Kathy Keller's Heroic Feminine

An exemplary role model for Christian women today

I recently wrote that conservative evangelicals don’t have a vision for women apart from being a wife and mother. In my article about this, I highlighted the thin evangelical anthropology of gender.

I also noted that in general female role archetypes have been underdeveloped. There are a slew of traditionally masculine role archetypes like the king, the warrior, the builder, the priest, the hermit, the sage, the trader, the craftsman, etc. But the list of traditionally female archetypes are under-developed.

Guest writer Kennaquhair explored the related challenges of the underdeveloped heroic feminine. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey is an essentially masculine story. Kennaquhair explored some themes related to a female version of the story, drawing heavily from the rabbinic traditions around Miriam.

Newsletter #65: The Missing Heroic Feminine

Today I want to combine these threads and talk about an expanded conservative evangelical vision for what women can be, as well as the heroic feminine, by looking at the life of Kathy Keller.

Kathy Keller was the wife of the late pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. I don’t know her personally, but she and Tim discussed their lives in various places, including their book The Meaning of Marriage, Kathy’s monograph Jesus, Justice, and Gender Roles, and elsewhere. There’s also a lot of their history in the Collin Hansen’s book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.

These sources paint a picture of a very compelling life, but one that has gotten less attention than that devoted to Tim Keller. So I want to correct that today by highlighting six exemplary aspects of Kathy Keller’s life that might be very useful to others in thinking about what a successful conservative Christian woman in today’s world can look like.

A Wife and Mother

When I said that the biggest problem facing the evangelical complementarian gender theology is its inability to articulate a compelling role for women apart from wife and mother, I got a lot of criticism from people who said I was denigrating motherhood.

To be clear, I wasn’t questioning that the normative path for women is being a wife and mother, just as the normative path for men is to be a husband and father, but rather that this is all that too many conservative evangelicals talk about women doing.

But I do want to highlight that Kathy Keller was a wife and mother. She had a lifelong, fruitful marriage to Tim. She successfully raised three boys who are, as far as I’m aware, successful men today. One followed in his father’s footsteps as a pastor. Another is an urban planner.

While on occasion Tim would do child care duty to allow Kathy to earn some extra money for the family, she seems to have been the one focused on the children when they were young. She was even a housewife for at least a brief period after Tim got his first pastor job but before they had kids. She wrote:

I was unprepared for the first morning in our new church when Tim packed up his briefcase, kissed me goodbye, and “went off to work.” I remember standing in the kitchen thinking, “Now what am I supposed to do all day?”

All of her other accomplishments and activities did not require her to compromise being a wife and mother.

A Talent Scout

Tim and Kathy met as undergraduates after Kathy’s sister introduced them. He decided to go to Gordon-Conwell seminary after learning that Kathy was going there. He actually had another girlfriend at the time, but that relationship didn’t survive the move. He and Kathy became very close friends, but she was frustrated that he wasn’t making the move to make her his girlfriend, so issued her “pearls before swine” ultimatum, saying that she would no longer hang out with him if they didn’t take their relationship to the next level.

Tim wrote about it this way:

Though we were best friends and kindred spirits, I was still hurting from a previous relationship that had ended badly. Kathy was patient and understanding, up to a point, but the day came when she said, “Look, I can’t take this anymore. I have been expecting to be promoted from friend to girlfriend. I know you don’t mean to be saying this, but every day you don’t choose me to be more than a friend, it feels as if I’ve been weighed and found wanting—I feel it as a rejection. So I just can’t keep going on the same way, hoping that someday you’ll want me to be more than a friend. I’m not calling myself a pearl, and I’m not calling you a pig, but one of the reasons Jesus told his disciples not to cast pearls before swine was because a pig can’t recognize the value of a pearl. It would seem like just a pebble. If you can’t see me as valuable to you, then I’m not going to keep throwing myself into your company, hoping and hoping. I can’t do it. The rejection that I perceive, whether you intend it or not, is just too painful.”

That’s exactly what she said. It got my attention. It sent me into a time of deep self-examination. A couple of weeks later, I made the choice.

As we’ll see, Tim describes himself in the book as something of a nerdy guy. He doesn’t seem to have been one of the most popular kids in school, so to speak. At this point, he hadn’t accomplished much of anything yet. He was not the superstar pastor and public intellectual that he would become later in life.

But Kathy obviously saw something in him. She saw the character, the talent, and the potential - and took steps to get that on lockdown for herself. Had she waited until Tim had already become a baller, it would have been too late for her. She made the early commitment, and benefitted incredibly from that. They were married a semester before graduating seminary, when she was roughly 25. This is not how many people make decisions today to say the least.

It’s said that women are the judge. They do the choosing of men. Men propose, women dispose, as it were. This was probably not true in much of history, where women, and even men, often had no choice about who to marry, but it’s certainly been the case in our society for a while.

Kathy judged very well in this case.

By the way, there are various rules named after men. The Billy Graham Rule. The Mike Pence Rule. Why not one named after a woman? I propose the Kathy Keller Rule:

Do not stay in a friendship where your desire for romance is persistently denied, but deliver an ultimatum (or ask the other person out on a date), exiting the friendship if the other person chooses not to reciprocate your desires.

I wrote about this in newsletter #25.

Newsletter #25: What Do We Do About the Friend Zone?

A True Believer

Men exist in a world of public competition, where everything is contingent, self-doubt is pervasive, and unconditional affirmation rare.

People frequently discuss what it means for a man to have a father that loved him, affirmed him, and believed in him when he was a boy. A lack of that affirming, validating father figure is debilitating for a lot of men.

But there’s another form of this affirmation that’s incredibly powerful for men. It’s the affirmation they receive from their wives. A woman who truly believes in her husband is empowering in ways that few other things can match.

Kathy was that for Tim. He wrote:

In my own life, I must confess that I had never felt “manly” until I got married. I was a nerd before it was fashionable, playing trumpet in the marching band and staying in the Boy Scouts through high school. Good things, no doubt, but not cool or macho. I was often mocked and excluded, especially during high school, for my uncoolness. But Kathy looked at me like her knight in shining armor. She has always told me, and continues to tell me, that though all the world may look at me and see Clark Kent, she knows that underneath I have on blue underwear. She has always been very quick to point out and celebrate anything I have done that is courageous. Over the years, bit by bit, it has sunk in. To my wife, I’m Superman, and it makes me feel like a man in a way nothing else could. [emphasis added]

I might also add that in part because his wife believed he was Superman, he was able to actually become Superman.

This is something all too few men have in their lives. Many of them don’t even know that they are missing it. It’s one of the superpowers women possess.

But Kathy didn’t just show her belief in Tim by her words but by her actions. Women aren’t just the judge, but as a person I know likes to say, they are the “sacrificial judge.” They most powerfully validate their judgments when they make sacrifices for their choice.

In Kathy’s case, she is obviously extremely smart herself. She graduated summa cum laude from seminary. While her changed theological beliefs led her to believe she could not become a pastor, she could have, as she puts it, “do anything an unordained man can do.” She could have decided that she was equally as qualified as Tim for Christian ministry, and want to build up her own separate career in that along with his. Instead, she followed him to the blue collar small town of Hopewell, Virginia to his first pastoring job where she, as the quote above shows, didn’t even know what she was going to do all day.

That’s real proof that she believed in Tim, and that her judgments about him were correct. She didn’t just tell him he was Superman, she acted like he had the worth of Superman.

My wife did something similar. When I suggested she should move to New York with the idea that we would be seriously dating with the plan of working toward marriage, she quit her job, sold her house, moved from Indianapolis to New York, and got a four month sublet in Hell’s Kitchen. When her sublet was over, we got married.

I also can’t help but think of Hillary Rodham here. She had been featured in Life magazine for her remarks at Wellesley College’s graduation and graduated from Yale Law School, among other generally high accomplishments. She was on the fast track to the top herself, but she elected to follow Bill Clinton to backwoods Arkansas and work in the law there while he pursued his political ambitions. People like to talk about the Rose Law Firm as some elite institution. But it was a Little Rock firm, let’s be clear, not a white shoe firm in New York.

Both Hillary Clinton’s and Kathy Keller’s stars ended up rising high into the firmament in their own right despite their early choices to sacrifice their ambitions to validate their judgments about their husbands, which is interesting to ponder.

Of course, Kathy Keller was not only a judge of talent, but also character, which makes her case different from the Clintons. She was a true believer in Tim, in words and in action, and that made a huge difference for him.

This is one where I’m still seeking more archetypal validation of the pattern. We could perhaps think of the “muse,” but I’m not sure that’s entirely right. If you know good historic, literary, or mythic examples of this sort of thing, I’d love to hear about them.

A Challenger of the Hero

One of the patterns Kennaquhair noted in his analysis of the heroic feminine, is that while the man directly challenges the dragon (or other foe), the woman challenges the man.

Again, Kennaquhair draws on the extra-Biblical Rabbinic literature around Miriam. One of the things Miriam does is challenge her father when he’s planning to make an ungodly decision to divorce his wife.

Miriam was the older sister of Moses. As a child, Miriam's father (in order to save the lives of Jewish children via a technicality) decided to divorce his wife and have the other men follow suit. Miriam, as a young girl, challenged him and insisted that he needed to find another way because it was more important to preserve the family. He accepted her critique and did so.

This pattern of challenging the man to do the correct and manly thing shows up at the end of The Meaning of Marriage when Kathy talks about making the decision to leave the comforts of the seminary professor life in suburban Philadelphia to launch Redeemer Presbyterian Church in pre-Giuliani Manhattan.

In the late 1980s, our family was comfortably situated in a very livable suburb of Philadelphia where Tim held a full-time position as a professor. Then he got an offer to move to New York City to plant a new church. He was excited by the idea, but I was appalled. Raising our three wild boys in Manhattan was unthinkable! Not only that, but almost no one who knew anything about Manhattan thought that the project would be successful. I also knew that this would not be something that Tim would be able to do as a nine-to-five job. It would absorb the whole family and nearly all of our time.

It was clear to me that Tim wanted to take the call, but I had serious doubts that it was the right choice. I expressed my strong doubts to Tim, who responded, “Well, if you don’t want to go, then we won’t go.” However, I replied, “Oh, no, you don’t! You aren’t putting this decision on me. That’s abdication. If you think this is the right thing to do, then exercise your leadership and make the choice. It’s your job to break this logjam. It’s my job to wrestle with God until I can joyfully support your call.”

Tim made the decision to come to New York City and plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The whole family, my sons included, consider it one of the most truly “manly” things he ever did, because he was quite scared, but he felt a call from God.

In the Kellers’ gender theology, wives are supposed to submit their husbands. This is the only example of submission in their book, however, and candidly a weak one. Viewed through that lens, what we see is that Kathy is really the initiator here. Tim only “makes the decision” after she all but tells him to and pre-commits to going along with it.

But the heroic feminine provides another lens on this. Here we see that Tim, the hero, is wavering in the choice of going to try to slay the dragon. She challenges him to rise up and accept his rendezvous with destiny. And she rightly recognizes his own heroic action in doing this.

This is the flip side of being the true believer. She challenges Tim to live like the Superman that she knows he is capable of being.

This short of challenging - which you’ll note is not second-guessing - is undoubtedly a valid part of the female repertoire that’s underplayed by more conservative evangelicals.

It’s critical that these be the right challenges, of course. We see the archetypal example of the inverse form of this in Lady Macbeth, who challenges her husband to greatness in evil rather than good. But clearly Kathy made the right challenge here.

A Partner in Mission

In preindustrial society, there was a strong sex role division of labor, but husbands and wives typically were joined together as part of a household economic enterprise. With industrialization, the husband became an employee of an outside company, getting paid in cash that would be traded for the household’s needed goods and services. The wife, in a normative if not universal sense, lost her economic function. The husband and wife were no longer engaged in a common productive enterprise apart from raising children (which is big and important), but rather mostly in sharing a consumption oriented household. With second wave feminism, women regained their economic function, but in the same mode as men, as employees of a company. The husband and wife remained separate in terms of productive endeavors.

But Kathy was able to be a joint partner on mission with Tim. They co-founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church together. She worked for the church from the very beginning.

As I’ve noted before, pastor and politician are some of the few remaining occupations where husband and wife can join together in economically productive life and mission. There’s typically still a division of labor, but as in the pre-industrial economy, they are engaged in the same enterprise.

Not only was Kathy’s labor itself invaluable in making Redeemer successful, her intellectual and other talents were a big part of that.

The one time I met the Kellers was at a brunch after Tim had preached at one of the Redeemer services. She mentioned a couple of scripture passages that were other examples of some of the points Tim had made. He said, “That’s great. I’m going to use that in tonight’s service.” Remember, Kathy herself was a summa cum laude seminary grad. There’s probably so much that she did to inform and influence his sermons and ministry that we will never know.

I’ve benefitted from this myself. My wife is not only very smart, but she also has different experiences and insights. Just as one example, she worked in politics for several years, so has a much better feel for that world than I do. When she read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, she said, “This is his Dreams From My Father.” She recognized immediately that this book signaled Vance’s political aspirations, something I had not picked up on. I was able to incorporate that into my book review, and as far as I know I’m the first person who put that political connection out there.

Skin in the Game

In her seeing something in Tim, choosing Tim, believing in Tim, sacrificing for Tim, challenging Tim, and being on mission with Tim, Kathy Keller played an indispensable role in making him what he became, and, dare I say it, reshaping the religious landscape of the United States to some extent. She helped propel her husband to greatness - greatness he may never have achieved without her.

She was most certainly a wife and mother, but was also able to develop and deploy her intellectual and other talents, work productively on mission, and achieve a lot of personal status and recognition. She directly influenced the lives of countless people.

There’s one other aspect of her life that’s not per se related to the idea of Kathy Keller as heroic feminine, but is something that deserves to be called out. Kathy Keller had real skin in the game on her gender theology.

Kathy was raised in an essentially feminist household by a college educated mother in the 1950s and 60s. She writes:

If a child of the fifties can be said to have been raised “gender neutral,” my siblings and I were. My mother was one of the only college-educated women among her acquaintances. I had grown up not even considering whether I was the equal of any boy—it just never occurred to me to divide the world into boys and girls, except when it came to restrooms. So, in some ways, the whole feminist movement was a terrible shock to me. You mean, I thought, there are women who have been mistreated, abused, exploited, marginalized, made to feel inferior? The proposed cure revealed to me that I had been oblivious to the disease.

She went to seminary with the idea that she would become a pastor, and was on the track to do that within the mainline Presbyterian church.

In seminary, she became convinced that the Bible prohibited female pastors, so she withdrew from the ordination track process she had been under. This involved explaining herself to her church’s presbytery, which was a fiasco:

It seemed clear to me that women were not being invited into the leadership role of elder in the church. As I was at that time officially under care of my church’s Session and about to proceed to the next step by becoming “a candidate under care” of the Pittsburgh Presbytery, I had to notify my advisor and several committees of the change in my views and status. Questioned about them from the floor the night I came before the Presbytery for the position of “Commissioned Church Worker,” I was booed and hissed by about half of the 350 pastors and elders attending. The Presbytery was divided on this issue, and I became the unintentional flashpoint of a long-simmering debate. The meeting degenerated into a circus, after which my pastor, Ray Pierson, said to me on the way home, “What am I going to tell the elders about tonight?!”

Here’s somebody who is an empowered, feminist, extremely smart woman getting a graduate degree to become a pastor, who does a reverse course against all of her instincts and personality to be obedient to what she believes is the word of God. And this decision causes external problems as well.

She then spent decades in ministry where she appears to have been the designated punching bag for women who were unhappy with the fact that Redeemer didn’t ordain women. Complementarian evangelical pastors have a tendency to let their wives deliver the talk about things like no female pastors or wives submitting to their husbands. The Kellers were no exception. Kathy wrote that chapter in their marriage book, and also wrote a monograph on gender roles in the church.

But this also applied at the retail level, where she was dispatched to have hundreds of what were surely unpleasant conversations on the topic:

One woman told me tearfully when she learned Redeemer did not ordain women as elders or pastors, “It was like finding out that your fiancé is a child molester!” These are not moderate words that encourage continuing conversation. I wanted to console and help her, but the question becomes: How does one talk pastorally and compassionately to twenty-first-century people so that the notion of gender roles is presented not as an embarrassing antiquity the church is stuck with but as a gift, meant for our good?

…

I have heard this cry from women with whom I’m having a quiet discussion, and from women who are weeping. I’ve heard it in small groups and had it shouted to me in large ones. While I understand the frustration from which this sentiment is born, it has nevertheless been my task, at some point in our conversation, to explain that, no, it is not primarily a justice issue, but first it is a theological issue.

…

As far as how they can be addressed, first there must be willing listeners. I cannot number the occasions—hundreds by now—on which I have been asked to reexamine my convictions on this subject. Sometimes the person is asking in tears and other times in anger, but I always agree. I have no investment in being wrong. I do not desire to be deceived or to deceive. So by all means, let us look at the data again.

I can’t name another woman who appears to have gone more against her own upbringing, personality, and the cultural incentives in order to lay it on the line for complementarianism than Kathy Keller. She not only had to do it, she had to spend decades having to deal with people complaining to her about it.

There seems to be a belief among some younger, more conservative evangelicals that the Kellers are crypto-egalitarians engaged in some type of 4D chess strategy to convert evangelicalism to that belief. But nobody goes incognito in 1974 in order to infiltrate evangelicalism in order to take rhetorical beatings for the next 50 years in the hope of the church changing its direction after they are gone.

I have my disagreements with the ultra-thin complementarianism of the Kellers, but there’s no doubt she laid it on the line and paid a very real cost for what she believes. That’s skin in the game. And that commands respect.

In all these respects, Kathy Keller is an exemplary role model for Christian women today. Not everyone has her personality and talents, or shares all of her beliefs. So people won’t do the exact things that she did. But these general patterns of life are powerful, productive, positive, healthy - and can produce a lot of fruit in the world and in life.

Kathy Keller Interview

On the first anniversary of Tim Keller’s death, Kathy Keller sat down with Ruth Jackson for this very interesting podcast you may want to watch.