Many years ago, as we were browsing the local bookstore, we happened onto Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God. We were struck foremost by the audacity of the title — as if some fellow mortal really could articulate such a thing. So we picked it up. And it hooked us.

Keller, it seemed, was speaking directly to me rather than the masses. He seemed to understand my innate skepticism, and he found a way to appeal to it.

Why does God allow suffering in the world? How could a loving God send people to Hell? Why isn’t Christianity more inclusive? How can one religion be “right” and the others “wrong”? Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?

Those were Keller’s questions, and they were mine. And he promised to answer them, to dismantle them. And he did, all throughout the book. He promised to explain “how faith in a Christian God is a soundly rational belief, held by thoughtful people of intellectual integrity,” and he did — at least to this one-time skeptic, and to millions of others, we’d guess.

A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Pastor Timothy Keller, 72, died at his home in New York City on Friday after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was probably best known for having brought the Good News to the bad places, the places whose denizens seemed most in need of redemption. Indeed, he founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan in 1989, and he built it into an improbable megachurch with a congregation of 5,000.

As Mark Kellner noted in The Washington Times: “In a fractious national climate where churches were split by party politics, particularly during the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Keller was nonpartisan. He rejected critical race theory and criticized those who denied the biblical view of gender and sexuality, but also told congregants they had an obligation to help people in need and commit themselves to racial equality.”

This nonpartisanship was insufficient for some. As columnist Bethel McGrew writes at The Federalist: “Whenever a giant of the faith passes into glory, there are two equal and opposite temptations: to deny his strengths, or deny his weaknesses. The passing of Tim Keller is no exception.”

McGrew continued: “There will be those who, quietly or openly, declare in sweeping tones that there’s nothing good in Keller’s legacy. Some are leftists who resent the fact that he never made a radical departure from sexual orthodoxy, or that he wasn’t vocal enough in campaigning against church abuse. Others have harshly criticized his so-called ‘third-way’ approach to politics and evangelism from the right.”

As to that third way, Keller believed in unity and worked diligently toward it. As he said last April: “Churches must not maintain unity at the expense of the gospel. Churches should not destroy unity or fellowship over political differences.”

If only religion and politics were that simple, that separable.

Four years earlier, in 2018, Keller invited plenty of controversy when he penned an op-ed in The New York Times which argued that Christians don’t fit into the two-party political system. This seems to us an accurate assessment if unreasonably absolute. It’s hard to imagine a Christian, for example, who can align himself with a political party that fights for abortion on demand, or a party that openly defies the second of Jesus’s Great Commandments, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” by routinely trading in the identity politics of race and class and gender.

One of Keller’s critics, columnist Larry Taunton, took him to task in 2021 for veering leftward politically: “Over the course of his career, Tim Keller has been a light for the Christian faith in the pulpit. He has also written several helpful books. Yet, bizarrely, he has recently embraced the so-called social justice movement.”

Taunton continued:

C. S. Lewis called Christianity a “fighting religion.” Think on that. These days, such a statement strikes a somewhat absurd note with a generation that has never known war, privation, or suffering in defense of anything, much less of noble ideals. For them, Jesus has been reinterpreted to meet a lifestyle preference. One might wonder if they truly know him. Because when Jesus said to turn the other cheek, he did not mean to turn a blind eye. And the highest calling of a Christian is not to be civil; it is to be salt and light.

For every critic such as Taunton, however, we suspect there are legions of admirers. Perhaps Erick Erickson captured him best: “He loved others. He believed in engaging a world hostile to Christ and learning from those not of the church. He told me frankly that because everyone is made in God’s image that we have much to learn even from those who might reject God. He loved people. He loved the Lord.”

“I can’t wait to see Jesus,” said Pastor Timothy Keller in his final hours. And now he’s with Him. We mourn Keller’s loss, and we celebrate his life. Our Thomas Gallatin, who once met the pastor, noted that he took up Jesus’s call and ventured out onto the highways and the byways to preach the gospel; that he met people “where they were” and brought the word of Jesus to them.

Jesus said, “I will build my church.” And through Tim Keller and his life well lived, He did just that.