Tim Keller’s Critique of Liberal Secularism
One spring day in 1970, a tall, slightly awkward undergraduate named Timothy Keller was standing with friends on the main quadrangle of Bucknell University’s campus in central Pennsylvania. Students were protesting in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings; they crowded onto the quad, half-listening to speakers who vied for the open mic. Keller, a new convert to Christianity and a religion major, ordinarily would have been busy with courses in existential philosophy, Buddhism, and biblical criticism. But at the moment, he and his friends in the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were trying to decide how to participate in this tense moment, when their peers were angry and probably not interested in talking about God.
They did not commandeer the microphone to rail at classmates about their sins; even single-minded evangelicals can read a room now and then. Instead, they set up a table nearby with a stack of Christian books and made a sign with bold lettering: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ Is Credible and Existentially Satisfying. “They didn’t get much of a response—mostly mocking and eye rolls,” Collin Hansen writes in his recent biography of Keller.
But some bystanders did bite: How could Jesus possibly be relevant when the world was on fire? Keller, manning the books table, was in his element, quietly suggesting
