Review: Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel By Matt Smethurst

by on November 6, 2025 | Comment

Crossway’s series about famous theologians on the Christian life has covered centuries of church history to help us see how some of the church’s brightest lights have offered insight about how to live faithfully and be well-equipped before the Lord. In this series’ newest installment, Matt Smethurst expounds on Tim Keller’s contributions concerning how the gospel transforms our lives as we walk with God.

Tim Keller (1950–2023) is most well known for being the long-time church planter and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He also pastored previously in rural Virginia, taught seminary courses at Westminster Theological Seminary, helped found The Gospel Coalition, and later became closely tied with church planting endeavors as well as a prolific writing output. He was linked to the resurgence of Neo-Calvinism, particularly in his approach to engaging the culture. Some of his views and approaches stirred controversy within evangelicalism and especially among his fellow Presbyterians.

Given Keller’s notoriety and the tendency to associate him with some intramural Reformed debates about ministry philosophy, the standout feature of this book is rather striking. Smethurst covers the ground of Keller’s approach to the Christian life, painting a portrait that turns out to be rather . . . plain. Now, this plainness is not about Smethurst’s writing or anything like that. Simply, the emphases catalogued in this book are far from lightning rod issues for controversy or disagreement. The topics and conclusions that Keller advocated on these issues, by and large, are rather ordinary fare.

Perhaps this feature of the book has a lesson to teach us. We need not think of others only in terms of our disagreements with them. Smethurst mined the expanse of Keller’s sources and came away with relatively unexotic but agreeable presentations of how Keller advocated for normal practices and preached unto comfort and help in the Christian life. It would be easy for many to approach the sources left by someone with whom they disagreed about various matters and focus on what may be fringe emphases rather than the steady core of someone’s thought.

This book contains some tremendous research. Smethurst is a pastor and also co-hosts the excellent podcast The Everyday Pastor with Ligon Duncan, which is a resource that pastors reading this may well appreciate as a source of wisdom in practical matters of ministry. Smethurst has combed through mountains of Keller’s sources to pull together these summaries of Keller’s teaching on the issues. He consults not only the obvious places, such as Keller’s published writings, but also stacks of conference messages and decades of sermons. Readers can easily get a sense of immersion (which Smethurst, as a Baptist, may well want!) into the full corpus and expansive teaching ministry that Keller left behind.

Smethurst notes that this work is not an analysis of Keller’s thought but a distillation of Keller’s best insights on this topic. Even that aim, however, is analytical in that Smethurst had to make qualitative judgments about all the material that he studied in Keller’s sources to decide what constitutes the “best” among that teaching. In this respect, the lack of relatively distinct elements of Keller’s thought on the Christian life might owe to the author’s judgment call. Certainly, Smethurst has done his due diligence in sifting through the sources in depth. We might also wonder if the same topics would have risen to the top, lacking any edgier aspects of Keller’s thought, had someone else compiled what they considered the “best” part of Keller’s teaching.

Either way, this book is an enriching guide into themes about the Christian life that sounded throughout Tim Keller’s ministry. It is not simply a digest of Keller’s thought. At times, Smethurst moves away from a description of Keller’s own thought to present biblical support or practical elaboration concerning the theme taken from Keller. This approach makes this book helpful as more than an anthology of Keller’s thought. Often, the practical elaboration takes its lead from Keller’s own starting point. In some cases, however, I wondered if even this feature might be livelier and more interesting if we had gotten the exegetical support that Keller offered for these principles.

This book is one take on the legacy of Tim Keller’s ministry. It is an important one for the confessionally Reformed to consider. Many discussions about Keller war over whether his ministry philosophy was tremendous or harmful. Smethurst’s book presents Tim Keller as a fairly vanilla Reformed, redemptive-historical preacher with emphases on how the gospel comes to bear on our personal life and the life of the church. Others may have more to say about what Keller brought to the table. This book, however, suggests an alternative starting point that the most defining features of Keller’s ministry were typically Reformed and very pastoral.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

Matt Smethurst, Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel (Crossway, 2025).

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