The Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally. Christians should think of how God rescued them. He did it not by taking power but by coming to earth, losing glory and power, serving and dying on a cross. How did Jesus save? Not with a sword but with nails in his hands.

Tim Keller, 2018

Tim Keller died of pancreatic cancer last Friday. He never lost his zeal for Christ and will leave a legacy both wide and deep.

Keller’s ministry reflected the nation that surrounded him. More apologist than pure evangelist, Keller planted a church that was faithful to the inerrant word of God and staunchly orthodox, even on culturally complicated things like sex and gender roles, in the heart of Gotham. Redeemer Presbyterian is a godly beachhead in a fallen city. To call it such suggests the degree to which America moved during Keller’s lifetime.

Keller’s death spawned a range of obituaries, but two merit special mention. Jonathan Rauch, a gay, atheistic Jew, recalls Keller’s willingness to have Zoom meetings during the pandemic. Keller entertained all questions, provided a godly, humble perspective, and never failed to examine his own assumptions, according to Rauch. Keller “did not give me faith, but he revived my faith in the power of faith,” Rauch writes. Keller’s spirit of grace is a constant theme throughout the reflections on his death.

Bethel McGrew was equally respectful of Keller’s orthodoxy. A committed Christian, McGrew used the bulk of her words to praise Keller’s faithful and profound influence, but she noted the complexity and controversy surrounding Keller’s ministry, especially as it touched on current political and social issues. Keller preached a Christianity that transcended the two-party system, arguing for a third way to engage society, one unbound by rigid ideological labels. Some conservative Christians, McGrew reflected, determined Keller’s “winsomeness” didn’t measure up to the cultural moment.

These Christians are convinced the world has moved so far beyond them that radical steps are required; old approaches like Keller’s are no longer relevant. Instead of winsomeness, a harder edge, something closer to combat, is demanded.

There are good reasons for Christians to weep at what we’ve become. Same-sex marriage is legal and increasingly popular, transgenderism has exploded, and the efforts to sexualize children in classrooms, on streaming platforms, and in toy aisles, is shocking. Drag queens are a topic of daily conversation, and pornography has been mainstreamed. Western culture struggles to define what is true, good, just, and beautiful, and efforts to embrace standards outside the sovereign self are often deemed oppressive and bigoted.

The world publicly despises God. Culture is detached from anything resembling a biblical understanding of sex, marriage, or morality. Sin, which has always been with us, is celebrated. Everywhere is the French Quarter and everyday is Fat Tuesday.

For Christians, this is traumatic, but we process the trauma differently. For some, it is depressing, a sign of things lost and never again to be found. Withdrawal from public life feels like the safest option for these people. They will tend their gardens, care for their families, and narrow their vision to things they can control. “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” is their refrain.

For others, the trauma is a source of anger; it has sparked a willingness to fight to protect and preserve. It is a call to arms, a channeling of Christ’s indignation, a search for another table to flip. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” they sing, marching to the cultural war.

These approaches, and the spectrum that exists between them, and the way they war within each of us, are understandable. After all, we are witnessing, in painful clarity, the end of Christendom. Our society, at one point, was held together by essentially Christian beliefs that influenced perceptions of politics, morality, the arts, business, community, and family. It was never close to perfect. That society papered over its sins, some of them grievous, but Christianity was, at minimum, owed deference, and, at maximum, was the foundation for reality. But Christendom is shattered. What began in Europe more than a century ago is now at our doorstep.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British television newsman and social critic. He converted later in life to Christianity and his entire worldview was transformed—as it should have been. Muggeridge, in 1978, delivered a lecture that was later published in a little booklet called The End of Christendom. His forecast from nearly a half-century ago was unquestionably right then, and events have only confirmed his hypothesis.

Muggeridge defines Christendom as “the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men.” Christendom was probably ushered in by Constantine in 313, when Rome began to tolerate and favor Christianity within the Empire. But by the twilight of the 20th Century, Christianity’s claim on western culture was no longer authoritative.

But as Muggeridge reminds us, the death of Christendom is not the death of Christianity. Our faith, the faith, will endure. God’s Kingdom does not rise or fall with Christendom. As he watched the decay of Rome, Augustine said, “All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them,” but the City of God, “which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting” will persist.

If we accept that Christendom has shriveled and died, we are left with the most important social question for Christians of the last five hundred years. As believers, what are we to do with a world that is slip-sliding away? I am not going to pretend to provide new and profound answers to this question. It has been asked and answered thousands of times throughout the history of the Church, but Tim Keller’s answer is worth consideration.

Keller engaged the world with grace and truth. Keller never shed his orthodoxy to curry favor with elites, but he did engage them. If your goal is to create a political movement, and provide followers a blueprint for influence or reclamation, Tim Keller was not your guy.

But if you want someone to reach Jonathan Rauch, a man seemingly designed to discard religion and its claims, Tim Keller was the right choice. Had Keller chosen the sharper path, the way of combat, he would never bother with someone like Rauch, or he would have poisoned the conversation with his prior public commitments.

To some degree, this is a question of how we portray ourselves to the world. Are we a political movement, complete with a legislative agenda and a posture toward culture to match, or are we becoming all things to all people so that we might win some?

I understand that we, as believers, can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can have a political agenda, on the one hand, and love our neighbors in a full and godly way, on the other. Put differently, we have political obligations that are publicly minded, but we are also privately engaged. Government is an agent of justice and we should push it to conform to godly standards, especially as we consider children in the womb and other vulnerable populations. This will require us to advocate for positions that are divisive because they challenge the prevailing culture. We should never apologize for standing for what is right and godly.

We also have private relationships. We are agents of love for our families, neighbors, and communities. We should work tirelessly to serve others and to reflect Christ as we do so. We can call for public justice and private love. Those are not contradictory and I think Scripture spells out both sets of obligations.

But we are foolish if we believe our behavior in one sphere has no bearing on our behavior in the other. The transformed Christian life defies compartmentalization. There must be coherence, or integrity, as we pursue the public and our neighbor. To FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT–either by word, deed, or disposition–in public, but to LOVE, LOVE, LOVE–either by word, deed, or disposition–in private seems, at best, difficult, and, at worst, impossible.

Tim Keller was a pastor and not a politician. He did not avoid politics. What he showed, I believe, was a model for politics that allowed him to be pastoral. This is good and it should encourage us as Christian citizens.

Godly politicians, or political operatives of any kind, are not pastors, but they should do politics in a way that allows them to be pastoral as they engage the world, their families, and their neighbors. This is good and it should encourage those fully within the political world.

Our politics in the age of the culture war is losing that pastoral sensibility. While we have political goals, they should be pursued in a manner that maximizes our witness. We should fight for justice, but how we fight matters. The world should see the full witness of Christ in public and in private. Those who criticize Keller’s methods as being out of step with our political reality–as a matter of pure politics–are probably right, but that was never Keller’s purpose.