By Colby Malsbury

The Rev. Timothy Keller, Pioneering Manhattan Evangelist, Dies at 72

Shunning fire and brimstone, he became a best-selling author and founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which drew young New Yorkers.

So lamented the headline of that most august bastion of our Christian civilization, The New York Times. There was much, much more, but as the Paper of Record hides behind an especially obnoxious paywall, I’m not about to plunk down drachmas to read any further. Suffice it to say that a Times obit is valued among modernist cosmopolitan Presbyterian sorts like Keller every bit as much as that precious bowl of pottage was to Esau. Hope that’s a comfort to Timmy where he is now.

No doubt Team Reformed will think those sentiments perfectly horrid and not very winsome. I don’t care. “Well, I didn’t agree with him 100% either, but it does not behoove us to speak ill of the dead!” Oh, really? What was the excuse of these soft apologists when they (ever so mildly) criticized him in his prime influence years, when his spiritually moribund state was on full display for all to gawk at, then?

“Well, I didn’t agree with him 100% either, but he was an elder in the Church and did much to further the Kingdom in his own unique fashion, and such hard work and dedication deserves our respect.” Oh, really? In his first epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul commanded them to ‘know them which labor among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you; and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake.’ (5:12-13) In no way, shape or form did this apply to those who merely claimed to labor and admonish among them, and it only stands to reason that the many Judaizers within Thessalonica who were doing just that should have been counted among those who labored against them, and ought to have been dealt with accordingly. Tim the Tool-Man fits into this category like a broken-in shoe.

Keller managed to attain what success he did by becoming a theological embodiment of his age, just as Karl Barth reached his peak of influence in the 60s via his otiose incomprehensible ‘otherness’ being embraced by that portion of the psychedelic zeitgeist with intellectual and theological predilections….at least until they tired of that and started digging Hesse’s Siddhartha instead, man. In Keller’s case, he boarded the equally otiose Social Media SST early on and circumnavigated the globe in that puppy a few thousand times. Prior to the publication of his first book in 2008, his Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) had operated in fairly nondescript fashion for nearly twenty years. But as 2008 also marked the beginning of the Facebook ascendancy (such a quaint notion now!), he rapidly adapted to the exciting new medium by a radical dumbing-down of his articles of faith:

1 There are many valid paths to the Kingdom of Heaven that are straight and narrow, and

2. We are all one race. The human race.

And he did, ah, “very well” by this apostolic creed, as fame and fortune soon followed. Ye cannot serve God and mammon, after all, and to keep a church in downtown Manhattan operative, lotsa mammon is required. Priorities.

While we’re on that topic: has anything theologically good ever come out New York City? Not Union Theological Seminary. Not Chabad Lubavitch. Not the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And certainly not Redeemer Presby. Shoot, at least Princeton across the river in Jersey used to produce a Warfield or a Machen once in a while, although that was way before our lifetimes.

But anyway. Fortified by the prevailing zeitgeist, Keller would spend the next fifteen years offering us aphorisms aplenty, better suited to an especially sacrilegious batch of fortune cookies than to a legitimate theologian:

Whoops – how did that last one get mixed up in there??? Hard to tell radical socialists apart sometimes, I guess.

The penultimate tweet presented above would prove to be one of Keller’s premier hobby-horses over the years, as he would go on to extol the inherent Godliness of any urban center to an embarrassing degree. Direct references from Scripture were never his strong suit, so he must have missed the part where that tremendous egalitarian Cain became the first-ever builder of a city. Or when the Sodomites demanded to get to, ah, ‘know’, the angels who lodged inside Lot’s abode. Or when God informed Jonah that only by His grace would Nineveh be spared, and not for any inherent worth therein. And so on and so forth. If you want to be an influencer, you gotta cater to the like-and-share crowd. And with Timmy’s trajectory, those weren’t gonna be found in Faithful Flats, OK, after all. They could be utterly ignored and denigrated with a clear conscience.

When it came to twisting Scripture, Keller could have given Old Slew Foot himself a run for his money. This wasn’t always so readily apparent on his tweets, which on occasion sounded sufficiently orthodox that the credulous would affirm ‘Wow, just wow! The prodigal is returning home, and we can finally embrace him with open arms again!!!’ Wishful thinking. When he stepped away from the keyboard long enough to proffer his thoughts at length and in real time, the fulness of his false gospel came shining through like a rock of crack cocaine sitting on Grandmother’s windowsill.

Thus, in an interview conducted with the Veritas Forum, we observe Keller emulating Billy Graham and declaring that “if they” – meaning Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucianists, etc. – “die and don’t have Jesus Christ, I don’t know” – meaning, what happens to them eternally. (Begin at the 2:45 mark.) If Keller couldn’t even let his yea be yea and his nay nay on that fundamental Christian tenet, then we are considerably less uncertain as to where he is residing at present. “Oh, so that’s what happened to you guys!” Or, in another now-infamous quote, Keller was proud to avow that he would “rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government was officially Christian.” Given that the Wall Street Journal gave extensive coverage to this bit of sophisticated sophistry, it was clear that for all of Keller’s grave faults, he at least knew who his core audience was. Apologists have claimed that this was only in keeping with Keller’s adherence to Kuyper and his anti-theonomic stance. Even if that’s true, so what? Kuyper wasn’t infallible in all his doctrines, and his distaste for the Bourbon regime that preceded the French Revolution doesn’t make his resultant revulsion towards Christian states any less misguided.

Keller joined John Piper in being at the very forefront of the Cultural Marxist Revolution: Calvinist Edition of the 2010s. Their soft-spoken Trotskyism disguised as Christianity did much to convince the likes of Gary North and Joel McDurmon that Woke was the wave of the church’s future, and aided in their disposal of the more localist, conservative populist beliefs they had previously held, however falsely. Our own Enos Powell has amply demonstrated this case in his excellent blog post ‘Tim Keller’s Testimony’ from a couple of years ago. In it, he quotes at length from a Keller sermon:

The history and philosophy departments were socially radicalized and were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt school. In 1968 this was heady stuff. THE SOCIAL ACTIVISM WAS PARTICULARLY ATTRACTIVE, AND THEIR CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN BOUREGOIS SOCIETY WAS COMPELLING. (emphasis added) But its philosophical underpinnings were confusing to me. I seemed to see two camps before me. And there was something radically wrong with both of them. The people most passionate about social justice were moral relativists. While the morally upright didn’t seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world. I was emotionally drawn to the former path. What young person wouldn’t be? Liberate the oppressed and sleep with who you wanted. But I kept asking the question, if morality is relative, why isn’t social justice as well? This seemed to be a blatant inconsistency in my professors and their followers. Yet, now I saw the stark contradiction in the traditional churches. How could I turn my back to the kind of orthodox Christianity that supported segregation in the South and South Africa? Christianity began to seem very unreal to me, though I was unable to discern a viable alternative way of life and thought.

To which Enos adds his own analysis of these words, of which I cannot improve on:

1.) The only fault Tim had with the Frankfurt School, per his own testimony, was its moral relativism. Take away the moral relativism of Cultural Marxism and Tim was good with the Frankfurt school.

2.) Tim says the Frankfurt school’s critique of American Bourgeois society was compelling. Please understand that the Frankfurt school’s critique of America first assumes a Marxist framework to make this analysis and second assumes that America had a bourgeois society to begin with. Already, with these words, Tim tells us that he is a Cultural Marxist.

3.) Tim assumes that social justice is what the Cultural Marxists defined it as. No Christian defines social justice in the framework of Cultural Marxists.

4.) Tim agreeingly speaks of the “oppression going on all over the world.” Now it is possible that there is “oppression going on all over the world” but if there is no Christian would conclude that on the basis of a Frankfurt school paradigm — and that is exactly what Tim is doing.

5.) It is interesting that the chief accusations first brought against each social order were first brought by Marxists. Until the Marxists started screaming about these social orders Christians understood that they were providing a social order that provided stability. Does anyone want to argue that South Africa is more whole now than it was before it got rid of Apartheid? Does anyone want to argue that the South is more whole with the elimination of segregation? Has the Communist social order that has replaced Apartheid an improvement? Is the black community in the South in America better off than it was before segregation was forever ended? Statistics regarding the dysfunction in the black community suggest the answer is “no.”

And if there was one thing Keller never was, it was Dr. No. Oh heavens, no! He never met a current iteration of the Hegelian dialectic he didn’t like, and he embraced them all with open arms and declared them Holy Writ. That’s just what Billy Graham used to do, and like that old heathen in death Keller has been embraced by the worldly-wise as the preeminent Christian stalwart of his time now that he’s dead and the Legacy Media™ doesn’t have to worry about him possibly reverting to opportunistic Paleocon precepts and humiliating their analytical acuity. Instead, we can remember him as a cringe merchant who once believed that introducing extremely effeminate male-only interpretive dance into his church was the most efficacious means of bringing forth the Gospel to a fallen world. Move over, Charlemagne! There’s a new Legacy King in town!

In closing, I would like to leave you with Philip Melanchthon’s words of eulogy at Martin Luther’s funeral:

Some have complained that Luther was too severe. I will not deny this. But I will answer in the language of Erasmus: Because the sickness was so great, God gave this age a rough doctor … If Luther was severe, it was because of his earnestness for the truth, not because he loved strife or harshness.

To which I will add: because the sickness was so greatly self-inflicted, God gave this age a smooth operator…if Keller was twee, it was because of his earnestness for the strife and harshness only the purveyors of this world can provide, not because he loved truth.