Assessing the Ministry of Tim Keller

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy. 

Collin Hansen
Welcome to the gospel coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel. This episode is a conversation that I Colin Hanson had with James R wood called assessing the ministry of Tim Keller. It was moderated by Peter light heart and hosted by the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 17. 2025

Peter Leithart
Welcome to this event. The Gospel to the skeptics assessing the ministry of Tim Keller, we’re grateful that you’re here this evening, and I’m especially grateful to our two to the two men who are on stage who are highly qualified to discuss this topic. Let me introduce them on my right. Colin Hanson is the vice president for content at the gospel coalition, an organization that TGC Keller helped the found. Also he’s Executive Director of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics and the author of an intellectual biography of Tim Keller.

Peter Leithart
James Wood, on my left, teaches at Redeemer University in Ontario, and he’s the author of a widely discussed 2022 article How I evolved on Tim Keller, published by first things magazine, we invited Colin and James to have this conversation some months ago. Since then, Charlie Kirk’s assassination has intensified debates about Keller and legacy, and we hope that our conversation this evening and this event will clarify and edify as we all together strive to serve God faithfully in exhilarating moments of history. As far as the format, James and Colin will make opening statements and then discuss back and forth. I will engage intervene occasionally with questions or to make sure that everyone’s getting roughly equal time. We’ll take a short break around 830 and then you’ll have time to submit questions. We have high tech note cards and pens, and there will be a basket up here on the stage where you can deposit the questions that you write down. And then we’ll have the last 20 minutes or so of our evening. We will spend with Q and A we’ll end about nine o’clock this evening.

Collin Hansen
Thank you, Peter, thanks for the warm welcome here in my hometown, Birmingham. Third prize. Thanks James for participating in this as well. So the last time I saw Tim Keller in person was the end of 2019 a few months later, the covid 19 pandemic shut down much of the world, and a few more months later, he revealed that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, from which he died in May of 2023

Collin Hansen
Keller gave little time to worrying about his own legacy. In that last meeting, Keller talked to me about how a new generation would need their own methods to share the gospel. Manhattan was already secular and post Christian when he arrived in the 1980s but in the 2010s he observed how youth were growing up without the architecture of religious awareness, God, sin, guilt, law, salvation had become foreign concepts. It would be a mistake to suppose that in the 1980s 1990s and 2000s that Keller had solved some kind of problem, and all Christians would need to do is replicate his formula. In fact, for almost 20 years, Keller had been calling for a deeper rethinking of Christian ministry amid spreading secularism, Keller didn’t even become well known until 2008 when he published the first two of his best selling books. But at the desiring God 2006 national conference, he observed a crisis for evangelism due to our changing cultural situation. It was 17 years later that we launched the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics to continue working on a problem that Keller did not believe that we had yet solved. How to foster spiritual revival in the post Christendom West, arguing about Keller’s legacy and his alleged failures often proves his very point, we have not yet solved the problem of secularism following the collapse of Christendom in the West, combined with the loss of social solidarity following the collapse of the Enlightenment, and we’re not going to solve those problems unless together we can move past superficial evaluations of culture and ministry. The 20th century historian Fernand Braudel, in his seminal 1972 work the Mediterranean world, described history as layered like the sea. The deepest layer is slow and repetitive in historical terms, think about seismic shifts like industrialization. And the great economic leap forward in the 18th century, the middle level of this historical Sea is social history, rhythms tides coming in and out. The third level, or surface, in historical terms, that comprises individuals who shape history like the foam that’s riding across the waves. Think then in historical and cultural terms, like musicians, politicians who direct trends but don’t change the underlying cultural conditions. What we need then, in light of Keller’s legacy, is a race to the bottom that is to the deepest layers of cultural change, because that’s the level of the problem that we face today. Across the West, the tide or vibes. They ebb and flow. The waves are politicians. They rise and fall, but the conditions of secularism rest dark, quiet and cold on the bottom of Western culture, we need a unified effort, humble, thoughtful and prayerful to learn these conditions and how they might become more favorable to saving faith. The last time I spoke with Keller was the month before his death, it was the first meeting of the Keller Center’s fellows. We’ll meet again next week in New York City, and in this meeting, Keller was commending early drafts of James Davison Hunter’s 2024 book, democracy and solidarity, more than anyone else. Hunter taught his friend Keller about the deep structures of culture. Hunter explains in that book, I’ve got a few quotes here I’ll be reading throughout culture at its deepest level is the implicit order underneath the apparent order of things, and it typically manifests itself as the unspoken rules, schemas and resources that organized the overall forms of linguistic and by extension, cultural expression and practice across his writings, Keller expressed deep concern over the decline of Western culture and the eclipse of classical liberalism. Indeed, Keller described value neutral liberalism as failed, informed by Hunter Keller wrote this in one of his last books, published in 2022 the result of the individualism of the Enlightenment is the decline of all human communities, institutions, neighborhoods and families, leading to greater isolation, loneliness, enemy, anxiety and depression. But as the percentage of the population going to church declined, and as the radical individualism of the West became more pervasive, the original enlightenment vision of a society based on secular human reason alone came largely to pass, but it has not led to unity at all Western society in general and US society in particular, are polarized, fragmented and ungovernable as everyone adopts their own meaning in life and moral values. Keller lamented that the Enlightenment liberalism sawed off the branch that it was sitting on. Quote, The polarization our society has become severe and the disagreements are about the most basic ideas of what human nature is and what human flourishing looks like. Thank you.

Collin Hansen
There is no longer any common set of American values or a unifying American story. Keller saw Christianity as the cure for renewing a truly pluralistic society, but not through Christian dominance of political power, and certainly not through any compromise with left or right wing versions of identity politics reminiscent of the paganism Christianity supplanted millennia ago. Indeed, Keller resisted the rise of identity in directing party politics after the fall of Christendom and church. The Church retains tremendous influence, especially in a few Bible Belt holdouts, and even at the national level. But we should not confuse the waves and tides for the depths. Keller warned there seem to be times of backlash when political conservatism does better in elections against liberals or progressives. But increasingly, those conservatives are themselves adopting secular approaches to the self, or embracing the secular ideologies of individualism or racial identitarianism, focusing on Anglo white identity rather than multiculturalism. In other words, the Christian worldview continues to retreat and the Christian church continues to decline and weaken, even when political conservative. TGC does better. Now, behind this analysis, you will find hunter who argues that American political culture, left and right, runs on the fuel of outrage. He writes, quote, identity groups became become so deeply attached to their own impotence, exclusion and subordination, because they provide the premises upon which the group’s existence depends. Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and both meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve. In short, if the identity group were ever to succeed, the group would disintegrate. Hence, the group built on grievance perpetuates that very grievance to the detriment to themselves and society at large. Hunter explains, quote, the cultural logic of resentment can bring about symbolic victories, but they tend to be self defeating. They deplete and exhaust rather than renew and refresh public life and democratic politics, a culture and politics of resentment, simply cannot heal wounds, and it cannot bring about a just reckoning against what could very well be legitimate claims against injustice. Resentment ultimately denies the possibility of a public life as shared project for there is nothing in this that requires or even encourages a person or group or organization to seek the consent of others. This kind of politics will not protect our society from dissolving in the aftermath of Christendom and the enlightenment. We need a source of solidarity that appeals to our better angels by warning us about our inner demons. We need leaders who are in hunters words learned principled, courageous and humble, embodied in the lives lived sacrificially toward the realization of that vision. This kind of leadership would have to be prepared to be ignored, then dismissed as naive and then despised by the main partisans who would ultimately see its exemplars as a threat to their interests. As a pastor, primarily concerned with the health of the church, Keller championed both special and common grace, that is the work of evangelism as well as the work of service for our neighbors, regardless of their belief. Identity Politics hurts both causes, as Keller predicted and practiced himself, polemics are sometimes necessary, but they are medicine, not food. You can’t live on medicine in the long run, constant polemics are exhausting, and they don’t build us up spiritually, the movement that will succeed, that becomes the most famous for preaching and writing and teaching and pastoring, that is astonishingly good and that spiritually nourishes and changes the readers or listeners right in their seats. This is not a third way between left and right. This is following the WAY the TRUTH and the LIFE Jesus Christ, because Jesus is risen from the dead, we are optimistic about what God is doing in the world, even at the deepest, darkest levels of our culture. But because Jesus has not yet returned, we are pessimistic, because we know that creation remains subjected to futility under sin. Romans, 820, the flow that we see in our culture will ebb once more, yet we know with all confidence that Jesus is coming quickly. Revelation. 2212, he is the hope who holds all things together. Hebrews, one, three, Keller wrote, We believe Christianity is relevant to society because it is true. It is not true because it is relevant. Christians do not believe in and promote the faith because it brings so much hope, though it does, or because it fills you with joy though it will, or because it creates deep and strong community though it can, or because it can heal our society of many ills, though it might rather, Christians seek renewal of the church as a way to love and serve the one who saved us, there is a great need for a new Christian church movement that practices love and justice, that equips its members to do enormous good in society, yet at the same time, resists the forces seeking to make it a political instrument that speaks to and answers the great questions of the human heart and of the human race, of purpose, meaning, hope, happiness, guilt and forgiveness, identity, questions to which the secular culture cannot speak as powerfully. Some may dismiss this church movement as naive. Its leaders may be despised by identity branded politicians and partisans, maybe their efforts will be ignored by the broader world, even by other Christians. This kind of church can endure the deeper challenges of the cultural crisis we face after Christendom, after the enlightenment. This kind of church because it’s based in Scripture. Scripture, empowered by the Spirit and ruled by Christ, can even become the catalyst for an unexpected, mighty movement of God in our day. It is the kind of church that Keller labored to build, and it is the legacy he has left for us to advance under God. Thank you.

James R. Wood
I on Okay, thank you Collins, refreshing to hear some of the remind me of some of the reasons why I so greatly do appreciate Tim Keller, even though I did remark upon some shifts in my own thinking, which I’ll get to in a minute. But it is a funny irony of my life that I became known as the Keller critic, and I guess that is will be carried with me for as long as Peter keeps making me talk about it.

James R. Wood
Everywhere I go, people first find out about me, and they’re like, Why do you hate Tim Keller and and and everybody winces every time they are about to say the word winsomeness. That is, that is one of the joys, actually, though I do. I do like that little squirming moment that I get to inflict upon others. But when I, as I was mentioning in the Collin earlier, and if you have paid attention to how I wrote about these matters, you know you can probably sense that I wanted to my goal was to make a qualified critique about a particular area of his thought, from the place of charity and respect and care for someone who also loves this person and thinks he has a lot To offer. Because most of the critiques I had seen, I thought were very uncharitable at that time, unfair and dishonoring to someone who deserves honor. So I thought that was worth speaking into that a little bit.

James R. Wood
Otherwise you just leave it to the worst actors. So that was part of the story here, and I’ll get to those critiques a little bit more about my background. I was thinking about some stories with what I most appreciate about Keller, how he had influenced me and why I wrote what I wrote. So the first time, I think I encountered his thought was, I think a sermon, a sermon, form of the product became the prodigal God book. He had, you know, preached on that quite a bit at the time. And I still actually think that will be his best book, his lasting legacy, I think, is one of that’s, that’s the really, real profound gift of gospel explication. And so I still really love that book. And I I’d heard that maybe around 2006 became a Christian in 2004 so this was pretty early on, and I started digging into his sermons at that time, which was really a gift to me to get out of the emerging church moment, which nobody even remembers. But when I was young college student and trying to find my way as a Christian, that was what was around, and it was not very good and and I wanted to, he brought me into something more theologically substantive and traditional, and I really appreciated that. And then also it began people Colin mentioned that he really kind of came on the scene at a popular level through his big blockbuster books in 2008 but even before that time after I was listening to sermons, what was also being was also being happening before that time was a lot of pastors, ministers. I was a campus minister a couple years after that, but ministers were passing around these white papers on ministry sociological insights about ministry dynamics in the post Christian West. And those were just gold. And there was even a website I was joking with Peter. It’s like, back in that day, I remember, like, all the old, you know, Gen X bloggers, like all these acts 29 you know, really aggressive blog pages. And there’s this guy named his. The website was refer missionary, I think, and he had literally a page on there was just like free Tim Keller sources. And I just everybody was scouring that site, you know, refreshing to try to try to get the links. And I availed myself of that. And those, a lot of those materials ended up getting reproduced in Center Church, later, much, much later. But those were gold back then, particularly some papers I particularly loved back then and how they shaped me. Had this essay on deconstructing defeater beliefs, which, in which he kind of offered a positive version of presuppositional apologetics, which I’m not going to explain what that is, but the little tagline that he used that really stuck with me was make them wish it were true, and it’s a beautiful way of thinking about apologetics, the idea of evangelism. He has an essay called evangelism through networking at that time, and it really inspired me to think about the role of community in mission, which has really profoundly shaped me, another one called the gospel in all its forms, which really helped me see the beauty of the multifaceted gospel and gave you some freedom and flexibility in presenting it to others. Why plant churches? Which really made me want to plant churches like I did everybody who read that and so. I was part of that. He also had a an essay about church size dynamics, which pastors circulate still to this day, it’s the number one little essay of like thinking about the sociological dynamics and the hurdles that happen at each stage of a church’s growth life, opportunities and obstacles. Kind of a SWOT analysis of ministry. There very, very helpful. And also his early book, ministry people, nobody remembers this, but he had a book before reason for God, I think it was like 1996 or maybe even earlier, called ministries of mercy. And in that book, he articulated some key arguments that really kind of laid the groundwork, I anticipated, at least arguments that would be produced in the very helpful book called when helping hurts, that was not written by him, but a lot of those insights were already in that early book by him. But I particularly love, and I suggest this to other ministers, especially if you’re in well, any ministry, there’s some material in that early book on how to lead, recruit, train volunteers that I haven’t seen anything better about how to do that. And that’s actually one of the most annoying parts of ministry that hardly anybody talks about. It’s like, how do you actually do this? Well and very, very insightful. Then I was, when I was leading a mission team to Greece, I think in 2007 maybe 2008 I actually paid to get a spiral bound version of his church planting manual, and brought that with me, and it was just one of the most profound, insightful pieces going in depth to not only how he thinks about ministry, but actually how they did it, like, what did they do at the beginning stages of Redeemer? And also what impressed me most there, and I’ll get to this in a minute. Just he just his hard labor, just a hard worker, courageous worker. But that really impressed me. And then reason for God comes out in 2008 and I fell in love with my future wife talking about ruminating on that book. One things I love so much about that book, it’s my other favorite book of his, particularly the opening preface to doubt your doubts, which is worth the price of the book. But I’d read a lot, a decent amount of apologetic books at that time, and they’re mostly bad, and because mostly what they do is they treat non Christians like they’re stupid. And one things I love so much about the way Keller talked about them is that they’re not stupid and that they have insights, and there’s places to have connection. And you could tell the care for them really was exudes out of that. And we were reading that, and, you know, we were dating and just dreaming about a lifetime of mission and ministry together, and then prodigal God, I gave to all my groomsmen in my wedding, and hoping, because there were some of them who weren’t Christians, hoping that you know this would be the magic bullet. And for one of them, I think it was a partial magic bullet. One of the guys, gosh, when I started talking about people in my life who come to crisis, get emotional, but one of my best friends came to Christ a couple years after that, so I think it played a role. Okay, there we go. And then my ministry, when I was in campus ministry, in pastoral ministry, one of the things people would always make fun of me about was I would always, often start my comments well, as Tim Keller would say, and then I would, you know, quote something, and they’d roll their eyes, which they were all very confused on my article came out, but, but I know I’ll share a story here about the only time I’ve met, only time I met Tim Keller. He was speaking at it. I was on Campus Crusade for Christ. Campus Crusade for Christ staff. They call it crew. Now, they just kept the worst part of their name. And don’t it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but, but I love my time. Campus Crusade helped bring me to the Lord and so, and I spent time on staff with him, and he was the speaker at one of the summer conferences for the staff. I still remember the talk. It was on a VPR your validation performance record and how we all have this internal one. Anyway, I bet I never do this. I hate Christian celebrity culture, and I don’t ever want any other Christian celebrities to get a bigger head on their shoulders than they already have. So I never go, like, talk to them after things, you know, I was like, my wife’s like, you got to go talk to him. And so I did go talk to him. And, you know, as went up there. And always, he’s awkward. I think he was awkward. I don’t think he likes these types of things either. And, and I was like, oh, you know, you know, Dr Keller, thank you so much for sharing. You know, I said you had a big impact on my life. I know you probably heard that a lot. And here’s our little funny exchange. Is he says, Oh, well, if you’ve listened to me a lot, you’ve probably already heard this before, and this is how much Keller had shaped me. I like reflexively used one of his illustrations back to him by saying, Well, you know, but it’s always good to get those pennies to drop, which why the pennies never made any sense to me, why he always used that illustration, nobody uses pennies. They didn’t when he was anyway, and the only thing he did, and this was the end of our conversation. This is how the conversation ended, I said that, and he just knocks me on the head, and I walk away. So But then, in first year of marriage. I think my wife and I were listening to his tapes with Kathy on marriage, and talking about it with other couples. And I do have some critiques of some of his material on marriage, but his thoughts on marriage as friendship was profound to me,

James R. Wood
and I used that material quite a bit in my ministry some other strengths, and I’ll pause, and maybe I can come back to my critiques in a minute, but just wanted to at least share some of these things. I think also, Keller was so great at popularizing scholarship for practitioners, and he really modeled that ministry does not need to be mindless. It should not be. And he helped us incorporate the insights of some of the leading lights of our era, like Alistair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Christian Smith, Miroslav Volf, Larry Hurtado, and on and on and on. You know this common thing when I see, when I hear evangelicals talk about some of these figures, I’m usually like, did you read them? Or did you like, hear Tim Keller talk about them, or you read Jamie Smith’s book on Charles Taylor, which, that’s one, almost 100% of the time when people talk about Charles Taylor, but he is kind of a pastoral version of Jamie. That’s also one of Jamie’s gifts is distilling and popularizing the best scholarship. This is even to mention how much he helped to cultivate a widespread obsession with Lewis and Tolkien, much to the chagrin of many parishioners hearing them in sermons all the time, illustrations of those figures, and I loved also how he modeled courage, not just to go into difficult ministry territory, New York City, but also engaging difficult topics, like he was early on addressing things like CRT and such. And I think he’s more subtle than often his other critics give him credit for and I think his final manifesto on he had these, like two final manifestos, how to reach the West again, the decline in renewal of the American church, I think was the other title. I think that first one, or the one on renewal and evangelicalism, did? I have some critiques of it. It had some real insights, particularly, I think, on the idea of the need for an intellectual ecosystem and pipeline and patronage network for thoughtful Protestants. By the way, we need that really badly. Catholics are very good at that, and we are not. And even, I think he did concede at least some shifts even more in the last decade, into the negative world reality, which I think we’re in a different moment now, even in that, in his last work on how to reach the West again, he conceded there were some things. There was like, Wait, this is actually an interesting seems to align much with that argumentation. Yeah. So those are my areas of appreciation. Let me share a couple couple thoughts. So I critiqued winsome Third Way ism as my summary term. I’m not saying he embraced that label. My summary term of the observing his approach to cultural engagement and kind of political commentary over the years, and also how it was perpetuated by his disciples, which is part of the problem, because I think they also were even worse, and some of them talking about these things just less careful. But I still think that there were some issues with that framework. And the main way I summarize it, and I can maybe share more later about what I think it translates into, but how I was trying to capture, like, what’s going on here, that I notice is off. I started to feel this in the mid 2010s early 2020s is I the way I summarize it is, I think that is that Keller seems to approach commentary on these issues through the lens of evangelism. That’s, I think that’s a strength and a danger commentary on political issues, thinking about how commentary on cultural issues, how will this open or close doors to gospel opportunities? I think there is good there, and I think there are pitfalls with that logic that I’ve written about. And so you could check that out, or I could summarize it if you have questions. But there’s a couple of other areas that I really haven’t talked about it elsewhere. But this is, you know, I haven’t written about Keller since 2020 22,022 but if you’re asking me, okay, so what are my thoughts on some other areas where I think there’s some gaps, some pitfalls, some issues. Well, I have my minute like this is easier see what I wrote in the back here, even in the marriage book, in the marriage material, which I love very much. Going back to it now, as a father of five, five girls, that’s not relevant, but I have five girls halfway to Peter. But going back to it now, I am struck by how kids seem to be absent in that book, and in the idea that marriage and sexuality is also partly ordered to procreation and childbearing, which is, I think that’s a it’s a gap. And I wonder, is that an over contextualization to a certain audience? That’s a question I have. But I have, but I do think it’s even just a gap at a level, at the level of content. If we’re going to talk about marriage, that needs to be in view, not the only thing, but it should be. This is a it’s classic Christian teaching. I just wrote a book on Augustine’s social teachings, and it’s one of the three ends of marriage, very explicitly. So I. Then the other some other things. You know, I think I also I, as I teach mission and ministry classes and worship classes at my university, I also have them read the famous little white paper he wrote on Evangelistic worship. I think there’s a lot true in that, but I’m not so convinced on the way he frames a lot of issues. He does talk about like there’s a real value, and I agree with worship as doxological, or a form of doxological evangelism. You want to invite your neighbors to observe how Christians worship, and this is part of actually, our witness to them. However, he’s trying to straddle, how do you do evangelism, edification and Sunday worship, and I’m just not very persuaded. He appeals to First Corinthians 14. It’s like, hey, outsiders come in. They hear you speaking in tongues. This is not edifying. And he kind of riffs on that, and says, We need to be seeker comprehensible worship. This is his version of, like, I’m not saying seeker sensitive, but seeker comprehensible. And I just think these are just all the wrong places to begin to think about what’s happening in the worship service. I have thoughts on that, but just how we think about more, what does God require of our worship? Etc. Are the better starting points for me when I think about what worship is and preaching, I do love his preaching is an amazing preacher, of course. But over time, there are a couple things I noticed. One is that I do wonder, with his strong emphasis on the gospel centered preaching and like, hey, you know, Jesus is the true and better of all the figures that you see in the scriptures, and the real desire to avoid moralism in your preaching, I just wrote down, I wonder is one of the thoughts I had, is, when you think about in the attempt to avoid moralizing, Does he fall into a trap where he might actually be missing one of the key elements of what in the medieval interpretive practice called the quadriga, the fourfold sense of Scripture. Like, is there a way that he could round out the sermons a little bit better to not just talk about and so here’s the way I phrase it, meaning, did he foreground the typological sense of Scripture at the expense of the tropological, the more that there is still a moral push that needs to be rounded out after you go through the typology. And this is relevant also in the standard form of his sermon, which I began to the form underneath. The way he did the sermons over time is he would kind of present as he’s walked through a text and say, Hey, here’s what the text says you are supposed to do. Here’s how you can’t and here’s how Christ did. Awesome, great. And I just over time, I started a sense like and I want this final piece, and maybe sometimes he does it, but it’s not the common way. Is now how, in light of that, can we live differently, and how is the community that’s shaped by the gospel formed by this in a profoundly different way? I just wanted to hear that over time, or I started to notice that. And also the two ditches trope that he would often use is neither religion or irreligion. I think that sometimes was imposed on texts and became a distraction to me to degree.

James R. Wood
Yeah, and then I had questions about, I’ll maybe Lastly, I do think so. I know we’re going to talk about the moment that we’re in, and we’re going to talk about politics. The name Donald Trump will come up. He comes up every single day. At some point in your life, every single day it’s going to happen. And I don’t, I don’t critique him for not supporting Trump. I think what people do critique is there does seem to be a subtext of like dumping on people who do support Trump. And this, I just even looked back over the decline and renewal piece, and I Control F, Trump, Maga, etc, and they’re just the subtext there is these people are fundamentalists, and there’s just kind of broadsides against them. And I think, in a way, that’s a little bit uncharitable, and also I think he made anticipations there and elsewhere that broad support for Trump would actually harm evangelistic opportunities. And I’m just not sure that that is the case. I don’t think, I don’t, I’m not sure. I’m not sure it’s necessarily the opposite either, we’ll have to wait and see. But I think, again, that’s part of the interpreting politics through the lens of evangelism problem that I have. First of all, I think that’s the wrong way to just think about politics. But secondly, I’m not convinced that we can be so certain about those things. And I do think those broad there are broadsides against fundamentalists that are often pop up, against a religious right, against Trump supporters that I just wish he would have been more charitable in and I do think lastly, there’s a method that you do see from time to time. This comes out, if you could look this up. It’s a fascinating little story. Kirsten powers story about her leaving Trump’s church, or no, the opposite Keller’s church, and she says, I was attracted to Keller’s brand of evangelicalism, that’s the term she uses. And then she talks about, like, what that brand is. And she was like, you know, intellectual, sophisticated, but she said, When I signed up for Keller’s brand of evangelism, she said, You know, I was signing up for that, that whole thing I just mentioned. But she said, I also appreciate that from the pulpit, he never talked about homosexuality or. Abortion, etc, as a sin, and then I only had to find years down the road that that’s what their church thought about these things. And I just I wonder about that. I’m not saying that that’s her account is absolutely true, but if it is, I do have questions about that methodology. And not only do I think there’s dangers there that you might hide away from offensive truths that are clear in Scripture, I think you will also you there’s a danger of really making people feel tricked once they’re once they’re brought in. And there’s that and, and I just do wonder if there’s a place, yes, we need to avoid what was the term? Colin used

James R. Wood
the term you used about polemics, yeah, that polemics is medicine and not food, and I’ve heard that trope elsewhere. And is, but is there another category of just forthright speech that isn’t necessarily polemics that there, that also might be missiologically strategic, but also just faithful? And so those are some of the challenges I push and he does from time to time, do that. But if the Kirsten powers story is also true, I think there are, there are gaps there that we should consider, there pitfalls there that are worth considering. So there you go. Those are my opening comments.

Peter Leithart
I’ll have a chance to respond to that, and then James, a chance to respond. Great.

Collin Hansen
Okay. I mean, one of the first books that I ever worked on in my career was called the leadership secrets of Billy Graham. It was a great introduction for me to the entire evangelical world that I didn’t grow up in, converted into but didn’t grow up in. One of the things that I appreciated most about Billy Graham is I actually had responsibility for two chapters. Turns out the Lord knew what was in my future. So chapters were on Billy Graham’s failures and his critics. Those are my two responsibilities. And Billy Graham is probably the most famous Christian in American history, one of the great evangelists of all time. And I don’t think another religious figure in American history was more criticized, widespread criticism of him, and having made some mistakes, some of which he acknowledged, some of which he did not well, some which he kind of knew were mistakes. Like, for example, he physically threw up when he found out about what Richard Nixon had said and done things like that because they’d been so close. And then others, like things that he said about religious freedom in Russia and then Soviet Union, things like that. But the point was, one of the things I appreciated most about him is his attitude toward his critics, and at the same time, also his willingness to go back and to recognize areas that he had where he’d made mistakes. And one of the things that you saw remarked upon at his death, which, you know, wasn’t that long ago, lay in state in the capitol when President Trump was in office, the first time they’ve so much, remarked on his personal humility. And one of the things that enabled me to be able to write the book that I did was Tim’s willingness to talk about how he did not have everything figured out. He didn’t have all the answers certainly for the future. Had made mistakes, and what also stood out is that I don’t know if people understand how uncommon that is. That is not common, especially for somebody who is at the pinnacle of their career achievements. I mean, I was just thinking about the question of, what are we talking about when we’re talking about Tim Keller’s legacy, and this will be for future generations, certainly not. You know, for me to be able to adjudicate as somebody who worked closely with him, but when you considered James talked about a number of the different aspects and highlighting a lot of wonderful specifics of things that he appreciated. But I mean, we can expand this to his Christ centered preaching in the vos tradition reviving, and can perpetuating that. I think the number one thing that he was known for, or will be known for, is a movement of church planting in global cities, to the point where you can virtually not go to a major city around the world and and miss a church that he had helped to start through Redeemer city to city. He also was instrumental in building a global church network with one of the largest Christian websites in the world, which is, of course, the Gospel coalition. There instrumental in expanding the PCA beyond the southeast. He was not the only person who did that, but he was the most influential person who did that. And. I don’t think many of his critics give him credit for being one of the key figures in opposing the rise of egalitarianism, but he was as a disciple of Elizabeth Elliot, his professor at Gordon Conwell. I went back in my book, and I had done a study of the writings of some of his egalitarian professors that he very publicly and boldly rebuked, and those arguments were worse than almost anything. I mean, things like, Well, Paul was wrong about slavery, so he’s wrong about women. Those are the kinds of arguments he was being taught in the rise of evangelical feminism in the 1970s you know, we could, of course, talk about writing the most effective apologetic works of a generation, maybe at least since CS Lewis, and just easily take for granted building churches in Manhattan from almost their entire disappearance the 20th century. A lot of people don’t realize that when you look through evangelical history, New York City was the capital of evangelicalism in the in the 1800s and by the 1900s even by the 1920s Protestantism had almost disappeared, apart from a few beleaguered outposts in Manhattan, and that is absolutely not the case today. So the point is, when you consider somebody who’s had that kind of influence, that kind of legacy that you haven’t even we’ve hardly even scratched the surface of you don’t expect that to be the kind of person who welcomes criticism, handles it with any measure of humility, is willing to learn from mistakes, to grow, to change, to borrow from James, to evolve Even in some of his perspectives and to become more expansive over time. Usually what happens is the Christian leader, when they become more influential, they become more insular. They shrink, in part because of what James talked about, the celebrity culture, which brings a lot of criticism that makes a lot of people say, I’m only going to surround myself with sycophants. And then when it comes time for them to work on books, they instruct their biographers, you can’t say anything negative about me. And then we publish those books, and they’re widely celebrated and widely read. They become hagiographies. None of that was the case with Tim, and I think it’s one reason that like Billy Graham, what was ultimately celebrated as his legacy at the end of his life was his individual character, and the people who were speaking and testifying to it were people like his children, like his boys, like his wife, like his best friend that he led to the Lord back in Hopewell, Virginia, wandering in for some marriage counseling after he had been divorced. I just think, isn’t it mean, when you have a funeral in such a prominent New York City Church, you think, Well, that might be it’s kind of a showy thing, but then you realize there’s no other place that can fit them, except for one of the baseball stadiums or Madison Square Garden. That’s why they host it there. But how many other major figures at the end of their life would have brought in a parade of just other major religious figures to testify to their greatness? And that’s not at all the case of what happened there. So I think part of what makes it easy for us to even discuss Keller’s legacy, is the fact that he was himself so open to learning, changing, not his core beliefs, but growing, evolving and and taking his critics seriously, as he often commented, I mean, if your critics really knew what was in your heart, it’d be So much worse, and that’s what grace is. Is all about. We can get into some more specifics on here, if they’re if they’re helpful here, but one, just to mention, related to the to the parenting, or to the children. One, that’s a good observation. I think there’s two points in particular that are relevant there. One is primarily the New York City, of Manhattan. Context, of course, singleness. Mean it’s, this is in my book. But the only time that Tim ever did a wedding during a service was when he preached what I think was his most famous message ever, the girl nobody wanted, which is an interesting wedding homily, text to take up of Rachel and Leah and but His concern was, how do you do a wedding service that acknowledges that the vast majority here are single, incorporates them. It’s related to also the fact that Tim and Cathy Were often asked, Why didn’t you write a book on parenting? Your book on marriage is so great. Another one of those legacies, it’s probably still the best one that you can find. And at the same time, why don’t you write a book on parenting? And response was, we don’t think we were very good parents, and we also find that our friends that we went to seminary with, they were very close with their seminary friends throughout their lives. Some of our seminary friends were amazing parents. Parents and their children did not turn out well, we were not great parents, and our children did turn out well, they said, You do not want to give the impression that, if you parenting is an out, input, output basis. There’s a mystery that’s involved. There are still principles. I still would have liked to know those principles from them, but even as their friends acknowledged, no, they weren’t the best parents, again, not in a way, like in a sinful way, but just some people are more predisposed to it than others. So just one kind of minor way of building on what

Peter Leithart
James was talking about, any response to that, yeah,

James R. Wood
yeah, that I don’t have any more responses than other would be obvious to what people might think I would say. But yeah, I think our age. I think it’s an idol of our age. There’s some idols of our age that are probably still unaddressed. When I’m thinking about writing about children. I wasn’t thinking about giving tips about parenting, but about how talking about one of the fundamental ends of marriage is to have and raise children. And I think that is actually a message. I know that it’s easy to say, well, there are some people who would say, like, you know, we have the idolatry of the family in our culture, and so we need to be careful about that. I’m just guessing that probably wasn’t true in New York City, and so that doesn’t seem very contextualized to me for New York City and and I think a lot of young families today probably need a little bit more of a push to actually consider the sacrifice of aiming for children. So that this is my only response to that. But now I absolutely agree on the agreement where I’d agree with you too is one things I love so much about him is the intellectual curiosity. Another thing I wrote in the trip, the only other thing I wrote about Keller after my initial critiques in 2022 is a while ago for me now, is I was asked to write a tribute when he died, and that was I wrote it in two hours. I mean, it’s like I had a million nice things to say. But one things I wrote down was the intellectual curiosity that I think characterized him to the end, which I do think is absolutely, unbelievably impressive. And I also and that the way I ended my tribute was in a evangelicalism of celebrity culture and celebrity pastors. I do think he was the anti celebrity celebrity pastor. I think that was manifest in concrete ways, which is one much to the screen of come see him when they would visit New York City, is he would never let them know where he was preaching, which campus. And again, you can critique the multi campus model, whatever. That’s a different conversation. But I do think that was a practical form of ASK JESUS, like, don’t come to this church for me, and so I really like that. Yeah, so that’s all I’ll say

Peter Leithart
for him. The issue about including procreation as part of the marriage group is that a part of the broader critique that is contextualization of marriage in a Manhattan setting actually becomes a kind of accommodation, so that he’s just talking about marriage in the kind of context that would make sense to Manhattan residents.

James R. Wood
So this is like, rather than pushing them into, yeah. So I think, I think one of the things that gets frustrated when you talk about Keller, because it’s such a and I think we’re handling this very respectfully, but there’s two sides of what’s frustrating about it is people who are acolytes and people who are haters, and it feels like you can’t get past that initial for a lot of people. But one of the things that often comes up when people are talking to me, because everybody wants to tell me why I’m stupid for critiquing Tim Keller, and so it happens all the time in my life, and and so and, but one of the say, but you don’t understand, he was just contextualizing him in New York City. He didn’t intend this his whole mind. I’m like that. That just isn’t true to me. First of all, like, I know he had a humility. He said, We need more contextualization. But he also wrote Center Church. He also started, I mean, he didn’t present a lot of his thoughts as type of paradigm for helping you think beyond just New York City that’s related to that’s the contextualization point, is part of it. But I also think there’s a when I noticed in that the gap there is, I think that wasn’t fully contextual if even that book was just written for his audience in mind, I don’t think that was the best form of contextualization, that I think it could have been an accommodation. And so the Yes, I think there’s, there are, I don’t think the idolatry of the family is, as President probably in, as you said at his church. I think that if you’re worried about that, that might be in different locations you should be worried about So, yeah, I think there’s something

Peter Leithart
to that maybe on the broader question of contextual and a critique of contextualization that you’re trying to make the gospel accessible to the culture, and in the process, even inadvertently just accommodate so much. To the culture that you’re just parroting what the culture is already believing and saying. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
a couple just small points that are related to that situation, especially in the way that Tim had framed things in the prodigal God. Keep in mind, James, when you’re talking about kind of that contextualization that I don’t think Tim used the phrase, I don’t you the family, but he might have somebody can tell me if he died, was trying to make sure I was checking in my head on that one. But I don’t think it would be too far to say that a lot of people in his congregation came from places where that might have been more true, and we’re feeling a lot of pressure or guilt or I mean, that would very much fit his prodigal God paradigm. Of a lot of people in New York City are running away from something. One of the things that they’re running away from would often be more traditional constructs. The other thing I’d say there is that widespread awareness of the disintegration, especially of birth rates, the kind of birth rates has been fairly recently understood beyond the scope of well, really, his lifetime even so, this is something that we talk about very intensely in the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, even though it wasn’t a major topic of his work, and we debate it, because there’s different not everybody lands in the same place and everybody lands in the same place, about how to can integrate between the Genesis commands and then the New Testament discussion of the church and the spiritual family. So we have some good discussions about that, but there Make no mistake, whatever we know about rapidly declining civilization, disappearing level fertility rates is related to a widespread loss of hope, a hope and for the future, and also a widespread and I’m not trying To boil it down just to this, but widespread individualism, affluence, selfishness, all sorts of different factors that directly relate to apologetics and ministry and evangelism. So I think those are very good questions should we be talking about? And I wonder what would happen if there was more awareness of that.

Peter Leithart
Go back to the question about preaching that was you made criticism. And I wonder if the would you say that his reluctance to draw moral conclusions, if that’s, in fact, the case, if that’s what he’s doing, his reluctance to draw more conclusions is part of his worry about legalism as a great enemy of genuine faith. That’s question. That’s the next question is, is that actually the greatest threat, and did he in opposing legalism? Did he? Did he set that up as a as an opponent, so much that he opened a door to a kind of antinomianism in the back door?

Collin Hansen
Yes, it’s a good question. So I do think that he was primarily attuned to what is the motivation for obeying Christ’s commands? So instead of usually just a straightforward This is what you’d have to do, it would be accompanied with and this is how you have the motivation to carry that out. And that would usually go back to primarily justification by faith alone. So in that sense, I think you would put Tim in more of a cat. I mean, James mentioned that. I mean, I think probably you’re right that the prodigal God will be kind of the enduring message. If you had to pick one message that would define Keller’s ministry, would be that one. It’s that one, not only because it was near the front, but also because, as we talk about in my book, that was his autobiography. That was as close as he came to writing a Spiritual Autobiography, and in that sense, his extremely high levels of scrupulousness, is very reminiscent of Luther and also his very strong reaction to Catholicism, and which through his mother’s side of the Italian family, those are important parts that I wanted to draw out, that I hope my book could contribute to the broader understanding of those things. I think contribute in a way that autobiographically, the same way that Luther did, there would have been a fronting of the conscious reflection on justification by faith alone as the ground or as the motivating factor in the obedience, and that’s where the emphasis would be in his preaching. So I think the moral commands are plainly there, but his emphasis is most certainly on how you obey them. Yeah, what you’re obeying.

James R. Wood
I’m often not in print because I think you know. Just invite people to react against your it’s a caricature, not about, okay, I’d often say he preaches like a Lutheran, and so I don’t want Lutherans coming at me, you know, saying, Well, you’re not really representing the Lutherans, okay? But he does foreground the justification issue in almost every sermon. And however, time when you’re going and I would always buy his MD threes, and he gave them all away for free after he’s gone. I spent $1,000 on buying because I’m scrupulous as well. But over time, I was like, these are just not helping me prepare for my sermons, because this just doesn’t feel like what the text is saying at times either. It does feel like a grid that’s imposed at times and so but I think Luther ism that what I say is, like Lutheran preaches, though y’all it does, it’s and it’s powerful, but I think it can be a limitation to then. This is the motivation to obey. But also, let me round it out by saying, now as renewed in Christ and forgiven, here’s what that looks like. Here’s the moral, here’s the moral cash out of this. And also, or I would say, the ecclesiotelic. Here’s how the church is new, a new community in light of this. But yeah, I think that’s his strength. Is what I would call the redemptive historical preaching in the reformed tradition. Here’s how Christ fulfills all those things for you as a safe sinner.

Peter Leithart
I wanted to raise a question that I know that you highlighted in your original essay, James and I suspect that Colin will have thoughts on this too, but one of the one of the things you’re emphasizing how you evolved on Tim Keller has much to do with the changes in circumstances. Keller was effective and a model for ministry in the world that he was working in. But you argued that the world had changed, based on your analysis, partly on the work of Aaron Brandt, and the idea that it moved from a neutral world toward Christianity to a negative world. So fill out that picture. How much did that understanding of a shift in cultural circumstances affect your evaluation?

James R. Wood
Yeah, I mean a couple of things. It’s not the main thing that made me reevaluate. I think the winsome Third Way model has errors in any era. And so I could expound on those. Maybe I just will but, but the shifts from like 2014 2015 on had all I had already kind of stopped paying attention to Keller as much because, as I saw him, a comment on a lot of these things. I was just like, this is not very helpful to me, and I didn’t despise him for that or anything. It was just like, I feel like there’s some whiffs here. To be honest, I feel like during the pandemic and other things too, just dismissing other views, and I think uncharitably So. I’ll say that forthrightly, I think. And he even comes up in his last piece about who’s identifying as fundamentalists. He says he just lists the two words right next to each other. Really fascinating. And I think, I think this should raise questions. Here are the fundamentalists. Here’s the people, though. And he says, and he says in his piece, the people that we really shouldn’t be working closely with for a renewal of the church. He says, Trump comma, anti Vax. I just think both, that’s just too blunt to be honest. And I and I think there were some whiffs there and but related to the negative world stuff, I do think, and he did admit, finally, in his book How to reach the West again, the first like 30 pages, he said, of course, New York City always had some hostilities. I don’t I think there’s some I could talk about, what I some views I have on that as well. But he even admits in that paper, any and Colin mentioned at the beginning, in the mid 2010s our kids aren’t getting the moral and mental framework, and they’re getting opposed very strongly for their views on sexual and gender after Obergefell, is a big shift. Obviously, there were people who had different views on marriage, but now it’s like they’re now, if you don’t affirm gay marriage or something like that, you’re a bigot. And we can also back that up by a fact. It’s that’s legal now, and it kind of confirms our view of you being backwards and bigoted. And those things start to scale up in 2015, then and then there was some race stuff, but that’s another conversation. And so I, yeah, I mean, I, I the there was a time where I thought we needed a bit more clarity on this is tied to one more comment I want to make before I forget the prodigal God thing, which I love. It’s my favorite book of Keller’s. But I think also an issue of how he applies the two ditches model is most the time when he attaches that to cultural issues, to political issues, the elder brother in the story, the one who’s the arrogant, prideful, self righteous, trying to impose their will on others or whatever. He almost always associates that with people on the right or movements on the right, and I think that’s missing some developments in the last 10 years from movements on the left. They’re also prideful, self righteous, imposing their views on others and. So I think that was but I think in basically the 2014 to 2022 era especially, I think there was a disproportionate evil coming from the left. I don’t think it’s always that way. And I thought that the framework, as it then got mapped onto those issues, was creating a false sense of moral equivalency. I’m just like, these are equal errors on equal sides, and we kind of always need to balance. When I say something about this side over here, or this party or this proposal, I also need to equal saying, but also this side too. And I know he’ll say like, this is not what Third Way was. You know the third way necessarily means, but it does often cast out that way rhetorically. I observed it many, many times, and so, yeah. So I think that’s how the negative world intersected with that. But my critiques of Third Way ism are also independent of particular errors thinking about politics through the lens of the gospel, which is my summary, trying to assess what’s going on. I think that is always wrong for different reasons, but, but I do think that’s how I would articulate the negative world thing. I also wouldn’t describe the moment in right now as negative world. And so, so that’s a different conversation. Keller’s back, maybe, maybe back might be back. So I don’t know what world Keller’s in. I don’t know what will we call it, and a different world has different errors. And so I, if you pay attention to things I write, I don’t write those same things anymore.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, few thoughts there. I think what’s mean. I don’t, don’t find the negative world framing helpful. I don’t find it accurate. I don’t find it biblical. I don’t find it historical. I find it myopic, American, political. I could go on and on. It doesn’t map onto any of it. It’s a convenient framing that obscures far more than it reveals. Also, if you go to any international settings that would have far less, far less church reach, far less, I mean, far more opposition. What churches are you going to find there? It’s usually going to be churches that are planted by city to city, or people who are learning from Tim Keller. So I just don’t, I don’t find that to be empirically helpful, either, when you get out of an American political lens. From there also, I think it’s, I don’t think it’s accurate to talk about Keller’s third way, and primarily in a culture or political framework, the vast majority of references are to moralism or licentiousness, their theological categories more broadly moral, as opposed to more narrowly political in the 21st Century. Another thing just to think about, just in terms of that context. We think about the things that have, as James is pointing out, that Tim recognized had changed further. We are talking about degrees in different ways the most the single factor in Redeemers early years in New York that marked them out as horrible bigots that no one would be able to even fathom could be living in New York City in the 21st Century was the topic of premarital sex, something that I mean, obviously people outside the church and inside the church all knew that this was something that the church opposed. So it’s clearly something that he was talking about. And one thing to remember, as James is pointing out, we don’t always write or speak the same things. Think about the 1990s with premarital sex. That’s the era of Seinfeld. That’s the era of friends. I mean, this would have been a predominant issue, and it would have been upstream from a lot of the things that we would associate later on with the moral degradation of our culture. So it’s clearly something that he was teaching directly on, and it’s related to those marriage that marriage work in there. I think James makes a good point, an accurate point, as it relates to evangelism. And I think really, you can correct me if I’m wrong James, but I think that is probably the number one critique that you make about seeing politics through evangelism. And I think that’s, I think that lands because I think he was primarily an evangelist. I think that and different pastors will have different strengths. One thing that’s interesting about Tim, he was here in Birmingham on Election Day 2016 I spent the entire day with him. We didn’t talk about the election. There was no interest. Now you can fault him for that, and you can say, well, as a pastor, you should have shown a lot more interest in that, especially since both candidates were from New York City. I mean, that’s a significant observation. It was not an issue. It just it’s not I mean, when you look at, if you look at the things that Tim was reading. And this is a literature and theology and Bible nerd, that’s the stuff he’s reading. He’s just not interested and, I mean, I’m more interested in Political Theology. We had a nice discussion about it over over dinner. At least I appreciated your guys’ thoughts on that. That just was not something that he was expert in and so one of the terms that I use to describe him is as an ecclesial revivalist, a church revivalist. And I think if I think that the comment about it’s not best to see politics always through the lens of evangelism, and also you can’t really be that confident that your assessment of the situation is going to last through every circumstance. I mean, I think that’s just accurate there, from what James has written, but I would simply point out that I think that has more to do with Tim’s particular calling and inclination as an evangelist, and I don’t think that is good or necessary for every pastor. It’s part of the toolkit, but it’s not always going to be somebody’s gifting.

Peter Leithart
James, can you define what you mean by winsome? Third Way ism What are you What are you talking

James R. Wood
Well, yes, if that’s what you want me to do and win some third way isms. I describe it as I summarize what I’ve observed by Keller and also the Keller rights, though, I mean, because there were for a long time, it’s less so now again, I think, but for a while, that a lot of the predominant voices on the social media landscape, et cetera, were those figures, and they appropriated this model is that it’s a package approach to cultural engagement that thinks about politics through the lens of the gospel, particularly about like how to maximize minimize offense so as to maximize openness to the gospel. It’s the way I sum it, package approach cultural engagement and politics so as to minimize offense and maximize openness to the gospel here, there are common problems with it, not saying this is always true about Keller. So let me just talk about the model. And I think sometimes this maps onto Keller, but often, maybe to his acolytes, is I think that it often reduces to niceness, which I think is a symptomized, sentimentalized reduction of the biblical worldview. What winsomeness does inclines Christians to embrace the narratives pushed by cultural elites, many of whom are increasingly hostile to Christianity. It’s moral teachings. It leads Christians, I think, often, to scorn fellow believers to their right who are more out of step with the cultural consensus. Joshua Mitchell calls this innocent signaling. Carl Truman calls it progressive privilege. Also, since culture has shifted in these certain ways we’ve been talking about, I think no matter how nicely Christians present traditional biblical positions on certain hot button issues, they will be viewed as backwards and bigoted no matter and unloving and Unwin some, no matter how they present it. And I think that temptation here is if that’s constantly the case, even though you’ve tried so hard to be nice and winsome. If you keep getting these accusations, I think there’s a temptation to doubt your convictions from this in an increasingly post Christian environment, I think Christians will be pressured to assume that loving the sinner means affirming and supporting their sin. And I mentioned how in my writings, how I think this is problematic in any environment. This approach for a couple reasons, approaching politics and cultural engagement, regarding hot button issues through the lens of evangelism, is wrong for three reasons, in my view. One, I don’t believe we can be so certain about how our political judgments and actions will be assessed by the broader public, especially some public in the future, I think we’re not we can’t be that certain about this. To approach approaching politics through the lens of evangelism simply a category error. Politics is not about minimizing offense in order to maximize openness to the evangelistic message. Rather, politics is focused on the pursuit of justice and the just ordering of society. And then lastly, I think this approach leads to all sorts of false moral equivalencies on issues and strategies, producing an almost crippling inability to recognize and publicly admit when there is moral asymmetry between the contemporary sides or even asymmetry among the issues themselves. What happens when the adherent is that the adherents of this model often constantly feel a pressure to highlight with equal air time the flaws in each position or strategy, and this inhibits the capacity to act in accord with proper political prudence. And I just round out that introduction to Dennis. The idea is, I think we just simply need to recognize that some causes are more important than others, some issues are black and white, and some strategies are clearly more in accord with justice. And as I concluded my follow up piece, when I first wrote these things, is sure, of course, so I say, as an expression of love of neighbor, let us focus on the pursuit of justice in politics, rather than how our political actions might be perceived. Yes, we will disagree on what best serves. Justice, of course we will, but that’s a better debate to have. Let’s focus our energy on that debate when we think about politics and hot button cultural issues. That was how I summarized what I view as winsome Third Way ism and the potential pitfalls, and not only potential, but a commonly observed and figures that appropriate it.

Collin Hansen
So I guess the question just related to Keller’s legacy is, how much credit does he deserve for being the vice president of the Christian ministry that spoke more often, more directly, more loudly about the moral issues of transgender ideology and abortion than any other in the world? How does that fit a winsome, Third Way structure? I’m just not, not sure how that, how that fits in.

James R. Wood
So maybe that is true. Do you concede also the what Kirsten Power said about I’ve never heard this at the church for years,

Collin Hansen
I would hate to be judged. And any pastor in this room would hate to be judged by what every single person in that congregation thought they heard and didn’t hear. I don’t think that’s remotely

James R. Wood
fair. Yeah, I’m just reading what I read from that there,

Collin Hansen
but I think you’ve heard a lot from her that would make you not want to trust her and their statements.

James R. Wood
But then also that famous thread that he had on Twitter about abortion, and he did exhibit that the third way thing here of like, I can’t, we can disagree on this, but we can’t say we should be trying to make it illegal. There’s this, there’s this dancing around this that I think probably is just not the most helpful. I just don’t think that’s the I’m not saying is entirely an error, but I think that is that exhibits a certain danger in the approach?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I think that the question that we all have to figure out as preachers, teachers, ministry leaders, and this is, this is really the crux of the argument. And I think there’s legitimate differences here. Keller’s defense of that was, you have A, B and C doctrines, and you don’t usually work backward from the C, B, A, but you work downward from the A, B, C. In other words, you focus on conversion from conversion. You focus on discipleship from discipleship. You focus including on the application to contemporary moral issues, and where that took place, specifically with Redeemer, would have been in the discipleship and the teaching of their officers and members. So you can argue with that. I mean, I could see some legitimate arguments about how, No, instead, we should be talking about the sea doctrines a lot more obviously. I think that’s just a legitimate discussion to have. I don’t think there’s an obvious wrong right or wrong answer when it comes when it comes to that one, and I do think in some ways, I just given the scale of the horror of abortion in New York City, even today, but going back to the 1990s certainly I would have wished to see more from him, more explicitly on that. That’s certainly a personal conviction of mine, just of the absolute evil that that represents. At the same time. If you talk to the people who are in the crisis pregnancy centers in New York City, the people that we’ve profiled at the gospel coalition doing this, they are converts under Tim Keller’s preaching ministry. So I’m not sure that all those public statements should be seen as the full measure of the application of discipleship, and specifically as it relates to the question of homosexuality, I do think that’s something that he addressed often. You can even consider people like Sam alberry, who preached the message at his funeral, having come up to the church and spoken about that a number of times, but admittedly, that was usually in training for officers and leaders in the church, as opposed to the typical Sunday morning fair. One other thing to add, though, and I think this is the real challenge for all of us who are preaching and teaching regularly. I think the true test of courage is whether you are going to preach about the sins of the people that are sitting in your pews, not in all the other pews out there. And I think we make a massive mistake of confusing the kind of courage that we hear in evangelical preaching today as preaching against other people’s sins and not confronting the idols of the people who are sitting right in front of you. And I don’t think anybody could accuse Tim of doing, of making that mistake, because he directly confronted the idols repeatedly of the people that were in his church, namely the people who are investment bankers, Broadway aspirants, people like that. And I think the experience that you get when you listen to Tim Keller preach, and I’m sure James, you would testify to this as well, with your appreciation when you read a Keller book and you read and you listen to a Keller sermon, you feel the Spirit convicting you of. Your sin and of and then darkness of your heart and the glory of grace, you don’t read it as Thank you Lord that I’m not like all those other people out there. And I’m not accusing you of, you know, saying otherwise.

Peter Leithart
But I want to take you back to the 2016 election. Yeah, and one one criticism would be, he should be more interested in the election, a big election in American history, you know, the other

Collin Hansen
and with New York City implications, I mean, very obvious

Peter Leithart
kind of criticism would be, he is, in fact, taking out a political position in his apolitical stance. And you can’t, you can’t avoid doing some kind of a political positioning one way. Yeah, how would you answer

Collin Hansen
that kind of so the primary way to think about this, and I think, and James, I don’t accuse you of doing this, but I think I don’t understand any of the application to Tim Keller’s teaching of what I see, broadly called Third Way ism the things that I’m seeing on podcasts, the things that I’m seeing in essays, I don’t recognize that in Keller at all, a sort of golden mean between two different things, a moderate approach to all things. I do think James brought up sometimes a moral equivalence, I think about that related. Sometimes he would say that, like, well, capitalism has problems and communism has problems well. And then other times he would say communism has more problems. You’re probably thinking of that example specifically in there, I think he

James R. Wood
comes up really clearly. For instance, it’s a good book, but I wrote this already, but in Christopher walkens, but a good book, and he does this. He third way. He does the third way. And Keller loved it.

Collin Hansen
He viewed it, yeah, diagonalization, but yeah, yeah.

James R. Wood
He talks about economics. He’s like, Well, capitalism has this is a moral equivalency, though,

Collin Hansen
well, and it’s a way of trying to explain that Christianity comes from point of critique. I would simply the best way to categorize the what position is he actually taking here? Actually, it comes from an essay that my intellectual mentor and my professor from college, Gary Saul Morrison at Northwestern a Russian literature professor. He just wrote about this in touchstone, and he talked about he talked about the package deal, and he was talking about liberal academia, and he said, Isn’t it amazing that when I talk to one of my colleagues, if I know their view on one thing, I know their view on 16 other things that are utterly unrelated. If I know their view on Hamas, I know their view on homosexuality, which, of course, is just Baff it makes no sense. There’s no consistency to that. But what does what do our politics and our media in a two party system, and the media is aligned with the politics, what do they force us into? They force us into these package deals. Now, what is the absurdity of this? Because, of course, what passes as Republican one year is the complete opposite of what passed as Republican last year or five years ago. Or, you know, speaking of abortion, you have the Republican Party becoming pro choice in 20 in 20 to 24 and people being okay with that, apparently, who had been pro life before, that kind of thing. So I don’t think the point that he’s trying to make is even a widely contestable one, that if Christianity, and I know you guys, would agree, just given what you teach in Political Theology, if Christianity can be reduced to what the Democratic Party says today in the United States of America, in the year of our Lord, 2025 then it has no transcendent referent, certainly no lasting judgment. It is merely a tool. So I think when you and Tim did in that 2022, book that I’ve quoted, and James has quoted, this is the explicit point that he’s making there. So yes, it is a political judgment. His point is we are going to be subsumed under the politics if we don’t recognize that Christianity stands as a judgment of both parties, if And insofar as they go against these unchangeable convictions that we have to hold as Christians. So I can acknowledge what James is saying, or the way that sometimes that does get applied into a kind of moral equivalence. I think it’s more fair to say that it’s about opposing the package deal that we’re offered today.

Peter Leithart
This may be my last inquiry. Where do you think James, we are right now have things shifted? I’m thinking, you know, since the last election, in the last eight months, since Charlie Burke’s assassination, what do you think is? What do you think is happening? What is your sense of what is happening? And part of that, to me is also you critique with some third way ism many great people saying it’s time to be down. Steve, we’re going to take the gloves off. Now that’s the whole thrust of the article. What is the alternative to what you’re calling winsome verbalism In our current moment? So what is our current moment?

James R. Wood
Colin’s opening address told me I couldn’t talk about what the current moment is. So things don’t really change.

Collin Hansen
They do change. They just change in the level of centuries, not in waves.

James R. Wood
So my first answer, maybe, maybe, can I answer the second question? First, what I was offering, even when I first wrote, was okay, so what do you think is needed to counter the errors in the pitfalls of winsome. Third Way ism, I’ll just put it that way is I used two words often when people would ask me, that is clarity and courage. That’s that’s what I offered. I’m not saying Keller was not courageous. I’m saying, as I observe the pitfalls of this model, these things I think are helpful to counter those pitfalls, clarity and courage and resilience, I think was the other word I used. So when you get pushback for your views, that you’re for the Christian views that you’re seeking to defend, not just whatever your your views are about tangential or tertiary issues, but when you’re trying to uphold the Christian faith, the Christian moral vision, etc, to be resilient when you get the pushback and to be clear, to be forthright in speech, like Second Corinthians, four types thing we renounce underhanded ways. But you know, with clear, forthright speech, representing, yes, the gospel and also things that are packaged in with the gospel and so clarity, courage, resilience, that’s those are the things I talked about. And I totally agree with Colin. I don’t think a lot of the guys who also critique Keller from a different angle, who are very bold on social media, are actually being that bold. So I fully agree with Colin there. I think there’s a lot of you’re tickling the ears of your audience. That’s a temptation, and I think we need to be very wary of that. And a lot of the platform builders, a lot of the people who are critiquing Keller are platform builders. I’ve not talked about Keller in three years. You know, this is not my thing, but I do think that’s a whole shtick. And I think courageous people are not just the people speaking to the sins of your audience, but also, are you willing to offend your tribe? And I really don’t trust people who are never willing to offend their followers and their tribe. And that’s a lot of the Keller critics, to be honest, some of them, I mean, not all of them, but I do notice that, and I don’t think that’s actually courageous. And so, because I actually am, I do agree with a lot of the third waves and logic of just like, I don’t think either side is right or whatever. And so you should make that clear even with your people. So where are we? I mean, the minor changes flitting about the surface of the waves. Okay? Is I coined another, another term that I wrote in the first things article last year, last summer. So 2024 is the term reality respecters I’ve started to observe, and this has been only confirmed the last year and a half, as I started to observe a new openness to the gospel among at least two categories of people, and I lumped them together with the broad term reality respecters, which is a play on the term God fears. And in early church missiology, there was a targeted approach of you first and foremost, go after these people who have a general respect for God, but don’t have all the dots connected yet, and they’ve already kind of been like pre catechized to they have some of the mental moral furniture that kind of you can build upon, and you kind of privilege them in strategic missiological initiatives. And so I started to notice people who I don’t think are necessarily God fears, but they’re people who are reality respecters. They respect kind of basic natural truths, et cetera, things that were common sense until five minutes ago. And this is kind of for many of them, it’s kind of also corresponded with or terminated in a new openness to the Gospel. And there are two categories within that. There’s highbrow and kind of lowbrow. The highbrow ones are the public intellectuals who have increasingly embraced the term cultural Christian. There’s a lot of them, and it’s very fascinating. You have Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, Richard Dawkins, Joe I’ll get to him. Then you have and then you have people. Those are people who stayed on this they flitted around though. They’re kind of open to Christianity. They respect it. They think that as and also they see that Christianity is going to be essential to preserve the goods of Western civilization that we care about, and and so that’s that’s fine. There’s a new kind of there is a bridge. There’s a connection points that I think we should attend to. Louise Perry would be another one. You have a lot this within that you have the sex realist feminists. They’re called Louise Perry, Mary, Harry. Louise Perry just became a Christian, very, very famous sexualist feminist. And then, and then, a couple other people have recently become Christians from that category. Category is I and her clee, most beautiful story of her conversion last year. And Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, just became an acna member. And so, and he talks about this. It’s like he just noticed that the left was shutting down rational, reason, speech, debate. And that’s his whole thing. It’s what he wanted to get with Wikipedia, etc. And he was so like, the people who are actually open to this type of discourse are Christians and kind of anything also. And you follow the facts, you follow the trail of breadcrumbs of reality, it leads you to Christianity. It’s very similar with Louise Perry. She said the natural truths led her to open up to the supernatural ones. Very fascinating that just That was last week she talked about this. So that’s the top cat, and then the bottom category, or not, just like, it’s not necessarily intellectual academics is a lot of young Gen Z guys. There are going to be issues with this group of people that’s interested in Christianity, of course, but there also might be mission opportunities here that I don’t want to ignore, and I don’t want to say, well, because it’s guys, it’s not girls, there must be something dark and nefarious here. It’s so ridiculous. Don’t hate the harvest that God is bringing to you, and don’t hate it. Doesn’t mean ignore the rest of the field either. I’m not saying don’t minister to people on the left, etc, etc, but I think too much of the missional literature was they always, it always was kind of a presumption. And a lot of the missional literature, well, the missional the people who are the lost that we need to be orienting ourselves to are usually, it’s usually people on the left that’s often, was a common assumption. I’m like, there’s this whole group of people on the right as well that are lost. I actually, and I do think they are lost. And there also seems to be a new openness. And so how do we lean into that? I think the dark. There are dark ways to lean into it, where you just coddle them, you coddle their white grievance and resentment and the messages that they’re getting from the manosphere of like how they’re just stuck in the Long House and the women are against them and all this stuff. And, yeah, don’t do that, and how the all the I hate to talk about it, but I’ve written against these guys, so I’ve tried to offend my audience on these points I’ve written about the rise of anti semitism on the right, and it’s been dark for a couple years now, and so all these guys who are trying to coddle them by saying, Yeah, it’s really the Jews. That’s the like, Bro, that’s such a loser mentality. First of all, that’s my piece that I wrote for first things, and this was called unmanly anti semitism. Like, you know, your life is not a mess because of the Jews, you know, and so. But I do think at least so regard for who knows about politics? Who knows? But I also think that it’s not clear that forthright defense of like, anti abortion, anti trans ideology, I don’t think those things close down gospel opportunities. I don’t think that is factual. You might speculate it could down the road, but it hasn’t at this point, a lot of those people who are have a renewed openness are also in that kind of world, and they don’t view that as shutting down. They don’t view that as offensive, and therefore I won’t hear about Jesus. Now, if you only talked about those things and you just demonize the left. That’s not evangelism either. Okay? And so that’s the these are, those are the dark versions of responding to our moment. But I think there’s opportunities here that I’m excited about, and I want to be someone who’s writing about thinking about that, to try to help us lean into that and to not miss out on the hardest,

Peter Leithart
same question for you, where, what’s your sense of where we are? Yeah, we’ll take a break. We’ll go a few more minutes. Sense of where we are, and what do you think is the church’s responsibility?

Collin Hansen
Well, even if, in November 24 we left the negative world behind, then we became the positive world once more. I still think that’s great, because a lot of our ministry opportunities are they’re quick, they’re rapid, they’re unpredictable, they’re uncontrollable. James makes a good point of not hating the harvest. If the people showing up to your church are not the people that you expected to come to your church, well that’s not, I mean, great. The Lord works in really surprising ways. In fact, there has never been a revival in all of world or biblical history that’s been expected otherwise, of course, it wouldn’t be a revival there. It’s always the unexpected work of the Lord. So, and I would say, we’re, we’re working in the early stages now, James, I think you’d appreciate this, because we’ve been talking to campus ministry leaders all over the country and across North America, and usually we’re getting the same response, which is we’re seeing something different with this freshman class. Some things change. Changed some things, some things different here. Even if it is the foam on the wave, it’s still something significant there. Now the questions that come at the mid or the lower level, or just deciding where it is in this cultural assessment, that’s where things get really interesting. And these are the debates that we have with the Keller center, with our fellows, one of the most significant questions would be, if something has changed, what is the thing that has changed? What’s the issue or the issue beneath the issue, or the issue beneath that issue? What is it? Is it the election? Was it the fact that the election was won in part related on opposing trans ideology. Did that open up the door for reality respecters to say what we all know is true, but we’ve been bullied into thinking, is this generation different? Because it’s the generation that was not in high school or early in high school when covid hit, was maybe that, you know, maybe that was the problem with the last few years was those are the students who suffered so much through covid, isolation, things like that. Is it like Jonathan height talks about so much and in others? Is it really the rise of the smartphones? Maybe parents adjusted. Maybe they adjusted. Maybe something’s different than among that group. Or another provocative thesis would be there’s also the same timeline of the rise of smartphones. Is the same timeline of the rise of wokeness. So could the neuroticism that was perpetuated by various different forms of wokeness that dissipated in the 2020s and especially since 2024 could that be why people are you know, we’re seeing more health among a younger group. Then, of course, the question becomes, are we seeing this among men or among women or both? Just like James talked about there, we don’t despise it if it comes from a group that we didn’t expect. At the same time, are we seeing in our churches more men, or instead, are we just seeing there are more men there, because so many women have been leaving and are leaving. Is it just that we’ve always expected there’s way more single women in our churches? And it turns out there are not more single women. So are we actually seeing an uptick of men or an overall decrease of women? I’m not sure the answer to that question. So I want to believe the best, and I want to encourage the best, and I want to always but the point is, when you’re trying to use this analysis of the different levels of the way historical change happens, often the debate is, what’s the issue? What’s the issue? Beneath the issue? And trying to get to the bottom of that, where you understand as as James is saying, you don’t want to be superficial in your missiology. You want to be able to ascertain what’s happening at deeper levels.

Peter Leithart
Thank you. Let’s take our two panelists. Let me

Peter Leithart
start with this. A writer says first thing, thinking concerning contextualization, the example of Charlie Kirk’s direct, prove me wrong. Style changes into it. That is, might his direct no-nonsense style show that sometimes it might be best to just to get to the point tell us isn’t gospel message call people of faith repentance without the contextualization.

Collin Hansen
I think the answer there is plainly Yes. I would simply point out since, again, the topic here broadly is Keller’s legacy. I don’t know how many other preachers did Q and A sessions after their sermons, but Tim did for most of his time in New York. That was actually a pattern that he followed from RC Sproul, from his Ligonier Valley Study Center, and since the book that I wrote talks about this, quite a bit, I’ve heard from pastors all over the place that are hosting these Sunday night Ask Me Anything sessions, and seeing huge numbers of young people coming and asking those questions. So I think there probably wasn’t anything more in life that Tim Keller loved than people asking him hard questions. In fact, when he was in Hopewell, Virginia, if you didn’t know what question to ask. That’s okay, because Tim had a ready list of hundreds that you could ask him. So anyway, I just think, yeah, of course. That’s but the questions now, but also the direct speech. I think when I go back, I mean James, I think you probably agree with this, Tim believed in direct sermons with direct appeal at the end, demanding and calling for you to conversion in that right moment, right there. So I don’t think, I don’t think rightly, we’d be talking about him hemming and hawing about this kind

James R. Wood
of stuff. Yeah, you would often use the Martin Lloyd Jones illustration. See, tip killer is deep in my. Bones. People don’t know this about the teller critic, but he was deep. Is a Yeah, he would use the reference. He’s like. He doesn’t like people always take this wrong way. Doesn’t like people taking notes in the

Collin Hansen
sermons. Well, not at the end, at the end, at the beginning, you can take the notes in her head,

James R. Wood
because he wants you to be changed on the spot, instead of thinking about things that you might might change you later. And so interesting little insight, I think. And it did, it reflects the desire that he did call you, wanted you to change in his sermons. And I think this person is probably asking more about, like when you talked about politics, which is, again, these are bleeding and, but I just think more, maybe just generally, about the idea of contextualization. It’s a I teach missiology. I teach that and, and I wasn’t a missionary for a while, and, but I think this is a it’s always a template. It’s always a temptation. Contextualization is a slippery thing. I think it’s you have to do it, and it’s good to do it, and it’s dangerous to do it. I think you can overthink it. Sometimes you can overthink the ministry. You can kind of constrain the work of God by getting really creative with your methodologies, etc, etc. And I forget just about Keller. I think that is a temptation generally. And then you might see the surprising work of God that something just happens like I to be honest. You know, in my cards, I think people probably already assume this about someone like me, is I didn’t really pay much attention to Charlie Kirk before this. Not neither, not because of I didn’t like him or not, but it was interesting after he died, then I go back and watch videos like Ali, I didn’t know that he actually shared the gospel so often. Like that was actually kind of surprising to me. And so I’m not going to talk about Kirk. We’re talking about Keller, but it’s related to the contextualization thing is, I think, yeah, you got to do it. And I think we can also be surprised when people who do it very differently. God seems to work in for some reason. And so we kind of hold things, I think both things in both hands. I think I think Keller really was his strength was being really thoughtful, painstakingly thoughtful for years and years. And that has really good merits and really good fruit, and we can all learn from it. And then also, like the Lord speaks through balaam’s Donkey and some, you know, and so I think all these things are going together. And did I have anything else? That’s maybe all I’ll say

Collin Hansen
about that, just real quickly there, if you’re overlapping concentric circles are Leslie Newman again, and Tim Keller. You might be prone to overthinking on the contextualization, missiology side, but if you like Tim Keller did, went through all of Lloyd Jones sermons and spent the entire 1970s reading George Whitfield from Banner of Truth and preaching like Whitfield, I don’t think that’s going to be your main problem there, but That’s not what everybody does when they’re emulating Keller. So just depends on which aspect of his legacy that you’re going after

James R. Wood
Leslie to begin. So

Collin Hansen
here I’m just saying if those are your two, you’re probably going to be prone to that if there’s not also a Lloyd Jones in that color palette.

Peter Leithart
Next question. Looks inadequate in a politicized age, but that is because ages and politics do the work once more cultural institutions like the family, church and local community, and if so, should we allow everything to be thought about? First is where they will second is theological, evangelistic

James R. Wood
console, hmm, it’s a deep question. I think maybe I don’t want to think about everything as partisan, but I do think more things are political by nature, not just in our moment, but generally part of the theopolitan view. Peter and I do the podcast, the hottest podcast out there, Civitas podcast. You all are subscribers. Leave five star reviews. I know you do, but that’s kind of when our whole angles is the church itself is political. And by that, we don’t mean it’s partisan. It just by nature of what it is, then it’s the new humanity, the new polytuma in the world, etc, etc, the new polis, all this. So when you ask the question is, do we need to think about things more politically? I think it’s yes and no, I don’t want to politicize everything, which is often maybe what is the temptation is where you’re even like thinking about how that creeps into the family. For instance, if you’re dividing the lines in your family, you know, on partisan lines, that’s very dangerous. Your family Trumps that, you know. And I do think the right can do that, but the left does it too. And I think that’s often unrecognized, not sufficiently recognized, but so and I don’t want that dividing churches necessarily, even though I think I want where the Bible is clear on on moral issues that bear upon the political order, I think pastors should absolutely not shy, and I think they should not worry that they’re they’re people attending. And I’m not saying killer did this. I’m just saying the temptation of the model that we’re talking about also is. I there was a this was a common trope among pastors for like, a decade. I heard it all the time among the types of pastors that are in these orbits over time, is they founded a virtue that their congregants had no idea who they where they fell in, the party lines. And I think that’s just kind of funny to me. Like, I don’t think your church should sound Republican or Democrat. But you know, if they don’t know where you stand on a lot of issues, and maybe could take some guesses, I think that’s probably a silly thing to be aiming for, and I don’t think the pastor should be telling you how to vote at all. It’s not my view

Collin Hansen
either. Do you think that would be true in the UK as well?

James R. Wood
Expand, yeah.

Collin Hansen
Well, I’m not sure church members in the UK always know what their pastors how they would vote, yes, okay, but I don’t think it would be along the same partisan lines. What you’re saying, Yeah, I think

James R. Wood
there’s not really a lot of there are no good options in Canada, and they’re not really good options in America either. But I think there’s not moral equivalence. There’s some clearer moral divides. Yes, then you see what you’re saying there, but it would often be Americans that I was talking about, and I just think, yeah, I don’t want your pastors to be hyper partisans. I just don’t want them to also be worried that somebody in the church might think that they’re conservative or something. And that was something I noticed by a lot of these people, so maybe that’s answering question, but maybe I missed totally misunderstood your question.

Collin Hansen
So I don’t, I don’t remember off the top of my head anything that Keller wrote about de Tocqueville, but I think it’s interesting, if you applied his politics, I think he would say that he was a Tocqueville Ian New Yorker, meaning he was very concerned, extremely concerned, about the politics of his city. And I don’t just mean who’s mayor, but if you look in my book and you talk about the early church members at Redeemer, they’re making comments like, we had prayer meetings, and that’s why the crime rate went down in New York. Okay? And then the comment of, you know, one of the most significant factors in people not abandoning New York City after 911 was Redeemer Presbyterian church and people not abandoning that city. We take it for granted that that’s not how people responded. But why do we assume that everybody was going to love living in New York City after 911 and that there wouldn’t be more attacks and things like that? So I would say you could identify his politics as being fairly localist and tocquevillian in that sense. So then the question, going back to what we heard here originally, is, are we over indexing to national politics as framed by certain media outlets, versus how much care and concern do we have for our local politics? And I, again, I’m just talking from his example there, but I think there was a lot of concern about that and the church’s witness locally.

Peter Leithart
Another question was seller’s patience. I think this was Heller’s patience, and his winsome approach ever a strategy of avoidance.

Collin Hansen
That’s a good question. So one other thing about Tim that goes back to my original response to James is understanding the man, understanding the personality, understanding his approach to his own legacy. I think when you look at the bare facts, and you look at what does it take to be a church planter in New York City, at that place and time, you would see a whole lot of confrontation, you’d see a whole lot of courage, you’d see a whole lot of direct speech. You’d see all those different things. But when you worked for him, and you worked with him, and you knew him well, and he talked to you about these things, and you put it in a book, you would say that he had tendencies to want to please people, and tendencies to not want to always have to talk about the hardest things out there in a very human way. But I never saw him talk about that as a strategy that was never a leadership strategy. Of, you know, what you need to do is make sure you don’t offend anybody in your church. That was obviously the opposite of what he would would commit, not that you offend everybody, but that as part of this faithful pastoral ministry as it comes with that kind of confrontation there. So, yeah, I think in general, he just that was a personality thing, not a principle. But even after a personality thing, it’s clearly something that he did a lot of. Otherwise, there’s no chance he would be an effective evangelist in New York City.

James R. Wood
The only thing I was gonna add to add to this just a kind of a meta level of one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how frustrating it is to try to share a message broadly and because a lot of times, whenever you’re speaking publicly about issues, it’s probably because you’re trying to correct an imbalance on the other side about something and. And and oftentimes you have a particular audience in mind that you’re trying to share this message with, who needs to hear it. And unfortunately, how this happens in the social media landscape, etc, or just sharing your message broadly almost anywhere. And you know, writing on your essays and etc, writing books is the people who most need to hear that and be corrected against the opposite error are not the people who are going to pick up your message and perpetuate it. The people who already basically agree with you and kind of align with you are probably more commonly going to be the ones who pick it up and they’re going to prepare, but then the message will be dismissed by those who need to hear it. Because of that. I think it’s just that’s a meta problem that I’ve thought a lot about myself, and it’s, I’m not sure what the answer is to it. So like, for instance, one of the reasons I felt I needed to make some of my own offer, my critique, originally, of some of the things that we’ve talked about tonight, is because I recognized how my own tendencies that I wanted to counter as well, and I just wondered if other people who are appropriating the model might be struggling the same way as well. But I don’t think a lot of people who picked up and appreciated my argument were the people who needed to hear it. So I’ll say, and I think this is just a problem. I think it’s probably true for people who really anyway. So I’ll leave it at that good point.

Peter Leithart
I’ll put this under the in the touche category, regarding the spiritual openness or curiosity of the late teens, early 20s. Could it be that they have become disillusioned by the woke left and while the Maga brand of Christianity and are therefore looking for a third way. I think that’s an actual question.

James R. Wood
I don’t know. I mean, obviously it’s some of this is going to be too soon to tell we have played out and see what’s happening. But the young Gen Z guys that were, that’s where a lot of the there is some data even on this, that they are more spiritually open. They were attending churches at higher rates there. There is data on this and and I do think that some of that is probably the overreach of the left I one of the terms I toyed with a couple years ago before I came up with the term reality respecters, which seemed to catch on more, is refugees from the woke and sexual revolutions. So, you know, experiencing the ravages of these kind of, these cultural forces that are destroying, in many ways, civilization and also just being hammered down your throat and you can’t speak against them, otherwise you will get canceled or whatever. I think a lot of guys, a lot of young guys, felt that especially, and are that’s part of I think they’re refugees from that direction, probably predominantly more so. But we’ll have to see. I haven’t seen enough data on that, but that’s my guess. But here’s the danger, though, again, I said there’s bad ways to respond to this moment, and I think one of the dangers generally about any of these types of shifts that are flitting about the surface that we’ve talked about is that you overplay your hand when you get when a door cracks open, you want to kick it open, and you overplay your hand, and it will backfire. It, and I call them beware of the Pyrrhic victories in the culture war, where you have an immediate win, you get some room, and then you really go for it. And actually, this is what I think happened with the woke moment, CRT and all that stuff was going through the institutions for decades, and it was growing and affecting all the literature, all the disciplines, et cetera, et cetera. I think the left really made a mistake. Once the George Floyd moment happened after, like, you know, six years or so of BLM stuff and whatever, I think they and then you had the after, also Obergefell. Then you got the trans thing emerging, those things coalesced. And I think it was overplaying of the hand, and I think that turned a lot of people off, and especially on the train, the shift on the trans thing is drastic of sentiments about the trans ideology right now. So that’s my guess. It’s probably more from that right now. But again, the danger still, even if that’s true, is the danger is you might get refugees from Maga in the near future as well.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, just a just a quick comment on there, which relates to the categorization of a lot of politics, not all politics, but a lot of politics, on that surface is the only real rule of politics is that which goes up must come down. That’s it. So we’ve seen it again and again and again. I think the older you are, the more you’ve seen it so many different times. And so if there’s a good moment now with spiritual openness, we give thanks. If that’s a change, we also know that, historically speaking and otherwise, religious movements that are explicitly tied to political movements just don’t typically go well, or they at least will rise. The highs of that political movement, and they will end up riding the lows down as well. And then, like you said, that’s worked on the left very clearly,

Peter Leithart
I’m going to take moderator’s privilege and ask a question of my own. It’s primarily directed to you, Colin, but I think James might have something to say this. I didn’t, I wouldn’t have realized Keller’s debt to Lewis and Tolkien, his interest in fairy tales and his interest in science fiction, fantasy fiction. And it occurred to me that you talk about the different levels of cultural change, yeah, the deepest level is kind of mythology Exactly. Is does he think of himself as a kind of part of an effort at re enchantment or giving, giving, giving his parishioners a new driving myth or new driving story to guide their lives, is that, is that the category that you would have

Collin Hansen
thought in? Yeah, a lot of you will be familiar probably, with the conversion of Molly Worthen, the history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She first talked about that in an interview that she and I did on my gospel bound podcast. She was somebody who was evangelized by JD Greer, most directly, but then also Tim Keller, and it’s noteworthy that the recommendation that Tim made to her included the space trilogy by CS Lewis, which, interestingly, I just wrote about this recently for the Keller center, about if this is, if Mere Christianity is the 20th century apologetic from Lewis, then it’s more likely that the space trilogy is the 21st Century. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s saying that. Our friend Derek has talked about that, and others there as well, but that’s why I wrote, especially about that hideous strength. I tend to lean in my apologetics quite a bit more on literature than Tim did. Tim was a little bit more focused on on Lewis and Tolkien. I tend to branch out into some other different genres in there. But his critique of me is that I tend toward the realist fiction writers, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others, the ones that I mentioned earlier, that I’ve been trained on, he said the difference with fantasy. I’ve just not always been a sci fi guy, but if you’re going to write about Tim Keller, you need to be so I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings before I was writing that book. Well, his view was that the reason science fiction is more beneficial is because it helps you imagine a world different from the one that you’re seeing with your eyes, and if you can open the imagination and you’ll be opening the heart to receive the gospel. So I think the answer is yes, it’s your

James R. Wood
question. I do. I do have a couple comments about this, less directly about Kelly, but more about that idea is I think I’ve asked people about this, but it’s a thought I’ve had in my mind for a while. If you, if you ask someone, and again, this is prognostication in the future, which is always dangerous. But I asked if you had to think about who would be the Christian writers who was from the 20th century that will still be read 500 years from now. Obviously you’re never gonna You can’t guarantee that your answer is going to be correct here. But if you have to take a guess, you know, I think I’ve actually, I’ve asked that question to people, and it’s surprising that a lot of them say the same ones and but here’s where I here’s an answer I think is wrong, but somebody could say is, well, Karl Barth, you know, the best, most important theologian the 20th century. And I think that’s also right. And when I say most important, I don’t mean the best. He’s not the best. The person I wrote my dissertations on is the best but, but I think the BART moment will be over at some point, and it’ll be an interesting footnote. But I think who will still be read. I think Lord of the Rings will still be read, and I think CS Lewis will still be read. It isn’t that fascinating that the two again, this is guessing, but a lot of people have answered the same way that the two most important Christian authors of the 20th century are fantasy writers, and that might be something worth tapping into more. I’m not good at that. And I actually I don’t know how good Tim Keller was himself directly at that writing that register, and that’s okay. We’re all very different. I’m not good at that either, but I do think he wanted people to do that.

Collin Hansen
This is a preview of the project that I’m working on right now for for the future. But what I find noteworthy that relates to my seas analogy is that the same month that the United States is dropping the atomic bombs on Japan is the same month that Orwell’s Animal Farm comes out, and it’s the same month that CS Lewis’s that hideous strength comes out. How did two of the most famous writers in the English language of the 20th century write dystopian fiction at the month that their nation wins the most significant victory in. Their entire Empire’s history. What did they see that did not correspond to, I think we’d all say the end of World War Two was a pretty big civilizational event. What did they see that did not make them rejoice as this is an obviously good thing? Well, it’s because, of course, they were very much worried about the specter of communism, in Orwell’s view, and then in Lewis’s much deeper than that, just the specter of the sort of scientific takeover that was just as true of parts of England as it was of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or anything like that. And then I think, to James’ point is why those books are still read? Because they’re written at that lower register, not just responding to a political moment.

Peter Leithart
This will have to be the last question, just for the sake of time, and this is a question that both of you can answer when the policies that are more obviously biblical are wrapped in a package in a binary political system and emotion is very attached to each side of the binary. How do we avoid giving offense because of our attachment to the person or the party or the package, rather than because of the gospel and its attendance? Policy implications? I, James is calling, phoning. I’m looking at my

James R. Wood
looking at the article that I wrote. I was trying to remember the exact line, but I have written on this, and so I don’t know if the person, because it sounds very similar to something I’ve said, somebody great man once, the one piece I’ve written on this that addresses that specifically, directly is a piece called against political donatism that I wrote for for World Magazine and and I do think we have a bad I think most evangelicals have not been trained well to Think what is actually happening in the Voting Act. And I think that’s a problem. I think we put the stakes on it way too high, positively, negatively, positively. People who worship politics, they think their candidates gonna usher in the, you know, the kingdom of God or something, you know, no, that’s happened. Every political development is ambivalent at best. And so, but the other side is we, I think we also make the stakes too high of like what we’re actually saying through the vote. And I think that’s a concern that I have as well. When you vote for someone, you’re not saying they completely embody all my values, or that they the closest approximation to Jesus or or whatever, or that they’re always going to everything that they are for is what I’m for. That’s just not what happens. Voting is a tragic act. Augustine is great on this. I’ve written a book on Augustine. He’s not great on voting because he didn’t vote, obviously not because he abdicated his civic responsibility, because he didn’t live in a democracy. But I the best analog in Augustine for here is his view of judges, of how judges have to perform their act in the judicial, judicial courts. And he says it’s tragic because they they have such they don’t have perfect information. They don’t know if what they’re receiving is true. They don’t know if they can perceive it correctly, and so should they abdicate responsibility and just step away? He says, No judge. They must, but always with contrition, always knowing that they could be wrong, always knowing that they can make mistakes. And I think voting is also like that. You’re making a judgment call when you vote. You’re making a judgment call about the potential package of relative, the relative merits of the potential package of actions of a candidate in their party. I mean all that you have five levels of qualifiers, and it’s relative. It’s in comparison to what, not comparison to Jesus. Jesus isn’t on the ballot, but comparison to what the other options are. And so who do you think will do, who you think will potentially probably do the most good and the least damage? That’s kind of what you’re doing in voting. And I think that takes the scales down and and I think that’s kind of one of the things we need. And again, obviously there are other people who think I’ve got to get my guy in there, or the every election is the most important election we important election we’ve ever seen. You know, of course, that’s wrong too, but I think there’s another complimentary truth that we need to also say, is we need to look more closely at what’s actually happening in the Voting Act. And I think we’ve thought about that pretty poorly.

Collin Hansen
That’s great, great observations there, and I think we’ll probably have some good agreement to be able to end on isn’t it noteworthy that I think what Tim was opposing politically at the national level, was that sense that you often hear among evangelicals that the church depends everything we care and we love about depends. Depends on the outcome of this election, and even people who don’t see it. A lot of us feel that. I think that is definitely part of what he was criticizing, but what James is commending here, I think, is exactly what he did when it came to New York City politics, and that’s why I think it might be helpful here once again, to work outward from the local to the national, instead of national to the local. And of course, there’s a pretty significant local election in New York right now, and this illustrates one of the things that people have criticized Keller for. I’ve never verified this myself, but supposedly Keller was a registered Democrat. Okay, so somebody must have done that investigation some way or another to figure that out. Again, I haven’t verified it myself, but as far as I know, his response, his explanation, was simple. The only meaningful elections where that matters are local elections, mayoral elections. And let’s just consider the current situation in New York. Were there better or I mean, were there great candidates? I doubt anybody. I mean, I of course could not talk to Tim about this, but I doubt he or many people would think that there were great options. Could there be less bad options, perhaps, and we’ll see. You know based on this election coming soon, with some massive changes in the city, but the only way you affect that change is if you’re registered to vote in that Democratic primary and so, and I don’t think that there would have been any thought that, okay, well, depending on who you vote here, everything’s going to be great, or everything’s going to be bad, but more of that. This is an important act, as you’re participating in a democratic process, enacting the principles of justice, where you do not have any perfect option, but you insofar as you can understand it, may have less bad options.

James R. Wood
I always think that was a low blow attack on Keller, because he clearly explained his logic there, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve never critiqued him for that. I think it was. It made tons of sense he’s trying to be able to vote in the primaries and to get the best possible option among the bad options that are there. And that’s the best way you can do it. That makes sense

Collin Hansen
local situation where there those outcomes can be very significantly different. Yeah.

Peter Leithart
Well, I want to thank you all for coming. And also thanks to James Wood, Collin Hansen, let’s give them applause.