Timothy Keller

Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen (Zondervan, 2023).

When Tim Keller passed away, I stopped listening to his sermons. That was the way I grieved. Keller’s ministry had a special place in my heart and my life, and so knowing he was gone made it hard to listen to his voice. This biography had just come out a few months before, but even so I was hesitant to buy it at first. I wanted more of him, but I wasn’t sure that a book about his influences would deliver that. I decided it was better than nothing, but after I bought it I sat on it for another two years. This summer I finally gave it a chance, and it has been the catalyst for a lot of reflection and growth this past month.

I’ve always hoped this “book reviews” section on my website would become more regular and professional, but in this post I’m giving myself permission to write something more like a book reaction instead. And for the subject of Keller in particular, I want to provide some of the personal context for that reaction. If you’re not interested in the background, feel free to skip to the next heading.

Tim and Me

I never met Tim Keller, but we were in the same room at least twice.

I first heard about him through some conference he spoke at around 2006 or 2007, possibly the Resurgence. The videos in the series found their way to me, and I remember being especially impressed with him and Matt Chandler, who was also new to me. Nearly everyone was new to me then, since I hadn’t been exposed to many contemporary Christian writers and thinkers until then. But as much as I enjoyed them, I don’t know that I thought to see what else was out there. After I went to seminary, my good friend Jeff told me he how much Keller meant to him, and that really made me take a closer look.

Until now, as I write this, I had read almost nothing that Keller wrote. What I really loved were his sermons. I started listening daily after I finished grad school, and it was fresh water. I loved the way he wove in the philosophical and cultural engagement that was so important to me, but that I didn’t know how to fit into a sermon. I loved the way they always exalted Christ, connecting what was in the text with what Jesus had done for us. And as someone who was trained in expository sermons and the “big idea” model (which I’m still convinced has many strengths), I felt it supplied things that had been missing in my spiritual diet for years.

At that point it didn’t take long before Keller became a personal hero. He provided a model for me of what intellectual ministry could look like in the pulpit.

When I went to visit my friend Ben out at his new home in Connecticut, he insisted on taking us to New York City. And somehow he managed to pull some strings and figure out which campus of Redeemer Presbyterian Keller would be preaching at that evening, something they didn’t advertise. And so that evening, there I was: in a half-full auditorium with two very small children, some great friends, and a very tall, unassuming, poorly-lit man preaching the Word. It was glorious.

For years, whenever I felt low I would go back and find a random Keller sermon and it would encourage and refresh me. In fact, for a long time, any time I couldn’t be at church in person I would listen to Keller instead of my church’s livestream. Maybe someday I’ll write a post about some of the sermons that impacted me the most.

I also incorporated him into my philosophy class. His reflections on the problem of evil (bad camera work aside) are the best I’ve heard on the subject.

Oh, and then there are the old Westminster Seminary lectures on the doctrine of the church! I’ve listened to them more than once over the years. I’m probably due for another pass. They are not only insightful, but prescient. Only an occasional reference to the USSR reminds me that this is 40-year-old material.

When I heard he had cancer, I prayed for him. And when I heard that he died, my friends and I agreed that it felt like a light had gone out in a dark world.

I don’t know that I heard any criticism of Keller until after he passed. I’m not sure if that’s a coincidence or not. As evangelicalism has fragmented over the past decade, some camps marked him as too “woke,” or too friendly to liberals. Or if he wasn’t that, it was that the culture had turned against us and there was no room to do his kind of culturally-engaged ministry anymore. I strongly disagree. More on that some other time.

Overview of the Book

As I said, I initially hesitated to buy this book because it’s not a true biography, and I was afraid I wouldn’t get as much as I wanted about his life. But this is still very much the story of Keller’s life; it simply tells the story from one vantage point. You still get insights into his upbringing, his education, his career, his marriage, and his parenting. These elements are simply not the foreground.

Instead in the foreground is something like intellectual history, which is a favorite subject of mine. We see some formative events, the ways they shaped his tendencies. More often we see the people who influenced him and the ways God opened doors for him to use what he had learned.

I won’t try to retell Tim’s story here, but I feel I have to give some roadmap in order to help you track with me in what follows. It starts with his upbringing in a nominally Christian home, then moves through his college education, conversion, and involvement in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He gets married, goes to seminary at Gordon-Conwell, and sits at the feet of R. C. Sproul in his spare time. His professional life begins in a small, blue-collar church ministry, where he labored intensely for 9 years. Then after a short stint as a professor at Westminster Seminary, he found himself planting a church in New York City. I highly recommend you read the book and get the whole story, especially if you have been blessed by Keller’s ministry or are interested in ministry in general.

What I want to focus on for the rest of this post is what I have learned from the book, and how it has impacted me.

A Vision of Pastoral Ministry

First of all, this book gives me a vision of what it can look like for a scholar to work in pastoral ministry. This is something I have wrestled with for most of my life. In my tradition, we tend to gravitate toward men with decisiveness, charisma, and ambition. These were the young men praised in my youth group growing up, the kinds of men we often sought to lead our local church, and these were the men on the pastoral track in seminary.

But in Keller, I get a picture I can relate to: someone who is incessantly curious, who believes that good doctrine is vital to healthy ministry. He’s a voracious reader and synthesizer, and rather than dampening his passion for evangelism and discipleship, it fuels that passion.

And it turns out that this is actually helpful in ways that never fully dawned on me. For one thing, instead of constantly scrounging for illustrations to keep his sermons fresh, his reading naturally produced connections he could use.

But in some ways, preaching is the easy part of pastoral ministry. The more you study, the more you practice, the easier it gets. What has daunted me most about the idea of being a senior pastor are the staggering traditional expectations that are so often laid on the office. It’s not enough to study and preach every week, lead staff and volunteers, counsel those in crisis, and perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals. People expect you to be part of their lives: show up not just in the hospital, but at soccer games, at graduations, at birthday parties, etc. Your family, too, is expected to be heavily involved and model Christians. This all seemed unreasonable to me, and it didn’t help that I would sometimes hear critical comments when the pastor or his family didn’t meet all their expectations.

I have often thought that what we need are healthier expectations for pastors—and their families. And I stand by that. But what astounded me in Keller’s story was that he didn’t become a pastor by setting boundaries and redefining the office to suit his gifts. Rather, he seemingly embraced all those expectations! He took every opportunity to invest in the personal lives of his congregants. This meant spending unreal hours working—something like 90 hours a week. This meant giving his whole life to ministry, not just his day job.

I don’t aspire to those extremes. But in Keller, I could finally see why and how someone with a scholarly bent could pursue that. He could be curious about people in the best sense. As he spent time with them, he learned how to communicate better with them. And in the unscheduled conversations people would often take to heart things that might not land in the context of a sermon. So much of what I had seen as an obstacle to ministry actually made it stronger for Keller.

Traditional and Aspirational Ministry

This has caused me to wonder if my whole paradigm for pastoring needs to shift.

Much of my training and experience has been in what I will call the aspirational model—a term I’m borrowing from a discussion with Carl Trueman. (There may be a whole literature about this, but I’m not aware of it and so I’m using the term in my own way and not necessarily in a technical sense.) Trueman used the term “aspirational model” to talk about a common way young would-be pastors think of ministry, wherein we strive for success that is measured by influence. If I’m doing a good job, I will get a bigger platform. My goal on this model is to be the kind of pastor who gets invited to speak at conferences, publishes books, etc.

And one danger for people like me is to look to someone like Keller and see those things as marks of success in his ministry. Keller and Piper and MacArthur and Platt and Begg and on and on and on—they inspire us in part because we read their books and see them at conferences. And we are in danger of aspiring not just to their skills or their faithfulness or their character but their reach and status.

I believe in setting goals. I believe in thinking strategically. I believe in reaching out. I believe in doing things with excellence. And yet there is a way these things can get distorted by this aspirational model. What kinds of goals are you setting? What boundaries are you putting on strategy? What healthy tensions are you maintaining that might limit your efficiency, excellence, and influence? If your 20-year goal is books and conferences, that’s going to pull your ministry in ways that I strongly suspect are unhealthy and counter-productive.

But in Keller’s first pastorate—with all its challenges and lack of boundaries and so on—I see what I take to be a traditional model. I see a man who will one day write books doing absolutely nothing to try and secure a deal. I see a man who will one day speak around the world doing nothing to lay the groundwork for a platform of any kind. Success is faithfulness to the Word, care for the congregation, and concern for the neighborhood. It’s not worked out in stretch goals, but in everyday practices.

In some ways, many of these observations aren’t new to me. But when I look at my life and what I’m aiming for, I still find myself thinking and planning and measuring in aspirational terms. Keller’s biography confronts me about this and challenges me to reach deeper to weed that out.

Reflecting …and Waiting

This book has challenged me to rethink and reflect on a great many things—too many to unpack here in any detail. They include:

• My own influences and the structure of that influence
• A new appreciation for pietism and spiritual experience
• Thinking in Gospel categories rather than philosophical categories
• The structure of Baptist and evangelical networks

I’ve journaled at length about each of these in private and maybe I’ll share those thoughts someday. But there’s one more thing that has really made the biggest difference in my life this month: finding peace in waiting.

I’ve been trying to discover what full-time ministry would look like in my current season of life, and I’ve been impatient to get on with the next thing. But based on our family’s goals and situation, our desire is to stay where we are for the moment. That means there are important aspects of the full-time pursuit that are outside of my control. The temptation in waiting after putting yourself “out there” is to interpret each day of silence as rejection.

In fact, I really resonated with Kathy Keller’s “pearls before swine” letter included in the book, which she wrote to Tim when they were just friends. She wanted to be more than that, but it didn’t seem to be on Tim’s mind. She finally confronted him in the letter, saying that at this point every day he didn’t ask her out felt like rejection and that she could no longer be friends with him if he wasn’t interested in her in that way.

For a few days, I was tempted to write my own such letter. But as I continued to read, I noticed a pattern in Tim’s life. At each stage the thing that came next didn’t come by setting a goal and striving for it. He didn’t fight for it; it came to him. And as I reflected on what it looks like to pursue God’s will, I wondered if this isn’t another aspect to overcoming the “aspirational” model.

Yes, Tim chose to marry Kathy, chose to pursue seminary, chose to pursue pastoral ministry. I’m in no way denying personal responsibility. But the opportunity to pastor Hopewell was something that came to him; someone matched him to that need. The opportunity to teach at Westminster came to him. He wasn’t intentionally networking or polishing his CV. He simply served and the position came to him as a surprise. Even at Redeemer, his influential New York City church, he didn’t intend to be the one planting that church. He was trying to find that guy, and almost thought he had once or twice. But when no one panned out, he prayerfully considered doing the work himself. It wasn’t part of his plan. It wasn’t something he was striving for. He was just obedient with the next thing, with wise counsel and much prayer.

Again, this is not to say that life is about doing nothing while you wait for God to make things happen. Far from it. Tim wasn’t, as far as I can see here, passive as he served in ministry. But he was confident that he wasn’t the only one at work. He trusted that God had a plan and would give him the right options and the wisdom to choose them at the right time. What marks the waiting is not aspiration and strategizing; it’s faithfulness and prayer.

And so I have been changing the way I wait, and in choosing that, I have found great peace—with God, with others, and with myself. I don’t pretend I’m as gifted as Keller. I don’t have any delusions that a platform like his is waiting around the corner for me. But in him I see an example of how God sovereignly works in everyday life. And in the context of the Gospel, I can untangle the waiting from any fears that each day of silence is a rejection or condemnation of some kind.

Conclusion

As I said, I would recommend this book for anyone in ministry or even anyone who’s close to someone in ministry. But for anyone with a more intellectual bent, I would say it’s required reading. We need healthy models of what it means to be a pastor, and hopefully the pastor of your local church provides you with that. But especially if you find yourself in a context where your pastor isn’t pulled in that direction, Keller’s story can help fill the gap.