What Happened to Tim Keller?

Tim Keller’s Early Formation in Mainline and Conservative Churches

Perhaps no one has done more to narrow the gap between progressive evangelicalism and mainstream evangelicalism than Tim Keller. Keller grew up in a mainline Lutheran Church. As a teenager, during confirmation class, a young Lutheran cleric and social activist introduced him to a Christian version of social liberation grounded in a spirit of love.

However, the Kellers soon started attending a conservative Methodist Church, which helped reinforce their son's more traditional conception of God and the reality of hell. What he could not harmonize as a teenager, the ethics of the New Left and Orthodox Christianity, he started learning to reconcile in college.

While attending Bucknell University in his home state of Pennsylvania, Keller learned the reigning ideologies of the time from radical professors, including the Neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

He was attracted to this critique of American bourgeoisie society, as well as social activism. 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.

Instead, they promoted peace and understanding, attended peace and civil rights marches, and shut down the college to debate the morality of the Cambodian invasion in 1970. The things like segregation and systemic violence against blacks bothered Keller before college.

They became an occasion for him to doubt Christianity itself after his arrival. 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.

There were times he wondered if he was just a cog in a machine determined by his environment. 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 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. When Christian evangelist John Guest came to campus and boldly challenged protesters for their inability to morally reason, Keller was there.

At the same time, he was disenchanted with orthodox Christianity, which he believed supported things like segregation and apartheid. Fortunately for Keller, the evangelical left offered a version of the faith which married the ethics of the new left with the metaphysical foundation 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 and the character of God. He became part of a campus fellowship sponsored by InterVarsity, which reflected the counterculture mindset of Bucknell by keeping their ministry non-traditional, spontaneous, and anti-institutional.

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

Tom Skinner and the Gospel of Liberation

In 1970, Keller heard a message which revolutionized his approach to political issues. Some of his friends attended InterVarsity's missions conference called Urbana 70, where the Harlem evangelist, Tom Skinner, spoke about a revolutionary Jesus who is incompatible with Americanism.

Any gospel that does not talk about delivering to man a personal Savior who will free them from the personal bondage of sin and grant them eternal life, but that does the same time does not speak to the issue of enslavement, does not speak to the issue of injustice.

Does not speak to the issue of inequality. Any gospel that doesn't want to go where people are hungry and people are poverty-stricken and set them free. And the name of Jesus Christ is not the gospel.

Skinner taught that the Evangelical Church had upheld slavery in the nation's political, economic, and religious systems. While gritty 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. 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.

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 issue of enslavement, injustice, or inequality was not the gospel.

Instead, he fused the incomplete Gospels of both fundamentalists and liberals into a salvation which delivered from both personal and systemic evil. Jesus had come to change the system and Christians were to preach liberation to oppressed people.

The sermon astounded 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. Tom Skinner, however, was not the only voice which helped Keller cultivate new left ideas in Christian soil.

Elwood Ellis, White Privilege, and Contextualized Ministry

After graduating from Bucknell, Keller worked for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary where he met fellow seminarian Elwood Ellis.

Ellis was a student leader for InterVarsity and had previously been a key leader in recruiting black students to attend Urbana 70 through a film that he wrote and produced entitled What Went Down at Urbana 67.

A black man's role to a great commission should be that he should go out through all the lands and preach the gospel in the way it's supposed to be and not with this white man's honkified way of preaching the gospel.

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.

What did they come for?

A large Sunday school picnic? Or maybe that gooey emotional feeling one gets in a synthetic integrated Christian happening. You know, that kind of Oreo feeling.

Carl Ellis, an InterVarsity leader who had enlisted Tom Skinner as a speaker for the event, narrated the video. Like Skinner, Elwood Ellis also imported new left thinking into Christianity. Ellis introduced 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.

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

White Christians, Ellis maintained, practiced discrimination by making their cultural preferences such as singing and preaching styles normative for everyone. White people, in general, were also ignorant of the hardships racial minorities underwent in navigating Euro-white culture.

Keller gladly accepted Ellis's bare-knuckled mentoring about the realities of injustice in American culture. He now understood, in greater detail, certain aspects of the new left critique but still needed to further develop a Christian response to the unjust status quo.

Keller’s Training, Harvey Kahn, and Liberation Theology

But first, he needed a job. In 1975, Tim Keller married his wife Kathy at the beginning of his final semester at Gordon-Conwell. After graduation, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of America, PCA, and moved to Virginia where he pastored a church in a blue-collar southern town.

He also served as a regional director of church planting for the PCA. Somehow, in the midst of his busy schedule, Keller also managed to take courses from Westminster Theological Seminary where he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1981.

Three years later, he moved to Philadelphia to take a job teaching at Westminster. It was there he met Harvey Kahn, a professor of missions who helped Keller take the next step in marrying his social justice concerns with his Christian faith.

Some considered Kahn a bit of a radical for challenging the interpretations of white Presbyterian males based on their allegedly biased cultural presuppositions. Instead, he believed in a contextual approach he referred to as a hermeneutic spiral for interpreting the Bible.

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

Of course, this method of interpretation denied objectivism and the classic pattern of historic grammatical exegesis. Because sociological and economic preconceptions influenced one's interpretation of the Bible and the world, Kahn affirmed, along with liberation theologians, a need for new input from sociology, economics, and politics in the doing of theology and missions.

In short, Kahn believes that the experience of social groups helped determine the meaning and application of a text. Not surprisingly, this approach opened the door for new ways of understanding the Bible.

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

After all, Jesus, who Kahn described as a refugee and immigrant, identified with the poor. Therefore, members of his kingdom must also show solidarity with the poor in their personal life and social perspective.

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

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 addresses social questions.

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. 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 Kuyperian thinking with evangelicalism. Kahn, who disparaged wealth and whiteness and compared Wall Street workers with prostitutes, certainly had little affinity for capitalism, which he believed provided myths for understanding social needs.

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

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. Instead, he pointed to members of the evangelical left, such as Orlando Costas, Jim Wallace, John Perkins, Richard Mao, and Ron Sider, as positive examples of evangelicals who understood what the title of his 1982 book, Evangelism, Doing Justice and Preaching Grace, promoted.

Tim Keller personally admired 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. 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.

Actually, the city carried with it a special eschatological significance. Since the final chapter in human history culminated with the New Jerusalem, it represented a return to Eden. Temporal cities reflected aspects of both Eden and the restoration of Christ as places to cultivate the earth, live in safety and security, and meet God.

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

Keller resonated with Kahn's ideas. While teaching at Westminster, Keller developed his distinctively Dutch Reformed approach to missions and apologetics under the influence of Kahn. The life-changing impact Kahn had had on him manifested itself in 1989, when Keller moved from Philadelphia with his wife and three sons to start 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. 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.

Like Kahn, Keller viewed influencing the city as a way of influencing the broader culture. He accepted Kahn's reconfiguration of the cultural mandate to fill, subdue, and rule the earth as an urban mandate.

Marxism, Social Justice, and the Moral Claims of Progressivism

Perhaps most important for political purposes, Keller also deeply imbibed Kahn's awareness of systemic injustice and the theme surrounding his proposed Christian solution. Like most leaders of the early evangelical left, Keller's main critique of Marxism was its materialism, not its moral claims.

Karl Marx's solutions were incorrect because he grounded them in atheism and ignored the reality of human sin. However, despite these major flaws, Keller believed Marxist hearts were in the right place.

He stated in a sermon at Redeemer,.

It's easy to pick on Marxism because socialism and communism virtually have collapsed. But you know, I've been thinking about this lately. The people I read who were the disciples of Marx were not villains, they were not fools.

They cared about people. And you know, it's easy for us to laugh at it since we live in America, but there's vast millions of populations of people that have been in absolute serfdom and peasantry and poverty for years and years, and there's no way they're going to get out.

There's no upward mobility. And you know, see, the people that read Marx said, we got to do something about this. They weren't fools. They weren't villains. But what was Marx's mistake? He thought defilement came from outside.

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. Unfortunately for Marx and new left thinkers downstream, like Ronald Dworkin, R .D. Lange, and Jean-Paul Satre, their moral claims could not be justified apart from the moral foundation Christianity provided, which had a basis for racial, social, and international justice.

Like progressive evangelicals before him, Keller addressed this problem by combining aspects of new left thinking with Christianity. From Keller's perspective, economics was a zero-sum game. Impoverished children suffered because of an inequitable distribution of goods and opportunities, not just a lack of them.

A friend of mine recently, who's a pastor, was talking to a Norwegian man who had just moved into his community and went to his church, and at one point he heard the pastor talking about the fact that we are all complicit in creating this narrative that black people are dangerous, etc., and so we're complicit in this.

Afterwards, the Norwegian came up and said, no, no, no, I'm Norwegian. No, I had nothing to do with it. And my pastor friend said, studies have shown, have pretty much proven, that if you have white skin, it's worth a million dollars over a lifetime over somebody who doesn't have white skin, and that's because of historical forces that have come about, and at this point, you know, you could go out of several ways.

One, as I mentioned, if you have that asset of white skin right now, historical asset, then you actually have to say, I didn't deserve this, and also I'm, to some degree, I'm the product of I'm standing on the shoulders of other people who got that through injustice.

So the Bible actually says, yes, you do, you do, you are involved in injustice, and even if you didn't actually do it, therefore you have a responsibility, not just to say, well, you know, maybe if I get around to it, maybe we could do something about the poor people out there.

No, you're part of the problem.

Therefore, Christians who failed to share with the needy were not only displaying stinginess, but injustice itself. 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 involves giving people their rights, which included things like access to opportunities, financial resources, access to education, legal assistance, and investment in job opportunities.

The principle of private property, however, was not an absolute right. In 2010, Keller told Christianity Today, it's biblical that we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away. Using the language of moral obligation, he implied that the have-nots, on the basis of their need, possessed a legitimate claim to the resources not distributed to them, which belonged to the haves.

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. Keller pointed to liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, teaching on God's preference for the poor, and progressive evangelical John Perkins, teaching on redistribution as positive examples.

It seems to me.

That to announce the kingdom of God is to announce the kingdom of life. Abundant life, all of life, personal, social, spiritual material. This is announcing the kingdom of God.

He encouraged churches to get involved in direct relief, individual development, community development, racial reconciliation, and social reform, which challenged and changed social systems. In Keller's model, the gospel itself became the basis for Christians to do this restorative and redistributive justice.

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

If you do preaching without deeds of justice, people are not going to listen to your evangelism.

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.

God, in Keller's mind, charged Old Testament Israel to create a culture of social justice. The application of this command in the 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. In contrast, Jesus almost sounded like a social justice radical activist when he instructed selling possessions and giving to the poor in the 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.

Keller's analysis for helping Christians battle disparities went deeper than just economic factors. Power relationships were also unequal. In his suffering, Jesus identified not only with the poor, but also the marginalized and oppressed.

The substitutionary atonement involved Jesus losing his power, which in turn inspired Christians to be radical agents for social change by giving up theirs. The people of God were commanded to administer true justice to groups which had no social power, which in modern times Keller expanded to include refugees, migrant workers, homeless, many single parents, and the elderly.

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

He thought Foucault was not only right, but put it better than anyone else when he said, "...Truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint, and it induces regular effects of power.

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.".

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.". And he says, when you set up a court in which you say, we're going to be for the people, what you really mean is, we're going to be for the people who agree with us about what the people need.

We're going to only be for the people who agree with us about what the people need, and we're going to exclude everybody else. And he says, every revolution is basically like that. You can't set up a people's court, he said, without basically accruing power for yourself and excluding the people who don't agree with you, the people who aren't your friends, the people who are not in your party.

And that's basically what Jesus is saying.

Even quoted Jesus as stating, "...Truth claims, in general, are power plays, in reaction to the Pharisees, who were guilty of using the Bible to get the right places in society, the high status, and to keep people down.

Keller, along with postmodern thinkers, saw the connection between truth and power everywhere from discriminatory hiring practices to media narratives. In fact, from the Beatitudes, Keller believed Jesus taught that the quest for power, success, comfort, and recognition dominated the kingdom of this world.

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

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.

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

He agreed with liberation theologian James Cone that slaves, because of their experience of oppression, were able to see things in the Bible, like a God who comes down from heaven and becomes a poor human being, which many of their masters were blind to.

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

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 non-believers. 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, 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.

Their concern was economic justice in taking care of the poor. Throughout his ministry, Keller identified social justice concern with more politically progressive groups. On the other hand, conservatives, he told his congregation, wanted legislation that supports the family and traditional values, but when it comes to giving money to the poor, that should be voluntary.

Liberals wanted to legislate social morality, but not personal morality, and conservatives wanted to legislate personal morality, but not social morality. Neither represented an acceptable Christian position.

The problem with closely aligning with either political philosophy, according to Keller, was that they could easily culturally colonize Christians into versions of extreme individualism.

There's a kind of, I call it a liberal individualism, that says, I need to do justice for the poor, and I need to do racial justice, but nobody should tell me what to do sexually. There's a kind of conservative individualism that says, I believe in traditional values, but I can do anything I want with my money, and please don't talk to me about race, because I didn't own any slaves, and I don't think that's a problem.

And it's extraordinarily easy for Christians to think that they are being Christian, but they're actually getting co-opted by either what I would call blue state or red state individualism.

The sexual rights of blue state individualism, and the property rights of red state individualism, were comparable to false religions co-opting Christians into their mold. Blue evangelicals were quiet about the biblical teaching on abortion, sexuality, and gender.

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

In both, something created and earthly is deified. Alternatively, Keller proposed a third option in the biblical worldview. While Christians could vote across a spectrum, for practical reasons, they should also feel somewhat uncomfortable in either political party.

The bible deconstructed all secular understanding of economics, including capitalism, which uses the engine of individuals envying individuals, and communism or socialism, which just uses the engine of classes envying classes.

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 addressed certain facets of biblical justice without addressing them all.

This, of course, meant Christians could care for the poor through high taxes in government services, or low taxes in private charity. 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.

Instead, Christians needed to, on some level, politically operate outside the available political parties. This, of course, meant spending more effort distancing themselves from Republicans, whom evangelicals had traditionally supported, than it did Democrats, the party Keller himself was a member of.

In 2017, Keller signed a statement, along with other more progressive-leaning evangelicals like Richard Mao and Ed Stetzer, urging President Trump to reconsider reduction in refugee resettlement. The next year, Keller, along with 50 evangelical 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.

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 Giboney, a 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 Fairness for All Act, comprehensive immigration reform, and affordable health care while discouraging abortion.

Keller's political vision was perhaps most clearly articulated in his 2008 book, 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 Christian moral and sexual ethics than Democrats have been. Christianity offered an identity which prioritized service instead of power.

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 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.

From Keller's perspective, the church occupied the same role that voluntary associations did in Saul Alinsky's vision of broad-based community organizing. He stated,.

The whole purpose of salvation is to cleanse and purify this material world.

Postmodern Influences, LGBTQ Inclusion, and Keller’s Lasting Legacy

Some have tried to analyze Tim Keller's social justice position as a subset of concerns stemming from his crafting new lines of thought for communicating with postmoderns. Michel 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, 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 Jesus's teaching in the story of the prodigal son. In 2018, he helped launch the Living Out Church Audit, designed to help churches be inclusive toward LGBTQ and same-sex attracted individuals.

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 Presbyterians wrote Engaging Keller in 2013.

However, there is another way to understand Keller's left-leaning tendency. From his earliest and most formative years as a Christian and theologian, Keller, who already stood politically with progressives, was influenced by the evangelical left.

Tom Skinner, Edward Ellis, Harvey Kahn, Richard Mao, and John Perkins all contributed to helping Keller integrate his faith with his politics. Keller often interpreted scriptures concerning politics and economics in ways consistent with neokuyperian and liberation theologies.

Keller then successfully marketed his ideas to the evangelical world. Today, having stepped down from pastoring at Redeemer Presbyterian in 2017, Tim Keller teaches for Reformed Theological Seminary and works with Redeemer city-to-city church planting network, where he continues to spread his ideas on contextualization, which he first learned from Harvey Kahn.

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.