Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

This two-part episode is a conversation that I, Colin Hanson, had with James R. Wood called Assessing the Ministry of Tim Keller.

It was moderated by Peter Lightheart and hosted by the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 17, 2025.

Here's the second half of our conversation, followed by Q&A.

I wanted to raise a question that I know that you highlighted in your original essay, James,

and I suspect that Colin will have thoughts on this too.

Well, one of the things you're emphasizing how you evolved on Tim Keller has much to do

with the changes in the circumstances.

Keller was effective and a model for ministry

in the world that he was working in, but you argued that the world would change, based

your analysis partly on the work of Aaron Friend, and the idea that it moved from, you

moved from a neutral world toward Christianity to a negative world of Christians.

So fill out that picture.

How much did that understanding of a shift in cultural circumstances affect your evaluation of color?

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things.

It's not the main thing that made me reevaluate. I think the Winsome Third Way model has

errors in any era. And so I could expound on those. Maybe I just will. But the shifts from like

2014, 2015 on had already kind of stopped paying attention to Keller as much, because as I saw him

a comment on a lot of these things, I was just like, this is not very helpful to me. And I didn't

despise him for that or anything. It was just like, I feel like there's some whiffs here. To be

honest, I feel like during the pandemic and other things too, just dismissing other views.

And I think uncharitably so. I'll say that forthrightly. I think, and he even comes up in his last

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