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Tim Keller’s Neo-Calvinism
I was converted at age 20 through the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The book table of my InterVarsity group provided a good dose of British evangelical pietism. But also available were volumes from Francis Schaeffer as well as from an art professor at the Free University of Amsterdam.
In Schaeffer’s books, I saw the term “world-view” for the first time, but it was in reading Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture that I first realized different worldviews produced different art. I’d only thought of theology as something you believed to please God and relate to him—did it also change the way you did everything else in life? Rookmaaker’s answer was a thunderous yes.
Rookmaaker met Schaeffer in 1948, and his neo-Calvinistic views had a major influence on the American fundamentalist. In Switzerland, Schaeffer established L’Abri, an open Christian community that became a magnet for disaffected, spiritually doubting young adults. Rookmaaker was active in it and began his own L’Abri branch in the Netherlands. Reading these men’s books in my college years, I learned at least two tenets of neo-Calvinism:
1. “We should be orthodox, yet modern.” The world isn’t something from which we should withdraw. While remaining grounded in traditional, historic Christian doctrine, we should engage the modern world in its every aspect.
2. “Christianity is a world-and-life-view.” Christian beliefs constitute a worldview, a way to think about all of life and to be distinctive in our practices in each area—art, business, politics, civic life, family life, education, and so on. We should articulate those distinctive ways of thinking, speaking, and acting out in the world with non-Christians in our shared spheres and institutions.
Deeper into Neo-Calvinism
In fall 1972, I enrolled in Gordon-Conwell Seminary. There, especially under the teaching of the Swiss Reformed theologian Roger Nicole, I learned more about neo-Calvinism (including the actual name).
Nicole’s main assigned text in our theological courses was Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, which followed Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics closely. This theology assumed an epistemology that denied the possibility of value-free knowledge and that saw reason and reasoning based on a foundation of faith (as in Bavinck’s theology) rather than seeing faith based on a foundation of reason (as in Charles Hodge’s theology).
Nicole also required us to read Bavinck’s Doctrine of God—at that time the only part of the Dogmatics that was in English—and parts of Our Reasonable Faith, which was the title of an English translation of The Wonderful Works of God.
Through all this, I learned four other features of neo-Calvinism:
1. “Grace restores nature.” God’s redemptive plan isn’t only to save individual souls but to heal all sin’s results, all the ways evil has marred creation—spiritually, psychologically, socially, physically, and culturally. The goal of creation and of redemption is the same: to create a perfect material world filled with embodied souls who love one another because they love God and live for his glory. This cosmic view of salvation moves Christians not only to evangelize but to work on social evils and for justice.
2. “There is both an antithesis yet common grace.” Due to the noetic effects of sin (Rom. 1:18–32), people aren’t neutral and objective. Alternative worldviews differ from Christianity at their roots, and so there’s always a radical antithesis between the thought systems of the world and Christianity. But because of general revelation and common grace, many have wisdom from God that’s inconsistent with their worldview. Hence, we engage nonbelievers with both respect and critique, with neither angry denunciations nor compromise.
We engage nonbelievers with both respect and critique, with neither angry denunciations nor compromise.
3. “Christianity brings together head and heart.” The Christian approach to evangelism is neither mainly rationalistic nor simply declarative. Nonbelievers have a knowledge of God they suppress (Rom. 1:18–32). Evangelism points to the inconsistencies between their best intuitions and the rest of their worldview. It affirms their aspirations but redirects them to Christ, so they can bring their “head” (their professed beliefs) together with their heart.
4. “All Scripture points to Christ.” We should read the Bible not only synchronically in a topical, systematic-theological way (so the gospel is “God-Sin-Christ-Faith”) but also diachronically in a chronological, redemptive-historical way (so the gospel is also “Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration”). This shows how every intercanonical theme, traced out through redemptive history’s stages, finds its fulfillment in Christ.
Value of Denominational Tension
After graduating from Gordon-Conwell, I was ordained into the ministry of the newly established Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). There I began to learn not only that all Calvinists aren’t alike but that they often feared and disliked one another. This is in part due to three different impulses or emphases in their practice, which George Marsden names “doctrinalist,” “pietist,” and “culturalist.”
Despite the tension, there are advantages to being in a denomination like the PCA with strong representations of each of these “wings” of American Reformed Christianity. One can see each up close and therefore can better perceive its strengths and weaknesses. I came into the PCA while imbibing a mixture of pietism and neo-Calvinism. Early on, I was challenged by our doctrinalist wing to see I wasn’t sufficiently grounded in our confessional documents. That was a great help to me. I also got to hear the doctrinalist critique of both revivalism and neo-Calvinism.
Listening to well-intended critiques enabled me to better see neo-Calvinism’s shortcomings, at least as it takes shape in the United States. First, neo-Calvinism puts such a heavy emphasis on laypeople being salt and light out in the culture through their work that there was a de-emphasis on the importance of the local church and the ordained ministry. Young people aren’t challenged to consider gospel ministry as a vocation.
Second, the concept of “worldview” was often conceived in heavily cognitive terms—more as a set of bullet-point beliefs than an order of loves in the heart or a way of imagining the world.
Third, in line with this, neo-Calvinism projected an intellectual and philosophical view of the Christian life. On the one hand, it didn’t seem to offer much to Christians apart from highly educated professionals. On the other hand, it didn’t emphasize inward Christian experience, communion with God, formation through prayer, or the Spirit’s power.
Finally, neo-Calvinism in North America became identified with “cultural transformationism,” a movement that promised to “redeem” and transform culture radically. Some in the Christian Right movement in the United States invoked Abraham Kuyper for their power strategy of taking over the “high places of culture.” Others in neo-Calvinist circles wedded Christianity to left-wing political movements and became sympathetic to secular views of sexuality and gender. The doctrinalists’ concerns—that neo-Calvinists tended to compromise orthodoxy to “reach the culture”—did have some merit.
Theological Synthesis
Though I tend toward the culturalist emphasis, the tensions within the PCA encouraged me to draw generously from the pietist and doctrinalist arms of Reformed Christianity while shaping my pastoral ministry.
The tensions within the PCA encouraged me to draw generously from the pietist and doctrinalist arms of Reformed Christianity while shaping my pastoral ministry.
One great resource for me was the English Puritans, a group ignored or often criticized by neo-Calvinists. Several of them—particularly John Owen, Thomas Brooks, John Flavel, Stephen Charnock, and Richard Sibbes—have profoundly shaped my understanding and experience of communion with God and “spirituality” in general.
The pietist wing of the church introduced me to the revivalism of Jonathan Edwards and others. While I didn’t reject revivalism, the doctrinalist critique of it certainly modified how I applied the dynamics of spiritual renewal in my ministry.
My friend James Davison Hunter, in his book To Change the World, helped me see the reality and yet the complexity of cultural change agency. This enabled Redeemer to neither give up on cultural renewal nor to make triumphalist claims for fast or direct social change.
I’m a neo-Calvinist. But, as a close second, I’m also a revivalist-pietist-evangelist, and third, a doctrinalist who doesn’t want to jettison or water down or de-emphasize a single part of the Reformed faith as embodied in the our confessions. I’m so grateful for a denomination in which these three emphases—so often at odds—were nonetheless able to move me toward the ministry philosophy I found so durable and effective in Manhattan.
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