Timothy Keller on Finding Infallible Hope in an Age of Anxiety (Part 1)
Editor’s Note: Timothy Keller passed away on May 19, 2023.
Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, and the chairman and co-founder of Redeemer City to City (CTC), which starts new churches in New York and other global cities, and produces content and training for ministry in the urban environment.
Keller’s books, including the New York Times bestselling The Reason for God and The Prodigal God, have sold over 2 million copies and been translated into 25 languages. His latest book, Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter (Viking) draws our attention to the “great reversal” present in Christ’s embrace of death, leading us to the glorious hope of new life.
In this interview, Keller talks about finding infallible hope in an age of anxiety, our present wrestling for hope in a culture of fear, and how the way of Jesus brings light into our darkness—including the difficulties of personal suffering and uncertainty.
The title of your book is simple: Hope in Times of Fear. Can you paint for us the contemporary landscape of fear?
W.H. Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948. Almost nobody reads it today, but it captured the spirit of the time. Imagine if you were middle-aged in 1948. You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Life seemed fragile. It felt like anything could happen. Nothing seemed secure.
I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived.
That’s over. As only one example, the COVID-19 pandemic was something very few people ever thought could happen. Until suddenly, the reality was upon us, and things changed very quickly. Add to that whichever looming disasters you’d like: the human and environmental crisis of climate change? Global terrorism? The knowledge that there are hackers who could bring down governments, nuclear security or banking systems?
And those are just the society-level anxieties. There are plenty waiting for us at home too. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. We can feel the cultural anxiety today. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety.
