Matt Smethurst has written a clear and concise book on Tim Keller, who died two years ago today. Its title—Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel—summarizes well what made a non-shouting pastor exceptionally effective in reaching the ears of educated and elite New Yorkers for nearly three decades.
Some Manhattanites saw religion is a good thing for personal peace and social coherence, but Keller went against the go-along tendency of theologically liberal churches and emphasized the peculiarity of the gospel. Keller preached that “Jesus isn’t one more teacher, come to tell you how to save yourself and find God. He is God himself, come to save and find you.” In this, he was not only greater than Buddha or Mohammed but also comprehensively different.
Smethurst rightly calls Keller “a three-dimensional voice in a two-dimensional world.” That well-roundedness pervaded his public ministry, not least in his cautions on partisan politics, which attracted criticism from the left and right alike. Until a decade ago, I tended to see danger mainly on the left. But Keller had a well-calibrated warning system that detected idolatrous pretensions across the board. He preached that all alternatives to the gospel are idolatry. Smethurst’s good summary: “Nobody is truly an unbeliever. Either you trust the real God or you’re enslaved to something you treat as a god.”
This doesn’t mean that Christians should be at war with other religions or that Christianity should be governmentally privileged above other beliefs. Keller was for a pluralism that could occasionally involve interreligious collaboration, but his basic posture was one of peaceful but persevering competition. Keller: “Every other savior but Jesus Christ is not really a savior.” Smethurst’s summary: If Christians “fail to explain different forms of works-based righteousness—different substitute saviors—we risk muting the depth of their slavery, the horror of their sin, and the wonder of God’s grace.”
This means Christians should not assume that having faith in some religion is a plus: Keller was pro-Christianity, not pro-religion. He was strongly pro-life, but not pro–our natural life. We are all made in God’s image, but we should admit that our natural heart is, as 16th-century theologian John Calvin said, “a perpetual factory of idols.” It’s hard to admit that. Keller, a modern Calvin, noted in Counterfeit Gods that “we look to our idols to love us, to provide us with value and a sense of beauty, significance, and worth.”
That’s why it’s so hard to accept the gospel and why we cannot do it apart from God’s grace. Keller made this clear in every sermon. (I still listen to examples each week, while walking my dog, via the Gospel in Life podcast.) He used a five-point structure: Here’s what we face. Here’s what we must do. Here’s why we can’t do it. Here’s how Jesus did it. Here’s how, through faith in Jesus, we should live. Smethurst aptly summarizes Keller’s challenge to high-achieving worshipers of success, sex, ideologies, or non-Christian religions: “Every substitute god is a taskmaster that will enslave you.”
The grammar is important: A substitute god is a that, but Christians worship a who, and every Keller sermon came back to the person of Christ. My wife and I sat in his congregation from 2008 to 2011 and never fell asleep as he sometimes wandered far afield but always made what we came to call “a Jesus turn” at the end: We sometimes whispered to each other, “Wait for it; wait for it,” and exchanged nudges when it happened.
We also learned from Keller our tendency toward pharisaism, which he diagnosed most clearly when explaining that the parable of the Prodigal Son is a misnomer: Christ speaks of two wayward sons: a younger brother who lived wastefully and an elder brother who wallowed in anger and pride rather than attending the celebratory feast. Keller had congregants like himself who had come from small towns to the fleshpots of Manhattan, but he neither indulged the tendency to squander nor expressed superiority to those who went astray. Christianity is superior, but Christians aren’t—and those who put on the airs of the elder brother may be even further from God than the younger.
This brings us back to Smethurst’s title, Tim Keller on the Christian Life, which evokes Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? Neither pastor said we Christians should stay in the pasture and style ourselves superior to those who wander. Smethurst summarizes well how Keller preached about the most famous chapters of Matthew’s gospel: “The Sermon on the Mount is a warning against rebellion dressed up as religion. … Apart from Jesus Christ, flagrant lawbreaking and fastidious rule keeping are dead ends. … When it comes to pleasing God, both the rebellious path and the religious path are dead ends.”
Smethurst also does readers the favor of amply quoting from some of Keller’s most succinct tropes. Here’s one:
Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine. Suffering—Buddhism says accept it, karma says pay it, fatalism says heroically endure it, secularism says avoid or fix it.
We learn from suffering. Keller had a good Christian life, with a long marriage to his wife, Kathy, and the blessings of family. Then he, like all of us eventually, had to face death, in his case from cancer. With an end in 2023 looming, Keller said he could “sincerely say, without any sentimentality or exaggeration, that I’ve never been happier in my life, that I’ve never had more days filled with comfort. But it is equally true that I’ve never had so many days of grief.”
This was part of Keller’s consistent honesty, and also his ability to see God’s goodness. As Keller numbered his days, he observed that “the joys of the earth are more poignant than they used to be.” From everything I’ve heard, Smethurst’s summary (based on 1 Thessalonians 4:13) is accurate: “Despite Keller’s terminal diagnosis, the promise of resurrection was powerful enough to keep him and Kathy from ‘grieving like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.’”
Marvin Olasky is executive editor of news and global at Christianity Today.
Correction: An earlier version of this review mischaracterized the book as a biography.
