Trusting God in the Face of Death

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Tim Keller

   There's nothing like the kind of prayer life you have when you have cancer or when your spouse has cancer. It's been enormously helpful. And I don't just mean prayer life, meaning we pray more. Of course we pray more, but communion with God, actual experience of God, and mortification of your idols, and really seeing things that you always relied on as sort of pseudo-gods and pseudo-salvations and pseudo-justifications. You always knew I had to do something about them, but in the face of death, you finally do something about them. So spiritually, Kathy and I, we have two basic prayers: Lord, please heal Tim of the cancer, and then don't let us ever go back to the way we were spiritually before the cancer. Don't let us lose any of the things that you've given us during this time.

2. 01:21

   Michael Horton

   Tim, it is such a pleasure to have you on today. It's been a while since our paths have crossed, and I know you've thought a lot about issues of suffering and pain. You wrote a book, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. But Martin Luther said being a theologian requires prayer, study, and suffering. What an odd thing to add—suffering, a requirement of really kind of understanding existentially what the promises of God mean. I'm sure our listeners would like to get an update on your health and how this experience of severe trial has challenged and deepened your confidence in his promises.

3. 02:05

   Tim Keller

   Well, Mike, just to reinforce what Luther said, I think if you wanted to make a biblical case for what Luther said, that you really do need suffering to be a theologian, you would do really well to study Psalm 119. Do you realize how often when you read through Psalm 119, it talks about the fact that I would have perished in my affliction, but I sought your precepts? In other words, and I came to delight in them. And there's a remarkable amount of coordination between my affliction and getting into your precepts, getting into your word, getting into your law, and seeing wondrous, wondrous things there. So I think Psalm 119 basically justifies what Luther said, that there does seem to be some kind of clear way in which affliction and suffering actually can deepen your theology. It's right there.

4. Tim Keller

   It's a long story. At the objective level, I have pancreatic cancer. I was diagnosed with it at stage four right away. When I first found out about it, I was already stage four, and that was in basically May of 2020. And some of your listeners know something about pancreatic cancer because you've lost so many people or friends, and all that is ordinarily you don't live more than a year after a diagnosis of stage four. But here I am, and it's partly because God was very good to give me a good response to first chemotherapy for two years, which is unusual. And now I'm in a trial for immunotherapy. Now, some of you all know immunotherapy is not chemotherapy; it's taking your own immune system and trying to help it fight the cancer. And I was, in God's providence, fortunate—I'm using the word fortunate theologically here—to have just had some friendship connections. And I qualified for a trial down in the National Institute of Health for an immune therapy that they had used on other kinds of cancer, but they've never used on pancreatic cancer, and they were looking for some pancreatic cancer people to use, and I qualified. And so I've been in that now for a few months, and initially it looks like it's having a good effect again. So from month to month, I continue to be here even past what ordinarily, objectively would be the time I should be here. So God keeps giving me some more time. Praise the Lord.

5. Tim Keller

   Spiritually, listen, spiritually, there's just nothing— Neither my wife or I ever, ever say, gee, why did God let this happen? Because even we could see 100 reasons. There's nothing like the kind of prayer life you have when you have cancer, when your spouse has cancer. It's been enormously helpful. And I don't just mean prayer life, meaning we pray more. Of course we pray more, but communion with God, actual experience of God, and mortification of your idols, and really seeing things that you always relied on as sort of pseudo-gods and pseudo-salvations and pseudo-justifications—you always knew I had to do something about them. But in the face of death, you finally do something about them. So spiritually, Kathy and I, we have two basic prayers. Lord, please heal Tim of the cancer. And then don't let us ever go back to the way we were spiritually before the cancer. Don't let us lose any of the things that you've given us during this time. That's the two prayers. So that's—

6. 06:09

   Tim Keller

   A kind of summary.

7. 06:10

   Michael Horton

   Yeah. How is it— I think we always think about the person who is directly going through the trial, but sometimes we forget about the spouse or the children, especially if they're adult children, the people who are going through it, too. What would you say to someone who is saying, "All right, my spouse is handling this well, but I'm not. I don't know why my husband or wife is being taken from our eight- and ten-year-old children right now. This doesn't make any sense to me"?

8. 06:48

   Tim Keller

   Well, listen, there's no doubt. I'm in my 70s, and of course Psalm 90—I actually think Psalm 90 takes away any kind of real warrant for complaint. It says if we live threescore and ten, or if by strength fourscore—it's almost like Psalm 90 says, if you get past 70, you really shouldn't be complaining. Plenty of people. So I'm not in the same situation. My children are adults. I'm not in the same boat. And Kathy and I both agree, even though neither of us want to be the first. I don't want to be the first to go because I don't want her to live without me. And she doesn't want to be the first to go. It's going to be far, far harder to be left behind than to go into glory, obviously, infinitely. Kathy says even if you get healed of the cancer, we're in our 70s. Something's going to come along. So we don't feel like at this point we have that problem of saying, Lord, why?

9. Tim Keller

   I suppose, Mike, because you and I are both authors, you could always say, why? Tim could write two more books. Why are you taking him? Well, you and I together—haven't we written 3,000 books? I'm not sure the world— The world doesn't need another one of us. But the point is that it's the younger people. I do have some, frankly, survivor's guilt. I've outlived a lot of people who were getting the same treatment with me, like 39-year-old mothers of four teenagers. And so why am I alive and she's not? Why?

10. Tim Keller

    And of course, I think what I try to say in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering is— I still think my favorite illustration is that when we moved from Philadelphia to New York, my older two kids were old enough to say, why in the world are you taking me away from all of my playmates, all the people that I know? And they were like eight and ten, and they were just very upset and angry at us. As far as they were concerned, we were turning their whole world upside down by moving. And all you can do is sit down and say, honey, I don't know what else to say, but you're eight years old. There's nothing I can say that will help you understand until later. Nothing. And yet, of course, obviously we weren't destroying their lives. They just felt we were. And there's a sense in which we're all like the ten- and eight-year-olds. We just feel like you must be destroying our lives. But there's absolutely no way that God could possibly get into our heads what all he's doing.

11. Tim Keller

    And Elisabeth Elliot—Kathy and I took a course with Elisabeth Elliot at Gordon-Conwell Seminary when we were there in the mid-'70s. And she had just lost her second husband to cancer, Dr. Addison Leitch. Have you ever heard of him? He was a

12. 10:18

    Michael Horton

    I've heard of him, but I never met him. I knew her, but I didn't—

13. 10:24

    Tim Keller

    Yeah. And she would teach about this. There's one place, I think it's in one of her books, she says, God is God, and he is infinitely greater and beyond my greatest idea of what he's up to. He's just too far beyond me. And she says, I can rest in that. That's hard for people. Very, very, very hard.

14. Tim Keller

    On the other hand, all right, here's my other best illustration besides the one of my eight- and ten-year-old. There were people standing around the foot of the cross, and they were looking up and seeing that God seemed to completely—in fact, no, not seemed to—God completely abandoned this man. Here's Jesus Christ. And he was— What B. B. Warfield said: he pretty much abolished sickness, because he was just healing people everywhere. And he was a great man, all that. And here you see God abandoning him. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And you got to think there were people that went home that night saying, I don't see how God could bring any good out of this. But we have a whole book that tells us how he brought good out of it. And what I always say to people is, we don't have your book. Someday you'll get the book, but we do not have the book. But there is a book. So those are the sorts of things I would say to folks like that, even though that's really hard. And I wouldn't say it unless I knew them pretty well and I spent a lot of time listening to them and cried with them. So—

15. 12:20

    Michael Horton

    I may not know why God has allowed this suffering to strike me or to strike my family, but I do actually know why the darkest moment that seemed the most tragic in human history was turned to light three days later.

16. 12:38

    Tim Keller

    Exactly.

17. 12:39

    Michael Horton

    Your latest book, Forgive—what I love about it is it is an imperative, teaching us how we forgive, not just that we should, but how to do it. But what I like is that so much of it, from what I've seen, is the indicative, as we call it: how we are forgiven, the forgiveness that we've received in Christ, but also then out of that to forgive. You think of "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." And I love the way the Heidelberg Catechism describes it as, forgive us, do not impute to us the guilt of our sins, and help us to show as gratitude for your grace toward us in Christ that forgiveness to others. Do you think our non-Christian neighbors right now associate forgiveness with the church? Is that the first thing, or is the symbol of the cross kind of used as a symbol for theology of glory these days?

18. 13:45

    Tim Keller

    Your question is leading the witness, but I completely agree with where you're leading me. No, no, no, our non-Christian neighbors do not associate the church with forgiveness. This is really terrible because, as you know, in the ancient pagan world, the early Christians were unique when it came to forgiveness. In the book, I did a little bit of tracing out about the fact that the Greeks and the Romans did not have forgiveness as one of the virtues. It wasn't there. And it was because they had no sense that a virtuous person would need forgiveness. And it's a completely biblical idea. Psalm 130: if you were to mark sins, who would stand? Psalm 143: no one is righteous before you. The idea that everybody fails to live up to God's standards and even their own standards, and therefore everybody lives only by divine forgiveness and therefore should be giving forgiveness to others—that was a completely unique new idea in history of the world. You don't get it from Confucianism or Buddhism. Well, you get an idea of compassion and forgiveness from Buddhism, but it's not based on the same thing. It's really the idea that you just are— it's a form of stoicism. So the idea that because we're forgiven, we need to forgive, it's a completely new idea. The early Christians were unique, and they were known at being forgiving. If you went and you burned down one of their houses, the Christians didn't come and burn down your house.

19. Tim Keller

    But that's not at all the image today. You know that. Christians are seen as not forgiving, but it's right now pretty harsh. And it's funny, Michael, you probably know that. And even in the public square amongst evangelical Christians right now, there's people saying we're too nice, we're too compassionate. We need to get tougher. We need to be not so kind and compassionate and forgiving and all that. We need to be tougher. So not only are we not known for forgiveness, but we got leaders out there saying we shouldn't be known for forgiveness. And boy, that's unbiblical.

20. 16:16

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. How do I forgive somebody I feel has irreparably harmed me or someone I love?

21. 16:22

    Tim Keller

    There's a theological and a practical. The theological is you have to say that I'm a forgiven sinner. I wronged God. I wronged my maker in very grievous and egregious ways. And yet he has forgiven me. I build the whole book around Matthew 18, the unforgiving servant, where the king actually says to the unforgiving servant, shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you? And so first of all, you've got to get to grips with the degree to which you wronged God, and he forgave you.

22. Tim Keller

    Then the second thing you have to do is—and here's the practical, David. I mean, Michael, this is what I always say. I say forgiveness is granted before it's felt. The way you grant forgiveness is to say, if I pursue justice—I can pursue justice, but I'm not going to pursue revenge. I am not going to try to make this person pay. I'm not going to do payback. I'm not going to try to do whatever I can to make this person be hurt as much as I was hurt. I could pursue justice. I could go to the law. I could do all sorts of things. I could confront the person, but I'm not going to do it out of a sense of vengeance, trying to pay back. So that's granting it. And the way you grant it is to say, I'm not going to throw this thing, this matter, up to the person. I'm not going to throw it up to other people and try to ruin their reputation. I'm not going to keep bringing it up to myself.

23. Tim Keller

    Let's get right down. You gave me an example of an egregious sin, but if I'm trying to forgive my wife for something she did, and she says, oh honey, I'm sorry, and I say, I forgive you, I can't bring it up again a month later and say, hey, remember when you did that? I don't bring it up to her. I don't bring it up to anybody else. Certainly I don't. And I also don't keep bringing it up to myself. And if you make that commitment—and by the way, this is an old Jay Adams idea. Do you remember Jay Adams?

24. 19:03

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, sure I do.

25. 19:05

    Tim Keller

    Okay. Jay Adams, I heard him say this once. He says, if you wait to feel forgiving, meaning get rid of all your anger before you grant it, you'll never grant it. So he says, grant it. And the way you grant it is say, I eschew vengeance, and I promise not to bring this thing up to the person, to others, and to myself. And he says, if you stick with that, it's going to be hard. But if you stick with that, after a while you'll start to feel it. And I've used this pastorally for years and years and years. What does it mean to grant it? No vengeance—doesn't mean I can't do justice—and do those three things. And I've seen it over and over work.

26. Tim Keller

    But it starts with the theological, the vertical. You've got to say, yeah, they have irreparably hurt me. If somebody hurts your reputation, it'll never come back. That's tough. And yet God says you have to have mercy on your fellow servant as I have mercy on you. And I do think—even though my first reason I tell people they have to forgive is theological, because God says so, because it's right, because of what he's done for you—there is a practical side too, and that is that if you don't forgive the person, the person continues to really control you. They affect you. In other words, I've seen people say to me, I'm never going to do that for my children because my father made me do that. So here's 30 years later and you're still being controlled by your father. You're not actually making a decision on the basis of what's best for your kids. You're making your decision on the basis of what your father did to you. And so there is, I guess, a practical side in which I say, if you don't forgive, that person's evil kind of wins. But that shouldn't be the first reason. The first reason you should forgive is because God says so.

27. 21:29

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. And the one who's forgiven much loves much.

28. 21:34

    Michael Horton

    So is it part of it? Just we forget so quickly and so easily how much we've been forgiven.

29. 21:42

    Michael Horton

    Well, Good Friday is good because of Easter, and your book Hope in Times of Fear focuses on Christ's resurrection. We have a lot of fears these days. As a parent, we all have lots of fears. Every time you turn on the TV, there's a lot of fear. It seems like we're all junkies on fear with our internet feeds and so forth. How does the resurrection readjust our horizon when it comes to fear?

30. 22:15

    Tim Keller

    Well, oh boy, readjust seems a little too weak a word. No offense. You're a great interlocutor here, but I would say it just transforms our understanding of the future. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example—just to show you how astounding— If the resurrection happened, everything's going to be fine, Michael. Everything's going to be fine. In fact, more than fine, because I was thinking about— Tolkien wrote a very famous, not really easy to read—it was, I guess, a lecture, or at least an essay—called "On Fairy-Stories." And in it, he says that deep down inside, all human beings find fairy tales, science fiction fascinating, because what they experience when they read fairy tales and science fiction, they see people escaping death, escaping time, good triumphing over evil, love that you never lose, and communicating with non-human beings like trees or animals or things like that. He makes a list of five or six things that you find in these stories. And he says there's a part of us that says, well, that's all fiction, that can't happen in real life. And yet there's a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down sense that human beings—it's indelible—that somehow this is how it ought to be. We should be able to escape time. We should be able to escape death. We should be able to have a love relationship that is never taken away from us. Death shouldn't take it away. We want all these things.

31. Tim Keller

    And then at the very end of it all, he says, if the story of Jesus is not one more fairy tale, but actually happened, then all these other things eventually will be true. You see, if you think about it, if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we will speak to non-human beings. We'll know angels. We will triumph over death. We will live forever. We will escape time. We will know a love without parting. We will see the final absolute triumph of good over evil. All those things that right now are fiction—we have to go into fantasy worlds to get those things. And you know what? If the resurrection is true, it's going to be part of our waking world. The myth became fact. And that's astounding. So it's not just that the resurrection— I often will say, if Jesus raised from the dead, everything's going to be fine. But that's a little too weak. We ought to say, oh my.

32. Tim Keller

    And by the way, one other thing recently—in fact, you would even know this person, but I'm not going to divulge the name—evangelizing a pretty prominent academic who was a secular person. And this person is an academic in the area of history. Got this person—I'm being careful here—a copy of N. T. Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God. Our mutual friend Tom Wright. This person said to me after reading it, how is it possible that I am a prominent person in the academy in history and I never even heard of this book? Because it was very compelling. And I said, it's not a level playing field out there. People don't want to know about those things. They just don't. People are not— I said, people are not just real. The resurrection is dangerous to a non-believer. It really is. They don't want to think too much about it because not only does it raise their hopes, but actually there's a lot of evidence for it. So anyway, the resurrection is an endless source of comfort for me, especially as a cancer patient.

33. 26:28

    Michael Horton

    Moves it out of the realm of fuzzy bears and whatever works for you. And speaking of the resurrection, he was crucified for our sins and raised for our justification. How has that doctrine—I know it's been so formative in your preaching and teaching ministry—how central is the doctrine of justification, do you think, now even more than ever in your own life and your ministry?

34. 26:55

    Tim Keller

    You've written the book—well, the two books on justification. You know what high regard I have for them. When I read them a couple of years ago, Michael, one of the reasons I was just so excited was I worry. I worry a lot about the doctrine of justification. And I felt like here we finally have a defense that I just think is kind of unassailable. And I do see people just chipping away at it. They chip away at it saying, well, justification by faith alone is too individualistic. We need to realize that salvation is corporate and it doesn't bring in the kingdom of God and the already but not yet. And I'm into all that stuff too.

35. Tim Keller

    What worries me is that whenever I see people moving towards saying, well, the kingdom, the gospel is about a new heavens and new earth, it's about salvation that's going to renew the creation. It's not just about you getting your little born-again certificate so you can go to heaven. See, that's Tom Wright's thing. Let's not be individualistic. Let's be holistic and corporate. But there's something about the human heart that always moves toward legalism and towards self-justification. And I see amongst really, really well-meaning evangelicals who are trying to move us away from that me-and-Jesus-going-to-heaven to a more holistic corporate understanding. And then it ends up being like, well, what is the gospel? Well, join God's kingdom program to renew the world. Well, then you know what? This is just more works righteousness.

36. 28:44

    Tim Keller

    And there is something about the heart that just goes to that so much that I feel like we just cannot stop beating the drum on justification by faith alone.

37. 28:57

    Michael Horton

    But not by faith, which is alone.

38. 29:00

    Tim Keller

    Yeah. The way I would put it, I say, what is the gospel? The gospel is you're saved by Christ's work, not your work. You're saved by faith alone, not a changed life. But that faith always changes the life. That's what I say. You say by faith alone, not a changed life, but that faith always changes the life. Saved by Christ's work, not your work. However else you want to talk about it. See, I actually don't for a moment even use the word justification just because I don't want people to say, oh, justification is not the gospel. Well, I don't know. I will agree technically that justification can't be the whole gospel. There's adoption, there's everything else. I get it. On the other hand, I think it needs a pride of place. I know I'm speaking to the choir—maybe, or maybe the only choirboy here. But it just feels to me like—

39. 30:06

    Michael Horton

    It's a small choir.

40. 30:07

    Tim Keller

    Yeah, I know. I just see in my own heart, even since I got my cancer, all sorts of self-justification, all sorts of ways that I was looking to other things besides Jesus to be my righteousness. Years ago I read some George Whitefield sermon where he said, we were born under a covenant of works, and the minute we even begin to get a little bit of conviction of sin, we fly back to the covenant of works and we try to patch up a righteousness of our own by living a good life and going to church and all that stuff. But these are just fig leaves. These are the fig leaves. This is not the righteousness of Christ. And I absolutely agree with that. So, yeah, I worry that justification doesn't have its pride of place. So I think we need to talk about the kingdom. You and I are Vos—Geerhardus Vos—people. And that's crucial to talk about that stuff.

41. 31:17

    Tim Keller

    But Vos never saw any kind of— You can tell he never saw any kind of tension between the doctrine of justification and redemptive history and that sort of thing. So anyway, sorry.

42. 31:31

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, no, that's great stuff.

43. 31:33

    Tim Keller

    Take over. I'm talking a little too much here.

44. 31:37

    Michael Horton

    No, you're not. And what an encouragement that is for a lot of people to hear.

45. 31:43

    Michael Horton

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46. 32:37

    Michael Horton

    Tim, you came out of the counterculture, '70s counterculture, at a time when a lot of young people, especially in the church, felt like the older generations were miles apart from where they were in their heads, and the older generations felt pretty much the same about the younger folks. Do you think we're in a similar place today, where the generation gap is kind of like a generation chasm, and older and younger generations don't overlap much anymore?

47. 33:10

    Tim Keller

    I think I agree with what you're suggesting. I don't know that I have a great answer to it, but I think I can confirm it. There was a big cultural difference between my parents' generation and my generation. Very, very big. The way they saw the Vietnam War, the way they saw the civil rights movement. My parents and my grandparents just saw the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. as a horrible thing. And everybody in my generation thought, hey, come on, what's wrong with it? There was a big gap. I did not see that same gap between me and my children. My three sons—two of them are Gen X and one of them is millennial. And I didn't sense a major difference between the boomers and Gen X and millennials, but I do see a very big new gap with Gen Z. I do. And I think you're right about that. I'm not sure what the way forward is. I do know that things like the Jesus Movement and even L'Abri was something that my parents just could not understand. They saw it as kind of liberal, kind of weird. So my guess is that whatever we come up with—or I shouldn't say we—whatever the younger generation of Christians come up with, it might again be a pretty big gap between the older and younger generation. It could be that Christians are going to have to find a new way forward and not just pick up programs and ways of doing things that we've done in the past.

48. 35:02

    Michael Horton

    And we shouldn't just assume that it's going to be a horrible failure.

49. 35:07

    Tim Keller

    No, no. I think either way—first of all, I don't think we should see them as failing if they don't just pick up our tools and ways of doing things. But on the other hand, I don't think we ought to say they're just lost, they're a lost cause. That's just— I'm sorry. Jesus said the gates of hell are not going to prevail against his church. So I don't see Jesus skipping a generation. He's just not going to do that.

50. 35:42

    Michael Horton

    Do you think that also, kind of similar to the '70s—we talk about a secular age, but that it's really spiritual, it's just anti-Christian right now, but spiritual but not religious, such a growing category. Do you think that's the kind of trend away from organized religion and Christianity in particular that we're seeing? Less than atheism, per se.

51. 36:07

    Tim Keller

    Yeah, yeah, certainly atheists don't seem like they're growing in number. Maybe I'm wrong. And as you may know, the vast majority of atheists are white males. I think it's like 78%. But I do follow Charles Taylor at this point. Taylor does say that there's a kind of spirituality that's just proliferating. And yet he calls it an immanent frame spirituality. There's no sense of divine authority coming into my life. Ordinarily, you become a Muslim or a Hindu or any major religion, you come in under authority, and there's some kind of transcendent source of that authority. Confucius talked about heaven, and we're not quite sure what that meant, but it did mean something like maybe what Plato meant, some kind of divine place. But immanent frame spiritualities means I feel spiritual and there's maybe more to it than just material world, but there's still no sense of transcendent authority coming in and telling me how to live my life. And so I do think there's some kind of— You can't just say it's all secular and nobody's spiritual anymore. That's just not true. But the spirituality has been immanentized or something like that. It's not the old kind of spirituality.

52. 37:33

    Michael Horton

    The kind of transcendence I feel at a Red Sox game?

53. 37:37

    Tim Keller

    I'm afraid so. And I don't think that's real transcendence. That's right. Or the transcendence you get through aesthetics. But it doesn't bring into your life any kind of authority that tells you how to live your life. You still stay in charge. So it's a kind of immanentized spirituality.

54. 37:59

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. For me, the evangelical movement associated with Billy Graham, John Stott, Francis Schaeffer, Carl Henry, that generation—I don't know where it went. I don't know about you. I'd love to get your take on this. When I hear the word evangelical today in the media, and often on the lips of people I know—neighbors, friends, what have you—it's pretty far from what I think it used to mean. Many of the institutions that formed the vast parachurch network are gone or going. I know we've always had, as Reformed Christians, a very complicated, touchy relationship with the evangelical movement. But I'd love to hear your take on where you think the evangelical movement is right now, and how that changes maybe the way we think about the identity of conservative Protestantism going forward.

55. 38:55

    Tim Keller

    Boy, well, you have just opened a massive subject. Well, first of all, I absolutely resonate with you. And I'm about 15 years older than you, Michael. And I believe I became a Christian kind of at the height of what I would call the Ockenga, Carl Henry, J. Howard Pew, Billy Graham revolt against fundamentalism. I talked to George Marsden about this at one point—and some of your listeners know George Marsden is maybe the preeminent historian of fundamentalism and evangelicalism—and George said that Carl Henry at one point told him that in the early '30s, everybody was a fundamentalist and nobody had a problem with that word. By the late '30s, Carl McIntire and— There was a movement going on that made a lot of people feel like our conservative Protestantism, having been kicked out of the major institutions by modernism, liberalism—J. Gresham Machen's great book on that—but conservatism actually was starting to get cultic, anti-intellectual, ingrown, and legalistic and militant in the worst way. Just combative and not really reaching out to do evangelism. So Carl Henry said by the late '30s they were looking for another word. Interestingly, by the way, Michael, you can find this in a footnote somewhere. Marsden said that Carl Henry didn't like the word evangelical. He thought it was too much of a throwback. But I guess Ockenga—he was starting the National Association of Something in 1942, and he needed a word. So he put it in there. And so— wow.

56. Tim Keller

    But I'd say for about 30 years, evangelicalism really was saying we're going to be absolutely orthodox. And as you know, almost all those folks—maybe not Billy Graham, but most of those folks—were Reformed. Carl Henry's a Baptist, but basically they were, roughly speaking, Reformed. And they also really were culturally engaged. They weren't really what you would call social liberals. But on the other hand, they said, we have to care about the society. And of course, Carl Henry wrote that great book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. And they put together a pipeline, and I was part of it. Young Life, InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, Navigators won a lot of young people to Christ and then pumped them into these seminaries which were being started by these folks, like Fuller—which was more orthodox in the earlier days—and Gordon-Conwell and Trinity. Kathy—my wife—was won to Christ through Young Life. I was won to Christ through InterVarsity in my college. We ended up at Gordon-Conwell together because actually everybody was going—all the Christian leaders would go to seminary. We weren't even sure if we were going to go into ministry. And we got Dr. Roger Nicole and Richard Lovelace and Meredith Kline. I took six classes with Meredith Kline. He was my— So anyway, it was a wonderful time.

57. Tim Keller

    Somewhere in the '80s— I would never have considered, for example—forgive me—most of the Southern Baptist Church, I would not have considered evangelical. I would have considered it fundamentalist. But then somewhere in the '80s—and maybe we have to blame David Bebbington for this—it's technically true that an evangelical is someone who believes in the infallibility of the Scripture, you have to be born again—the Bebbington Four—you're on mission, you have to be saved through the blood of Christ and faith in him and not good works. But fundamentalists believe that, too. But there was a massive, I think, theological, cultural difference between the legalism and the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Somehow that got— We stopped using the word fundamentalist. Everybody became an evangelical in the '80s and '90s through the media. And somewhere the distinction, which was crucial, I thought, in the '60s and '70s—there was liberalism, evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Three approaches to Protestantism. It was very clear. And then it just went away somewhere in the '80s. Do I blame the Moral Majority? Do I blame Jerry Falwell Sr.? Maybe. But suddenly it was liberalism and evangelicalism. And when that happened, a lot of us were all thrown in, including, by the way, the confessional churches. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod just laughs at people calling them evangelical. And yet technically they fit in the Bebbington Four. So I think something happened, and I can't quite put my finger on it, where that distinction, which was so important, I think, went away.

58. Tim Keller

    So I do think Reformed Christians might be able to help, because we've never gotten rid of the idea that we shouldn't be anti-intellectual. We've got a tradition unlike a lot of other— maybe even the Lutherans, frankly, I have to say. And I was raised Lutheran. Maybe you know that. Keller, good German. Even the Lutherans don't have anywhere near as good a theology of cultural engagement as the Reformed do. So maybe we could help reconstitute something. I don't know what we're going to call it—something that is not fundamentalism and it's not liberalism. And frankly, since you're 15 years younger than me, Michael, you would be one of the— I don't think you should be looking to people in their mid-70s. We can't look at Richard Mouw anymore. We can't go for us old people. We got to have some of you who are in your 60s and 50s and 40s say, here, let's go. We have to do something, I think, again, like what—imperfectly—what Ockenga and Carl Henry and Billy Graham tried to do. They tried to say the fundamentalism that we thought we were part of is really going in a very, we think, unbiblical direction. And we need to renew it and still stay true to the conservative doctrinal roots. So go to it, and send me your plan, and I'll pray for it. A one-pager would help me.

59. 45:40

    Michael Horton

    Okay. Do you think, though, that maybe in some sense it's actually a blessing in disguise that sort of the parachurch movement we were all relying on for identity has collapsed, and now you have a younger generation of pastors who aren't celebrities, who aren't well-known, who are just faithful at their tasks? And

60. 46:03

    Tim Keller

    I see what you're saying there. It's true that the problem with the parachurch— Folks like Darryl Hart, who we both know well—I'm not sure I agree with the level to which he would go, but he certainly was right about the weak underbelly of evangelicalism. It was its ecclesiology. That was the weak underbelly. And you are absolutely right in the fact that the parachurch era in which I became a Christian morphed into the megachurch, nondenominational church era. It morphed. And I tell this story. I'm in the PCA, and Michael, you probably know this, but maybe what I heard about it is— In our denomination, we care about what the Bible says about creation and evolution. I've taken the Meredith Kline framework hypothesis approach to Genesis. And there's other people in my denomination that don't like it. They would much rather do the 24-hour—they believe it's 24 hours a day. But we were able to live. We know the PCA says you can both be in the PCA. However, there are some people in one presbytery that felt like I'd gone too far, and that maybe I had gone into theistic evolution, didn't believe in Adam and Eve and all that sort of thing. So they wrote my presbytery, and my presbytery examined me and then wrote back to their presbytery, because there's accountability. Even in the PCA, there's some accountability. You couldn't do that to Mark Driscoll. In other words, if you felt there was something Mark was doing wrong, there's nobody to write. There's nobody to go to. And I don't know if you know Yuval Levin, who's become a friend.

61. 48:00

    Tim Keller

    Well, Yuval's point is that these churches, and even Congress, frankly—that all of our institutions in this country are becoming platforms rather than institutions. They're becoming platforms for celebrities. And so I do think what happened was the parachurch, which wasn't so bad—parachurch morphed into these huge nondenominational churches. And not even just huge—just nondenominational churches where there was really no— There are two things. There was no accountability to the past because they weren't confessional, so they were not linked to the past. And then secondly, there wasn't a connection any bigger than the congregation. So that just led to the ability for local pastors to abuse. And I think you're right. I think that was another part that happened in the, say, '70s, '80s, and '90s. We had this enormous increase in the nondenominational church. Most evangelical churches are nondenominational, I think. And that's another place where Reformed and Lutheran and Anglican churches might be able to show the way forward, I hope.

62. 49:10

    Michael Horton

    I'll finish up with one here, Tim. About a month or two before he died, Billy Graham—I had the opportunity to visit with him in his home, and I asked him—you know, this is not a good time probably to ask—but what, since you were so formative in the evangelical movement, what, as you look back, would you like to change? What would you say to younger generation that you're concerned about? And he said, "Hell." I said, "Why? Huh? Hell?" He said, "Yeah, you never hear about hell anymore in evangelicalism, and if you don't hear about hell, you don't hear about the cross. The cross will go away once you stop talking about hell." How do you talk about hell in New York City? And how do we talk about it without selling like hair-on-fire, crazy people running down the street?

63. 50:11

    Tim Keller

    No, that's quite— Well, you know what? He just showed the way. I totally agree with what Billy Graham said there. And actually, the answer to your question is embedded in what he said. You can just say that unless you understand hell, you don't understand how holy God is, because you don't understand that sin and evil cannot be tolerated. Now, interestingly enough, Michael, I have found that because our modern generation, our youngest generation, is very justice-oriented—they are really justice-oriented—I'm not sure the idea of hell as judgment of God on evil is going to be quite as offensive to them as it was to my generation of therapeutic baby boomers. So first of all, I would say that I'm not sure to bring out the idea of hell as a way for God to judge evil and injustice is going to be quite as offensive as it used to be.

64. Tim Keller

    But what Billy Graham hinted at is it also— Without the doctrine of hell, you really don't know how much God loves you. It's not just that about hell, you minimize his wrath against sin, but you also minimize— All we know is that on the cross, Jesus Christ took the curse, and he must have taken— He was clearly in agony. We all know that it wasn't just body. We also know that he experienced the curse, which was— What is the curse? It's to be cut off. And therefore there is a sense in which I can say that Jesus experienced hell. You have to be careful there. You've got all kinds of Trinitarian issues. He's still God. And we're not talking about one member of the Trinity being somehow losing the deity and that sort of thing. But you have to say Jesus Christ must have taken the penalty. And so I can go so far as to say, if you don't believe in hell, you really don't know how much Jesus loves you. You don't know how much he endured for you. So it's a bit of a mystery. I don't know exactly what he experienced up on the cross, but we do know it wasn't just physical pain and that he experienced the rejection. So I actually think that he's absolutely right. And I think it's a little daring to talk about hell, but I also think it's great.

65. Tim Keller

    Also, by the way, C. S. Lewis also gives you some tools, because I do think that it is fair to say that in some ways, like it says in 2 Thessalonians, you're cut off from him. In other words, basically the curse is that you're cut off from his presence. And since we're made for his presence, that means to be away from God's presence is to experience horrible— You lose peace, you lose joy, you lose all the things that make human life good. And yet we have chosen to be away from him. Lewis makes a big case that hell is something you've chosen. And I think that fits in fine. It does fit in fine with a Reformed understanding of free will and predestination. And I do think that idea that basically what God is giving you is what you chose, which is to be away from the one who you were created for. So I actually do think— I did preach on hell at Redeemer, and I got a lot of flak for it. But I actually think in the future you could do it as a way of preaching on love, a way of preaching on justice, and a way of preaching on God honoring your choice. I think it can be done.

66. 54:31

    Michael Horton

    When you preached it, were you surprised at perhaps some people who weren't even believers asking you questions and not taking maybe as much offense as perhaps even some Christians?

67. 54:44

    Tim Keller

    Yeah, I do. Right. No, they were usually pretty respectful. They were pretty respectful. Of course, being the thing that they have to say is that I'm still coming to grips with whether we live forever and there's an afterlife. A lot of times the non-Christians weren't sure there was a God or there was an afterlife. And yet what they actually felt like—there was something rightful about the way in which we talked about the afterlife, that it wasn't really just simply a matter of good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell, but that you get what you choose. And that the idea that you go on afterwards means that if you choose to be away from God, you're actually choosing hell. So anyway, I think there's really actually a lot of tools. And I agree with Billy Graham that we need— I don't think we're evangelical if we don't preach on hell. But by the way, that you also have to do it, as Francis Schaeffer said—when you talk about judgment and hell, it's got to be clear that you're not doing with any delight, that you're trembling before it yourself.

68. 56:07

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, tearing your eyes out.

69. 56:09

    Tim Keller

    Yeah, you're not out there saying, you nonbelievers, you're really going to get it if you don't turn to me. Schaeffer is right. That was one of the things that turned him away from fundamentalism—that almost a kind of relish when people were preaching about hell and judgment. And he knew that that's not right.

70. 56:32

    Michael Horton

    Tim, what final thought can you give us about your hope for the future? What do you see out there? We've talked about some challenges that we may have to deal with, but what is hopeful to you? Some changes that you've seen that are really inspiring and encouraging?

71. 56:53

    Tim Keller

    Well, you've alluded to some of them. My guess is that the youngest generation right now—there's plenty of Christians. I don't know yet the number of Christians overall. Number of professing Christians, probably the number of churchgoing Christians, number of evangelical Christians, I'm sure, is declining still. But we're still talking about millions of people out there. And I know from talking to young Christians that they're trying to find a way forward. And I think they will. They will find ways forward because Jesus says, I will build my church.

72. Tim Keller

    Secondly, though, Michael, because I'm involved with Redeemer City to City—what we did starting almost 30 years ago— Redeemer, when we started growing in Manhattan, we decided we were going to try to help national leaders in other parts of the world plant churches in their big cities, because we found lots and lots of people— You might find this interesting, Michael. In 1991, four different Dutch denominations approached us and said, we haven't been able to start a new church in Amsterdam in years. We don't need your money. We just don't know how to do it. They just die in there. And so we started helping people. So today we've helped over 1,000 churches get started in about 75 cities.

73. Tim Keller

    And recently I talked to 60 of our leaders, which means they're kind of our leading church planter supervisors in all different parts of the world—India, Africa, Middle East, Europe, Latin America. And I spent two hours a month with them, with 60 or so of them. And I came away— This is how I'd like to end this conversation here. I was shocked at how spiritually strong, how theologically sharp these folks were. And they were like third or fourth generation down. That's the thing that amazed me: I trained people who trained people, and these were people that were sort of trained by the people who I trained who were trained. So they were like three or four generations away from me. Most of them were in their late 30s, early 40s, and I'm in my 70s, and yet they got it. They were theologically sharp. They were contextual, but in good ways, meaning they really contextualize without compromise. And I came away saying the world church isn't in such bad shape. Maybe the American church is, and maybe they'll have to come here to help us. Maybe they will. And I think they've got the chops, and I think they've got the people. We can't be so American-centric that we say, oh, if the American church is not doing well, the whole world is going to hell. Nope. No. There's an awful lot of wonderful things happening in the rest of the world. The world church is actually strong and going and getting stronger. And so the fact that I do see the youngest generations here in this country—there's still millions of good, solid Christians who are trying to find a way forward—and the fact that the world church, God is still blessing, I don't think we have to worry that much.

74. 60:32

    Michael Horton

    Well, Tim, thanks for taking the time to do this, to have this conversation. And we actually do need more books from you. So keep writing, and we'll keep reading.

75. 60:44

    Tim Keller

    And from you, too. I couldn't be more grateful for your ministry, even though you're out on the West Coast and you probably don't root for the right teams. But in spite of that, honestly, I can't thank you enough. I'm so appreciative of what you're doing.

76. 61:04

    Michael Horton

    Thank you, Tim. Thanks so much.

77. 61:07

    Tim Keller

    Thank you.