The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller
Shortly after I met my wife, Cindy, in 1989—she was living in New York City at the time, while I was living in Northern Virginia—she told me about a new church she was attending in Manhattan: Redeemer Presbyterian. The young minister, she told me, was “the best pastor in America.”
His name was Timothy J. Keller.
Since that time Keller, 69, has become one of the most consequential figures in American Christianity. When he founded Redeemer in the fall of 1989, fewer than 100 people attended; in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, Keller was preaching in multiple services in three different venues each Sunday to about 5,000 people—mostly young, single, professionally and ethnically diverse. He has written about two dozen books, several of them best sellers. And unlike that of many popular ministers, his reach extends far beyond the Christian subculture.
In 2017, Keller retired as senior pastor of Redeemer, but he hasn’t slowed down. He’s chairman of Redeemer City to City, which has helped start more than 500 churches in many of the most influential cities in the world; he’s a visiting lecturer in pastoral theology at Reformed Theological Seminary New York City; and he’s one of the most in-demand evangelical speakers in the Christian world.
I met Keller through Cindy, and over the decades we’ve developed a close friendship, including conversations, in person and via email, about family and mutual friends, theology and philosophy, faith and science, and politics and books—and in just about every instance, I’ve come away at least a little more enlightened than I was, including on matters on which we might not fully agree. So it seemed like a good time to interview Keller, first in an hour-and-a-half phone conversation and then over email, to ask him to reflect on his past, Christian theology, and the role of Christianity in contemporary American society.
No two journeys
