A Tribute to Tim Keller
This past Friday, Tim Keller died. He was the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, a skilled apologist, and the reason I’m not an atheist.
The first time I pressed play on one of his sermons was completely by accident. It was 2019 and I was “sermon-surfing” on the commute home. While scrolling through the typical roster - Joel Osteen, Steven Furtick, and the like, I stumbled upon a title that caught my attention.
Literalism: Isn’t the Bible historically unreliable and regressive?
Provocative, right?
Within a few minutes, I felt like I had been transported into a classroom. Tim Keller stood willfully disarmed at the podium, talking about the common misconceptions that tend to trouble people in our culture.
Doesn’t the Bible endorse slavery? Doesn’t it promote outdated practices like primogeniture? Isn’t there murder and infidelity all throughout the Old Testament?
And if the Bible is filled will these awful things, how can it be good let alone culturally relevant?
One by one, he dismantled each misconception: slavery in biblical times is not the same as we imagine slavery to be today (or even 100 years ago); while primogeniture was practiced, we see God choose the youngest son over the oldest son in every generation; circumstances with infidelity, murder, or polygamy were not being endorsed by the Bible but used to illustrate the devastation they caused.
While no, he didn’t “debunk” every controversial part of scripture in one fell swoop, he did open my eyes to apologetics. A world where intellectualism and faith could meet - where there were emotional, historical, and evidence-based reasons to believe in the existence of God.
And he did it with so much…humility. He didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing the historical context or for having doubts. He made each point so matter-of-factly, in such a way that I felt my objections were addressed seriously and honestly.
This was a relief. Despite my ritual of throwing on a sermon during my commute, my faith was hanging on by a thread. After years of agnosticism, I was thrown into a community of “name it and claim it” and while I was initially swept away into the excitement, I was beginning to see right through it. On the other side of Joel Osteen sermons and manipulated bible verses was something sad and empty. Something akin to the despondency of atheism.
So my fixation with Tim Keller's sermons began. It was the only way I felt I could access the true beauty of Jesus – to feel it and be moved by it. I listened to his sermons when I moved alone across the country. I listened to his sermons when I drove solo on the blue ridge parkway. I listened to his sermons when I got my heart broken, and could hardly hear the recording over the sound of my weeping.
I listened because he showed me a gospel with substance. Something much more honest about suffering and the complexity of life. I was so tired of people trying to explain life to me as if it were some simple equation. I was so bored of lazy, black-and-white thinking.
Tim Keller never gave me an ultimatum about heaven and hell, he never told me that my salvation was based on my performance. Instead, he showed me what lay at the center of it all:
“We are more sinful than we could ever dare imagine and more loved and accepted than we could ever dare hope.”
I’ve never struggled with the notion that we’re sinful. In fact, I feel it all the time. The weight of my inadequacy is overwhelming. And yet Tim reminds me that I don’t need anything to make me acceptable but Jesus.
If you never got a chance to listen to him, I’m linking two of my all-time favorite sermons here:
And my favorite books by him here:
Thanks for reading. And Tim, if you see this, thank you.
