Honoring Tim Keller
These are some reflections I shared through Preaching Today in honor of Tim Keller’s recent passing from pancreatic cancer:
Tim Keller's passing is a critical loss for us who remain as resident aliens stationed on this chaotic, rough-and-tumble topsoil called earth. God's already but not yet Kingdom has been advanced with the fusion of his writing skill, biblical orthodoxy, intellectual acumen, and pastoral call. His handling of the 2017 kerfuffle at Princeton Theological Seminary over being chosen to receive their Kuyper Prize, only for it to then not be awarded that year to anyone as a kind of peace offering, has stuck with me. By all accounts, he and then president M. Craig Barnes had fruitful, hospitable exchanges about the matter, even if in the end larger, louder currents of cancellation kept pushing their own agendas.
Keller represented Christ within his ecclesial tradition (Presbyterian Church of America) the best he could, confidently addressing idolatry’s various forms, the complexities of marriage, skepticism, and suffering. Though cancer, perhaps especially of the pancreas, has its markedly nasty ways of humbling the most stubborn of us, my sense was that Keller had long ago become a student of faithfully navigating the crucible of cross-shaped living. His ministry was mega and global presumably without it all having gone to his head, which is shout-worthy right there. The world surely does not need another ego-laden, immoral windbag pastor, whether they preach to ten people or tens of thousands.
H. Beecher Hicks, Jr., the once longtime pulpiteer of Washington, DC’s historic Metropolitan Baptist Church, reflected decades ago: “The preacher-pastor who is more concerned about what people think than how people live in response to the demands of the gospel is little more than a leaky vessel in search of a storm.” I thank God for Keller’s faithfulness, that we preachers and pastors will more thoroughly heed Paul’s instruction to pour out ourselves as a “living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” (Romans 12:1) Most of our names will not hit the big stages, command large paychecks, and whatever writings we produce will rarely, if ever, reach bestseller status, but we too can do our part, vocationally and personally, to seek God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.