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<\/a><\/p>\nTim Keller, the former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who brought the Gospel to thousands of sophisticated New Yorkers and thoughtful readers, has died.<\/p>\n
The tributes keep pouring in.\u00a0 Here<\/a> is a good one from Marvin Olasky.\u00a0 I was most struck by my fellow Patheos blogger Daniel K. Williams, who recounted how Tim Keller kept him from losing his faith.<\/p>\n In his post The Secret of Tim Keller\u2019s Christian Apologetics<\/a>, he says,<\/p>\n I think that Keller\u2019s effectiveness as an apologist stemmed largely from his ability to combine four very different approaches to apologetics\u2014the classic evidentialist approach, the narrative apologetics of C. S. Lewis, the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til, and the psychological insights of Jonathan Edwards\u2014 and translate those approaches into an idiom that answered the questions of a 21st<\/sup>-century college-educated urban professional. Most Christian apologists have mastered only one of these approaches, but Keller was\u00a0 unique in synthesizing all of them in a way that seemed fresh and compelling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Williams cites Keller\u2019s bestselling book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism<\/em><\/a>, which, he says, is outstanding.\u00a0 And yet all of the good arguments left him strangely unmoved.\u00a0 What got through to him was another of Keller\u2019s books, \u00a0The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith<\/em><\/a>, which uses what Williams calls a psychological approach derived from the 17th century American Puritan Jonathan Edwards.<\/p>\n Here is how Williams describes what happened:<\/p>\n Keller\u2019s\u00a0The Prodigal God<\/em> showed me who I really was in a way that I had never seen before. At the time I read this book, I had spent my entire life as someone whom Keller described as the \u201celder brother\u201d of Jesus\u2019s parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. . . .<\/p>\n Elder brothers, Keller argued, are self-righteous, religiously observant people who find refuge in their own goodness but who don\u2019t really love the Father. They often \u201chave an undercurrent of anger toward life circumstances, hold grudges long and bitterly, look down at people of other races, religions and lifestyles, experience life as a joyless, crushing drudgery, have little intimacy and joy in their prayer lives, and have a deep insecurity that makes them overly sensitive to criticism and rejection yet fierce and merciless in condemning others\u201d (The Prodigal God<\/em>, 70-71).<\/p>\n What elder brothers need is the freedom that comes from loving the Father and feeling his acceptance. Their good works are really a way for them to distance themselves from God, because they think that if they\u2019re good, they won\u2019t really need God\u2019s salvation. They therefore need to repent of the motivations even for their good works, because in doing good, they weren\u2019t really loving God \u2013 in fact, they were doing the opposite. . . .<\/p>\n I recognized myself in that picture. . . .I had thought of sin merely as violations of God\u2019s commands \u2013 and by that standard, I thought (incorrectly, of course) that my need of a Savior was only moderate. . . .My whole life had been deeply sinful, because the good works and squeaky-clean moral living had been motivated by something very different from real love for God and desire for his glory and his grace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Then Williams \u201crealized my need for a Savior in a new way\u201d and\u00a0 \u2013 and \u201ccame to believe the gospel in a way that I never had before.\u201d\u00a0 Whereupon he saw Scripture\u2013even the \u201cproblem passages\u201d\u2013in a new way.\u00a0 He saw the historic and scientific objections that he had in a new light.\u00a0 Now Keller\u2019s evidentialist and narrative apologetics, especially regarding Christ\u2019s resurrection, became more convincing.\u00a0 But first he had to realize the extent of his sin and the extent of Christ\u2019s salvation.<\/p>\n Williams credits Jonathan Edward\u2019s Reformed theology, which Keller shared, for this.\u00a0 But, as a Lutheran, this sounds like nothing more than the distinction between Law and Gospel.\u00a0 The former is necessary to convict us of sin, to show even self-righteous \u201celder brothers\u201d that they are sinners, so that, broken, we can be open to the message of Christ\u2019s redemption and His forgiveness.<\/p>\n I know that the Reformed can preach this way too, as Keller did, recognizing that conversion is not just intellectual assent or \u201cmaking a decision,\u201d but rather the birth of faith that comes from hearing God\u2019s Word of both condemnation and grace.<\/p>\n What Williams describes is not just apologetics but evangelism.\u00a0 Interestingly, he says, after<\/em> the evangelism the apologetics made sense.\u00a0 Many of us do need to grasp the reasons for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15), so apologetics is important.\u00a0 But, since God is no mere abstract idea and since we are not disembodied intelligences but sinners in need of grace, apologetics needs to either begin or end in evangelism.<\/p>\n