In his new book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, Collin Hansen surveys the family members, friends, professors, pastors, and authors who shaped The Gospel Coalition’s cofounder. Get your copy of this fascinating deep dive into Keller’s life and influences.
Here are 20 quotes to whet your appetite.
Bruce Henderson remembers a decisive moment on his twentieth birthday, April 21, 1970, when he woke up to find Tim sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed, silently waiting for him. Bruce knew something was different, that something significant had changed in Tim. His wrestling was over. Tim had repented of his sin and believed in Jesus. He had put his heart’s faith and trust in Christ alone for salvation. . . . “During college the Bible came alive in a way that was hard to describe,” Keller remembered in his book Jesus the King. “The best way I can put it is that, 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.” (18)
Whether from [Ed] Clowney or [Dick] Merritt, Keller heard at Bucknell [University] the kind of approach to evangelical preaching that he would himself embody in future decades. No bells and whistles. Always present the basic gospel message—Christ is in charge of the world, and he is the way to God, because he alone can redeem us from our sins. (27–28)
Even before Kathy Kristy took the name Keller, she would become the most formative intellectual and spiritual influence on Tim Keller’s life. When you’re writing about Tim, you’re really writing about Tim and Kathy, a marriage between intellectual equals who met in seminary over shared commitment to ministry and love for literature, along with serious devotion to theology. (42)
It didn’t take long for Keller to realize he needed to adjust his preaching—to become more concrete, clear, and practical. [His small-town church in Hopewell, Virginia] became his first foray into contextualization. He realized he needed to listen and learn before he spoke, so that he could persuade. (109–10)
During his West Hopewell tenure, Keller picked up the Puritan paperback edition of The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter, in which he commends visiting every family in the church at least once each year. . . . Keller made it his own habit to pray through the church’s membership list systematically. Through role models in books and other pastors in Hopewell, he learned what it meant to be a pastor and not just a preacher. . . . Keller recalled his time in Hopewell as the most formative ministry years of his life. (114–15, 118)
Many have concluded that in Hopewell, Keller learned to “put the cookies on the bottom shelf.” Indeed, it would be neat and tidy to say that Hopewell’s blue-collar congregation forced Keller to develop his skill for distilling difficult and complicated concepts in ways that Christians and non-Christians alike can understand. If he would have jumped straight from seminary to a highly educated congregation, he might never have become a widely popular writer or preacher. He might never have produced the material that challenges motivated students and still edifies the rest. (121)
[Self-righteousness] is the cause, according to Keller, of spiritually stagnant churches. While Jesus attracted outsiders and offended insiders, churches today tend to do the opposite. The moralistic, self-righteous people know they need to be in church. But the broken and marginalized don’t feel welcome. (143)
Conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists of the early twentieth century saw Gotham as a modern Babylon, pulsating with temptations for the faithful. Keller wanted to shape a congregation that would stand apart from the city, from within the city, while loving the city—a congregation that could meet the city’s physical needs without losing focus on their spiritual plight. (156–57)
Sometimes what Christians identify as doctrinal downgrade is merely a different theological vision. (173)
Keller’s friends back in Philadelphia had been praying for Tim for months as he first searched for a different pastor for this calling [to Manhattan] and then slowly realized he would need to go. Finally, he came to the group and said, “I have to do this myself.” Kathy considers that decision “one of the most truly ‘manly’ things” her husband ever did. The move scared him. But he felt God’s call. He had no way of knowing the result would be a dynamic, growing megachurch. He just knew it was the next step of faith, even if the church were to end in failure. (192)
Redeemer received almost ninety thousand dollars from these Presbyterian women [Women in the Church of the PCA], about one-third of the total raised for the plant. But their support didn’t stop with this gift. Kathy wrote these women what she admits were “the whiniest, most self-pitying prayer letters anyone has ever written or received.” From Kathy’s perspective, these women were just so thankful they weren’t in her position, trying to raise three boys in the big, violent city! She even received small family collections of twelve dollars earmarked for her family to eat out at McDonald’s. She would never stop thanking God for these women. “They prayed up a storm,” Kathy Keller said. “It’s like we couldn’t make a bad decision in those early years. I’m convinced there was never a church plant, even going back to the apostle Paul and the first-century church, that had so many people, especially women, praying for it.” (193, emphasis added)
[At Redeemer] the Christian community itself would be the evangelistic program of the church. . . . “The real secret of fruitful and effective mission in the world is the quality of our community.” (197, 215)
Keller found that if he didn’t read broadly and deeply at the same time, his preaching grew stale and repetitive. (206)
Keller explained: “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. . . . I 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!” (214)
Kathy recommended that they pray together every night, no exceptions. Tim remembered that she told him: Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine—a pill every night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No—it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget. You would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray together to God, we’re not going to make it because of all we are facing. I’m certainly not. We have to pray. We can’t let it slip our minds. (228)
Before 2010, most of the people who came forward to talk to Keller after services were New Yorkers and members of the church. He spent an hour in evangelistic or pastoral conversation after each service. 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. (232)
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. And where do our Anglo-Saxon warrior and our modern Manhattan man get their grids? From their cultures, their communities, their heroic stories. They are actually not simply ‘choosing to be themselves’—they are filtering their feelings, jettisoning some and embracing others. They are choosing to be the selves their cultures tell them they may be. In the end, an identity based independently on your own inner feelings is impossible.” (241)
By acknowledging doubt [in his preaching], Keller cracked open the door for belief. (244)
Among his generation, no one did more than Keller to prepare evangelicals for the global, multicultural, urban future. He wouldn’t warrant an obituary in The New York Times if not for this central theme. The closest parallel is John Stott from the previous generation. And yet for the first half of his life, Keller showed almost no familiarity with global, multicultural, or urban ministry. He didn’t gain widespread recognition until relatively late in his career, during his fifties. Rising generations can do no better than to patiently build out their [tree] rings as they wait on the Lord. (265)
Keller’s originality comes in his synthesis, how he pulls the sources together for unexpected insights. Having one hero would be derivative; having one hundred heroes means you’ve drunk deeply by scouring the world for the purest wells. This God-given ability to integrate disparate sources and then share insights with others has been observed by just about anyone who has known Keller, going back to his college days. He’s the guide to the gurus. You get their best conclusions, with Keller’s unique twist. (265–66)