Tim Keller’s Overlooked Teaching That Will Endure for Generations

Matt Smethurst

Tim often invoked Jonathan Edwards image that it’s one thing to know about honey, the properties of it, it’s another thing to have tasted it. And Tim was at pains in his preaching and teaching his writing to bring us into this dynamic encounter with Christ and be renewed inwardly, spiritually vigorously by that encounter with gospel grace, He was not satisfied with just information transfer that leaves the person maybe intellectually stirred, but fundamentally unchanged you

Collin Hansen

I know a thing or two about trying to summarize the life and work of Timothy Keller. It’s not easy, but it is rewarding, because there is no one who has taught me more about the Christian life, and if there’s one person in the world I’d want to teach me about the late Tim Keller, it’s my friend and longtime colleague, Matt Smithers, one of my favorite human beings on the earth. Now what I’m looking for somebody to teach me about Tim Keller is exactly what we get in the new book, Tim Keller on the Christian life, the transforming power of the gospel, published by crossway, written by Matt Matt Smithers is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He’s the author of several books, and also co host with Lincoln Duncan of the everyday pastor podcast from the gospel coalition. I can’t do a better job of summarizing this book than what Kathy Keller offers in her endorsement Tim’s wife, she says, Matt Smithers has researched an impressive amount of content for this book, sermons, books, papers, courses, articles and unpublished conversations. He found resources even I wasn’t familiar with, and he has produced a work of scholarship that will long stand as the most thorough examination of the biblical themes that animated all of Tim’s ministry. Well, how about that, Matt, let’s jump right in. Thanks for joining me on gospel pound.

Matt Smethurst

Thanks for having me, Colin, and getting to talk with you about Tim. Is particularly special given not just your own work on Tim with your book, but also all the conversations we’ve had over the years about him and his ministry, a couple of visits that we got to make to New York, and so, yeah, this is real privilege.

Collin Hansen

Oh, man, that’s special. Matt. Well, what do you most? What do you miss most about Tim? It’s the TGC. You were our managing editor for so many years. You were always the one to correspond with Tim about his new books. Always be interviewing him about those and there were many of those books that came out during your years full time on TGC staff, so at least, I guess you had a head start in this project. So what is it you missed most about Tim?

Matt Smethurst

I didn’t know Tim personally as well as many others did, including yourself. And so when I think about what I’ll miss most about Tim, I think it probably is the material, the content that he was producing. And I know you’ve mentioned before that that there was a book on identity that was going to be written and that never got to be written. So it’s the faithful but fresh way that Tim would address every topic that he took up in a way that made you think, I’ve never thought of it that way before. I’ve never looked at it from that angle. And yet you realize you’re not just looking at someone who’s being clever or creative for the sake of wowing you. You’re looking at someone who has so deeply peered into the mirror of God’s word, to use James’ illustration in James chapter one that he’s showing you what you should have seen in the first place if you had just looked more carefully.

Collin Hansen

Well, along those lines, Matt, we’re not going to get more new books from Tim. Unfortunately, we can go back and we can read an entire library, not to mention 1000s of sermons from Tim. But what is it that readers get in this book that you’ve written that they couldn’t get just by reading and listening to Tim for themselves?

Matt Smethurst

Well, my aim was to essentially provide a digest of his best teaching on Christian living. There’s actually a crossway series theologians on the Christian life, and it’s very confusing, because this book is actually not part of that series. But we ended up going with the title Tim Keller on the Christian life, because we simply couldn’t think of another title that better captured the scope and the focus of this particular book. So I’ve not set out to write a biography. I’ve not set out to critically evaluate his legacy. I’ve really tried to just synthesize and distill and bring forth what I think is his best material on topics where I think sometimes he’s least a pre. Appreciate it. We all know how skilled Tim was when it came to topics like cultural apologetics, for example, which obviously you’re giving a lot of thought and leadership to through TGC Center for Cultural apologetics, the Keller center, but I think it was the bread and butter timeless teaching on everyday Christian living, which isn’t quite as attention grabbing on first glance, but is the kind of stuff that really will stand the test of time. And as I revisited all of Tim’s published work for this project, I was struck reading, you know, rereading counterfeit gods and the prodigal God and down the line, I was struck by how relevant, and I almost said impactful, but that would have offended our colleague, Ivan Mesa, editorial pet peeve, how relevant and fresh his work still is. It resonates, in a sense, across not just generations, but even across tribes, he had a way of presenting how the gospel applies to all of life in a way that made you think, man, I’m I feel like I’m falling in love with Jesus all over again. Oh,

Collin Hansen

man, such a good way to such a good way to put it. Let’s talk about the themes. How did you identify which themes You’d cover, how you’d organize them? I know we talked about that some in the editing and in writing process, and I thought you did a great job of it. But that’s not an easy thing to do. To say I’m going to cover these and not these. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst

I just basically cast lots. No, it was hard and and I realized very early on, I cannot be exhaustive, he left behind a massive body of work. It’s it’s incredible. I mean, as you’ve pointed out in your book on Tim, he preached 1500 expositional messages in his first nine years as a pastor. Before he he ever even went to New York City and has published, you know, he wrote 31 books, not to mention white papers and essays even into his final months on Earth. And so I basically wanted to think, when it comes to the kind of book I’d want to give members in my church, maybe they’ve, they’ve, of course, heard of Tim Keller. Maybe they have some Tim Keller books on their shelf, but they don’t maybe know where to begin. Maybe they feel intimidated about dipping into that body of work I wanted to provide, essentially an on ramp into his body of work, and if I’ve succeeded, it’ll leave people wanting more. It’ll leave people, hopefully wanting to dive even deeper into Tim’s published work. I’m

Collin Hansen

going to go off script here a little bit and follow up on that one and ask if people could read one Tim Keller book. Which one should it be?

Matt Smethurst

I thought about that question before, and it does depend on who the person is. So let’s say it’s a skeptic, I think, making sense of God, which he wrote after the reason for God, but described as a prequel, and he’s doing so much of that subterranean work in people’s hearts and imaginations to show them, as Pascal famously said that first you, you know, show them, you make them wish it were true, and then you can show them that it is true. So I think making sense of God is one of his most underrated books. But I do think the prodigal God is the most distilled essence of his gospel teaching. So if someone’s only gonna, if someone wants to just read one book to kind of get a taste for what Keller, what animated his heart, his life, his ministry, what he sounded like, I’d probably hand them the prodigal God. What would you say? I’m very curious.

Collin Hansen

Well, yeah, probably prodigal God. It’s a it’s a shorter book. It was a best selling book. It was one of his first books, and it is as close as it as he came to writing an autobiography. It’s the one that most clearly represents the passions of his own heart and his own experience. Which is not to say that the other books did not but it’s the one that most clearly encapsulates that I was going to try to try to expand it and say if then two books, or if then three books, but you’re right. It depends so much on the different audience that you’re talking about. But making sense of God definitely that might be that that second book, and then I guess it depends on who the person is, because I might even jump all the way to Center Church, if it’s somebody who’s in ministry, or if it’s somebody who’s still skeptical, I might send him over to reason for God. Or if it’s somebody who’s still in that kind of the more generic category of Christian living, he can probably stick with his own order, which would have been things like counterfeit gods, right?

Matt Smethurst

Exactly. And that’s when I when I speak of bread and butter everyday topics. I mean, you think about his contribution. We didn’t even we haven’t even mentioned prayer, suffering, forgiveness, marriage, they’ll stand the test of time because they’re topics that virtually every believer will face and will need help doing so in a faithful way,

Collin Hansen

which I think is what you see when you have a pastor who’s so theologically minded can do. It’s not the way theologians typically think. So. It’s very much a pastor theologian at work. Matt, this is an impossibly big question, but maybe there’s a simple way to answer it. How would you summarize Tim’s view of the Christian life? Now the subtitle of your book the transforming power of the gospel? That’s probably one way we could do it, but take a stab at it.

Matt Smethurst

I think vital union with the living Christ experienced as a dynamic encounter with His grace. The reason I say that is because Tim often invoked Jonathan Edwards image that it’s one thing to know about honey, the properties of it. It’s another thing to have tasted it. And Tim was at pains in his preaching and teaching his writing to bring us into this dynamic encounter with Christ and be renewed inwardly, spiritually vigorously by that encounter with gospel grace. And so I think, I think above all, and it wasn’t a kind of manipulative experientialism, right? It was really more first Great Awakening than Second Great Awakening. Revival, not revivalism, an attempt to reverse engineer that. But Tim was not satisfied in his own life or with the with the content he produced. He was not satisfied with just information transfer that leaves the person maybe intellectually stirred, but fundamentally unchanged.

Collin Hansen

Well, that’s good answer. Obviously you prepared for that one. And I think there maybe would be a footnote, or maybe an extension a bit on Grace, because you opened the statement with union with Christ, which is perfectly in keeping with the experiential elements as well the objective elements, and also his status as a reformed theologian. But usually what you would hear him talk about would be justification by faith alone, kind of a Lutheran emphasis, which is also more broadly reformed emphasis as well. So I wonder if it’s grace, you know, through justification by faith, or something like that, in there, that I’d want to incorporate in there. But that’s a really good summary. I think you’re

Matt Smethurst

right. And I also think weakness was a theme, was almost a motif, kind of a sub theme, the the that true strength is found in weakness, and that’s ultimately seen in the Lord Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich, became poor, so that we, through his poverty, might become rich.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, amen to that. And it adds some biographical elements in there. Tim was not somebody who was personally a triumphalist in terms of his life, he was not sort of the up and up, up and comer all the time, things like that. So he was personally acquainted and connected with Christ through those elements of weaknesses as he experienced them throughout his life in different stages. I’ve already alluded to this. Matt Tim was unusually gifted at reaching a wide range of people, even if they didn’t always agree with his theology. You’ve You’ve mentioned a couple different options. What did you discover? Why he was able to do that?

Matt Smethurst

Well, I think because he read widely and he listened well. And that’s I feel like in all my answers I need to say, and this is something that you ably touched on in your work as well. And I would encourage listeners to I actually think your book is a good one to read before mine, because your book on the influences and the intellectual and spiritual formation of Tim will help them. I think perhaps better situate, better interpret some of the stuff he would later end up saying once all those rings were in the tree, to use his metaphor, once all those influences had really taken hold. You know, my mind goes immediately to a passage I just preached a couple weeks ago in First Peter, chapter three, where there’s that classic apologetics verse where we should always be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have. But then Peter goes on to say, yet do it with gentleness and respect having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. It’s so easy in our day and age to mistake, to mistake gentleness for cowardice, but actually, according to Scripture, gentleness is a form of strength. Gentleness is not weakness. It’s channeled strength. And I think that Keller was able to speak so well. People to People who disagreed with him. Because, frankly, I mean, some of it probably was temperamental. I think that the more just naturally ironic Spirit helps. But I think it was deeper than that. I think it was that he spoke with people who disagreed with him, especially skeptics, as if he remembered what it was like to be lost to and I think there’s a lot we could as I was preparing the sermon on this passage, I was just struck by what a model Keller was not mincing words or sidestepping the truth, but obeying the inspired apostle Peter and engaging with those who don’t yet know Christ with gentleness and respect. I’m curious to know, though, what you would add,

Collin Hansen

I would that’s a great way to look at it, both biblically and experientially, through personality, through sanctification, I would look at it also theologically, try perspectivally. He was focused on engaging the head. I mean, you would be intellectually stimulated by engaging with him. But then also, as you’ve already able to pointed out with the with the head nod there to Jonathan Edwards, was very focused on the heart. Was not not happy if you just kept the knowledge in your head and it never traveled to your heart. But then furthermore, he would help you take it practically. He’d be able to connect it to your life, and then also to work backward, work backward from your experience through your heart to your head, to go both directions. And I find that a lot of writers, teachers, preachers, they can engage, they’re very good with the head knowledge, or they can be really practical, or they can tug on the heart strings, but it’s really hard for them to put together all three. That’s really hard. And so my experience of reading Tim Keller, in fact, it was one of his last books, and hadn’t read anything from him in a little while. And as I look back on it, I thought, whoa. It’s like the words were in three dimensions. They were popping out at me. There was a liveliness to it. And in fact, the experience, and I think Tim would appreciate this connection. The other day, I was reading through CS Lewis’s living in the Atomic Age, and it was, it was like firing off the page. It was so dynamic, the ideas, the words, everything I had to put it down. It’s like, I cannot handle this right now, like it’s so engaging, my emotions, my intellect, things like that. That was a common experience. Yeah, I think reading Tim absolutely now this is a little bit more of what my book was focused on, but I love for you to make your own observation,

Speaker 1

we’re not on the everyday pastor. We’re on we’re on gospel bound true.

Collin Hansen

This is a, this is a crossover podcast, but yeah, this is my show. Did you identify any patterns or major changes as Tim’s work progressed over the years?

Matt Smethurst

Yes and no, so let’s start with the no at the 2023 TGC conference, Chris Watkin delivered a talk at a micro event about Keller’s formation. Is that available online? Do you know?

Collin Hansen

Yeah, yeah, that was something I participated in. Yes. Okay, well, I

Matt Smethurst

would encourage listeners to look that up. Chris Watkin, where in that message, he says that he had gone back to a lot of Tim’s earliest sermons, and all the ingredients were there in 1989 that we see kind of come to full flower in later years, especially as he starts publishing books. And I do think, by the way, that writing books only helped Tim. He was already a gifted communicator, but I think he grew in precision as he was forced to turn spoken words into written words. And so know, in the sense that, yeah, I’ve listened to a lot of his earliest stuff, and you’re like, yep, that’s Tim, having said that, Tim himself identified a few areas where he definitely did learn and grow and even in some ways change. So, for example, his emphasis on idolatry was not something that was very prominent in his Hopewell years 1975 to 1984 he credits a couple of things, a Martin Lloyd Jones sermon on First John 521. Little children, keep yourselves from idols that he read around the time he was planting Redeemer, as well as the David palace in essay, idols of the heart and Vanity Fair, which was published in 1991 he credits both of those works with helping him realize that, especially as a way, as an evangelist trying to help late modern New Yorkers. Were they late modern in 1989 you’re smart, so in New York they were, we call them that, okay, but yeah, Manhattan, i. Skeptics helping them not just to dismiss the category of sin as outdated, archaic thing they’re not going to even give a hearing to, but rather describing it as a worship problem. You’re living for something, and that thing you’re living for, you’re enslaved to, and that thing cannot satisfy you, and it can’t die for your sins. Only Jesus can. So idolatry was something that I do think, as you listen to his his sermons, especially in the Redeemer years, you see it become a more pronounced theme. And the other I would add, is prayer. So like any good minister, Tim taught and spoke eloquently on prayer for decades, and yet, three months before he died, he was being interviewed, and someone said, as you look back over your life and ministry, Do you have regrets? What’s one thing you wish you had done differently? And he said, that’s easy. I wish I’d prayed more. And he actually gave a talk on his I think it’s called a personal journey in prayer. You can find it on the gospel and Life website, where he talks about in his own spiritual formation, kind of three distinct chapters in terms of how he engaged in his prayer life. So I would say idolatry and prayer are two examples. But I’m curious to know if you’ve been able to identify others.

Collin Hansen

Well, no surprise. In my book, I emphasized a lot of the cultural apologetic dimensions that changed. So especially after 2008 they were changing in the mid 2000s right there in your neck of the woods, they with James Davison Hunter. So that that that’s probably the biggest shift. But I talk about that at length because it’s a big part of what we do at the Keller center. Keller center in there, but I don’t think I even understood that development with the idolatry that you just laid out right there. So definitely teaching me that to mention, because when he would typically cite it, he wouldn’t cite those guys explicitly, as much palace than he did pretty often, and Lloyd Jones, he often talked to, especially about the experience of the sport, work of the Spirit, with idolatry. It must have been more retroactive that he tried, I think successfully, to root it in Luthers teaching on idolatry and then August and on disordered loves. So I guess those were not necessarily the origin of it, but more of a post hoc application.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, that’s right. And one thing that brings both of these together, cultural apologetics and work on idolatry and such is the fact that he listened, in his early years of Redeemer to, I think he said, 100 to 150 tapes of both Martyn Lloyd Jones and Dick Lucas, because he recognized that in New York City in the early 1990s in some ways, the closest contextual parallel to his ministry was people ministering in an even more secular London. They had these nighttime evangelistic addresses that Keller loved listening to because it gave him ideas for how these guys were trying to engage with skeptics in ways that are subversive and surprising. Where I do think you get some of that, A, doctrine B, doctrine stuff, you know, confront and connect that Keller ended up putting in Center Church and other books, Matt,

Collin Hansen

you’re you’re helping people to try to behold Christ and to to know Him, to encounter Christ through the Spirit every week in your own pulpit there in Richmond. What insights from Tim about Christ, about his word, about our Triune God? What those insights do you most commonly engage in your own preaching?

Matt Smethurst

Well, certainly the Christ centered interpretation of all of Scripture. It begins there. And I think sometimes Tim has been critiqued for pulling Jesus out of a hat type preaching, but I think when you actually engage what he did it was more sophisticated and more careful than that. After all, he taught preaching as a seminary professor, not to say you can’t get things wrong, but he had definitely thought through the reality that Jesus, or the way he put it, would be that all of our deepest hopes and longings are only going to find a happy ending in Jesus, and so he was wanting to follow these cultural narratives, these baseline cultural narratives, as well as the kinds of things that animate our hearts and our lives and show how We’re seeking fulfillment, and all these empty, broken cisterns when the fountain of life is is right there, there. Keller never used this illustration, but I’ve used this in my my preaching before, when the concentration camp Bucha was liberated, and by the way, speaking of Bucha, Vaul. Just read your book. Oh, yesterday.

Collin Hansen

There you go. Where is God?

Matt Smethurst

Where is God in the world? With

Collin Hansen

so much evil? Yeah, with the book, Yeah, where’s God in world? So you open with that, yeah, involved. It’s, it’s for Ellie viso was Yeah.

Matt Smethurst

And the TGC hard question series, actually, here’s another one. Did the resurrection really happened to Timothy Paul Jones when the Allied soldiers came into the camp and they just saw sheer horror, I mean, bodies stacked, one on top of the other, and basically a little huddle of prisoners on the doorstep of death, and they bring in these large cans of drinking water. And the soldiers all kind of make their way over to the water, but there was one inmate off to the side. He was on his hands and knees, and he was lapping from a puddle of mud, even though he saw the containers of fresh drinking water, and so a soldier had to come up and bring him over. And it’s such a picture, I think, of a lot of Tim’s ministry, but what I’m certainly trying to do in my preaching is, and this is what we have to do week after week. It’s not just a one time thing. It’s not like you’re lapping up muddy water and you come to the water of life and conversion, and then you never go back. No, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Let us stand firm then and not be beholden to captive to a yoke of slavery. And so I don’t know why that illustration just came to mind, but I feel like in my preaching, I’m not just wanting to tell, I’m wanting to show. And Tim was a master of the metaphor. I think when some preachers think about illustrations, they imagine that they have to be these elaborate stories, but really an illustration, as Tim points out in his book on preaching, is can just be an image. It can just be Jonathan Edwards talking about, you know, a spider web will no more stop a falling rock than you will get to heaven through your good works. And Tim, because he was a student of CS Lewis and others, really suffused his preaching with vivid images that that caused you to feel like you were encountering the real thing in the gospel of Christ, yeah. What would you add there? Colin

Collin Hansen

that I that I adopt? I mean, well, by the way, that that illustration is very similar to one of CS Lewis’s most famous illustrations, so just kind of a historical twist on the same imagery in there. I mean, it’s hard to know where to begin. I would say probably his work on suffering is the stuff that I go back to most consistently. It’s the triumph through weakness. It’s the longing for the ultimate encounter with Christ, the return of Christ, the comfort of judgment, all those sorts of things. I probably go back to those, yeah, as much as anything. And it’s no surprise that my book is on the My latest book is on the problem of evil, yeah. So that’s very much similar to things that I’d learned from Tim, but then adapted in my own way to apply them to historical questions. I was just watching

Matt Smethurst

a clip the other day of something he he said, I believe in 2020 where the interviewer asked, How do you make sense of the problem of evil? And he essentially said, Well, there’s a philosophical answer and a personal answer. And so you see, in that moment, an apologists mind and a pastor’s heart, the philosophical answer is, well, just because you can’t think of a good reason that God would permit suffering doesn’t mean there can’t be one that doesn’t make any sense. But the personal answer that is needed for those in the throes of pain is that we don’t know actually the all the reasons why God permitted this in your life, but we know what the reason wasn’t, and it wasn’t that he doesn’t, doesn’t love you, and the reason we can know that is because he’s the only God with scars. He’s the only God who plunged himself into our weakness, into our suffering, into our pain, in order to be able to, as Tim loved to say, one day end suffering and death without ending us.

Collin Hansen

Oh, man, I love that you’ve mentioned a couple different elements of this already. But what about Tim’s work or goals as you understood them? In writing about his views in the Christian life most misunderstood or misinterpreted today, that could be from people who love him or people who don’t. And I think it’s helpful to point out that you and I both operate in ecclesial spaces, where by no means would everybody be a Tim Keller fan at all. Yeah. So, yeah. Can. Absolutely different

Matt Smethurst

directions, and I didn’t agree with Tim on everything and but that’s okay. I don’t even agree with myself on everything, and I don’t need to agree with someone. In fact, I think it’s a way to learn from and honor Tim’s legacy, given how he engaged with those who were very different than him, in a lot of ways that we can learn and engage from someone that we don’t think it got it, that we don’t think always got it right in the exact way we would want to in our in our modern context. But I think that overall, Tim was an incredibly faithful Communicator of the gospel, and you can’t understand Tim and you know, I’m not the first to say this, but you can’t understand Tim Keller without understanding that he was an evangelist. His heart was not to sidestep the severity of sin or make the gospel palatable to late, modern New Yorkers the way I’ve described, I’ve described contextualization before, at least when it’s done well, is that you’re not dressing up the gospel to make it cool. You’re breaking it down to make it clear. And that’s what Tim was trying to do. He was wanting the offense of the cross to be more obvious, more clear, so that people again could encounter the real thing. They could encounter Jesus. But because he was an evangelist, that meant that when it came to more controversial cultural and political issues, he often pushed those down into the discipleship of the church, into small groups and stuff, more than he tended to address them from the pulpit on Sundays. That’s not to say he never did. In fact, I think he he did so in his sermons, more than some of his critics give him credit for. But the point stands that he was, he was trying to preach expositional sermons that had an evangelistic accent on Sundays, and trusting that his books, I mean, a lot of the stuff Tim wrote, If listeners aren’t familiar with this, they can be found on the gospel and Life website, are really extensive Bible studies and courses that I’ve used in my own preaching through judges and Mark and other books. And there’s so much there when it comes to discipleship for kind of the quote, unquote, harder issues of life. The other thing I would say is, when you actually listen to Tim’s preaching, and I would say, the more you listen to his preaching, you realize that, though his demeanor was often gentle, and you know, he wasn’t a kind of fire brand in the pulpit. He had a directness about the way he spoke. He called Manhattanites to the math over and over again, I hear this. I mean, even a few days ago, I was listening to a couple of his messages from First Peter four. I think they were preached in 1994 and he is going after his audience, basically telling them that they’re wasting their lives and offending the God who made them because they’re living for themselves and they deserve to go to hell. And so when I hear people say that Tim was trying to soft pedal sin or curry favor with cultural elites in New York. I’m less and less persuaded by that as an overall assessment of His ministry, the more I actually listen to his sermons. Yeah, I think

Collin Hansen

it’s very true. What else could you say? Well, yeah, I just, I think it’s, it’s easy for anybody to grab something without context on Twitter. It’s easy for somebody to find a part of a best selling book that they don’t they don’t love, or maybe it’s not as clear as it should be, and then to extrapolate that onto somebody who just was not a partisan political preacher. I mean, whatever you want to say, that just wasn’t what he was doing. And other people are, or some people are more comfortable with it than he is. By you. I know that you and I are both shaped very much by Tim Keller and Mark dever. Well, Mark Devers in Capitol Hill Baptist church, and he doesn’t do that either. So I think people single out Tim because he didn’t go

Matt Smethurst

after in Don Carson’s book, Christ and culture revisited, he compares Redeemer and CHPC in that regard, and actually shows that though Keller endeavor have two different postures or approaches, in some ways, when it comes to say cultural apologetics that this, there are far more similarities than differences there. Sorry to interrupt you.

Collin Hansen

No, it’s a great point that I’d long since forgotten. I’m surprised I didn’t remember that. Thank you. And they’re both evangelists at heart, and you can say that. Evangelism is not everything in the Christian life, and I would agree, but it’s pretty important, and I would rather have somebody who’s focusing on conversion and eternity and judgment and heaven and hell than somebody who’s focused on political news that’s going to be here today and gone tomorrow. So thing that offers a much better example in the balance, even if we think, okay, I wish he’d been more specific from the pulpit on certain certain sins that were especially a big issue in his context, like, say, abortion as an example there,

Matt Smethurst

yeah. And both Keller endeavor, of course, were shaped by very similar influences, not not only because they both got their degrees at the same seminary, but also because the influence of Lloyd Jones or especially the Puritans both obviously, they’re different personalities. They’re very different men with different ministries, and yet they’re both kind of modern day Puritans, and I don’t think you can understand Keller’s ministry if you’re only looking at the contextualization or the cultural apologetics or this or that, without understanding the deep well he was drawing from from the historic reform tradition. In fact, in his book on prayer, he says that when his prayer life stalled out. Not long after 911 Cathy had Crohn’s disease. Ministry was stressful for him. The first time cancer, the first time he went on a journey to try to find deeper experience and prayer. And he was reading from different traditions. And ultimately, that journey led him back to his own tradition, and he realized that what he was searching for was available right there in the Puritans.

Collin Hansen

Well, then connect to that. Think you’ve probably answered this question already, but is there an aspect of his teaching that we overlook today, and the way that I answered that question, and maybe you’d agree with me based on that answer, but I would say that typically, when I have met somebody in the last 10 years who really loves Tim Keller, but seems to not be calibrated the same that Tim was, it’s usually because they do not have grounding in the Puritans that he did that’s interesting. It’s usually that they have a lot of commonality with his sophisticated urbane preaching, maybe even an aspect of his apologetics. But of course, this is the exact same thing that happened to Jonathan Edwards is what happened to some of his own children, grandchildren, theological successors. They gravitated toward his cultural engagement, but not his Puritan pietism. And so that’s at least what I see, and why in my book, I took pains to say, spend your night to you know, his 1970s his formative seminary as well as then early in heaven, had the kids, then for his pastoral ministry all that stuff into the mid 1980s said, you know, spend that time reading the Puritan paperbacks. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst

and both of those themes were prominent to the very end of his life. So on the one hand, he was writing white papers on justice and writing critiques of critical theory, and on the other hand, he was writing books like hope in times of fear and forgive, which are very much not pietistic books in the negative sense, but calls for us to engage seriously with the words of Jesus on the level of our heart so that we can be those that he’s he’s called us to be but you asked, What was your question? There is one thing I wanted to say, an aspect of his teaching that we overlooked today. Yeah, but you asked about maybe an overlooked aspect of his teaching? I think one of them is friendship. So you scan the list of chapters in my book that is probably the one that wouldn’t make it on most people’s lists, if they’re just trying to think what were the most pronounced themes in Tim’s ministry, and I don’t even think it was on my very first draft of the table of contents. But the deeper I went into his work, the more I realized, Oh, actually, this this theme of friendship, and how, in particular, how the gospel transforms relationships. We see that expressed in a book like the meaning of marriage, but it’s also a theme that showed up throughout his preaching, because he’s in New York, which is a transient place. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a context where people are not prioritizing friendships or church. Tim, though my ecclesiology differed from his, he also didn’t mince words when it came to the necessity of church membership. He said, You cannot obey Hebrews 1317, to obey your pastors, obey your leaders apart from church membership. In fact, he likened attending a church but not joining it to living with someone before you get married. Married, you’re wanting the benefits, but not the commitment. And I think his work on friendship, especially in an age of loneliness, is it just it just rings with relevance, and he’s obviously drawing deeply from the well of the four loves from CS Lewis there. But I just think there’s a lot that’s worth exploring or even revisiting there that will encourage us in our in our daily lives.

Collin Hansen

Speaking of friendship, tell us a little bit about your friendship with one of Tim’s best friends, Graham Howell.

Matt Smethurst

Oh man, Graham Howell was basically Tim’s first convert in 1975 he has an amazing testimony you can look up online. He wrote it up at the gospel and Life website. He also shared a clip you can find on YouTube at the at Tim’s memorial service. And Graham is from Hopewell, Virginia, small town blue collar guy. He’s actually the volunteer janitor at my son’s school, and so I met him before I realized he was had been a friend of Tim’s for 40 years. He and his wife Laurie, vacationed virtually every summer with the Kellers and getting to know Graham and Tim and Kathy, through Graham and Laurie, has been one of the privileges of my life, just to see an ordinary, faithful person whose life has been transformed not just by the gospel that saves but by the gospel that sanctifies and sustains us. And he’s Graham is one of the most humble, down to earth men I know. And yeah, just working on this book with his encouragement and input along the way was invaluable. Oh man,

Collin Hansen

I love that. And got a chance to meet Graham the course of my book, and Graham is both a testament to the work of the Lord above all, the love of the Kellers, Tim and Kathy, but also such a pushback to people’s expectations of Tim, but really an illustration of what he believed about the gospel and what he believed about friendship. Tim had absolutely really good friends, including Graham, who lasted a long time and and one of the major things that Tim wanted out of my book was for people to get to know those friends and to understand how important friendship was to him in the Christian life. Let’s wrap up with this question, Matt, I want to be you, to be as specific, because I think you’ve been so great in both specific and general here. But let’s talk about what’s going to endure in the literature, the sermons, the corpus that we have from Tim Keller, what will our children, our grandchildren still be reading or listening to? What do you think stands out? I know that’s not a totally fair question. You can’t possibly know that, but what comes to mind?

Matt Smethurst

Well, it’s a it’s a self serve. It’s a matte serving question, because in some ways, I was trying to write that book. I was trying to discipline, I was trying to narrow the focus to what are the things that I would want people still reading, drawing from in 100 years, regardless of their cultural context. And man, I think that that all of it, I mean one, one theme we haven’t touched on is the kind of three ways to live. Theme. There is one way to be saved, but there are two ways to be lost. Not only do we see that in the parable of the prodigal sons? We see it in Romans one and then Romans two. We see it in various places. And the reason I think that will endure is because, as Tim often said, Legalism is the default mode of the human heart. So even if you’re in Center City London or Center City Manhattan, or the most secular place on Earth, with people who seem like Luke 15 younger brothers wanting nothing to do with the law of God. At bottom, they are wired to assume that if there is a God, and that if they’re going to please that God, they’re going to have to earn his favor and stay in his good graces, which is why Tim preached against legalism in New York City. So he’s preaching to what we would think of as younger brothers, but he’s preaching against also being an older brother, and the reason is he knew that the way an ordinary younger brother would hear the message of the gospel was, oh, the alternative is I need to be an older brother. The alternative to license is legalism. But he was saying, no, actually, the gospel is this message which critiques both errors, it exposes them in all of their bankruptcy. And it holds out Jesus Christ as the only treasure, the only one who will satisfy and save

Collin Hansen

Yeah, I think that’s boy. That’s a great play. I think if, if Tim wanted anything that he preached and wrote to be remembered, I think it would be that. And that’s also something that has been confusing to people, because some people have unfortunately redefined what he meant by third way to be some sort of political compromise. That’s not what he was trying to do at all. You described what he meant by the third way right there, which is the gospel is a rejection of two ways to run from God. Yep, that’s what he was trying to get at in there. And so does that map onto our sociology? Does it map onto our politics? Maybe in some ways, but that wasn’t his primary concern. His primary concern was trying to illustrate a dynamic that runs through the scriptures. Obviously, those themes of two brothers run through Scripture quite a bit, and the one older brother who came sacrificed his life, triumphed over death, said he would make a way for us to be reunited with the Father.

Matt Smethurst

Amen, which is what Tim preached at his own younger brother’s funeral. Yeah,

Collin Hansen

exactly which was who? Yeah, more of that story in my book. But Matt, this, this book is a treasure. I know how much it’s going to be used by God with so many different people. I can’t commend it enough. It was a privilege for me to kind of walk you walk with you through the process. But what you’ve achieved here, you’ve made it look fairly simple, and it was not simple because of the amount and the range, the volume and range of the material you were dealing with was was enormous. But you’ve given a gift. And I just let me just go back to what Kathy said. Matt Smith has produced a work of scholarship that will long stand as the most thorough examination of the biblical themes that animated all of Tim’s ministry. Colin,

Matt Smethurst

I’m gonna get the last word on your podcast.

Collin Hansen

Oh, no, okay. What’s that?

Matt Smethurst

I want our listeners to know what I wrote about you in the acknowledgements. I thank a variety of friends for their advice at various points, including you. Speaking of Colin, it is immensely gracious for the author of Timothy Keller his intellectual and spiritual formation to get so excited about another book on Keller that speaks to his humility and character, besides my mother, no one has influenced me as an editor and, by extension, as a writer, more than Colin. So I’m very indebted to you, grateful for your friendship. And man, it’s fun to talk about Tim, and not ultimately Tim, but how the Lord has used him in our lives, and how the more we listen to him and read him, we taste and see that the Lord is good.

Collin Hansen

Amen. Thanks, Matt.