Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

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...