifty were coming. By the following autumn it was six hundred. Behind that growth sat one decision Keller had made about the preaching, and it explains a great deal of what followed. He preached every sermon as though a non-Christian were sitting in the room, addressing that person’s objections out loud and by name, which meant that a believer who brought a skeptical colleague along did not have to spend the following week apologising for what the man in the pulpit had said.

(●) 2001 AD: After the towers fell Redeemer filled, and the books that made him known everywhere else followed. + On the Sunday before 11 September 2001, about two thousand eight hundred people were at Redeemer. On the Sunday after, more than five thousand three hundred came, and Keller asked his staff whether they could put on another service. The sermon he gave that morning was called "Truth, Tears, Anger and Grace," and he began it not with an explanation of the disaster but at a graveside. Lazarus, a friend of Jesus, had died, and Jesus arrived at the tomb knowing perfectly well that he was about to raise the man, and stood in front of the grave and cried anyway. "Jesus wept." (John 11:35) Roughly eight hundred people joined the church in the weeks that followed, and Redeemer never went back to the size it had been. The rest of that decade turned a Manhattan pastor into a public figure, and it happened in three stages. The first was an institution. In 2001 he and his colleagues founded Redeemer City to City to train church planters for large cities elsewhere, and by the end of 2023 the organisation reported that it had helped start more than sixteen hundred churches and trained over a hundred thousand leaders. The second began over lunch at a Manhattan sidewalk cafe in 2002, where he and the New Testament scholar D. A. Carson settled on the idea of a network for pastors that would be theologically serious without being tribal, by which they meant serious about doctrine without being organised around a party. The two of them sent out forty invitations to North American leaders. All forty came to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in May 2005, and the result went public in 2007 as The Gospel Coalition, with Keller drafting its Theological Vision for Ministry. The third stage was the books. The Reason for God appeared in February 2008 and reached number seven on the New York Times nonfiction list the following month, which is not where books of Christian apologetics normally go. The Prodigal God came out the same year, and after that he published something almost every year until he died. He had thyroid cancer in 2002 and recovered. He stepped down as senior pastor of Redeemer on 1 July 2017 and was named pastor emeritus, which is the title a congregation gives a minister it has retired but does not want to stop claiming. Retirement did not look much like retirement. He spent the years afterwards teaching for Reformed Theological Seminary’s New York campus and working for City to City, which is to say he spent them training the people who would do next what he had done.

(●) 2020 AD: Pancreatic cancer gave him three years to find out whether he believed what he had spent a lifetime telling everybody else, and he wrote about it until he died at seventy-two. + In May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Keller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he made it public on 7 June. It was stage four. He and Kathy were both about to turn seventy and had felt entirely well; the cancer turned up by accident, in what his doctors called an incidental pickup and he called providential intervention. He wrote afterwards that they spent much time in tears and disbelief, that they had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially their children and grandchildren, and that they had expected some illness to come and take them when they felt really old. But not now, not yet. What he did next is probably the most useful thing he ever did for the people who had read him. He wrote about it while it was happening, in an essay for The Atlantic in March 2021 called "Growing My Faith in the Face of Death," and he opened it by admitting the one thing a professional Christian is least keen to admit: that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. Think of what that costs a man in his position. He had spent a career telling other people that God is love and that the dead in Christ will rise, and now the theoretical ideas, as he put it, had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless. Getting them from the one condition to the other took, in his description, both intellectual and emotional engagement, head work and heart work. What helped was finding that the Psalms had been written by people who already knew this. They say things like "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 13:1) without apology, and nobody edited the line out of the book. He kept writing. Hope in Times of Fear, on the resurrection, came out in 2021, and Forgive in 2022. He was in and out of treatment and then, in May 2023, out of options; he went home to hospice care on 18 May. He died the next morning, 19 May 2023, at seventy-two. His son Michael wrote that his father had waited until he was alone with his mother, that she kissed him on the forehead, and that he breathed his last breath. The family said they took comfort in some of his last words, which were that there is no downside for him leaving, not in the slightest.

What He Taught

(T1) There are two ways to be your own saviour, breaking the rules and keeping them, and the gospel is neither. + A father has two sons. The younger one takes his share of the money, goes abroad and spends it on nothing worth having. The older one stays home, works the fields, never disobeys an order, and when the father throws a party for the brother who came back, he will not go in. Most people have heard the story of the prodigal son, prodigal being an old word for recklessly wasteful, and most people have heard it as a story about a wastrel who was forgiven. Keller’s reading, which is not his invention but is the one he made famous, is that the story has two lost sons in it and that Jesus told it to an audience of elder brothers. Luke says so in the first two verses of the chapter: the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear him, and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling about the company he kept (Luke 15:1-2). The Pharisees were the strictest religious party of the day and the scribes were the trained experts in the law, and between them they were the respectable end of the room. The point that follows is the engine of everything Keller wrote. The younger brother wanted the father’s things and left to get them. The elder brother wanted the father’s things too, and stayed, and obeyed, in order to get them. Neither of them wanted the father. Both were using him. Which means that being good can be a strategy for keeping God at a distance just as effectively as being bad, and it is the more dangerous of the two, because it looks like the opposite. Keller named the two ways irreligion and religion, irreligion being the younger brother’s road out and religion being the elder brother’s road of dutiful staying, and he said that the gospel is a third thing entirely: not "I obey, therefore I am accepted," but "I am accepted, therefore I obey." Two consequences fall out of this, and they are the reason the idea did so much work. The first is diagnostic. A person who is furious at God when life goes wrong, in the way the elder brother is furious, has quietly been running an account: this much obedience purchases that much protection. The anger is the receipt. The second is about churches. If Jesus attracted the wrong sort of people and annoyed the respectable ones, then a church which attracts only the respectable has drifted from him somewhere, whatever it says in its statement of faith. Keller made that observation about his own tradition more often than about anybody else’s. Nothing here is new doctrine, and Keller never claimed it was. It is the Reformation’s doctrine of justification by faith, which is the sixteenth-century recovery of Paul’s claim that God declares a person to be in the right on the strength of what Christ has done, received by trust, and not on the strength of what the person has managed to accumulate. Keller told it as a story rather than stating it as a formula, and he aimed it squarely at two audiences at once: people who thought they had left religion behind, and people who thought they were safely inside it.

(Q) "Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day." + Source: Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (Dutton, 2008), chapter one. The sentence that follows it in the book is the sting: that our churches today do not have this effect, and that the kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even the most avant-garde ones. He is not scoring a point against liberals or against conservatives. He is asking a congregation to check itself against the crowd that gathered around Christ (T1).

(T2) Sin is not mainly rule-breaking; it is building a life on something that cannot carry the weight. + Think of what happens when a marriage ends and one of the two cannot get up in the morning afterwards, while the other is standing more or less upright. The difference is rarely that one loved more. It is that for one of them the marriage had been holding up the whole building. Take out a wall and the room is bare. Take out the load-bearing wall and the roof comes down. That is what Keller meant by idolatry, and it is worth saying plainly what the word means here, because most people hear it and picture a carved statue. An idol, in the biblical sense he was using, is anything a person looks to for what only God can give: identity, security, a reason to think one’s life counts. It need not be a bad thing. It is almost always a good thing, which is what makes it hard to see. Work is good. A child is good. Being thought well of is good. Any of them becomes an idol the moment it stops being one of the things that make life worth living and becomes the thing that makes life worth living. John Calvin, the Frenchman who led the Reformation in Geneva, called the human mind a perpetual forge of idols, meaning a workshop that never shuts, and Paul had described the exchange at the root of it long before him: "because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen." (Romans 1:25) Keller took this from three places at once: from Calvin, from Martin Luther’s treatment of the first commandment, which is the one forbidding any other god before the true one, and from Kierkegaard’s account of a self that builds itself on something finite and then discovers that the something is not big enough to hold a life. What Keller did with it was one specific thing, and it is what made the idea useful. He turned it into a question anybody can ask himself. What is it that, if I lost it, would make me feel my life was hardly worth living? Whatever answers that question is functioning as a god, whether or not the person would use the word. It also changed what he thought repentance looked like. If sin is only rule-breaking, repentance means trying harder next time, and a great many people have found that this does not work for long. If sin is misplaced worship, then the cure is not effort but replacement: something has to be more beautiful to you than the thing you are clinging to, or you will not let go of it. That is why Keller preached grace at Christians rather than duty. He thought duty had already been tried.

(Q) "A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living." + Source: Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (Dutton, 2009), introduction. The book takes the idea through money, sex, power and success, and then, in the chapters most of its Christian readers did not expect, through the idols that only religious people can have: doctrinal correctness, a ministry, a political cause, a family. The definition is deliberately framed as a test rather than a category, so that a reader can apply it to himself without waiting to be told (T2).

(T3) Every doubt about Christianity stands on a belief of its own, so a fair skeptic doubts his doubts as well. + Somebody says he cannot accept Christianity because a good God would not allow so much suffering. Look at what he has just leaned on. He is confident that a good God, if there were one, would have no reasons for permitting suffering that a human being could not see. That is not an observation. It is a claim about the range of divine reasoning, and it is at least as large a claim as the one he is rejecting. Keller’s point is not that the objection is bad. It is that the objection is a belief, and a belief can be asked for its credentials like any other. He set this out in the introduction to The Reason for God, and he called the practice doubting your doubts. All doubts, he argued, however skeptical they look, are a set of alternative beliefs, and you cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. So the fair thing, and the interesting thing, is to turn round and ask what supports Belief B. If someone says all religions are equally valid paths up the same mountain, he is standing somewhere above all of them to see that, which is exactly the position he has just said nobody occupies. Then comes the half of the argument aimed at believers, and it is the half that gets quoted at church. Keller told Christians to take their own doubts seriously rather than suppressing them, on the ground that a faith which has never been questioned has never been strengthened either. The immune system is the picture he used. A body kept in a sterile room is not healthy; it is defenceless, and the first ordinary infection will take it apart. A believer who has never let himself feel the force of the objections is in the same condition, and the crisis, when it arrives, does not defeat his faith so much as reveal that there was nothing there to defeat. This is why the structure of The Reason for God is what it is. The first half of the book contains no case for Christianity at all. It is seven chapters of objections, each stated as strongly as Keller could state it, and only after that does he begin to answer. He learned the order in New York, where anybody who reversed it lost the room.

(Q) "A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it." + Source: Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008), introduction. He goes on to say that people who avoid the hard questions about their own beliefs will find themselves defenceless when a tragedy or a clever skeptic arrives, and that a faith which has not patiently listened to its own doubts can collapse very fast. In the same few pages he gives the other half of the instruction, addressed to the skeptic: in fairness you must doubt your doubts (T3).

(T4) A church should learn to speak the language of the place it is in without changing what it has to say. + A doctor who has to give bad news says the same thing to a frightened teenager and to a retired surgeon, and says it in two different ways, and would be doing the job badly if he did not. Nobody accuses him of changing the diagnosis. That distinction, between the message and the delivery, is what missionaries have long called contextualization, and Keller spent a career insisting that everyone does it whether or not they admit it. A church with an organ and a church with a guitar have both made a decision about the culture they are speaking to. The only question is whether the decision was made on purpose. He argued for two habits held together, and each without the other goes wrong. The first is that a church must enter the culture far enough to know what the people in it are actually asking: not the questions Christians expect them to ask, but the ones they have. The second is that the church must then challenge the culture at the point where its own best hopes cannot deliver, which is generally the point the culture is least willing to look at. In New York that meant taking seriously a young analyst’s conviction that her work would make her someone, and then showing her what happens to a person whose worth is made of performance the first time the performance fails. Behind the method sat a conviction about cities that he got from Harvie Conn and never gave up. Cities concentrate people, and they concentrate a particular sort: the young, the newly arrived, and the ones who will decide what a culture thinks next. That is where the apostles went. The book of Acts moves from city to city and hardly stops in a village. Keller’s favourite text for all this was a letter written to Judeans who had been carried off to Babylon and who had every reason to hate the place they were now living in: "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." (Jeremiah 29:7) The instruction is not to conquer Babylon, and it is not to hide from it. It is to make it a better place to live in and to pray for it, and Keller read the Christian’s position in a secular city as much the same. He was clear about the risk, and the risk is the one his critics later pressed. A church that adapts too far has nothing left to say that the culture was not already saying, and Keller thought this was exactly what had happened to the mainline denominations he had grown up in. A church that refuses to adapt at all ends up defending its own habits and calling them the gospel. He held that both failures come from the same root, which is a church more interested in itself than in the people outside it.

(Q) "Contextualization is not, as is often argued, ‘giving people what they want to hear.’ Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them." + Source: Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Zondervan, 2012), part three, page 89. Center Church is the closest thing he wrote to a manual, and it is organised around three commitments held in tension: the gospel itself, the city, and the movement. The sentence is his answer to the standard charge that any adaptation to an audience is a concession, and the clause that carries the weight is the last one, since arguments with force they can feel is a much harder standard than arguments they can follow (T4).

(T5) Christianity does not explain suffering away; it says that God has been inside it. + Sit with somebody whose child has died and try the argument that God has good reasons we cannot see. It may well be true. It will not be any use, and Keller, who did this work for fifty years in hospital rooms and at gravesides, was blunt about the reason. A sufferer does not need an explanation first. He needs to know that he has not been abandoned, and an explanation delivered too early tells him precisely the opposite, because a person who is explaining is a person standing at a distance. So Keller made the Christian answer to suffering a claim about where God is rather than a claim about why the suffering happened. Every religion and every philosophy has something to say about pain, and the answers are not the same. The Stoic, trained by the old Greek and Roman school not to be moved by anything outside his control, says to master it. The Buddhist says the attachment is what hurts. The modern secularist says there is nothing to be said, because there is nobody to say it to. Christianity says something none of the others says: that God has been through it. Not observed it from a safe distance. Been through it, in Jesus, up to and including the loss of God himself, which is what the cry from the cross is, the moment when the dying man asks why God has forsaken him. He took two working conclusions from that, both of them things he practised before he wrote them down. The first is that Christians are permitted to grieve out loud. Roughly a third of the Psalms are complaints, several of them uncomfortably close to accusations, and they were kept in the church’s hymnbook rather than tidied out of it. The second is that the resurrection changes what suffering is without making it less. Keller was careful here, and the care matters. The Christian hope is not that the bad things turn out to have been good, but that they are undone, and that the future is a raised body in a mended world rather than a consoling idea. Then in 2020 he had to find out whether he believed it. He had written the book on suffering in 2013, seven years before the diagnosis, and the essay he wrote afterwards says frankly that having the doctrine right had not been the same as having it work, and that getting it from the one condition to the other took months.

(Q) "Christianity alone among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment." + Source: Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008), chapter two, "How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?" The chapter is one of the seven in which he is still stating objections rather than answering them, and this passage is the single move he allows himself before the answering begins. The long version is Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (2013), which spends its first half on how different cultures have tried to make sense of pain before it says anything Christian at all (T5).

(Q) "We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." + Source: Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Dutton, 2011), page 44. He used the sentence in sermons for years before it reached print, and it is the most quoted line he ever wrote. The setting is an argument about why marriage is painful and wonderful at once, and the answer is that marriage reflects the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. Both halves of the sentence have to land together or neither works: the first half alone crushes, the second half alone flatters, and Keller held that a person who has taken both at the same time is the only sort who can be told the truth about himself without falling apart (T1, T2).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He showed a generation of pastors that a serious church could be planted in a hostile city, and then trained them to do it. + In 1989 the estimate was that under one percent of Manhattan’s residents attended a church that preached the gospel in any historic sense. By the time Keller retired in 2017 the figure being cited was around five percent. Redeemer was not responsible for all of that, and Keller was quick to say so, pointing to the immigrant congregations of Queens and Brooklyn that had been growing all along without anybody in the evangelical press noticing. But something had changed, and the change was visible enough that pastors began arriving from other cities to ask how it had been done. What they were given was not a franchise. Redeemer City to City, founded in 2001, trains leaders and then leaves them to work out what their own city is asking, on the principle that a method transplanted whole from New York to São Paulo or to London will fail in exactly the way Keller spent his career warning about (T4). The organisation reported more than sixteen hundred churches started and over a hundred thousand leaders trained by the end of 2023. The Gospel Coalition, which he founded with the New Testament scholar D. A. Carson, did something different and arguably harder. It gathered pastors who agreed on the historic doctrines and disagreed about a good deal else, and gave them a common vocabulary without a denomination. Keller wrote its Theological Vision for Ministry, and the shape of that document is the shape of his mind: doctrine first, then a description of the culture, then the practical consequences, in that order and never in another. Carson wrote after his death that Keller had an uncommon ability to tell old truths in a fresh way, and that his sermons were never so cerebral that arguments were allowed to displace confession, prayer and a deep sense of the presence of God. The influence on preaching is the part that will outlast the institutions. A generation of younger ministers, many of whom never met him, learned from his sermons to name the objection in the room before answering it, to preach Christ from the Old Testament rather than a moral, and to assume that the person in the third row is not yet convinced. It is a debt widely and openly acknowledged, and it runs across denominations that agree about very little else.

(†) Skeptics read him, which is rarer than it sounds, because he stated their case before he answered it. + Most Christian apologetics is bought by Christians. The Reason for God broke out of that, reaching number seven on the New York Times nonfiction list in March 2008 and getting reviewed in places that do not ordinarily review this kind of book, and the reason is structural rather than promotional. A skeptic who opens it finds the first half of it devoted to his own objections, argued at their strongest, with no answer offered until page one hundred and something. Whatever else that is, it is not a sales technique, and readers who expected to be handled noticed. The inheritance is easy to trace, and Keller never hid it. C. S. Lewis is quoted more often than anyone else in his books, and the argumentative habit of granting an opponent his best ground and then walking with him one step further is Lewis’s before it is Keller’s. From Jonathan Edwards he took the conviction that the will follows whatever the heart finds beautiful, which is why he thought a sermon had to do more than convince a man: it had to make the thing attractive to him. From Lesslie Newbigin, the missionary bishop who came home from India and found England a mission field, he took the framework for treating the modern West as a culture to be evangelised rather than a lapse to be scolded. Richard Lovelace, whose work on revivals he had studied in seminary, gave him the pattern by which a church goes cold and is renewed. And Kierkegaard gave him the account of a self that has to build itself on something. He also, deliberately, wrote a second book for the readers he judged the first had missed. The Reason for God assumes a person who thinks Christianity might be false. Making Sense of God (2016) assumes a person who thinks it is irrelevant and cannot see why anyone would want it to be true, and so it argues about meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity and hope before it argues about evidence at all. That order, wanting before believing, is the same order Edwards had insisted on nearly three centuries earlier. Not every Christian reader approved of the tone. Some judged that the effort to be heard by skeptics cost him sharpness on hell, on judgment and on sexual ethics, subjects on which he held the historic positions and stated them less loudly than his critics wished. Keller’s answer was that he was not writing to settle a question for people who had already accepted the framework, but to get a hearing from people who had not, and that a preacher who cannot tell the difference between the two audiences will not reach either.

(†) Two of his own positions divided Christians who admired everything else about him: his refusal to take a party side in politics, and his account of evolution and Adam. + The criticisms worth recording are the ones aimed at what Keller himself taught and did, and there are two of them. Neither is a charge of misconduct. Both are arguments about his judgment, and both were running in public while he was alive and able to answer, which is the fairest condition a disagreement can have. - The third way in politics. The third way is the name for refusing both of the available sides. Keller taught that a church should decline to be identified with either party in American politics, on the ground that the Bible cuts across both of them and that a church wearing a party badge has effectively told half the city not to bother coming. He put it in print in Center Church and argued it in public, including in the New York Times in 2018, where he wrote that Christians do not fit into the two-party system. In May 2022 the objection came from a man who had been trained by the method. James Wood, a younger writer who had helped plant churches in Austin on Keller’s model and was by then an editor at First Things, the journal of religion and public life, published an essay there saying that he had changed his mind. Wood leaned on Aaron Renn’s description of a "negative world," a culture in which Christian belief is treated as a social harm rather than merely as odd, and made three complaints: • Keller’s approach was designed for a culture that no longer exists. • Its evangelistic caution about giving offence had become a reason for avoiding fights that need fighting. • It encourages a habit of keeping one’s hands clean. Others answered that avoiding tribalism is not a strategy to be discarded when it gets expensive but a New Testament command. Keller answered on Twitter within the week, in a few sentences worth weighing: the approach was forged in a hostile culture rather than a neutral one, and was forged for people to use in hostile cultures everywhere going forward. Where a reader lands on this will depend on a judgment about the times rather than a judgment about him, which is why the argument outlived him. - Evolution and the historical Adam. In 2009 Keller wrote a paper for BioLogos, an organisation of Christians working in the sciences, called "Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople," and it is the piece of his work that cost him most among conservative Protestants. He argued that a Christian can accept evolutionary biological processes as the means by which God formed the human body, while rejecting what he called the Grand Theory of Evolution, meaning the further claim that the same process accounts for everything about human beings including morality and religion. He also insisted, against most who are willing to take the first step, that Adam and Eve must be real people who really fell, because Paul’s argument in Romans 5 depends on it. The criticism came from two directions. Young-earth creationists, who hold that Genesis 1 describes six ordinary days a few thousand years ago, rejected the whole position outright. Some confessional Reformed readers, meaning those who measure a teacher against the historic Reformed confessions of faith, judged that his handling of Genesis 1 conceded too much to the sciences and that his account of Adam was not a stable place to stand, since it satisfies neither those who want the text read plainly nor those who want the biology followed all the way. Keller answered that the church is losing people at exactly the point where they are told they must choose between the two, and that a pastor owes them a position that does not require the choice. Neither of these belongs in the same category as the doctrines he preached, and he would have said so. On the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, the atonement and the authority of Scripture he taught what the church has always taught, and the critics on both counts have not disputed it.