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A Crash Course in Grace: My Journey Compiling a Year of Daily Readings from Timothy Keller—Caleb Woodbridge



by Caleb Woodbridge


Note: Today marks the second anniversary of Tim Keller’s death. As we celebrate his life and legacy, it seemed fitting to share this reflection on his works and the compilation of the devotional Go Forward In Love: A Year of Daily Readings from Timothy Keller (first published in the UK as A Year With Timothy Keller).



At Hutchmoot UK 2023, in the beautiful Derbyshire setting of the Hayes Conference Centre, I sat down for lunch on Friday with a friend and former colleague from Hodder Faith, the UK publishers of Tim Keller’s books. It was great comparing notes on Hutchmoot, chatting about Christian books, faith and creativity—and also a freelance project I was about to begin work on: compiling A Year With Timothy Keller, as the UK edition is called.


I’d been asked to compile a devotional volume of 365 excerpts from Keller’s writings into daily readings. It was a big task, but I already had some ideas about how to break it down and start choosing Keller’s “greatest hits,” and was looking forward to getting into the project. I don’t remember the details, but as well as discussing the book, we almost certainly discussed Keller’s health, since his son Michael had just shared on social media that Tim was going into hospice care.


Later that day, on the afternoon of May 19, 2023, the news came through: Tim Keller had passed away. This good and faithful servant had gone to be with his Savior.


Inklings and Imagination


The news was a sobering jolt amidst the joys of creative fellowship at Hutchmoot UK. Many of those present had read and been influenced by Keller, appreciating his nuanced, culturally engaged approach to the Christian faith.


Like Hutchmoot and the Rabbit Room, Tim Keller was deeply shaped by Tolkien and Lewis. According to Collin Hansen’s Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, he’d been introduced to The Chronicles of Narnia by Kathy Kelly (who’d corresponded with Lewis) early on in their relationship, and their shared love of The Lord of the Rings was one of the threads that drew them together as a couple. This love for the Inklings runs through Keller’s writing and preaching—Tolkien and Lewis are among his most-quoted authors outside the Bible.


The Inklings helped awaken Keller to the importance of engaging the imagination as a Christian communicator, preacher and apologist. In his book Preaching, he reminded the reader that “Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties.” He was at pains to bring the Christian faith to life through the imagination, to make its truths real and concrete for his listeners. He quotes Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy Stories” for its argument that “there are indelible, deep longings in the human heart that realistic fiction cannot satisfy.”


Keller also found comfort and Christian truth in The Lord of the Rings while fighting cancer. In his book King’s Cross (also published as Jesus the King), Keller confesses that when he was undergoing surgery for an earlier round of thyroid cancer, what came to mind wasn’t a passage of Scripture, but that from The Return of the King where Sam sees a white star twinkling above the darkness of Mordor:


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.

For Keller facing the possibility of death, this was a reminder that it is really true. “Because of Jesus’s death evil is a passing thing—a shadow . . . It didn’t matter what happened in my surgery—it was going to be all right. And it is going to be all right.”


Integration


As far as I know, Keller never had any direct connection with Hutchmoot or the Rabbit Room. But I think most friends of the Rabbit Room will also find a friend in Keller’s writings. Keller had a vision for a faith integrated with all of life, including the arts and creativity. Keller also sought to find balance and nuance, often offering creative “third way” positions that integrated seemingly disparate emphases, a skill that many of an artistic temperament will appreciate!


This particularly comes out in his book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, which takes Tolkien’s allegorical short story “Leaf by Niggle” as one of its early starting points. Niggle is an artist who dreams of painting a great tree, but is distracted by his daily obligations and his need to help those around him, and never manages to finish it. After he dies, only the painting of one beautiful leaf ends up in the Town Museum, mostly forgotten. But in the afterlife, on the outskirts of the heavenly country, he finds his Tree, finished and glorious. “It is a gift!” says Niggle. His artistic vision was participating in some glimpse of true reality.


Keller uses Tolkien’s story to unpack a Christian understanding of art and vocation:


If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises.

Unfortunately not all church leaders place a high value on the arts and on creative callings—but Keller had an expansive vision of the Christian faith for all of life and encouraged Christian creatives to see the validity and spiritual importance of their gifts.


That evening at Hutchmoot after the news of his passing, we took time to give thanks together for Keller’s life and work. Michael J. Tinker performed one of his songs from When There Are No Words, which he had written following the recent death of his own father, Melvin Tinker.


Working on A Year With Timothy Keller took on a new weight for me. I now had the responsibility of making sure it was a fitting memorial to Keller’s life and teaching, but I was honored to be entrusted with the task. But what exactly went into compiling a set of 365 daily readings from across the breadth of Keller’s writings?


Speed-running Keller


With the clock ticking until my deadline, I realized I needed a process to help me pull out the “best of” Keller’s nuggets. Armed with my own collection of Keller books plus a set of PDFs supplied by Hodder, I set out to make a plan.


Writing software Scrivener came to my rescue: With its abilities to organize complicated texts, it was perfect for the messy business of pulling out excerpts from Keller’s books and ordering them coherently. I speed-read each book (it helped that I was already familiar with many of them, though not all!) looking for themes and sequences that would make for good devotional readings or that would help capture some of Keller’s key themes and ideas, all the way copying and pasting excerpts.


As I collected my excerpts along with Bible verses into Scrivener, I then shaped them into order, taking into account themes, variety and seasonal relevance. For example, February started with excerpts on love and relationships to coincide with Valentine’s Day season (while being mindful to also include Keller’s observations on the goodness of singleness). For the season of Lent, I focused on excerpts from Counterfeit Gods on idolatry and from Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, and as we got into Easter, excerpts from King’s Cross on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection.


In compiling the devotional, I sneaked in one or two “Easter eggs” that I hope Keller would have enjoyed: For example, March 25, as many fans of Tolkien will know, is the date in Middle-earth when the Ring was destroyed. I found a Keller quote from Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering where he uses the destruction of the Ring to illustrate the theme of idolatry to use on that day. See if you can spot any others!


The Spiritual Impact


It was impossible for me to immerse myself in Keller’s writings without it having a spiritual impact. Again and again, Keller brings us back to grace. We can avoid God not only by being “sinners” in an obvious way but also by our religion, by building our sense of identity on our own achievements rather than what God has done for us.


For me, having recently left the senior role of publishing director of Inter-Varsity Press UK, a well-regarded evangelical Christian publishing house, reading Keller helped me realize that I’d put an unhealthy weight on my job as a measure of my spiritual status. I realized that I was often driven by a sense of anxious striving rather than resting in God’s grace.


But if we are in Christ, we are already completely loved and accepted. As Keller puts it in The Reason for God:


When my own personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self­-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards – in academic work, professional achievement or relationships – I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. When I was not living up to standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. I discov­ered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued and that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of my­self less. I don’t need to notice myself – how I’m doing, how I’m being regarded – so often.

This isn’t some radically novel insight, but again and again Keller speaks the Gospel to our hearts with bright clarity and imagination. (Re-)reading most of Keller’s books in the space of a few weeks was a refresher course in grace for me, which Keller applies with wisdom to the wholeness of life.


As we mark the second anniversary of Keller’s passing, it’s a great time to pick up Go Forward in Love (US) or A Year With Timothy Keller (UK). I hope that those reading it are as blessed by it as I was in compiling it!



Go Forward in Love is published by Zondervan in the US and out now in hardcover. A Year with Timothy Keller is published by Hodder Faith in the UK and out now in paperback.


Caleb Woodbridge is a freelance writer, editor and digital consultant, who writes on faith and imagination at www.biggerinside.co.uk.


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