I first heard about Timothy J. Keller in the early 1990s. My future wife, Cindy, began attending Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City shortly after it was founded by Tim and his wife, Kathy, in 1989. I didn’t personally know Tim—I was living in northern Virginia at the time—but Cindy spoke very highly of the Kellers. During car rides together we would listen to tapes of his sermons.

I was impressed enough to invite Tim and Kathy to a small gathering in Washington, D.C., to discuss faith and culture. Tim wasn’t particularly well known at the time, but it was clear to me—from how well he spoke, how well he thought, how well he reasoned—that that would change. It did.

Tim became one of the 21st century’s most influential and revered church leaders—a pastor and theologian; an author who sold an estimated 25 million copies of his books; the co-founder and driving force behind Redeemer City to City, a nonprofit that promotes church planting and gospel movements in the great cities of the world; a mentor to many and a counselor and friend to many more. It has been a gift to count myself among them.

Tim Keller died of cancer last Friday morning. He was 72 years old.

ONE OF THE THINGS that made Tim distinct was his ability to bring an ancient faith into the modern city, into the lives of busy young professionals who might otherwise have dismissed it, and to do so with quiet confidence and not hostile defensiveness. He made the discussion of faith seem relevant, and exciting.

People were understandably skeptical that Tim, having left a teaching post at Westminster Theological Seminary, could succeed in planting a new church with theologically orthodox beliefs in Manhattan. But he did.

In less than a decade, 2,000 people were attending; by the mid-2000s, attendance had increased to 5,000. The congregation was diverse, young, and cosmopolitan. Many of those attending Redeemer found liberation from the pressures of life in Manhattan. Tim named the idols of our lives, which often come in the form of striving for worldly success. He spoke about how we make the mistake of turning good things into ultimate things. It resonated.

Tim’s preaching style was cerebral, culturally sophisticated, conversational, and nonabrasive. There was a “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord” spirit to his ministry. Above all he had a passion for biblical text and was able to impart that passion to his audience.

His 2008 book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism,  which was written primarily for people with doubts about Christianity, sold more than 1 million copies. “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,” he said. “I wrote this book to respectfully engage those doubts.” He was at that point a significant figure in worldwide Christianity.  

Nine years later, in 2017, Tim relinquished his position as the senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian to focus on teaching and speaking, writing and mentoring, and church planting. He stayed active until the end of his life, his reputation spotless.

I CAME TO KNOW Tim in a variety of settings, as our friendly acquaintance evolved into a close and genuine friendship.

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. It’s revealing that the book on his life that he authorized, written by Collin Hansen, wasn’t a traditional biography; it was focused on the people who shaped Tim’s spiritual and intellectual journey. I sensed it was his way of honoring those who formed him.

If you engaged Tim on a topic, either one-on-one or in a small group, he was likely to cite some combination of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, playwrights, and historians. (C. S. Lewis, Jonathan Edwards, and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and his book A Secular Age were just a few of his favorites.)

Tim offered the references easily and unostentatiously, like a person sharing a new gift he was excited about and was sure you would be too. He wanted to understand the world—but above all, he wanted to better understand God, in order to better love God.

Tim certainly had strong convictions on matters of faith and theology. He was a Calvinist and very much a part of the Reformed tradition. But in my experience, Tim held those convictions without hard edges. Some people are temperamentally predisposed toward arrogance and conflict; Tim wasn’t. And even when he had differences with you, he was unusually open to hearing other perspectives. He listened well.

In September 2021, Tim, the political analyst Yuval Levin, and I had a Zoom call to discuss a theological topic we had been emailing one another about. I’m a question asker and have been all my life, and Tim knew it. I probed his thinking because I was trying to form my own opinions through a dialectic.

After the call, Tim sent a marvelous one-page summary of five points I had raised and invited ongoing dialogue. “My guess is that if we keep these five questions/issues in our mind, that when we get an idea or read something that addresses one of these, we’ll pass it along to each other,” he said. But here’s what’s more telling: He expressed gratitude to us because he felt our friendship and conversations like the one we had added to what he called “the richness” of his life.

Most people, and certainly those of his standing, grow defensive or dismissive when their views are challenged, even when it’s done respectfully. Tim thrived in conversations with people who had experienced life differently than he had.

“What always stood out most to me in talking to Tim was the pleasure he took in sharing his deep knowledge of scripture and theology,” Yuval told me. “It was like he was sharing a gift, something he had that he knew his friend would love. We unavoidably spoke across the line that separates Christians from Jews, and yet Tim approached that line like a low fence between friendly neighbors, the kind of fence you’d stand at for hours to chat about what matters most in life, not a high wall that divides.”

Over time, some in the Christian world came to criticize Tim’s commitment to this sort of engagement as a weakness, or at least, as an approach poorly suited to this moment. “I would argue quite the opposite,” Bill Fullilove, executive pastor at McLean Presbyterian, told me. “His model of gracious and thoughtful engagement, even when disagreeing vehemently, is exactly what we need more of today. It is simply impermissible to pursue biblical goals while ignoring biblical ethics.  And what Tim did was marry the best of intellect and argument and eloquence with a truly gracious and kind and biblical spirit, both in person and in a large room.”

LAST FEBRUARY, Tim was scheduled to talk about a document he had written, “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church,” at a book club to which we both belonged. Kathy called me that afternoon to say that Tim had been taken to the ER at New York Presbyterian Hospital because of gastrointestinal complications due to cancer. He wouldn’t be joining us. As our discussion began at 7 p.m. on Zoom, I told the others in the group about his absence. But at 7:42 p.m., Tim emailed me. “I can listen in a bit. Still in noisy er room.” Minutes later, his name popped up on the screen; he joined, but without video, listening silently.

Soon, though, I made a comment with which Tim disagreed. Suddenly he broke his silence.“What you’re describing isn’t the Gospel,” he said. “It’s moralism.”

“I don’t think what I’m describing is moralism,” I replied. “What I think I’m describing are the teachings from Paul.” And off we went.

It was a fascinating exchange; the fact that Tim so much wanted to be a part of it lifted the spirits of the entire group. For my part, I will retain in my mind a vision of Tim calling in from the noisy emergency room at New York Presbyterian to participate in a discussion about faith and to correct my heresies, of which I’m sure there are many.  

I INTRODUCED MY close friend and fellow Atlantic contributor Jonathan Rauch to Tim, and Jon invited him to join us on a weekly Zoom call he hosted. Jon is Jewish, gay, and an atheist, yet our eclectic group, more often than not, discusses matters of faith and spirituality.

Jon recalls pressing Tim once on why a good God would permit unmerited suffering. If the answer was a bucket, Tim replied, he could fill it only three-quarters of the way. “I perceived his faith as a mystery and a search, not as a set of answers or rules,” Jon told me. “Outsider and unbeliever though I am, he made me feel like a member of his search party.”

“I can’t understand Tim’s world, but his gift was to give me glimpses of it,” he said. “And he made me feel loved—by him and by his God. I once asked him if God hears the prayers of an atheist. He said yes, and I hope that’s true, and in that spirit I’ll pray for him.”

Tim Keller was an intellectual, but he possessed a pastor’s heart. Cindy recalls the time he met with her at a coffee shop in Manhattan in the early 1990s to help her understand the proper theological approach to forgiveness. Tim reached out to others in times of need, during crises, to offer comfort and counsel. He would patiently meet with people as they were sorting through their faith, unsure of what they believed, while he listened to their doubts. And people reached out to him when a loved one died, as they were living in the shadow of grief, or when they were nearing death themselves. Where is God in the midst of pain and disease and death?

“THIS IS A DARK WORLD. There are many ways to keep that darkness at bay, but we cannot do it forever. Eventually the lights of our lives—love, health, home, work—will begin to go out. And when that happens, we will need something more than our understanding, competence, and power can give us.”

Tim wrote those words in his 2013 book, Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. Seven years later, in June 2020, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He knew then that it wouldn’t be long before the lights of his life would go out.

Tim admitted that, in the early months, his death sentence “felt very unfair.” In 2021 he wrote about his journey with cancer—what he called “an agent of death growing inside of me”—in The Atlantic.

“Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality,” he wrote.

“When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God.”

Tim’s actual understanding of God proved to be more than enough to sustain him. He wanted to be cured, of course, and he knew that his last days were likely to be very difficult, and they were. But Tim was able to say that he was never happier, never had more days of comfort, and that his relationship with God had never been better. It was an extraordinary testimony.

Tim was also transparent, admitting that he and Kathy—his best friend, his soulmate, the co-author of his life—would often cry together. It was impossible for them to imagine life apart from each other.

“It is endlessly comforting to have a God who is both infinitely more wise and more loving than I am,” he wrote in 2021. “He has plenty of good reasons for everything he does and allows that I cannot know, and therein is my hope and strength.”

Last Friday morning, at home, while he was still alert, Kathy went into his room. They were alone. She kissed him on his forehead. He took one more breath, and then passed from this life.

“I’m thankful for all the people who’ve prayed for me over the years,” Tim said three days before he died, according to his son Michael, a pastor. “I’m thankful for my family, that loves me. I’m thankful for the time God has given me, but I’m ready to see Jesus. I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.”

One spring day in 1970, a tall, slightly awkward undergraduate named Timothy Keller was standing with friends on the main quadrangle of Bucknell University’s campus in central Pennsylvania. Students were protesting in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings; they crowded onto the quad, half-listening to speakers who vied for the open mic. Keller, a new convert to Christianity and a religion major, ordinarily would have been busy with courses in existential philosophy, Buddhism, and biblical criticism. But at the moment, he and his friends in the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were trying to decide how to participate in this tense moment, when their peers were angry and probably not interested in talking about God.

They did not commandeer the microphone to rail at classmates about their sins; even single-minded evangelicals can read a room now and then. Instead, they set up a table nearby with a stack of Christian books and made a sign with bold lettering: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ Is Credible and Existentially Satisfying. “They didn’t get much of a response—mostly mocking and eye rolls,” Collin Hansen writes in his recent biography of Keller.

But some bystanders did bite: How could Jesus possibly be relevant when the world is on fire? Keller, manning the books table, was in his element, quietly suggesting that they set aside political categories for the moment. Don’t look away from economic or racial injustice; don’t stop hating war, or stifle your anger at corrupt and lying leaders. Just try looking at all of that through Christian lenses, and you’ll see idolatry, the worship of self: the real things that wreck our world.

Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival

Keller, who died May 19 at age 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was the most influential Christian apologist and evangelical leader of his generation, even if his name is unfamiliar to many secular people. The flood of articles noting his death have remarked on the flourishing megachurch he built in supposedly godless Manhattan; the hundreds of new congregations he helped plant around the world; the best-selling books he wrote that made the case for Christianity to a popular audience. And that’s all true. But in all of this, two fundamental ideas propelled him: Biblical Christianity is not a political position, and secular liberalism deserves theological critique—because it is not simply how the world really works, but is itself a kind of faith.

When Tim and his wife, Kathy, founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989, the prospects seemed dismal. Walking the city streets, Keller was struck by how many grand historic church buildings had been repurposed as clubs, coffee shops, and condos—visible signs that New Yorkers seemed to have moved on from church. Yet over the decades that followed, Redeemer grew into a booming congregation of several thousand people, including many young doctors, lawyers, bankers, and artists who never considered themselves the churchgoing type.

Journalists were confused by why so many “yuppie Manhattanites” would attend this “conservative evangelical” church. Keller had the quiet charisma of a professor at a small liberal-arts college rather than the persona of a megachurch warlord; he poured energy into co-founding institutions, such as the church network and media organization The Gospel Coalition, rather than nurturing a cult of personality.

Moreover, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, and was not shy about his denomination’s conservative teachings on sexual identity and gender roles. The PCA does not bless same-sex marriages and discourages the use of the phrase gay Christian because it elevates homosexuality as an “identity marker alongside our identity as new creations in Christ.” The denomination teaches the “complementarity” of men and women, “displayed when a Christian husband expresses his responsibility of headship in sacrificial love to his wife,” and does not ordain women as pastors, though women can serve in some leadership roles. But Keller never led with those issues, and steered every conversation back to how broken and miserable we all are without the free gift of God’s grace. “The real culture war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, that fail to satisfy us even when we get them,” he wrote in 2008 in his breakout best-seller, The Reason for God.

The year the Kellers founded Redeemer, the mainstream media were preoccupied with a very different group of evangelical leaders. Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and their colleagues had recently founded the Christian Coalition of America, the latest in a series of organizations carrying the banner for conservative Christian activists who lashed the gospel to Republican policy goals. While they sacralized nostalgia for a bygone Christian America in which white middle-class men had the largest share of cultural prestige and economic privilege, Keller was busy ministering to post-Christian, pluralist, urban Americans, convincing them to decouple Christianity from any political platform.

In later years, on one of the very few occasions when Keller made a public statement about politics—halfway through the Trump administration—he published an op-ed in The New York Times insisting that Christians should reject tidy alignment with either the Republicans or Democrats. “Following the Bible and the early church,” he wrote,  “Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.”

[Timothy Keller: Growing my faith in the face of death]

Keller’s approach—to spurn tribalism, avoid picking unnecessary fights, and preach to our shared existential angst—was not normal, not even in New York City. A century earlier, the fundamentalist movement was born primarily in the urban north, where Keller’s Reformed Protestant forebears founded breakaway churches and Bible institutes to rebel against a tide of non-Protestant immigrants, first-wave feminism, new trends in biblical criticism, and other changes they saw as threats to both the authority of scripture and their own cultural status. America replayed that same basic culture war in the 1960s and ’70s, when Keller was an undergraduate. We are in the throes of another rerun now.

Over that time, the great evangelical tradition of apologetics—making reasoned arguments for Christian truth claims based on historical evidence, scientific discoveries, and moral philosophy—largely fell captive to these culture wars. One might have expected Keller to imitate the apologists who were at the height of their powers while he was starting out as a young pastor: men like Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell, who blended their mission to defend the truth of Christianity with their callings as culture warriors.  

Instead, he modeled his writing and preaching on irenic British Christians: the Anglican minister John Stott and, especially, C. S. Lewis (although Keller’s books feature a wide range of cultural and literary references, including Pascal, Tolstoy, the movie Fargo, various atheist thinkers—even, at least once, the Disney cartoon Frozen). Over the years, Keller became not just a Christian apologist but a sophisticated critic of secular liberalism, especially its worship of personal autonomy as the highest good. He pushed his audiences to consider whether total sexual freedom was truly the pinnacle of human liberation, or whether the boundaries of marriage might actually enrich their lives. He took on the false idol of professional achievement: “As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as ‘drive’ and your anxiety as ‘hope,’” he wrote in 2013’s Encounters With Jesus. “And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is.”

Secular Americans in the 21st century might think they are free individuals, living true to themselves—but in fact they have unconsciously absorbed the preferences and prejudices of their particular cultural setting, he wrote in what may be his most important book, 2016’s Making Sense of God. All humans, in all historical contexts, “use some kind of filter—a set of beliefs and values—to sift through our hearts and determine which emotions and sensibilities we will value and incorporate into our core identity and which we will not. It is this value-laden filter that forms our identity, rather than our feelings themselves.”

In these later years, he drew more and more on the philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor: each, in his own way, a forceful critic of secular modernity, but all cited more often in scholarly journals than in sermons or popular books. Keller’s unique evangelistic gift lay in simplifying and popularizing their dense academic arguments to help a wide range of Christians and nonbelievers see that the secularization of Western culture was not so much a story about traditional faiths declining—what Taylor calls the “subtraction story”—but a story of new, equally metaphysical assumptions taking hold. Keller insisted that these assumptions cannot adequately explain human experience. We all seek what Taylor calls “fullness”: an idea that, Keller wrote, “is neither strictly a belief nor a mere experience. It is the perception that life is greater than can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations … It is the widespread, actual lived condition of most human beings regardless of worldview.”

[Molly Worthen: Why conservative evangelicals like Trump]

His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity; isolation; transience—were becoming  common in rural and suburban contexts as well. Keller was ahead of the curve in confronting these changes. Younger pastors and lay Christians found in him a mentor who might help them make traditional Christianity seem plausible to indifferent, even hostile, hearers—and, possibly, help them survive American evangelicalism’s current doom spiral of anger and political idolatry.

In his hugely influential 2012 book on starting new churches, Center Church, he used the analogy of the four seasons to describe the church’s changing relationship to culture. Keller believed the American church was well into its autumn season, when Christian influence is in decline; people are opting for other master narratives to explain their lives; evangelists who trained in the “summertime” of Christendom are flailing.

In all his apologetic work, Keller politely deconstructed secular narratives of meaning and happiness before making any attempt to convince his audience that Jesus’s tomb really was empty—and always in the tone of a humble conversation partner rather than a browbeating crusader. He was careful to present his arguments as “clues” rather than airtight proof: a set of hints—in the fine-tuning of the universe; in human moral instincts; in the intriguing historical evidence from Jesus’s life and death—which, taken together, do not wholly eliminate doubts, but have an awfully good chance of making you doubt your doubts.

Yet by the end of Keller’s long career, he had accumulated plenty of critics on both the left and the right who complained that his claim to sidestep politics in favor of the big existential questions was a red herring, an attempt to evade the issues that cause the most pain and anger in ordinary people’s lives. In 2017, Princeton Theological Seminary rescinded a prestigious lecture invitation it had extended to Keller after many in the seminary community objected to his views on gender and sexuality. Carol Howard Merritt, a Presbyterian minister in the more liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) denomination, called him “one of the loudest, most read, and most adhered-to proponents of male headship in the home … I have spent years with women who have tried to de-program themselves after growing up in this baptized abuse.”

[Tim Alberta: How politics poisoned the evangelical church]

American Christians—not to mention U.S. courts—are also in a long-running battle over whether the religious objection to same-sex relationships is akin to anti-Black racism, and therefore an intolerable and anachronistic doctrine, or whether it is acceptable within the bounds of religious freedom. Keller’s long-term legacy in mainstream culture depends on how these legal and cultural debates evolve.

Meanwhile, conservatives criticize Keller’s “third way” philosophy as “instinctively accommodating” to secular contexts, as James R. Wood, then an associate editor at the conservative Christian magazine First Things, wrote last spring. He used to admire Keller but has changed his mind as American culture has grown more hostile to traditional Christianity. “A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions,” he wrote. “The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.” Better, perhaps, to sharpen the contradictions.

It’s possible that Keller’s strategy was the luxury of a less polarized time. Now that Christians on the right and the left both feel remorselessly persecuted, many believe they have no choice but to purify their own ranks and defeat the forces of evil at the ballot box. There are more urgent tasks than patiently engaging a skeptic.  

Keller’s aim was never to make the gospel any less outrageous, but to make our own private idols moreso. He wanted to help sincere and restless people (and that’s most of us) finally see the false gods we are worshiping—whether we realize it or not.