Tim Keller’s faithful witness

Along with many other people whose lives he touched, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Rev. Timothy Keller, who died in May at age 72. Keller was the long-time pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and the author of many books, some of which became best sellers.

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1950, Keller grew up in a Lutheran congregation but came to a fuller knowledge of the Christian faith while studying at Bucknell University through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. With his life now redirected towards serving God’s kingdom, Keller went on to attend Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts and Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a confessional Reformed denomination currently observing its 50^th anniversary.

After serving as pastor of a small congregation in Virginia, the PCA in 1989 asked him to start and lead a church plant in America’s largest city. Of course, New York is not a heavily churched community, and trying to maintain a Christian ministry in the heart of a secular urban centre certainly looked to be an uphill battle. Nevertheless, we know that with God nothing is impossible, and he used Keller to grow a vibrant church community in an unlikely setting. Beginning with only 50 people, by the end of 1989, attendance had grown to 250.

By 1993, Redeemer was hosting four services in a building that could accommodate 400 people, prompting a move to a larger facility. By 1996, some 3,000 people were attending Redeemer, and the congregation added another site. Eventually, Redeemer would plant daughter churches in the larger New York metropolitan area and even outside the United States. Redeemer itself divided into three congregations with a combined attendance of 5,000. All of this suggests that Redeemer could have joined the ranks of North America’s megachurches. However, Keller was not a stereotypical megachurch pastor. He retained a humble spirit that sharply differentiated him from the high profile preachers who become too puffed up with their own stardom. Writing recently in the New York Times, Tish Harrison-Warren, an Anglican priest who differed with Keller on some issues, testified to his personal support for her ministry and for her pursuits as a writer. She noted that he exhibited a generosity of spirit towards his intellectual and spiritual opponents. In this way he successfully reached those who were otherwise sceptical about the claims of the gospel.

Faithful doubt

Keller’s first book was The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Penguin, 2008), in which he responded both to those doubting the faith and to those of faith who feared the designs of the doubters. Keller’s response was that even doubters come to their position from a standpoint of faith – faith that, for example, “the existence of God is a matter of indifference until its intersects with my emotional needs.” Even scepticism requires a leap of faith.

After 2008, Keller published many more books, including one co-authored with his wife Kathy on The Meaning of Marriage (Penguin, 2013). Through his writings, his testimony to the gospel has assumed a global reach, one that promises to continue long after his passing.

In 2017, Princeton Theological Seminary awarded Keller the Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness, only to revoke it after faculty protests over doctrinal differences. Many of us were incensed that a seminary that was once a bastion of Reformed orthodoxy would treat Keller so shabbily. Nevertheless, Keller himself graciously came to the annual Kuyper conference, at which the award was to have been presented, and delivered his previously scheduled address to the assembled attendees. To be honest, I’m not sure I could have brought myself to do that after such treatment. But this only demonstrated Keller’s generous spirit once again.

I mentioned my own debt to Keller. In July 2020 he endorsed my book, Political Visions and Illusions, over Twitter. It had just come out in a second edition the previous year, and Keller’s endorsement led to the book quickly selling out at the publisher and requiring another printing. He repeated his endorsement several times over the next two years, most recently in a video he posted on YouTube in May 2022.

Thanks be to God for providing us with shepherds to guide us in living lives of grateful obedience to his will. May Keller’s legacy in particular continue to testify globally to the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.