Pastor Tim Keller: Testifying to Christ by example

By David A. Sylvester

An outpouring of tributes to Pastor Tim Keller comes just after his death at the age of 72 and  for someone who, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve never heard about. It appears that he won so many admirers, not just because he wrote some 24 books arguing for a  conservative evangelical understanding of life and God, or because he helped plant churches around the world, but that he apparently did so in a low-key, kind and reasonable way. That’s why I regret my provincial West Coast orientation for many years and wonder who else is out there who I’d like to learn from during their life, not just at their death. 

If Christianity is ever to have any credibility in the future, we are going to need a lot more gentle, persuasive and strong leaders to show a different way of being Christian than the shrill, cruel and politicized theocracy of the so-called Christian Nationalists who dominate the news every day.  And Pastor Tim Keller clearly showed that greater way.  At a time when everyone is striving to take over leadership, Pastor Keller led by exampleship.

By all accounts, Pastor Keller was a remarkable church leader. He argued as a conservative evangelical in the center of secular and modern New York City  – yet attracted thousands to his Redeemer Presbyterian Church in downtown Manhattan.

His Redeemer church was certainly traditionally Christian. Pastor Keller wrote that   “…the beliefs of the new church would be the orthodox, historic tenets of Christianity — the infallibility of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the necessity of spiritual regeneration (the new birth)— all doctrines considered hopelessly dated by the majority of New Yorkers.”

New York magazine echoed the predictable reaction with an article in 2002 entitled: Tim Keller Wants to Save Your Yuppie Soul.  Writer Joseph Hooper called the pastor’s plan “close to a theological suicide mission—to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom.”

I must admit that I know little of what Pastor Keller actually wrote, something I hope to remedy soon, but what little I’ve heard, his theology does not appeal to me. I hear more theology than praxis in it. And it seems like I’ve heard these words so many times before – and they leave out the central question: “Yes, that all sounds great but what exactly do you mean in life, in how we live our day to day life in the midst of constant difficulties?”

I am, however, deeply attracted to his manner, as so many others have been. In his article “My Friend, Tim Keller” columnist Peter Wehner writes in the Atlantic Monthly:

“I have met few people who have delighted in discussing ideas as much as Tim; they fascinated him, formed him, vivified him. And his mind was a wonder to behold: intelligent, orderly, and insatiably curious. He was a voracious reader who possessed an amazingly retentive memory. Tim wasn’t an original scholar; his strength was synthesis and integration.”

David Brooks at the New York Times remembered Pastor Keller in a similar way in his column, “Tim Keller Taught Me about Joy” :

Tim Keller was a recliner. Whenever a particular group of my friends would get together, discussing some personal, social or philosophical issue over Zoom during the past few years, you could see Tim just chilling and enjoying it, lounging back in his chair. The conversation would flow, and finally somebody would ask: “Tim, what do you think?”

He’d start slow, with that wry, friendly smile. He’d mention a relevant John Bunyan poem, then an observation Kierkegaard had made or a pattern the historian David Bebbington had noticed. Then Tim would synthesize it all into the four crucial points that pierced the clouds of confusion and brought you to a new layer of understanding.

Unlike the merciless Christian culture warriors, Pastor Keller seemed to relish the conversation with modern world. Mr. Wehner quotes him about his motivation for writing his bestselling book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism:

“I’ve talked to literally thousands of people in New York City over the years, and I found as I talked to people, so many of the doubts are passionate; they’re well thought out; and they deserve respect. I wrote this book to respectfully engage those doubts.”

Perhaps most revealing about Pastor Keller was what happened at the Princeton Theological Seminary when he was invited to receive an award and speak to the students in 2017.  This was a confrontation at the center of liberal modern Presbyterians and a traditional conservative. Jeff Chu, a student at Princeton Theological, described in a nutshell the core  questions that created the uproar and are tearing churches apart across the country, if not the modern world:

How could an institution committed to full inclusion of women and LGBT people in ministry give a prize — and $10,000 — to someone who very publicly wasn’t? Indeed, how could the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s flagship graduate school honor a minister of the Presbyterian Church in America, a denomination founded partly in opposition to the PCUSA’s decision to ordain women?

In Mr. Chu’s article, he quotes a vitally important observation that Pastor Keller made about engaging in debate: 

The great failure of Christians today is their lack of empathy and willingness to listen to their opponents. Each beats the other over the head for not agreeing with their interpretative framework of the Bible and the Christian message.

This doesn’t mean we should attempt a simple-minded “both-sides” of false equivalence. Pastor Keller certainly didn’t water down his message to fit his listeners, but he maintained his integrity in a spirit of kindness and respect for the other side. It was his way of being, not just his way of thinking, that was his most powerful testimony to Christ.

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