Keller, Kierkegaard, and the Renovation of a Life
My new book, Renovated: How God Makes Us Christlike, explores how God is working in our lives every day. Even though it can be difficult to see the presence of God in the complexities of life, He is deeply, profoundly moving within us—“renovating” us.
If I were required to give a reason for why I wrote it, I think the answer would inevitably be the ministry of Tim Keller. Why? I could point to his work on prayer, his apologetics, or simply the fact that he is the only international role model I had early on who stayed faithful and true. But I think underneath all of these things is a vision for the way the grace of Christ is constantly at work in the life of believers.
My experience with this articulation of grace began when a colleague asked me to listen to a sermon called “The Wounded Spirit” by Keller (an unfamiliar name to me at the time). I was a young youth pastor without any formal ministry training—only the kind mentorship and example of others. I was always seeking to make sense of ministry and life. This sermon opened a new world for me: the world of the heart. Before I heard it, I hadn’t quite grasped the enormous and complex influence the spiritual heart has upon someone's whole course of life.
As a way of honouring the connection to Keller, I want to lay out a crucial background that lies behind my book: a journey from Keller’s own thinking into the strange world of Søren Kierkegaard and, then, into its own practical application.
Keller on Grace Renewal
Keller always emphasised the need for believers to continually receive the gospel. The gospel empowers the whole of Christian life and must be renewed in our hearts regularly. It is not enough to ask ourselves to stop sinning; it takes constant, thoughtful consideration of our motivations to sin that lie in our heart—desires for approval, comfort, power, security, and so on. For example, I have sometimes found myself driven by a need for comfort, which can make me shy away from important conversations, avoid putting healthy pressure on myself, and seek comfort in sinful ways. Gospel renewal helps me diagnose these issues and avoid them day by day.
To honour Keller’s teaching, we should not just consume it but find ways to extend and grow it. The prodigious ways he learned and developed the ideas of others is itself a model for us. Keller would want us to develop and grow this vision for how grace continually remakes the human self.
In my quest to understand the nature of grace and human transformation, I found an unlikely home with the enigmatic Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard. As if providence guided my reading, here was the weaving together of two teachings about gospel renewal.
Kierkegaard on Transformation
Kierkegaard begins the final section of his book Practice in Christianity by meditating on Jesus’ words in John 12:32: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” It is a look at how Christ, who is “present everywhere” and “occupied with drawing all to himself” uses “the most varied things as a way and as a means.”¹ Kierkegaard goes on to describe how this work occurs in and through the reality of life:
1. The Holy Spirit Presses Christ on Our Hearts
To describe the work of transformation, Kierkegaard tells the story of “a young man” and traces his growth from childhood to adulthood. As a child he flicks through a set of pictures of different heroes. In the middle of the stack is one of the crucified Jesus Christ. Initially the boy is taken aback and deeply confused as to why such an ugly sight could be considered heroic. Someone then speaks to the child and tells him that “this crucified man was the most loving person who ever lived.”² The child then slowly comes to grips with the significance of this gruesome image as it begins to capture his imagination. Our hearts slowly come to understand the significance of Christ’s death as we learn its meaning and continually have Christ placed before our eyes.
As the young man grows, his imagination is transfixed and filled with Christ. His suffering love begins to impress itself on the young man’s thinking and feeling:
And just as it so beautifully happens with lovers that they begin to resemble each other, so the young man is transformed in likeness to this image, which imprints or impresses itself on all his thought and on every utterance by him, while he, to repeat, with his eyes directed to this image—has not watched his step, had not paid attention to where he is.³
The young man is led out into life with a longing for Jesus. The Holy Spirit floods his inward imagination with the glory of Christ’s love. The love awakens a passion in him for Christ and to be like him. “This is how it moved the apostles, who knew nothing and wanted to know nothing except Christ and him crucified.”⁴
The Holy Spirit floods us with Jesus, convinces us of his love, his beauty, and his worth until our very spirit sings joyfully in response and all our passion is awakened. It is a remarkable work that the Holy Spirit does as he accomplishes this. He does not force us to follow Jesus, nor does he override our thinking and our feeling. He simply overwhelms us with the reality of Christ in all his glory. This is what John Owen talks about when he says of the Spirit, he “works upon our understandings, wills, consciences, and affections... he works in us and with us, not against us or without us.”⁵ The Holy Spirit enables our freedom by pouring the love of God into our hearts (Romans 5:5).
2. The Holy Spirit Leads Us Through Particular Circumstances to Form Us
However, falling in love with the image of Christ crucified is not enough for us. The Christian life is not empty idealism. It involves real love and real situations. The young man from Kierkegaard’s story, having forgotten everything but Christ, now ends up in suffering and trouble. Kierkegaard speaks of a “governance” of the life of every believer, where they are led progressively into deeper and deeper dangers as a means of being “tested like gold.”⁶ The Holy Spirit led Christ through the desert after his baptism, led him to love and care for many people, led him into conflict with the powers of his day, and ultimately led him to the cross. So too will the Holy Spirit lead us into our own dangers that we might image Christ crucified.
Of course, this does not happen once or twice in life, but again and again:
This is how Governance deals with him many times, and every time helps him further and further out into suffering, because the youth does not want to abandon that image he so desires to resemble…. Now existence has turned the screws as tight as it can tighten the screws on a human being. If existence had done this at the outset, it would have crushed him. Now he is probably able to bear it—yes, he must be able to since Governance does it with him—Governance who is indeed love.⁷
The Holy Spirit leads us and upholds us through the dangers of life through concrete encounters with people and circumstances every single day. As we suffer with a passion for Jesus, our love for Jesus grows. As we love Jesus more, we venture a bit further in his name and the Holy Spirit leads us into his likeness again and again and again.
For Kierkegaard, these two actions happen in a reciprocal and ongoing manner. We are flooded with Christ and we grow into the image of Christ. We suffer and look for comfort in Christ. These are the essential dynamics of the Christian life.
Renovations of the Self
From Keller to Kierkegaard, I wrapped all of this thinking up into the notion of “renovation” and tied it to 2 Corinthians 3:17-18, to which Kierkegaard seems to constantly allude.
The idea of our life as a renovation site is a particularly fruitful one. We often operate with an understanding that God is only working in some segments of our lives, but not in others; He may be at church and in our families, but not in our workplaces and our sport clubs. Renovating a house involves changing lots of different rooms and spaces: kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and backyards. However, these are just part of one bigger work. The goal is to create a whole new house. The work in each space is a part of, and contributes to, the whole. So it is in our lives. God is at work in every room with one purpose. He is undertaking one big transformation project in every part of our lives!
All houses are different, and their transformation process is likewise. However, there is always a plan and a general way in which things do come about. It is the same in the transformation of our lives: there will always be a great divergence between plan and reality, but that does not mean there isn’t a general pattern. In many ways, how the living God transforms his people is a mysterious and messy work that is hard to quantify for every person. Yet it is also worth using what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 as one coherent picture as we begin. These two simple verses profoundly lay out God’s pattern of transformation:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
Here is the reality for all believers: life is changed not by good deeds or grand thoughts, but by having a big vision of Jesus. We become like Jesus when we gaze upon Jesus. In this, the Holy Spirit is doing two important things at the same time to renovate us:
1. Giving us a vision of Jesus in our hearts, and
2. Leading us into situations where we can be an image of Jesus.
Here is the whole Christian life: the Holy Spirit helping us apprehend the love of Christ and then enabling us to risk everything to resemble it in the real circumstances of life. In every room of our lives, He will give us opportunities to act like Jesus and will empower us to do it by looking closer and closer at Him. This is the profound, growing, and hopeful work of personal renovation amid the mess of our daily struggles and experiences.⁸
Notes
1. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p.155. Hereafter, PC.
2. PC, 175.
3. PC, 189.
4. PC, 178.
5. John Owen, “Mortification of Sin in the Believer” in Overcoming Sin and Temptation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 62.
6. PC, 191.
7. PC, 191.
8. These final paragraphs are from my book Renovated: How God makes us Christlike (Illinois: Kharis Publishing), p.14-16.
About the Author
Matt is the Acting Rector of South Head Anglican in Sydney, Australia where he lives with his wife and three kids. He is completing his PhD in the theology of Søren Kierkegaard at the University of Aberdeen and is the author of a new book Renovated.