Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

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.”

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

Mixing believers and nonbelievers to study the Bible together would become a hallmark of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, including Keller’s expectation that he was always preaching to Christians and skeptics at the same time. Keller would also bring to Redeemer the InterVarsity mentality that the students do the work.

“I must say to Kathy what John Newton wrote to his wife, Polly, namely, it is no wonder if so many years, so many endearments, so many obligations have produced such an uncommon effect, that by long habit, it is almost impossible for me to draw a breath, in which you are not involved.”31

“When you dive that deeply into the life and works of a single figure, something interesting happens,” Keller said. “You don’t just get to know his writings; you get to know how his mind works. You come to know what he would have said in answer to a particular question or how he would have responded to a particular incident.”3

The logos and pathos of neo-Calvinism, as he read it in these writers and saw it in their evangelistic communities, animated Keller’s entire ministry. 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.

The Kellers upheld biblical teaching on male leadership in marriage and the church while defying some cultural expectations on men and woman.

Keller objected to how “hermeneutical Nestorianism” likewise separates the human and divine authorship of Scripture, so that the Bible becomes culturally captive to the author’s immediate context. Keller also acknowledged the opposite temptation—any kind of Monophysite error that would underappreciate human

authorship in favor of the divine. Still, he judged the Nestorian threat to be more imminent.

Under Nicole’s influence, Keller continued his trajectory toward continental neo-Calvinism, rather than the British-American Reformed theology associated with Princeton Theological Seminary in the nineteenth century. Nicole assigned Louis Berkhof ’s Systematic Theology, which tracks closely with Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, as the textbook for his theology courses. Nicole also assigned parts of Bavinck’s Our Reasonable Faith and his Doctrine of God—at that time, no other section of his Dogmatics had been translated into English. The differences in these two strains of Reformed theology illuminate Keller’s apologetic approach. Princeton theology, exemplified in Charles Hodge, begins by seeking to prove the existence of God by showing nonbelievers that Christianity is built on rational arguments. The continental neo-Calvinism of Bavinck and Berkhof begins by assuming from Romans 1 that everyone already knows God and many things about him by general revelation that they suppress in sin (Romans 1). The job of the apologist, then, is to show nonbelievers how Christianity explains what they know in their hearts but deny with their lips.

Keller found Edwards’s distinction between “common virtue” and “true virtue” in The Nature of True Virtue especially helpful. “Common virtues”—such as love for family, nation, and self—breed rivalry. We put our families ahead of others. We pit our nation against others. We choose our self-interest over the interest of others. But the kind of “true virtue” we see in revived Christians, when God becomes their summum bonum, or ultimate good and center, blesses everyone.13

It didn’t take long for Keller to realize he needed to adjust his preaching—to become more concrete, clear, and practical. Hopewell became his first foray into contextualization. He realized he needed to listen and learn before he spoke, so that he could persuade.5

Clowney worried that preachers would just grab anything they could somehow relate to Jesus. Instead, preachers must labor to get specific with the events and structure of salvation history and how they point to Jesus as the climax, as the fulfillment, as the unity between faith and grace.

His TGC talk on gospel-centered ministry popularized a riff that inspired a whole new generation to preach the way he had been taught by Clowney.

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.”

Illustrating the point from his work in a Korean context, Conn pointed out that this seventeenth-century British confession doesn’t say much about how Christians should treat their parents, ancestors, and grandparents. Yet discipleship among Koreans must address such topics as ancestor worship. The Westminster Confession may not be wrong, but it’s not sufficient for every time and place.14

A missional church will be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional fundamentalist churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional liberal churches. This kind of church is profoundly counterintuitive to American observers, who are no longer able to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian West.35

This concept was later given fuller intellectual basis and treatment by Keller… found this to be an interesting example of his intuition (or Spirit-led conviction) preceding that.

To develop theological vision, Keller commends four steps from The Fabric of Theology. The first step is the same for Lints as for Clowney: listen to the Bible to develop doctrinal beliefs. The next step is the same as for Conn: reflect on culture to determine from the Bible what Christians must reject and what they must accept. Then Lints says Christians must decide what level of rational understanding of the gospel they expect from non-Christians, in how they will present the gospel—in short, whether they will follow the continental or British Reformed traditions. Finally, conclusions will depend on theological tradition—on how much deference Christians will show to previous generations’ beliefs and practices.

While I don’t like the term “theological vision,” I agree wholeheartedly with the contextualizing method outlined here.

Sensitive to her reluctance, Tim insisted he wouldn’t take the family there if she didn’t approve. Kathy erupted. “You’re not pushing this decision on me! You’re the head of this household. If God calls you to New York, I’ll wrestle it out with God.”

Convicting…

Kathy considers that decision “one of the most truly ‘manly’ things” her husband ever did.31 The move scared him. But he felt God’s call.

The Christian community itself would be the evangelistic program of the church.

Following John’s gospel and letters and fully in line with Bonhoeffer’s “Santorum Communio” which traces its origins from Luther and early church fathers.

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 leadership literature advises us to know our weaknesses, our gift-deficient areas. It usually tells us to surround ourselves with a team of people with complementary gifts, and that is certainly wise if you can do it. But even if you can, that is not sufficient, for your gift-deficient areas will undermine you unless there is compensatory godliness. . .

didn’t want to make religion illegal. They didn’t have the legal or political support for such a move. They aimed instead to make religion toxic,

But he noticed two shifts in the late-2000s. First, the questions shifted from science and history to morals and values. Doubt and incredulity shifted to anger and denunciation. The New Atheists framed Christianity as oppressive to women and racial minorities.24 Compared to when he began preaching in 1975, Keller observed that the gospel message, especially the topics of hell and judgment, had become a hundred times more unpopular.

The epochal experience for Keller was cribbing the reading list of Hunter, who taught about his understanding of culture’s “deep structures.” Through Hunter, Keller was introduced to the “big four” critics of secular modernity. From this time forward, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Philip Rieff, and Robert Bellah became staples in Keller’s thinking, writing, and teaching.2 They provoked Keller to a deeper analysis of the problems besetting the post-Christian West in politics and culture.

Much of Christian apologetics, including The Reason for God, still operates within the confines of the Enlightenment.

Keller asked the Oxford students to imagine an Anglo-Saxon warrior in Britain in AD 800. Inside he feels the impulse to destroy anyone who disrespects him. That’s the response his honor/shame culture demands, and so he does. But he also feels sexually attracted to men. His culture demands that he suppress those feelings, so he does not act on them. Now consider a man of the same age walking the streets of Manhattan in our day. He feels just like the Anglo-Saxon warrior. He wants to kill anyone who looks at him the wrong way. And he desires sexual relations with other men. Our culture sends him to therapy for anger management. He will identify publicly with his sexual orientation. So what does this illustration teach us? Keller explains: Primarily it reveals that we do not get our identity simply from within. Rather, we receive some interpretive moral grid, lay it down over our various feelings and impulses, and sift them through it. This grid helps us decide which feelings are “me” and should be expressed—and which are not and should not be. So this grid of interpretive beliefs—not an innate, unadulterated expression of our feelings—is what shapes our identity. Despite protests to the contrary, we instinctively know our inner depths are insufficient to guide us. We need some standard or rule from outside of us to help us sort out the warring impulses of our interior life.

Compelling illustration — this adds an immense color to the challenge against modern “Values” which I first found in Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.”

“Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”7 Individuality may be the goal, but as Keller observes with the Anglo-Saxon warrior imagery, identity forms in community. And communities shape which values can contribute to our identity. No one is free to be anything they want, especially when the government imposes secular views of sexuality on law and public education. Power convinces everyone they’re expressing their individual identity, while instead they’re all doing the same thing.8

Fourth, Christian community must disrupt the culture’s social categories.

These modern beliefs—that we must all be committed to equal rights and justice but that there are no God-given moral absolutes—undermine each other. Modern secular education teaches every child that they must be true to themselves, that they must identify their deepest desires and dreams and pursue them, not letting family, community, tradition, or religion stand in their way. Then it calls for justice, reconciliation, and benevolence, all of which are basic forms of self-denial, even as it encourages self-assertion. It teaches relativism and calls people to be ethical. It encourages self-seeking and calls people to be sacrificial.35

if you can’t enjoy a good feast, you are not ready for God’s future.

As public intellectuals, pastors are not commonly known for citing their sources. In fact they’re often explicitly discouraged in training from doing so, for fear of distracting the congregation with author and book names they won’t remember. Keller breaks that mold. From Tolkien to Taylor, Clowney to Conn, Keller shows his work, so we can carry on his project. Future generations will honor Keller better by reading his library than by quoting him. How ironic if the pastor who gathered from such varied tributaries became a solitary river flowing down through the years.

What a closing paragraph… while I don’t consider Tim Keller a formative influence of my own, his lived synthesis of these other writers / theologians / pastors certainly is.