提姆·凯勒（Tim Keller）是谁？他的一生、他的教会与他的批评者

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In June 1989 a Presbyterian pastor named Tim Keller moved his wife, Kathy, and their three young boys to Manhattan to start a church among people who mostly did not go to one, and he lived in New York for the rest of his life. That church was Redeemer Presbyterian. His book 《为何是神》, in 2008, carried him far beyond it, and by 2017 《今日基督教》 was calling him “the most popular Reformed preacher and author in America.” He was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1950, and he died of pancreatic cancer at home in New York on May 19, 2023, at 72.

“I was told by almost everyone it was a fool’s errand,” he said of going there. Manhattan was a land of skeptics, and the middle class was leaving it over crime and rising costs. Thirty-four years later, several weeks before he died, he recorded a video for the leaders of his church, and the first thing he had to tell them came out of the letter Jeremiah sent to the exiles in Babylon: “And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace” (Jeremiah 29:7). Those people had been carried off to a city they never asked to live in, and God told them to pray for it.

He grew up in Allentown in the 1950s, in a Lutheran church where the idea he picked up about being a Christian was to be a good person and go to church. At thirteen and fourteen he went through two years of confirmation class. One year a young minister talked about the civil rights movement and never about doctrine, and the next a retired minister told him, for the first time in his life, that salvation is a free gift received by faith, and he forgot it, because nothing else he heard in that church sounded anything like it. A couple of years before college his parents moved to a very conservative evangelical congregation, where he gave his life to Christ several times over at youth meetings and came away, as he said later, feeling spiritually superior to other people.

At Bucknell University he majored in religion and took courses in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism, looking for a God of love who would not judge anyone, while a Christian student on his dormitory floor kept nagging him to come to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He went, and for a while he acted like a Christian there because he so badly wanted friends. What reached him in the end was C. S. Lewis on pride, which showed him that under all his religion he was hostile to God and needed to be saved by grace alone. He could only ever say that it happened somewhere in his sophomore year, but his friend Bruce Henderson remembered the morning. On Bruce’s twentieth birthday, April 21, 1970, he woke up to find Tim sitting silently on the floor at the foot of his bed, and he could see that something had changed. Keller wrote later that until then he had been the one going over the Bible and questioning it, and that from then on the Bible, or God through it, “began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me.” Bruce put it more simply. Tim was a lot kinder now, and you could reach him.

He met Kathy Kristy of Pittsburgh at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and they were married in January 1975. That same year he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, which had only 300 congregations then, and he became pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia, just south of Richmond, where he stayed for nine years and where David, Michael and Jonathan were all born.

When he talked about those years he told the story against himself: his sermons ran too long, he started programs nobody wanted, he was sometimes too direct with people and sometimes not direct enough, and that congregation loved him through all of it and never attacked him. They were blue-collar people and they taught him to be clear and practical in the pulpit, and one of the biggest compliments he ever got, he said, came from someone who thanked him that he wasn’t intellectual and so could be understood. He found that in a small town people will follow a pastor they trust, and that they come to trust one who has loved them and who repents when he is wrong.

In 1984 he moved to Philadelphia to teach practical theology at Westminster Seminary and to direct his denomination’s mercy ministry, and there he came to know African American, Hispanic and Asian pastors with thriving churches in the inner cities. Years later an interviewer asked him which pastors had been preaching love for the city back then, and he began with them, because those churches, he said, had never left it. His denomination asked him to look into starting a church in New York, and he tried to recruit someone else to do it.

Early in 1989 fifteen people began meeting every week in an apartment on the Upper East Side to pray for a new church in the heart of Manhattan, one where new believers could feel safe bringing their skeptical friends. Keller started commuting to New York to meet with them, around his teaching, and before long the work he had been trying to hand to someone else felt like his own call. Kathy was against it at first for the children’s sake, and a number of people told them they were sinning against their boys by taking them to the city, though she was less afraid than he was that the church would fail. The first evening service met on April 9, 1989, in a Seventh-day Adventist church, and in June the family moved.

They never handed out a flyer or advertised in any way, and in those first years the only way you heard of Redeemer was that a friend brought you. People were coming to faith so often that nobody could keep count, and Keller, who was careful with the word, called those years from 1989 to 1991 a revival, with perhaps a couple of hundred people brought to Christ. Kathy had her own way of putting it. If you want to know how to plant a successful church, she said, “Find out where God is beginning a revival, and move there the month before.” This is how the church grew from that apartment:

何时	How many came	备注
Early 1989	15, to pray	An apartment on the Upper East Side
Christmas 1989	About 250	Church of the Advent Hope
March 1993	Four services in a room of nearly 400	Out of space, so the church moved to Hunter College Auditorium
1996	约 3,000 人	Three services at Hunter College, with West Side services to follow
September 2001	About 3,000, then 5,200	The week after the attacks, by Keller’s own count
Fall 2004	About 4,200	Four services
2007	About 4,800	Five services
2016	Over 5,300	Eight services in three congregations

On the Sunday after September 11, 2001, he had a sermon ready on Jonah, the prophet who ran from the great city God sent him to, and he laid it aside. He preached instead on the raising of Lazarus, where Jesus weeps for his friend, to a room full of new faces, many of them people who did not ordinarily go to church at all. Churches all over the city were packed for a couple of weeks and then went back to what they had been. Redeemer went from 3,000 to 5,200 that week and never again fell below 3,600, and still Keller would not call it a revival, because he had seen one.

The people who called it a fool’s errand had the numbers on their side in 1989, when by his own count fewer than one in a hundred of those living in center-city Manhattan went to an evangelical church. By 2019 it was eight in a hundred, and the evangelical churches there had gone from about 100 to 308. Redeemer did not plant them all, he was careful to say, though he thought it had contributed more than anyone, and its work of starting churches grew into Redeemer City to City, which his family says has helped start more than 1,000 churches in over 150 cities. In May 2017 the one large church became three, each with its own senior pastor, and on July 1 he stepped down to work with City to City full time.

All those years the sermons had been traveling without him, because a member of the first congregation had begun recording them and handing out cassettes to anyone who wanted one, and by the late 1990s thousands of tapes a year were going out by mail to people all over the world. In 2016 that work took the name Gospel in Life, and the sermons he preached at Redeemer from 1989 to 2017 are free there now, and on a podcast downloaded about two million times a month.

In 2007 The Gospel Coalition, which he cofounded, held its first public event, with a vision for ministry that he had drafted. Even so, he was known mostly to people who had heard him preach. Then in 2008 came 《为何是神》, in which he took the doubts that skeptics most often brought to his church, why God allows suffering and why he would send anyone to hell among them, and answered them. It reached No. 7 on the 《纽约时报》 best-seller list, and visitors from out of town began coming up after services to ask him to sign a book or pose for a picture. He and Kathy, both quiet people, found that uncomfortable, and he said it was just as well it had not happened until he was almost sixty. Anyone who tried calling him Dr. Keller was waved off and asked to call him Tim. His family counts 31 books in all, with more than six million copies sold in 29 languages, and our guide to Tim Keller’s books says where to begin with them and what each one covers.

He was Reformed, which puts him in the Calvinist family of churches, and he was an evangelical, and his own denomination was the Presbyterian Church in America, the conservative body that, unlike the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), does not ordain women. The two Presbyterian churches differ on more than that. He could say the heart of what he preached in a breath, with a nod to his late friend Jack Miller: we are worse than we have ever dared to admit, and more loved in Jesus than we have ever dared to hope. He watched what that did to people in Manhattan who had spent their lives being told by parents, teachers, coaches and bosses to try harder, and who took God for the hardest boss of all. To hear that God had met his own demands himself, through the life and death of Jesus, set them free.

Redeemer, he said, was a conservative evangelical church in secular, liberal Manhattan. Every week he was telling people that Jesus is the only way of salvation, that the Bible is true and must be obeyed whether it suits us or not, that sex is for a man and a woman in marriage, and that those who prosper should live modestly and be radically generous. In his lectures at Princeton in 2017 he proposed a third way between the mainline churches’ concern for social problems and the evangelicals’ concern for spiritual ones, teaching that a person made right with God must go on to care about justice.

In 2013 some of his own Reformed family questioned him in print. They were mostly British Presbyterians, all holding to the Westminster Confession, and their book, Engaging with Keller, was appreciative in tone. Some of his teachings, the editors wrote, seem to be “better at being relevant than they are at conveying the fullness of Biblical truth.” They thought he had made sin too much a matter of misplaced love and too little a breaking of God’s law, and that his account of hell owed too much to C. S. Lewis.

Four years later the objection came from the other side. Princeton Theological Seminary, a school of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), announced that it would give him its Kuyper Prize, and alumni protested that his denomination does not ordain women or LGBTQ people. On March 22, 2017, the seminary’s president, Craig Barnes, withdrew the prize and kept the invitation to lecture, and Princeton would hear him, Barnes wrote, “even if we strongly disagree with his theology on ordination to ministry.” So Keller came, and on April 6 he spoke to more than 600 people about Lesslie Newbigin and the mission of the church, and before he spoke a group of students held a preach-in in the chapel featuring the voices of women and LGBTQ people.

Then in 2022 James Wood, who had named his family’s dog Keller and who still admired him, wrote in 《第一事物》（First Things） that the pastor’s gentle, winsome approach had suited a time when the culture was neutral toward the faith, and that in a time of open hostility it left believers too slow to take a side. “Keller was the right man for a moment,” he wrote, and he thought the moment had passed. We would point to what Keller wrote in the 2020 election season as the sort of thing Wood meant: the Bible, he said, binds his conscience to care for the poor without telling him whether high taxes or private charity is the best way to do it, and he rejected the idea that American Christians had to vote for one party or the other. After he died his friend Russell Moore said that kindness to unbelievers had never been a strategy for him, only what it means to follow Christ. He hated a fight, too. His biographer, Collin Hansen, cannot recall one critical comment from him about a fellow believer, and says anyone who worked with him could attest to his “extreme aversion to conflict,” which is not far from what Wood had been saying.

In May 2020, a little more than a month after he published a small book called 论死亡, drawn from a lifetime at bedsides, he was told he had pancreatic cancer. “I was still caught unprepared,” he wrote in the Atlantic. He went through chemotherapy and a trial of an immunotherapy drug at the National Institutes of Health, and he went on writing. He was working on a book about the resurrection when he found out something about himself, and he told an interviewer what it was: “I also only half-believed in the resurrection,” not so much in his mind as deep down in his heart. It took him several months of prayer and Bible reading to get what he believed down that far, and he said it worked. He had been sitting at bedsides for forty-five years by then.

In March 2023 he announced that new tumors had appeared, and on May 18 he came home from the hospital into hospice care. His son Michael wrote out a prayer his father had prayed that week. It gave thanks for everyone who had prayed for him, for a family that loved him and for the time God had given him, and it ended, “Send me home.” He died the next morning. He waited until he was alone with Kathy, Michael wrote. She kissed him on the forehead, and he breathed his last. The family took comfort in some of his last words: “There is no downside for me leaving, not in the slightest.” Paul had written much the same to the Philippians from his chains: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Someone asked him in December 2021 whether there was anything in his ministry he wished he had done differently, and he said, “I should have prayed more.” When people asked how he wanted to be remembered he turned the question aside, and said now and then that he hoped his grandchildren would remember him. The last advice he gave his church’s leaders in that final video was to forget about their reputations, and he read them Jeremiah’s word to his scribe, “seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not” (Jeremiah 45:5). He had given thirty-four years to seeking the peace of one city, and at the end he asked to be sent home. “For here have we no continuing city,” the letter to the Hebrews says, “but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14).

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