What We Need From Pastor-apologists

In his lifetime, pastor Tim Keller was most often compared not to any pastor but instead to an academic and novelist, C. S. Lewis. It’s easy to see why––apart from Scripture, no one’s words showed up more in his talks and writings than Lewis’s. Both men had a knack for connecting with people’s hearts and minds. But unlike Lewis, who poured his apologetic genius into beloved novels like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, Keller stuck to nonfiction, sharing his insights through sermons and books.

If we’re looking for a closer match to Keller’s style, two earlier pastors come to mind: Augustine and Jonathan Edwards, both of whom deeply shaped Keller’s thinking.

Take Augustine’s idea of “disordered loves,” which Keller leaned into heavily in his book Counterfeit Gods. The idea is simple yet profound: When we love anything or anyone more than we love God, it throws our hearts out of balance. Only by putting God first can we love others and the world around us in a healthy way. Keller often pointed out that when we let something other than God define us, we end up hurting the people or things we cherish most. He had a saying that went something like this: “Show me what you daydream about, and I’ll show you what you think you can’t live without.” It’s a gentle but powerful way to get us thinking about our priorities.

Keller also drew inspiration from Edwards, a pastor who blended deep theology, heartfelt spiritual revival, and thoughtful engagement with culture. For Keller, the best, most biblical ministry weaves together these priorities. Without confessional theology, our apologetics has no stable grounding. Without spiritual revival, confessional theology becomes dead orthodoxy. And without cultural apologetics, our spiritual revival becomes easily co-opted by the predominant narratives of our time, such as (especially in our day) the primacy of the self.

What Augustine, Edwards, and Keller all shared was a passion for ministry that speaks to the whole person. Keller wasn’t afraid to reference modern cultural voices, but he always aimed to touch hearts while encouraging the church to live out its faith through good works that bless the people around us.

That’s the beauty of Keller’s example—he shows us that when our hands are busy serving others, these loving actions can soften hearts and open minds. That’s a challenge worth tackling today: to live out a faith that transforms not just how we think but how we love and serve. And as we consider the work of the pastor as apologist today, I want to offer six recommendations from Keller that can instruct us in this cultural moment.

1. Don’t neglect the ministry of good works.

For his doctor of ministry degree, Keller wrote what might be the longest dissertation in the history of Westminster Theological Seminary. He studied Thomas Chalmers and the Presbyterian diaconate of Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 19th century, along with similar Reformed works in Amsterdam and Geneva.

That’s a challenge worth tackling today: to live out a faith that transforms not just how we think but how we love and serve.

Based on this historic example, Redeemer Presbyterian Church launched Hope for New York in 1992 to mobilize funding and volunteers for organizations meeting the physical needs of the city. If the church didn’t do this work, Keller warned, they would deserve the city’s scorn. The world may not be accustomed to a church that cares just as much about expositional preaching as about justice for the poor. But at Redeemer, these goals would be theologically inseparable.

Keller insisted that genuine Christian faith affects every aspect of life, or else it’s not the best of biblical and historical Christianity. To stay faithful to the gospel, churches must break stereotypes, Keller argued in Center Church:

A missional church will be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional fundamentalist churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional liberal churches. This kind of church is profoundly counterintuitive to American observers, who are no longer able to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian West.

Jonathan Haidt, a friend to Keller and professor of social psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has been an atheist since his teenage years. He saw Christians as the enemy due to his perception of conflict between science and religion. So what lowered his hostility toward Christians? He began teaching at the University of Virginia and met Christian students who “radiated a kind of sweetness, a kind of warmth and gentleness and humility that [he] hadn’t seen before.” He visited evangelical churches for a class he taught on moral communities. Haidt says, “It was really beautiful, and it touched my heart. And when your heart is open, then your mind is open.”

This is the theme for a class I teach at Beeson Divinity School on cultural apologetics: “When your heart is open, then your mind is open.” And good works are one of the primary means God uses to open hearts.

2. Prioritize cultural apologetics.

Keller observed that we’re paying too much attention to politics and ephemeral events and not enough to the underlying conditions of our society, even our very civilization. Keller saw the great need in our day as producing the same kind of biblical/cultural synthesis that Augustine offered in City of God as Christians struggled to cope with the decline of the Roman Empire and took blame from pagans. Keller saw Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory as a good example, and also commended Tom Holland’s Dominion.

Keller observed that we’re paying too much attention to politics and ephemeral events and not enough to the underlying conditions of our society.

This approach is already bearing evangelistic fruit. Just consider three mid-career historians—Molly Worthen, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, and Nadya Williams—who have recently found Christ amid dissatisfaction with the academy.

Keller’s apologetic approach was eclectic. You can’t limit him to one school. He used evidential apologetics in The Reason for God in 2008. But by 2016, in his book Making Sense of God, he thought apologetics needs to begin further back in the conversation and proceed with fewer shared assumptions. He saw special promise in fantasy and science fiction such as Lewis’s Space Trilogy, which played a role in Worthen’s conversion. We’ve dedicated our new book to Keller for his example across the breadth of cultural apologetics.

3. Show how the Christian story subversively fulfills our culture’s narratives.

Apologetics often boils down to Christians saying, “You’re wrong and I’m right because I have the Bible.” I’ve graded many papers along these lines, and this approach isn’t especially effective among non-Christians. So instead, I teach subversive fulfillment, as it’s termed by Keller Center fellow Dan Strange. Or a slight variation on what Joshua Chatraw teaches as inside-out apologetics. Here’s how Chatraw describes the process in his chapter on Keller for The History of Apologetics:

1. Articulate late-modern cultural aspirations and values.

2. Affirm elements that overlap with Christianity.

3. Point out where the secular position is inconsistent, undermines its deepest aspiration, and is unlivable.

4. Explain how Christianity offers a more consistent, livable, and rational way to live.

If nothing else, this approach extends and deepens apologetic discussions instead of cornering them into warring camps.

4. Read Herman Bavinck.

“When it comes to theologians that contemporary church leaders should be reading, I don’t know of a more important one than Herman Bavinck.”

So Keller said in his endorsement of James Eglinton’s 2020 critical biography of Bavinck. Keller first read Bavinck more than 50 years ago in a class with Roger Nicole at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. But not much of Bavinck’s voluminous work has been translated until recent years. Today, we live in a renaissance of appreciation for this Dutch theologian who died in 1921.

Bavinck’s neo-Calvinist tradition is modern but orthodox, and this combination appealed to Keller, as it did in Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards. As an apologist, Keller began with the neo-Calvinist emphasis on common grace and the creation of human beings in God’s image. This means the desires of non-Christians can be good but still disordered by sin in our fallen world. As a result of original sin, our work and relationships and desires are fraught with tension and futility. Keller pointed out these contradictions within other views on their own merits without appealing right away to Christianity. Only then did he move toward resolution in the grace of God through the redemption of Jesus Christ. Subversive fulfillment is not merely tactical but theological.

5. Preach to evangelize and edify at the same time.

In Keller’s lifetime, seeker churches were the most popular ministry trend. Sunday mornings focused on non-Christians; preaching aimed at conversion by addressing relevant, practical topics. Church was designed to look like the rest of life, like a mall with its food court.

Redeemer eschewed those trends. As Kathy Keller said, you’ll find no dancing bears at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Yet Keller did labor as a pastor to make his sermons comprehensible to non-Christians. Keller believed that when you evangelize in your preaching through apologetics, you’re also addressing the questions your church members are silently asking.

One example was what Keller called “cultural narratives.” Late-modern Westerners string together a series of stories about justice, about happiness, about science, and the like. By naming and engaging these stories, we evangelize non-Christians so they realize only Jesus can meet their deepest longings. At the same time, however, we edify Christians so they can be sanctified and pursue holiness by living according to God’s story and not the world’s alternatives.

Keller engaged these narratives in “Ask Anything” Q&As when he was a young pastor in Hopewell, Virginia. If you didn’t know what to ask him, he provided sheets with dozens of questions he could answer—and was willing to stay as late as Kathy would allow on Sunday night. At Redeemer in the early years, he did this after the service. Michael Keller has picked up that practice for Lincoln Square. Look for more help on “cultural narratives” in early 2026 when The Keller Center releases a new video and group curriculum, Making Sense of Us.

6. Expect opposition even as we see salvation.

If everyone loves you, something is probably wrong. If everyone hates you, something is probably wrong. The Bible grounds our expectations for responses. The apostle John reminds us of Jesus’s words: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (16:33). Similarly, Peter said, “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Pet. 2:12).

If everyone loves you, something is probably wrong. If everyone hates you, something is probably wrong.

Apologetics isn’t about making the gospel easier to believe. It’s about clarifying the offense of the gospel so non-Christians confront Jesus’s words and not just our frail imitation.

Keller was often faulted for advancing a third way. He didn’t believe in compromise, however, or in Aristotle’s golden mean. He simply believed there’s more than one way to run from God. His pastoral apologetics was rooted in his other 2008 New York Times best-selling book, Prodigal God, as close as he came to an autobiography. You can run from God pursuing freedom. You can run from God in self-righteousness. And if you’re preaching the true gospel, both sides will probably give you grief. Jesus isn’t from this world. He doesn’t conform to our culture’s dominant dichotomies.

Grounded in the Gospel

Keller faced much criticism from other Christians as an apologist. Did he err in his apologetics and pastoral ministry by fronting evangelism as his goal? Should he have more aggressively denounced the moral evils of his city, such as abortion? Perhaps. Were the laudatory eulogies in mainstream media after Keller’s death a sign of his compromise? Or evidence of his good works and godly character?

With any historical figure, even Augustine and Edwards, it’s easy to pick apart what we may view as his errors. But it’s more helpful to appreciate and apply what we can to advance the gospel through effective apologetics in our own day. No matter the era, the biblical strategy for cultural change never really changes: We thank God for common grace as we trust in the gospel’s power to root out sin first personally and then corporately through conversions.