(By Leonardo Blair, The Christian Post). A week after disgruntled Princeton Theological Seminary alumni complained that Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, should not receive the school’s Kuyper Prize because of his church’s position on the ordination of women and LGBT individuals, the seminary decided Wednesday not to give the award this year.
“I have … had helpful conversations about this with the Chair of the Kuyper Committee, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, and Reverend Keller. In order to communicate that the invitation to speak at the upcoming conference does not imply an endorsement of the Presbyterian Church in America’s views about ordination, we have agreed not to award the Kuyper Prize this year,” M. Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote in a statement Wednesday.
The Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life is awarded each year to a scholar or community leader whose outstanding contribution to their chosen sphere reflects the ideas and values characteristic of the Neo-Calvinist vision of religious engagement in matters of social, political and cultural significance in one or more of the spheres of society. A condition of the prize is that the recipient deliver a lecture on a topic appropriate to the aims of the Abraham Kuyper Center for Public Theology.
Keller, 66, started Redeemer in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For more than 20 years he led the diverse congregation of young professionals that has grown to a weekly attendance of more than 5,000. He also serves as chairman of Redeemer City to City, which starts new churches in New York and other global cities, and publishes books and resources for faith in an urban culture. In over 10 years, they have helped launch over 250 churches in 48 cities.
On April 6 at the Princeton Seminary campus in Miller Chapel, Keller was slated to collect the Abraham Kuyper Prize and deliver a lecture on church planting.
About a week ago, however, Princeton Theological Seminary alumna Traci Smith complained in a blog post that she doesn’t believe Keller should be honored because of the Presbyterian Church in America’s position on the ordination of women and LGBT individuals.
Listen to the comments Carmen Fowler LaBerge made on The Reconnect about the situation.
Related articles:
A Seminary Snubs a Presbyterian Pastor, By Case Thorp, the Wall Street Journal
What Exactly Is the “Toxic” Effect of Tim Keller’s Theology?, by
The gathered storm, the love of Jesus and Rev. Tim Keller, by Viola Larson, Naming His Grace blog
A Kuyper Prize?, by William B. Evans, The Ecclesial Calvinist blog
Princeton Seminary Reverses Course, Won’t Award Tim Keller, by Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism
Read Craig Barnes entire statement:
Update on the 2017 Kuyper Lecture and Prize
President Barnes addresses concerns raised within the Princeton Seminary community
March 22, 2017
Dear Members of the Seminary Community,
On March 10 I sent a letter to the seminary community addressing the emerging objections to the Kuyper Center’s invitation to the Reverend Timothy Keller to speak at their annual conference and receive the Kuyper Prize. Those who are concerned point to Reverend Keller’s leadership role in the Presbyterian Church in America, a denomination which prevents women and LGBTQ+ persons from full participation in the ordained Ministry of Word and Sacrament.
As I indicated in my previous letter, it is not my practice to censor the invitations to campus from any of our theological centers or student organizations. This commitment to academic freedom is vital to the critical inquiry and theological diversity of our community. In talking with those who are deeply concerned about Reverend Keller’s visit to campus, I find that most share this commitment to academic freedom. Yet many regard awarding the Kuyper Prize as an affirmation of Reverend Keller’s belief that women and LGBTQ+ persons should not be ordained. This conflicts with the stance of the Presbyterian Church (USA). And it is an important issue among the divided Reformed communions.
I have also had helpful conversations about this with the Chair of the Kuyper Committee, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, and Reverend Keller. In order to communicate that the invitation to speak at the upcoming conference does not imply an endorsement of the Presbyterian Church in America’s views about ordination, we have agreed not to award the Kuyper Prize this year.
However, the Kuyper Center’s invitation to Reverend Keller simply to lecture at their conference will stand, and he has graciously agreed to keep the commitment. We are a community that does not silence voices in the church. In this spirit we are a school that can welcome a church leader to address one of its centers about his subject, even if we strongly disagree with his theology on ordination to ministry. Reverend Keller will be lecturing on Lesslie Newbigin and the mission of the church – not on ordination.
I want to thank all who have communicated with the administration of the seminary as this important conversation has unfolded on campus. We have heard many heartfelt perspectives from both sides of the debate. It has been a hard conversation, but one that a theologically diverse community can handle.
In the grace and love of Jesus Christ, we strive to be a community that can engage with generosity and respect those with whom we disagree about important issues.
Sincerely,
Craig Barnes
M. Craig Barnes
President
Princeton Theological Seminary
17 Comments. Leave new
So the oh so diverse, inclusive and ecumenical folks at Princeton Seminary deem Rev. Keller unfit for their award. I wholeheartedly agree with PCUSA liberals on a lot of their hot button issues such as the ordination of women and gay marriage but I will never call myself a liberal because their illiberal hypocrisies repulse me. Episodes like this make me thankful that even as the son and brother of PCUSA ministers I had the good sense to get out of the PCUSA decades ago. If I’m able I’m going to attend the event at which Rev. Keller will be speaking next month to see if the best and brightest of the PCUSA’s future pastors are content with having spiked the award or if they’re compelled to engage in other forms of outraged protest that someone like Rev. Keller is permitted to speak on their campus.
Whatever gravitas the Kuyper prize bore has been permanently diminished. President Barnes, in a moment demanding critical leadership backbone, caved. The PC culture pressuring such actions is today’s Pharisaism–a blue-nosed, long-faced, and joy-killing piety more interested in preserving its own codes than serving Christ. It is secularism posing as righteousness. Barnes caved to the code, proving himself to be, in a time of critical decision, a great tower of marshmallow fluff.
Having labored in the general PTS region for sometime, again I am not shocked by the eventual outcome of this story. Profiles in courage it is not for PTS. And I have to commend Rev. Keller on his grace in all of this. PTS and its surround community went far out of its way to publicly humiliate, embarrass, and other wise insult him. Again, not surprising from my observations of the major players in the drama. To even show up on campus after this public ridicule and back-slap engineered by an infantile and intolerant faculty, alumni, staff base is courageous on his part.
The courageous option for PTS and its President would have been to stand with Rev. Keller in a witness of tolerance, free expression, speech and free inquiry. It opted for the cowards way of least resistance and appeasement to the forces of intolerance and free expression. They have only proved themselves what they are. Moral and intellectual cowards, secure in their own tenure and positions, hiding in fear of the mob they call students and alumni, and oh, getting a good reservation at more tony eateries on Nassau street or the Square, secure they will not have to soil their garments with the great unwashed.
It seem now that the PCUSA gets to define what reformed theology is.
Keller has had more success as a PCA pastor that most of the PCUSA pastors combined, so much for the tolerance of the left. Within 10 years the PCA,EPC and ECO will have more members combined than the PCUSA will have based on projections and the present reality in the PCUSA.
Princeton is just one of the many problems facing the Seminaries in the PCUSA, declining enrollment for starters, with that said the louisville sluggers are not going to change, they will just manage the decline relying on endowments, selling properties, and blackmail money from departing churches. The mainline churches cannot just say they are delining because people don’t go to church anymore, that’s NOT true, when other churches from the evangelical bent are booming.
Take heart Rev. Keller. What matters most is the judgement of almighty God, not the worldly pharisees. Also I recommend readers click on the hyperlink shown above, ‘Carmen’s The Reconnect.’
The LGBT obsessives really run the denomination, don’t they?
If anything, this decision to withdraw the offer of the Kuyper Prize, lest PTS be seen as “affirming Reverend Keller’s belief that women and LGBTQ+ persons should not be ordained (and) conflicting with the stance of the Presbyterian Church (USA)”, clearly demonstrates that Theological Liberals, who exercise hegemony in the PC(USA), really do not value unity with Evangelical Presbyterians, despite their pretensions to the contrary. Despite their appeals for unity under a “Big Tent” that encompasses both “Conservatives and Liberals” or “Evangelicals and Progressives”, they really do not want to share their proverbial tent with those who do not share their convictions about what constitutes justice and about what is really important in the life and work of the Church of Jesus Christ.
What they want, although they will not come out and actually say it, is for Evangelical Presbyterians to see things the way they do, which is to say, they want us to adopt their beliefs that, regardless of what Paul or Moses might say (presupposing that the Scripture is not inerrant, which really is the key to everything), women ought to be ordained to the offices of Teaching Elder, Ruling Elder, and Deacon (cf. I Tim. 2.12, which immediately precedes the qualifications for Elder and Deacon in I Tim. 3.1-13), that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism are not sins (cf. Lev. 18.22, 20.13, Dt. 22.5, 23.1, Rom. 1.24-27, 13.14, I Cor. 6.9-11, I Tim. 1.8-11), and that these issues are fundamentally matters of justice owed to women, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals, rather than matters of trust in and obedience to the Word of God. Theological Liberals will often say that “Evangelicals and Progressives need each other” and that the Church of Jesus Christ needs them to live and work together in community and so as to show a united front to the world. But as evidenced from previously quoted angry denunciations by alumni against PTS for having offered the Kuyper Prize to Rev. Keller in the first place and from Dr. Barnes’ restatement of solidarity with these fundamental Theologically Liberal precepts and his rescindment of the offer of the Kuyper Prize, it is clear that Theological Liberals have no respect for Evangelical beliefs and interpretations of the Scripture when they violate these precepts. Theological Liberals do not value “diversity of theological thought and practice” nearly as much as they say they do.
To be sure, Theological Liberals will say that they have as much respect for the Bible as the Word of God Written as Evangelicals, but that they simply have a “different interpretation”. By this they mean, with respect to the aforementioned divisive issues, that either Paul’s injunction against the ordination of women must always and only be interpreted to have applied only to circumstances in the First Century Church that no longer exist today, or else rejected altogether because “Paul was wrong”. Likewise, they hold unequivocally that postmodern beliefs in Sexual Orientation justify homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual behavior, thereby nullifying the Biblical injunctions, which are “interpreted” to have been either issued against only abusive same gender sexual relationships (although the Judicial Law’s requirement in Lev. 20.13 for both men found guilty of homosexuality to be put to death is hard to square with this “interpretation”), issued in ignorance and fear (which “interpretation” fundamentally undermines trust in the Bible as the Word of God Written and belies the assertion that Theological Liberals have as much respect for the Bible as Evangelicals), not issued against homosexuals (which is always predicated upon faulty exegesis that ignores facts, such as the “interpretation” that the Greek word arsenokoites used by Paul in I Cor. 6.9 and I Tim. 1.9 has an ambiguous meaning that does not refer to male homosexuals, ignoring the fact that the Septuagint version of Lev. 18.22, which condemns men who take other men to bed [i.e., engage in sexual intercourse with them] uses arsenos for the word man and koites for the word bed, and that koites was also a euphemism for sexual intercourse, from which we get our English word coitus; it is clear that Paul’s intended purpose for using arsenokoites in this context was to condemn male homosexuality), or some kind of hybrid of the different “interpretations”. Of course, for Evangelical Presbyterians to adopt these beliefs would effectively mean that they would be converting to Theological Liberalism from Evangelicalism, thereby nullifying the stated purpose of “Progressives and Evangelicals” living in community together.
This becomes even more blatant in situations where PC(USA) congregations with a majority of Evangelicals have discerned that the Holy Spirit is leading them to separate corporately (i.e., while maintaining their identity as a distinct congregation) from the PC(USA) and be united with other Evangelical Christian congregations in another Presbyterian denomination, and the presbyteries with oversight of these congregations are determined to pursue reconciliation. Nearly all presbyteries (if not all presbyteries) in the PC(USA) are dominated by a Theologically Liberal hegemony; that is, the majority of teaching elders in these presbyteries are Theological Liberals who hold to the aforementioned precepts and pursue an agenda predicated thereupon. Their approach to reconciliation is always to persuade the congregation seeking to depart to be reconciled to them, not the other way around. I have yet to hear of a presbytery administrative commission that has counseled the PC(USA) loyalists in a departing congregation to be reconciled to the separatists for the sake of the health and witness of the congregation. Yet in story after story, the presbytery fights the departing congregation in separation negotiations and/or in civil court on behalf of the minority loyalist remnant in order to keep the congregation’s property in the denomination, so that the PC(USA) will still have a hollow shell of a denominational witness where a thriving congregation once stood, while that congregation leaves and thrives (or perhaps dies) somewhere else in town.
Lately, the presbyteries have stepped up their vindictive game. There is a mindset that is gradually taking hold in the presbyteries (and encouraged by the new Stated Clerk of the denomination), that if a congregation is seeking to leave the denomination, it must be the fault of the leadership—especially the pastor. They believe that if a few targeted individuals can be made to leave individually, the rest of the congregation can be persuaded to be reconciled (on the terms stated above) with the presbytery, and they can go back to being a happy, thriving, productive (and re-programmed) congregation with new, tractable leadership that will never seek separation again.
Or be an Evangelical congregation again, for that matter, which also defeats the purpose of “Progressives and Evangelicals” living in community together. The so-called “Big Tent” of PC(USA) Presbyterianism is not so big as its proponents like to think. It’s not big enough to cover Evangelicals.
Diversity is one thing. Awarding someone whose views include sexism and bigotry is quite another. Mr Keller is free to hold his views, pathetic as they are, but they should not be rewarded by those who stand for the human dignity of all.
God has blessed Tim Keller with His grace in many ways. Especially since Tim’s start in Manhattan in 1989, the results of these blessings have become visible and undeniable to the major part of the evangelical world. This is God’s own award to Tim Keller. Does Tim Keller deserve a human award from Christian beneficiaries of his work for the Church? I leave it to everybody’s judgment to build an own opinion. I have mine, I give Tim Keller the award for my transformed life.
I love the tyranny of the tolerant. John, how can there be open, honest dialogue when you call Keller’s positions “pathetic?” The fascism of the left is ignorance unleashed, with no one to stand up to them. Mr. Barnes, et al, have failed the quest for truth and an honest exchange of ideas.
It is important to realize that what actually happened here is that Mr Barnes was made to realize by his coreligionists that the Rev Tim Keller, however gracious a person he may be, is in fact a mortal enemy of what PCUSAers hold to be truly essential and necessary to their benighted religion — and that a person such as Tim Keller cannot be honored in any way or for any reason without putting into question the basic tenets of their creed. To my way of thinking, Tim Keller received a far greater honor in having this prize denied to him than he would have received had it been given to him. Good for him. And good for the Gospel.
I’ve read comments by various feminist types that the original award to Keller had reduced them to weeping, gnashing of teeth, and PTSD. If this is how they react to a Christian with slightly different viewpoints than theirs, how can they possibly have any success with non-religious people who may be indifferent or outright hostile to Christianity? Will they retreat to safe spaces and write angry Facebook posts about people who aren’t interested in what they say? With such people in control, no wonder the denomination is dying.
Of course what’s missing from this discussion is that when the PCUSA first started ordaining women in 1956 the PCUSA fervently promised conservatives (do I dare say on a stack of Bibles?) that the issue would always remain a matter of individual church discretion. With 60 years of hindsight it’s now crystal clear that those promises were a hollow, dishonest expedient to minimize the number of churches leaving the denomination. It has always been inevitable that the issue would evolve over time from congregational discretion to denominational coercion and today most presbyteries require people serving on a church’s PNC to sign a written promise that they will consider women for the position. I would never be part of Rev. Keller’s church or any church which doesn’t fully engaged the gifts of women in ordained ministry. But I’m also thankful that I’m no longer part of the dishonest, illiberal hypocrisies of the PCUSA.
I am not sure how to characterize the faux outrage expressed on this page. Funny? ironic? Nearly half of Princeton seminary graduates would not be permitted to preach at Rev. Keller’s church, while Keller has a prominent speaking gig at a major Princeton conference. Nonetheless, it is somehow a crime against humanity that Keller does not receive a cash prize and a medal along with his invitation. Entitlement issues?
Point (a) your comment about “dishonest, illiberal hypocrisies” is way off base. If you look around, you will find a lot of people think differently about a lot of things now compared to 1956. Thank God for that! When someone comes to a change of heart, I hope they are not afraid to admit they (or their forebears) were wrong in what they said way back when. But (b) sort of a fair point, or at least a point you seem to make by implication, about what the future may hold. Whatever they may think now about ordination of LGBT people being a local option, I for one expect that the church will come to see that sot of thinking as medieval as limiting ordination based on gender or what continent one’s ancestors came from.
No problem, Zack, but in light of your views is it unreasonable to ask that the PCUSA please stop the constant crowing about how diverse, inclusive and ecumenical they are?