He was a popular preacher in New York and a celebrity who hated attention.

By Kate Bachelder Odell – May 24, 2023 – The Wall Street Journal

Tim Keller Photo: Redeemer Presbyterian Church

Ask anyone to name a story from the Bible, and you’ll likely get the answer David and Goliath. Most Americans know it as a tale about facing your fears, steeling yourself and prevailing against long odds. “I’m here to say that’s a shallow understanding, even a deceptive understanding, of how to read the text,” Tim Keller, minister of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, told his congregation one Sunday morning in 2015.

Keller, who died May 19 at age 72, then indicted what he called “counterfeit courage”—the modern idea that the way to overcome fear is to “visualize success.” Stoicism works only in “short-term bursts, mainly on adrenaline,” and most “of the acts of courage we most admire don’t come from self-assertion and self-confidence.”

His church shouldn’t see itself in David but in the story’s terrified Israelites, who needed a savior. Christians, Keller concluded, can face life’s complexities and dangers because Jesus Christ conquered death. Those who follow him are secure, and “joy is always on the way.” In saying so, Keller blew open an old story with intellectual force and verve.

Keller’s life was confounding. The first paradox is obvious: He built a congregation of orthodox Christians in the naked city. Keller spent his early career as a country preacher in Hopewell, Va., before a stint in academia, departing to plant Redeemer for the Presbyterian Church in America in 1989.

“We did not come expecting a great deal of success,” Keller said on the church’s 25th anniversary. He spoke plainly of sin and grace to New York’s skeptical and high-achieving clientele: the corporate managers and Ivy League-educated consultants but also the artists, musicians and nonprofit executives.

He would, as he told me for a 2014 Weekend Interview, aspire to “show secular people that they’re not quite as unreligious as they think. They’re putting their hopes in something, and they’re living for it.” In New York, it’s often a career. “I try to tell people: The only reason you’re laying yourself out like this is because you’re not really just working. This is very much your religion.”

A second paradox: Keller was a popular pastor who was allergic to the celebrity he attracted. His books, such as “The Prodigal God” and “The Meaning of Marriage,” among many others, have sold millions of copies. But he was enigmatic and avoided the spotlight. An editor of the Christian magazine World once quipped that he could organize an interview with Keller “as easily as I can set one up with Vladimir Putin.”

Keller “was not that great showman preacher,” says Collin Hansen, editor of the Gospel Coalition, a network of Presbyterian and Reformed churches. He was introverted and cerebral in a way that Billy Graham, for all his strengths, never was. But Keller’s “sense of irony,” his “professorial approach,” appealed to New Yorkers.

Keller insisted that Christian evangelism be winsome, which made him polarizing—perhaps the third paradox. “I fear that anxious evangelicals hope that if they can just be grace-centered enough” and “serve the community, and make clear that they are not Republicans, then unbelievers will turn to Christ,” Kevin DeYoung, a fellow Reformed pastor, recently wrote of Keller’s bent.

It’s a fair point. Keller warned that Christians shouldn’t be politically monolithic. He worried about American evangelicalism’s association with the political right. But there is also the risk, which Keller realized, that Christian believers become entangled with the obsessions of the political left: sexual identity, racial grievance, Marxian redistributionism and so on. Progressive Christianity is the mirror image of the moral majoritarianism of the 1980s, and it will end no better for the church’s public witness.

Some dismiss Keller’s approach as outmoded in an American culture hostile to Christianity. Underlying this critique is the assumption that it was easy for a minister in Manhattan 25 years ago to preach that sex is reserved for a man and a woman in marriage. It wasn’t. “We were thrown out of facilities for our faith. We were mocked in the press,” Keller recalled of founding Redeemer.

In 2017 Princeton Theological Seminary revoked an award it had planned to bestow on Keller, because his church didn’t countenance same-sex marriage or female ordination. The latter charge is especially redolent. Keller’s marriage to “Kathy, the Valiant”—as he described her in a book dedication—was a more than 40-year intellectual conspiracy of equals and a living refutation to the canard that Christianity relegates women to inferior status.

At the end of his 2015 sermon, Keller referred to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose myth-drenched narratives had long captured his imagination. Keller said he leaned on a line from “The Lord of the Rings” while fading under anesthesia for thyroid cancer surgery, years before the pancreatic variety took his life. A thought pierced the character Sam, “that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

Keller said he realized that “if the Bible is true, the whole universe is a universe of joy, of glory, of life.” On earth we’re “stuck in this little tiny speck of darkness.” But because of Christ’s death and resurrection, “even that darkness someday is going to be taken away.”

Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal’s editorial board