In his message at TGC Netherlands 2023, James Eglinton delves into Tim Keller’s evolving relationship with neo-Calvinism. He recommends Center Church as the primary source for understanding Keller’s mature theological voice and the biblical basis for his ministry.
Eglinton discusses the evolution of Keller’s thinking, showcasing a shift from a distant association with neo-Calvinism to Keller explicitly identifying as a neo-Calvinist in later years. A careful examination of both explicit and implicit engagements with neo-Calvinist thought in Center Church is essential to understanding Keller’s theological journey.
Transcript
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James Eglinton: I was asked to speak about Tim Keller’s relationship to Neo Calvinism. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Neo Calvinism it’s maybe a strange thing to present and the Netherlands because it comes from here. But for some people, maybe it’s new. Neo Calvinism is a branch of the reformed tradition that began here 100 years ago or so and the Netherlands through theologians like Musa namond up and Holland’s outspoken arbiter hum koper, and head of Mumbai Vic, an English we call them Abraham Kuyper and Herman Babic. And there’s was a theological tradition that tried to articulate a holistic vision of the historic Reformed faith in their own late modern Western culture. So what was Tim’s relationship to that tradition? 11 years ago, he published the book, Central Church, Marco just mentioned it and Stefan mentioned that in his talk as well. Central Church is a book that provided Tim’s vision of a gospel movement in cities. And it has been very influential, and many lands and cities since its publication. It was published in Dutch 2014. You can buy it at the back there send from kerucut Eva Haley mitten, and you stopped. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth reading in this book, and this is a really important thing to understand for the rest of what I’m going to say. So retain this. In this book, he spelled out how the doctrinal foundation of a church gives rise to a particular theological vision, which is a set of intuitions, sensibilities that guide how a church exists in its cultural surrounds. And that theological vision is then something that takes us to a third thing, which is expression of ministry. So these three things are really important for the book, doctrinal Foundation, theological vision, ministry expression. Now, thanks to Collins new book on Tim and his spiritual and intellectual formation, we now have a much better impression of how Tim’s thought developed across his lifetime. The young students at Bucknell University reading, existentialist philosophers and whatever Christian books he could find, wasn’t the same thinker who published the reason for God when he was 57 or 58. Tim’s thought developed. And if you want to understand the range of his development, and try to find the texts where we can identify something like a mature expression of Tim’s theology, his development in a stable form, Center Church is probably as good a place to look as any. In 2013, not long after Central Church was released. I had an email conversation with Tim, where I asked him where I should look to find an expression of his theology like that a stable, mature expression, and theology in his own voice as well. The thing that I asked him about was something that we’ve heard about from a few speakers that Tim synthesized lots of different figures and popularized the people he was reading, but ask them, Where can I go to hear Tim Keller’s own theological voice? And he said, I should read Center Church. And in his email, he said, This is the only place that I lay out an extensive biblical and theological basis for my ministry. So initially, at least Central Church seems like a good anchor point and talking about Tim’s relationship to Neo Calvinism. Now, if you were to use Central Church like that, this is maybe the kind of answer you would sketch to the question, what was Tim’s relationship to Neo Calvinism? The this this kind of answer, and Center Church, the labels, Neo Calvinist, and the related word chi Perian crop up explicitly at one point in the book. And that is when Tim discusses theologies of Christ and culture. This is the part of the book where he deals with cultural engagement. But when he discusses Neo Calvinism, and K Perian ism there, and models of Christ and culture, he does so in quite a distant way. He holds them at arm’s length and talks about them but not as things that he identifies himself with and a strong explicit way. Now, when and this is why I mentioned that it’s really important to remember that doctrinal foundation theological vision ministry expression structure, okay, this pattern of thought in the book, when he moves from doctrinal Foundation, to theological vision to ministry expression in the whole sweep of the book, the labels, Neo Calvinists, and que Perian make a cameo appearance, they enter the stage for one moment in the center church, but they seem to leave the stage quite quickly. And that’s because in parts, he needed to cover those words, in order to give a comprehensive account of the Christ and culture paradigms. So there he is writing about transformational ism as one of these paradigms for how we relate Christ and culture. And his summary of the transformational lists view of Christ and culture needed to refer to the American reception of Kuyper. But in Central Church, he doesn’t identify himself explicitly as Hyperion, or as Neo Calvinist. So those terms are part of a much bigger discussion, where he argues that all of the models are right. And all of the models are wrong. So that’s the bigger statement that also includes Neo Calvinism and cap Arianism. He could glean insights from that Neo Calvinism. But at the surface level, at least, when we think of the kind of picture that Tim painted in center, church, Neo Calvinist and K period are in one corner of the painting. But the frame around the picture itself isn’t labeled Neo Calvinist, and the painter, the paintbrush, don’t seem to be labeled Neo Calvinist either. Now, if we take that viewpoint from Tim Keller in 2012, from Center Church, that perspective on Neo Calvinism might seem surprising. If you have also followed things Tim said and did and wrote after Center Church up to up to this year. It might make you wonder, actually, if Center Church really is reliable as a stable reflection of his mature theology, because he goes on to do a lot to promote Neo Calvinism in the years after Central Church. If you follow, for example, Tim’s the things Tim would tweet about to his huge global audience between 2014 and 2019. He only tweeted six times about either Herman bavinck, or his nephew, the missiologist Johann Hermann diving, but particularly from 2020 onwards, the volume of his tweets about Neo Calvinism the banks really increases exponentially. That’s a dramatic change. And over the last couple of years, he did more than maybe anyone else in the world to champion Neo Calvinism and 2020. He calls Herman bavinck, and I quote him here, the greatest reformed theologian of the 20th century. And he wrote that when it comes to theologians, that contemporary church leaders should be reading, I don’t know of a more important one than Herman Babic. He said that in 2020, and 2022, Tim was a guest on Grace and common, which is a podcast on Neo Calvinism, that I co host with muddiness, the young pastor in the Ulster Parcak in Amsterdam. So an eight cylinder, Corey Brock, an American theologian, whose pastor in Edinburgh, and grace attend to an Indonesian theologian who’s a theology professor in the United States lecker internasional. So that’s the unique selling point of our podcasts as you’ll hear people talking about Neo Calvinism from a range of different places in the world. And on our podcasts, we interviewed him on Neo Calvinism on his relationship to it. He identified himself in these words, that he is, I quote him, a NEO Calvinist first and as a close second, a revivalist piety first evangelist, and thirdly, a doctrinal list. That’s Tim Keller, 2022 and 2023. His final article for gospel and life was a creative missiological application of things that he had read an Abraham Cuypers Book Pro reggae. And then later that year, shortly before his passing his final publication, was a foreword to the first English translation of Jay H. Banks book persona, Kate unveiled his housing, personality and worldview
It’s worth noting that, as far as I’m aware, his first posthumous publication will be a chapter on new Calvinism and pastoral ministry and the t&t Clark Handbook of Neo Calvinism, edited by Corey Brock and Gracie tonto. And in that chapter he reflects on the importance of Neo Calvinism to his ministry at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, precisely the ministry that he describes in Center Church. And that’s where he describes his primary theological identity in that ministry as Neo Calvinist. So I presented you with a riddle. How do we move from the Center Church era, Tim Keller, in 2012, who used the words Neo Calvinist and que Perian with some distance. How do we move from that to the eventual Tim Keller who champions Neo Calvinism to a global audience and says that his ministry at Redeemer, as described in Central Church was first and foremost a NEO Calvinist ministry. Does the move from Central Church to Neo Calvinist first represent a dramatic shifts in Tim’s thinking in this final decade, or should we interpret that difference in some other way? For example, was he already following a NEO Calvinistic trajectory when he wrote Center Church, but that only reached full bloom later in his life? These are important questions that also emerged from Colin Hansen’s book on Tim’s spiritual and intellectual formation. Hanson writes about how a young student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, Tim Keller was taught by Roger Nichol, a French Swiss Reformed Baptist, who got him to read having spoke or reasonable faith in Dutch it’s Magnolia day, and all of Louis Berkhof systematic theology which is very heavily indebted to do by having had a familiar to dogmatic at Gordon Conwell, the young Tim Keller was exposed to what Hanson calls continental Neo Calvinism. And that turned to him as a as a young theology student away from Anglo style, common sense realism. And it grounded him in a presuppositional way of approaching questions of faith and unbelief, culture, apologetics, evangelism, and worldview. Hanson also argues that the student here at Tim Keller was also critical of some defects that he saw in Neo Calvinism that it wasn’t focused enough on the church and also that it wasn’t evangelistic enough. But after that, in Collins book, Neo Calvinism, explicit Neo Calvinism drops out of the narrative until we move on to Tim’s later years when it comes back explicitly, with a bang in the things that champion that Tim champions in particular, the banks. In this talk, then I’m asking about what happened between these two things between this brief introduction to continental Neo Calvinism at Gordon Conwell as a student, and then Tim’s much later identification of himself as a NEO Calvinist. And the way that I want to do that is actually by focusing on Center Church as a middle point. Now that might seem like a puzzling move, because I introduced Center Church as a book where he discussed the term Neo Calvinist and K Perian. But he holds them at arm’s length, they’re distant terms. But I think that a close careful reading of Center Church helps us make some sense of Tim’s relationship to Neo Calvinism before and after Center Church, to see that we need to pay attention to two things. One is the kind of Neo Calvinism and que Perian theology that Tim presented explicitly and Center Church. And the other thing is the kind of theology that permeates Center Church from cover to cover, which I will argue is implicitly deeply influenced by Neo Calvinism. Okay, so I’m really asking you to think about a difference between explicit Neo Calvinism, implicit Neo Calvinism in Central Church. And I want to make a case that Center Church itself as a book that handles two kinds of Neo Calvinists thought, and that does so in two quite different ways than explicitly at one point that deals with an American branch of the Neo Calvinist tradition that explicitly called itself K Perian. And Neo Calvinist, but also implicitly, many of the books repeated source of inspiration, not all of them, but many of them are theologically inexplicable, apart from the Calvinism so in Central Church, you have a couple of duction Neo Calvinists, Herman bavinck, and Gerhard is vos. And they’re only mentioned briefly in Central Church, especially if you compare them to the attention, for example that Tim gave to Jonathan Edwards. You could compare him. But the reality is that without Herman bavinck We have no Gearhart is false. Without your heart is false. We have no merit of claim, or Harvey calm, or at clonee. And without claim Cloney and con, we have no Tim Keller, in terms of degrees of separation to go from Tim Keller to Herman Bhavin. We’re only talking about four degrees and actually in history quite a short space of time. Nowadays, when we try to imagine the reception of Neo Calvinist Calvinism outside the Netherlands, often we still think that Neo Calvinism only really began to impact the the non Dutch world when banks that are familiar to dogmatic became reformed dogmatics. And but from 2003 to 2008. And that’s when Neo Calvinism crossed the North Sea and the Atlantic. But we think far less, I think, anyway, about how Neo Calvinism actually followed its own path, particularly in North America throughout the 20th century, mostly through the influence of your hardest boss, who is now probably almost entirely unknown to to Dutch Christians today.
George Herrick has written about him as the American bank, and that’s a really helpful way to frame who he was and what he was like. In our day, when we imagined lists of important 20th century Neo Calvinists theologians, instinctively I think a lot of us are looking for duction names. And that tendency means that we overlook, particularly among the hardest bosses, 20th century American disciples, we overlooked names like Cloney, and Con and claim theologians whose deep theological intuitions were profoundly Neo Calvinistic. But if we learn to look for American theologians in that century, who were Neo Calvinistic in nature, if not in name, Central Church starts to read like a very different book. So I want you to, I want to ask you to re imagine, to revisit Center Church through that lens. And think about these two kinds of American Neo Calvinism. So one implicit another explicit. Now, as I said before, when Tim dealt explicitly with Neo Calvinism, in Center Church, it was when he was describing the transformation of this model of Christ and culture. So there he describes a tradition that I quote him here engages with culture largely through an emphasis on Christians pursuing their vocations from a Christian worldview, and thereby changing culture, and quote, where did the transformation list model of Christ and culture come from? Tim writes this, this model is heavily indebted to the work and thought of the Dutch theologian, and political leader Abraham Piper. At that point, Tim identifies two important insights and Cuypers thoughts. That then shaped transformation realism, Insight number one, Christians should be intentionally Christian in all that we do our faith as Catholic faith for all of life, and sight number two. By being intentionally Christian and all of life, Christians have a transformative impact on their cultures. And these for Tim, are the most basic building blocks for transformation realism Simpliciter. From then on, Tim moves to describing the reception of capers basic insights here in the Netherlands, across the Atlantic in North America. The underlying question is, how did Americans work with those basic building blocks, however, Cuypers insights in culture rated in North America, and so he guides the reader through different branches of the American reception of caper. This includes figures like Francis Schaeffer, and Chuck Colson, and their influence on the American religious rights and popularizing the notion of worldview amongst conservative American Christians. In Tim’s analysis, American Cape Arianism gravitated towards conservative political philosophy. He then describes Christian reconstructionism and theonomy as this as a distinctive branch of the American reception of Kuyper, but then he moves to describe a very different group, a group that tymberlee Abels the Neo Calvinists. Now, in 2012. He was not using Neo Calvinist and K Perian. as synonyms, they were not interchangeable for him, who then were the Neo Calvinists, and this is Tim describing Americans in his own lifetime. Whereas the K perience gravitated towards socially conservative political ideals. Tim wrote the following as an extended description of the Neo Calvinists. The new Calvinists are centered left in their politics, seeing a progressive tax structure, strong labor unions, and more centralized economies as appropriate expressions of the biblical principles of justice, the Neo Calvinist speak of principle pluralism, the belief that Christians and government should seek principles of justice that can be recognized as such by non believers because of natural revelation or common grace. And yet these principles clearly aligned with biblical principles as well. Times quote on the Neo Calvinists. At this point, the main difference that he presented between K Perian and Neo Calvinist seems to reflect the reception of Cuypers basic ideas, Cuypers theological foundation, or doctrinal Foundation, on the American rights criterion, and on the American Left Neo Calvinist. Earlier on in the chapter, for example, Tim identified the progressive Neo Calvinists, as people who were bemused by how caper their intellectual hero had now become the basis for much of the Christian right in the United States. Now, at this point, Tim was being the clear headed analysts and Colin describes them like this really well, in the, in the book that Tim was was able to soar above the things he described and talk about them with this kind of distance. Tim had the ability to present a detailed, large picture, but where Tim is very much in control as the painter and he’s not so much part of the painting. And at that point and Center Church, he’s describing Hyperion and Neo Calvinist in that way, he’s not trying to paint his own theological identity. Now, if you think about his analysis of the the American receptions of basic ideas from Kuyper, I’m thinking about it within this the structure of Central Church, okay, which asks you to remember from doctrinal foundation to theological vision to ministry expression, when we think about that structure, and then use that to look at what he writes about American, the American reception of Kuyper, we can see that Tim was sympathetic to Cuypers on doctrinal foundation. Okay, so there’s this affirmation there of the need to be Christian and all of life and the effect of being Christian and all of life on culture around us. And then you can see that these core doctrines foundational doctrines filter through into an Americanized theological vision of those ideas based on those ideas. And that’s transformational. This theological vision then leads to different American expressions of that theological vision. I don’t think that I’m reading this three part structure on to what he writes at this point and Senator church, I think that clearly he identifies different American expressions of capers legacy, you see this and how he writes about the difference between Christian reconstructionists and the people that Tim labels, progressive Neo Calvinists, those are very different, and expressions that begin with the same idea. He also identified what he called strategies of engagement amongst these American inheritors of caper and the strategy engagement, I think, is what he means by theological vision. And the difference between K Perian and Neo Calvinist theological visions or strategies of engagement here for Tim, is that the, on the right, the American criterions want to transform culture by taking control of its political structure. So you hold the shape of society to make it Christianized. So you Christianize it almost from the outside by controlling its structure. Whereas the American Neo Calvinists have a different vision of how to transform culture, which is that you grow educated Christians holistically educated Christians within the culture, so you change it from the inside their Christian education. So we can see direct equivalence to ministry expression and theological vision. And then as he’s moving through all of this, he also starts to describe theological difference between the Neo Calvinists and the K perience. This is doctrinal foundation He identifies that the two have different doctrinal foundations. So he writes this. One of the main differences between the Neo Calvinists and the religious rites has to do with Neo Calvinists belief that Christians do not rely on the Bible alone when seeking guidance regarding business, art and vocation. They teach that we can discern many of God’s intentions for our life in the world by looking at creation, a general revelation. In other words, while Neo Calvinists believe there is a distinctively Christian way to carry out our cultural activity. They believe non Christians can intuitively discern much of how God wants humans to live in culture. And then to Matt’s a statement of approval for the Neo Calvinist doctrinal Foundation. He writes, I believe this view helps Neo Calvinists make common cause with non believers, and adopt a far less combative stance in the public sphere. Now, in Central Church, Tim wrote about American criterion and American Neo Calvinist seemingly at a distance. And as I said, that more distance handling is part of a big argument that there is a grain of truth in all of the Christ on culture paradigms, and the sense they’re all right, and they’re all wrong. In that bigger picture, Tim was trying to synthesize these different paradigms for Christ and culture into a holistic unit. For which reason he does not closely identify himself with any of them, and that also includes this hyper inspired transformational ism.
Now, apart from that handling of distinctly American receptions of caper Center Church, mentions to first generation Dutch Neo Calvinists very briefly mentioned their names already, Herman Babic is mentioned twice for the idea that grace restores nature. And Gerhardt is Voss as discussed at one point for his view that the kingdom of God primarily operates in the church and that it does not coerce the culture around it. But Bhavin can vos make these brief cameo appearances also under the the umbrella of transformational ism, Tim’s cited them approvingly on those particular insights. So these fit under the doctrinal foundation idea, he approves their doctrinal foundations and Babington vos. But he does that without without jumping on to the American ship that sails under the Neo Calvinist flag. Tim did not do that in Central Church. But if you understand how his thought works in Center Church, the fact that he didn’t fly under the American new Calvinist flag, or the American Korean flag is not surprising. He was able to find common ground with Cuypers basic building blocks, the doctrinal foundation and also with Bhavin, converse on doctrinal Foundation. He did not share the theological vision of some of Cuypers American inheritors theonomy lists an obvious example, but he did appreciate the ministry expression of some of capers, inheritors in America, but that’s the Neo Calvinists, not the CO perience. In that the Neo Calvinists to want to inhabit culture, persuasively, non competitively, non coercively. So, we’re starting to think about doctrinal Foundation, theological vision ministry expression, we already have in Center Church, to have these three things being approved by Tim and the doctrinal foundation and at least one kind of American Neo Calvinist ministry expression, all that’s lacking in Central Church is approval, or sympathy with theological vision. In the middle of you remember, the theological vision he identified in Central Church was criterions want to control the society politically, Neo Calvinists want to transform the society by through Christian education, but we can update Center Church with with the renewal of the Christian mind project that Tim developed after where he’s very much expressing this kind of Neo Calvinist theological vision for how you transform the culture. So if you judge, judge it by these three key ideas and Center Church, although Tim didn’t call himself a NEO Calvinist in that book, and although he handled those who did identify themselves as American Neo Calvinists with a careful kind of distance, it is not the case that he rejected it. At the very least, the sort of American caper reception that he liked, was a kindred spirits to the project that he developed in Center Church. We can say at least that much about his relationship towards Americans who were explicitly working with a Dutch Neo Calvinists legacy. But then we have to ask a different question not about those who are explicitly Neo Calvinist, but those who are implicitly so how did or what about the American theologians who didn’t use Those labels explicitly but whose work was also and who thought was also an American reception of Dutch ideas. And Center Church. The most important theologian in shaping Tim’s view of the gospel, understood contextually was Harvey comm. The most important theologian and shaping his view of biblical theology applied to the ministry of the church was at cloning. And cloning was also inestimable important in teaching him how to preach Christ from all of Scripture. Where did cotton and Cloney get their ideas? They were both theological disciples of your hardest boss, a Dutch Neo Calvinist who moved to America as a teenager. I mentioned already that George haring calls vos the American bavinck The vos and Bhavin families had extremely close connections both rooted in the upscaling act in feeding Delta. Vos himself was a close friend of Herman bavinck vos his career in the United States was spent first teaching in Grand Rapids very much in Dutch America, Dutch speaking Dutch America at that point where he was quite isolated from English speaking Presbyterian America, and then Voss moved to Princeton seminary, where he brought this Dutch Reformed approach to how to read Christ, hate to see Christ in all of Scripture, where he brought that to an English speaking American Presbyterian audience. Now, what’s often forgotten about vos is that his deeply Neo Calvinistic approach to biblical hermeneutics was part of a bigger theological package. In Dutch America, vos tot dogmatics, vos even wrote his own reformed dogmatics. Also, unsurprisingly, a very Neo Calvinistic work and his dogmatics and his biblical theology were interconnected. I have a PhD student in Edinburgh, a Chinese Malaysian New Zealander. This is a hybrid the Neo Calvinism has spread who’s just about to defend a PhD thesis that shows us just how Neo Calvinistic vos really was. So vos took that near Calvinists package into a Presbyterian setting, and had a major impact in reaching Presbyterian students. But what he reached them with was near Calvinist theology, as American disciples might not have worn that label explicitly, but implicitly, how they thought about scripture, culture, theology, philosophy, apologetics ministry, all of those things were inexplicable without the Neo Calvinism of their Dutch mentor. And the point I’m trying to make is that in Central Church, the explicit engagement with two streams of American caper reception is not the whole story of the books interaction with Neo Calvinism, at one level, offers that distanced perspective on those American developments, but at another level throughout the book assumes a different Neo Calvinist perspective, inherited from Cloney and Con and also Meredith Klein, who inherited it from Voss, who developed it with Herman bavinck And Abraham Kuyper. So in that regard on some of the most important theological foundations Center Church is a profoundly implicitly Neo Calvinistic book, but it’s a different stream of Neo Calvinism to the American forms that Tim dealt with explicitly. So how does that help us answer the big question on how we should move from the early Tim Keller reading Magnolia day at seminary to the mature Tim Keller, who promoted Neo Calvinism so enthusiastically? What does Neo Calvinism have to do with these many years in between? When Tim came on Grace and common, we asked him that question. And when we asked him, he started to talk about another one of his Gordon Conwell professors, another, maybe we could call him an implicit Neo Calvinist whose works feature at various points in Center Church, and that was the Old Testament scholar Meredith Klein. Meredith Klein made Tim as a student may Tim read everything that vos published in English or that had been translated into English. And Tim said, in effect, that while there were other places in America, where Christians labeled themselves Neo Calvinist, and nobody would have called Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and Neo Calvinist Seminary. He said that Gordon Conwell gave him what he called a different door into Neo Calvinism, because of the emphasis there on reading the Calvinist sources, and when we view him in that way, his seminary education grounded him in a particular form of Neo Calvinism, without telling him explicitly that those sources all happen to be part of a tradition. And actually when he started to tell us about this, he then took us back to before Gordon Conwell when he was a student at Bucknell University, and he read a book by a Dutchman, Hans I broke Macker the title of the book escapes me is it’s the death of art and modern culture. You know, the book, I mean, some? Yes, thank you. So he read this book by this new Calvinist art historian, which blew his young mind, because of the way that it presented Christianity as holistic as a faith for all of life, as a faith that didn’t just show you how to know that you’re right with God, but actually your theology was relevant to everything, how you produce art, how you think about how you do your job. And this intuition about the catholicity of the faith was something that captured him even before he’d gone to seminary. And that’s, so there was even some kind of four quarter porch to this different door into Neo Calvinism that reached him before he’d ever gone to seminary, but he didn’t know that that’s what the tradition was. But he but he was influenced by it even back then. So I think that the big change between the Tim Keller of Center Church, and the Tim Keller, who later said that he was, quote, first a NEO Calvinist, that’s absolutely not the difference between not Neo Calvinist and Neo Calvinist. In my view, it’s the difference between implicit Neo Calvinist and explicit Neo Calvinist. And of course, when Tim eventually called himself first the Neo Calvinist that remained Neo Calvinism on his own terms, he still saw himself as much closer to Babic than to Kuyper.
And he spoke about that maybe in terms of temperaments, but there was something some kind of intuitions that he felt he was closer to having on than to caper, and he still saw himself as more ecclesiological and more evangelistic than other American strands of explicit Neo Calvinism. But I think, a huge factor in the last couple of decades of his life. And his theological development was and some of the other speakers have already mentioned this. It was the availability of English translations of Neo Calvinists texts by Herman bavinck, JH bavinck. Abraham Kuyper, which helped him helps him realize that the tradition that he was operating within was done was downstream from these sources that were now available to him. And then he realized that he can drink directly from the source. And when he did that, he find something that could hold together the commitments that he had maintained for, for many years before that, commitments to being a revivalist, and a pious and an evangelist, and the doctrinal list. So the self identification of the end of as a NEO Calvinist first wasn’t a rejection of those things, either. But it was the through his engagement with Neo Calvinist sources directly. He thought that this tradition actually held those things together. So in that regard, I say this to close this paper, this lecture has been on Tim’s relationship to American Neo Calvinism. In that context, maybe his significance to American Neo Calvinism is that through him, this long stream of holistic, implicit American Neo Calvinism has actually become explicit Neo Calvinism of its own sort. But I wonder if maybe here in almeyda, and 2023, there’s another significance of Tim Keller as an American Neo Calvinist, which is that we have a room full of Dutch Christians who resonate so strongly with Tim Keller. But the thing that Tim Keller resonated with was actually your own tradition, your own theologians, your own sources. So maybe it’s not just the case of rethinking Center Church, but doing that maybe makes Dutch Christians rethink Dutch, their own heritage. And I can if I can close with one idea from Tim, that I think is really resonant here. One of the things that Tim emphasized and and preaching Christ to culture is finding, finding sources, culturally respected sources, culturally important sources within that culture, not always importing sometimes that’s really important to do as well and very useful to bring in Christians from other contexts to help you like a lens or a mirror to think about your culture. But for 10 of you have these resources within your own culture and don’t use them that’s a missed opportunity. So I think that’s probably the alarm to tell me this is for a few minutes my clock makes it 39 and 18 seconds, Dutch punctuality but anyway, my best and thank you.
The original conference video and audio content is courtesy of geloofstoerusting.nl.
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Join the mailing list »James Eglinton is Meldrum senior lecturer in Reformed theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Bavinck: A Critical Biography. You can follow him on X.