Collin Hansen on Tim Keller

Mark Tooley on December 16, 2022

Here’s my interview with Gospel Coalition editor Collin Hansen about his spiritual biography of one of America’s most famous pastors called Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation:

Mark Tooley: Hello, this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, here on a cloudy day in downtown Washington, D.C., with the pleasure of conversation with Collin Hanson of the Gospel Coalition, and author of a very interesting new book, Timothy Keller: His spiritual and Intellectual Formation about, of course, the famous and celebrated founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, who has had an outsized influence on American Christianity as a successful church planter, author, speaker and a public theologian. So, Colin Hansen tell us about this book.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. So, this is not exactly like a traditional biography, because the interesting thing about Tim is that he does not like to talk about himself, and he is also a living figure. Most biographies are about long past figures. But, though Tim continues to battle against pancreatic cancer, the latest news has been very positive for him. So we hope we have him for a long time. So, what this book primarily is an exploration of all of those influences in his life, and a lot of stories that nobody knows, and a lot of things that explain so much of what makes him who he is and has made him so influential as a pastor. Just give you an example that Tim and his wife Kathy, gave me permission and vouch for me to talk with a number of their friends and even family members. So, I was able to talk to Tim’s sister. And I got a lot of perspective on the kind of theological life growing up. Tim is such an interesting conglomeration of American religion because he was baptized Roman Catholic by his mother, who was one time an Italian Catholic, but then she also had him baptized as a Lutheran in the Keller’s historic German Lutheran Church there in eastern Pennsylvania. He was confirmed Lutheran as well. But then he went on, and his mother shifted away from the Lutheran Church in part over dissatisfaction about Liberal political activism as well as theology. This was the 1960s. And then they had a new Lutheran pastor come in from Gettysburg Seminary, and then they shifted over then to the Evangelical Congregational Church, more of a holiness type tradition, and that’s where he finished off high school. Of course, he goes off [and] becomes a Christian through InterVarsity, and then becomes a Presbyterian minister in this brand-new domination. The PCA. So, I’m trying to tell the story of mid-century to late twentieth into the early twenty first century of evangelical religion, through Tim Keller’s experiences which have covered a lot of that ground. So, it’s kind of a unique approach. Not exactly a traditional biography, but you do get a lot of the story of this life.

Mark Tooley: Explain a little bit for those who may not know why Tim Keller is so important, having a first pastor to, I guess, medium-sized church in Petersburg, Virginia, then founding Redeemer Church in New York City 30 years ago, which has been extremely successful, and a model for dozens of not hundreds of other churches, as well as selling or writing bestselling books. So perhaps he’s one of the most important Protestant pastors in America today.

Collin Hansen: Yeah, absolutely today. And for the last couple of decades, no doubt. So, part of what I’m trying to do with the book is to set that context, because a lot of people don’t know, Mark, that New York City was a very different place than it is today, or at least that it has been in the last 20 years back in the 1980s. So, I talk a lot about things like The Bonfire of the Vanities, the rise of Wall Street, and various kinds of trading and whatnot and the Yuppie Revolution in New York. So, there were very few evangelical congregations in Manhattan back in the 1970s and 1980s compared to today, and a lot of that stems directly from Tim Keller’s ministry through Redeemer Presbyterian Church. But not only that, through Redeemer Presbyterian Church was launched Redeemer City to City, a global church planting network in the largest cities. So, I mentioned in the book that when the New York Times publishes an obituary of Tim Keller. The lead essentially is that he’s more responsible than anyone else for engaging Evangelicals in urban ministry, and you’ve been doing ministry long enough, Mark, to know what that looked like in places like New York or Washington, DC, and in other places in the 1980s versus today. And when you throw on top of that the fact that he is one of the most high-profile evangelical authors, read by people of all kinds of different denominations. He’s one of the few evangelical figures today who really transcends a lot of our differences, theologically and otherwise. And then you look at other things that he’s done. For example, co-founding the Gospel Coalition, where I’ve been employed since 2010, which has become one of the largest Christian websites in the world. You can see a lot of different things that he’s done both directly and indirectly and has been just a major figure in, I would say, the rise of Reformed theology, especially among young people in the last couple generations.

Mark Tooley: Well, you’re right. Even here in Washington, DC. I grew up in this area, and 25 years ago there were almost no evangelical churches in the city itself. Now there are dozens, most of them disproportionately very young. Grace DC is a PCA congregation. I’m sure it was very much connected to Tim Keller, and I would say almost all of Evangelical DC is Reformed, and perhaps Tim Keller should be credited for that influence. The same is true for dozens of cities around America. So how do you explain the success of his model in terms of these Gen X pastors who planted these churches 25 years ago, and appeal to educated young professionals?

Collin Hansen: I think the specific kind of Reformed theology that Tim Keller represents is really neo-Calvinism that goes back to the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, especially in the Netherlands, associated with figures like Abraham Kuyper and Hermann Bavinck. What you see through those figures, in particular, is a combination of being modern and orthodox. And it’s that combination together that’s proved to be so potent, because without orthodoxy, without a connection to the Bible as our ultimate authority to the historic tradition, certainly Protestantism, but more broadly, the Ecumenical Councils, and going all the way back to the early church, without that we are completely unmoored. We are unanchored in a changing time. We’ve seen that’s what’s happened with theological Liberalism. So, it’s that perspective of being anchored to the Biblical witness ultimately. But then, second, doing that in a modern way. And so, it’s bringing that theology to bear on all of life. That’s what the neo-Calvinist did, and that’s very much what Tim Keller does and so, when he’s talking about these things, he’s I’ll give you an example. In the early years at Redeemer Presbyterian Church the most controversial issue was premarital sex, or extramarital sex. It wasn’t so much homosexuality at the time, it was that it was a complete incomprehension that you would abstain from sex outside of marriage. Well, Tim, doesn’t accommodate the teaching to be able to, you know, allow for that. He challenges that, and he challenges it on the basic of Biblical historical, sexual ethics. But as he does that, he also challenges in some ways the default assumptions about how everybody needs to be married, and he goes back to the Biblical witness and points out that singleness is highly valued, and in some ways even seemingly preferred for the purposes of Gospel ministry, as the Apostle Paul writes in there. So, at the same time, he’s affirming biblical truth. But he’s also pushing back sometimes on cultural accretions that have accumulated over time and assumptions. It’s that modern and orthodox, that seems to appeal to people of genuine spiritual conversion, but not necessarily in the same way of the church traditions that they would have known that they may have found, perhaps stultifying, especially in cities that many of them have not grown up in but have moved too away from their homes.

Mark Tooley: And, as you note, he has founded and sustained these successful evangelical ministries remaining theologically orthodox and upholding traditional Christian teaching about moral issues, and in very socially liberal areas. Presumably there are many of his church’s members who don’t completely subscribe to his perspective, and yet they still attend and admire him. So how has he successfully managed this balance?

Collin Hansen: That’s a great question, Mark, very perceptive. One of the things that Tim Keller decided early on: that in these increasingly post-Christian settings, especially in cities, it was very important to emphasize those things that separate Christians from non-Christians as opposed to Christians from other Christians. Now you might hear that and say, oh, well, that means he doesn’t have his own theological tradition. No, I mean he’s very much not Roman Catholic, very much not Eastern Orthodox. He is very much a Reformed Protestant. But it means that most of what he was talking about were those basic Christian doctrines. Yes, with a Protestant emphasis on things like justification by faith alone, and the inerrancy of Scripture and the penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. We could go on and on and on there. But he was really teaching more of Christianity than that particular denominational view. So, for example, at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, if you were going to be an officer in that church a staff member, certainly an elder, and be ordained, you had to be right down the line on all of those beliefs. But they were not emphasized in the same way for every member of the congregation. Now, in part, because that’s the way Presbyterians work. That’s not a big deal for Baptists that might have been different because of congregational voting. But essentially, it’s exactly what you said. The church majored on [the essentials]. The majors didn’t always push people on those things that they deemed to be non-essential, and that did give them quite a bit of flexibility. An environment where it just kind of helped them to stay focused on the things that were offensive enough, which is the exclusivity of Christ, the reality of hell, the substitutionary death, as I mentioned earlier of Jesus, and the necessity of submitting to God’s word when it comes to everything, including our sexual ethics. It really majored on those things. And just didn’t make such a fuss about everything else, and I think that’s proven to be pretty flexible, and also effective for ministry.

Mark Tooley: But, as you know, he’s had his critics more on the right than on the left, especially lately late for sure. Some have accused him of being squishy in his desire supposedly to be winsome, he has not sufficiently emphasized the distinctions of Christian teaching, and that his model of “winsomeness” may have worked in the 1990s and the early 2000s but that is no longer relevant today in a more polarized culture. So how do you respond to those critics?

Collin Hansen: I think Tim would be the first person to say that not everything he did will translate in the same way going forward, and so there may be some things that he didn’t talk about as much that we’re going to have to talk about more in the future. One thing I talk about a lot, Mark, is a concept of theological triage, the first order or second order, third order, kind of issues. But you notice that while the first order issues never change, things like the Trinity and scripture and whatnot, second and third order sometimes do change. Certain issues will come to the fore, certain other issues are going to diminish. And I think, even though Tim faced quite a bit of opposition, certainly in New York he would be the first to say that the levels of opposition are quite a bit deeper now than he had experienced before, and that’s even at a time when Manhattan was nearly thirty percent no religion when he got there, which is a little bit bigger, a little bit larger than the whole country as a whole. So, it’s interesting that some of the criticism of Tim seems to suppose that he believed in a cultural engagement strategy that was if we’re just nice enough, we’re going to get a seat at the tables of power, even though he was in and is in Manhattan, doing that ministry with a lot of powerful people. There was an assumption from the very beginning that this ministry was deeply counter-cultural in New York. But what Tim always said is that it was a counterculture for the common good. And I think that’s what some of the critics miss, and what many people from early Redeemer emphasized to me, which is that yes, we were a counterculture. We’d pray all night. I remember them telling me about the all-night prayer meetings they had during the first Gulf War in 1991. They expected this to be countercultural, but the things they prayed about were things like crime in the city, and that it would go down. When they saw the broken window policies and whatnot of Mayor Giuliani and some of the changes in New York, they took that as a positive answer to prayer. So, I think that’s what people miss. They assumed that it was just only this common good, let’s be nice to everybody, so that they’ll be nice to us policy. No, it was always built on a counter-cultural conversionist, evangelistic strategy, but one that would result in love of neighbors in obedience to God and love of the city. And I think partly, Mark, why people don’t resonate with Tim is that Evangelicals have always had a pretty strong skepticism, at least since the since the early twentieth century towards cities, and part of what you’re seeing is Tim just gets caught up a little bit, I think, in our culture wars and those divides that are so prominent in our politics today.

Mark Tooley: So, do you think that some of his critics have a point that his era served a purpose over the last three decades. But perhaps that era is closing, and we’re entering a new age that others will have to appeal to with a very different style and message.

Collin Hansen: Well, yeah, that’s why I’m saying, I think Tim would be the first person to say that. That was one thing that he said to me in 2019. We were meeting in December of 2019. That’s three months before the world shut down with COVID. And he said, I’m just not sure, Colin, if everything that I did is going to translate very well because of how much the culture has changed. The way he typically describes it, Mark, is that there were not many dots being connected between Biblical truth and our popular cultural beliefs back in 1989, and when he founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church, but there are even fewer of them right now. We have to start from further behind in those issues. And so, I would say that if you even look at Tim’s life, he recognizes that. I wish some of the critics were more concerned about those deeper cultural problems than they are with some of the kind of kind of political issues that they discussed so often. But at the same time, another thing that you’ll see pretty clearly is that I wouldn’t say that race and racism were a major theme of Tim’s ministry. Now he has written on those subjects, but he’s written about it more recently. In some ways he did write his book Generous Justice years ago, but a lot of his explorations have been more recent. I would say that’s why, in some ways, Mark, both Left and Right have criticized him, saying, “hey, you didn’t talk enough about, from the Right, abortion, especially the high rates in New York” or, on the Left, “you didn’t talk enough about race.” But in all my years of talking with Tim, he’s usually the first person to be able to acknowledge criticism and to encourage younger generations that they’re going to have to figure things out themselves by God’s grace. And so, I think that’s a good challenge for the rest of us to take up, and I would. I just encourage people to treat Tim the way we want to be treated by the people who follow us because we’re going to get some things. We’re probably going to not emphasize things the way that younger generations would want us too either.

Mark Tooley: And so, he appealed I think it’s fair to say mostly to Gen X in terms of millennial pastors. What does he bring to the table that they should heed? And who are the next young Tim Kellers out there if there are any?

Collin Hansen: That’s a good question. So yeah, definitely, Gen X in a lot of ways. You think about that Friends/Seinfeld generation in a lot of ways. That was the sweet spot of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. But I do think there was, I think, what millennial and younger pastors need to heed from Tim is the wide breadth of his reading. The way that he would continue to grow like rings on a tree. But he never lost that first love of Jesus. He’s never lost that first love of the Gospel. And even though he gets interested in new and exciting things, it doesn’t mean that he departs from that. And I think a lot of younger pastors, especially in the internet age. They tend to just get fascinated by new shiny objects and to run after those new trends, and they tend to change their mind a lot about things. That’s the thing about Tim is that most of his theological beliefs were set pretty early, and he’s been consistent with those over time, so I would just encourage people to give a lot of thought early on to these things and just not be so swayed by different trends. I think that’s concerning to do that. I would say also, if we want to see the next generation of Tim Kellers, just consider that when he started, the Presbyterian Church in America was a small, largely regional southern denomination, which now has a substantial reach across North America on campuses through Reformed University Fellowship in church planting all over the North and the South and the East and the West. I think that would probably be the best legacy that Tim would want to leave behind, as those people doing that kind of ministry not just in New York, but in all kinds of different places, and the fact that now I could look at my alma mater Northwestern University, and see a thriving Reformed University Fellowship chapter there, which is an official ministry of the PCA. I just think, Mark, how excited I would have been if I could have benefited from that when I was an undergraduate. But to think that now, in almost any major campus you’re going to find that kind of ministry that’s not just like Tim’s soul doing. But I think he, more than anybody else, has inspired that kind of work from a younger generation of millennial, and even now heading into Gen Z pastors.

Mark Tooley: Collin Hanson, author of Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. Thank you very much, for, as an expected, very interesting interview, and I encourage all of our listeners to get this book.

Collin Hansen: Thank you, Mark.

  1. Comment by Anuschka on December 17, 2022 at 7:33 pm

    Jon Harris has recently done an analysis of Keller and some of the theological problems he has proposed… if anyone reading this site cares. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC3S-Zc7cwIFv0eNGs4ZaRyQ

  2. Comment by Mateen Elass on December 19, 2022 at 4:53 pm

    Very good, insightful interview.

    My one unexpected takeaway — though I can understand Redeemer in its early years having to deal with the issue of premarital sex, I had no idea that the issue of extraterrestrial sex was a big deal back them! Perhaps the author meant extramarital? Though I don’t want to be closed-minded about New Yorkers in 1989….

  3. Comment by MJ on December 19, 2022 at 10:34 pm

    The transcribed version of this interview could benefit from an editor giving it a once over.

  4. Comment by Jeffrey Walton on December 20, 2022 at 12:08 pm

    Thanks for flagging that, I’ve reviewed the transcript and cleaned it up a bit.

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