Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

by Collin Hansen

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.”

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.

Even when Christians know in their heads that God accepts them by faith through the grace of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, they don’t always live that way. Day to day, they believe that God loves them because they obey his law. They draw “their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience.”6 That’s why we need revivals, so that we can be weaned off our natural-born

proclivity to works-righteousness and live in light of the gospel of grace.7

when Christians don’t know God accepts them on Jesus’ behalf, they become insecure. “Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.”

Logic, when fired with captivating illustrations, changes hearts.

“Unless we understand the gospel, we are always obeying God for our sake and not for his.”14

Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgement that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind.25

The whole structure of the history of salvation, Clowney told his students, is God working the impossible.

The difference between a lecture and a sermon, Keller explained, is the instinct to see everything pointing to Christ, who produces praise.

reading the Bible is like watching The Sixth Sense. The ending of the film sends you back to look at everything afresh, seeing with different eyes as you begin again.

“The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works.”

You’re not a Christian because you obey the will of God, Keller explained. You’re a Christian because you obey the will of God for the right reasons. You love God because he loved you first.

“It’s your goodness that makes you miserable,” Keller said. “It’s your goodness that’s at the heart of all the problems. It’s your self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is the cause of racism. It’s the cause of classism. It’s

the cause of so much of the family breakdown.”32

The primary hindrance to contextualization is our own blind spots. We can’t see our own culture with sufficient perspective on its strengths and weaknesses.

It’s the thing God has given them to say to people, and that is that you have to think of yourself as a dearly loved child of God or you’re really not able to live the Christian life at all. Unless you are governed by the idea that you are a dearly loved child, you can’t live. You were built for family love. You were built for it. You were built to have a loving father, a loving parent. You were built for it, and until you see that’s true of you, you can’t live a life of imitation of God.51

“Cheer up! You’re a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.”

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

Inspired by Lints, Keller explains theological vision as the “middle-ware” between the “hardware” of confessional theology and “software” of ministry programs. Churches tend to know their theology and defend their programs. But they can’t connect the two in a way that suits their place and time.

“Evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize.”

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.

continually observe that ministry amplifies people’s spiritual character. It makes them far

better or far worse Christians than they would have been otherwise, but it will not leave anyone where he was!58

Keller introduced Taylor’s description of the cross-pressures between belief and doubt.12 Some may pose as never doubting God’s existence. Others may pose as never doubting God’s nonexistence. But the rest of us fall somewhere in the middle, either believing in God but doubting from time to time, or doubting God but believing from time to time.

Through Taylor’s concept of cross-pressures, Keller sought to level the playing field between doubters and believers. By acknowledging doubt, Keller cracked open the door for belief: The premise is that since none of us can prove or disprove our deepest beliefs, your deepest moral convictions about right and wrong, your deepest convictions about what people should be doing with their lives, belief whether there’s a God or whether there’s no God. . . . You can’t prove God. You can’t totally disprove God. That means all of us have beliefs we can’t prove, and yet you can’t live without those beliefs.13

Forming identity under the terms of expressive individualism is crushing.15

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Civilization. Newbigin argued for a missionary encounter with Western culture, which had become post-Christian. Look no further for evidence of this shift than a Christian seminary rejecting a Christian pastor because he holds to Christian beliefs.

For Newbigin, the post-Christian West is the most resistant, challenging missionary frontier of all time.

James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: “defensive against” (religious right), “relevant to” (mainline), and “purity from” (Amish). Hunter proposed “faithful presence within” as a better alternative, which Keller adopted as his own perspective in Center Church.20

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

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.

“People who are passionate for justice often become self-righteous and cruel when they confront persons whom they perceive as being oppressors,” Keller wrote in Making Sense of God.29 Only the gospel can unite tolerance and justice. “The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a non-oppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside of ourselves as the way to escape relativism and selfish individualism, yet one that cannot be used to oppress others.”

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

If Christians hope to evangelize their neighbors, they can’t ignore or denounce them. They must show how the gospel changes everything.

meaning in life that suffering can’t take away, but can even deepen; • a satisfaction that isn’t based on circumstances; • a freedom that doesn’t reduce community and relationships to thin transactions; • an identity that isn’t fragile or based on our performance or the exclusion of others; • a way both to deal with guilt and to forgive others without residual bitterness or shame; • a basis for seeking justice that does not turn us into oppressors ourselves; • a way to face not only the future, but death itself with poise and peace; and • an explanation for the senses of transcendent beauty and love we often experience.

Friedrich Nietzsche admitted in the early twentieth century that without Christianity, equal rights and human dignity find no basis. We can assert our rights and claim them for others, such as the poor, but society can’t agree on any reason why. Keller argues:

Keller argued that you can only debate philosophy and ethics without reference to God when you’re safe from real darkness.36

“If the church does not identify with the marginalized, it will itself be marginalized.”

we’re saved by our good works, Tim Keller wrote in Making Sense of God, then the stronger and more privileged could boast in their accomplishment. Salvation by grace alone, however, favors the overlooked. Jesus, after all, didn’t come to earth wealthy and powerful, but poor, born to a woman not yet married.

If the gospel changes you, you will never see anybody else, anywhere else, as being the enemy, the real problem with the world. It makes you more able to cooperate with people, more able to make common cause with people, therefore, ultimately more pragmatic and more willing to compromise, more willing to do things with people. . . . Only self-righteousness makes you look at other people, saying, “The people over there are the bad guys. They’re the real problem here.”43

Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

“there is no way you will be able to grow spiritually apart from a deep involvement in a community of other believers. You can’t live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.”1

From the inner ring of the gospel in his college conversion, Keller branched out for insight wherever he could find it.

Keller opted for synthesis over antithesis. When he added rings, he didn’t subtract others.

“I’m not fighting my cancer; I’m fighting my sin.”

The other night we said, ‘We really try to turn this world into heaven.’ . . . And as a result of all that, we were always unhappy because you can’t stay in England. You have to come home. You can’t stay in South Carolina. . . . Meanwhile I was never enjoying my day because I was always thinking about tomorrow and all the stuff I have to get done and how I’m behind. . . . 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.