Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

Janet Essig recalled how she also primed them with a methodology for observation, interpretation, and application: 1. Read through the passage at least twice. In the second reading, slow down and observe what is in the passage. 2. Identify who is involved and what is happening—where and when. How and why might also apply. 3. Note words that are repeated or words of contrast or words of cause and effect. 4. Paraphrase the passage. 5. Note any questions you have about the passage. See if there are answers within the passage. If this involves historical context or the meaning of words, other resources can be used. 6. Determine the overall theme. 7. Outline the passage—showing the movement of ideas and noting connectors or contrasts between sections—looking at words such as and, but, so, therefore, then, and so on. 8. Move to interpretation to see how the mechanics of the passage illuminate what the passage is about. Reword the theme if needed. 9. Finally, in light of all that you have seen in the passage, what does the passage mean? How does it apply to you? What thinking or actions do you need to change? What have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about God? What are the implications of this truth?10

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.4

Thanks to fantasy stories, readers can find existential satisfaction before they discover intellectual credibility. They can want something to be true even if they can’t yet bring themselves to believe it’s true. The writer can show the world as it ought to be, as it once was, and how it will be again someday. The writer can usher us into a world even better than what we can now imagine. For Tolkien, as for Keller, that’s the seed of Christian belief. “We are so deeply interested in these stories because we have intuitions of the creation/fall/redemption/restoration plotline of the Bible,” Keller wrote. “Even if we repress the knowledge of that plotline intellectually, we can’t not know it imaginatively, and our hearts are stirred by any stories that evoke it.”10 As Keller told Redeemer in 1997, the good news of Jesus is the story behind all the other stories. “The gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take their cues.”11 How, exactly, did Tolkien see the gospel as the mold for fantasy stories? It’s in the moment when you think all hope has been lost, as when the disciples huddled together, hidden away in a house after Jesus’ death on the cross. It’s when victory seems to emerge from nowhere in the least likely way, as when the risen Jesus walked through walls into that house and greeted his old friends and followers. It’s when someone’s greatest weakness becomes the source of greatest strength. It’s what Tolkien called ...

“Every story whispers his name.”7

“Only if our highest love is God himself can we love and serve all people, families, classes, races; and only God’s saving grace can bring us to the place where we are loving and serving God for himself alone and not for what he can give us,” Keller explained. “Unless we understand the gospel, we are always obeying God for our sake and not for his.”14

For at least the first hundred sermons, no preacher can be any good, Keller concluded from his experience in Hopewell. Given the small, relational setting of that church, he found he could refine his teaching for next time in response to any confusion about his message.

Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden, a much tougher garden, and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for our acquittal. Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go into the void, not knowing whither he went. Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us all. What God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son—your only son whom you love—from me,” now we, at the foot of the cross, can say to God, “Now we know that you love me because you did not withhold your Son—your only Son whom you love—from me.” Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserve so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace that wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph who sits at the right hand of the King and forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people in the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.

Jesus is the true and better rock of Moses who, when struck with a rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus is the true and better Job who became a truly innocent sufferer and now intercedes for and saves his stupid friends. Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk losing an earthly palace but lost the ultimate heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life but gave his life, who didn’t just say, “If I perish, I perish,” but also, “When I perish, I’ll perish to save my people.” Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so we could be brought in. Jesus is the real Passover lamb. Jesus is the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread.28

“Churches that live for themselves die by themselves. . . . If our evangelism is to be effective, the church must be concerned to meet the surrounding need.”31

Keller laid out the traits of churches he believed would thrive in the coming secular city: 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 m...

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

“It requires more prowess and greatness of spirit to obey God faithfully, than to command an army of men; to be a Christian, than to be a captain.”

Another one-third of Redeemer’s initial funding came from Spanish River Church, one of the most aggressive planting congregations in the PCA. Its pastor, David Nicholas, cofounded the Acts 29 church planting network.

“Young Life for grown-ups.” And the visitor wasn’t just referring to the high concentration of young adults. Keller followed the Young Life calendar in his preaching. In the fall, he focused on apologetics, especially through sermons from the Old Testament on the nature of God. In the winter, he shifted to the life of Jesus, culminating in the cross and resurrection for Good Friday and Easter. Spring and summer worked out salvation with application on how to live as a Christian.

In the fall of 1991, Tim Keller preached nine weeks on marriage, a series recalled by many early Redeemer members, most of whom were not yet married. It’s the most downloaded content the church has ever released.

Lloyd-Jones aimed his morning sermons to build up Christians and his evening sermons to reach non-Christians. Both sermons, though, focused on the gospel of Jesus Christ and challenged listeners with biblical and theological insight.

For the first seven years at Redeemer, Keller followed the Lloyd-Jones plan, though he reversed evening and morning, so that he preached more narrative portions of the Bible for nonbelievers in the morning.28 Keller learned from Lloyd-Jones never to assume everyone is a Christian, and never assume Christians no longer need the gospel. “Evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize.”

About this point in the sermon you might wonder what the bride and groom standing in front of Keller were thinking. What’s the point of the story? Who’s supposed to be the good guy of this twisted tale? Keller anticipated these objections: “I don’t see any! What is going on here.” Keller continued: The answer is: That is absolutely correct. You are starting to get it. You are starting to get the point of the Bible. What do I mean? The Bible doesn’t give us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “Look at the people who have found God through their great performance and their moral record. Be like them!” Of course not! Instead, over and over again, the Bible gives us absolutely weak people who don’t seek the grace they need and who don’t deserve the grace they get.

The greatest factor in the long-term effectiveness of a Christian minister is how (or whether) the gift-deficient areas in his skill set are mitigated by the strong grace operations in his character.

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.

Keller didn’t attempt to answer why God allowed this tragedy to befall New York. But as Jesus wept over the death of his friend Lazarus, he wasn’t helpless. He wouldn’t leave the sisters Mary and Martha hopeless. He didn’t ignore their plight. When somebody says to me, “I don’t know that God cares about our suffering; I don’t know that God cares about it at all,” I say, “Yes, he does.” They say, “How do you know?” Well, I’ll tell you something. If I was in any other religion, I wouldn’t know what to say. But what I can say is the proof is he was willing to suffer himself. I don’t know why he hasn’t ended suffering and evil by now, but the fact that he was willing to be involved and he himself got involved is proof that he must have some good reason, because he cares. He is not remote. He is not away from us.3 By

Keller variously attributed his inspiration for talking more about idolatry than the more common explanation of sin as offending God by breaking his laws. He credited Augustine’s “disordered loves” in Confessions, which reveals the enslaving power of passions not rooted in God.29 Former Augustinian monk Martin Luther appeared more often in Keller’s early Redeemer sermons than anyone else except Jonathan Edwards.30 Luther said that no one breaks the commandments against murder or theft or covetousness without first breaking the commandment against idolatry.31 The uneasy Lutheran Søren Kierkegaard described sin as building identity on anything other than God.32

As Keller explained at PTS, his missionary program for the post-Christian West follows seven steps, deeply informed by the neo-Calvinism of Kuyper and his allies.

The first step is promoting incisive public apologetics. Classic apologetic works such as N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God are helpful.

Even better for our time is Augustine’s City of God, because it speaks to social asp...

When secularists endorse human dignity, rights, and the responsibility in order to eliminate human suffering, they are indeed exercising religious faith in some kind of supranatural, transcendent reality. . . . To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary.21

Second, horizontal and vertical dimensions of the faith must be integrated. The mainline can’t just care about social problems. And evangelicals can’t just care about spiritual problems. Justification must lead to justice.

Third, a critique of secularism must emerge from within its own framework, not from an outward construct. Borrowing from Daniel Strange, Keller calls this process “subversive fulfillment.” It’s a form of “active contextualization” in three parts: enter the culture, challenge the culture, then appeal to the gospel.22 You can see this model in his preaching.

Fourth, Christian community must disrupt the culture’s social categories. Thriving communities lend credibility to the transformative power of the gospel.

Fifth, to achieve an effective missionary encounter in the post-Christian West, laity must integrate their faith with their work. Discipleship must extend from private to public. It can’t be compartmentalized. Non-Christians must see the difference faith makes in day-to-day living.

Sixth, the local church must be informed by the global church. Nobody did this better than Lesslie Newbigin. His experience in India gave fresh perspective on cultural changes inside and outside the church in his native England. In his answer to Newbigin at Princeton, Keller admitted that conservative evangelicals in the United States put too much faith in their methodology and struggle to see the kingdom of God apart from American national interest.

Seventh, and finally, Keller encouraged PTS not to miss the difference between grace and religion. As Richard Lovelace first showed Keller in his study of revival, missionary encounters that produce social change depend on grace, not on the rules of religion. Only grace brings spiritual transformation. And apart fro...

Churches that aligned with the blue team were tempted to ignore the vertical dimensions of personal conversion. And churches that aligned with the red team were tempted to ignore the horizontal dimensions of biblical justice and not evangelize outside their political tribe. Far from uniting to share Jesus with a world desperate for justice yet unable to even define it, American Christians had largely conformed by 2020 with the partisan battle lines.45

Keller explained to Redeemer in 1997 that Kierkegaard identified three ways to live before God: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual. We could summarize the aesthetic approach as, “Follow your dreams.” This is the opera singer who sent Babette to the sisters. The ethical says, “Do your duty.” This is how the sisters fulfill their father’s wishes by staying home and overseeing the sect. According to Kierkegaard, just about everyone looks for happiness either through duty or desire. Sometimes people switch between the two. Keller offered Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy as an example of switching from the aesthetic to the ethical. More often in New York City, Keller said, he finds the opposite. Raised in the ethical, many flee to find the aesthetic in New York. Neither one works, Kierkegaard warned. Both the aesthetic Herodians and the ethical Pharisees miss the spiritual freedom and joy of the gospel.57 A good feast can be a spiritual experience that draws us closer to God, because we catch a taste of what we’ll enjoy forever in his presence.58 Kierkegaard isn’t easy reading, especially if you don’t know his context of Lutheran pietism in Denmark. But his spiritual approach to God resonated with Keller as the alternative to legalism and antinomianism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kierkegaard taught: The absurdity of atonement requires faith that we believe that for God even the impossible is possible, including the forgiveness of the unforgivab...

“Our models of theological formation give us a firm grasp of biblical doctrine, which is indispensable,” Keller wrote, “but they fail to deconstruct culture’s beliefs and provide better, Christian answers to the questions of the late modern human heart.”