Interview with Collin Hansen

Alasdair Groves speaks with Collin Hansen about his new book, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, and the influences on Tim Keller, which included CCEF and David Powlison.

Collin Hansen is the vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

Transcript:

Alasdair Groves:

Before we get started today, I wanted to let you know that we’re doing something a bit different. Today’s episode is actually a bonus episode, a different format. I had the chance to interview Collin Hansen, whom some of you may know from The Gospel Coalition and his book on Tim Keller that just recently came out. I thought it would be fruitful just because Tim Keller has had such a big impact on so many of us at CCEF, including me, and because in the book, Collin goes briefly into some of the influences that CCEF has had on Keller. So I thought it would be an interesting thing for us to explore, and I think you’ll appreciate the conversation we had.

Welcome to Where Life and Scripture Meet, a podcast of CCEF, the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation. I’m your host, Alasdair Groves, and today, we’re doing something a bit different. I have the chance to interview Collin Hansen, who is the author of Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. Timothy Keller’s probably a name that I would imagine almost everyone listening to this podcast knows. If somehow you’ve managed not to hear of Tim Keller, he’s a pastor in Manhattan, has been for many years, founded a very successful church there called Redeemer. It’s a Presbyterian church and was a big part of launching The Gospel Coalition where Collin works.

So without further ado, Collin, thank you so much for giving us some of your time to talk a little bit about this particular book. I’d love it if you would start by maybe saying a couple words before we even get to the book about The Gospel Coalition, about your relationship there. Actually, I don’t know how and why you found TGC. I know you have a relationship with Tim. I don’t know if that predated your time at TGC, but what would you say a little bit about TGC, what you love, how you got there?

Collin Hansen:

Well, thanks, Alasdair. I really have connections at TGC to both of our founders, Don Carson and Tim Keller. So Don Carson was my biblical theology and New Testament professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I did did my Master of Divinity between 2007 and 2010. I had previously worked with him because I was the news editor at Christianity Today Magazine before that. Then Tim Keller, I interviewed him unsuccessfully for my first book, Young, Restless, Reformed, and met him at the first Gospel Coalition event in 2007 where he was just talking about preaching Christ from all of scriptures and gospel-centered ministry.

So when I graduated in 2010, then I started working for TGC, for Tim and for Don, and starting a lot of that editorial effort. So that’s where I originally got started, but the basic premise of The Gospel Coalition is that we just provide resources that help train church leaders, so all the different kinds of things that they face. We do a little bit of what CCEF does just in terms of getting resources about counseling issues and applying the Bible to all of life, how we do a little bit of what 9Marks does in terms of trying to help people think through ecclesiology and church leadership, but we also try to just connect organizations like CCEF and 9Marks and all these different seminaries and all these different publishers and just keep them working together.

So that’s what we do. We just try to help equip church leaders with all kinds of different tools that they need to be doing their work, and that could be as pastors, that could be as professors, but it could be as parents, and also as counselors.

Alasdair Groves:

Well, it’s an interesting road to go. I have to ask and you’re welcome to say, “I have nothing else I can or should say about that question,” but what do you mean by you interviewed Tim Keller unsuccessfully?

Collin Hansen:

Yeah. Well, so at the time, and really for most of his career, Tim has been focused on being a pastor in New York City, and that’s meant that he’s not really been that inclined toward getting involved with a bunch of evangelical controversies or trends. I was writing about the rise of reformed theology and this revival of reformed theology in the early 2000s. I think he was very much in the middle of all of it, and I had not even much of an idea at the time of how much it had been influenced, how much he had influenced it and how much he’d been influenced by an earlier reformed revival in Pennsylvania in the 1960s and ’70s, but at the time, I think he just wasn’t really interested in getting caught up in all of that publicly in his work outside of New York.

So I said, “Do you want to do this interview?” He said, “No,” and then he said, “Well, but here’s my email address. You can send me some questions.” Then I sent him questions and he responded to them, “Yes, no, no, yes, no.” So it was useless. So that was my unsuccessful interview of Tim Keller.

Alasdair Groves:

That really does check both the box of interview and of unsuccessful or anything that’s actually of worth to you. That’s hilarious.

Collin Hansen:

That’s right.

Alasdair Groves:

I noticed looking at your notes in the back that you’ve obviously done a lot of interviews for this book. I sincerely hope you got a bit more from him on some of those dates that it says, “Interview with Tim Keller”.

Collin Hansen:

I did. I got many hours with the more successful.

Alasdair Groves:

Oh, I’m glad to hear it. Oh, man. Well, hey, take us into the book here a little bit. I’ll say probably my question I be most interested for you to start with is, why this book? Let me preface it in a couple ways just to give you where my brain is going on this. I’ve been enormously impacted by Tim Keller. I’ve been listening to him for years, hearing his sermons. I’ve read his things. I was in the navigators in the early 2000s, and they were passing around this little PDF six page thing on deconstructing defeater beliefs, and before the reason for God took it and made it much more widely available and accessible, and it has been … Yeah, any thoughtful Christian anywhere near the conservative or reformed side of the evangelical world, you’d be hard pressed not to be influenced by Tim, and I would just look to him as an enormous, enormous impact on me. So I would’ve read anything you wrote about Tim Keller. You could have said, “Timothy Keller: His Taste in Clean Coats,” and I would’ve bought the book and-

Collin Hansen:

Why he hates broccoli.

Alasdair Groves:

Why he hates broccoli, sign me up. I would be eager to hear that, but you’ve chosen the spiritual intellectual formation. Now, I’ve not read a lot of biographies, but that’s not a subtitle I’ve seen on anybody else’s work here. How did you come to this particular tack of thinking about sharing Tim’s story? Why did you choose the project at all? I imagine that has had something to do with his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Anyhow, say as you go. That’s my question.

Collin Hansen:

That’s right. Well, I think basically this is the only book Tim would’ve agreed to work on and the only book that I could have written about him. So first of all, on what he would agree to, Tim does not like talking about himself. Now, I’ve never been in a counseling session with Tim as in being his counselor, but he just does not like talking to people about himself, not in my experience, at least not talking to me that way, but he loves to talk about other people.

In one sense, that’s just being a preacher. You’re talking about Jesus all the time, but especially, he loves to talk about the people who have taught him everything, and he shows that work in a way that I don’t think hardly any pastors or any counselors do. So that’s the first why this particular angle on his spiritual and intellectual formation. Well, that’s because that’s the way he talks.

Alasdair, I have not ever seen another book like this. I kept asking people. I never saw it. Every biography has a section on, “Oh, okay, well, where did he or she developed those ideas?” but nothing. I mean, I just haven’t seen anything like this before where it just focuses on that.

The second thing is I mentioned it’s the only kind of book that I could have written, I wasn’t going to write some critical biography, one, because Tim’s not gone, he’s still with us. It was definitely catapulted by his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which back in May of 2020, we had no idea how long we’d have with him. The fact that we’re three years later is-

Alasdair Groves:

Shocking.

Collin Hansen:

Yeah, it’s quite shocking. Exactly. So essentially just wanted to get him on the record saying, “Hey, what were you thinking here? What did you learn from so-and-so? Where did these ideas come from?” That’s the result is we now can see where he pieced all these things together, like I said, in terms of his spiritual and his intellectual formation in ways that, I mean, some ways, I wonder if he even had thought about it before. The book itself I think was a catalyst for him piecing that together in his own mind as well.

Alasdair Groves:

Was it your idea? Was it his? Did someone put you both onto it?

Collin Hansen:

Well, I knew that this was the only kind of book that he would agree to. I just knew. I didn’t care who the writer was. I didn’t care who the publisher was. I just wanted him to do it. I just hoped that somebody would do it. So he happened to ask me to do it. So I was just hopeful that somebody would get him on the record doing this at some point, but I would say yes, in that sense, it was my idea, but I think anybody around Tim, if they were thinking about writing a book with him and about him, they would’ve reached the same conclusions that this is the way to do it.

Even in the course of writing the book, I talked with just about everybody else before I talked with him. Now, he’s on record as a teacher. I could look at his sermons, I could look at his books, and I figured if somebody has not mentioned in those places, they’re probably not a huge influence on him just given how much he talks about them, but in the course of doing the project, my effort or my approach of talking to everybody else first and then talking to him to fill in the gaps and then going back and putting it all together, that approach was my idea as well.

Alasdair Groves:

So it seems you, I suppose, had a bit the same experience he had in starting Redeemer himself. He was praying about it and talking to people about it and trying to recruit somebody to go do it and then the-

Collin Hansen:

That’s true.

Alasdair Groves:

… the Lord said, “Actually, Tim, it’s going to be you,” and here you have a book in the same vein.

Collin Hansen:

Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, I mean, think, gosh, I think for 10 years I was trying to talk people into writing about him because I think I just thought I didn’t have the level of critical distance necessary to be able to assess him, and again, that’s not really what the book is. It’s not an assessment, but in the end, hopefully it becomes really useful to counselors and to pastors and to elders of just being able to learn from his life and learn about God through him. So hopefully, yeah, hopefully that’s the experience that people have. It certainly came out a particular way because it was me writing it, but I’m just glad that somebody got to have those interviews with him.

Alasdair Groves:

Yeah. Collin, obviously, at some point I want to get to some of the stuff in the book about CCEF in particular and some of the influences that were there, but before I do that, and this is I suppose on one level, this is just my CCEFness internal to me that I can’t control and can’t restrain, and so I have to go here first, but given the uniqueness of the book and the way you … I didn’t realize you hadn’t started with Tim but had talked to others more first. I would just be fascinated to hear you reflect on how the writing process of the book has impacted you personally. Watching his intellectual formation, how has it made you? What has it motivated you to change or double down on? Where have you looked at Tim’s trajectory and said, “Oh, that, that’s interesting he had that point. I wonder if this particular point in my life will go a different direction or be more significant than I realized,” et cetera, et cetera? How has it changed you?

Collin Hansen:

That’s a great question. I would say that when I sat down to start to do all the interviews in January of 2021, I was pretty scared.

Alasdair Groves:

I can imagine.

Collin Hansen:

One because I just felt the weight of responsibility for the project, but also, I’ve worked with Tim for a long time. I’m like anybody else, just like what you were describing right there in the beginning. I’ve read his books. I’ve listened to his sermons. I’ve been at all these conferences where he’s spoken and he’s had a big influence on my life, I mean, probably as much as anybody else. I mean, I teach through his textbook center church and seminary and all these different things in there.

I think, Alasdair, I was scared about what I was going to find. I’ve been in politics, I’ve been in journalism. I’ve been in church leadership for a long time, and it’s not always pretty behind the curtain. In fact, it’s not just that it’s not always pretty. It’s usually not pretty behind the curtain in some way or another. I think I was just afraid by what I was going to find.

There was a moment in the project where one of his longtime colleagues, Katherine Leary Alsdorf, and Katherine and I have worked together a number of things as well, and Katherine had the same experience that a lot of people had talking with me. She was crying in thankfulness for Tim, and she saw me feverishly scribbling down a bunch of notes, and then she stopped herself and she said, “Don’t you dare make him out to be a saint.” He had to go to the Lord in prayer because of all the problems that we had on staff. A lot of people had that experience of the closer they got to Tim, the more they have loved him, but not idolized him, but that’s a good attitude.

So I think what changed me is that you want people that are close to you to not idolize you because it means you’re not being honest enough and you’re not confessing enough about your sin. If people don’t see you in your sin, they probably just don’t know you very well. It’s just not possible for us to hide it when we’re being our true selves entirely. So you don’t want people to idolize you, but you do want the people that we’re close to should admire us at some level and we should admire them and we should love them, and we should appreciate them, and we should give the Lord thanks for the role that they’ve played in our lives.

So that changed me, and it gave me perspective on the kind of leader that I want to be, not idolized by anyone, but hopefully admired only as somebody who is trying to be a conduit of that grace that comes from God alone, so not for our sake, but appointing to Christ. So that was a real privilege to be a part of that process, and thankfully, the more I talk to other people, the less scared I got.

Alasdair Groves:

Well, I’m glad you persevered through the fear and put these things down on paper. I guess I’ll speak here for a moment to our listeners. It should be pretty obvious by the fact that I’m doing our first ever interview special episode here that I appreciate the book, but I think I read the book, like I said, because I’m interested in Tim. What I found is that it’s had a much more profound, inspiring, convicting reflection forcing impact on me than I had expected. I was intrigued more about Tim and I’m finding it so many places it’s really pushed me.

One place to what you just said, Collin, that really struck me, towards the end, there’s a bit where Tim says, essentially, leadership and ministry is going to amplify whoever you are, and your weaknesses therefore are going to be exposed, and it’s not fundamentally staffing your weaknesses, which is the typical advice out there that’s going to help you get through. It’s actually the core of your character that is going to be the thing that is most important in the face of your weaknesses that will remain however much you may make little bits of improvement here and there. That was so striking to me.

I’m fairly young in leadership myself, and that was both a scary and an encouraging thing to hear as I’ve seen my own weaknesses exposed. So your focus on just that sense of, yeah, it shaped … I would love people near me to have an affection, appreciation or a respect, an admiration even for me if I am serving the Lord well, but they wouldn’t idolize, it would be impossible to idolize me, and I wouldn’t hide from that. I really appreciate that answer.

Collin Hansen:

Yeah. Well, and it helped give me some perspective on the particular weaknesses that he has. He’s open about them. He does not like conflict, and he does not like it when people don’t like him. I mean, I think a lot of us-

Alasdair Groves:

Craziness, craziness.

Collin Hansen:

… do these things, but it is a little bit weird for somebody who’s in such a prominent leadership position to admit that or to be able to say leadership is a multi-varied thing. Tim can say, “I am not a very good leader,” and I can say, “Ah, Tim, I’ve seen you for too long and I’ve talked to too many people. You are definitely a good leader, but you are definitely not a good manager.”

Look, when you think about church leaders, think about pastors especially, counselors are a little bit different there because they have a little bit more of a specific vocation, but a pastor is expected to be a business leader, a teacher, an academic, a counselor. I tell people all the time, if your pastor’s good at two of those things, that’s basically a miracle, but just nobody is … I mean, we’re just good at all these things, and most of us are not good at many of these things.

So it’s just typical when you have somebody who might be a spectacular counselor who wouldn’t be able to run an elders’ business meeting or being able to finance a building campaign. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. Somebody who could be an outstanding preacher is not clear how that skill is supposed to translate to counseling.

Now, I mean, hopefully the better counselor you were using your CCEF resources, it would make you a better preacher. That’s definitely Tim Keller’s experience, but even though Tim has spent a lot of time in his past as a counselor, I would not really describe him … I just did not see a lot of evidence of him in New York doing a lot of counseling as a pastor. So that is the experience I’m hoping that people will have is being able to see some of themselves in what they’re learning from Tim. Hopefully that’s a major takeaway for everybody who reads the book.

Alasdair Groves:

Yeah. Well, as a counselor, I can certainly affirm that Tim’s material has been stunningly, stunningly helpful to me as a counselor and to many of my colleagues. Collin, can we segue to this CCEF particular here?

Collin Hansen:

Yeah, let’s do it.

Alasdair Groves:

You say a number of things in the book. I appreciate just the kindness with which you’ve treated CCEF in general, David Powlison and Ed Welch in particular. I would characterize the influences. You’ve described it as there were just some key seeds, maybe some key places where Tim was already heading a particular direction and having some maybe refinement of his categories, maybe some unpacking of particularly issues of idolatry, whether cultural or personal, that you would say impacts there from David in particular. David and Tim spent some time together at New Life Presbyterian Church in Glenside outside Philadelphia in the mid ’80s. There would’ve been a shared overlap of Westminster’s Seminary time and CCEF faculty connecting with Westminster faculty, but would you speak just to what influences impacts things you’ve observed there?

Collin Hansen:

The first exposure connection between Tim Keller and CCEF was 1975. It was when he graduated seminary, headed to Hopewell. I actually have this. I’ll have to go pull it up if you want to share it with people, but I have the CCEF worksheet that he used with this young man who wandered into his church and it was like, “Hey, my life is falling apart. I don’t know where else to go. I got married. It’s not working out. What should I do?” This guy would become one of Tim and Kathy Keller’s closest friends. I remember asking him, “Do you still have that worksheet?” He said, “Yeah.” I never knew a pastor before who assigned me homework.

Alasdair Groves:

I will take it, Collin. I would love to see it.

Collin Hansen:

I’ll go track it down.

Alasdair Groves:

If you can dig it up, sure.

Collin Hansen:

Yeah, I mean, that was Tim’s first instinct as a pastor was to say, “Where do I go for this help? I’m going to CCEF.” So that’s right there in 1975, and CCEF was how old at that time?

Alasdair Groves:

Seven years old. We were little babies.

Collin Hansen:

That’s right.

Alasdair Groves:

David Powlison, I don’t think David had even necessarily come to faith yet in ’75. I can’t remember. He was somewhere in that mid to late ’70s. David was working on an inpatient ward in a psychiatric teaching hospital. It was partly through observing the extremities of human brokenness and saying, “They’re actually more like me. I have keys and I go home, and there are reasons for that, but I can’t answer the human condition in an intellectually satisfying way.” So actually, I don’t know the exact date of David’s conversion, but it was right in that era. So anyhow, we were young. We were young at ’75.

Collin Hansen:

Yeah, that’s what I thought. I was just trying to even think of where he would’ve connected with CCEF at the time because he was in Virginia. So maybe there was some connection through Gordon Conwell. I’m not even sure, but he had that right off the bat. That was his instinct. I would have to imagine he got burned out in Hopewell. He said at a given point he might be doing four crisis counseling interventions with couples at the same time. As you know, that’s incredibly draining work for somebody who’s also preaching three different-

Alasdair Groves:

For anybody.

Collin Hansen:

For anybody, but somebody who’s also preaching three separate messages per week and has three young boys in the home. That would’ve been a rough situation, but I have to imagine in those marriage counseling sessions he was using CCEF as well just based on my experience with him. I didn’t document that in the book, but I’m just assuming that, but you mentioned already you jumped forward to Philadelphia and all of a sudden, yeah, there’s all these intersections in 1980s between Jack Miller and then ultimately David Powlison, Ed Welch, and just the whole Philadelphia milieu at the time.

It is interesting that when you … Then the next explicit connection is that of all the things Tim Keller is known for, and it’s a long list, one of them that would be near the top would be the centrality of his treatment of idolatry, his counterfeit, God’s book, but it’s really a central feature of virtually every sermon that he does. You can cite that lineage all sorts of different ways. You can cite it back to Augustine in his disordered loves. You can cite it back to Luther and the concept of when we break any of the two through 10 commandments, we break the first.

You could look at it from all those different perspectives, but for sure, you can connect it to David Powlison’s article, Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair. So that’s not the first time I don’t think Tim exposed to that concept, but it helps to crystallize that for him.

Then I would say that I had a very insightful friend at one point mentioned to me that when people misunderstand the essence of Tim, they think, “Oh, here’s somebody who really just understands our culture,” and while he does, what he understands more than anything else is our hearts, and that goes back to the way that he would sit with his friends at Gordon Conwell and they would just talk about their challenges. They would counsel each other as young 20 something friends, but then you can see through CCEF that heart surgeon at work and the way that somebody would preach with an eye toward those heart dynamics and gospel dynamics in there of a counselor.

As somebody who did actually do a lot of cultural analysis through just asking people questions, that was the one thread through his life was that the way he did that cultural analysis was through asking questions, not through debates, not through arguing, but primarily just through asking questions, and that became then a method for him to be able to point people toward the gospel.

So in some ways, and people have often commented that Tim has a professorial demeanor. I don’t know exactly what a counselor’s demeanor is supposed to be exactly, but he has a very approachable physician of the soul just feel as a preacher. I really think that if you combine that with CCEF with his extensive exposure to the puritans who were themselves very attuned to being physicians of the soul, I think that’s the key to understanding Tim that people often miss. So we could double click on any of those points there. I think they’re just key, key, key overlaps with CCEF in particular for Tim.

Alasdair Groves:

It’s just fascinating to me, Collin, to hear you reflecting on it from your seat and seeing it and seeing Tim and even just the way that you described those Gordon Conwell days, young friends were counseling each other. One of the distinctives of CCEF, and it’s something that I find I’m constantly having to explain to people who are not familiar, is the idea that it’s not like we have this crazy counselor technology and all these things you’ve never heard of. It’s we are simply doing Christian life. We are simply doing the application of the gospel. It happens in a particular context, and there’s a lot of things that we have had to wrestle through and think through the darkest, hardest places that human beings can go, and taking the rich theology that’s there that matters when you’re parenting your five-year-old, it matters when you’re talking to your friend in a dorm room at 3:00 AM, and matters when you’re on Zoom with your boss.

Whatever it looks like in the most difficult complex, wow, this human issue is so ingrained and difficult to even know. It is simply the heart, the active heart, the out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks, and so therefore, the demeanor of a counselor is, well, it’s whoever the Lord has made you to be. There isn’t one personality. The professor and the prophet and the evangelist, and the shy, quiet, but thoughtful boldly putting myself out there person are equally welcome at the table.

Question for you. This is a little bit off this side. One thing David Powlison experience in particular was that the article you mentioned, Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair, was immensely popular, helpful, has been transformative for so many. I found this too. David began to find that there was something that would happen with students in particular where they would get ahold of the idol category and see the helpfulness of it for rearranging the furniture in our souls, but would then narrow into only idolatry.

There’s often language we’d use of idol hunting. David, as time went on, actually began to push away from the language of idolatry not so much because he disagreed with it, but because he watched it, over focused on it a narrowing. Tim, obviously not someone you would ever accuse of narrowing in any way, broadening out. Did you ever observe or have you seen in Tim any qualifying or concern about idolatry language? I’ve not done an intensive study. I’ve never heard Tim step away from that language. It seems he’s always very comfortable using it. Have you seen anything there?

Collin Hansen:

I haven’t seen him step away from that, but I think the difference with Tim is that he is such an expansive thinker who borrows from so many different categories that you’re not going to find him hitting only one note on anything. He’ll be able to transition between different influences. So he might be hitting really hard on the idolatry theme in some different ways, but again, it’s going to be mediated through so many different stories and so many different perspectives. He might draw out the Augustinian angle at this point. He might draw out the Lutheran angle at this point or he might go straight for the Puritans or he might just explicitly cite Palestine in there.

Also, there are so many different applications to it, so many different forms in which it is manifested. Then you can also look at, you alluded to this earlier, Alasdair, you can also look at this at a cultural level. That was one of his distinct contributions as well as being able to, because, yeah, when you think about Jack Miller, he would also often talk about being gospel-centered, but he tended to speak of that in psychological terms. Tim has often spoken about that, but he speaks about it more theological or cultural terms, and that’s similar to the way that he would use idolatry in so many different ways, that he would talk about it in terms of a culture, he’d talk about in terms of an individual. He’d use it in terms of personal ways, but also multifaceted. There’d be so many different manifestations of it.

So yeah, it’s just typical of Tim that he’ll add it to his tool belt and he’ll deploy it when he needs to, but he;s got so many other tools that it doesn’t sound entirely repetitive. That’s also true of when he got older because earlier in his ministry, before he’d added all of those mature rings as that tree grew, he would get into a situation where he would say, “Oh, I’m reading too many Dick Lucas sermons,” or, “I’m listening to too many Dick Lucas sermons,” and all of a sudden, Kathy, Tim’s wife, was telling him, “You got to stop because you sound too much.”

Then Tim also complained about how some people, they get into the Puritan forest and they never come out and all of a sudden they’re saying methinks in their sermons because they’re so influenced. So I mean, bottom line, no, I’ve never heard him back away from that, but it’s just one tool in the tool belt.

Alasdair Groves:

Yeah, and the implication there is that the breadth of his preaching and the breadth of what was happening at Redeemer has never left him concerned that those who are hearing him were somehow locking in an idolatry in an overly narrow way, but the breadth of what he was doing was obviously coming through to the community in a way he was satisfied with. You need to respond to the pastoral concern on the ground not to some theoretical sense of, “Am I over percentagizing one particular avenue in scripture?” Obviously, Tim is the most well-read and most broadly read person I’ve ever-

Collin Hansen:

I think that’s safe to say. I think that’s safe to say.

Alasdair Groves:

Collin, let’s aim to land in this area. I’m just thinking about Tim and his legacy. Obviously, both you and I can speak powerfully to his legacy and us personally and to a gajillion people around us. We’re glad that we’re not saying methinks, but we probably are saying things that Tim Keller has put in his sermon that we’re not even aware of.

Collin Hansen:

That’s true.

Alasdair Groves:

How would you describe … THere’s two parts. What are you perceiving currently as Keller’s legacy? Then if you could just write your dream script, if you could look out into the future as many decades out as you want to go, what do you hope for the legacy of Keller? I know that may take you into question about the Keller’s Center that PGC is trying to form, but I’m just interested in your view from up close with a lot of responsibility, how do you see Tim’s legacy and where do you see it going?

Collin Hansen:

That’s a good question. The thing that Tim comes back to consistently is that identity as an ecclesial revivalist. So there’s two important components there, ecclesial meaning based in the church, and then revivalist, seeking that deeper experience of God. That I think is, I mean, I guess that is my ideal script is that people will see the important role of the church that Ed Clowney taught Tim. Now, Tim was a convert of the Parachurch, but it was Ed Clowney who helped him see the significance of the church in God’s plan.

Then the revival part was it was a sense in which that the church as an institution can become calcified. It can be frozen in time. It can be decontextualized. Richard Loveless taught him about those dynamics of revival of disinculturating the faith of unleashing the gospel with new expressions. So I think that institutional slash movement dynamic, those have always been an interplay in his life, that we need institutions because that’s what God has given us to be able to do His work. At the same time, we need the fresh wind of the spirit to be able to move.

I think we are in a unique time that is very, very deeply anti-institutional. It’s very emotive in a lot of different ways across the culture, and it is performative. There’s a lot of performative spirituality. So that’s where revival can go wrong. It can become very performative and self-centered especially when it’s not ecclesial.

So that’s a lot of the legacy that I’m hoping that people will be able to see in Tim because the thing about the cultural apologetics is that even for the amazing work that Tim has done, the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics is not about going back and just repeating the things that Tim has said because Tim himself will be the first person to say, “I’m not sure that stuff works in the same way.”

An important part of this book is talking about how the reason for God is this amazing bestselling book in 2008. He is already thinking that it’s obsolete and then he has to write a whole new book making sense of God in 2016 to try to show different directions. So New York has changed. The nation has changed. The world has changed in a lot of different ways, but in the end, there’s still … So it’s that same dynamic of everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed.

The solution is the same. It’s Christ and Christ alone. It’s His gospel. It’s in the transforming power of the spirit in the human heart. Like you said, that’s out of that heart flows everything. So that solution hasn’t changed, but at the same time, we do have to be flexible in what the best methods essentially are of being able to apply that gospel because the issues always change, and new threats tend to emerge and must be addressed in there, and not just new threats, but as we see through church history, it’s the same gospel always, but we seem to see different facets of it like a diamond at different points of time.

So I think the best way to honor Tim when we’re thinking about counseling, preaching, doing this work of evangelism is not by going back and saying, “Wow, he figured it all out,” but to say he was a faithful example in his time, and we will continue to learn from him in his sermons and books for many, many, many years to come, but we’ve got to do our own work in our generation, and that work starts in our hearts. It starts on our faces in prayer before God and in His word because that’s how it happened for Tim. It didn’t come through just learning from some other human figure. It came from learning from God himself.

So that’s what I’m hopeful that people do is, and I just concluded the book this way, but it would be terribly ironic if this man who has spent so much of his life pointing people to Jesus, we turn around and we point to him. So as I mentioned in the book, we honor him best by reading his library, but by adding him to that library that we grab from and learn from as best we can, applying it to our day, and then doing that work in our own time. So it’s a complicated answer, but that’s how I’m thinking.

Alasdair Groves:

No, Collin, well, I suppose it is a complicated answer once, but it’s a simple answer at the heart of the complexity, which is there’s nothing different, there’s no magic, there’s not the PK way that we need to study and preserve for all time, if anything. I mean, you referenced his book in ’08 and then his book in ’16. I remember that. That has been one of the most scary, but one of the most freeing things to preserve from a distance of, “Here’s a guy who wrote the book on apologetics in 2008,” and eight years later, he wrote another book that basically said the culture’s just not asking the same questions. So I have a second book that speaks differently because the pastoral concern on the ground is there’s a difference between Colossians and there’s a difference between Galatians and Corinthians because there are different pastoral concerns. It’s not a different gospel.

Collin Hansen:

Exactly.

Alasdair Groves:

It’s a different pastoral context, and that has been so freeing to see. So I think you’re dead on. Let me ask you one last question, and I’m speaking now to Collin the writer, and I’ve heard every writing seminar, every writing book, every guru of writing or even writing blog I’ve ever seen has referenced the Keller Darlings line. The great writer has to pull other things and there’s things you love and you wish you had it, but you were so excited about it you’ve got to kill your darlings on the cutting room floor and let them go and whatever. So I’m going to give you a chance here, Collin. What is one darling you had to cut out of the book that you didn’t get to put in, but now you get to at least have summary on the public record? What’s one of your favorite darlings?

Collin Hansen:

I’ll give you two, all right? So let’s give you two.

Alasdair Groves:

Two for the price of one. I love it.

Collin Hansen:

Two for the price of one. I did what I thought was a fascinating exploration of the reception history of J. R. R. Tolkien because we think of him today as this middle America apple pie and American flag figure, family figure, but he was a countercultural figure in the 1960s and the 1970s thinking about little people sitting in their little huts all day smoking. I mean, he was considered a rebel. I mean, these hobbits, they were considered rebels. So I just did a little bit of a reception history, which helped to explain to me the way the Jesus movement was very much countercultural, rebellious, but now is just mainstream baby boomer stuff.

Then the second one, which is perhaps more poignant, that is more the history of Richard Loveless, Tim’s incredibly influential professor at a Gordon Conwell. Loveless was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and it helped to give context for why his students felt that he was notoriously absent-minded and why he had just the wildest stories. I mean, we’re talking about getting fired from a church after showing inappropriate horror movies to students, having an alligator jump out of a church organ. I mean, just weird, weird stuff in there, but later on, one of Loveless’ sons wrote just a very painful, just account of the family’s struggles in there.

I can understand why it was cut, but I do think it’s just helpful to understand how complicated people are, and counselors know that full well, but young people setting out in ministry, I don’t think they do understand that. So when you think about Tim as a young professor, young student looking up to his professor, he learned so much from Richard Loveless, but really didn’t have much idea what he was really experiencing or going through. So it’s a good lesson for church leaders just to know you don’t usually know all that somebody is going through, and it’s good to have a posture of sympathy going into that and of curiosity to learn about that. So I had to cut the sections on Loveless and on Tolkien, but I may find other venues.

Alasdair Groves:

Well, I really hope you do because of exactly the lesson, I mean, hey, I would just be interested, but the lesson you’re saying is a profound one, and it all the more just encourages me of the mercy of God who can work through people who are not perfect. He doesn’t need a perfect Loveless, He doesn’t need a perfect Tolkien, He doesn’t need a perfect Keller to do His good work through us and each other. So Collin, thank you so, so much for giving us this time. Really, really appreciate it. May the Lord bless you as you continue to write and think and lead and grow.

Collin Hansen:

Oh, thanks so much, Alasdair.