Tim Keller From the Margins

A brief appreciation of Timothy Keller, upon his death

Timothy Keller died this week. His influence on evangelical Christianity probably can’t be over-estimated. He was a major Christian writer and apologist, and his church, Redeemer Presbyterian in New Your City exerts a profound influence that extends well beyond Manhattan. His passing has been a time of deep reflection for me.

I had known for some time that he was sick; pancreatic cancer had brought the end in sight for him some time ago. Still, when I read that he died late last week, I felt a hollow sadness.

I am not the proper person to eulogize Keller, I know this. My experience with him and his ministry, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, is marginal at best. There will be outpourings from those who knew him and had their lives touched by him and you should read those as you find them.

Still, news of his passing led me to reflect on what a profound influence he had on my religious life (or spiritual life, if you rather). My experience with his ministry was no doubt life-altering, even as it came a distance, from the back of the room.

Let me provide a bit of context for my thoughts first, though.

During the last decade, the more conservative strains of American Christianity have faced up to some of the uglier elements of their legacies. There have been justifiable tsunamis crashing down on many figures and religious denominations, comeuppance for generations of shameful institutional practices and bigotries. I’m not someone to stand in the way of people or institutions bearing the consequences of their choices and actions. So when people like Mark Driscoll are exposed and finally made to take very public walks of shame, I’m not particularly bothered by the vitriol with which this justice is doled out.

Often however, with the regularity of clockwork, the zeitgeist that rises up to hold villains accountable, eventually mirrors the cruel zealotry of the old, overthrown bosses. One of the discourses that soured me on Twitter has to do with Timothy Keller, who because of his theological associations has frequently been reduced to a stock villain in this small culture war arena.

I get that Tim Keller was and instrumental figure in the Gospel Coalition, and I understand that organization has become one of those institutions that have enabled countless hideous men. But Tim Keller was not a hideous man and the smug snark that he (very graciously) absorbed by some of the more toxic members of the Exvangelical identity group was nauseating to me. And here is why:

Sure, Keller was never going to be a progressive Christian, sanctified and justified by the orthodoxies of liberal religious movements. But this does not make him Mark Driscoll. The lack of nuance in the discussions I witnessed in the Blue Bird Cage was one of the things that drove me to Substack.

Let me try and explain, from my own, admittedly limited, perspective.

I grew up in a certain backwater of Evangelical Land, and my religious experience was extremely fundamentalist. (This is no doubt the source of my revulsion to any forms of fundamentalism, conservative, liberal, or radical). I’ve written about this before, declaring my exhaustion with apocalyptic thinking. The black and white, reductive, paranoid, frankly ignorant expressions of Christianity that dominated my religious culture were sad and utterly destructive, perhaps even satanic.

Then, in the late 90’s an existential desperation washed over me. In a bizarre and confounding decision, without any precedent in my life, I made a radical decision to move to New York City. It was a good decision and the ensuing chaos that blew my life to shreds was cleansing and renewing.

I can tell you that a massive part of the salvation I experienced took place at Redeemer, where I listened to Timothy Keller preach each Sunday.

I did not join Redeemer (I was actually attached to another church at the time), but on Sunday evenings, I walked up Park Avenue, to the Upper East Side, and stepped into an auditorium at Hunter College. Like a nameless, lonely freshman in a first-year survey course, I normally sat in the balcony, alone. Instead of learning about General Psych, though, I was absorbing with quiet contemplation a completely alien religious culture unfold before my eyes.

The people I watched were intelligent, thoughtful, talented, engaged, and still somehow passionate for God, despite any Holiness moralism driving them to anger and depression. How was this possible? At the time, I could never socialize with such people; I was far too out of my depth and intimidated. The life I’d lived up to that point provided me with nothing to say in such a crowd. But, alone in the balcony, I sat and took it all in. This was the culture that Timothy Keller’s faith and ministry produced and it was anything but toxic and simple-minded.

Keller’s sermons were like nothing I’d ever heard. He was not worried about events in the news and their connections to books of prophecy. He was not overly concerned with a declining culture. Instead, he focused on the creative and renewing possibilities that the Gospel offered. And he walked me through that hope with intense, deep readings of the text. At times it felt like I’d signed up for a Hunter College literature course. Keller would reference Freud and Nietzsche and (of course) The Lord of the Rings — before the movies ever came out. For someone like me, a dabbler who often found himself immersed in pop culture, and who was just discovering a bigger world of ideas, the so-called “Life of the Mind,” Keller’s sermons were a revelation. Even long after I’d left New York and moved back to Ohio, I subscribed to Keller’s Redeemer sermons. Each week, I looked forward to a new cassette tape of the sermon (usually about 2 weeks behind). I was under his tutelage from an even greater distance.

This is the source of my frustration with Exvangelical dismissals of Keller’s work, based only on his commitment to theologically conservative forms of Protestantism. These people simply don’t understand how Keller almost single-handedly built the bridge for my escape from the toxic forms of Christianity that have done so much damage to the world. They’re lashing out at an ally, as such movements so often do.

Tim Keller’s death has been a profound moment of reflection for me. As I struggle to express my gratitude for the kind of ministry he built, the kind of sermons he preached, I shudder to think of where I would be, spiritually speaking, without my experience with him from the back of the room. This man, who I never spoke to, is almost single-handedly responsible for making Christianity remain plausible for me at the most uncertain time in my life. To smugly dismiss him and the work he did is ignorant and, frankly, as simple-minded as anything the Exvangelicals are revolting against.

As I finish, I will say that every so often, I did venture out of the shadows at Redeemer. Each week after the sermon, Keller would invite anyone who had questions to gather in the back of the Hunter College auditorium, where he would meet them for an impromptu Q&A. I joined these gatherings a handful of times, sitting with perhaps twenty people instead of 500, though still nervously silent in the back. The patience and grace and seriousness with Tim Keller approached these sessions never failed to impress me. Sometimes the questions were hostile. Often they were naive. But he treated then all as sincere.

I still consider myself a person of the margins in life. I don’t generally find utterly comfortable spaces to inhabit, physically or ideologically or spiritually. Timothy Keller was the first person to make me feel like this was alright.

I have, over time, developed the ability to engage the people I find in the communities I inhabit (however liminally), and I generally feel at home in the world. But this has been a long, slow journey, one that began in the balcony at Hunter College in 1998. I don’t believe any single person played a bigger role in my spiritual and social growth than Tim Keller, who nourished me in the margins, empowering me to eventually flourish in the world of faith. I am sad he’s gone, but so very grateful for his life and his ministry.

I would love to hear about your experiences with Keller and his ministry in the comments below: