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Tim keller lent devotional10/7/2023 ![]() To bring skeptics to this point, he borrowed from C. But he was more likely to appeal to skeptics’ imagination and longings and leave them feeling that even if they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe in Christ yet, they sort of wanted to do so. He urged skeptics to “doubt their doubts” by examining the presuppositions that had led them to dismiss Christianity. Keller did a bit of that as well on occasion. Like many Reformed evangelicals of his generation, he was influenced by Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositionalism and by the concept of “worldview.”Įarlier presuppositionalists had attempted to argue against secular worldviews by demonstrating their inconsistency. ![]() “If he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead” ( Reason for God, 210).īut Keller also recognized that people often need more than factual evidence to experience a paradigm shift, because our presuppositions influence the way in which we interpret facts. “If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said,” Keller wrote. Wright, he argued that the resurrection narratives could not have been legends or the product of hallucinations, but were instead credible testimonies of genuine encounters with a resurrected Jesus.įor Keller, the evidence for this historical claim was supremely important. For centuries, Christian apologists have appealed to evidence from history and science to argue that the universe must have had a designer and that the scriptural testimony of Jesus’s miracles and resurrection is credible. Some chapters in Reason for God are written from an evidentialist perspective, which is perhaps the oldest and best known of the approaches to Christian apologetics in the United States today. Most Christian apologists have mastered only one of these approaches, but Keller was unique in synthesizing all of them in a way that seemed fresh and compelling. Lewis, the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til, and the psychological insights of Jonathan Edwards- and translate those approaches into an idiom that answered the questions of a 21 st-century college-educated urban professional. I think that Keller’s effectiveness as an apologist stemmed largely from his ability to combine four very different approaches to apologetics-the classic evidentialist approach, the narrative apologetics of C. What was Keller’s approach to apologetics-and why was it so pathbreaking? ![]() Keller gave them reasons to believe – and perhaps not always the reasons they were expecting. That book, which compiled the arguments that he made to thousands of skeptical New Yorkers over the course of twenty years, revolutionized Christian apologetics and laid a foundation for several other Keller books that were aimed at skeptics who needed a good reason to believe. The New York Times bestseller that first put him on the map-and that continued to sell more copies than any of his other books-was The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008). And while his pastoral insights and devotional writings on prayer, scriptural meditations, and the gospel sold widely, he arguably made his greatest impact as a Christian apologist-that is, as someone who provided persuasive arguments for the truth and reasonableness of the Christian faith. I have met a number of people who have said that Keller helped them return to faith, discover Christian faith for the first time, or gain an increased confidence in the faith they already possess.Īlthough Keller was a highly effective pastor of a congregation that had 5,000 members by the time of his death last week, his widest influence came through his writings and recorded sermons that reached millions of people who could never attend New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in person. Timothy Keller (2006) (Photo by Frank Licorice / Wikimedia Commons) When I was losing my faith fourteen years ago, Tim Keller’s writings and sermons gave me a new understanding of the gospel and a restored confidence in the truth of the Christian message.
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