The Atlantic just ran a puff piece on Tim Keller written by his “close friend.” Some odds and ends:
Keller is “America’s best pastor.”
On Keller’s wife Kathy: “it’s nearly impossible to overstate her significance to almost every important area in Keller’s life.”
Keller is “one of the most consequential figures in American Christianity.”
Keller had “about 5,000 people—mostly young, single, professionally and ethnically diverse.”
Keller’s “reach extends far beyond the Christian subculture.”
Keller’s City to City “has helped start more than 500 churches in many of the most influential cities in the world.”
Here’s Keller on being a good city preacher:
people look for expertise; they’re professionals, and they want to know you’ve got the goods; they want to know you’re really good at what you do. And if they hear you and they say, “Oh, that’s smart, that’s very interesting, that’s very skillful”…
Authors cited include Lewis, F. F. Bruce, Nietzsche, Hume, Plantinga, James Davison Hunter, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Kierkegaard, Hatch, Richard Niebuhr…
The sole quote Keller uses—and no, I’m not making this up—is this from The Abolition of Man:
We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Ummm. Errrr
Penultimate Keller quotes from the piece:
What we need is a non-oppressive moral absolute. We need moral absolutes that don’t turn the bearers of those moral absolutes into oppressors themselves.
Here’s the final sentence. It’s Keller’s witness to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords:
I actually think the Christian faith has got all the resources you need.
Keller has eviscerated Reformed preaching of any authority and for this has come to be considered the paragon of excellence in Reformed preaching.
