On the night of February 11, 2006, a extreme winter storm arrived in New York Metropolis. By 4 within the afternoon the following day, almost twenty-seven inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, surpassing the report that had been set in 1947. That night time, as many streets within the metropolis remained impassable, I trudged to a church constructing on Manhattan’s Higher West Facet and located 600 or so folks, principally younger professionals, squeezed into the pews. That they had come to hearken to a Presbyterian minister named Timothy J. Keller preach his fourth sermon of the day. I used to be there, as a faith reporter for the Occasions, to look at maybe probably the most gifted communicator of traditionally orthodox Christian teachings within the nation.
Keller had glasses and a bald pate and wore a darkish blazer and a purple tie. He stood effectively over six toes tall. The stage made him seem much more imposing, significantly when he raised his hand excessive to make some extent, however his mannerisms and tone have been that of an English professor. With a sheaf of notes on a music stand, he preached a considerate disquisition on Jesus’ therapeutic of a paralyzed man, drawing on readings from C. S. Lewis, the Village Voice, and the George MacDonald fairy story “The Princess and the Goblin.”
Keller, who died, of pancreatic most cancers, on Friday, on the age of seventy-two, had a résumé that resembled that of maybe no different Christian minister in America. In 1989, he and his spouse based Redeemer Presbyterian Church within the closely secular milieu of Manhattan. By the point he stepped down, in 2017, Redeemer had greater than 5 thousand worshippers throughout a number of providers each Sunday, making it one of many largest Protestant church buildings in New York Metropolis. Keller additionally was a best-selling writer, publishing greater than twenty books, together with 2008’s “The Purpose for God: Perception in an Age of Skepticism,” and writing often for main publications such because the Occasions, The Atlantic, and this journal. He was a frequent visitor on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”—the co-host Joe Scarborough and his household attended Redeemer—and was pleasant with a remarkably broad cross-section of influential figures in media and politics, together with the Occasions columnist David Brooks; The Atlantic’s former majority proprietor, David Bradley; Francis Collins, the previous head of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being; the actress Patricia Heaton, of “Everyone Loves Raymond”; and even Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (President Bush issued a assertion on Friday, through which he stated he was “certainly one of many who’s blessed to have realized from Dr. Keller’s teachings and benefited from his compassion.”)
On the weekend after the terrorist assault on September 11, 2001, greater than 5 thousand folks confirmed up for Sunday providers at Redeemer. At one service the place folks needed to be turned away, Keller rapidly determined to convene one other, and tons of returned. The traumatic second for town turned out to be a pivotal one for Redeemer’s development, as its attendance remained elevated within the weeks and months afterward. On the fifth anniversary of the assault, White Home officers requested Keller to ship a sermon at an ecumenical service at St. Paul’s Chapel, in decrease Manhattan, for the households of the victims. In 2011, President Obama invited Keller to the White Home to talk on the Easter prayer breakfast.
In “Timothy Keller: His Religious and Mental Formation,” a biography printed earlier this yr, the writer Collin Hansen sketches Keller’s uncommon path to ministry success. Keller was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 1950. His father, Invoice, was a retail govt; his mom, Louise, reared Tim and his two siblings totally on her personal. The household attended a Lutheran church, and Tim, the eldest little one, was bookish and socially awkward. He enrolled at Bucknell College, the place he studied faith, but it surely was his involvement with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the evangelical campus group, that propelled his curiosity within the ministry. He went on to attend Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in Massachusetts, and, in 1975, moved along with his spouse, Kathy, to Hopewell, Virginia, a pale manufacturing facility city as soon as often called the “chemical capital of the South.” Keller led a small blue-collar church in Hopewell for 9 years, earlier than turning into a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
Within the late nineteen-eighties, officers with the Presbyterian Church in America, a comparatively younger denomination based mostly in a suburb of Atlanta, started looking for a pastor to begin a congregation in Manhattan. Once they provided the place to Keller, he initially turned them down. Solely after two different candidates additionally declined did he conform to take the job. His restricted preaching expertise, in a small-town church within the Bible Belt, made him an unlikely match for New York Metropolis. Inside three years of its founding, nonetheless, Redeemer had swelled from fifty folks to a thousand. By the mid-aughts, it had turn into a beacon, world wide, for pastors concerned with ministering to cosmopolitan audiences. In contrast to many suburban megachurches, with their soft-rock reward bands and user-friendly sermons, Redeemer’s providers have been virtually defiantly staid, that includes conventional hymns and liturgy. However the sermons have been wry and erudite, full of literary allusions and philosophical references, and Keller was shrewd about urging his congregants to look at their “counterfeit gods”—their pursuit of totems like energy, standing, and wealth, which town inspired. Hansen depicts Keller as a voracious reader, continuously looking out for supply materials, whether or not it was from the Anglican minister John Stott, the existentialist thinker Søren Kierkegaard, or the urbanist thinker Jane Jacobs. “Keller’s originality is available in his synthesis, how he pulls the sources collectively for surprising insights,” Hansen writes. “Having one hero can be spinoff; having 100 heroes means you’ve drunk deeply by scouring the world for the purest wells.”
Shortly after I wrote the article about Keller for the Occasions, I started often attending his church. Over time, we grew to become pals, and I’d seek the advice of him every so often whereas reporting on faith. In December, 2017, Keller wrote an essay for The New Yorker, through which he lamented the state of the evangelical motion within the Trump period. He had lengthy eschewed the “evangelical” label due to its partisan implications, making some extent of avoiding controversial political matters on the pulpit. In his essay, Keller defined that he had come of age within the early seventies, when “the phrase ‘evangelical’ nonetheless meant a substitute for the fortress mentality of fundamentalism.” However the which means of the time period had modified radically, not describing a set of historic Christian doctrines. “ ‘Evangelical’ used to indicate individuals who claimed the excessive ethical floor,” he wrote. “Now, in in style utilization, the phrase is almost synonymous with ‘hypocrite.’ ” Keller sought a return to what he referred to as “little-e evangelicalism,” which is “outlined not by a political celebration, whether or not conservative, liberal, or populist, however by theological beliefs.” He expressed optimism for a future formed not by white evangelicalism, whose core was ageing and declining, however by a extra various, international cadre of leaders who defied political categorization.
He later wrote an Op-Ed for the Occasions through which he warned that Christian religion ought to by no means be aligned with a single political celebration. “Most political positions,” Keller wrote, “usually are not issues of biblical command however of sensible knowledge.” By the use of instance, he famous that the Bible made lifting up the poor an ethical crucial, however that there have been some ways to take action. “Ought to we shrink authorities and let personal capital markets allocate assets, or ought to we develop the federal government and provides the state extra of the ability to redistribute wealth? Or is the best path one of many many prospects in between?” he wrote. “The Bible doesn’t give actual solutions to those questions for each time, place and tradition.”
In June, 2020, Keller introduced that he had been identified with pancreatic most cancers. Certainly one of his ultimate tasks, accomplished earlier this yr, was an eighty-three-page white paper he referred to as “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church.” It affords a wide-ranging set of prescriptions for what he seen because the profound afflictions of the evangelical motion, together with its anti-intellectualism, its issues with race, and the politicization of the church that has “turned off half the nation.” The doc is an exhaustive blueprint, however the query now’s who will carry it out.
Keller’s passing leaves a void within the nascent motion to reform evangelicalism, and at present’s social and political currents make the prospects for change appear dim. In his paper, Keller noticed that, up to now, important revival actions in Europe and North America usually started with “pace-setting people”––in different phrases, folks like Keller. But he was cautious so as to add that “finally nobody can management” what would seize the creativeness, fortify the spirit, and turn into “an natural, important motion.” In his view, this was the position of the divine. ♦
