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An Undeceptions Podcast. The first time I talked to my doctor about the pancreatic cancer, he says, "You're going to die of this. We don't have any way really of curing this."
Though he's backtracked and said, look, the reality is there have been remissions and things that we can't explain. But the fact is that you need to assume that this is going to take you out. And so we are. And what that has done to both of us is it has just shown us that we were living in a veil of illusion that we would live forever. We actually really were. Everybody says, no, no, no, no, no. You are. You are.
On Friday the 19th of May, pastor and public intellectual Tim Keller died in his Manhattan home. It had been a long and valiant fight after being diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer back in December 2021. His son Michael wrote these words on social media.
Timothy J. Keller, husband, father, grandfather, mentor, friend, pastor and scholar, died this morning at home. Dad waited until he was alone with Mum. She kissed him on the forehead and he breathed his last breath. We take comfort in some of his last words, quote, "...there is no downside for me leaving, not in the slightest."
Millions of people have read Tim Keller's books and listened to his talks. He's been called a once-in-a-century sort of person, one of Christianity's great undersevers. I spoke with Tim Keller last year, you might remember, for episode 63. Go and listen to that if you want the full thing.
We talked about many things, his formation as a pastor, the future of Christianity, how he's seen culture change and how the culture's criticisms of the faith have evolved, and whether he reckons there could be a Christian renaissance, a Western turning back to God. His answer to that one was fascinating. When we heard the news of Tim Keller's death,
We were deep into the production of this episode. We were just putting the final touches on it. We spoke to his friend and protege, Colin Hanson, because Colin has a new book about Keller titled Timothy Keller, His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.
With many, Colin right now is grieving. But with his permission, we'd like to share with you our conversation with him about Keller, interwoven with some of Keller's own words from our chat last year. What happens is the things of the earth grow strangely dim. And when that happens, you say, gosh, God isn't really enough for me. I really don't have enough of a grip on God.
to get through the day. I was really living off of a deep denial of my mortality and a belief that the things of this world are really the things that are going to satisfy me. But they never really have. And yet I keep going back and keep going back. So there are there are places like there's a place in Tolkien, you know, where Sam
is falling asleep after Frodo. They're on their way to Mount Doom, and at one point he looks up and he sees a star twinkling. It's a very famous place where he says, suddenly, cold and clear like a shaft, the realization pierced him that the shadow, you know, the evil of this world is a passing thing. There's light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. And he immediately just fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.
And what happens is that having cancer, which means no longer the things that you really were relying on for your soul's repose, they just don't do it anymore. It's God or nothing. And when you go to him, guess what? There's a communion with God which is available at a level that you just never felt the need to push through to find. And when you do and you push through, you find that
It's there. There is not only enough for you to get through the day, but then actually the things around you, you recognize as greater gifts than you were looking at them before. I'm John Dixon, and this is a tribute episode of Undeceptions. Undeceptions
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that
that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
Tim Keller is one of the most significant leaders in especially the Western church in the 21st century. He's one of the leading writers, podcasters. You'll find him, his sermons at the very top of the list, the top of the charts, even five years, six years after he's retired. And I think the simplest way to explain it is you're one of the pastors of one of the largest churches in New York City when 9-11 happened.
And that gives you a certain context about Tim Keller and then helps you to see, oh, okay, so this is kind of his... If you can have 5,000 people coming to a church in New York City in the 21st century, probably this is somebody that we should be paying attention to. He seems to understand... That's Colin Hanson. He's not just one of Keller's friends and mentees.
He's an influential thought leader in his own right. He's a professional journalist with a master's degree in theology. There's not too many of those. He's editor-in-chief at the Gospel Coalition, the author of at least five books I know of, and he hosts his own podcast, Gospel Bound. Go check that out.
Most recently, Collins become executive director of one of the most interesting aspects of Keller's legacy, the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.
I'm not a fan of the word apologetics, as I've confessed many times before. But if this new center is about making Christianity public in the way that Keller did, and I'm pretty sure it is, then I'm a fan. Yeah, I mean, I've often felt like if someone who's not a believer said to me, I'll give listen to 10 sermons. That's all I'm going to give you, 10 sermons. I reckon nine of them.
I would be Keller on my list. I don't know who the other—I'm just reserving one just in case I can think of someone else, but nine of the ten would be Keller. Yeah. Well, and you can see even non-Christians tend to have a sense that Christians are fractious, that they have a lot of different viewpoints, that they disagree on a lot of different things.
Keller is one of those figures who, not like everybody agrees with him, but a wide range of people agree with him. You'll run into Christians in different cities around the world, different parts of the country, different political beliefs, and they'll say the same things, John, that you're saying right there. And that's pretty rare historically, let alone in our digital fractious age.
Of course, a bunch of stuff has come out in the last few weeks in memory of Tim Keller. Writing for The New Yorker, journalist Michael Luo described Keller as, quote, "...perhaps the most gifted communicator of historically orthodox Christian teachings in the country, creating a new blueprint for Christian thought, showing how traditional doctrine could address the crisis of modern life."
Similar things were said in the New York Times by David Brooks and in The Atlantic by Peter Weiner, both top flight journalists writing in very secular, historically left-of-center publications.
In a culture that increasingly finds the historic tenets of Christianity at best outdated and at worst dangerous, Keller demonstrated how to hold these beliefs firmly and yet convey them gently and positively. Man, do we need more of that.
You know, one thing that if people are not used to listening to Christian preaching, they might imagine that there's a lot of grandstanding or drawing attention to themselves or arrogance. Maybe they've been watching a televangelist or something like that, and they've been put off by that.
That is not Tim Keller. First of all, he sounds more like a professor, I think, than most people expect of as a preacher. But the other thing is that he's always quoting preachers.
other people. He's drawing attention to other people. And of course, as a preacher, he wants you to see Jesus more than anybody else, but he's always drawing your attention toward this book that he read. And it could be a New York Times bestseller. It could be an article that he read in Village Voice. It could be, if he were still preaching a lot today, it would be some podcast that he listened to. He just reads and listens and consumes so broadly the
that those things are on the front of his mind. And so you look at him and you say, okay, well, here's a C.S. Lewis of the 21st century. Well, I mean, yes, in that they both do apologetics. They both reach, you know, they're defending the faith. They reach a wide variety of people. They have a kind of sophisticated, urbane manner about them.
But no, they're really different in a lot of ways. And so you just can't reduce Tim Keller down to even his major, biggest influence, which is Lewis, because Tim doesn't even hardly read much fiction, let alone write fiction. There's substantial differences. So you can't really understand Keller unless you see all the wide variety of influences on his life.
Colin calls Tim an apologist, someone who gives a defense of the Christian faith. As I said, I'm not a huge fan of that word, partly because it too often connotes someone who'll use any argument, even a poor one, to advance the cause.
But the word does come from New Testament Greek, apologia. It just means an answer or defense. The classic New Testament text that uses the word is 1 Peter 3, verse 15. Christians are urged, quote,
Always be prepared to give an apologia to those who ask you to give the reason, that's the word logos, for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.
Now, I don't think the Apostle Peter ever expected an industry of apologetics, but he did hope that Christians would be able to give a reason for their hope in Christ that was simultaneously gentle instead of arrogant or pushy and respectful of the human being with the question or the complaint about Christianity. Now, there's a plan, and Keller walked that path better than anyone I've ever seen.
The difference with Keller's apologetic, and he didn't invent all of this, there's a common stream of others who have learned from him and that he's learned from, but he practices what he often describes then as subversive fulfillment, meaning his apologetics are often building bridges with non-Christians.
showing how non-Christians and Christians will agree on things. So his instinct in defending the faith is to often say, "You know something important and true about the faith, you just don't know where it comes from."
You have a hope, but maybe you haven't considered how this is going to play out. And let's show you how that hope can only be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. So he is an apologist in some of that sense of he does believe that he's right about things. He's also an evangelist, which means that he believes things like eternity and judgment are at stake. This is, I mean, part of the significance here is that he is a traditional Protestant Christian.
But yes, I think the reason why so many people don't associate him with apologetics is because there's so much affirming back and forth with other people and building common ground, but showing that the reason we are that way is because we do belong to God who created us and sent his son Jesus Christ to die to redeem us.
You mentioned a moment ago that some of the questions are changing, the sorts of questions that they ask you at the front of church. Do you think the classical intellectual questions like the existence of God, the reliability of the Bible, etc., have any currency amongst doubting folks today, or have these really faded to the background? Neither. They've just gone. They're not primary. They're secondary now. So one of the things I found interesting was
More and more, I'm booting my evangelism and apologetics off of Pascal's famous Pensee, where he says, first, show people that Christianity is rationally respectable. It's reasonable. That's all. Number one. Number two, get them to want it to be true. In other words, that means show its personal offers, the things that it can do. And then finally, he says, and then show them that it is true.
So I have found that, for example, the first layer, and I'll give you a couple examples of why this works. The first layer I try to work with is leveling the playing field. So I want to get a non-believer off this idea that I've got faith and he or she doesn't. I want to say, you do realize that everybody basically has a view of the world based on
a set of assumptions that you can't prove. Therefore, in a sense, all knowledge starts with faith. But I said, that doesn't mean that you can't rationally weigh the different worldviews and say which ones are more consistent, which ones within themselves, which ones actually explain the world the way we see it, which ones are best even at being livable.
They say you can't prove a worldview. Therefore, you might say the burden of proof is kind of equal on every nobody can prove it. And yet at the same time, you can weigh them. So I start that way. And even I get a lot of especially from some guys and I mean, guys, a lot of young white men really just don't believe that they believe they're totally objective and absolutely rational and so on and so forth.
And I actually, if I point them to Alistair McIntyre's book, Who's Justice, Which Rationality, their head starts to hurt. So did mine. Yeah, which rationality? And, you know, but anyway, so you level the playing field, then rather than go, most people aren't immediately, I think, as a
ready, their eyes glaze over if you really go in to too much. And both you and I have written a lot of these books, okay, brother? But if you just go too much into the proofs of God or even the evidence for the resurrection, things like that, they're just not there. The real question is, why would I want this thing to be true?
They very often have a very poor understanding of what Christianity actually offers. And so there, I guess you might call it existential apologetics where you're saying, okay, well, how do you get meaning in life? Here's what Christianity does. How do you get an identity? Here's what Christianity does. How do you face suffering? Here's what, here's how Christianity helps. And then if eventually they get to the place where they say, huh,
This is actually pretty nice, but I mean, how do I know it's true? Finally, they're motivated. And then actually, even if they don't want a little bit of a rehearsal of the evidence, they ought to get it because they're going to have bad time. Even if somebody says, I want to be a Christian, I think you do have to rehearse the fact that there's not proofs, but pretty strong evidence. Behind all this, John, is interesting. I was reading, rereading Molly Worthen.
Wrote a book called Apostles of Reason. It's a very critical look at evangelicalism in the United States. She's a professor of religion, I think, at University of North Carolina and very critical of evangelicals. Interestingly enough, she said, amidst all the bluster and the culture war, she doesn't like Francis Schaeffer. She doesn't like
popular evangelical apologetics at all. But she says, you know, over the last 60 years, these two guys, which is Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolderstorff. And he says, most evangelicals, I've never heard of them. He said, they, over about a 50 or 60 year period, this is how she said it, they created a modest
but absolutely intellectually impervious rationale for why it's very reasonable to be a Christian.
She said they handled everything from Hegel to biblical criticism and showed there really are no decisive objections to the reasonableness of Christianity. And she said instead of trying to slam dunk and say, ha, see, I've proven it, they were modest. That's what I call that level of the playing field. They're very modest. There's really no reason why a reasonable person, a very reasonable person can't be a Christian.
And she says they did that. And she says also they took non-Christians seriously. They didn't just write them off. And they engaged with them. And then they wrote, you know, Nick Woldestorff, of course, wrote books about how did I overcome grief and how did I, you know, one of his sons died and that stuff. And she says, you know, they're just ignored by evangelicals when actually for a person like Molly, who I don't know, but seems to be a very, very smart skeptic,
She finds them by far the most compelling presentation of Christianity. I mean, she looks at them and says, I could be a Christian like that, even though for whatever reason, the Holy Spirit hasn't worked on her.
so i would say uh what they do is they they're very modest about trying not to prove everything but but show it's rational and reasonable then you show people it works and then if they come back and they want then they say well how do i know it's true then i really am going to even press them even if they don't want it to look at the arguments because there really are good arguments i mean even
Alvin Plantinga has got some article saying 20 or so pretty good proofs for the existence of God. I think it's an article. He says, no, none of them just do a slam dunk where every rational person is forced kicking and screaming to believe in God. But he says, you know, cumulatively, these are really a lot. Yeah, they're not bad. I think, honestly, there are a lot of people who've been so hurt by religion or hurt by stuff that
that they're just not going to be able to give you, they're not going to give you the time of day. But in a place like Manhattan or places like so much of Australia, this approach will really bear fruit. It really will. The modest approach, the leveling the playing field, the being careful, not trying to overdo it. It's a combination of things. Also, people come in very different.
One of Keller's great gifts was his ability to speak in a relatable way to his main audience, New York professionals, while maintaining an uncompromising biblical orthodoxy. His knack for dropping cultural references into sermons further helped contextualize the Bible for a modern audience.
For his detractors, this was part of the problem. Keller was sometimes accused of trying to make the gospel cool or sanitized even.
But his approach was similar to another very famous public Christian, the Apostle Paul, who could quote the works of the pagan poets, Aratus and Cleanthes, to highlight the relevance of Christianity for first century Athenian philosophers. In the book of Acts chapter 17, Paul is speaking in the Areopagus, a kind of court of ideas.
And he's speaking to a group of Stoic and Epicurean thinkers. Here's what he said. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. He is not far from any one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring."
Therefore, since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image made by human design and skill. The words, "In him we live and move and have our being," come from Cleanthes, 3rd century BC. The opening line of Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus read:
Zeus, the first cause of nature, hail! It is right for mortals to call upon you, since from you we have our being. We alone of all mortal creatures that live and move upon the earth.
Paul's quotation, we are his offspring, comes from the 3rd century BC poet Aratus, from his work Phenomena. It's a hymn about the stars, and it reads, From Zeus let us begin. Full of Zeus are all the streets. Always we all have need of Zeus, for we are also his offspring.
The thing is, Paul uses these pagan poems, they're hymns really, to stress that the best Greek thinkers of the past were on the right track in some really important things. Namely, that God is way more than mere images. God is the source of all things.
Now, this is not just good teaching, good persuasion. It's not just a technique. It's the fruit of good reading habits. Paul might not have had an elite education. There's some fun debates around that. But he'd obviously taken the time to reflect not only on the Jewish traditions of his upbringing, but also on the pagan, that's the Greek and Roman traditions of his surrounding culture.
And my point is, for Keller, referencing a movie or a song or a piece of literature wasn't about being relevant. It was a consequence of knowing and feeling an affinity with his audience. In a 2013 essay titled Preaching to the Collective Heart, he wrote...
My hearers, both Christians and non-Christians, live in the highly secular, late modern, some would say post-modern, cosmopolitan culture of Manhattan. This ethos is pulling on the hearts of all of its residents. It is the source of so many of their deep aspirations, unspoken fears and inner conflicts.
The so-called cultural references then are simply my way of entering the world of my hearers, helping them understand at a deep level what is shaping their daily work, their romantic and family relationships, their attitudes towards sex, money and power. I seek to make plain the foundations of our city's culture in order to help people understand themselves more fully and imagine what it means or would mean to live a Christian life here.
I reckon Paul might have said something similar to any complainy conservative Christians who were troubled by the apostle quoting the Zeus-worshipping Cleanthes or the star-worshipping Aratus. I asked Colin, though, to give us the origin story of all this, the origin story of Keller's faith and his approach to communication. The main thing that I think was formative from his earliest years
was a rather domineering, I think we could say, mother who was not your typical kind of person who left the Catholic Church, Italian Catholic background. She left the Catholic Church because it was not legalistic enough for her.
She was disturbed that these changes that were being made in the Catholic Church were in the wrong direction. So she passed from Roman Catholicism in the Vatican II era into mainline Protestant Lutheranism, which was vacillating back and forth from really liberal and modernist theology back to more of a traditional evangelical theology, all the way to a fundamentalist type of
You know, you walk the aisle to profess your faith in Jesus Christ every single week. Your faith is really borne out in what you do and is very much wedded to a conservative outlook on life. And I got to say, that was pretty off-putting to young Tim Keller. That was something that he ran away from and really did not have interest in. Yeah. So my question is just, did Keller have a conversion experience or what sort of brought him back to the faith? Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I think, John, you might imagine with somebody like Keller that they just, they were always this way or they were born somehow religious. And I think if you were to go back and see Tim Keller as a freshman at Bucknell University in 1968, I don't think you would have seen him as the kind of person who would go on to do any of these things. His best friend at the time, Bruce Henderson, had said to me,
I was afraid that Tim was going to smash the walls in the hallway outside of our apartment because he would just flail around with this huge frame and just smash walls as he was arguing with us about different things. And by us, he meant a group involved with a Christian ministry called InterVar City Christian Fellowship. And so he liked to hang around them. So maybe there were some of those latent religious impulses carried up from home, but he
He was very much upset about them. And in his case, there was a dramatic conversion where essentially, as he describes it, just
came to the end of himself. It came to the end of his own ability to think through every possible objection. He was reading a lot of different religions, think through the implications of his own life. And as we would say, as Christians, he surrendered to the Lord, or in this case, he was in some ways captured by the Lord.
And I mentioned Bruce earlier. Bruce describes that, and interesting, it's kind of like Lewis in the sense that there's some dispute about the dating on this one. But Bruce is pretty insistent because he says, oh, I know, because it was my 21st birthday.
And I woke up and there's Tim Keller at the foot of my bed, and you could just see a difference in him. You could just see a physical transformation from him. And John, one of the reviewers of my book was pretty critical, not really critical, but made a good critical point, which was, I never talked about Tim Keller's decision to go into ministry.
John, it never even occurred to me actually to go into that because from the moment this happens, he seems to be engaging in activities of talking to his classmates about Jesus and then talking about the implications of the resurrection for protesting the Vietnam War and student strikes. It just seems that it was an immediate change.
in that sense. And from there, it's hard to find a time when he's not doing things like that. So even though it was unexpected, it was certainly dramatic and has been a fairly clear path ever since that 20-year-old transformation.
The works of C.S. Lewis were particularly important to the young student Keller. A fellow student, someone who was already a Christian, urged Tim Keller to read Lewis's fictional masterwork, The Chronicles of Narnia. That student became Tim's reading buddy, and after a while, Tim's wife.
Did he start to read Lewis and Tolkien at that point? Is that immediately where they started to exert their influence over him? So Lewis was before the conversion. So if you're hanging out in the 1960s in an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter... Someone's passing you mere Christianity at some point. That's exactly right. You're reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There's sort of a group of patron saints at that time. Tolkien comes in there as well, but really...
The major influence at this point on his reading
is a woman by the name of Kathy Christie. She was not a student with Tim at Bucknell. She was at a place called Allegheny College in Northwest Pennsylvania, but she had a younger sister who was two years behind Tim. And so the first year, Tim's a Christian and a leader in his local campus group. There's a freshman there. She's got an older sister. And eventually they start passing book recommendations, Kathy Christie with Tim Keller,
through his sister. And one of the major recommendations from Kathy Christie was to
you need to read C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, which he didn't have any background in. And this is just one of my favorite stories. Anything you need to know about Kathy Christie, who of course, for those who may not know, becomes Kathy Keller, but only a few years later. At age 13, she's one of the last people to ever write C.S. Lewis, to ever correspond back and forth with C.S. Lewis.
She was another very precocious child. And in fact, she traveled to England to be able to meet with Lewis's brother, later on met his stepson. And so, so much of Tim Keller's intellectual and spiritual formation comes through this woman who started as a sister of a fellow student. But Kathy is easily the biggest influence on Tim and very much in both intellectual and spiritual ways.
Tim and Kathy eventually went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, one of the top-rated places in the country, where Tim studied to become a minister. He then went on to Westminster Theological Seminary, also top tier, to complete his doctorate, and we'll come to the topic of that doctorate a little later.
His first church gig out of college was as the pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church, a small blue-collar church in a tired factory town. It's a very different beginning from how we imagine Keller at the end in Manhattan. Tell us about that context and the way you reckon it might have influenced him, shaped him.
Absolutely. So this was an important point in my research, John. I think it was one of their best friends there was telling me about Hopewell. It was known at the time as the chemical capital of the South.
They were so proud of being the chemical capital of the South that they had signs that said, "Welcome to the chemical capital of the South." Got to understand some context here. I mean, there were only two members of the church who had college degrees. Both of them were elementary school teachers. Most of them, the members, which you're fewer than 100 here, most of them didn't have education beyond sixth grade.
Some of them, their fathers had fought the Civil War for the South. This is Virginia, after all. That's the situation that he's coming into, and he's coming from the pinnacle of evangelical intellectual life in the United States at the time through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. So this adjustment was significant. In fact, Bruce Henderson had said something that really stuck with me. He said,
They just must have been desperate with this church. And I said, well, of course they were desperate. I mean, the Kellers, they thought they were going to be postal workers. Instead, they couldn't find a church. And he said, no, you don't understand. I mean, the church must have been desperate to hire the Kellers. It was just such an interesting match. But I think more than anything else, John, the effect of preaching 1,500 sermons in nine years...
that's going to shape someone. And it shaped him in some other ways as well that are a little bit unexpected.
He was doing everything with pastoral ministry. We're talking crisis intervention with marriages, tracking down. The classic thing that you would expect of a small town chaplain in some ways, but also preaching three times. Really, John, it just burned him out. This was unsustainable to be able to do that. But it did bring him back to one of the most important observations that I actually just heard him say again last week.
He said, when you're in some areas, people have to know that you love them before they'll listen to you. And in some places, people need to know that you're worth listening to before they'll allow you to love them. And that's the contrast that he's often drawn between small town, rural Virginia, and ultimately where he ended up, New York City. In 1989, when Tim and Kathy Keller arrived in New York City, Kathy called it the big bad whore of Babylon.
Spicy words. The city's crime rate had climbed to stratospheric levels, fueled in no small part by the arrival of crack cocaine.
Spiritually, the city was a bit of a wasteland. Church attendance in Manhattan was amongst the lowest rate in the country. It was into this maelstrom of crime, culture and hedonism that Tim, Kathy and their three children dove in 1989 to plant the first Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a move which many of his peers thought at the time was a terrible one.
New York Magazine put it, maybe a little hyperbolically, like this. In the late 80s, Keller came here on what at the time seemed close to a theological suicide mission, to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom. His love of the city is weird to some people, and in some ways has been one of the criticisms of Keller, where I come from.
In Sydney, amongst Anglicans there, there have been a few people who would criticise him for being too pro-the-city, you know, seek the prosperity of the city, you know, that text. Tim has sort of taken and run with, would be the criticism, and been too pro-city, pro-the-arts, pro-work, and has therefore not elevated enough gospel ministry. That's the critique. What's the reality?
Well, the reality is that he's a, and I'll explain this in a second, he's a neo-Calvinist. I mean, that's his theological orientation. What that means is, we're largely referring here to a late 19th, early 20th century movement that continues today, especially of the Netherlands, but they focus on how our beliefs and our salvation work themselves out in every aspect of life.
Often that's referred to our vocations, but it's applied to our arts. For those of you not living in the United States, but you'd associate this very much with parts of the United States where the Dutch had settled. Places like Western Michigan, Northwest Iowa. You see a distinct emphasis on how our theology applies to everything, and it transforms everything that we do. That's the basic answer to that question. And then the reality is that the transforming experience is
that people had in the 1980s and 1990s in New York with Redeemer Presbyterian Church is that they could be fully Christian
but also love to be a part of the city. Not all the negative, not the crime, not the things that we often associate negatively, but part of the energy, the love, the common life that they could make the city a better place by how they loved their neighbors. They could live distinctively, that they could pray that way. Now, Tim, sometimes when he gets pushed back on that, he'll retreat back into just look at the numbers.
People are moving to cities way faster than Christians are starting new churches in cities. So if we're just being practical here, we would do that. But I would say it comes from a core theological belief that our theology is not meant to be confined to matters of salvation or to inside the church, but affects how we do our jobs. I'll just say this, John.
That theology is what made Redeemer unique in the sense that the church was made up of this emerging yuppie investor class of hard-charging, type A, working a bunch of hours on Wall Street, and artists.
Graphic art like Mako Fujimura, who I mentioned in the book as one of the first elders there, all these Broadway actors and actresses and on and on and on, the literary types that you find so much in New York. It's that theology that brought them together in the church. And I don't think that's something that he would ever apologize for. I think that's exactly what he was going for, even if that's not what critics wanted him to do.
Makoto Fujimura is a leading American contemporary artist, and you may recall he was a guest on Undeceptions back in season six. That's episode 70, The Artist.
Fujimura was captivated by Keller's exposition of Christianity. And when Keller showed as much fluency in the writings of the novelist Flannery O'Connor as he did in, say, the Gospel of Matthew, Fujimura decided to stick around at Redeemer when it was still a small fledgling church in the early 1990s. Keller's curiosity about the world shone through his sermons.
Colin calls him the guide to the gurus, with a God-given ability to integrate disparate sources and then share insights with others. It impressed more than just Fujimura, and Redeemer started to grow. But it was in September 2001 that Keller would be called upon to give the most important sermon of his life. Peace I leave with you.
My peace I give to you, not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Let me call, invite you to worship today in a quiet way that's appropriate today, this week. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul says to Christians, grieve, but don't grieve as those without hope.
On the first Sunday after September 11, 2001, just five days after hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in downtown New York, the line to get into Redeemer Presbyterian stretched out the door. You would have still been able to smell the burning buildings. There were still posters everywhere asking for information about people who hadn't been found under the rubble.
On a normal Sunday, Tim Keller's church at that time had a little under 3,000 people attend services. That day, well over 5,000 people came. Keller added another service to accommodate people who were seeking something after that tragedy. Talk about 9-11 because the new atheists, who are very old now, claim that 9-11 really set them free.
going to turn against religion per se. But in the experience of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York, 9-11 was a catalyst for a lot of people actually wanting to investigate the Christian faith and so on. So how did that happen?
Yeah, absolutely. So September 16, 2001 is when Tim preached. The first Sunday after September 11th, he gave a message that was really transformative. There was a lot of Tolkien in that one of just using ways of illustrating from the culture the hope that we have of the resurrection, even when literally the towers are falling around us. I'm untrue. Do you remember that? At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Sam the Hobbit, who thought everything was going wrong, he wakes up.
And the sun is out and he sees Gandalf, the great wizard. You'll all be seeing him soon in the movies. And he says, Gandalf, and I mean, to me, this is the quintessence of Jesus' promise. He says, Gandalf, I thought you were dead. I thought I was dead. Is everything sad going to come untrue? The answer of Jesus is yes. Someday will be the great morning, the morning, not M-O-U-R-N, M-O-R-N-I-G.
I think, John, that for me, and I was in Alabama at the time, and I don't think any of the rest of us can really understand what it was like to be in New York at that time. And Redeemer is one of the few churches that not only saw a huge influx of people on September 16th, but a lot of those people stayed.
by the many hundreds. In fact, I was just last week with a woman who she and her husband both came to profess faith in Jesus, and it was because Redeemer, the church had collected somewhere between one and two million dollars just unsolicited, people sending it from around the world to distribute, and they had been rendered homeless because their place was near the site of the towers collapsing. They were blown into their... I mean, it was a really traumatic experience for them.
But somebody said, hey, I hear there's a church that's just giving out financial support, no questions asked.
And so they did, they got that support. And now this couple, and actually the husband, Brian Stanton, is the chief financial officer of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. So you could clearly see people were looking for answers and Redeemer was eager to offer biblical and theological perspective for what they were seeing. But I think, John, it's important to note that not over-explain it. Tim's, I keep going back to apologetics, but Tim's apologetic is not to tell you
that He has answers for every single thing of why it happens in your life or anybody else's life, is to say that often we don't have an answer to what's happening. But we can look to the cross and know definitively that whatever we might be going through
it can't be because God doesn't care about us, that He doesn't love us, and He hasn't demonstrated His love for us on the cross. And I think that's appealing to a lot of people, especially at a time when other Christians were very public of saying, "Oh, this happened because of this," which just happens to align with the people whose politics I already hate. He very much avoided that, and so it did allow the church to continue to grow. But one last point there, John, that
Their attitude was not just to build up their church, but to continue to love their city, and loving their city meant staying in their city. That is what it means. You can talk about all the criticism, but what that theology means in the end is that when everybody might be tempted to flee, anybody who can flee would be tempted to flee.
that Tim's encouragement was, "Stay, be a part of rebuilding this city, loving your neighbors." And I talked with a number of people last week in New York, John, who said it really does feel like the city changed at that time. That it did become a more neighborly place than it was. And I mean, who knows? But that's... 9/11 was certainly a huge turning point for the church.
Colin says before 9/11, the archetypal enemy of the United States was the atheist, perhaps in the form of a communist from the Soviet Union.
After 9-11, he adds, the greatest perceived threat was fundamentalist religious belief. Islamic fundamentalism, sure, but actually any type of religion that aims to dominate society. And for many, that included at least some versions of Christianity. It was into this environment that Keller's writings really took off.
In 2008, he published his first bestseller, The Reason for God. He said at the time, More about that after the break. ♪
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.
and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.
Colin Hanson's big idea is that to truly appreciate Tim Keller, we need to focus less on him and more on those who taught and influenced him. So get your pen ready and jot these down. Sort of putting you on the spot when I say this, but what would be some of the books Keller wrote?
would recommend they read and why, right? So if you were Keller, few people are more in Keller's head than you. What would he say? Someone who's just not sure what to make of the Christian faith. What should they go and read?
Well, John, I'm going to cheat here, and I'm going to use Tim Keller books, okay, to answer that question. That's not how he would answer the question, though. That's not how he would answer it. That's the problem, though. I mean, I could... I'll let you off there. Go on, give me Keller's books. I mean, certainly C.S. Lewis, you know, Basic Christianity by John Stott. Like, I mean, Mere Christianity, Basic Christianity, that's where he would start there, almost certainly. The thing about Tim, though, is that the kind of books that he would want you to read
he would want you to read them to provoke your thinking about things. So he might say, have you read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death? Have you read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt? That's what we probably do there, in addition to John Dixon's books, obviously. But no, I think I just, I want to answer it with Tim's books, because that was a helpful exercise for me to work through. First of all,
Prodigal God is his autobiography. He doesn't say that, but he would probably in that one, he would tell you, read Babette's Feast. That's how he closes that book or watch the film adaptation of that Karen Blixen short story, which is so beautiful. Why? Explain to my listener why. Well, why? So now again, bear with me here, listener, because I got to dive deep a little bit here.
In the basic sense, in watching this moral parable play out, he would say that it shows you that the only way you can get the rich, fulfilling, eternal life is through Christ. The feast, this Babette's feast, it doesn't come through moralism of being a pious person and always doing the right things. No, sometimes that leads you in the exact wrong path.
But it doesn't come from devouring everything that the world has to offer out there, of every experience you could ever have. But the true feast surrounded by those that you love comes only through Christ with a life that will never end, that is full of blessings forevermore because Jesus Christ died for you and he offers that path of salvation to you even in your sin. That's what he would say about Babette's feast at that basic level. That's prodigal God.
Now, if we want to take a step back, he would argue that it's basically a parable of Kierkegaard, that it was Kierkegaard speaking himself about, I can't remember the aesthetic and I can't remember all the categories in here, but basically it's Christian existentialism explained in this short story. But I think if Tim were explaining, he would say just basically to understand that the things that you want out of this life, they're good impulses, right?
But you can't have them without confessing that sin and following Jesus Christ. That's the only way you can get them forever. And once you do, it's beyond anything you could ever imagine.
If people say, how many times have you read The Lord of the Rings? The answer is, I never stop reading them. That is to say, I'm always reading them. And I'm always reading the other books, too, that he's written. And even the books that he never wrote, but his son Christopher put together from unpublished writings. I'm always going through the cycle. So if somebody says, well, how many times have you been through it? And I would say 20, 30, 40, I don't know, at least 20.
And I owe Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis a debt I couldn't possibly repay. He would say Lord of the Rings too. He'd say Lord of the Rings as well because he'd be able to see all of the major themes of life and death and good and evil that we often inoculate ourselves against. And he would also say this, that you should read fantasy fiction because it expands your mind to imagine that there's something beyond your senses.
you know, a rich imaginary world is closer to reality than what you can perceive with your senses. So it opens you up. My director, Mark, is loving every word of that. Okay. Look, John, I'm a realist fiction guy. The Russians, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, that's my inclination. Scandinavian literature. But no, Tim's all about the fantasy literature. But I think he makes a good point that it helps us to see what we can't see.
And that's important to becoming a Christian. The question is, what is the reasoning that leads to belief in God? And I like to deal with that under three headings: why the reasons for God are important, how the reasons for God work, and what the reasons for God are. First, why the reasons for God are important. Why should you even be here? In fact, I don't know why you're here, but I'll tell you why you ought to be here.
If you have a kind of sound, firm skepticism and you really don't believe in God, you really need to know this, what I'm about to tell you. And here's the reason why.
That's a bit of a talk Tim Keller gave in 2008 for the Talks at Google series. Google invites influential thinkers and creators to speak about their work and inspiration to an audience of Google employees in person and across the company's 30-plus offices worldwide.
It's an audience of sceptics and doubters. This was Keller's favourite type of conversation. We'll link to this talk in the show notes. But for all our talk about Keller's cultural and intellectual power...
He was intensely practical. Christianity wasn't really Christianity unless it was embodied in communities of love, of mercy. Christianity couldn't really be understood or seen without what Keller called mercy ministry.
And he wrote what is known as the longest dissertation in the history of their Doctor of Ministry program. And he focused on the contributions made in the traditional reform cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Geneva of how the earlier diaconates, the ministry of the deacons in the church, became the basis for social services in the West.
So essentially, he's the academic expert within Christianity, especially his branch of mercy ministry. I'm fascinated about his dissertation at the demon level, because on the one hand, those who just know Tim through listening to his talks think of him as the academic preacher. But to choose to do something about mercy ministry and the history of mercy ministry is intriguing, but...
Would you also say core to who he is and how he approaches the academic task? It is, Jon. So he is a pastor in the sense that his academic work is intended to make a difference in people's tangible lives. He's not that kind of abstract thinker that's just thinking for that sake. He's trying to think
How does this make me a better teacher? How does this make my church more effective? And as I thought about this years ago, I was working on a book called Blind Spots, and I found that in the ministry of Jesus, you see elements of His courage, His compassion, but also this commission that He gives His followers to take His message to the ends of the earth.
And many Christian leaders, they might be strong in one, but not two, or maybe two, but not three. Tim Keller is one of the rare leaders who has established strengths academically, pastorally, and otherwise in all three areas. Meaning, we've been mentioning his apologetics, that nasty word, as an intellectual defender of the faith, like Assias Lewis. He's fairly courageous to preach that truth.
But he's also the person who has done more than almost anybody else to make mercy ministry, serving the poor, just for the sake of loving your neighbor in obedience to Jesus, core to the ministry of what a church should be doing. But he's also the person who has done as much as anybody else to implement a kind of sociology of the cities, right?
to encourage people to start new churches in the major cities around the world, including Australia, all over North America, Europe, Africa, South America, all these different places there. So it's one reason why it's hard to really pin him down on anything in particular, because we associate academics with being specialists in something. Tim is kind of simultaneously a specialist in many things,
in a portfolio of a generalist, which is what pastors are. In some ways, he's like that really old school, I don't know, 19th century, even 18th century English pastor who was an expert in many, many things. He's a throwback. Yeah, a throwback to the Puritans. And I mean, you could definitely see him, as I was thinking, John, in the American context, I couldn't think of anybody equivalent to him
other than Jonathan Edwards in the sense of that kind of wide-ranging intellectual engagement and all these different topics covered. Just quickly, Jonathan Edwards was an 18th century Puritan, considered one of the most important of America's philosophical theologians. He was a prolific writer and became president of what would become Princeton University.
For all the Hamilton fans out there, he's also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States. Edwards was the fire and brimstone preacher Burr sings about in the Hamilton musical. And I should say that sometimes when people are talking about somebody else, we all do this. They're talking about themselves at a certain level.
When Tim Keller spoke at the beginning, the first meeting of a group that I've worked with him on since 2010, the Gospel Coalition, he described the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. And he said, Edwards held together three different aspects. One was cultural apologetics, applying the gospel to the culture with intellectual trends. A second was confessional theology. And then a third was revivalism. You know, piety just changed heart.
And Tim said, since Edwards, these have gone in different directions, but the task of the moment is to bring them all together. And then when Tim later did the memorial message in the United States for John Stott, he similarly described a lot of these different things that John Stott brings together that don't normally hold together. A global perspective on mercy ministry, a real humble, sacrificial, simple life that
but a highly intellectual life in pastoral ministry among upper classes. And I think Tim's a lot like John Stott. I think there's a lot of similarities between the two of them as well. I'll say, I want you to riff on.
John Stott, if you don't already know, is one of the most influential British evangelicals of the last couple of generations, actually. And he influenced Tim Keller. I think Tim Keller spoke at the American Memorial when John Stott died. But Stott was an amazing Bible teacher and author. One of those things he holds together, I want you to riff on if you can, and that is this kind of...
fully traditional, confessional, orthodox Christianity. Like he believes all the scary things, hell, predestination. Right, here we go. And yet remarkable gentleness, grace. So how did those things come together for him? I mean, is it more than personality? Is it influences? And tell us about the significance of that for his wide impact.
Oh, that's a good question, John. I don't think anybody's ever asked me that before. I think the easy thing here would be for me to say that's the inevitable outworking of grace in his life, because that's the definition of grace, this unmerited favor shown by God.
toward all of us who are, as the scriptures say, dead in our transgressions, in our sins, needing a rescue. But I think we both know, John, that that doesn't always translate into a certain kind of attitude. And I know that many people listening and watching are not Christians. You haven't always been treated that way by Christians and their evangelism and their apologetics. So it's like the more strict approach.
their belief, the harsher they are. And it's so distressing and discouraging. And so at some level, I want to say, theologically, that's grace. Once I was blind, but now I can see. At the same time, I want to say that it's personality because I could...
I don't want to get into a whole Enneagram discussion here, but you can peg him pretty well in the nine categories of peacemaker. He just doesn't like conflict. He tends to want people to like him, which by the way, is not that common for some evangelists or apologists in there. They tend to be okay with people who disagree with them a lot. So there's a personality component. And I guess, John, I don't have a great answer here.
It just seems to be kind of a combination of a lot of different things. But maybe this is what I'll say. I opened the book with an observation. I was just in New York last week. And interestingly, I was in a group and three of us got recognized on the street. And we're not some sort of major celebrities, but people recognized us and made a comment. But the opening of my book is a line from Kathy Keller that says, the first 10,000 people Tim Keller sees each day in New York City, no one knows who he is.
And I thought, I'm not saying this because it's necessarily accurate, but because it accurately reflects self-perception. I think, John, the most important thing is he doesn't think of himself much. He doesn't think much of himself. He doesn't think of himself much. There is a genuine humility. I'm talking to a guy who's written a whole book on this, but there's a true... The arrogant guy who presumed to write a book on humility, yeah.
I just think there's a genuine humility. He seems to be very much in touch with his sin, his need of grace, his deference to others. I mean, John, we both know that somebody as smart as he is could pretend like he just made up all this stuff himself.
He wouldn't have to credit other people, let alone let somebody like me write about it. So I think there is a genuine humility there that is like many other things, a combination of personality. He doesn't like the spotlight. He likes talking about other people, not himself. I mean, ideas, not gossip, but ideas.
And so it's that combination there. But, well, I don't think anybody's ever asked me that before, but that's the best that I can think of. Yeah. May it multiply throughout the world.
For a man who spoke a lot, Tim Keller didn't speak much at all about politics. And when he did, it was to shun partisan politics. In 2018, as American Christianity became increasingly polarized, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times insisting that Christians should reject the tidy alignment with either the Republicans or the Democrats.
Listen to this little grab from the article: "Following the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments."
I love it. To my mind, and this is just Dixon now, not Keller, what we call liberal and conservative are what you get when you split apart things that Christianity historically held together beautifully. Each of them is kind of a Christian heresy, a magnification or absolutization or perversion of half the truth.
So for someone who believes the gospel, you know, it reaches into the arts and business and welfare programs, he has studiously avoided politics. In fact, he's written about the need not to be left or right.
Yeah, that's a good observation. And I think that's actually an avenue potentially, John, for critique, because you could say that he should have applied his theology more to certain political issues. At the same time, what he would certainly say is that he was trying to avoid partisanship
That's still a raging issue today. Not me, buddy. Not me, buddy. I know. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Tim has... This is also what he gets criticized for, but it's also... It's part of the package. He was wanting people to focus on the claims of Jesus Christ. His apologetics was to clear the way of all the other stuff and focus on Jesus himself. So it wasn't...
Okay, if I get Jesus, then I have to vote this certain way and I have to wear these kind of clothes and I have to listen to this kind of music. No, focus on Jesus because if he's not raised from the dead, nothing else matters. Forget those other things over there. Focus on who he claims to be.
That's been his major emphasis in evangelism. That's also what steered him away of that partisanship. And so maybe that's where his neo-Calvinism is balanced out by some of his just kind of straight up evangelical beliefs. There have been some sad celebrity pastors in my country, in your country, and in New York.
How has Keller been a celebrity pastor, frankly, just because he's celebrated by so many people, without having even a whiff of the celebrity pastor? Well, I think that does get...
connected back to what we were saying about the humility and the personality converging. The first book I ever worked on was about Billy Graham, and you, of course, very closely associated now in your role. And I love Billy Graham. I think he was a very humble man. I got to meet him once, which was just an incredible treasure. But he was also a very natural celebrity.
He could have been president of the United States. He could have been a senator. He could have been a movie star. He had the personality. He had the voice. He had the looks. There's a photograph just outside here, mate, of Billy Graham next to Johnny Cash, arm in arm. I thought, I can hardly tell the difference.
No, exactly. That's exactly right. And the kind of celebrity that Tim Keller would hang out with would be Jonathan Haidt at New York University. That's his kind of celebrity. And so I just think at some level, it would just be awkward with him. That's just not his personality.
But I think, John, the more important point, and I just got to talk last week with a number of people that I'd interviewed for the book or who had read the book and had spent a lot of time around Redeemer Presbyterian Church. And I think an important aspect was he apologized when he was wrong. And when there was a crisis, he admitted that he couldn't do or hadn't done what needed to be done in his leadership there.
And I don't think that's what we typically associate with celebrity pastors is a willingness to apologize or to admit their weaknesses and to know that they need help. But that is Tim. And I think that's helped him a lot.
Outside of his New York church, Redeemer Presbyterian, Keller also poured a lot of his energy into institutions he helped found. The Gospel Coalition is a church network and media organization. Redeemer City to City is a nonprofit that exists to mentor pastors and church planters in urban centers around the world.
And then there's the new Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics that I mentioned earlier. It was launched at the beginning of this year to support a new generation of Christians who aspire to, I guess, be like Tim and communicate the unchanging Christian message for a changing world. What do you think will be Keller's legacy? It's a great question, John. You know, I'll go back to Billy Graham again and say that
I don't think there are many people today who are listening to Billy Graham's sermons, though I do have my SiriusXM channel that always plays them on my drives. I don't think many people are reading Billy Graham books, but people are still studying with you at the Billy Graham Center. They're still studying at Gordon-Conwell, which never would have happened without him. Interestingly enough, it was the institutions that he built. That was his legacy, which is the opposite, John, of what you would have thought.
as somebody who was so famous for his speaking and his best-selling books and all of that. So I think in some ways, Tim's legacy is tied up with groups like Redeemer City to City and Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the Gospel Coalition and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. I think it depends on how those institutions go. I tend to personally think that his books will stand the test of time. Certainly not every one of them, but...
His publishing output is not like anything else we've seen. And that does place him closer to Lewis. So different, though, of course, because there's no fiction, but just the breadth of popular readership, but with really studious thought. That combination, I think that legacy will stand the test of time. And I would say minimally, I hope we'll remember Tim with the same fondness that we have for J.I. Packer and for John Stott.
But it could be that as we look at the real differences that he made in terms of attitudes toward the city, toward the work of evangelism and apologetics, toward the church and church growth, we may see him as a more, a longer term figure, more like in that Calvin or Edwards category. Again, understand I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. Really, it's left to future generations to find. And so, so much of our legacy is,
is what subsequent generations do with it. And I think that's one of the beauties of, and very humbling, is to know that in the end, none of us controls that legacy. I mean, it has been 19 months since I was diagnosed, which my doctors say is extraordinary. But on the other hand, it's cancer, it could just turn around tomorrow and suddenly you're gone.
And I'm glad to live like that. I mean, I'm at a good spot where I say I actually might have years left. On the other hand, I might not at all. There, peeping among the cloud rack above a dark torm high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while.
The beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. J.R.R. Tolkien I might not at all.
And it's really important for me to live with a certain amount of hope both ways. So I've got absolute hope in Christ, but I've also got the possibility that God might say, yeah, you know, I got some surprises up my sleeve before I take you. And that's kind of nice to have it both ways. So in a way, I'm in a win-win situation, John. An Undeceptions Podcast.