Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

That was the day she looked at us, and she said something like, “If you want to invite me into your house, and you say, ‘Come in, Barbara. Stay out, Boyd,’ I wouldn’t know what to do because I’m Barbara Boyd. In fact, I couldn’t even say, ‘This half is Barbara and this half is Boyd, so I’ll just bring this half in,’ because I’m all Barbara and I’m all Boyd. I’m both,

so you either get me all or you get neither of me.” Then she turned around and said, “If you say, ‘I would like the loving Jesus. I would like the helping Jesus. I would like the Jesus I can ask to help me through the hard times, but I don’t want the holy Jesus. I don’t want the powerful Jesus. I don’t want the Jesus who is great,’ you get no Jesus at all.” She said, “Think about this for a minute.” (Some of you, if you’ve been around, you’re going to say, “Gosh, this is where he got these things from.” It has echoed ever since.)

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.”

“You ought to be collegial and open-minded to other Christians who differ on the secondary issues.

Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices by the seventeenth-century Puritan Thomas Brooks.

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

Preaching can, even should, lead Christians to wonder.

“The gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take their cues.”

Calling is different from giftedness or even desire.”

Only when we can see God as far surpassing us in goodness and wisdom, when we behold him in glory, can we obey what we don’t necessarily comprehend in his commands.10

The job of the apologist, then, is to show nonbelievers how Christianity explains what they know in their hearts but deny with their lips.

A good and faithful sermon will help Christians see the excellency of Jesus and not merely his usefulness. We need more than understanding, more than a notion of God; we need a sense of pleasure and delight in him.

“To the degree that people knew he cared, to that degree and that degree only, were they interested in what he had to say from the pulpit,” Laurie Howell said.

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. .

Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.

we only ever understand doctrine on our knees before God. In prayer we can praise what we don’t prefer.

frontline prayer confesses sin, seeks humility, pursues the lost, and yearns to know God face-to-face, to encounter his glory.14

Keller had long argued that the gospel humbles everyone to see themselves as part of the problem.

According to Kierkegaard, just about everyone looks for happiness either through duty or desire.

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

“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.”62

It’s almost like if you cut a person—a good minister, for example—like a tree, there should be a lot of rings. That gives that minister his own distinctive voice and perhaps really helps him listen to what God is calling him to be as a minister. Whereas if you only have one or two individuals or even kinds of sources, you really become almost a clone.2

We can’t make a heaven out of this earth because it’s going to be taken away from us. . . . When you actually make heaven heaven, the joys of earth are more poignant than they used to be. That’s what’s so strange. We enjoy our day more than we ever did.

Charles E. Cotherman, To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), 14.

Timothy Keller, foreword to Alec Motyer, A Christian’s Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament: One Book, One God, One Story (Ross-Shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2015), xi–xii. 10.