My Complicated Feelings About Tim Keller

One of modern Christianity’s most influential theologians and pastors passed this week

Tim Keller, one of American Christianity’s giants, passed away this week at age 72.

As some of you may know, I somewhat improbably spent years in the evangelical fold starting in 2005 following the sudden death of my father at age 61 and the passing of my beloved grandmother the year after. It’s hard to imagine that I would have headed down this road but for Tim Keller.

I entered Tim’s church, Redeemer Presbyterian, as a fairly committed atheist. I had long ago dispatched with my Episcopalian upbringing and other than the boyfriend who brought me to church, there were very few religious people in my Manhattan friend group, which consisted primarily of people working in or dedicated to Democratic politics.

Sunday was for brunch, not church.

A year later, I was all in with Christianity. And not just any Christianity — I had signed up for Tim Keller’s brand of evangelical Christianity, or at least what I thought was Tim Keller’s brand of evangelicalism.

My feelings about Tim Keller the person are straightforward: I knew him to be a thoughtful, brilliant, kind person. A devoted husband and father; humble and generous. I was often the beneficiary of his wisdom as I navigated various issues. His wife Kathy, just as brilliant as he, was my Bible study teacher for years. They were intertwined heart, mind and soul — it’s hard to imagine the grief she is experiencing as she faces life without him.

What was it that was so alluring about Tim? David Brooks does a good job of capturing it:

American evangelicalism suffers from an intellectual inferiority complex that sometimes turns into straight anti-intellectualism. But Tim could draw on a vast array of intellectual sources to argue for the existence of God, to draw piercing psychological insights from the troubling parts of Scripture or to help people through moments of suffering. His voice was warm, his observations crystal clear. We all tried to act cool around Tim, but we knew we had a giant in our midst.

He didn’t fight a culture war against that Manhattan world. His focus was not on politics but on “our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, that fail to satisfy us even when we get them.”

It was his focus on the eternal issues of life — of issues of meaning — that really hooked me. Nowhere else was anybody I knew talking about these things in the way that Tim was. He illustrated his points through philosophy, art, pop culture and yes, the Bible. But it was a Bible I had never been introduced to, despite attending church and Sunday school every weekend of my childhood. He brought it alive and showed how it was actually relevant to my life.

So why are my feelings complicated?

Ultimately, evangelicalism ended up being quite harmful to me and to many people I care about, and I can’t imagine I would ever have signed up for it but for Tim’s expert apologetics.

When I say I signed up for Tim Keller’s brand of evangelicalism, I mean I signed up for what I heard from the pulpit, which never included teaching about homosexuality or abortion being a sin or men being the head of the family. But as I became more involved in the church, I learned that these were in fact core teachings. It was more through peer pressure than any sermons that I started to conform to teachings that left me feeling unsettled and confused. Slowly, I lost myself as I attempted to conform to a theology that had the effect of disempowering me and alienating me from myself and many important people in my life.

I am not alone in my experience. But many people who leave evangelicalism (and really it’s white evangelicalism for the most part) end up defining themselves in opposition to the world they left. They bring the same religious fervor once marshaled in favor of evangelical theology and deploy it to demonize their former faith community. It’s still a paradigm of good versus evil, only now the evangelicals or believers in general are the evil ones.

I understand this impulse and fell prey to it for awhile. But ultimately it became for me an issue of both/and. I found evangelicalism was both harmful and it taught me a lot about a life of profound faith. I would not understand the Bible as deeply as I do had I not spent time at Tim Keller’s church and specifically Kathy Keller’s Bible study, which was as rigorous intellectually as it was spiritually meaningful.

This experience gave me a container for a growing faith at a time I felt very lost. It ultimately wasn’t the right container for me, but it provided a place to start. While I do not consider myself a particularly religious person anymore, I still view the Bible as a rich source of spiritual wisdom and while evangelicals get a lot wrong in my opinion, they get one major thing right: they understand there is a spiritual dimension to life and they take that seriously.

Richard Rohr talks about the importance of “transcending and including.” If we have truly moved on from a formative experience we will not need to denigrate it. (Note: “transcend” does not mean that you have “risen above” as if you are better. If you think you are better, then you haven’t transcended.)

When we transcend and include, we will take what was good about our experience and include it in the next chapter of our lives. I like to think that I’ve done this. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have harsh criticism for some parts of evangelical theology, and I will continue to voice them. It’s not “transcend and endorse.” There is no obligation to pretend you agree with something you don’t.

I think my experience with Tim and Kathy Keller and evangelicalism shows how complex human relationships can be. It’s rarely all or nothing. If you don’t have a connection to an actual person, it’s easy to treat them as a caricature or project onto them all your negative feelings about what they represent to you. But once a real person — and an actual relationship—enters the picture, binaries will often fall away and reveal a more complicated picture.

RIP Tim Keller.