IIt is an enormous burden for the biographer to shoulder,” writes Elisabeth Elliot in her 1968 biography of missionary R. Kenneth Strachan. Any such project is “a judgment – on the subject, of course, on the biographer himself, and on all those who have been associated with the subject.” To read such a work is, in a way, to become involved in the judgment. The reader is invited to grapple with the questions raised by the subject’s life.
And yet we are endlessly fascinated by biographies, not to mention autobiographies, memoirs, interviews, published diaries, collected letters – anything that falls under the umbrella of “life writing.” By reading them, we hope perhaps to gain insight into the inner workings of the human heart and mind, to make sense of what Elliot calls the “reckless – sometimes seemingly random” events of human life. Perhaps the light cast by these other lives can help us see the shapes of our own more clearly.
TTwo recent versions offer this opportunity. The first one, Timothy Keller: his spiritual and intellectual formation, is a biography of the author and retired pastor, now in his seventies and undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer. A teacher since 1975, Keller became nationally known after 9/11 for his role in the growth of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church.
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Author Collin Hansen, editor-in-chief of The Gospel Coalition, lightly sketches what might be called the personal side of his subject’s life. Keller’s mother was involved and demanding; his father, emotionally absent. Keller left for college, disenchanted with the lack of grace he saw in the churches of his youth. Although he majored in religion in order to seek alternatives to Christianity, he committed himself to Christ – and apparently to the pastorate, although Hansen devotes only one ambiguous sentence to the subject – at the end of his second year.
Hansen briefly addresses what he sees as Keller’s weaknesses, describing him as a poor manager who tends to overcommit and be a people pleaser. Keller’s strengths are more obvious, including his ability to connect with people and present theology in a way that many have found compelling. These elements helped make his teaching effective and paved the way for a demanding one-title-per-year contract with Penguin Books.
Ironically, this expansion of Keller’s audience disrupted his primary work in the local church, as people from outside New York City began coming to hear him preach and get signed copies of his books . Further disruption came with the 2016 election, as he increasingly found many of his ideas a target for Christians across the political spectrum.
Keller’s ideas are the focus of Hansen’s attention, and he carefully traces their development. Neo-Calvinism, penal substitutionary atonement, amillennialism, complementarianism, broader politics, social justice, worship, evangelism – these are some of the themes Keller is known for, and Hansen shows both the individual and institutional influences that underlie them. (He names John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, John Stott, JI Packer, RC Sproul, CS Lewis, Elliot, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, InterVarsity’s Urbana Missions Conference, L’Abri and many others.) For Hansen, this richness of sources is essential. to Keller’s success. We “honor Keller better by reading his library than by quoting him,” he writes.
The second offering in this genre comes from Beth Moore, founder of Living Proof Ministries. Moore taught the public for nearly 40 years, published a half-dozen books and more than 20 Bible studies, and amassed more than a million followers on Twitter. Today, at age 65, she has published a memoir, My whole life tied up.
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Moore is a good storyteller with an engaging voice. With a few well-chosen vignettes, she shows the inner dynamics of her family of origin: her father’s infidelity and abuse, her mother’s depression and suicidal tendencies, and the children’s attempts to cope. Moore married her college sweetheart at age 21, and they each brought heartbreak and trauma into the marriage. They had two daughters who “deserved stability” that “we didn’t… have to give” but who hung the moon and stars on their parents.
The common thread of the Southern Baptist church, where Moore grew up, runs through the narrative. In college, she volunteered at the denomination’s sixth-grade girls’ summer camp, where she had a spiritual experience that her pastor and the camp supervisor both took seriously as “a call to vocational Christian service.” As a young mother, Moore was asked to lead an aerobics class at church, then to speak at women’s retreats, then to teach Sunday school, then to provide fitness equipment. original Bible study to his classes. The major Baptist press Lifeway asked to publish this Bible study, then others, and then to host events with Moore on the front page.
While preparing to teach, Moore discovered an abiding love for the Bible. Studying him became “the hunt for Christ himself.” She learned from sources such as Marge Caldwell, Buddy Walters, John Bisagno, Abraham Joshua Heschel, William Tyndale, Lewis, Stott, Packer, and many others she does not name.
She studied New Testament Greek, then Hebrew, going through the multi-volume commentaries one after the other. As she describes it: “I would spend my entire adult life looking for someone I had already found. I’m looking for something else in him. To know what his face looked like in this or that light.
Moore’s audience has grown with his reach, from women to mixed groups, from fellow Baptists to a multitude of denominations, from live events to the vast world opened up by the Internet. And the greater the visibility, the greater the criticism she faces. Despite this, she chose to open more of her life to the public: “A couple, a family, a reader we would never have been able to reach otherwise might need to hear our story,” she wrote. “We can’t solve another person’s similar problems any more than we can solve our own, but we can help another person feel less alone.”
Tthese books and their subjects are very different in many ways. Hansen’s voice is more formal; Moore is more familiar. Keller did his work largely in connection with a local church body; Moore has worked with many churches and denominations. Keller found a ready-made organizational structure to formalize his vocation and support his work; Moore created her own organization because such a framework did not exist for her.
It is therefore striking that, in other respects, Keller and Moore followed such similar trajectories. Both experienced massive audience growth, Keller from a church of fewer than 100 people to one of 5,000, Moore from a class of 12 to regular arena crowds of 10,000. Keller has sold more than 7.5 million books; Moore, 17.5 million Bible studies. Moore’s YouTube channel has 65,000 subscribers; Keller’s, more than double. Moore is often described as belonging to the para-church side of the Christian world and Keller to the institutional church, but these figures suggest that Keller’s influence is now primarily in the para-church world as well.
And Keller and Moore found that as their reach grew, it posed problems for their work. As Moore says, “Visibility means scrutiny.” Both saw this scrutiny intensify in the political ferment around the 2016 presidential election. Both were widely criticized for ideas they had been teaching for years.
We see here an opportunity that these books offer to enter into the process of judgment. Keller and Moore brought the good news about Jesus to many people. But the extent of their influence has obvious drawbacks. Both are burdened by the pressure of increased attention, hurt by harsh criticism, and alone because their busy schedules limit relationships. These constraints shape their marriage, their parenting, their theology, and their souls in ways that are impossible to quantify.
It’s even harder to know the effect on the rest of us of a regular diet dispensed by people we don’t really know. Scripture paints a picture of teaching and learning as a shared life, not just the communication of information. Paul told the Thessalonians, “We were pleased to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also our lives” (1 Thess. 2:8). Keller and Moore give every indication that they are doing the best they can in the system we live in, but with an audience of millions, there is no way they can share their lives with many of the people they support. And it’s impossible for most of us to know what kind of people they are in the quiet moments of their lives.
Books like these can serve as a partial antidote, offering the perspective of a handful of people who may have known Keller and Moore in daily life. These windows into life offstage suggest patterns of growth and repentance.
But Scripture also emphasizes that the purpose of Christian teaching lies in what we do with it. James reminds us that if we habitually listen to teaching without putting it into practice, we are like amnesiacs, not even knowing who we are (1:23-24). Paul says, “The purpose of our instruction is love” (1 Tim. 1:5, NASB). For most of us, it is easier to keep the right beliefs on paper than to turn the other cheek, and in this type of distance learning there is no accountability, no means for the shepherds to know how sheep live their daily lives.
The truth of Elisabeth Elliot’s observation thus emerges. Not only do these works provide necessary insight into Keller and Moore’s fidelity and failure, they invite us to examine the shape of our own lives. What do we value? Why are we attracted to teachers we can’t maintain relationships with? Do we seek those of whom we can say, as Timothy might of Paul, that we “know all about (their) teaching…their way of life…their purpose, their faith, their patience, their love, their endurance, their persecutions , their sufferings” (2 Tim. 3:10-11)? Do we live in such a way that the people around us can say the same thing?
Lucy SR Austen is the author of the forthcoming biography Elisabeth Elliot: a life.
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