Beeson Podcast, Episode #641 Collin Hansen Feb. 14, 2023 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my go-host, Kristen Padilla. We have a good friend and favorite guest on the show today with an exciting new book we want to tell you all about. Kristen will introduce him in just a moment. Before she does though, let me make two brief announcements. First, our annual biblical studies will take place February 21-23 and will feature our recently retired professor of Old Testament, Dr. Ken Matthews. Dr. Matthews will speak about Pilgrimages of the Heart: The Lives of Israel’s Ancestors. Second, our annual Conger Lectures on Biblical Preaching will take place March 21-23. Dr. Scott Gibson of Baylor’s Truett Seminary will give those talks and will speak about the character of the preacher. All these lectures are free and open to the public. Find out more at BeesonDivinity.com/lectures. All right, Kristen, who do we have on the show with us today? >>Kristen Padilla: Well, as you said, we have our favorite guest and our most frequent quest, Collin Hanson. He is the Vice President for Content and Editor in Chief of The Gospel Coalition. He’s also the co-chair of our advisory board and he has started teaching an elective course during our inter-term which takes place in January for the last two years. So, welcome back, Collin, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Hanson: I’m so excited to be here. >>Kristen Padilla: As Doug mentioned, we’re here to talk to you about your new book called Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. But before we do, as I’ve said, you’ve been on the show ... hopefully our guests know you by now. So, I wonder if we can just start off with you giving us an update on your life and ministry. What’s new? >>Hanson: Oh, goodness. It has been wonderful to teach this class at Beeson my second time through, what a joy to interact with those students. There’s nothing like being at that whiteboard with those students and thinking about big ideas and how to translate the great stuff they’re learning in their classes, other classes on exegesis and doctrine and translate into their ministry. That’s been a ton of fun. I got three kids now. They’re eight, five, and one. And my wife, Lauren, is now a women’s minister at Iron City Church. Which has got a lot of wonderful Beeson students and graduates serving there. And she’s working with the new senior pastor, Isaac Adams, who is a good friend of ours. So, that’s probably the biggest change. And it’s been a really good one for our family. And hopefully for the church as well. >>Doug Sweeney: All right, let’s start talking about this big new book of yours, Collin, on Tim Keller. Let’s start with a question about why you decided to write the book. Obviously, Tim Keller is a very influential person; he’s important in your own life. But what is it that made you think, “I’m going to write my next book on Tim Keller?” And then if I could add just one little corollary question onto that – everybody is going to want to know – so, if it’s a book about Tim Keller and Collin and Tim Keller have been associated in The Gospel Coalition for awhile, etcetera ... I wonder if Tim Keller ever told Collin there’s rules, or I have to approve it? What was the relationship with Tim Keller like as you were getting into this? >>Hanson: Those are good questions from a historian. Because ultimately those will be important questions for anybody evaluating the work long term. Tim is a unique individual. As a pastor, as you guys know, in classes you don’t typically tell preachers to cite all of their sources. You’re not trying to hide anything, it’s just you don’t want to overwhelm listeners with this quote from this person and this book from this person, and this sermon that I heard from this person. There’s a lot of reasons not to do that. Tim breaks that mold. He is the most ... he refers to more sources than anybody else I’ve ever heard of in his preaching. And then if you really want to understand his books, you look at the footnotes. The footnotes are so extensive in there. So, he shows his work in ways that I don’t think is very common at all. Which helped contribute to the idea of he’s never explained his methodology before. He’s never explained how in the world do you take ... some of us have one person we look up to, maybe we have three ... Tim has like 50. It’s just a strange phenomenon. And somehow he pulls them all together and they somehow make sense when they come out with him. That also seems to be an interesting window into evangelical history. Because he pulls together the mid century British evangelical movement of Intervarsity, I think about John Stott, Lloyd Jones, and all that sort of group – C Stacey Woods, he gives you a window there. Then he jumps in and he’s a convert of the Jesus Movement. So, then you’ve got all of this stuff about Elizabeth Elliott, one of his professors there, you’ve got Ed Clowney, you’ve got the whole history of Westminster Seminary, the evangelical versus Reformed dynamic in that place, Urbana – that major movement. You jump ahead to, I mean, Urban Church planting, 9/11, I mean, on and on and on. It just felt to me a somebody who has studied and taught and written evangelical history for 20 years now, that Tim would be a unique opportunity to tell that story through his influences. Just imagining that you have in the Keller’s that ... CS Lewis, one of the last people he wrote before he died, was 13 year old Cathy Christie. Who would become Cathy Keller, Tim’s wife. And then Elizabeth Elliott would have been such a dramatic influence on their life. People just don’t know that as well. Or even know the back-story behind Tim’s younger brother dying of AIDS in 1998, and the whole AIDS crisis of the 80s and the 90s. Tim’s brother was gay. It just seemed that there were a lot of opportunity to use Tim Keller as a window into telling other stories. And hopefully that’s what people will get in the book. There was no way for me to be as close as I am to Tim and for him to be alive and for me not to be a practicing academic historian for me to try to attempt anything like a comprehensive critical biography. So, essentially the way that I thought about it was this would be like really good source material for anybody who wants to write about him in the future. They can make their own evaluations of him, but this is more or less the official explanation from him via my interpretation. It’s definitely my interpretation of him, but it’s checked with Tim. In other words, it’s like if I was really wrong about something, he didn’t tell me what to put in there, anything like that. But he did suggest a number of avenues of exploration. So, hopefully in the future when people look back they’ll say, “OH, that’s what Tim was thinking explicitly about something.” They don’t have to agree with him or me. But at least they’ll know what he was thinking. >>Doug Sweeney: So, did you interview him a fair amount? What was the process like? >>Hanson: I did. Yeah, so the interesting thing though about Tim, and I knew this, was that first of all he doesn’t like to talk about himself. He likes to talk about ideas. He likes to talk about other people. So, I expected that. So, the book is a book with Tim Keller’s name and face on the cover, which is about Barbara Boyd, the first staff member of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. I mean, it’s kind of odd that way. But that’s what it is because she taught him how to read the bible at Bear Trap Ranch, Colorado in 1970. So, things like that in there. So, essentially what I did is I went through all of his sermons, I went through all of his books, went through all of those footnotes, and I just went and saw who is he referencing? Oh, Barbara Boyd – he always talks about her Lordship talk. Always comes up in his sermons. What’s the story behind Barbara Boyd? That kind of thing. So, I did all of that. The big difference in this book is that I had cooperation from his family and friends. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else do that with Tim. And so talking to his only immediate family member who is still alive – his younger sister. She gives me the window into his home and his relationship with his mom. It’s not the story Tim would have told. But it’s the only other eye witness to that relationship in there. So, that has a lot of historical value, of course. And so I interviewed his best friend from seminary, Louis Midwood, who also sent me all these original documents from Ligonier Valley Study Center. She’s the one that gave probably the most significant historical artifact in there, which was the original issue of Table Talk Magazine that, of course, Ligonier is known for. But started as a student protest publication as a seminary student by Tim Keller and a group of his friends to condemn two of his New Testament professors as Nestorian heretics. I mean, try to piece that together. Classic Tim Keller writes an unnamed article called Hermeneutical Nestorianism. Which that same issue has the cover story ... is a treatment of Hardesty’s visit to Gordon Conwell. So, essentially it’s a first person front row seat to the birth of evangelical feminism and the reaction from none other than faculty member Elizabeth Elliott. Who then wrote Let Me Be A Woman, quoting Cathy Christie in that book. So, I did all of that work before I ever talked to Tim. And that turned out to work really well. Because Tim could comment on things that he wouldn’t necessarily have brought up himself. He might have just thought, eh, but all of a sudden, oh, well, now that I think about it ... I’ll put two and two together there. So, I did interview him for many hours. But it was largely after I had already established my basic framework based on his own writings, his sermons, his friends. I mean, I’ll give you one classic anecdote on here. So, I knew that when Tim and Cathy were graduating from Gordon Conwell they couldn’t get a job. Now in retrospect it makes a ton of sense, because the PCA was brand new. And RC Sproul had just convinced them to go into the PCA. They’re in New England. There’s no PCA churches in New England. So, they study for the civil service exam for the US Postal Service. That’s their plan before they end up going south. I talked to the Best Man at Tim and Cathy’s wedding. He was a best friend from college, from Bucknell, Bruce Anderson. And Bruce ... RC Sproul does the wedding as well ... I talked to Bruce and he says about the church, “They must have been desperate.” And I’m like, well yeah, the Keller’s, they didn’t have a job. Of course, when you take a three month job in Virginia. He’s like, “I wasn’t talking about the Keller’s. I was saying the church must have been desperate to have the Keller’s.” That’s just not how you’d think, but this is what happens when you’re talking to your best friend from college, who is like, “I don’t think they would have impressed anybody back then.” He was kind of nerdy. They’re just not the most likely to succeed in your seminary classroom in there. So, yeah, I mean, Tim’s not going to say that. But it sure gives you an interesting perspective on him to talk to that friend who was the guy who stood up next to you at your wedding. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, you’ve kind of already answered the question I had but perhaps you want to say more. What surprised you and what you think might surprise the readers who already feel like they know Tim Keller pretty well? Maybe they’ve read his books, they have listened to his sermons, they’ve gone to the conferences in which he has spoken? What would you say to that without giving away your whole book? >>Hanson: No, I got you. Well, I don’t think they probably know much about his actual life. He doesn’t talk about it. He’s not an autobiographical preacher. He doesn’t use a bunch of personal illustrations. So, that stands out as unique. So, you’ll hear, “Oh, he had a brother who died of AIDS, a brother who was gay.” Wait, did he do the funeral? Yes, he did the funeral in 1998 in Baltimore. Hmm, what did he preach? I’ll leave that one up to people to look at. I think that’s kind of the climax of the book is that sermon. I asked him for the sermon. He’s like, eh, I mean, I don’t know, it’s somewhere in storage. Thankfully, his assistant had the notes. (laughs) So, I don’t think anybody has ever seen that before. But everything that Tim Keller would go on to do ten years later makes a lot of sense when you understand that message. Just think about that for anybody listening. What does Tim Keller preach at his younger brother’s funeral. Put two and two together. I’ll give you a hint ... Well, when you jump ahead ten years later his assistant told me early on he’s never written an autobiography. But his book The Prodigal God is his autobiography. You’ll appreciate this at some level, Doug. The Keller’s are Lutherans, German Lutherans going all the way back to colonial America. His mother is a Neapolitan Catholic immigrant family, early 20th century. And so interestingly, there’s a lot of Lutheran history, classic mainline Lutheran history in there as well because as Tim went on he ... one year he’s got a classic confessional Lutheran pastor at their church who is teaching him, doing confirmation, teaching the catechisms, next year a brand new Gettysburg alum, doesn’t talk about theology at all, doesn’t talk about the bible at all, it’s all social activism in there. But what’s interesting is that what people will identify with Tim is he’s got a particularly Luther-esque conscience. And part of it is connected to his mom. Part of it is just himself. Oldest child, he was the oldest son and all that sort of stuff. You’ll see it there in the book, but it’s pretty clear. Not everybody has that kind of conscience. But there’s a lot of Luther type dynamics in kind of his understanding of grace and kind of how hard he was on himself as well, and difficulty and stuff understanding that. >>Doug Sweeney: So, we’ve already talked a little bit about how you approached this book by means of the influencers, by means of the people who played the biggest role in shaping Keller’s life and ministry and theology and so on. Is there a systematic way to make sense of why that set of people were the biggest influence on him? Or is he just sort of an eclectic guy who takes insight and influence where he can get it and there’s no kind of tight rhyme or reason to it? There’s no kind of system that’s there to be discovered as you look at all the influencers? >>Hanson: I do think there is. So, at his core, he is a mid century British evangelical. That’s bottom line. That’s who he is. And so what’s interesting, especially for you, Doug, is that when you look back, he has very few American influences. It’s pretty fascinating. He just doesn’t. So, Carl Henry, the entire American evangelical movement has very little influence on Tim Keller. He’s got no connections to Billy Graham, despite the fact that Billy Graham’s most famous crusade was in New York City – didn’t have any connection to that. New York City is always the place you go as an evangelist in America, right, for your big evangelistic event? That’s not an influence on Tim. No Billy Graham. They did overlap at Urbana, but nothing there. No Carl Henry. Keller wasn’t a huge advocate of the inerrancy battles. The fundamentalist modernist controversies, evolution, it just doesn’t play a big role in his ministry. So, when you look back it is very clear, it’s Stott that’s the closest recent parallel to him, very clearly. Edwards is the most significant American influence on him. But not in like a 20th century evangelical influence. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, and Edwards was a British subject. >>Hanson: Exactly. He was a British subject. I mean, even his most influential professors – Roger Nicole, not an American, a Swiss theologian there again. You can find some others like Loveless and whatnot. But Ockenga was his seminary president. But there’s no influence from Ockenga in there on him. So, just very clear. And this interesting. I don’t think a lot of people would naturally think of it this way, but it makes more sense ... he and Don Carson, who is Canadian, whose wife is from England, they started The Gospel Coalition after meeting at the EMA in England, at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly. And the whole thing was to pattern TJC off British evangelicalism mid century. Now, I wouldn’t say that’s how it’s always played out, but the other major influence in addition to that for Tim is Neo Calvinism. It’s [inaudible 00:18:17] late 19th, early 20th century theology, and that comes to him through Nicole. Now he definitely adds, well again it’s the Puritans, not Americans, again, in there. So, he really is a towering figure in American evangelical history who has very little connection to the broader American evangelical movement. >>Doug Sweeney: And don’t you make a case for CS Lewis being a big- >>Hanson: And CS Lewis with Edwards is his other major influence. So, again, it’s who you were reading in Intervarsity published books in the 1970s, wasn’t Americans, so part of what I adopt via Tim in the book is Mark Knowles’ interpretation of 20th century evangelical biblical scholarship. And namely that William Lane, who was one of Tim’s professors before he had a moral failing and left, first New Testament professor. William Lane was the first major American biblical commentator at a critical level basically since Machean. A massive gap of decades in there. That’s Knowles’ argument. And so you can see there that if you’re an especially academically inclined student at a place like Gordon Conwell in the 1970s, I mean, British authors are where you’re going. If you’re coming to faith in the Jesus Movement and you’re intellectually engaged, I mean, you’re looking to Rookmaker, you’re looking to Stott, Shaffer becomes something of an influence in Tim, but mostly through Sproul. But the Sproul influence is only insofar as Sproul was a countercultural figure in the 1970s. Once Sproul moves to Orlando, he’s not a major influence on Tim anymore. Clowney is really the only major, major American evangelical figure that was in Tim’s life. But yeah, Lewis is massive in Mere Christianity right off the bat. I mean, that’s a lot of people’s story. That was definitely Tim’s story. >>Kristen Padilla: I’ve heard you mention some names of women. So, what female influencers did Tim have? >>Hanson: Yep. Oh, tons. I mean, the biggest influence on him is Cathy. And I don’t say that as sort of an obligatory thing with mentioning the wife. They have a unique marriage. They have a unique partnership in ministry. Part of that is because they met at seminary. Part of that is because Cathy was an absolutely dynamo in ministry before she ever met Tim. There was a bit of a kind of Jesus Movement/Broadly Reformed revival in Pittsburgh that I write about in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, I’m blanking on the name, you’ll remember ... the Gurtsner. John Gurtsner and Sprouls. You get a lot of Edwards type of influence that’s coming in through them. So, Cathy was a part of that through Young Life, especially part of that movement. So, Cathy and John Guest makes an appearance in the book, the kind of revival Episcopal evangelist who is still alive. But he was doing rock concerts, all sorts of stuff. He identifies Cathy as the greatest youth organizer in western Pennsylvania. So, that’s Cathy before she ever meets Tim. Plus Tim says in The Reason For God, Cathy is the greatest influence because she introduces him to every other one of his influences. She’s the one who corresponded with CS Lewis as a pre teen. She’s the one who was Reformed and she was the one to read the Narnia books and got Tim reading those. She was the one into Reformed theology. She went to Gordon Conwell reformed, he did not. He was a Methodist, like a holiness tradition at the time through his mom. So, Cathy is the biggest influence by far. Then you add Barbara Boyd in there, first female staff member for Intervarsity. Taught him the inductive bible study method, more or less. Elizabeth Elliott, huge influence there. Primarily in her calls to a radical submission to God and to His will, which is what she was also ... she was the first female key note speaker at the Urbana conferences. And so that was a major influence as well. Tim and Cathy went in ’76. I think she did her first message in ’73 there as well. So, I could keep going on in there, but those are really the major influences. And I mean, Tim’s dad was a kind of ghost, is how a lot of people would describe him. He worked a lot. He’d be in a room but he was completely silent. His mom was dominant. And so that’s a major influence there. Not always in positive ways. >>Doug Sweeney: Can we talk just a minute or two about influences on the formation of Redeemer in New York? Kristen provided this in my notes. I think it’s just fascinating. It’s a quotation from the beginning of your book, “When Tim Keller started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989, he deliberately avoided publicizing the church, especially to other Christians.” That’s a pretty striking statement. Why? >>Hanson: Yeah. So, as you would know better, Doug, I went back and I studied late 19th, early 20th century New York evangelicalism and more or less you’ve got 19th century New York is the Protestant evangelical capital of the country. The 758 revivals of course, Moody. I mean Sunday. You can go on and on and on throughout that. By the time you get to the early 20th century, the upper east side of Manhattan, 25% are regular church-going evangelicals. Well, the liberal evangelical movement sweeps in. Immigration becomes a massive force. Both from the south as well as from Europe. Especially southern and eastern Europe. And that protestant establishment is broken up. By the time you get that post war period in the 1970s, 1980s basically there’s four evangelical churches that I could identify in Manhattan. I mean, if you were young and you were part of the yuppie generation or whatever, you’re in Manhattan, it’s like four. And we could ... I mean, some significant figures, Gordon MacDonald was one of those pastors, Martin Mintz was one of those pastors, as well. Some pretty strong leaders there. But four. The task was such that there really weren’t many evangelical Christians that you could pull from other churches to begin with. But second, the mission was very clearly to reach secular people. It was very much that. And I think the thought was we’ll take money from the South (laughs) but it’s not going to help us to do publicity up there. The biggest thing people talked to me about was that in New York at the time, if you went to an evangelical church, it did not feel like New York at all. It would feel like an evangelical church from some other part of the country. What was different about Redeemer is that it was the first church for people in that era, people from New York, living in New York, who loved being in New York, felt like, oh, this feels like a church for here. Yes, they have all of these evangelical beliefs, but it fits here. Now we take that kind of contextualization for granted, but that was the Luzon movement, that was Harvey Con, it was a relatively recent concept of bringing missiology into the [inaudible 00:25:22] Leslie Newbigen. Tim was on the cutting edge of all of that. And so the publicity, it just was like, there are not enough people and we’re not trying to build a church for Birmingham, Alabama in New York. We’re trying to build a New York church as contextualized for people there who don’t know Jesus. >>Kristen Padilla: Some of our listeners may be wondering, Collin, if the event of 9/11 factors into the book in any way. >>Hanson: Yeah, it’s a major turning point in there. The church did not suffer a tremendous number of personal losses. I think maybe three members died or something like that. It was a large church at the time. But what did change is that it was the only congregation in Manhattan that saw a huge surge, like 1,000+ new people and some 800 of them stayed. They added a whole other service that day, September 16th, 2001. So, it was the only church that ... I mean, a lot of people ... they had a lot of people that Sunday, but they just didn’t stay. And the church, it was overwhelmed. More than a million dollars came in from Christians from across the country and around the world to support them. They had no structures to be able to figure out how to distribute that. Tim’s academic specialty, by the way, is the Presbyterian diaconate. It’s what he did his academic work on, and a DMin at Westminster, apparently the longest DMin dissertation in history. He looked at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Geneva, the diaconates there. Mercy Ministry. So, you’d think they would have been equipped to do this, but it was just overwhelming. The trauma was far beyond anybody’s understanding. Yet at the same ... in fact, a pastor from Oklahoma City called Tim and said, “Hey, we just went through the federal bombing, you don’t know what you’re in for here.” But at the same time there was a strong sense among the leadership that because Redeemer struck such a significant note of STAY. The connection I draw in the book is to Rodney Stark’s, “The Rise of Christianity, 1998.” Tim had been teaching through it about the urbanization of Christianity. A key takeaway was that in the pandemic, in the typhoid or whatever the people were experiencing back then, the Christians stayed. That was the illustration that he used for New York. Well, 9/11, the message was STAY. I’ve had people say that was a major factor in why New York did not collapse, was Redeemer’s influence of encouraging people to stay and not flee the city. We take that for granted now, but it was a heavy cost. I talked to people like [inaudible 00:28:01] who was an elder at the church at the time, or right before then. He was downtown, I mean, he lived downtown. These people couldn’t go to their homes for months, if not longer after that. And it was just devastating. Tim also had his first major health bout. Cathy had a huge health problem at the time. He didn’t think he was going to survive that ministry. The crazy thing is ... 9/11 is still seven years before Tim has his first bestselling book. Most people still have no idea who Tim Keller is in 2001. And maybe never would have. But they made it through that. It was a tough time. >>Doug Sweeney: I’ve known you a long time, Collin. And you and Tim Keller have this in common. Neither one of you likes to talk a lot about yourself. You spend a lot of your time shining a light on other people, writing about other people, talking about other people. But I want to ask you a personal question. I know that you have great admiration for Tim Keller. You’ve written a great book. It’s critically sound. Your admiration hasn’t gotten in the way of doing a good job. Could you share with us just a little bit ... I don’t want to make you feel awkward about it, but just a little bit about the influence that Tim Keller has had on you and the way in which your appreciation for him and his ministry has been a blessing in your life? And maybe even affected the way you wrote about him in the book? >>Hanson: Yeah, so I had a bit of a scary moment when I started the intense research and writing on the project. I thought, oh boy, how much do I really know? (laughs) I mean, I’ve been working with leading church figures for my whole career, in fact much of my career has been as the news editor of Christianity Today Magazine where my job was covering a lot of the difficult stuff. So, I kind of feel like I’ve had a front row seat to a lot of difficult things. And I just had a moment of, oh, I don’t know what I’m going to find. I just don’t know what ... I had the same thought of like, am I going to find something that I’m going to write about and somebody is going to say, “You can’t write about that?” And there was a recent biography that I looked at and found out that the ministry and the writer were told you can’t say anything negative or critical. I mean, I just ... I didn’t want to do that. There was a moment in an interview with Catherine Allsdorf, she came to Christ at the church in the 1990s, wrote a book on faith and work with Tim. She was the leader of the Redeemer Center for Faith and Work. And I had this experience fairly often. Somebody would look at me and they would be crying of how grateful they were for Tim. I mean, it was just genuine appreciation. And then they’d see me taking notes and they’d say, “But don’t you dare make him out to be a saint.” (laughs) He was such a bad leader at this time, or something like that. And I’ve worked with Tim for a long time. And I recognized a lot of the same emotions in myself of like, I have a tremendous amount of affection and appreciation for him. But I also know he’s not a very good administrator. (laughs) He’s not a very careful attentive kind of leader. And so I thought, oh, well, if that’s the worst I’m going to be dealing with here, then I can handle that. And I could handle it in part because he’s pretty open about saying, I’m a people pleaser, I like to be liked, I don’t like conflict. It was just helpful to know that. And so oddly enough, I’m hoping that with the book, just like with my own experience with him, that the more you’re honest about your sins and your persistent shortcomings, that it doesn’t make people more skeptical of you. It actually engenders trust because we know ourselves, we know our own hearts, and we know others, and nobody has it all figured out. Nobody is good at everything. It wouldn’t be fair if Tim Keller could remember all of this stuff and write all of this stuff and also be an amazing manager of a huge complex mega church staff that’s always turning over in New York City. That doesn’t make any sense. I think it’s hopefully helpful to me and to other people to say, he wasn’t good at everything. You can’t pull this off. You can’t be meeting with skeptics all the time and be an attentive dad and be an awesome husband and preach amazing messages and write three books. You can’t do that. It’s not possible. And Tim was also somebody who worked 90 to 100 hours every week. That’s not sustainable. It’s not good. And people can read about Hopewell, Virginia and they can be like, whoa, that’s real pastoral ministry. Yeah, and it burned him out in nine years. I mean, he went to Westminster, took two jobs, two part time jobs that were both full time and said that it felt like a vacation. A sabbatical. Compared to being a pastor. And so I think what it meant for me, it was just like I think it’s helpful to look at somebody like this and say, okay, he doesn’t have it figured out. I can learn some things from him, and I can grab some things I want to do from him, things I don’t want to do from him, and that’s what he did with everybody else, too. (laughs) That’s what he did with all his influences. I like this. I don’t like this. I think that’s the best tribute to Tim. Don’t just do everything he did. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, congratulations on your new book, which happened to release today, the day that we’re recording this interview. I know that this will air a week later. It’s still new – “Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.” You can find it on Amazon. So, congratulations on this new book. We commend it to our audience. We always like to end these shows, as you know, by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching them these days that would serve as a word of encouragement, or even a word of challenge to us as we close out the show. >>Hanson: I think I’d probably just continue the point that I was just making there. I think a lot of us enjoy biographies and just ... I mean, I think about the Old Testament and I think about how flawed, deeply flawed every single one of those tremendous saints is. And it just helps you to see that simultaneously sinner and justified dynamic ... clearly New Testament and from Luther’s theology it becomes a tremendous encouragement to me in my sanctification. I think it’s so helpful when you have books that illumine the good and the bad and the challenging. Because it gives us that realistic assessment. And I just love that about God and about the bible. It’s nothing if not realistic. Man ... but always hopeful in the end. And so that’s kind of the attitude that I like to adopt and [inaudible 00:35:01] others. Yeah, pretty realistic, but in the end, thanks to Jesus, hopeful. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s great, Collin. Thank you for another wonderful book. You have been listening to Collin Hanson. He serves as the Vice President for Content and Editor in Chief of The Gospel Coalition. I am proud to say that he serves as the co-chairman of the advisory board here at Beeson Divinity School, and is a regular adjunct prof for us, one of the most popular professors here at Beeson Divinity School. He’s a good friend of mine and of Kristen’s as well. Thanks, Collin, for your time. Great to have you. >>Hanson: Thanks, guys. Couldn’t think of a better place to celebrate the launch. Thanks, guys. >>Doug Sweeney? Goodbye listeners, we love you! We’ll say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.