It is time to give credit where credit is due. I have many ways that I am thankful for the New York pastor Tim Keller. Keller died on May 18th 2023 in a battle with stomach cancer. I consider Keller to be my mentor who kept me on the right path through my late twenties and throughout my thirties. This is my tribute to a man who helped me develop as a person spiritually, professionally, intellectually, and emotionally.

When I was about 28 years old, I found myself in a semi-friendly debate with my friend Spencer about whether God existed. Spencer suggested, “Why don’t I give you a book by an atheist and you give me a book about by a Christian.” I told him I’d think about it. It had been maybe 8-9 years since I’d read any Christian apologetics. A friend told me Tim Keller’s “A Reason for God” presented a good argument for the existence of God. So I picked up a copy.

I debated whether I should read it before giving it to Spencer. I like to go by the policy of “Read a book before you recommend it to someone else.” So I decided it would be best to skim some of Keller’s book when I sat and waited on my laundry at a laundromat on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro about a mile from UNCG where I was in grad school.

It was a sunny day and the light was shining through the large 8 foot tall windows at about 2pm on a weekday afternoon. I was sitting on a wooden bench at the laundromat as I waited for my clothes to finish so I could switch them over to the dryer. And that’s when I read the sentence from my copy of A Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism:

“Foucault was pressing the truth of his analysis on others even as he denied the very category of truth. Some kind of truth-claim, then, seems unavoidable. The inconsistency of working against oppression when you refuse to admit there is such a thing as truth is the reason that postmodern “theory” and “deconstruction” is perhaps on the wane.”

This struck me as an odd statement. How could postmodern theory be on the wane? I was in the middle of getting my master's in literature where the subculture of the literature department was religiously devoted to literary theory and writers like Foucault. Critical theory was the pinnacle of truth and meaning to my professors. At the end of that last sentence was a footnote, so I flipped to the back of the book and I read the following:

“Emily Eakin, “The Latest Theory is that That Theory Doesn’t Matter,” New York Times, April 29, 2003, and “The Theory of Everything, RIP,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. See also Dinita Smith, “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs,” New York Times, January 3, 2004.”

I vividly remember feeling a considerable amount of hope and excitement. I felt this excitement because Tim Keller was the first Christian apologist that I’d ever read who explicitly challenged critical theory. Most Christian apologists in the early 2000s ruthlessly critiqued postmodernism. Yet it seemed like none of them knew the fact that everyone in academia in the early 2000s was obsessed with deconstruction and critical theory. When was a Christian apologist going to write about Foucault and Derrida?

I decided that I did not want to do a book swap with Spencer. This was no longer about me winning a “theist vs. atheist” debate. I have that tendency in me to debate atheists and it typically doesn't work in the traditional point-counterpoint style. Rather I needed Keller's “A Reason for God” for my own personal growth. I needed to read the whole book for myself. The book was giving me hope in a time when I was running on empty, a kind of subconscious emptiness that I didn’t realize until I read this book.

Thank you for your ability to use 47 footnotes in one chapter and not be boring. I now love footnotes.

Writer David Brooks explains in his Op-Ed Tim Keller Taught Me About Joy” that “Tim could draw on a vast array of intellectual sources to argue for the existence of God, to draw piercing psychological insights from the troubling parts of Scripture or to help people through moments of suffering.” Brooks says that he and Keller developed a friendship where he and other friends would have Zoom conversations in recent years. Brooks describes Keller’s response on a Zoom call once asked “Tim, what do you think?” about some political, personal or social issue:

“He'd start slow, with that wry, friendly smile. He'd mention a relevant John Bunyan poem, then an observation Kierkegaard had made or a pattern the historian David Bebbington had noticed. Then Tim would synthesize it all into the four crucial points that pierced the clouds of confusion and brought you to a new layer of understanding. I used to think of it as the Keller Clarity Beam. He didn't make these points in a didactic or professorial way. It was more like: Hey, you're thirsty. I happen to have this glass of water. Want a sip?”

It is one thing for a person to be intelligent and well-read. It takes another set of skills to be able to make connections between multiple texts and come to useful conclusions. Some might call this wisdom. Some might call it insight or synthesis. Or you might call it using your knowledge to serve your fellow humans. Whatever it was, Keller had it.

Speaking of synthesis, part of my job as a college writing professor is to coach college freshmen on how to write research papers. Synthesis is the method of taking multiple perspectives and sources in order to come to a stated conclusion. Two years ago I started teaching it more explicitly, yet I had a hard time finding an article that sufficiently cites their sources. Many of the articles I read online (specifically the Atlantic) did not explicitly use citations or footnotes.

Where could I find an article that sufficiently synthesizes sources for the sake of an argument?
It was during this time when I was reading Keller’s book “Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering.” It hit me one day when I realized that Keller used the whole first chapter to make an argument that people in the 21st-century in America are more prone to ignore or escape from their suffering. Keller argued this was an unhealthy habit in contrast to methods from previous decades (and centuries). So, why not have my class read the first chapter titled “The Cultures of Suffering”?

The chapter reads like a stand-alone academic essay that calls into question the strength of our own culture’s ability to cope with traumatic events. He uses a total of 47 footnotes and quotes Max Weber, Peter Berger, C.S. Lewis, Richard Dawkins, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (among others). The chapter isn’t explicitly Christian because his goal is to critique the secularist worldview that most Americans unintentionally ascribe to regarding suffering. He starts off the book with a smart rhetorical move by identifying something we can all agree is a problem: Americans are not good at dealing with trauma and then goes on to explain why.

I have my composition class read this because he so seamlessly is able to integrate all these sources and his writing is engaging and life-giving. With Keller, the more footnotes, the better.

Thank you for smoothly synthesizing multiple sources and writing like a journalist. I want to write like you.

There is a tendency among Christian content creators today that hesitates to quote movies, magazines, literature, newspapers, or song lyrics that are not explicitly Christian or conservative. When I say “Christian content” I mean sermons, blog entries or Christian literature. Pastors often other pastors, theologians, or the Bible in their sermons rather than quote a source created by someone who is not a Christian. Pastors do give illustrations of popular movies or from a secular source in order to diagnose a cultural or social problem. Some pastors do this well, but in general, I find that some pastors, thinkers, and bloggers stay in their comfort zone of quoting other Christians.

This generally pisses me off. Why? It is generally because I am an English professor at a public college who has to use the hints of eternity seen in Keats's poetry to make an argument for the existence of heaven. I have to ask my students questions about “what it means to be human” because I can’t explicitly say what Paul says about the servanthood of Christ. I can’t explicitly quote the Bible or a theologian (although I sometimes do), but I have to do in a way that seems like it fits the context. At a public university, it is all about being creative enough to use cultural problems to bring up hints that the Christian faith might be worth exploring.

Keller helped me understand how to take cultural hints from articles in the New York Times to point to a need for Jesus Christ. Many evangelical Christians are skeptical of the New York Times because it is politically more liberal. Yet Keller regularly quoted the New York Times in his books that would support his argument for the truth of Christianity. His attitude was “I’m going to use whatever references I can to help people see the serious need to explore Christ as someone worth following.”

Let me give a more explicit example. Keller often uses non-Christian thinkers to highlight serious cultural problems. The following question can be troubling: Why are so many Americans getting divorced?

That’s a big question that all Americans see that is both troubling and confusing. Yet for Keller in Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matter he used a quote from sociologist Ernest Becker to help explain why so many people in the 21st century are disappointed with marriage. Becker says we can place “cosmically impossible expectations” on our partners because Western culture replaced belief in a God with the romantic partner:

“The love partner becomes the divine ideal within with to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual . . .In one word the love object is God . . .Man reached for a “thou” when the worldview of the great religious community overseen by God died. . . After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption---nothing less.”

Becker(a non-religious man) argued that when a secular culture no longer acknowledges God, people replace God with a romantic love partner. Thus society ends up putting an unreasonable amount of weight on the other person. Keller used this argument to say that we need to look for redemption and existential meaning in God rather than a romantic partner. I mention this because Ernest Becker is not a religious person and Keller compliments Becker’s point of view rather than subtly dismissing his view.

Often Christians take it for granted how freely we can talk about the gospel and Scripture. But if you work in the secular world, it takes work to be like Paul in Acts 17 where he is able to communicate clearly with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers so that he can talk to them about following Christ.

Thank you for teaching me how to creatively highlight cultural problems around me to show others the need for the message of Christ.

Then there is the strange phase of adulthood which is my thirties. I am 39 years old as I write this. I am coming into the final years of my thirties in a state of surprise. How on earth did I become 39 years old? It is somewhat terrifying and troubling to know that I am almost 40 years old. However, the one thing I am proud of from my thirties is the work I’ve done at Carteret Community College as an English professor.

I considered quitting when I was 30 years old. I got demoted from full-time to adjunct after budget cuts in 2014. That means I took a $28,000 pay cut. The pay difference between an adjunct professor and a full-time professor is huge. I thought to myself “Maybe being an English professor is a pipe dream. It may be time to look for another career.”

Then I started reading Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work in the January of 2015. This book helped me endure the time of being an adjunct. Nine months later, I was offered a full-time job at Carteret Community College. I almost burnt out. Keller analyzes why Americans both idolize (“I gain my identity through my job”) and despise (“working for the weekend”) work. This book helped me think about how God uses me on a daily basis to serve people. It shifted my mind from fantasizing about being in an unrealistic profession or just thinking about my next vacation.

I see now how God uses me every day as a teacher. I thank God for using Keller's book to help me find my life's purpose. If you feel like you are about to burn out at your job, get a copy of this book and read it.

Thank you for teaching me how to see my job at the community college is charged with meaning (even on the bleakest of days).