Understanding Tim Keller's "Social Justice"

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and as my grandfather likes to say, things are getting crazier out there, are they not?

00:09

Cancel culture is on the move. I know a lake near me was renamed because it was named after, I guess, a

00:14

Southern soldier in the Civil War. I didn't even know. Hardly anyone probably did. There was a bird

00:19

I noticed, a mccowns or mcgowns, I think pigeon or something, maybe it was a finch, but anyway, the guy who discovered it was also a soldier in the

00:28

Civil War from the South. Of course, they had to rename that. People are just depressed looking at this bird,

00:33

I guess. I don't know. I mean, he's the one that discovered it, so I mean, that's why it was named after him, not because he fought in the war or something.

00:44

It's getting silly, guys. It's really, really, really getting silly out there. I don't know if you noticed that Jim Wallace now is in the crosshairs because he had deleted an article at Sojourner's written by a younger guy against the

00:57

Catholic Church, saying the Catholic Church is racist and Jim Wallace has allies in the Catholic Church, so he deleted it, and the young guy who wrote it called

01:04

Jim Wallace this insult. He's an old white man. Yeah. So Jim Wallace, who's gone along with pretty much every liberal agenda, he's the quintessential evangelical progressive.

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I mean, I don't know why I would call him evangelical. He's called himself that, that's why. But he's being eaten by the very thing he created.

01:24

His own monster is now coming and eating him, and I think he's stepped down from being editor -in -chief or something.

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He's still president. I don't know, but Jim Wallace, the acid's eating him, and the question is how many other things will the acid eat that we care about before it gets to more progressives, and that has always been the question.

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John Muir, the Sierra Club chief, environmentalist guy, right? I mean, he's presented that way in California and a lot of the national parks.

01:49

He's now in the crosshairs. The Audubon Society is searching into the racial views,

01:54

I guess, or there's, I don't even remember, sexist views, probably racial views of the founder of their organization. It never ends, and I've seen some liberals try to mock conservatives.

02:04

Whenever conservatives lift a finger to criticize something, they'll say, oh, that's cancel culture. Well, not exactly.

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Cancel culture is really part of the social justice religion and it's a form of judgment. It's their equivalent to judgment.

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It's social ostracism, there's no forgiveness in it.

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You will always be marked, there's no leniency, there's no asking for what is it that you actually meant in this.

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There's no trying to give any kind of grace whatsoever.

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It is an immediate, even if there's just an insinuation, it's an immediate cancel. That's cancel culture, and so it is quite different than conservatives who are looking at a big, a canon of literature or the positions that someone has held over time and then saying, hey, there might be a problem with this person.

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Much different, and so I wanted to explain that real quick, but we're seeing reparations now.

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And I mean, the real kind being advocated, and what I mean by the real kind, I mean like people that are going out into the suburbs of Portland, protesters wanting to take it from people that are middle class in the suburbs, because they stole it.

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It doesn't, their property doesn't really belong to them. And so I don't know how much longer this can continue.

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This is threatening some violence, and one of the things I thought of as I was looking at some videos, you can go online and see these horrible videos of people intimidating people in their homes at night, in some cases, shouting outside, shouting at them at their, they're putting lights on their windows.

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I mean, it's horrible, horrible things. You wonder where the police are in all this, this harassment. And so I'm watching this, and I'm thinking to myself, evangelicals who have tried to take this third way approach, who have tried to say, yes, the money that you have doesn't belong to you.

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Obviously it belongs to God. We all know this, we're stewards of it. But the money that God has given you to steward, it's not really your money because of systemic and historic injustice.

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You're benefiting from systems of white privilege, et cetera. So you're just getting this money unfairly, and really, if you don't give it away, it's robbery, it's stealing, because it doesn't really belong to you.

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It belongs to someone else, and it was stolen from them. Now, in the normal course of affairs, if something's stolen from you, like your phone, then immediately you want it back, or you want compensation for it.

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That is restitution. That's biblical, right? So you pursue actual justice in that situation.

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Now, if you're gonna say that the wealth that you've gotten from the sweat of your brow, hard work, inheriting from your parents, whatever, that wealth is all, or in part at least, stolen from other people, minorities to whom it really does belong.

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How do you keep back something like what's happening in Portland from happening? How do you keep that from happening?

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That's just the logic. You're gonna want your phone back if your phone's stolen. So if someone stole property that belongs to you, and you're told that in this narrative, this complicated narrative of systemic injustice, then aren't you gonna wanna go and steal it?

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You see, this is where it doesn't make sense to me. For evangelicals to go down this path, for social justice evangelicals who say, "'Well, yes, it's not yours.

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"'It belongs to these other people, "'but you should voluntarily give it. "'The government shouldn't force you, "'and it shouldn't be stolen from you.'"

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Or however they phrase that. Like, it's not the government's job to take it from you. You should just voluntarily give it because it belongs to these other oppressed people.

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If you go down that path, something's gotta give because you can't have it both ways. You don't treat normal thievery that way.

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And so this is, it's part of the logic of the social justice movement when you see people out in the suburbs demanding reparations in the form of give us your property.

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That's just the logic of it. What did you expect to happen if you tell them a story about how they've been stolen from and disenfranchised by those people in the suburbs?

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So anyway, that's also happening. Democrat evangelicals, that's another crazy thing, but something that we expected, those of us who are paying attention to this stuff.

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I don't have all the screenshots, but several people this last week during the DNC convention have come out either in favor of Democrats, evangelicals, or just stepping up to the line as close as they can get without endorsing the

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Democratic Party, but telling you it's okay to vote for a Democrat. And I've compared this to like Nazi Germany.

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If you were in Nazi Germany, would you say, well, hey, the Nazi Party, they have a really good green movement, which they did.

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They had a green movement. They have, you know, Hitler's a vegetarian. They care about the environment. They really do.

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And yeah, I understand the whole like ethnic or biological determinism. I understand what they're doing to the

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Jews, but they also got this other good point. You'd say that's crazy. And I don't understand how someone reading the

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Democratic platform, understanding the positions of Democrats can get past their abortion stance.

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And we get accused often of saying it's all about abortion. No, it's not. I think every single belief that the Democrat Party has just about is wrong.

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Most of them are blatantly anti -biblical. I think they're wrong on the economy. I think they're wrong on the environment.

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I think they're wrong in just about everything. But all that aside, I think it is a much bigger priority that there is a current

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Holocaust going on in the United States of America. And I don't see evangelical social justice warriors wanting to talk about it or phrase it in those terms.

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They really want to talk about things that play to a Democrat narrative.

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They want to talk about Black Lives Matter stuff. They don't want to talk about what's right in front of them, the actual injustice.

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If you're going to create a hierarchy of the injustices in this country, abortion would be at the top of that list. Would it not?

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It's murder. And I don't know. I just don't know how these guys can justify voting for a

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Democrat. But more on that later. I'm going to try to keep gathering some of these screenshots and maybe

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I'll bring some of that information to you. We'll talk about it in more depth. But yes, Democrat evangelicals are taking the masks off here in 2020.

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I want to talk today though, this is the main thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about Tim Keller because Tim Keller, to his credit, did something that I have not hardly ever seen from evangelicals that are blue check mark on Twitter.

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This is actually the reason I still have Twitter. I've thought about getting rid of Twitter so many times. The only reason

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I think I still have it is because sometimes you get interactions like this. And I know I won't have Twitter forever. By the way, guys, just side tangent here.

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The reason I do what I do in these videos is I really want you to think for yourself. I want to equip you to do that as much as possible and to just critically engage what you're listening to.

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I don't think I'll be doing this forever. I never intended to do this forever. I made a video about Southeastern and things kind of skyrocketed from there.

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But my intention has always been for you guys to engage this stuff yourself. I'm taking a break from other things in my life in some ways to, well,

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I still do have a side business and things like that. I have to pay the bills. But because of your support, because of the patrons and just all of you guys who pray for me too,

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I've been able to do some of this. But my intention is for you guys to think and you guys to recognize these errors when they come in.

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And so that's why I'm committed right now to trying to put out resources, not just the videos, but writing resources for understanding this.

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And so today, I wanna fairly, as much as we possibly can, fairly understand

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Tim Keller's point of view. Represent it accurately and do so with grace.

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And I think Tim Keller, to his credit, when he interacted with me on Twitter, he was a gentleman. He did so with grace. I told him

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I was praying for him as far as his cancer is concerned. And I have a lot of respect for him for doing this,

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I'll be honest with you. Now, it doesn't mean I agree with him, but he was very gracious, in my opinion, in this interaction at least.

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And so I do wanna be very fair -minded about this and present to you, at least from my perspective, what

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I believe is actually taking place. And Tim Keller was not a nasty guy at all or anything like that.

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And so I'm gonna take you through the Twitter conversation. And then, which to me, I kind of thought it was incoherent.

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It didn't make sense to me. So I'm gonna give you my thoughts on it. And then I'm going to play for you a segment from a, well, it should be, we'll see if it makes it in or not, but an addendum.

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So at the end of a book, for the book, "'Social Justice Goes to Church," which should be coming out here in the next few weeks.

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And I'm excited about that. And if you like this, if you like this addendum, then you'll like the book because it's a lot of research just like this.

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And so I'm going to play for you, kind of, I'm gonna get my audio book voice on, we're gonna do an audio book, and I'm gonna play for you just my reading of this addendum on Tim Keller.

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And it's gonna give you kind of a biographical sketch of Tim Keller as it pertains to his views on social justice.

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So you can understand more where he's coming from. And so we'll do that at the end, but I wanna go over this first.

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This is a Twitter conversation, which I had with Dr. Keller. I think it's Dr. Keller, right?

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And so it starts out with this. I said, I quoted him, because I've been reading his sermons,

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I've been reading his articles and his books. And I came across this quote,

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I came across a bunch of quotes, but this is one of them that was just interesting to me. He says, the people who read, who

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I read, sorry, let me start over. The people I read, who were the disciples of Marx were not villains.

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They were not fools, they cared about people. There are vast populations where there's no upward mobility. See, the people who read

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Marx said, we have to do something about this. Tim Keller in 1997 said this. And so I just posted that as kind of like an interesting, like, wow, look at what

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I uncovered. This is, I wasn't expecting language quite that radical coming from Tim Keller.

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And of course, there, I mean, I was called all sorts of names and I'm sure Tim Keller probably got called names too.

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I didn't see that really, but I'm sure on his wall he did. But I got called all sorts of names and said that I'm making an argument, which

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I mean, I really wasn't making an argument, I was just quoting him. Said I was quoting him out of context.

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I'm like, I can show you the context. I mean, it's, I don't think it changed. I mean, I admitted later on, or I made sure to say that,

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Tim Keller does critique Marxism. He's not a Marxist. I don't think anyone, and I don't know if there's anyone who seriously thinks

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Tim Keller is a classical Marxist. I think when people say he's a Marxist, they're saying that he uses Marxist ideas.

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They're not saying he is just like Karl Marx, obviously. Karl Marx wasn't a theist. Tim Keller is a theist.

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So there's that big gulf. And Tim Keller critiques Marxism by critiquing atheism and materialism.

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So obviously, that is not, what I was trying to communicate was that he's a Marxist in every way.

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But here's what happens. And I'm gonna see if I can,

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I don't know if I can do this. Let's see. I'm probably not gonna find his tweet.

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He basically responded and said that Marx is a problem, that he doesn't agree with Marx, which, yeah, clearly, we knew that he doesn't agree with Marx and everything.

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But then, so here's the curious thing. This is what he says here, if I can find it.

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He goes, talking about oppression, justice, et cetera, doesn't make one a Marxist. It makes one a student of the

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Bible. Okay, but that's not the issue here, right? So it's not like, no one, in my opinion,

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I can't find anyone, at least, in my experience here, no one I know of thinks talking about oppression makes someone a

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Marxist. It's not the talking about oppression. It's the way in which someone talks about oppression. Conservatives talk about oppression, right?

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Capitalists talk about oppression. Capitalists talk about it all the time, the oppressive national government and what the government does to businesses.

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That's oppression, right? So there's, oppression's talked about. That's not the issue. So to me, this just muddies the waters.

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It's not clear at all. It's not the nature of the conversation. It's the assumptions brought to the conversation that are the issue.

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I quoted Tim Keller later on, and part of this was to clarify kind of where he comes down on Marx, but also to just point out, like, he's got a soft spot here somewhere for Marx.

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This is what he said in 2000. The only person who has had this high view of work, except for God, was

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Karl Marx. Karl Marx held up the common worker, but Marx didn't ground his high view of work in a

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God who loves to get his hands dirty, and a God who, with his hands in the dirt. And let's just give

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Tim Keller the benefit of the doubt. He's probably overstating his case in this sermon. He's saying that, you know, because,

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I mean, to say that Karl Marx is, has the highest view of work equivalent to, or comparative to somehow the view

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God has of work, and he's the only one, I mean, that is pretty, I mean, look, if you talk a lot, here's the thing, if you talk a lot, you're gonna make mistakes.

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I'm gonna make them, we're all gonna make them. And maybe Tim Keller made one here. But this is not, like, this is not an easy mistake in my mind to make.

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Like, to say that Karl Marx had the same kind of view of work that God has, or the same priority of work, he views it in this high way that God views it, that,

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I mean, that's a real oops. And so when something like this comes out, what I'd expect, if I said something crazy,

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I'd expect to go back and say, okay, if someone brought this up, like, you know what? That wasn't a good moment for me, and I'm sorry

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I said that. You know, this, I was trying to overstate my case, and it just went, it went bad.

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I don't really agree with this. I recant that, or whatever. I mean, but there's no distancing himself from these kinds of statements when these statements come up, as far as I know, as far as I can tell.

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So I quoted Tim Keller again. And then Tim Keller kind of gets back, Tim Keller and I kind of start going back and forth, right?

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And I said to him, so I retweeted where he said, talking about oppression and justice doesn't make one a Marxist, it makes one a student of the

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Bible. I retweeted him, and I said, how about assuming economics is a zero -sum game, have -nots have a right to the resources of the haves, and it's

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Christians' job to do redistributive justice for the purpose of reducing disparities. It's not classical

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Marxism, but what would you call it? So I'm trying to ask him, how do you represent your view? What do you call your view?

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Because this, it sounds an awful lot like you're getting some of these principles from Marxism.

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So what do we call this then? And I know it's not classical Marxism, because you're not an atheist, I get that. Now, all of these views are things that I found in Tim Keller's writings.

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I'm summarizing some of them, but these are all things that I have primary sources for. They're not things that I'm just throwing out there.

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I'm trying to represent his view as accurately as I possibly can. And so then, so he gives a

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Calvin quote from the Institutes, and in my opinion, so I read this quote, and maybe

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I'll just read it for you here real quick. So he says, I don't believe in zero -sum economics or redistributive economics.

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Those are secular abstractions that understand obligation only in secular terms. Now, notice what he's doing here.

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He keeps saying secularism. That's the difference between his view and these other views is he's not a secularist, which

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I already get that. I think a lot of us get that. We know you're not a secularist. I believe, like John Calvin, that when you see your neighbor in need, you have more goods than they.

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You have some obligation to give to them because of your relationship to God and to others as fellow image bearers.

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Okay, now, where's the obligation coming from? This is the important part. Is the obligation coming from God?

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Is it something that you do voluntarily without the coercion of any humans, but it's just out of obedience to God, you wanna share what you have?

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And those commands in scripture, the ones that he usually uses are commands that are given to believers, that if you see your brother in need, it's believers specifically.

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But Keller, I think, he expands that. And there's nothing wrong with giving. I mean, we should give.

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We should be giving people to people who aren't even believers, but the commands usually are about believers. Anyway, so Keller says you have this obligation.

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So I'm with him if he means that God requires us to engage in charity.

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I'm with him on that, right? But that's an obligation to God and it's a personal obligation that we have to God.

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And you can't really set the parameters of that. It's like we have an obligation to tithe to the church, right?

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It's not something that really should be coerced, right? And so I can sort of go with him on this, but here's what he says.

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Calvin says, each Christian will so consider himself a debtor to his neighbors that he ought, in exercising kindness towards them, to set no other limit than the end of his resources.

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Why? Calvin says, say about the neighbor that you owe nothing for any service of his, but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits which

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God has bound you to himself. You will say he has deserved something far different from me.

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Yet, what has the Lord deserved? Remember not to consider men's evil intention, but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions.

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And with its beauty and dignity, allures us to love and embrace them. Okay, and this is, this is, that's friendly, right?

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I can take a little friendly jousting here. He says, you may think Calvin is wrong too, but now make an argument that he was a

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Marxist. So again, I'm quoting Keller. I didn't ever make an argument that he was a

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Marxist in this thread, but Keller's sensitive to this. That's, I guess, what he and a bunch of other people interpreted me as doing.

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And so here's how I responded. I said, yeah, regarding that Calvin quote, that's an excellent description of charity based on voluntary obedience to God and according to circumstances set by his sovereign plan, right?

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So this is, someone comes into your path. This is in your daily life. You see someone, you're, all right, so this is

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God. God is the one bringing these people into your path. Much different than saying that have -nots on the basis of their need have a right to resources not distributed to them belonging to the haves.

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And it's true, those two things are very different. They may not seem on the surface like they are, but you really start thinking about it, they do.

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And it really comes back to the whole like stealing analogy. Like if you are stealing from someone, if you have resources that belong to them, then they have a right to those resources, right?

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Remember the, you should go back if you, if the rights language doesn't make sense. Go back to the episode

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I did a week ago, a week and a half ago on rights and responsibilities, right? A right and a responsibility are two sides of the same coin, right?

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So this, when you start using this language to insinuate that people who have certain needs, however those are defined by the way,

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I mean in America, most people, even the poorest among us are rich by world standards, but however you define that, if you think that somehow they have a right to things that are not in their possession, that belong to other people in a sense, then essentially what you're saying is they have a positive right.

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They have, this is the kind of right the Soviet Union granted. This is kind of right the Democratic Party's trying to grant.

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You have a right to free healthcare, right? This isn't a right to engage in the responsibilities

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God has set for you. So to raise your family, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right? And I went over what those mean.

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It's not happiness in the sense that we think of happiness today. It's pursuing the creation of your own wealth in an economy, arranging things in your own property the way you want them arranged.

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I mean, that's what Jefferson was meaning by that. And so these are rights that the government cannot infringe on, all right?

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So the difference between positive and negative rights, if you go down the path of people have a right to stuff belonging to other people, then now you're in the positive rights language and you don't have responsibilities to ground these rights anymore.

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And so I do believe this is antithetical to not just the founding, but this is antithetical to the understanding that I think we're given in scripture of what rights are.

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And so, and you go back and watch my video on rights and responsibilities according to the founding fathers and you'll see more of my discussion on that.

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But that's very different than saying that for the sake of charity and responsibility before God as a

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Christian, you should give away the resources that God has allowed you to steward, right? It's not that the, it's not that people in need that you owe it to them because somehow they have a claim on your stuff.

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It's because out of worship for God and love for them, you're being, you're giving, you're acting in a merciful manner, in a grace -filled manner.

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Justice and mercy are two different things. If we don't get those things right, we have a different gospel if we conflate these.

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You can very easily, if we apply them to the gospel, have a different gospel. And so, and so that's my concern is when we start using this kind of language that Tim Keller uses often, it sounds like mercy and justice get conflated.

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And so I'm all for the mercy. I think Calvin was all for the mercy, but that's not social justice. And so that's why

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I made that distinction. So Tim Keller comes back and he says, no, no, you are still leaving

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God out of the picture. I have to do for my neighbor whatever God says I need to do, which I say, amen. That includes voluntary charity.

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Amen again. But it also requires advocacy for the poor. Okay, what does that mean? He says, see my articles.

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And I've read a lot of his articles. I still don't quite know what he means. My assumption is this is challenging systemic oppressions, that kind of thing.

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So if that's what he's talking about, does that open the door for socialism? I mean,

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I don't know. What do you mean by advocacy for the poor? I mean, we should advocate for the rights of the poor.

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Remember, rights attached to responsibilities. If they are not, if something is barring them unjustly from working because of who they are, for some external reason, they're not allowed to work.

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And so the government is telling them that they can't provide for their family because we'll take care of you.

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We're the government. Well, then I'm gonna advocate for the right of the poor to provide for their family, right? That's what that would mean in my mind.

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I don't know that Keller is talking about that. He says Marxism is as, so here's where he goes.

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This is where like when he, the first part of this sort of interacts with what

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I was saying. Not, I mean, not completely. I'm just largely in agreement with it. Obviously we both believe in God. We both believe in responsibility.

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I never left God out of the picture. I'm certainly not advocating some kind of secular economic system, but now he, listen to what he does here.

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See my articles. Marxism is as secular as libertarianism. It reduces how you help the poor to one thing, either a socialistic or voluntaristic economics, both are reductionistic.

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It seems you're saying that I'm not a Marxist. I'm on the libertarian's voluntaristic side as Treebird says, I'm not on anyone's side in this debate as you set it up.

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Now, number one, I didn't set up the debate. I'm not a libertarian. So I didn't set it up that way.

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I believe when you're born into this world, you have a definition given to you from God. And that includes responsibilities to, because of the gender that you have.

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You have responsibilities because of the community that you're born in. You have responsibilities because of the family that you're part of.

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You have responsibilities because of the church that you're part of. You have responsibilities. And I don't know that that my understanding of responsibilities is compatible, at least with the forms of libertarianism

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I'm acquainted with, which seem to just go back to the non -aggression principle and free market. So I don't believe in autonomous individuals.

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I don't believe you're a blank slate. I think you have responsibilities when you're born here. So I'm a little mystified.

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What do you mean? I'm not a libertarian. I'm not saying that you have to be a libertarian. So why is he bringing this up?

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So he's assuming something here, which, and I didn't correct him on it, but this is confusing.

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And so what he's trying to do, it looks like, is he's trying to say that Marxism and libertarianism are both secular.

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They're not rooted in responsibility to God. Now, that is true.

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I think that is true. Now, there are Christian libertarians who I think don't think that way. And there are

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Marxist Christians who will like, well, you know, like some evangelicals who are trying to root Marxist ideas in God.

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But that's not fundamentally what we're talking about. We're talking about, you can't just put

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God at the foundation for it and then say, well, these are all morally wrong things.

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But if we put God at the foundation, now all of a sudden they're morally right. It doesn't work that way. Marxism is wrong, not just because it's based on dialectic materialism.

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Marxism is wrong because stealing is wrong. And you can't build a foundation and say, well, God says stealing is okay, right?

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Which no one says, obviously. But I'm taking my example to the extreme to show you what

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I mean by that. You don't just add God to the equation and now, oh, it's morally right.

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And so I don't think we're getting at the crux of the matter here. Because the crux of the matter here is, where is the obligation?

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Where is it coming from? And why is there an obligation to give to people who are quote unquote poor?

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Why is there an obligation? If you wanna say that because God wants us to be merciful to others, then absolutely,

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I'm with you all day on that. If you're saying because they have a moral right to your stuff because it's somehow been stolen from them or it's not fair that you worked harder and have more or somehow there were barriers that they had that you didn't have and therefore it belongs to them, as soon as you start using that kind of language, not with you anymore on that.

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And I don't know how you escape that kind of thing being coerced. Because if it's stealing, then someone's,

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I mean, in the normal course of events, something's stolen, the police come, they rectify the situation. That's bringing true justice.

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If you start using that language, then what's to keep you from sliding into, well, yeah, the government should impose some kind of a redistribution.

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I just don't think you have an answer for it anymore. So anyway, let's see.

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I think that was the last thing. Let's see. So I said, oh, so I'm, this is what

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I said to Tim Keller. You've compared failing to share with the poor to robbery, injustice, and failing to meet an obligation owed because they have a right to those things, they need, not granted to them, due to inequitable distribution.

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I'm not sure how adding God makes this morally better. Now, I thought my point was clear. I'm saying these are the moral things that you're, and I'm taking all from primary sources that I have of Keller.

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These are all things you've said. And so you're basically saying, you're saying robbery. You're saying that the haves have taken from the have -nots in some way.

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There's some kind of immoral, it's immoral that they have more than other people.

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I'm not with you on that. That's not immoral. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm saying, you know, this parallels

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Marxist theory. I don't see how it doesn't. Not saying you're a Marxist, but there's some shared ideas here somehow, or maybe there's a coincidence, right?

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But I don't know how adding God and our responsibility to God to give to the poor makes this morally any better.

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And so here's, I can, I'm gonna have to go to Tim Keller's response here.

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So he says, I gotta thumb through his Twitter now to find it.

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He says, respectfully, I'm not adding God to some existing secular system or account of human behavior.

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Here we go. Account of human behavior or of morality. I hope to be building a way of doing justice around what

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God commands and requires. So his defense is, I'm not starting with a secular system.

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It's not my starting point. I'm just trying to look at what the Bible says and grapple with that. To which

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I would, if I kept this going, which I didn't, I would say, okay, where do you get this idea that it's somehow immoral to have more?

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That's robbery to the poor. That's what I would ask of you. Give me the Bible verses on this and let's have a Bible study.

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But I, you know, I didn't wanna keep going back and forth. It was gracious enough of him to give me my time. Well, I'll show you how he ends it.

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And it was kind of a way out. He says, my last article is coming out, right, goes into further depth on this.

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Many of the things I'm saying assume a number of background theological beliefs that obviously many don't share with me. But in the footnotes,

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I will speak to these background issues, at least to make them more visible. And he tells what that's gonna be. So basically he's saying,

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I got an article coming out. I'm gonna address this further. And so my response was just that I look forward to it.

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And he liked it. He liked my comment when I said I look forward to it. And so I think that was a very pleasant exchange, but honestly, like,

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I don't think I, we're talking past each other. I don't think Keller was going to the root issues of what

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I was bringing up. Now, interestingly, this is, he tweets later.

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This is last night. This is actually like this morning. It was after midnight. He tweeted, where is it?

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Maybe it wasn't after midnight. I'm looking at a different tweet here. Hold on. All right, so he does it again.

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This is after a lot of this, after much of our discussion. He tweets out, talking about oppression, justice, et cetera, doesn't make one a

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Marxist. It makes one a student of the Bible. So he doubles down on that to which, again, I've already given you my critique, but like talk about like not engaging the actual issues here and talk about not ever, not ever giving an explanation for the quote on Marx and on followers of Marx.

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And today he's putting out more on, he says, if you're looking for a longer treatment from tweets yesterday,

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I go into more detail here. And so, and I've read this article. I did a whole review on this article.

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So he's been, this is clearly, this has been on his mind both yesterday and today. And again,

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I think he was respectful. I appreciate it. I think it was a good back and forth. Now, I'm just a dude.

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Like I'm, I am a guy making videos for my wife's laundry room and have a, you know, my little side business

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I do. And I just wanna be a faithful guy in the community I live in. And that's kind of, that's my shtick.

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I'm not looking to be in Tim Keller's circles. In fact,

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I was talking to someone about this yesterday. I don't wanna be a celebrity. I don't wanna be a celebrity.

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I know, and I'll tell you guys this, unless the Lord does a real work on my heart, like I can't handle it. My pride,

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I don't think, I couldn't handle that level. I would just, something, God would have to do a real work on me.

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But not only that, I just don't have a desire to be at that level. I like to analyze things. I like to write.

34:33

I like to write music. That's my favorite thing, really. But I like to produce things.

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I don't, I'm not necessarily the guy that likes to just be out there in front and everyone kinda looking to me for answers to things.

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But, and I realize some people treat me that way. But I'm just telling you, that's not who I wanna be. That's not who I am.

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I'm a little guy. And so for Tim Keller to interact with someone who's just so outside of his circles, kudos to him.

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Kudos to him for doing that. Don't think he hit the mark, but kudos to him for doing it. So, without further ado though,

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I would like to end this podcast with a bit of an audio book. It is Storytime with John.

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That's right, Storytime with John, where I am going to read for you kind of some biographical information, a short biography as it concerns, pertains social justice and Tim Keller.

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And so this is for educational purposes. This is so you can kind of understand, I think, more where Keller's coming from.

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I think it's important that we represent each other in a manner that is accurate. And so I'm always open to people that have further information.

35:46

Oftentimes when people say that I'm taking something out of context or I'm misrepresenting, they don't usually have an actual, an argument or a reason for it.

35:54

Usually it's just they don't like what I said. But if you actually do have arguments or reasons and I miss something,

36:01

I make mistakes, I'm human, then hey, I wanna hear it. That's just what I, that's who I wanna be. That's hopefully who

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I am. So, but anyway, this has been pretty thoroughly researched, what I'm about to share with you.

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This is like primary sources all over the place. There's really nothing said that I know of that doesn't have backup, a real backing to it.

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A lot of the sources are taken from the Tim Keller Sherman Archive. A lot of them are from articles. I think there's a video in there.

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There's his books. I mean, it's really a pretty thorough interaction with Tim Keller.

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And so if you are a patron of mine, you have access to this in its print form.

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You have the sources, you have all of it. It's all right there. So if you're a patron of mine, you have special access to that.

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If you're not, then you get to listen to the audio and hopefully you enjoy it. Hopefully it helps make sense of some things for you.

36:58

So God bless you. And I hope that you have a wonderful weekend. And one last announcement before we get to that audio book reading.

37:09

I just wanna thank all of you for praying for my father -in -law, Frank. He came home from the hospital two days ago and he's still in rough shape, but we're just not even sure how he's able to come home.

37:24

It's just, the Lord has been very gracious with him and your prayers have just meant a lot to my family. So thank you so much for that.

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And God bless you. Have a wonderful weekend. Tim Keller and progressive evangelicalism.

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Perhaps no one has done more to narrow the gap between progressive evangelicalism and mainstream evangelicalism than Tim Keller.

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Keller grew up in a mainline Lutheran church. As a teenager during his confirmation class, a young Lutheran cleric and social activist introduced him to a

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Christian version of social liberation grounded in a spirit of love. However, the Kellers soon started attending a conservative

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Methodist church, which helped reinforce their son's more traditional conception of God and the reality of hell.

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What he could not harmonize as a teenager, the ethics of the new left and Orthodox Christianity, he started learning to reconcile in college.

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While attending Bucknell University in his home state of Pennsylvania, Keller learned the reigning ideologies of the time from radical professors, including the

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Neo -Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He was attracted to this critique of American bourgeoisie society, as well as social activism.

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Keller described himself and fellow students as wanting to change the world by rejecting things like the military industrial complex and a society of inequities and materialism.

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Instead, they promoted peace and understanding, attended peace and civil rights marches, and shut down the college to debate the morality of the

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Cambodian invasion in 1970. Though things like segregation and systemic violence against blacks bothered

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Keller before college, they became an occasion for him to doubt Christianity itself after his arrival.

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It was hard enough for the young student to maintain his faith while regularly hearing philosophical objections to it, living a double life and struggling with deep depression.

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There were times he wondered if he was just a cog in a machine determined by his environment.

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However, the spiritual crisis he experienced as a student was also the result of a tension between his more activist secular friends and Christians who considered

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Martin Luther King Jr. to be a social threat. Keller had a dilemma. While he was emotionally drawn to social justice, its practitioners were moral relativists who could not ground their convictions in an objective standard.

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When Christian evangelist John Guess came to campus and boldly challenged protesters for their inability to morally reason,

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Keller was there. At the same time, he was disenchanted with Orthodox Christianity, which he believed supported things like segregation and apartheid.

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Fortunately for Keller, the evangelical left offered a version of the faith which married the ethics of the new left with the metaphysical foundation

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Christianity provided. He began to realize he could have both. Keller wrote that things began to change for him after finding a band of brothers who grounded their concern for justice in the character of God.

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He became part of a campus fellowship sponsored by InterVarsity, which reflected the counterculture mindset of Bucknell by keeping their ministry nontraditional, spontaneous and anti -institutional.

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It was there Keller first truly came to Christ. He also learned to navigate the cultural battle between people against commie pinkos, rabble rousing in the street and the radicals who protested on those streets.

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In 1970, Keller heard a message which revolutionized his approach to political issues. Some of his friends attended

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InterVarsity's missions conference called Urbana 70, where the Harlem evangelist Tom Skinner spoke about a revolutionary

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Jesus who was incompatible with Americanism. Skinner taught that the evangelical church had upheld slavery in the nation's political, economic and religious systems.

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While greedy landlords paid off corrupt building inspectors, police forces maintained the interests of white society and the top 1 % controlled the entire economy, evangelicals were silent and even supported the industrial complex.

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The 20 year old Keller already resonated with the new left critique, but Skinner's way of incorporating it into Christianity was new for him.

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His friends gave him a tape recording of Skinner's talk and Keller could not listen to this sermon enough. Skinner claimed that a gospel that did not speak to the issues of enslavement, injustice or inequality was not the gospel.

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Instead, he fused the incomplete gospels of both fundamentalists and liberals into a salvation which delivered from both personal and systemic evil.

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Jesus had come to change the system and Christians were to preach liberation to oppress people. The sermon astounded

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Keller. It was just the kind of reconciliation he was waiting for and it left him unable to think about politics the same way again after hearing it.

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Tom Skinner, however, was not the only voice which helped Keller cultivate new left ideas in Christian soil. After graduating from Bucknell, Keller worked for Inner Varsity Christian Fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts and attended

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Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary where he met fellow seminarian, Elward Ellis. Ellis was a student leader for Inner Varsity and had previously been a key leader in recruiting black students to attend

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Urbana 70 through a film he wrote and produced entitled What Went Down at Urbana 67.

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The film challenged the notion that missions was Christian racism and promoted the idea that those of non -European descent could preach the gospel the way it should be instead of the honkified way of preaching the gospel.

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Carl Ellis, an Inner Varsity leader who had enlisted Tom Skinner as a speaker for the event narrated the video.

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Like Skinner, Elward Ellis also imported new left thinking into Christianity. Ellis introduced

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Keller to concepts now referred to as systemic racism and white privilege by showing him that white folks did not have to be personally bigoted in order to support social, educational, judicial and economic systems and customs that automatically privileged whites over others.

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On occasion, Ellis called Keller a racist even though he admitted that Keller didn't mean to be or want to be.

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Ellis told Keller that he simply could not really help it since Keller was blind to his own cultural biases which he used to judge people of other races.

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White Christians, Ellis maintained, practiced discrimination by making their cultural preferences such as singing and preaching styles normative for everyone.

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White people in general were also ignorant of the hardships racial minorities underwent in navigating Euro -white culture.

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Keller gladly accepted Ellis's bare -knuckled mentoring about the realities of injustice in American culture.

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He now understood in greater detail certain aspects of the new left critique but still needed to further develop a

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Christian response to the unjust status quo. But first, he needed a job. In 1975,

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Tim Keller married his wife Kathy at the beginning of his final semester at Gordon -Conwell. After graduation, he was ordained in the

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Presbyterian Church of America and moved to Virginia where he pastored a church in a blue -collar southern town.

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He also served as a regional director of church planting for the PCA. Somehow, in the midst of his busy schedule,

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Keller also managed to take courses from Westminster Theological Seminary where he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1981.

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Three years later, he moved to Philadelphia to take a job teaching at Westminster. It was there he met

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Harvey Kahn, a professor of missions who helped Keller take the next step in marrying his social justice concerns with his

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Christian faith. Some considered Kahn a bit of a radical for challenging the interpretations of white

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Presbyterian males based on their allegedly biased cultural presuppositions. Instead, he believed in a contextual approach he referred to as a hermeneutical spiral for interpreting the

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Bible. This approach combined interpretation and application by emphasizing the cultural contexts of the biblical texts and the contemporary readers, which called for a dialogue between the two in a dynamic interplay between text and interpretation.

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Of course, this method of interpretation denied objectivism and the classic pattern of historic grammatical exegesis.

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Because sociological and economic preconceptions influenced one's interpretation of the Bible and the world,

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Kahn affirmed, along with other liberation theologians, a need for new input from sociology, economics, and politics in the doing of theology and missions.

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In short, Kahn believed that the experience of social groups helped determine the meaning and application of a text.

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Not surprisingly, this approach opened the door for new ways of understanding the Bible. Liberation theology, which used

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Marxism as an instrument of social analysis, awakened Kahn's own conscience to the realities of oppression.

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He believed that a bias toward the poor, the doing of justice, and the battle against racism were necessary starting points for properly interpreting scripture.

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After all, Jesus, who Kahn described as a refugee and immigrant, identified with the poor.

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Therefore, members of his kingdom must also show solidarity with the poor in their personal life and social perspective.

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Instead, white American evangelicals identified with saints and required the world to come on the church's terms.

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Not surprisingly, Kahn thought the church must recapture its identity as the only organization in the world that exists for the sake of its non -members and repent for things like neglect of the urban poor, dull, repetitious, and unexciting services, and hypocrisy.

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In order to follow Kahn's advice, churches needed to engage in holistic evangelism, which included working to eliminate war and poverty and injustice with a full gospel, which addressed social questions.

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Charity alone was not enough. In fact, the gospel possessed its own political program based on its own analysis of the global reality of man.

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Kahn even believed that certain socioeconomic commitments came closer to certain features of the gospel than others. This broadening of the gospel message and evangelistic task included a fusion of liberation theology and perhaps

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Kuyperian thinking with evangelicalism. Kahn, who disparaged wealth and whiteness and compared

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Wall Street workers with prostitutes, certainly had little affinity for capitalism, which he believed provided myths for understanding social needs.

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At the same time, the Marxist tool was only useful insofar as it remained subservient to the

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Lordship of Christ. Liberation theologians distorted the role of the church by making it into revolution, but they also challenged the hidden ideologies of conservative evangelicals, such as pietism and privatization, and could help refine their commitment to the gospel.

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Kahn believed the problem with most evangelicals was they gave the salvation of souls top priority and the concern for social justice only secondary and derived importance.

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Instead, he pointed to members of the evangelical left, such as Orlando Kostas, Jim Wallace, John Perkins, Richard Mao, and Ron Sider as positive examples of evangelicals who understood what the title of his 1982 book,

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Evangelism, Doing Justice and Preaching Grace, promoted. Tim Keller personally admired

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Harvey Kahn and found his writings to be both mind -blowing and deeply impacting. Kahn's most famous contributions to missions were his writings on urban ministry.

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By using insights from urban sociology, urban anthropology, and biblical theology, Kahn showed that cities were not the impersonal secular places evangelicals thought them to be.

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Actually, the city carried with it a special eschatological significance. Since the final chapter in human history culminated with the

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New Jerusalem, it represented a return to Eden. Temporal cities reflected aspects of both

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Eden and the restoration of Christ as places to cultivate the earth, live in safety and security, and meet

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God. Scripture taught that Jesus came to redeem the city, and it was the church's job to join this special kingdom story.

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Kahn's strategy for evangelizing urban centers involved focusing on social groups, as opposed to individuals, and promoting cross -cultural interactions, which served to help eliminate racism, injustice, and discrimination.

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Keller resonated with Kahn's ideas. While teaching at Westminster, Keller developed his distinctively

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Dutch -reformed approach to missions and apologetics under the influence of Kahn. The life -changing impact

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Kahn had on him manifested itself in 1989, when Keller moved from Philadelphia with his wife and three sons to start

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Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Keller wrote he would never, ever have been open to the idea of church planting in New York City if it were not for the books and example of Harvey Kahn.

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In facing the challenges of urban ministry, Keller appealed to many of Kahn's teachings, including the priority of cultural contextualization, the hermeneutical spiral, and the eschatological significance of the city.

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Like Kahn, Keller viewed influencing the city as a way of influencing the broader culture. He accepted

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Kahn's reconfiguration of the cultural mandate to fill, subdue, and rule the earth as an urban mandate.

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Perhaps most important for political purposes, Keller also deeply imbibed Kahn's awareness of systemic injustice and the theme surrounding his proposed

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Christian solution. Like most leaders of the evangelical left, Keller's main critique of Marxism was its materialism, not its moral claims.

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Karl Marx's solutions were incorrect because he grounded them in atheism and ignored the reality of human sin.

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However, despite these major flaws, Keller believed Marxist hearts were in the right place.

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He stated in a sermon at Redeemer, The people I read who were the disciples of Marx were not villains.

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They were not fools. They cared about people. There are vast populations, millions of people, who have been in absolute serfdom and peasantry and poverty for years and years, and there's no way they're going to get out.

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There's no upward mobility. See, the people who read Marx said, we have to do something about this.

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They weren't fools. Keller also singled Karl Marx out as the only major thinker, other than God himself, who held up the common worker with a high view of labor.

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Unfortunately for Marx and new left thinkers downstream like Ronald Dorkin, R .D.

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Lange, and Jean -Paul Sartre, their moral claims could not be justified apart from the moral foundation

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Christianity provided, which had a basis for racial, social, and international justice. Like progressive evangelicals before him,

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Keller addressed this problem by combining aspects of new left thinking with Christianity. From Keller's perspective, economics was a zero -sum game.

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Impoverished children suffered because of an inequitable distribution of goods and opportunities, not just a lack of them.

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Therefore, Christians who failed to share with the needy were not only displaying stinginess, but injustice itself.

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For believers, this kind of work, unlike charity, was not optional. In fact, failing to share with the poor was tantamount to robbery because justice involved giving people their rights, which included things like access to opportunities, financial resources, access to education, legal assistance, and investment in job opportunities.

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The principle of private property, however, was not an absolute right. In 2010, Keller told

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Christianity Today, it's biblical that we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away.

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Using the language of moral obligation, he implied that the have -nots, on the basis of their need, possessed a legitimate claim to resources not distributed to them, which belonged to the haves.

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The church's job was to address these inequities by not only meeting needs, but also addressing the conditions and social structures that led to such needs in the first place.

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Keller pointed to liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez's teaching on God's preference for the poor, and progressive evangelical

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John Perkins' teaching on redistribution as positive examples. He encouraged churches to get involved in direct relief, individual development, community development, racial reconciliation, and social reform, which challenged and changed social systems.

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In Keller's model, the gospel itself became the basis for Christians to do this restorative and redistributive justice.

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It was both a response to the gospel, and a means by which believers attracted unbelievers to Christianity.

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According to Keller, this was not a new development either. He translated some Old Testament passages using the term social justice in the place of words that, in other translations, simply conveyed righteousness or justice.

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God, in Keller's mind, charged Old Testament Israel to create a culture of social justice. The application of this command in the

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Mosaic Law was designed to reduce unjust economic disparities between social groups. According to the prophets, great disparities resulted, at least in part, from a selfish individualism overcoming concern for the common good.

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In contrast, Jesus almost sounded like a social justice radical activist when he instructed selling possessions and giving to the poor in the

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Sermon on the Mount. Christians who understood God's grace the best were the most sensitive to the social inequities, and churches who were true to the gospel were just as involved in social justice issues as in bringing people to radical conversion.

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Keller's analysis for helping Christians battle disparities went deeper than just economic factors. Power relationships were also unequal.

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In his suffering, Jesus identified not only with the poor, but also the marginalized and oppressed. The substitutionary atonement involved

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Jesus losing his power, which in turn inspired Christians to be radical agents for social change by giving up theirs.

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The people of God were commanded to administer true justice to groups which had no social power, which in modern times

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Keller expanded to include refugees, migrant workers, homeless, many single parents, and the elderly.

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Much of his sermons on power relationships incorporated the teachings of Michel Foucault, who, according to Keller, was a postmodern theorist, socialist, and French deconstructionist.

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Keller stated that the problem with the world was the way we use the truth for the purpose of getting power over other people.

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He thought Foucault was not only right, but put it better than anyone else when he said, truth is a thing of this world.

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It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint, and it induces regular effects of power.

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Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth, that is, the types of discourse which it accepts, the means by which each is sanctioned, the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

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Keller summarized Foucault's theory by stating, truth is a thing of this world, and every person who claims to have the truth is really basically doing a power play.

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He even quoted Jesus as stating, truth claims, in general, are power plays, in reaction to the

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Pharisees, who were guilty of using the Bible to get the right places in society, the high status, and to keep people down.

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Keller, along with postmodern thinkers, saw the connection between truth and power everywhere from discriminatory hiring practices to media narratives.

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In fact, from the Beatitudes, Keller believed, Jesus taught that the quest for power, success, comfort, and recognition dominated the kingdom of this world.

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It even inescapably defined individuals themselves. New left thinkers, like Foucault, saw in Hegel's conception of the other, a substitute for the alienation which took place at the fall.

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Identity was not organically inherited or part of the fabric of duty and design, but rather, created through struggle against the other, which represented a negative, usually social standard.

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Keller stated in Reliance on Foucault, that when we form an identity, we get a sense of self -worth by despising the people who don't have it, which is the same as bolstering a self through exclusion of the other.

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Simply put, people use their chosen identities, based on things like their work, religion, and political affiliation, to exert power by vilifying others who are not like them.

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Only in Christianity did Keller see a basis for accepting different people. No revolution could escape the reality of power except the kingdom of God, ruled by a king without a quarter, power, or recognition, and requiring his followers to give up their power as well.

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Keller saw Christianity as a kind of truth, which empowered and liberated its believers to serve and love others, not control them.

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He agreed with liberation theologian, James Cone, that slaves, because of their experience of oppression, were able to see things in the

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Bible like a God who comes down from heaven and becomes a poor human being, which many of their masters were blind to.

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This difference in experience was so great it nurtured a real Christianity as opposed to the oppressive master's religion.

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Real Christianity was the escape hatch from the view that truth inevitably leads to power, as it not only addressed economic disparities, but also unequal power relationships.

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Therefore, the church could not ally or align itself with the secular left or right for the sake of political power without giving up its spiritual power and credibility with nonbelievers.

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Christians needed a different political approach. Because Christianity, in Keller's view, grounded both personal ethics and social justice in a transcendent standard, it represented an unconventional political perspective outside of earthly political parties.

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Keller conceived of liberal politics as a philosophy dedicated to doing whatever you want with your body, but not whatever you want with your money.

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Their concern was economic justice in taking care of the poor. Throughout his ministry, Keller identified social justice concern with more politically progressive groups.

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On the other hand, conservatives, he told his congregation, wanted legislation that supports the family and traditional values.

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But when it comes to giving money to the poor, that should be voluntary. Liberals wanted to legislate social morality, but not personal morality.

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And conservatives wanted to legislate personal morality, but not social morality. Neither represented an acceptable

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Christian position. The problem with closely aligning with either political philosophy, according to Keller, was that they could easily culturally colonize

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Christians into versions of extreme individualism. The sexual rights of blue state individualism and the property rights of red state individualism were comparable to false religions co -opting

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Christians into their mold. Blue evangelicals were quiet about the biblical teaching on abortion, sexuality, and gender.

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Red evangelicals were silent when political allies fanned the flames of racial resentment toward immigrants.

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Keller wrote that theologically, both political polls are suspect because one makes an idol out of individual freedom and the other makes an idol out of race and nation, blood and soil.

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In both, something created and earthly is deified. Alternatively, Keller proposed a third option in the biblical worldview.

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While Christians could vote across a spectrum for practical reasons, they should also feel somewhat uncomfortable in either political party.

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The Bible deconstructed all secular understandings of economics, including capitalism, which uses the engine of individuals and being individuals, and communism or socialism, which just uses the engine of classes and being classes.

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In order to be biblical, Keller thought consistent Christians would, in applying an understanding of justice and equality, sometimes side with one school of thought and other times they will side with another because secular theories of justice address certain facets of biblical justice without addressing them all.

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The biblical idea that the community has some claim on private profits and assets, but that those items should not be confiscated did not fit well with either a capitalist or a socialist economy.

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Instead, Christians needed to, on some level, politically operate outside the available political parties.

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This, of course, meant spending more effort distancing themselves from Republicans whom evangelicals had traditionally supported than it did

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Democrats. In 2017, Keller signed a statement along with other more progressive -leaning evangelicals like Richard Mao and Ed Stetzer, urging

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President Trump to reconsider a reduction in refugee resettlement. The next year, Keller, along with 50 evangelical

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Christian leaders, including Jim Wallace, gathered at Wheaton College to discuss their concern that evangelicalism had become too closely associated with President Trump's polarizing politics.

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In 2020, Keller briefly joined the elder board of the AND Campaign, led by Michael Ware, one of President Obama's former faith advisors, and Justin Gaboni, a

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Democrat political strategist. The campaign produced a 2020 presidential election statement to promote social justice and moral order, which included concern for racial disparities, support for the

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Fairness for All Act, comprehensive immigration reform, and affordable healthcare, while discouraging abortion.

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Keller's political vision was perhaps most clearly articulated in his 2008 book,

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Reason for God, in which he signaled his hope that younger Christians could make the older form of culture wars obsolete through their version of Christianity, which is much more concerned about the poor and social justice than Republicans have been, and at the same time, much more concerned about upholding classic

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Christian moral and sexual ethics than Democrats have been. Christianity offered an identity which prioritized service instead of power.

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A new human society, a new human order, and a new set of social arrangements not based on power and pride was on the horizon in what the

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Bible called the lofty city. The vision of Redeemer Presbyterian was to help build a great city for all people through a movement of the gospel that brings personal conversion, community formation, social justice, and cultural renewal to New York City and, through it, the world.

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Keller said, the whole purpose of salvation is to cleanse and purify this material world.

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Some have tried to analyze Tim Keller's social justice position as a subset of concern stemming from his crafting new lines of thought for communicating with postmoderns.

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Mikhail Foucault was not the only postmodern New Left thinker Keller gleaned from in his ministry. For example, in crafting his new city catechism created to meet the challenges of a postmodern world,

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Keller partially relied on understandings gleaned from Charles Taylor's buffered self -narrative. Keller also taught his congregation that Martin Heidegger's theory of alienation paralleled

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Jesus' teaching in the story of the prodigal son. In 2018, he helped launch the

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Living Out Church Audit designed to help churches be inclusive toward LGBTQ plus and same -sex attracted individuals.

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Because of Keller's non -traditional conceptions of sin, hell, the trinity, the church's mission, biblical interpretation, creation, and ecclesiology, a group of traditional

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Presbyterians wrote Engaging Keller in 2013. However, there is another way to understand

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Keller's left -leaning tendency. From his earliest and most formative years as a Christian and theologian,

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Keller, who already stood politically with progressives, was influenced by the evangelical left.

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Tom Skinner, Elrod Ellis, Harvey Kahn, Richard Mao, and John Perkins all contributed to helping

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Keller integrate his faith with his politics. Keller often interpreted scriptures concerning politics and economics in ways consistent with Neo -Kyperian and liberation theologies.

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Keller then successfully marketed his ideas to the evangelical world. Today, having stepped down from the pastoring at Redeemer Presbyterian in 2017,

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Tim Keller teaches for Reformed Theological Seminary and works with Redeemer's city -to -city church planning network where he continues to spread his ideas on contextualization, which he first learned from Harvey Kahn.

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Keller's contribution to moving evangelicals in a leftward direction cannot be underestimated. The impact of his teachings will be felt for years to come.