Timothy Keller, evangelical minister with national flock, dies at 72
Timothy Keller, an evangelical minister who started a thriving church in New York City and cultivated a national following with a theology that separated faith from party politics and centered his vision of conservative Christianity in the hubbub of modern life, died Friday at his home in New York. He was 72.
His death was announced in an email by Redeemer Churches and Ministries, a network of organizations established by Keller. He was diagnosed in 2020 with pancreatic cancer and had previously been treated for thyroid cancer.
Keller spent nearly three decades as pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a congregation he founded in 1989.
Unlike the leaders of many evangelical megachurches, he did not employ Jumbotrons or pop music in his services. He adhered to traditional liturgy and music while peppering his sermons with references to Saint Augustine and ancient Greek, Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen, J.R.R. Tolkien and “Star Wars.”
His erudition proved especially attractive to young urban professionals – New York’s investment bankers, lawyers, tech wizards and aspiring actors – and the congregation drew wide attention as it swelled to include 5,000 weekly worshipers.
Keller won the admiration of many evangelicals, who credited him with demonstrating their movement’s potential far beyond the Bible Belt.
He reached millions of readers through books including his best-selling volume “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” (2008), an elaboration of Christian beliefs for which he was compared to C.S. Lewis, the British lay theologian and author of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
“Like Lewis, he had a gift for avoiding any whiff of pedantry or preachiness,” Molly Worthen, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an authority on American evangelicalism, said in an interview for this obituary. “He had a gift, as Lewis did, for . . . homing in on the core ideas of the Gospel and understanding the perspective of a skeptical reader, an atheist or a person who has been bruised by Christianity.”
Keller belonged to the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative Presbyterian denomination.
He did not rail against sex outside marriage but rather counseled congregants that “the logic of your relationship with Christ” should move them not to engage in it. He regarded homosexuality as contrary to Scripture and adhered to complementarianism, which establishes separate roles for men and women in the church and in life and which gives men the authority to lead.
PREACHED RACIAL EQUALITY, OVERHAULING JUSTICE SYSTEM
He also insisted that Christians commit themselves to racial equality, service to the needy and the rectification of a justice system that favors the rich. His combination of views – some archconservative and others more in line with liberal thinking – was consistent with his vision of Christianity but, to his frustration, often at odds with the binary world of contemporary politics.
He sought to separate Christian faith from political allegiance, and he became a notable outlier in the evangelical movement in recent years as it was cleaved, in his words, into “a red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism.”
Keller occupied a position “between two worlds,” Worthen said. “He had a way of allowing secular people who thought of themselves as hostile to Christianity or simply not in need of Christianity to suspend their disbelief so that they could entertain the possibility that this world he was offering, his Christian worldview, could be true.”
At the same time, she said, “he was able to speak to conservative Christians who feel themselves to be alienated from multicultural America and helped them see ways to speak to that pluralism and embrace it.”
Keller resisted being characterized as an “evangelical” because of the word’s association with conservative politics; he preferred instead the label “orthodox” Christian. Even that, he found, came with baggage.
“Frankly, if you are an orthodox Christian in Manhattan right now, it’s a social problem,” he told the Atlantic magazine in 2011. “People are nervous about you, they feel like you’re bigoted. And so actually right now if you are a graduate of Harvard, Yale or Princeton, and you’ve got your MBA, and you’re working on Wall Street, or being a downtown artist or something like that, and if you are an orthodox Christian, that’s very, very subversive. It’s very transgressive.”
CRITIC OF CHURCH-POLITICAL ALLIANCE
Especially after the rise of Donald Trump, Keller was an outspoken critic of the politicization of faith. As the Republican candidate for president, Trump overwhelmingly won the White evangelical vote in both his successful 2016 campaign and his failed 2020 bid for reelection. No party, Keller argued, should have a lock on the Christian vote, because no single party platform was interchangeable with Christian faith.
Keller’s “third way” approach to civic engagement was challenged by evangelicals who regarded Republican candidates as by far the more reliable representatives of their most fundamental beliefs, including opposition to abortion rights. At the same time, the apolitical nature of his orthodoxy was insufficient to win the approval of many liberals, who could not abide his views on such matters as homosexuality.
But Keller held firm – chiefly, he wrote in a 2018 article in the New York Times, because allying a church with one party or another “confirms what many skeptics want to believe about religion,” which is “that it is merely one more voting bloc aiming for power.”
Timothy James Keller was born in Allentown,
Pa., on Sept. 23, 1950. His father worked in advertising, and his mother was a homemaker.
He was raised in the Lutheran church, but he experienced a gradual religious conversion in college. He graduated in 1972 from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1975, the same year he received a master of divinity degree from GordonConwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
There he met his future wife, Kathy Kristy, whom he married in 1975, and who worked closely with him in his ministry. Besides his wife, survivors include three sons, Jonathan Keller, Michael Keller and David Keller; a sister; and seven grandchildren.
Keller was 24 when he was named pastor of his first congregation, West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Va., a rural community south of Richmond. Over his nine years there, membership reportedly grew from 90 congregants to 300. He later taught theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pa., where he received a doctor of ministry degree in 1981.
When Keller’s denomination decided to dispatch a minister to New York City, several candidates turned down the assignment before Keller accepted; to them, the prospect seemed a losing venture.
At the outset, the congregation that became Redeemer Presbyterian met in a private living room. The group grew steadily and began renting increasingly larger churches and auditoriums for weekly services. The numbers surged after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Keller picked up more worshipers amid the Great Recession later that decade.
“If you’re trying to win people to Christ, if you’re trying to say this world is not enough and you need faith – I hate to say it, recessions are wonderful times for that message to fall on more open people,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2014. “I wish the number of conversions and Christian growth would go along with prosperity and giving – but they usually don’t.”
Keller retired as senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in 2017. In addition to the Manhattan congregation, he founded Redeemer City to City, a nonprofit organization that seeks to start – or “plant,” in the evangelical phrasing – churches in cities around the world.
He wrote more than 20 books, including the trilogy “On Birth,” “On Marriage” and “On Death”
(all 2020), the last of which was published shortly before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“Religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis,” he wrote in the Atlantic after becoming ill.
But “as God’s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more heavenly minded that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.”