Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

Billy said he was thinking hard about what it means to be righteous in Christ. He had thought being a Christian meant cleaning up his life and making himself righteous. But Tim pointed to 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Amazing story about Tim’s younger brother in this book. Absolutely teared up at this portion.

Dead is when you’re trying to earn your salvation or designing your own, Tim said. Dead is when you never weep with joy over what God has done for you. Dead is when God is never more than an abstraction, an idea. The gospel humbles and emboldens and melts us with understanding what Jesus has done on the cross. Dead is when we don’t know God as Father but only as boss or vague influence.

He wrote in Center Church that “the Christian gospel turns people away from both their selfishness and their self-righteousness to serve others in the way that Jesus gave himself for his enemies.”31

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.