The Rev. Timothy J. Keller, a best-selling creator and theorist of Christianity who carried out a contemporary miracle of his personal — organising a theologically orthodox church in Manhattan that attracted 1000’s of younger skilled fans — died on Friday at his house in Manhattan. He was once 72.
His loss of life was once introduced by way of Redeemer City to City, a company affiliated with Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Mr. Keller announced on Twitter in December 2021 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic most cancers.
Mr. Keller, whose most effective earlier enjoy within the pulpit were at a blue-collar congregation in a rural Virginia parish, moved together with his spouse and 3 sons to New York in 1987 and, with neither hearth nor brimstone, launched into what New York mag hyperbolized as “close to a theological suicide mission — to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom.”
Colleagues, Mr. Keller recalled in his best-selling guide “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” (2008), “were incredulous when I explained that the beliefs of the new church would be the orthodox, historic tenets of Christianity — the infallibility of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the necessity of spiritual regeneration (the new birth)— all doctrines considered hopelessly dated by the majority of New Yorkers. Nobody ever said ‘fuggedaboutit’ out loud, but it always hung in the air.
“Nevertheless,” he endured, “we launched Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and by the end of 2007 it had grown to more than 5,000 attendees and had spawned more than a dozen daughter congregations in the immediate metropolitan area.”
Today the church has a number of places in Manhattan, even though the principle one is on West 83rd Street close to Amsterdam Avenue; the others are at the Lower West Side, at the West Side at Lincoln Square, at the Upper East Side and in East Harlem.
In addition to those that heard him pontificate in particular person at any a type of church buildings, 1000’s downloaded Mr. Keller’s weekly sermons from the Redeemer website. His dozens of books had been translated into 25 languages and bought an estimated 25 million copies.
“Fifty years from now,” the magazine Christianity Today wrote in 2006, “if evangelical Christians are widely known for their love of cities, their commitment to mercy and justice, and their love of their neighbors, Tim Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians.”
Evangelicals belong to any choice of denominations however proportion a theology of salvation via religion in Christ on my own. Mr. Keller’s ministry was once in contrast to that of many better-known figures in evangelicalism: He lacked a normal tv platform and have shyed away from being known with a unmarried political view.
Instead, he turning in pointed, professorial messages — in particular person, on podcasts, on blogs and in print — in conversational tones that invoked C.S. Lewis, the philosophers Michael Foucault and Thomas Kuhn, the 18th-century Japanese poet Issa, or even Woody Allen.
He thought to be homosexuality to be inconsistent with scripture and premarital intercourse and abortion to be sins. “I am not going to pressure you to stop having sex out of marriage,” he advised The New York Times in 1998. “The logic of your relationship with Christ should move you to do it.”
In an interview with The Atlantic in 2019, he mentioned: “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.”
In 2017, Mr. Keller gave up his function as senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church and shifted to mentoring pastors to preside in church buildings seeded all over the world by way of the offshoot group Redeemer City to City, which influences city ministries globally.
Redeemer Presbyterian Church additionally based Hope for New York, a company that deploys volunteers and distributes grants to ministries offering social services and products, and the Center for Faith and Work, which integrates Christian theology with skilled enjoy.
Mr. Keller dissented from the in style give a boost to that in large part white evangelical Americans have proven for former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies. “For Christians just to completely hook up with one party or another is really idolatry,” he advised The Atlantic.
And he regularly drew — and attempted to bridge — a difference between that politically conservative American evangelicalism and the evangelical motion international.
“There exists a far larger evangelicalism, both here and around the world, which is not politically aligned,” Mr. Keller wrote in The New Yorker in 2017, describing it as a rising multiethnic motion rooted in theological ideals which might be conservative on problems like intercourse outdoor marriage and liberal on problems like racial justice and fear for the deficient.
His loss of life elicited a observation from former President George W. Bush, a fellow evangelical Christian, who mentioned: “I’m fortunate to have gotten to know him. And I’m one of many who is blessed to have learned from Mr. Keller’s teachings and benefited from his compassion.”
Timothy James Keller was once born on Sept. 23, 1950, in Allentown, Pa. His father, William was once a tv promoting supervisor. His mom, Louise (Clemente) Keller, was once a nurse. They met all through World War II, when William Keller was once a conscientious objector assigned to handle sufferers in a psychological ward.
Tim was once raised Lutheran and embraced the church throughout the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a ministry lively on school campuses, whilst he was once attending Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, the place he majored in faith.
He outlined a totally shaped Christian as “somebody who finds Christianity both rationally and intellectually credible, but also emotionally and existentially true and satisfying.”
After he graduated with a bachelor’s stage in 1972, he won a grasp’s of divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in (*72*) in 1975 and a health care provider of ministry stage from Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1981. It was once at Westminster that he met Kathy Louise Kristy, who made up our minds in opposition to turning into a pastor as a result of feminine ministers weren’t biblical. They married in 1975.
She survives him, at the side of 3 sons, David, Michael and Jonathan; a sister, Sharon Johnson; and 7 grandchildren. Michael Keller is a pastor at Redeemer Lincoln Square.
Mr. Keller served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Boston and was once ordained there earlier than serving as pastor for 9 years in Hopewell, Va., whilst overseeing the improvement of latest congregations within the Mid-Atlantic area for the Presbyterian Church.
When New York gave the impression so daunting that Mr. Keller’s first two alternatives for pastor there grew to become him down, he felt pressured to just accept the problem himself.
“I just felt it would be cowardly of me not to,” he advised New York mag. “But we had a kind of ‘sick in the pit of our stomach’ feeling every day.”
“Big bad Whore of Babylon is where we were going,” Mrs. Keller advised the mag.
The circle of relatives moved to an rental on Roosevelt Island.
His luck as founding pastor of Redeemer in 1989 and his enjoy with a bout of thyroid most cancers in 2002 helped do away with no matter doubts he had about God, he advised the site First Things in 2008.
He reaffirmed that religion in his 2021 Twitter post pronouncing his most cancers analysis, writing: “It is endlessly comforting to have a God who is both infinitely more wise and more loving than I am. He has plenty of good reasons for everything he does and allows that I cannot know, and therein is my hope and strength.”
Mr. Keller encapsulated Redeemer’s venture in a single biblical passage, Proverbs, Chapter II, Verse 10: “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.”
He advised The Times, “I wanted to prove that the Gospel could change people even in New York.”
Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting.
