The fanfare among evangelical Presbyterians for Tim Keller’s book was deafening. So we decided to see what someone from the audience for whom Keller wrote – a non-believer – would think of Keller’s arguments. After all, are people who already believe really the best to judge a book designed to persuade those who don’t? As the reviewer, the Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania explains, the editors asked for this review. We had no idea what Professor Kuklick would write.

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton, 2008. 296 pp.

The editors of the NTJ asked me to review this book. Readers have heralded it, they said, as a sophisticated body blow to secularism, but maybe the author is only talking to the already converted. What did I think?

Keller serves as the astoundingly successful pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York. Presbyterian readers of NTJ will forgive me if I say he reminds me of a latter-day Henry Ward Beecher, an effective exponent of Christian ideas to a prosperous northeastern urban audience looking for guidance in the modern world. The book exemplifies the more or less systematic exposition of Reformed Protestantism that Keller’s sermons present, and that he promotes in his ministry.

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