Sermon Steward.
Archive Overview Theological Fingerprint Rhetorical Profile Illustration Arsenal Intellectual Lineage BT Moves Key Claims Corpus Table
Archive analysis · Back to profile

Tim Keller

Senior Pastor · Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City · 1950–2023 · Founded Redeemer 1989

PCA Gospel-Centered Apologetic Canonical Redemptive-Historical Cultural Engagement Manhattan Context
23
Sermons Indexed
Soteriology
Top Doctrinal Locus
3.8
Illus. per Sermon
97
BT Move Instances
C.S. Lewis
Most Cited (23×)
01 — Archive Overview

23 sermons.
775 decomposed units.

23
Total Sermons
775
Rhetorical Units
87
Illustrations
91%
Expository Rate

Sermon Type Breakdown

Expository
21 · 91%
Topical
1 · 5%
Textual
1 · 4%
Corpus Note

Keller's commitment to expository preaching is near-absolute. Even his "Objections to Christianity" apologetic series treats specific biblical texts as the ground to stand on — he never abandons the text for a lecture platform. The singular textual sermon on 1 Peter 1 approaches the category line but keeps the text primary.

Series Distribution

Objections to Christianity
4
Ephesians: Who is the Church?
3
Savior and Teacher (Matthew)
3
The Gospel Goods
2
The Psalms
2
Vision of Redeemer
1
The Church
1
Love Series (1 Cor. 13)
1
Standalone
6
02 — Theological Fingerprint

What Keller's corpus
obsesses over.

Doctrinal Loci — Primary

Soteriology
179
Christology
160
Hamartiology
145
Sanctification
107
Anthropology
99
Theology Proper
72
Ethics / Moral Theology
68
Eschatology
52
Bibliology
47
Ecclesiology
44

Doctrinal Loci — Secondary

Providence / Sovereignty
29
Pastoral Theology
28
Spiritual Warfare
18
Doxology / Worship
17
Pneumatology
15
Covenant Theology
5
The Keller Signature

Soteriology leads — but not by the typical margin. The near-equal weight of Christology and Hamartiology reflects Keller's approach: sin is always diagnosed before grace is applied, and grace is always anchored in the person of Christ. Anthropology ranking #5 (unusual) reveals his consistent diagnosis of secular identity formation — he's as interested in how people construct selfhood as in how they're redeemed.

03 — Rhetorical Profile

How Keller structures
the sermon itself.

Unit Function Distribution

Theological Claim
240
Exposition
210
Transition
90
Illustration
87
Application
72
Introduction
27
Prayer
23
Conclusion
13
Pastoral Aside
13
Structural Note

Theological Claims lead exposition units 240 to 210 — reversed from most expository preachers, where textual exposition precedes doctrinal assertion. Keller often makes the theological claim first, then grounds it exegetically. This is the "argument then text" move characteristic of his apologetic method.

Tone Distribution

Pastoral
23 sermons
Didactic
23 sermons
Prophetic
7 sermons
Polemic
4 sermons
Celebratory
3 sermons

Hermeneutical Method

Canonical
100%
Grammatical-Historical
87%
Redemptive-Historical
78%
Applicatory
65%

Rhetorical Register

Distribution across 775 units.

Logos · dominant Pathos · moderate Ethos · via citation Narrative · sustained
The Dual Tone

Every single sermon registers both Pastoral and Didactic simultaneously — not a single outlier. This is Keller's hallmark: he never teaches without pastoring, never pastors without teaching. The Manhattan congregation demanded intellectual rigor; the gospel demanded pastoral warmth. He never chose between them.

04 — Illustration Arsenal

87 illustrations from
23 sermons.

Cultural Reference
24 · 28%
Historical Example
20 · 23%
Hypothetical
18 · 21%
Personal Story
17 · 20%
Analogy
8 · 9%
Illustration Profile

Cultural reference leads at 28% — the inverse of most evangelical preachers, where personal story dominates. Keller's Manhattan context produced a distinct hermeneutic: the secular world's films, novels, and philosophers become unwitting witnesses to the gospel's truth. Personal stories (20%) are notably low for a major preacher, consistent with his stated philosophy that the sermon's authority should not rest on the preacher's biography.

Personal Story
A college freshman who had given up her faith "around Thanksgiving" — she cited intellectual objections, but a minister's questions revealed she had moved in with a boyfriend that same semester. Keller's point: irreligion and skepticism can themselves be fig leaves, covering not philosophical conviction but the desire to escape the gaze of God. Her arguments were real, but they were also serving a function.
Nakedness & the Holiness of God · Genesis 3:7–13
Cultural Reference
Draws on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents — the original German title uses "Unbehagen" (deep unease, malaise) rather than mere "discontent." Freud argued that civilization's price is pervasive guilt: the ego must repress its egocentric desires, producing a life-pervading anxiety. "Freud believed our lives were pervaded with guilt… we feel uneasy about ourselves, we feel uneasy about life." Used to ground the gospel's address to universal condemnation.
Reconciled and at Peace · Hebrews 9:11–14
Hypothetical
Develops the scenario of a judge who has one son — a murderer and fugitive who shows up at her door asking to be hidden. On one hand: a mother's love is strongest when a child is in trouble. On the other: "I'm a judge. I cannot take you… I stand for the law. I uphold the law." The hypothetical holds subjective revulsion and legal barrier in tension simultaneously — the exact double problem the atonement resolves.
Reconciled and at Peace · Hebrews 9:11–14
Personal Story
A physically beautiful woman in Keller's Virginia congregation had been taught from childhood that her looks were her "calling card" — and could not shake the internal voice: "you better go with him honey because if you don't have a man who loves you you're nothing." A counselor told her to build a career instead; Keller pointed to Colossians 3:3 — "your life is hid with God in Christ." Two months later, transformed: "You're not my life. Christ is my life."
Nakedness & the Holiness of God · Genesis 3:7–13
Cultural Reference
Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of "The Look" from Being and Nothingness: to be seen by another is to be turned into an object, diminished, dehumanized. Sartre applied this to God — "because God can see me and I can't see him, I am dehumanized." Keller uses Sartre as the secular world's own witness to the terror of God's holiness when sin has not been dealt with, then pivots: in Christ, God's gaze becomes acceptance, not exposure.
Nakedness & the Holiness of God · Genesis 3:7–13
Historical Example
Early Christians in the Antonine Plague: "Most Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and only thinking of others. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attended to their every need… many departed their life serenely happy." Contrasted with contemporaries who abandoned the dying and threw the half-dead into the streets. Used to demonstrate how eschatological hope produces this-worldly fearlessness.
Healing the Sick · Matthew 8:5–17
Hypothetical
The divorce law thought experiment: Richard Rorty says keep religion out of public discourse — but divorce law depends on the purpose of marriage, which depends on views of human flourishing, which are rooted in deep metaphysical commitments. "If you say, keep your religion out of the public realm, what you really are meaning is, my Enlightenment Western individualistic faith assumptions about human nature are privileged over yours." The secular is never value-neutral.
Exclusivity: How Can There Be Just One True Religion? · 1 John 4:1–10
Analogy
Uses addiction to map the dynamics of sin: disintegration (you need more for less satisfaction), isolation (you have to lie, defend, blame others), and denial (increasingly out of touch with reality). "Everybody in this room says, I know. First hand or second hand, at the most third hand, the devastation of those poor people who get addicted to substances." The punchline: this is every human heart's relationship to any idol — not just substances.
Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an Angry Judge? · Luke 16:19–31
Personal Story
Peter Kreeft's neighbor — a woman who had resolved her fear of death through secular "death is natural" philosophy — tells her seven-year-old son whose cousin has just died: "Your cousin has gone back to the earth… when you see the earth putting forth new flowers next spring, you can know that your cousin's life is fertilizing those flowers." The boy screamed, "I don't want him to be a fertilizer!" and ran out. The natural human intuition: death is not natural. It's an intrusion.
Hope in the Face of Death · 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
Analogy
Every person who sits on their porch after a relational rupture and says "they started it — I shouldn't have to go to them first" is mirrored by the other party on their porch saying the exact same thing. "The whole world is sinking into hell because everybody's sitting on their porch waiting for the other person to make the first move." The prodigal's father does the opposite — he runs. He doesn't wait. Used to illuminate the scandal of divine initiative.
And Kissed Him · Luke 15:11–24
Cultural Reference
Aldous Huxley from Ends and Means: "I realize I didn't want there to be a God. I wanted atheism to be true. I wanted life to be meaningless because then I could do whatever I wanted." Keller deploys this as the secular world's most honest witness — Huxley's confession that atheism often functions not as the conclusion of dispassionate inquiry but as moral liberation. The intellectual objection and the moral desire are not always separable.
Out of Egypt · Matthew 2:13–23
Historical Example
Albert Camus on the cross: "Christ, the God-man, suffers too. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important because the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death." Camus — atheist, existentialist — identifies the crucifixion as the moment that changes the problem of suffering philosophically. Used to show the cross is where atheism's best objection runs aground.
Suffering: If God Is Good, Why Is There So Much Evil? · 1 Peter 1:3–12
05 — Intellectual Lineage

The tradition Keller
draws from — and argues with.

C.S. Lewis 23× Augustine 6× Jean-Paul Sartre 3× B.B. Warfield 2× Martin Luther 2× Dietrich Bonhoeffer 2× Jonathan Edwards 2× John Stott 2× George Herbert 2× Aldous Huxley 1× Albert Camus 1× Françoise Sagan 1× William Shakespeare 1× Sigmund Freud 1× Dick Lucas 1× Bill Murray 1×
"The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it… Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him and with Him, everything else thrown in."
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
"So you say a man has murdered someone. Well, what was his motive?… Every man who commits murder does so because he loves something, because he loves something too much. And that is the motive for his crime."
Augustine
Confessions
"What does ambition seek except honor and glory? But only you, Lord, have a glory forever that can never be lost… Thus the soul commits adultery whenever it turns from you and seeks these things that it cannot find except in you."
Augustine
Confessions
"You cannot go on explaining away forever, or you will find that you have explained your own explanation itself away… A wholly transparent world would be an invisible world. And to see through everything would be the same as not to see."
C.S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man
"Work hard on the disappointment, which is certainly coming to him, during his first weeks of church… all good things happen slowly… he refuses to carry them by their mere affections and habits to any of the goals which he sets before them."
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters
"because God can see me and I can't see him, I am dehumanized."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness · via Keller
"Christ, the God-man, suffers too. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important because the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege."
Albert Camus
Referenced in sermon on suffering
"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all."
William Shakespeare
Hamlet · Nakedness & the Holiness of God
"The number of the miracles Jesus Christ did may easily be underrated. It has been said that, in effect, he banished disease and death from Palestine for three years."
B.B. Warfield
The Emotional Life of Our Lord
"What if God didn't give us a watertight argument for his existence but a watertight person, Jesus Christ, against whom in the end there can be no argument?"
Dick Lucas
Healing the Sick · Matthew 8
"I realize I didn't want there to be a God. I wanted atheism to be true. I wanted life to be meaningless because then I could do whatever I wanted."
Aldous Huxley
Ends and Means
"dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria"
Bill Murray
Ghostbusters · used to illustrate the scandal of religious pluralism
Top Scripture Cross-References
Ephesians 6:4 4× 1 Thess. 4:13 4× Luke 15:20 4× Isaiah 53:5 3× Acts 17:16 3× Romans 3:25 3× Genesis 3:9 3× 1 John 4:1 3× John 11 3× Ephesians 6:14 3× Matthew 18 3× Luke 16:19–31 3× Luke 15:12 3× Isaiah 54:1 3× Genesis 3:7 3×
Intellectual Lineage Note

C.S. Lewis appears 23 times — more than all other external sources combined. This is not incidental. Keller uses Lewis as a culturally legible bridge: a literary giant, a former atheist, a philosopher comfortable in secular idiom who nonetheless reached orthodox Christianity. The second most cited figure is Augustine, whose analysis of disordered love in Confessions undergirds Keller's entire doctrine of idolatry. Unusually, Sartre, Camus, Huxley, and Freud appear as witnesses — not enemies. Keller's practice: let the secular world's most honest thinkers testify against their own system.

06 — Biblical-Theological Moves

How Keller connects every text
to the whole-Bible narrative.

BT Move Type Distribution

Fulfillment
32
Typology
25
Contrast
12
Thematic Thread
9
Intertextual Echo
7
Narrative Arc
6
Progressive Revelation
6

What This Reveals

Fulfillment dominates (33%) — Keller's reflexive move is to show how a text, figure, or theme finds its completion in Christ. This is not a Christo-centric add-on; it is the structural argument. Every passage is preached as pointing to something it cannot itself supply.

Typology ranks second (26%) — Keller reads Old Testament persons and institutions as patterns that anticipate Christ's person and work. The Ethiopian eunuch, the Passover lamb, the temple priesthood: all rehearsals for what was to come.

Contrast appears third (12%): a move where the text's situation is inverted by the gospel. The Prodigal's shame becomes the father's running embrace. The slave becomes a son. The condemned becomes the justified. This is the "gospel reversal" move — the last thing you expect the text to do.

The Gospel Third

Keller's distinctive: every sermon concludes with explicit gospel application regardless of the text. A sermon on work ends in Christ's labor. A sermon on idolatry ends at the cross. The BT moves are the mechanism — fulfillment and typology are the structural devices that make the pivot unavoidable.

07 — Key Theological Claims

15 claims from
the theological archive.

"At the root of almost all human behavior is the desperate desire to cover our nakedness — to hide our sense of unacceptability because we believe it's the only way we can be loved."
Theological Claim
Nakedness & the Holiness of God
"All problems in your life and in the world stem from disordered loves, which starve you, emotionally enslave you, and divide you from others."
Theological Claim
Give Me Mine
"All human beings, regardless of cultural posturing about moral autonomy, carry a deep sense of guilt and condemnation because we know we are not living as we ought to live."
Theological Claim
Bought Out of Slavery
"Abstract moral truth creates slavery to fear, but the gospel of Jesus Christ — a personal truth who lived and died for us — liberates from fear-driven obedience."
Theological Claim
Absolutism
"Any good thing elevated to the place of God becomes an idol that will destroy you because it cannot provide the meaning, security, and value that only God can give."
Theological Claim
Children of the Light
"Ancient cultures enslaved through collectivist idols (family), while modern Western culture enslaves through individualistic idols (looks, career, money) — the mechanism is identical, only the idol changes."
Theological Claim
The Gospel
"According to Augustine, every murderer commits murder because he loves something too much — making disordered love the root motive for even the most extreme sins."
Exposition
Give Me Mine
"Abandoning belief in God does not help you understand or handle suffering — atheism removes the very framework that makes suffering intelligible as injustice."
Theological Claim
Suffering
"Abraham's sorrowful address of the rich man as 'son' demonstrates that proper understanding of hell produces tragic awareness rather than disdain — especially when one recognizes the same hellish patterns in oneself."
Theological Claim
Hell
"All legitimate work, no matter how menial or boring, reflects God's character as the One who brings order out of chaos — there are no small people and no unimportant work."
Exposition
Work and Family
"Attempts to regulate or suppress religion through government control have the ironic effect of strengthening and accelerating religious growth."
Theological Claim
Exclusivity
"The secular worldview's most honest thinkers — Sartre, Camus, Huxley, Freud — are not enemies of the gospel but its unwitting witnesses; their diagnoses of the human condition require the gospel to complete them."
Theological Claim
Across the corpus
"A common response to horrendous suffering is to abandon belief in God — but this response leaves suffering without moral weight, since evil requires a moral order to be genuinely evil."
Exposition
Suffering
"All cultures oppress by declaring that worth depends on possessing certain objects — ancient cultures said family/children, modern cultures say individual assets like appearance. The gospel alone declares worth prior to achievement."
Theological Claim
The Gospel
"The cross is not God's abandonment of Christ but God's identification with the condemned — which is why the resurrection is not an escape from suffering but its transformation into the ground of all future hope."
Theological Claim
The Sin-Bearer
08 — Corpus Table

23 sermons.
Fully decomposed.

# Title · Primary Text Series Type Tone
Series — Objections to Christianity
01
Absolutism: Don't We All Have to Find Truth for Ourselves?
Galatians 2:4–16
 Objections to Christianity Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Polemic
02
Exclusivity: How Can There Be Just One True Religion?
1 John 4:1–10
 Objections to Christianity Topical Didactic · Pastoral · Polemic
03
Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an Angry Judge?
Luke 16:19–31
 Objections to Christianity Expository Pastoral · Didactic
04
Suffering: If God Is Good, Why Is There So Much Evil in the World?
1 Peter 1:3–12
 Objections to Christianity Textual Pastoral · Didactic
Series — Savior and Teacher: A Study of Matthew
05
Out of Egypt
Matthew 2:13–23
 Savior and Teacher Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Prophetic
06
Healing the Sick
Matthew 8:5–17
 Savior and Teacher Expository Didactic · Pastoral
07
Into Jerusalem
Matthew 21:1–14
 Savior and Teacher Expository Pastoral · Didactic · Prophetic
Series — A Study of Ephesians: Who is the Church?
08
A World of Idols
Acts 17:16–21
 The Church Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Prophetic
09
Children of the Light
Ephesians 5:5–21
 Ephesians Expository Didactic · Pastoral
10
Work and Family
Ephesians 6:1–9
 Ephesians Expository Didactic · Pastoral
11
How to Be Strong
Ephesians 6:14–24
 Ephesians Expository Didactic · Pastoral
Series — The Gospel Goods / The Great Goods of the Gospel
12
Hope in the Face of Death
1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
 The Gospel Goods Expository Pastoral · Didactic · Celebratory
13
The Sin-Bearer
Isaiah 52:13–53:12
 The Gospel Goods Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Celebratory
14
Reconciled and at Peace
Hebrews 9:11–14
 The Great Goods Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Prophetic
Series — Vision of Redeemer / Love Series
15
The Gospel
Isaiah 53:4–5
 Vision of Redeemer Expository Pastoral · Didactic · Prophetic
16
Love, Patience, and Suffering
Romans 8:16–28
 Love Series Expository Didactic · Pastoral
Series — The Psalms
17
Tears
Psalm 39:12–13
 The Psalms Expository Pastoral · Didactic
Standalone Sermons
18
A Spirit Hath Not Flesh and Bones
Luke 24:37–43
 — Expository Polemic · Pastoral · Didactic
19
And Kissed Him
Luke 15:11–24
 — Expository Pastoral · Didactic
20
Bought Out of Slavery
Romans 3:22–31
 — Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Polemic
21
Converted by the Spirit
Acts 10:27–47
 — Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Prophetic
22
Give Me Mine
Luke 15:11–32
 — Expository Didactic · Pastoral · Celebratory
23
Nakedness & the Holiness of God
Genesis 3:7–13
 — Expository Pastoral · Didactic · Prophetic