Thread by @LarryTaunton

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THE COMPLEX LEGACY OF TIM KELLER: 🧵

I’ve been processing the passing of two PCA pastors this week: Tim Keller and Harry Reeder III. They leave two very different legacies.

I have already expressed my shock and grief for the sudden loss of Harry. Keller’s passing, …

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…though expected, nonetheless leaves a permanent hole in a family. We grieve with them.

Harry was well-known to me if not to others. He did not have Keller’s national profile even though he pastored a PCA flagship. But the contrast between them is noteworthy.

Harry was…

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…a simple man. Not a simpleton, mind you, but a man who saw his duty in black and white terms. For Harry, the Gospel was utterly clear. From that flowed his worldview. There were no gray areas on male-female sexuality, sex, race, or man’s responsibility to God. And if…

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…you ever heard him preach or broke bread with him as I did many times, you might disagree with him, but you never came away wondering what he meant. Harry was not subtle.

This stands in sharp contrast to Tim Keller who, much more than Harry as you would expect, is being…

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…celebrated as one of the great men of the Faith. But of the two, Harry’s legacy is to be preferred.

It’s not my desire to trash Keller in a time of mourning. But I do think it is important that we properly evaluate legacies because they have powerful implications for how…

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…we utilize their teaching moving forward. And make no mistake about it, Keller’s teaching, both good and bad—and there were truckloads of both—will be used to justify a great many agendas for at least a generation, and probably more.

So, it is dangerous to lionize him, …

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…and, by inference, his teaching, without some serious reflection on that teaching.

I cut my theological teeth in the PCA. I was in my 20s when I first heard Keller quoted from pulpits with Papal authority. With pastors speaking of him with reverence, I did, too….

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…I quoted him in my own teaching: “As Tim Keller said…!” As a PCA elder and delegate to the General Assembly, I heard him speak many times as I made my way through college, grad school, and into my career.

By this time, busy as I was writing, teaching, and speaking, I… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

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…no longer focused on internal church issues. And that’s when I started hearing PCA pastors expressing concern about Keller’s theological reliability.

I dismissed it at first, but the quiet murmurs steadily grew to public denunciation. To fully understand this, it…

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…is important to understand Keller’s place in the PCA at this time. Keller wasn’t yet well-known beyond Calvinist circles. But he was already deemed an authority on everything.

Whenever he said something theologically suspect, he was always excused with a line that went…

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…something like this: “Well, Keller’s in New York City and has to be careful.”

I cannot tell you how many times I heard that. Almost word-for-word. It was odd. The PCA had a Keller Problem of their own making. On the one hand, his apparent success in NYC had put the…

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…relatively small PCA on the cultural radar. His teaching could be profoundly insightful. On the other, he was increasingly moving away from straightforward preaching of the Gospel to a godless “social justice.”

Having raised him up to rock star status and conditioned…

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…their congregations to view him with holy infallibility—which is itself entirely unbiblical—attempts to backtrack fell on deaf ears. Keller was now unassailable, his position being reinforced by his cancer diagnosis. He could say what he wanted and if you questioned him…

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…you were cruel or unchristian.

Say what you will of my assessment as many have already done in their letters or tweets:

“Tim is a better man than you’ll ever be!” and “He’s done more for the Kingdom than you!”

How one knows what treasure a man has in Heaven is beyond…

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…me. Even his staff & board told me off after the publication of my piece in The American Spectator.

Perhaps they’re right. By all accounts Tim was a fine man, father, & husband. I thank God for it. But my faith doesn’t rest on my goodness. And that’s beside the point….

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When Aristotle was asked about his own departure from the teachings of his old master Plato, his response was unequivocal:

“While Plato and truth are dear to me, it is right to prefer truth.”

Keller’s teaching was a mixed bag. His exposition on the Gospel of John, for…

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…example, was superb. I greatly benefited from it. Undermining his legacy, however, was his stiff-necked embrace of Marxism’s latest iteration, the so-called “social justice” movement—and that’s why the Left platformed him.

Why did he do it?

It seems clear enough…

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…that he sincerely believed in it. But sincerity is no substitute for Truth. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man but it only brings him death.”

In this case, the death wasn’t Keller’s. I am confident he is with the Lord. No, the death is that…

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…of naive people, pastors especially, who will adopt his teaching as holy writ.

Now, before the Kellerites tell me Tim denounced Marxism, let me say that I know that. But his understanding of Marxism was, at best, muddled. Tim denounced Marxism’s atrocities while never…

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…fully understanding that the social justice he advocated is the first step toward those atrocities. There are no benign forms of Marxism. It is all Satanic.

I’d love to be able to say this confusion was caused by chemotherapy, but he was moving in this direction long…

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…before any cancer diagnosis. Worse still, having raised Keller up to the status of oracle of wisdom, many assumed that whenever he said something that didn’t make biblical sense it must be deeply intellectual and beyond their understanding, so it went largely unquestioned.

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There are lessons to be learned here:

1. No one—NO ONE—is beyond questioning. If the Bereans could question the Apostle Paul, you can question your teachers.

2. Private sin is to remain private. False teaching, however, is another matter. Its capacity to lead others…

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…astray is due to the fact that it is, by definition, public. Hence the reason Paul publicly confronted Peter “to his face” in Galatians 2.

3. Stardom is dangerous, be it Christian or otherwise.

4. Neither our hope nor our authority rests upon anything other than Jesus…

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…Christ and his Word.

5. Wrong teachings sincerely taught are still wrong. As a historian and student of Marxist thought, I learned early on that a chief danger of Marxism was its ability to sock-puppet any other ideology or institution.

So convincing is it, that even…

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…the Tim Kellers of the world can be deceived by it.

I grieve that he never recognized nor repented of the error. I fear students of Keller will take his teaching much further than he ever did—or ever would.

THE END