Let's Talk about Tim Keller & TGC | Collin Hansen

Opening Prayer and Introduction to the Conversation

Colin Hanson, welcome to the Room for Nuance podcast. I am excited to be here physically. Oof, yes, not via Skype, not via Zoom, you're here. No, I mean, your setup is so much better than my setup. Hey, thanks for saying that, man.

I'm gonna cling to that. Hey, before we get started, would you just open us up in prayer? Yeah, let's pray. God, everything we have, all that we are, is by your grace alone. I pray that you'd bless this conversation.

Let it be fruitful to us and to anybody who might be listening by your spirit. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. So, you have like 15 different jobs. Can you just tell us briefly? I wish I didn't. You run an apothecary, no, no, no.

Yeah, brother, just I run a soda shop. Yeah, that's right. Tell us who you are and what you do. My name is Colin Hanson, and I serve as the Vice President of Content and Editor-in-Chief of The Gospel Coalition.

Also, as Executive Director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. I teach cultural apologetics as an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, which is part of Samford University, and I co-chair that advisory board.

And sometimes I write books and host podcasts. That's right. And you teach pre-K Sunday school? I do. So, yeah, my daughter is just about heading to kindergarten, and so I get to teach her Sunday school class, yes.

Wow, praise God. Thank you for being here, brother. I've valued your work over the years, and the work of The Gospel Coalition. So let's just dive right in, okay? So we just got through having a luncheon with 30 local pastors here in North Alabama.

And the essence of that lunch was me trying to get you a figurehead for The Gospel Coalition, not the figurehead, right, but a figurehead, a representative of The Gospel Coalition, in front of these pastors so that they could hear you talk, so that you could answer their questions, so that there could be more trust, more capital, so that The Gospel Coalition can continue to serve the local church.

Can you just speak to how The Gospel Coalition relates to the local church, how you hope that it can serve the local church? Yeah, so when I came to The Gospel Coalition in 2010, my desire was to be a pastor.

In fact, Don Carson had recruited me year after year while I was in seminary, saying, I'd love for you to come join this thing. We'd love to have you. And I just said, let me be a pastor. Like, that's what I want to be able to do.

My background was pretty varied. Another one of my seminary professors really wanted me to go to get my PhD in history and come back and be a professor. My background was also in journalism as the news editor of Christianity Today.

So I had these kind of worlds together, and I didn't quite know how they were all gonna fit together, but through a very different things, I brought them together through The Gospel Coalition to serve pastors, and also by translating a lot of academic work, but doing it in a journalistic context.

And so, especially compared to my experience at Christianity Today, my hope was always very simple for TGC's content, that we just exist to serve church leaders. Like, they tell us what they need, and we're kind of like resource quartermasters, or just supply chain engineers or something like that.

We meet with pastors, they tell us, hey, here's what we need, here's what I'm struggling with, here's what people are asking me, do you have any resources on that? And it could be a podcast, could be a video, could be a conference, could be an article or a journal article or a book review or something like that, but we just try to fill that gap.

There's only so many different things that you can cover in your sermon, and that should cover in your sermon, or even your small groups or Sunday school classes, but we try to help to fill in a lot of those digital gaps, and do that through a variety of different ways.

So, in that luncheon with those pastors, I asked the guys to raise their hands if they've ever used The Gospel Coalition as a resource, either for themselves, for their elders, for their church on any number of different issues, and everyone raised their hand, right?

How Search Data Reveals What Pastors and Churches Need

In that meeting, you said something really interesting. You talked about the way in which, because the way you just described it to me just now, is like, oh, I sit down and have lunch with a pastor, I hear what they need, or in that meeting, you said the search engine kind of tells us what churches want and need to hear about.

Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so, just to give you a specific example of that, often our phones or our search engines, they know us better than we seem to know ourselves. These algorithms, well, I get a report on what people come to The Gospel Coalition looking for, not what people find on social media and then end up on our site, but people come, I want help on this topic.

That's right. Just type that into the search bar on the upper left, and going all the way back to about 2014, 2015, the number one search topic there was transgender. And so, even before a lot of pastors were talking about that broadly, they must have privately been dealing with these kind of counseling situations.

Not just pastors, though, this would have been parents, as well, who were coming directly saying, I don't know who to talk to about this. I don't know who to ask. And so, yeah, we can see pretty clearly what people are interested in, what they're asking for, what they need, and you don't have many other opportunities like that in the aggregate to be asking tens of millions of people what they need help with, but that's what our search bar and our analytics help us to do.

Yeah. Are you at all worried about letting that sort of drive your ministry, as in we're sort of beholden to what people are most intrigued by or interested in in the moment? Yeah, I think that definitely can be the case.

Now, we're insulated from that for a couple different reasons. The simplest is that we don't have a business model that depends on page views. Oh, wow. If you go back to the early days of Facebook, and you remember places like BuzzFeed and things like that that we haven't talked about in a long time, you get paid by clicks, you get paid by advertisers, things like that.

It doesn't really have a business model. The Gospel Coalition works, so we don't have a lot of those incentives. So we're not sitting there saying, we have to keep our traffic up, therefore we should talk about X topic on social media.

Instead, we only use it to say, we wanna publish things that people are actually asking for, that they're trying to help with, and we also don't want to supplant anything that the local church should be doing.

So we're not coming here saying, hey, read our devotionals instead of going to church, or listen to our music instead of worshiping with your local congregation. We're not trying to do anything like that.

We're just trying to say, what's the helpful stuff around, beside, under, behind, the church that they might need, and just trying to provide that in an efficient manner digitally. Yeah, so an example of that might be, you're a pastor, you're doing a counseling session with a couple in your church, and they tell you that they've begun IVF treatments.

You ask them, have you thought about that biblically? Are you ethically? You're trying to figure out if they're ethically informed from scripture or from the world. And maybe you as a pastor haven't really thought about that as much as you would like to.

What you would like to see is, they just check the gospel coalition, because they know the gospel coalition is the kind of place where they will have subject matter experts, Christian ethicists, who think well from scripture on those topics.

Good example? Yeah, that's a great example, and we might have a couple different views on that topic, but at least we want to be able to provide an alternative to what most people are going to get, especially from their doctors or the medical community.

But we also want to have people, as you mentioned, who are experts in thinking about this, but not only from the medical perspective, but also from the scriptural perspective and theologically. So that's a good example of one where we've had a back and forth.

In that case, Matt Anderson on one side, Wayne Grudem on another side. So we at least want to give people some sort of Christian grounding to think through that. I'll tell you an example here, though, of where we've tried to do that, and it has not turned out.

We've had a hard time finding resources. Birth control. Oh yeah, go to the Catholics if you want to talk about birth control. Yeah, well, I mean, exactly. So there's not a lot of Protestant thinking on that, but what you consistently hear from many different women is that not my doctor, not my parents, not my spouse, no one talked to me either about the biology or the actual effect of this or any of the ethics behind it.

It was all just assumed. And so I feel like I've spent years trying to ask somebody to think that through, but I've had a hard time finding anybody who's even thinking about that much outside of Catholics.

Exactly. So we just did a sermon series going through Genesis 1, thinking about everything that you need to think about from Genesis 1. We did it in light of the fall of Obergefell. Not Obergefell, Roe v. Wade.

Yeah, and we did it because we realized that a lot of the Christians in our church, the members of our church, they were sort of minimally pro-life, right? Abortion is bad, right? That's kind of it. But they hadn't thought about things like adoption, foster care, vasectomies, birth control, what it means to image God as you multiply and so on and so forth.

But when it came time to have this application where we were talking about birth control, our people were pleasantly surprised. I mean, listen, we've talked about race stuff. We've talked about COVID stuff.

We talked about politics stuff. By and large, I don't think I've been as nervous as a pastor to talk about anything as much as I've been nervous to talk about birth control, particularly because I'm not super pro-birth control.

I'm actually pretty anti in many ways. And so, but I tried to handle it with nuance, right? And brother, we had women, women were coming up saying, thank you so much. This is just so helpful, so useful.

I had some women ask me, and do you have any resources on this? Now, here I am as a pastor, do I give them some Roman Catholic book on it, which is gonna be laden with a bunch of other unhelpful stuff?

Or maybe one of the best books that I've read on it, I don't wanna say the name here, but it comes from an author who has one chapter that is supremely helpful. And the rest of it's like, oh, look at the wonder, the wonders of natural selection and what can't it do in evolutionary theory?

I mean, just, can you even believe the genius of mother nature? And by the way, it's good to be a feminist. But now here's a chapter about the dangers of birth control. Really? Yeah. I mean, just study after study, really useful stuff.

Well, it's a good example of a specific issue where when you're talking to people in a church environment or even with your spouse, you'll see that a lot of things surprise women. They surprise men too.

They say, wait a minute, I didn't know I was going to gain weight. Oh, I didn't realize this was gonna suppress my sex drive. Yeah, or even change who I'm sexually attracted to. Exactly, so there's just a lot of questions out there where you're thinking, these are important changes.

These are important things to talk about. Sometimes the internet, we know all of the dark corners of the internet, but sometimes it's also a safe place to be able to go, oh, here's a trusted website, a trusted organization where I can ask these questions that I'm not even really sure how to ask anybody else about.

So now I know who's gonna write my article on birth control, it's Sean DeMars. Let's follow up on that. It just blows my mind, if I may real quick go on a little rant, that we don't even stop and consider what pumping exogenous hormones into our body at the most fruitful stages of our lives, that we just think it's sort of this morally neutral thing.

Yeah, and I think a lot of that, you could look back historically and see why that is. And it's the nexus of a couple of different things. One Insert Carl Truman. Yeah, exactly, and one of them is because like abortion, this was seen as a Catholic issue, that's one thing.

And yes, you'd go all the way back to Sanger, who produced the birth control pill. I talk about this in my class on cultural apologetics, it was Planned Parenthood, originally facilitated the development of it.

But then also there's in Protestantism in America, at least there's generally in the past, I think less so post COVID, there's a kind of techno utopianism, kind of a scientific utopianism of progress.

It's deeply rooted in the American Protestant psyche that we've used medicine to solve every problem. And so it's hard to kind of get out of that mentality. So you combine those two things and you can see why there wasn't a lot of thought given to it.

But you're right when you stop and just look at it, even if you might support it still, it is a weird how little we actually talk about what happens in that process. Again, my wife and I haven't experienced that same thing ourselves.

The Charge of Wokeness and Tim Keller's Civil Rights Awakening

Well, let's go from one easy topic to another, from birth control to wokeness. Oh, great, yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask you in that room full of pastors was about the accusations being leveled against TGC that you guys are woke.

Let me just use an illustration, okay? So I did the TGC good faith debates with Rebecca McLaughlin. And thank you for having me to do that, brother. And in the dialogue portion of that debate, I said, people who think that Tim Keller is woke, I didn't say they're ridiculous.

I said something to that effect, like it is ridiculous, right? Like Tim Keller is not woke. To this day, I'm still catching flack for that, flack in person, flack online. How could you say that Tim Keller is so woke?

And so in this sense, Dr. Keller probably stands as a representative of TGC as a whole and how maybe if we're doing DeYoung's taxonomy, all the fours hear that and they go, absolutely. And the threes go, I don't know if that's true, but maybe.

But I've seen some things that maybe I really disagree with. Yeah, I'm concerned, right? So speak to that, brother. Sure, yeah. So I think when you go back and this is related to my work on Tim and a specific study of him.

When you go back and look, he came of age in the 1970s at a time in the aftermath of civil rights movement. So if your definition of woke is somebody who was awakened to the challenges of race in America and specifically inside the church, then Tim Keller has been woke since 1970 or 1968.

That's very clear. One of the things I wrote about and found actually a parallel in Philip Yancey's life who grew up in Atlanta. Both of them had this experience in the post-civil rights, kind of post-King assassination period.

Tim went to college the fall after King was assassinated. So they have this experience of, wait a minute, my church and my family taught me that the civil rights movement was just a bunch of evil communists.

And they have this awakening of, ooh, maybe that wasn't the case at all. So, and maybe there's more to see here with that. So in that sense, if that's what woke means from Tim's perspective, from the gospel coach's perspective, I guess then we definitely are woke.

We're not woke in the sense that Tim has written very critically about critical race theory, specifically very negative. Kathy, his wife has written very critically about churches that have adopted large aspects of critical race theory.

Or critical theory in general. Critical theory in general applied to a lot of different subject matters in there. And I don't think if there were room for nuance with Ibram Kendi or somebody like that, I don't think he would recognize Tim Keller or the gospel coach as any kind of ally, especially with the way that in critical theory, a lot of different oppressions are linked related to gender, sexuality.

Intersectionality. Intersectionality, exactly. So in that sense, no, absolutely not. Just not buying the whole program on all these other different diversity, equity, inclusion issues just would disqualify you there.

So in that sense, absolutely not. That's what's so difficult about this conversation. And in some ways, part of the reason why my debate with Rebecca was not as fruitful as it could have been, because she was defending a concept of wokeness that I was not arguing against, right?

It's also interesting to sort of trace an etymology, right? The way that the word To initially, wokeness derived from purely a Marxist thought it's to elevate the consciousness, to be aware of the oppression that's consuming you.

And then sort of through black feminism in the 70s, it was kind of adopted and then popularized to just sort of mean become awake to injustices, about real injustices related to race in the United States.

And now, whereas someone like Rebecca, that's probably the main way she thinks about it. The vast majority of people, when they use the word woke, that's not what they mean. What they mean is beholden to critical theory, whether they even understand what that means, right?

Beholden to this idea of sexuality, gender, race, so on and so forth. Yeah, no, that's exactly what I mean. And most of the people using the term woke now are only the critics. That's right. So even now there's that transformation as well.

And then there is a very deliberate attempt now from some on the right wing to use woke to apply to anything that's not Republican or anything that's not something the Daily Wire is talking about or that they don't support or something like that.

So, and then all of a sudden it's woke to even acknowledge racism at all. So you're right, that is a moving target. And that's why it's, you have to, just like many questions, you have to ask, what do you mean by that?

Because if you ask it one way, I guess Tim Keller and The Gospel Quotient definitely are woke. If you ask it most of the ways that people would mean it, not remotely. Now what we're gonna do to get as many views as possible.

I knew it. Colin Hansen says Tim Keller is definitely woke. I knew as soon as I said it what was gonna happen to me. Oh man, our TikTok is gonna go crazy. Hey Luke, do we have a TikTok? No, okay, all right.

All right, let's just keep following this Tim Keller, because you wrote a book, right? Tim Keller, his spiritual and intellectual formation. Don't worry, Sean, if I live long enough, I'll do one of you.

Hey, the church can only hope, brother. So in this pastor's luncheon, which yes, I'm gonna keep referring to, because you just gave me so much fodder. I may not even use these questions that I have here for you.

You said something that I thought was really profound. It's something that I heard Mark Dever say years ago. Maybe he stole it from you. He said that what people don't understand about Tim Keller is that he was steeped in conservative, evangelical Presbyterianism for decades before he sort of emerged in New York City as this cultural apologist, which leads some people to think of him as being squishy in certain areas.

Can you just speak to that? I mean, I think it's because there are a lot of guys out there who are doing their best Tim Keller impersonation. They're trying to evangelize like him. They're trying to do apologetics like him.

They're trying to preach like him, but they have not been steeped in the gospel and in scripture. I mean, when he was in Virginia, how many times did he preach through the Bible? 1 ,500 sermons. Yeah, 1 ,500 expositional preaching before he ever sort of came onto the world stage, if you will.

So anyways, can you just speak to that dynamic? Yeah, so there's also something interesting where Kathy has discipled plenty of women herself, Tim's wife, and Kathy's formation theologically, if I were doing the same thing with her, which I do cover her in there, but she's not been reading all of the same things that Tim has forever.

She went to seminary with him, and one of the things you notice is that the main thing she uses for discipleship is she uses Puritan paperbacks and especially the letters of John Newton. And there's nothing better for me out there apart from scripture than letters of John Newton.

They're just absolutely amazing. And so what you'll notice is a fairly significant difference sometimes in the disciples coming from even the Kellers themselves because like you said, somebody might get really thrilled about Tim's social criticism, but they might not realize how many years he was reading Charles Spurgeon or George Whitefield just to be an evangelist in there.

And so that's one of the major motivations I had of the book was to give that holistic picture to see that Tim grew over time, but he always has kept that core. He's always kept that core right there.

And I think that's something that I've been getting a lot of good feedback about as well in the book. And there is another reason though, Sean, why people get confused about that with Tim, and it's because of an evangelistic strategy he adopted when moving to New York.

Now you can disagree with him, anybody can disagree with him about this, but specifically he said, in such a significantly post-Christian environment, even in 1989 in New York, we are going to choose to emphasize the areas that Christians disagree with non-Christians on, not the things that Christians disagree with other Christians on.

Now, if you're pastoring in Birmingham, Alabama, or Decatur, Alabama, or places like that, you have a lot of churches, the differences between Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Pentecostals are a really big deal, but there are far fewer percentage-wise Christians in New York, and they feel more of a sense of solidarity.

I don't mean necessarily between Catholics and Protestants. I'm primarily speaking even between evangelicals, exactly. And he had a background with that from Gordon Conwell, as well as InterVarsity. So one of the reasons why people think Tim is not outspoken enough in certain areas is because a lot of the hot-button issues that have been a major thing in the last few decades, he might have his own views on, does have his own views on, they tend to be fairly conservative, but he's not outspoken on them.

And he's also very ironic. And in this cultural moment, that automatically makes someone think that you're left-leaning. Jonathan Lehman's a great example of that. I mean, not a squish in any way. Very kind, loving, gentle, patient, desiring to build bridges, even with those with whom he's debating.

And in our context, it causes people to view you in a certain way. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And also just being an evangelist. If you're an evangelist, your goal is to try to persuade somebody. Our media and our politics today do not spend much time at all trying to persuade.

It's all about rallying your base. Well, Tim is not a rallying the base kind of personality. He's always been kind of a cosmopolitan in the sense of him being an outspoken evangelical Christian in a largely non-Christian environment, but holding that conviction with a desire that the gospel would appeal, not by changing the gospel, not by compromising the gospel, but by putting on its best face in an effort to try to persuade them to become Christians.

And you're right that that's significantly out of favor with a lot of the church in this media and political climate. So let's talk a little bit more about Tim Keller, the evangelist. So when I was reading this book, which is fantastic, by the way, thank you so much, it really grew my appreciation for Tim, which was already there, but it increased it.

The thing that I walked away most sort of chewing on in this book is how much of an evangelist. I don't think people understand. Leading people away from hell into a loving, saving relationship with Jesus Christ is the heartbeat of Tim Keller's ministry.

It has been since the day he got saved. Exactly right. Now, Christians are always gonna have disagreements about what is the best, most faithful methodology to lead people to Christ. But I mean, I think a lot of the people who, going back to Moody's quote, you don't like the way that I'm evangelizing.

What did he say? I don't like the way you're not. I don't like the way you're not. It's better than the way you're not evangelizing. A lot of the people who critique Keller and his methodologies of whom, I've been one of those people in the past.

I haven't appreciated certain things here and there, but I think he's done more evangelism than the vast majority of his critics, perhaps even combined. Yeah, absolutely. I think what we need to understand, though, is in my classes on cultural apologetics, I write an equation on the board.

I say Yes, exactly. I do math. We're gonna do math here, okay? This is evangelistic math. Evangelism plus pragmatism equals liberalism. Evangelism plus pragmatism equals liberalism. The math checks out on that.

Many of the movements toward liberalism in the past have been evangelistically motivated, including in New York. Now, the difference with Tim is that he's not a pragmatist. He's not a pragmatist. Now, he does want to be very intentional.

He wants to be very thoughtful, wants to be very planned as much as possible, but he's a revivalist. I mean, at his core, he's an ecclesial, a church revivalist. And in that sense, and not a Finney-ite.

We're talking the Edwards-Whitfield tradition of revival in there that he learned from Richard Loveless at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And so he very much believes in getting the gospel out and contextualizing it, but not compromising.

His view of contextualization is that we are clarifying the offense. We don't want people to be offended because we're jerks. We don't want them to be offended because we're adding a bunch of other things on top of the gospel.

We want them to be offended by the gospel itself. Now, of course, we ultimately want them to be saved, but he's very clear in his contextualization. It's clearing things away so that people will have to confront the gospel itself.

And if that's what's offensive to them, so be it. We're not going to change that, but there's not a Finney-ite bone in his body. Well, I got to tell you, if I don't take anything away from our time together today, it's going to be clearing the offense away.

Wait, say it one more time. Yeah, clearing everything so people can be confronted by the offense of the gospel. Yeah, you just know what that's like. If you're an evangelist and you're just mean, you're a jerk, all that sort of stuff, people look at you.

They're not thinking about Christ and his finished work and his claims. Or if you're saying, hey, become a Christian. And to do that, I need you to put on a suit and put on a tie and vote for this party and do that.

And like this music, people sit there and say, well, I guess I can't be a Christian because I don't like organ music. Well, I mean, that's not what you should be offended by. Like we're trying to present to you the claims of Christ himself.

So yeah, that's what he means by that. But you really have to clarify that because others do use contextualization in pragmatic terms, which tend to result in that equation with liberalism. Okay, so before we, this book has been called not so much a biography, but a bibliography, which is very accurate.

And we're gonna talk about some of the influences that have shaped Keller. But before we do that, we have Colin Hansen, right? Oh, he's the managing editor and vice president and all this stuff. And here we are just sitting and talking about Tim Keller.

Why should we be sitting here spending an hour talking about Tim Keller? Is this hero worship? Is this what's wrong with, are we what's wrong with evangelicalism? Well, I think that the beautiful thing about Tim is that personality wise and conviction wise, he doesn't let you dwell on him.

First of all, I think we take for granted the fact that he's pastor. That's just who he is and what he, just like you said, he'd been called to ministry basically from the moment that he became a Christian.

What do we do in ministry, Sean? We're pointing people to Jesus all the time, like not to ourselves, but to Jesus. When I was trying to figure out how to close that book, I thought, yes, when I read Tim's books and I listen to his sermons, I come away with an appreciation of him, but my affections toward Christ, that's what is happening there.

He doesn't end his sermons and you think, oh my gosh, that was so eloquent. Maybe you think some of that, but you're thinking, oh, Christ is amazing. Look at the work of Christ here. That's what you focus on.

That's true of all the best preachers. Exactly, so that's one thing. The second thing is that personality wise and by conviction, when you talk to him, he's always going to deflect. He's always gonna deflect.

He's gonna say, hmm, let's kind of think of that from an analyst perspective and say, well, this is what I learned from Jonathan Edwards. This is what I learned from C .S. Lewis. This is what I learned from Barbara Boyd, from Elizabeth Elliott, from John Owen.

He's just always deflecting you toward others. And so that's why I felt comfortable and why he felt comfortable working with me on that book was because it's a book about Tim, but ultimately it's pointing you to Christ, hopefully.

And also it's introducing you to all of these other people that you might already know well, like Lewis or Edwards, but other people like, or Elizabeth Elliott or people like Barbara Boyd or even Ed Clowney that you maybe haven't heard of before.

And so that's what makes it easy, I think, for me to talk about it as well as for him because I've been a student of evangelical history for a couple of decades now. And that book was an amazing adventure for me of being able to tell that story just through the lens of one particular person who experienced a lot of it.

So, sorry, let me put a finer point on this question. How influential is Tim Keller? Well, I mean, I think that's a great question and probably in our lifetimes, we won't be able to answer it. Hopefully Jesus comes today or tomorrow and none of that will matter.

But if the Lord should tarry, I think we're kind of in a situation there where we'll probably remember him along the lines of J .I. Packer or John Stott. Usually when somebody is remembered among us, it's because we can still read their books.

I think Tim has left us quite a few books that can still be profitably read for years to come. One of the interesting, okay, so I agree with you and that's true. Having said that, because so many of his writings have been so contextually situated, does that mean that perhaps they're gonna have a shorter lifespan than say someone like John Piper?

Yeah, well, the thing that's common about Tim and John is they're both voluminous in their writing. So it's a wide range. So some of Tim's work is that way. In fact, as the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, one of the specific things he said to me is, I don't think you're gonna be able to go back and just rehash my stuff.

You're gonna have to do this own, so the Keller Center doesn't exist to perpetuate all of his old stuff, but in that spirit to try to do the same thing in our day. And the generation after us is gonna have to do the same thing.

But in talking to my friend, Kevin DeYoung about this, we've both agreed that that's not a problem with his work on prayer or on suffering or on forgiveness. They're all situated in a specific moment in time, but they're universal or marriage even.

Yeah, maybe the situation in 25, 50 years will be different in terms of the challenges people face in marriage, but the truth of what he's getting at, that doesn't change. I probably have more confidence that something like Center Church will still be valuable a while later, just because very few people have done a textbook exploration of that many different things.

It's true. But by his own admission, his concept of theological vision is one that's not like a doctrinal confession. It has to be revisited. Right, and re-imagined in every new context, yeah. Yeah, so he'd be the last person to say, oh yeah, you need to be spending your whole lifetime regurgitating stuff that I said.

That's just not the way he is. Okay, so let's talk about some of his influences. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. Here's the list. Now, see here, as I was reading Oh, you wrote it down. Okay, I thought you just had the table of contents.

Clowney, Packer, Luther, Stott, Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Schaefer, Bruce Henderson, maybe less known there, Dick Merritt, Barbara Boyd, Martin Lloyd-Jones, Ender Varsity, Cathy, Christie, that's his wife. That's his wife, maiden name, yeah.

Sproul, Schaefer, Gordon Conwell, and there's a whole bunch of people there, Lincoln, Lane, Kline, Elizabeth Elliott. Roger Nicole, Richard Loveless, Kennedy Kennedy Smart, a pastor. John Owen, Whitfield, Mottyer.

I don't know if I'm Mottyer, Alec Mottyer. If I would have gone to seminary, would I know how to say that? Yes. Okay, I also say Karl Barth, if anybody's wondering. Dick Lucas, Harvey Kahn, Jack Miller, Richard Lentz, the big four, I don't even remember what that is.

That's the social critics, that's Charles Taylor, Alistair McGrath, yeah. We're gonna come back and talk about them in a minute. Alistair McIntyre, I'm sorry, I meant to say there. Totally fine, Tom Holland, Michael Horton.

So that's a lot. How many hours are we gonna be here? Can you, maybe you can't, can you try to pick three that, I bet you can't do this. You're probably not smart enough or handsome enough or godly enough.

Could you just talk about maybe three that even as you worked on this, stood out to you as the most significant in his life? Well, that's kind of an easy, that's actually a softball because he defines it himself in reason for God.

His three are clearly Lewis, Edwards, and then his wife, Kathy. Okay, riff on it, brother, take it away. So Mako Fujimura was an elder at Redeemer in the early 1990s and mid -1990s. The artist. And he's the artist, the visual artist.

He said, we always knew when Tim did not have time to prepare his sermons because he would just quote C .S. Lewis. And he said, not that it was bad, it was actually amazing. But Lewis is the one person outside of scripture where if you just told Tim, you've got to talk about something and you have no time to prepare, he was just going to start rattling off Lewis.

He's significantly different from Lewis in a lot of different ways. He's not an academic, he's not a novelist, he's not a fantasy writer, things like that. But when it comes to engaging public intellect and especially apologetics, mere Christianity was one of the first things that Tim ever read on his path toward conversion.

So that's Lewis. Edwards comes in as one of the closest role models for Tim because the terminology that Tim himself used that I grabbed out of center church is the terminology of an ecclesial revivalist.