Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

Always present the basic gospel message—Christ is in charge of the world, and he is the way

no one finds the deepest veins of gold at the mouth of the cave. You find the greatest treasures after thorough exploration.

in 1989, he listened to hundreds of sermons by Lloyd-Jones and

He didn’t need to choose between edifying believers and evangelizing nonbelievers. Lloyd-Jones showed him he could—indeed, he should—do both at the same time. “Evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize.”

Rarely in his ministry has Keller emphasized his differences with other Christians, as Lloyd-Jones did. Like Stott, he emphasizes the contrast between Christians and the unbelieving world.

Preaching can do more than just transmit true information. Preaching can, even should, lead Christians to wonder.

When you pluck the string of the gospel, it never stops reverberating in your heart.

He advocated for a Christianity that is orthodox and modern at the same time. 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.

“We are relentlessly aware of and glad for the presence of doubters in our midst,” Keller wrote early in his tenure at Redeemer. “We are very relentless yet extremely noncombative as we present the reasonable beauty of the Christian faith in every aspect of our ministry.”

“An evangelical theology of Scripture acknowledges that the Bible is a thoroughly human book, each author being embedded in human culture, but it believes that God specifically chose each author’s culture and even the very life circumstances so that God’s overruling providence sovereignly determined every word to be written just as it was.”19

He argued that revival intensifies the Spirit’s normal work of convicting sinners, regenerating and sanctifying them, and assuring them of God’s grace. The Spirit does so through the ordinary means of grace—namely, preaching, prayer, and sacraments.3 Revival may be discerned when these ordinary means result in a surprising surge of converted sinners and renewed believers.

Lovelace believed he saw such a revival in the Jesus Movement—a movement other Christian leaders viewed with suspicion because of the counterculture’s dress and music.

Edwards gave Keller a desire for mystical experiences of God.

In other words, when knowledge about God’s love travels from our head into the feeling of God’s love in our hearts, that’s revival.

“Over and over again [Calvin] teaches that you are not truly converted by merely understanding doctrine, but by grasping God’s love so that the inner structure and motivation of the heart are changed.”34

That’s where the God of the Bible is most radically different from the primitive gods of old. The ancients understood the idea of the wrath of God, they understood the idea of justice, the idea of a debt and a necessary punishment, but they had no idea that God would come and pay it himself. The cross is the self-substitution of God. . . . God created the world in an instant, and it was a beautiful process. He re-created the world on the cross—and it was a horrible process. That’s how it works. Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.16

He then quoted his friend John Gerstner, the Jonathan Edwards scholar from Pittsburgh, as saying, “The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works.”

For Keller, this meant training 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.24 It meant forsaking “church growth” models that use the city and instead deploying the church in a “city growth” model that helps everyone flourish.

The gospel is not just the ABCs but the A to Z of the Christian life. It is inaccurate to think the gospel is what saves non-Christians, and then Christians mature by trying hard to live according to biblical principles. It is more accurate to say that we are saved by believing the gospel, and then we are transformed in every part of our minds, hearts, and lives by believing the gospel more and more deeply as life goes on.64

“What could lead to a growing movement of gospel-centered churches?” Keller wrote in TGC’s theological vision for ministry in 2007. “The ultimate answer is that God must, for his own glory, send revival in response to the fervent, extraordinary, prevailing prayer of his people.”72

“Tim set other people’s gifts free.”2

Redeemer sought to foster a loving and hospitable Christian community that welcomed nonbelievers. Worship and discipleship wouldn’t happen separately from evangelism. Redeemer wouldn’t code-switch its vocabulary between Christians and non-Christians. The Christian community itself would be the evangelistic program of the church.

A church with movement dynamics, however, generates ideas, leaders, and initiatives from the grassroots. Ideas come less from formal strategic meetings and more from off-line conversations among friends. Since the motivation for the work is not so much about compensation and self-interest as about a shared willingness to sacrifice for the infectious vision, such churches naturally create friendships among members and staff.9

In just one generation, between 1989 and 2019, the number of Manhattan residents attending evangelical churches grew from nine thousand to more than eighty thousand.12 That kind of church growth doesn’t usually happen without the “extraordinary prayer” advocated by Jonathan Edwards in the First Great Awakening. Keller commended this bold prayer, which pleads for God to unite the church in advancing his kingdom on earth.13

Writing in Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, one of the most popular books in Redeemer’s early history, Jack Miller contrasted “frontline” prayer with “maintenance” prayer. Most people only know prayer meetings as maintenance. Christians share concerns for the physical well-being of known members. But frontline prayer confesses sin, seeks humility, pursues the lost, and yearns to know God face-to-face, to encounter his glory.14

Over the years many mainstream journalists, including some Redeemer members, wrote about the church. Kathy commented to one of the journalists, “It’s surprising that so many educated twenty- and thirty-somethings would attend a church that teaches against sex outside marriage.” The journalist laughed. “Yes, that would be surprising.” “No,” Kathy clarified, “I’m saying that’s what we actually teach.” The journalist blinked a dumbfounded response.

Lloyd-Jones still argued against dividing too sharply between the audiences though. Both needed to be reminded of the gospel. Both needed spiritual depth.26 Lloyd-Jones warned that when preachers target only believers, they tend to make Christians harsh, cold, and self-satisfied. When they don’t evangelize in their sermons, preachers produce Pharisees.27

accurate, then, to say that Keller has never been an

In these years of growth pains, elders and staff pushed back hard on Keller, who knew virtually nothing about the dynamics of management. “He went through a long, hard struggle with not being liked, where he was failing,” Katherine Alsdorf said of management struggles that continued for Keller into the mid-2000s. “That was painful and humbling, with a lot of his time spent on his knees in prayer.”52 Keller admitted as much himself in Every Good Endeavor, the book on work he coauthored with Alsdorf. “At times staff members have protested that my vision was outpacing my ability to lead it or their ability to implement it.”53

The essence of becoming a disciple is, to put it colloquially, becoming like the people we hang out with the most. Just as the single most formative experience in our lives is our membership in a nuclear family, so the main way we grow in grace and holiness is through deep involvement in the family of God. Christian community is more than just a supportive fellowship; it is an alternate society. And it is through this alternate human society that God shapes us into who and what we are. . . . The real secret of fruitful and effective mission in the world is the quality of our community.

He quoted George Herbert: “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel made him just a gardener.”

“Everybody worships,” Wallace told the students. “The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

“So the question becomes,” Kathy asked, “does the church want to be effective in changing hearts and making disciples, as Jesus commanded, or are we going to be content with preaching only to the already converted who agree with one another on the particular way they think gospel translates into social policy?”

Above all Tim Keller returned to God in prayer, with greater length and depth, as he prepared for his faith to become sight.