The first time I met him was in front of the post office on West 83rd Street. I was on the phone with my mother as I rounded the corner past the flower stand, past the Dominican bodega, and past the Hertz rental garage where cars exit at alarming speeds.
I noticed him initially because he matched the blue mailbox he was peering into, clad in an unseasonably heavy winter coat. I noticed his bald head, and then his glasses. His gloved hands deliberately delivering handwritten letters, one by one. My pulse quickened as I placed him — Timothy Keller. A name synonymous with Christian apologetics. A theological giant and New York City icon, a pillar of my own spiritual journey. The modern-day C. S. Lewis.
I walked past, wrestling with myself. It was the height of the Covid pandemic, and he’d been ill with pancreatic cancer, for which he was receiving brutal treatment. He wants his space, I thought. Let him be. Don’t make him uncomfortable or compromise his recovery. His car was parked on the side of the street with the door ajar, as if he’d only stopped for a moment.
A blessed counter-impulse stopped me in my tracks. This could be the only moment to tell him what he’s meant to you.
“Pastor Keller, hi,” I said as I turned, mindful to keep my distance, “I just wanted to thank you. Your work has changed my life.” He approached without a thought, seeing me. I had his full attention.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Grace Bydalek.”
“Bydalek,” he said, leaning in and cocking his head slightly, smirking. “Is that Polish?” We spoke on the sidewalk as my mother listened in. The moment became minutes. The car idling. The door ajar.
***
Though it was the first time I’d met him in person, I’d met him many times on the page. Keller had a rich, nuanced intellectual understanding of faith which he distilled from the pulpit into his signature three points every Sunday. With books such as Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical and the Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, he captured the urbanite heart in a singular way. He was rational. He was truthful. He was straight-up. New Yorkers liked that.
I liked that. I’d never encountered that sort of pastor until my friend Emily invited me to Questioning Christianity, a lecture series Tim gave in 2018. Instead of silencing or belittling the questioner, he created a forum specifically to honor and respect her. To Keller, sincere questioning wasn’t impetuous. It was a way to draw near to God. The God of Jacob is a wrestler, after all.
He spoke that night on finding meaning in life, comparing Christianity’s practical resources to those of other religious systems. He explained that while respected philosopher Thomas Nagel urged the atheist not to think too much about the universe in which he believes he lives, C. S. Lewis urges the Christian whose life is seemingly devoid of meaning to think more.
“Think, think, think, think, think!” he urged, speaking to my mind. “Think harder!”
So I did. I went to church. I joined a community group. I completed Keller’s Gotham Fellowship through Redeemer Presbyterian Church. I engaged with Judeo-Christian faith leaders. By the time he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020, I was a devotee, drinking his words — and the words of other theologians and philosophers — like water.
This diagnosis came only a month after he’d published a little book called “On Death,” which, in retrospect, makes me wonder what he knew. In “Growing my Faith in the Face of Death,” an article in the Atlantic, he wrote about his desperate questions to God, quoting the Psalms — “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”
It seemed to onlookers to be an immediate death sentence. But then, a miracle. He was given more time — two and a half precious years that allowed for me to become his student at Reformed Theological Seminary. It was, and will always be, a great honor of my life.
During the short time I was in class with him, he was visibly sick but sharp as ever. Kathy would frequently knock on his study door. “I’ve promised my wife,” he said with a smile, “that I will take breaks every hour.” Faithfully, he did.
At this time, I was in a particularly poignant (and self-imposed) spiritual battle. I never questioned the existence of God, or even my need for a savior. I did, however, question the necessity of Jesus Himself in the biblical narrative. If God’s grace was finger-painted all over the Tanakh well before Jesus’s coming, and David made reference to the presence of the Holy Spirit in Psalm 51:13, what was the true necessity of the New Testament? Why the Cross? Why Jesus?
Though these questions felt shameful to ask, he dealt with me patiently, inquiry by inquiry. “Grace, does that answer your question?”
“Just one more,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
He laughed freely and frequently. “Keep going. You’re asking the right ones.”
In the end, it wasn’t questioning that brought me back to the fold. Though Pastor Keller understood the necessity of a good intellectual wrestling match, he also knew that every skeptic reaches a point of surrender — the moment their hip is touched, and they realize who it is they’ve been fighting all along.
He constantly pointed toward that moment — the moment the truth of the gospel drops from head to heart. The personal renewal that transpires, by the grace of God, on the other side of questioning. The moment your sinfulness and God’s sacrifice on the Cross coincide.
He wrote about this moment in the Atlantic, too, as he reexamined his beliefs in the face of his fatal diagnosis. “Rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart.”
“For me as a Christian,” he wrote, “Jesus’s costly love, death, and resurrection had become not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day.”
He prayed this prayer: As I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.
Think, think, think, think, think, I can hear him say. Think harder about what that grace means for your life. I have seen this grace make cowards brave and grown men crumble.
***
It is no coincidence that Keller’s last sermon series published through the Gospel in Life podcast is about worldly encounters with the Living God.
I shudder to think what Pastor Keller is seeing now, what he saw at the moment he left his body. What was his first encounter with the Living God? Did he see white light? Did angels swarm his bedside? Were they beautiful? Was he terrified? Did they comfort him? When he ascended, did the courts roll out the red carpet for heaven’s VIP?
Of course they did.
On the day he died, Tim’s message dropped from my head to my heart: that future belongs to all who hold fast to the God of Jacob. Those who, through tears and gritted teeth, say, “I won’t let go until you bless me.”
When our work on earth is done, the skeptics, the cynics, and the wrestlers alike will follow Pastor Keller into glory.
GRACE BYDALEK is a writer, performer, and administrator based on the Upper West Side. She is a theater critic for the New York Sun and the director of the Dissident Project. @grace_daley
Published in The National Review on May 28th, 2023.