I was first exposed to the ministry of Dr. Timothy Keller in college while pursuing a degree in philosophy and reading through the western canon of Great Books. Immersed in the intersection of Christian discipleship and the life of the mind, I found in Keller a comforting voice that resonated with many of the questions I was asking.
Keller had a gift for making complex things simple for ordinary people to understand. This made him a great teacher. It did not matter whether he was distilling the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards or the secularization analysis of Charles Taylor. He communicated these ideas with fairness and clarity, all in a conversational, winsome tone.
This, of course, was all part of his strategy. Keller spent the bulk of his life ministering in New York City, arguably the hub of secularism in the United States. He knew he was dealing with an educated, achievement-oriented audience that was, at the same time, critical toward Christianity. To minister to them effectively, he would need to disrupt their assumptions about faith in the modern world. This meant not only knowing Scripture, but knowing New Yorkers. He would need to live where they live, see what they see, and hear what they hear. Then he would need to translate the message of the gospel accordingly, a process called “contextualization,” for which Keller would become a master in a class of his own.
As a classical educator, I cannot help but see parallels to my own work. I am trying to pass on the hallmark contributions of a tradition to the next generation. This includes intellectual skills, such as the liberal arts, yes, but even deeper, the affections of the heart and longings of the soul. I am trying to form students to be wise, virtuous, and eloquent followers of Christ. To do such work requires an element of disruption–disruption against modern assumptions about education, secular assumptions about knowledge, and cultural assumptions about identity. To share this vision requires seeking to understand parents and students in my community and translating the value of a classical liberal arts education for those who have ears to hear.
In this article, I will highlight parallels between the late Dr. Timothy Keller’s ministry and the values of classical education. Having recently finished reading Collin Hansen’s newly published Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Zondervan, 2023), I have observed aspects of Keller’s approach that are deeply relevant for classical educators today. While I have no knowledge that Keller himself was a proponent of classical education, I can imagine he would appreciate the values we share.
A Love for Reading
I begin with the fact that Tim Keller was a bibliophile. He simply loved to read. By the age of three, Keller was reading on his own. Growing up, he delighted in reading entry after entry in the encyclopedia, enjoying history and non-fiction as well. His family had a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s works that he would read along with seminal works from the Bronte sisters.
Keller studied religion at Bucknell, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and began doing parachurch ministry with InterVarsity. Here he developed a heart for evangelism and helping non-believers see the truth and veracity of the Christian faith. During this time, Keller experienced the teaching of a professor who would become a lifelong mentor to him: Ed Clowney, the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary.
As part of an InterVarsity outreach, Clowney once gave a series of evangelistic talks, interacting with the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (Hansen 23). In this way, Clowney illustrated what Tim Keller would later add to his own skillset: interacting with the leading intellectual ideas of the day through a biblical, gospel-shaped lens. Around this same time, InterVarsity Press published Colin Brown’s Philosophy and the Christian Faith, along with similiar types of books, covering the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Barth, and Francis Schaeffer. As Hansen puts it, “For a precocious student such as Keller, the high-level philosophical engagement of these InterVarsity authors showed him you could be intellectually serious and also a Christian” (25).
This first parallel I observe between Keller and classical education is about a love for the written word, supplied through both Christian and secular authors. All truth is God’s truth, and humanity across cultures receives a common grace from the Lord to discover this truth and inscribe it into books. Keller’s love for reading books, along with newspaper articles, journals, magazines, plays, and short stories, enabled him to speak so knowledgeably and connect so naturally with a wide audience.
The Power of Imagination
It is hard to write an article on Tim Keller without mentioning the Inklings, a group of Oxford literary enthusiasts who would meet to discuss and share their work with one another. Keller read the Inklings, especially C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, along with their forerunners G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald.
Through the works of the Inklings, especially The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Keller encountered the power of story and imagination for shaping one’s faith. Lewis famously described the Christian story as the “true myth” in that it is the underlying story behind all stories and myths. The only difference is that it is actually true. The biblical storyline of creation-fall-redemption-restoration is present across cultural literary traditions, and the fulfillment of these stories is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this way, all stories worth their salt borrow in some way from the story.
Similarly, Tolkien’s idea of a “eucatastrophe” points to the gospel notion of an unexpected turn of events for the better. This, of course, is what makes fairy tales so great. Just when things look like they can only get darker, the hero comes in to save the day. Just when it appears all is lost, the beast is transformed, the ugly duckling becomes a swan, and the princess awakes. In the gospel, this is precisely what happens through the person and work of Christ. Hansen writes, “Lewis gave Keller a model for wide reading and clear thinking. Lewis challenged Keller to deploy vivid illustrations for public apologetics in defense of Christian claims to truth and beauty…Tolkien gave him ways to talk about work, to talk about hope, to talk about the stories we all hope will come true someday” (53).
I have yet very few classical educators who have not read (and loved) the Inklings. My explanation for this is that classicists love stories. Stories touch our hearts and seize our imaginations in a way that didactic instruction simply fails to do. They embody perennial ideas and unchanging values in characters and plots that we cannot forget. Stories point us to truths about reality that are more certain than empirical facts and more tested than results from the lab.
As Keller found ministering to New Yorkers who needed to be re-enchanted with the gospel, telling stories and using vivid illustrations utilize the imagination to grasp the greatest story of them all. He himself said, “The gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take their cues” (57). This is the power of Christian imagination.
Learning in Community
Through the Inklings, Keller came to appreciate the role of imagination for the Christian. But going back to his days of evangelism and apologetics in college, leading people to faith in Christ, especially through overcoming doubt, was a lifelong passion. To support this process, Keller discovered the importance of learning in community, a third parallel I see with classical educators.
While Tim never visited L’Abri, the famous retreat center for intellectual pilgrims nestled in the Swiss Alps, he did spend time with R.C. Sproul at the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania. The vision for Sproul’s center, modeled after Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri, was to provide an affordable and hospitable space for college students to think, pray, study, and work with their hands. The goals was the cultivated integration of faith and reason. Emerging during the 1960’s and 70’s, these centers were safe havens for counter-culture seekers and doubters. Students could come to study under the guidance of Christian pastors and professors, and encounter a case for faith that resonated with them through an appeal to modern art, literature, and philosophy.
The idea of seeking wisdom in the context of doing life together resonates for many classical educators. While classical schools range in size, make-up, and resources, there is an underlying value for pursuing deep relationships. There is this sense, when teaching in a classical classroom, that we are pursuing truth together. Yes, the teacher may come to the table with some expertise to share, but really, teacher and student mutually submit themselves to the authority and transcendence of objective truth, goodness, and beauty. In this communal pursuit, fellow pilgrims on the journey learn as much about one another as they do about what they are studying. When done properly, the tension of faith and doubt is honored, not eliminated, and tough questions about life, faith, suffering, and purpose come to the surface. Hansen writes, “Tim sought to replicate this kind of community inside the church–hospitable and evangelistic, intellectual and earthy (64).
Faith in a Secular Age
A final parallel between Tim Keller and classical educators is the desire to be orthodox yet modern. Both Keller and classicists embrace the resources of church history as assets, not impediments, for leading lives of faith in the 21st century. This includes particular creeds, doctrines, and traditions. At the same time, both Keller and classicists seek to be modern, believing whole-heartedly that God is at work in the church and culture today. The calling of a Christian is neither to flee from culture nor to succumb to it, but rather, to care for it.
The phrase “orthodox yet modern” itself comes from Herman Bavinck, a Dutch neo-Calvinist who greatly influenced Keller. As a Presbyterian and reformed theologian, Keller subscribed to the reformed tradition of theology, reading the likes of John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and Abraham Kuyper. Central to the neo-Calvinist view is the idea that faith extends across culture. As Hansen puts it, “Believers cannot withdraw from the modern world but must engage every aspect, from art to business to politics to family to education, with a distinct worldview built on a historic Christian faith” (66).
Abraham Kuyper, the pioneer of neo-Calvinism, famously declared, “No single piece of our mental world is to be sealed off from the rest and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” In this quotation, we see parallels to our own classical, Christian approach to the liberal arts. If Christ is indeed sovereign over all creation, then he is sovereign over all disciplines. Whether one is studying the humane or natural sciences, knowledge discovered by way of grace common to the believer and unbeliever alike, is ultimately knowledge whose source is Christ.
This idea of common grace, paradigmatically observed in Romans 1, means that all people possess some seed of knowledge of God in their hearts. Those that deny the existence of God simply suppress this knowledge. Thus, the job of the apologist is not to offer proofs for the existence of God, but rather to demonstrate how Christianity explains what unbelievers “know with their hearts but deny with their lips” (91). This occurs through identifying inconsistencies in the worldview of an unbeliever, an approach called presuppositional apologetics.
How the Trivium Can Help
For classical educators, we are preparing students through the Trivium to study the truth (grammar), reason about the truth (dialectic), and speak the truth (rhetoric). But in a secular society that no longer takes its cues from the Enlightenment, appeals to objective truth are no longer effective. Our postmodern culture has freed itself from modernistic appeals to universal rationality and empirical evidence. People believe all sorts of things that cannot be proved by modern science–human rights, convictions about justice, personal identity, and longings for meaning–to name a few. We therefore ned to help people see, through the arts of the Trivium, that their intuitions about these metaphysical realities require a foundation that is also metaphysical. This is the need for transcendence.
What Tim Keller has shed especially clear pastoral light on is that the empty promises of secular modernity are equally empty in secular postmodernity. Truth is indeed not knowable by human reason alone. But it becomes available when received as a gracious gift from God. To be known and loved– not by how much one knows or how well one loves, but by a creator who ultimately knows and loves– this is the message our world needs to hear today. The task of the classical educator, then, is to wield the liberal arts to reveal this reality and go on to proclaim “the true myth,” the ultimate story, and invite others into the new community, marked not by good people or bad people, but by what Keller calls, “new people.”
Conclusion
In this article, I have sough to demonstrate parallels between the ministry of Tim Keller and the work of classical educators today. So many of the tactics Tim Keller used in his ministry align with our own work of helping students encounter the living God through a faith integrated with all domains of knowledge and fueled through the power of imagination. May the legacy of Keller continue as we seek to raise up disciples of Christ who love God with their minds, and proclaim the gospel in a secular time in which people are so desperately looking for good, perhaps surprising, news.
