Ideas
Keller, the most influential Christian apologist and evangelical leader of his generation, died Friday at age 72.
One spring day in 1970, a tall, slightly awkward undergraduate named Timothy Keller was standing with friends on the main quadrangle of Bucknell University’s campus in central Pennsylvania. Students were protesting in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings; they crowded onto the quad, half-listening to speakers who vied for the open mic. Keller, a new convert to Christianity and a religion major, ordinarily would have been busy with courses in existential philosophy, Buddhism, and biblical criticism. But at the moment, he and his friends in the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were trying to decide how to participate in this tense moment, when their peers were angry and probably not interested in talking about God.
They did not commandeer the microphone to rail at classmates about their sins; even single-minded evangelicals can read a room now and then. Instead, they set up a table nearby with a stack of Christian books and made a sign with bold lettering: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ Is Credible and Existentially Satisfying. “They didn’t get much of a response—mostly mocking and eye rolls,” Collin Hansen writes in his recent biography of Keller.
But some bystanders did bite: How could Jesus possibly be relevant when the world was on fire? Keller, manning the books table, was in his element, quietly suggesting that they set aside political categories for the moment. Don’t look away from economic or racial injustice; don’t stop hating war, or stifle your anger at corrupt and lying leaders. Just try looking at all of that through Christian lenses, and you’ll see idolatry, the worship of self: the real things that wreck our world.
Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival
Keller, who died May 19 at age 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was the most influential Christian apologist and evangelical leader of his generation, even if his name is unfamiliar to many secular people. The flood of articles noting his death have remarked on the flourishing megachurch he built in supposedly godless Manhattan; the hundreds of new congregations he helped plant around the world; the best-selling books he wrote that made the case for Christianity to a popular audience. And that’s all true. But in all of this, two fundamental ideas propelled him: Biblical Christianity is not a political position, and secular liberalism deserves theological critique—because it is not simply how the world really works, but is itself a kind of faith.
When Tim and his wife, Kathy, founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989, the prospects seemed dismal. Walking the city streets, Keller was struck by how many grand historical church buildings had been repurposed as clubs, coffee shops, and condos—visible signs that New Yorkers seemed to have moved on from church. Yet over the decades that followed, Redeemer grew into a booming congregation of several thousand people, including many young doctors, lawyers, bankers, and artists who never considered themselves the churchgoing type.
Journalists were confused by why so many “yuppie Manhattanites” would attend this “conservative evangelical” church. Keller had the quiet charisma of a professor at a small liberal-arts college rather than the persona of a megachurch warlord; he poured energy into co-founding institutions, such as the church network and media organization The Gospel Coalition, rather than nurturing a cult of personality.
Moreover, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, and was not shy about his denomination’s conservative teachings on sexual identity and gender roles. The PCA does not bless same-sex marriages and discourages the use of the phrase gay Christian, because it elevates homosexuality as an “identity marker alongside our identity as new creations in Christ.” The denomination teaches the “complementarity” of men and women, “displayed when a Christian husband expresses his responsibility of headship in sacrificial love to his wife,” and does not ordain women as pastors, though women can serve in some leadership roles. But Keller never led with those issues, and steered every conversation back to how broken and miserable we all are without the free gift of God’s grace. “The real culture war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, that fail to satisfy us even when we get them,” he wrote in 2008 in his breakout best-seller, The Reason for God.
The year the Kellers founded Redeemer, the mainstream media were preoccupied with a very different group of evangelical leaders. Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and their colleagues had recently founded the Christian Coalition of America, the latest in a series of organizations carrying the banner for conservative Christian activists who lashed the Gospel to Republican policy goals. While they sacralized nostalgia for a bygone Christian America in which white middle-class men had the largest share of cultural prestige and economic privilege, Keller was busy ministering to post-Christian, pluralist, urban Americans, convincing them to decouple Christianity from any political platform.
In later years, on one of the very few occasions when Keller made a public statement about politics—halfway through the Trump administration—he published an op-ed in The New York Times insisting that Christians should reject tidy alignment with either the Republicans or Democrats. “Following the Bible and the early church,” he wrote, “Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.”
Timothy Keller: Growing my faith in the face of death
Keller’s approach—to spurn tribalism, avoid picking unnecessary fights, and preach to our shared existential angst—was not normal, not even in New York City. A century earlier, the fundamentalist movement was born primarily in the urban north, where Keller’s Reformed Protestant forebears founded breakaway churches and Bible institutes to rebel against a tide of non-Protestant immigrants, first-wave feminism, new trends in biblical criticism, and other changes they saw as threats to both the authority of scripture and their own cultural status. America replayed that same basic culture war in the 1960s and ’70s, when Keller was an undergraduate. We are in the throes of another rerun now.
Over that time, the great evangelical tradition of apologetics—making reasoned arguments for Christian truth claims based on historical evidence, scientific discoveries, and moral philosophy—largely fell captive to these culture wars. One might have expected Keller to imitate the apologists who were at the height of their powers while he was starting out as a young pastor: men like Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell, who blended their mission to defend the truth of Christianity with their callings as culture warriors.
Instead, he modeled his writing and preaching on irenic British Christians: the Anglican minister John Stott and, especially, C. S. Lewis (although Keller’s books feature a wide range of cultural and literary references, including Pascal, Tolstoy, the movie Fargo, various atheist thinkers—even, at least once, the Disney cartoon Frozen). Over the years, Keller became not just a Christian apologist but a sophisticated critic of secular liberalism, especially its worship of personal autonomy as the highest good. He pushed his audiences to consider whether total sexual freedom was truly the pinnacle of human liberation, or whether the boundaries of marriage might actually enrich their lives. He took on the false idol of professional achievement: “As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as ‘drive’ and your anxiety as ‘hope,’” he wrote in 2013’s Encounters With Jesus. “And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is.”
Secular Americans in the 21st century might think that they are free individuals, living true to themselves—but in fact they have unconsciously absorbed the preferences and prejudices of their particular cultural setting, he wrote in what may be his most important book, 2016’s Making Sense of God. All humans, in all historical contexts, “use some kind of filter—a set of beliefs and values—to sift through our hearts and determine which emotions and sensibilities we will value and incorporate into our core identity and which we will not. It is this value-laden filter that forms our identity, rather than our feelings themselves.”
In these later years, he drew more and more on the philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor, each, in his own way, a forceful critic of secular modernity, but all cited more often in scholarly journals than in sermons or popular books. Keller’s unique evangelistic gift lay in simplifying and popularizing their dense academic arguments to help a wide range of Christians and nonbelievers see that the secularization of Western culture was not so much a story about traditional faiths declining—what Taylor calls the “subtraction story”—but a story of new, equally metaphysical assumptions taking hold. Keller insisted that these assumptions cannot adequately explain human experience. We all seek what Taylor calls “fullness”: an idea that, Keller wrote, “is neither strictly a belief nor a mere experience. It is the perception that life is greater than can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations … It is the widespread, actual lived condition of most human beings regardless of worldview.”
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His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity, isolation, transience—were becoming common in rural and suburban contexts as well. Keller was ahead of the curve in confronting these changes. Younger pastors and lay Christians found in him a mentor who might help them make traditional Christianity seem plausible to indifferent, even hostile, hearers—and, possibly, help them survive American evangelicalism’s current doom spiral of anger and political idolatry.
In his hugely influential 2012 book on starting new churches, Center Church, he used the analogy of the four seasons to describe the Church’s changing relationship to culture. Keller believed the American Church was well into its autumn season, with Christian influence in decline; people are opting for other master narratives to explain their lives; evangelists who trained in the “summertime” of Christendom are flailing.
In all of his apologetic work, Keller politely deconstructed secular narratives of meaning and happiness before making any attempt to convince his audience that Jesus’s tomb really was empty—and always in the tone of a humble conversation partner rather than a browbeating crusader. He was careful to present his arguments as “clues” rather than airtight proof: a set of hints in the fine-tuning of the universe, in human moral instincts, in the intriguing historical evidence from Jesus’s life and death—which, taken together, do not wholly eliminate doubts but have an awfully good chance of making you doubt your doubts.
Yet by the end of Keller’s long career, he had accumulated plenty of critics on both the left and the right who complained that his claim to sidestep politics in favor of the big existential questions was a red herring, an attempt to evade the issues that cause the most pain and anger in ordinary people’s lives. In 2017, Princeton Theological Seminary rescinded a prestigious lecture invitation it had extended to Keller after many in the seminary community objected to his views on gender and sexuality. Carol Howard Merritt, a Presbyterian minister in the more liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) denomination, called him “one of the loudest, most read, and most adhered-to proponents of male headship in the home … I have spent years with women who have tried to de-program themselves after growing up in this baptized abuse.”
Tim Alberta: How politics poisoned the evangelical church
American Christians—not to mention U.S. courts—are also in a long-running battle over whether the religious objection to same-sex relationships is akin to anti-Black racism, and is therefore an intolerable and anachronistic doctrine, or whether it is acceptable within the bounds of religious freedom. Keller’s long-term legacy in mainstream culture depends on how these legal and cultural debates evolve.
Meanwhile, conservatives criticize Keller’s “third way” philosophy as “instinctively accommodating” to secular contexts, as James R. Wood, then an associate editor at the conservative Christian magazine First Things, wrote last spring. He used to admire Keller but has changed his mind as American culture has grown more hostile to traditional Christianity. “A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions,” he wrote. “The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the Gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.” Better, perhaps, to sharpen the contradictions.
It’s possible that Keller’s strategy was the luxury of a less polarized time. Now that Christians on the right and the left both feel remorselessly persecuted, many believe they have no choice but to purify their own ranks and defeat the forces of evil at the ballot box. There are more urgent tasks than patiently engaging a skeptic.
Keller’s aim was never to make the Gospel any less outrageous but to make our own private idols moreso. He wanted to help sincere and restless people (and that’s most of us) finally see the false gods we are worshipping—whether we realize it or not.
FAQs
What does Timothy Keller believe? ›
Theological views. Keller shunned the label "evangelical" because of its political and fundamentalist connotation, preferring to call himself orthodox because "he believes in the importance of personal conversion or being 'born again,' and the full authority of the Bible."
What is the difference between religion and gospel Keller? ›Gospel: Motivation is based on grateful joy. Religion: I obey God in order to get things from God. Gospel: I obey to get God–to delight in and resemble him. Religion: When the circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or myself, since I believe that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.
What is the difference between religion and the Gospel? ›The goal of religion is to get from God such things as health, wealth, insight, power, and control. The goal of the gospel is not the gifts God gives, but rather God as the gift given to us by grace.
Is Timothy Keller still living? › What is the main point of Timothy's story? ›In 1 Timothy, we read about a holistic vision of the nature and mission of the Church. Just as in Timothy's time, corrupt teachers can confuse believers, but Paul instructs on how the Church and its leaders can stay faithful to the way of Jesus.
What does Timothy teach us? ›1 Timothy 2–3.
He teaches that Jesus Christ is the ransom for all and is our Mediator with the Father. He instructs men and women how to conduct themselves during worship. He outlines the qualifications for bishops and deacons.
The True Jesus Church (TJC) is a non-denominational Christian Church that originated in Beijing, China, during the Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century.
What is the difference between secular and gospel? ›Many Christians separate music into these two categories. Gospel music refers to music that is centered around God and Jesus, while secular music includes everything else.
Do Mormons preach the gospel? ›For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ is at the cornerstone of their beliefs.
What religion was Jesus? ›He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text, from the Bible.
Is Christianity a religion according to Bible? ›
Christianity is religion. It's “pure religion,” as the Epistle of James submits. It is religion that makes a relationship with God possible when it comes to our own response to God's grace at work within us.
What religions consider the Bible to be holy? ›The Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, and many other religions.
Is Tim Keller Married? ›Tim and Kathy Keller met while studying at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and were married at the beginning of their final semester. In 1989, Tim, Kathy, and their family moved to New York city to start Redeemer Presbyterian Church. They are the authors of the best-selling book The Meaning of Marriage.
Did Phillip Keller have children? ›On Monday, March 27, Phil Keller, the loving husband and father of two beautiful children, passed away peacefully at the age of 80 with his wife at his side.
Can a female be a pastor? ›Scripture is clear. Only biblically qualified men can hold the position of pastor in Christ's church.
Who taught Timothy about God? ›Not only did Eunice and Lois live out their faith in the presence of young Timothy—they also taught him the Word of God.
What was Timothy's fear? ›The fear that Timothy is experiencing is not from God. Timothy may be experiencing fear of retaliation for preaching the gospel, much like his mentor Paul is experiencing. Paul encourages Timothy not to be ashamed of the gospel or of Paul himself, who is suffering in prison.
What was God's gift to Timothy? ›Paul knew Timothy was gifted, and he urged Timothy to cultivate his gift. We are not told specifically what it was. It could have been preaching, prophecy, healing, or any number of things. Timothy received this gift when the elders laid their hands on him and commissioned him for ministry.
What are two important things covered in the first letter to Timothy? ›First Timothy presents the most explicit and complete instructions for church leadership and organization in the entire Bible. This includes sections on appropriate conduct in worship gatherings, the qualifications of elders and deacons, and the proper order of church discipline.
What was the advice to Timothy? ›
We remember that Paul regarded Timothy as a young man. His advice to Timothy was: “Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, show yourself an example of those who believe” (1 Timothy 4:12 NAS).
What is the most true Church in the world? ›The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Christ founded only "one true Church", and that this one true Church is the Catholic Church with the bishop of Rome (the pope) as its supreme, infallible head and locus of communion.
Who is the Church of God affiliated with? ›The Church of God is headquartered in Tennessee, and it's affiliated with both the Pentecostal and Holiness movements. In 1886, R. G. Spurling organized a meeting in Monroe County, Tennessee, for former Baptists who wanted to break away from the mainstream and form their own movement.
Is the LDS Church the only true Church? ›The Lord Himself said that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church. When Joseph Smith prayed to know which church was right, the Savior told Joseph that he “must join none of them, for they were all wrong” (JS—H 1:19).
Can you be secular and believe in God? ›You may be surprised to know that while most secularists are atheists, some secularists are actually believers in a faith. While they believe, they don't think that belief is a reason for special treatment.
Which religion follows gospel? ›It is a central message of Christianity today, in which written accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ are known as Gospels.
What are secular views on Christianity? ›Secular theology holds that theism has lost credibility as a valid conception of God's nature. It rejects the concept of a personal God and embraces the status of Jesus Christ, Christology and Christian eschatology as Christian mythology without basis in historical events.
Who do Mormons think Jesus is? ›We believe Jesus is the Son of God, the Only Begotten Son in the flesh (John 3:16). We accept the prophetic declarations in the Old Testament that refer directly and powerfully to the coming of the Messiah, the Savior of all humankind. We believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the fulfillment of those prophecies.
Do Mormons believe Jesus came to the US? ›After Jesus' resurrection, according to the Book of Mormon, he visited America. In fact, America plays a special role in Mormonism. Mormons believe that when Jesus returns to Earth, he will first go to Jerusalem and then to Missouri.
Where do Mormons think Jesus was? ›Mormons believe that Jesus was born as an infant in Bethlehem. As the child of God the Father and a mortal mother, Mary, He grew up learning His divine mission and His Father's gospel line upon line, precept upon precept (see D&C 98:12).
What religion was Adam and Eve? ›
Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors.
What was Jesus real name? ›Jesus' name in Hebrew was “Yeshua” which translates to English as Joshua.
What is the oldest religion in the world? ›The word Hindu is an exonym, and while Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world, many practitioners refer to their religion as Sanātana Dharma (Sanskrit: सनातन धर्म, lit.
Is being Baptist a religion? ›Baptists are members of a Protestant Christian denomination, united by a specific set of religious beliefs. Baptists originated with a 16th-century denomination known as the Anabaptists, and have since grown into a religious denomination with millions of members worldwide.
What religion is the same as Christianity? ›Islam shares a number of beliefs with Christianity. They share similar views on judgment, heaven, hell, spirits, angels, and a future resurrection. Jesus is acknowledged as the greatest prophet and venerated as a saint by Muslims.
What religion has the same God as Christianity? ›Most mainstream Muslims would generally agree they worship the same God that Christians — or Jews — worship. Zeki Saritoprak, a professor of Islamic studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, points out that in the Quran there's the Biblical story of Jacob asking his sons whom they'll worship after his death.
What does the Bible say about cremation? ›What does the Bible say about cremation? According to most Biblical study websites, there is no explicit scriptural command for or against cremation. There are no passages that forbid cremation, according to most Biblical scholars.
What religion has no holy scriptures? ›Unlike Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, Buddhism has no single authoritative book; there are multiple Buddhist canons in multiple languages. Consult individual Buddhism reference sources to learn more about the Indic, Tibetan, Chinese, and other Buddhist canons and to find recommendations for particular Buddhist texts.
Why the Bible is true? ›Although the Bible was written over many centuries by different writers, the messages it contains are coherent and consistent. The Bible presents a coherent theology and worldview and presents this material consistently. Moreover, the Christian worldview is robust, reasonable and grounded in history.
What do Presbyterian churches believe? ›Presbyterian theology typically emphasizes the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures, and the necessity of grace through faith in Christ. Presbyterian church government was ensured in Scotland by the Acts of Union in 1707, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain.
How much does the mayor of Keller make? ›
How much does a City Mayor make in Keller, TX? The salary range for a City Mayor job is from $73,729 to $93,486 per year in Keller, TX. Click on the filter to check out City Mayor job salaries by hourly, weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly, and yearly.
What is a complementarian church? ›Complementarianism holds that "God has created men and women equal in their essential dignity and human personhood, but different and complementary in function with male headship in the home and in the Church." Many proponents and also opponents of complementarianism see the Bible as the infallible word of God.
What religion is mayor Tim Keller? ›He was raised as a Roman Catholic and following his graduation from Saint Pius X High School, he attended the University of Notre Dame. Growing up, Keller struggled with dyslexia, though he was not diagnosed until graduate school.
What is the purpose of marriage? ›God has three purposes for marriage: companionship, procreation, and redemption. These purposes are still relevant today and are essential for a healthy society. Let's take a closer look at each one.
How does Tim Keller define marriage? ›Marriage, writes Keller, “is a way for two spiritual friends to help each other on their journey to become the persons God designed them to be.” In other words, marriage means becoming more than you are with the help of someone else. To allow this process, you need to surrender yourself to that someone else.
What happened to Mrs Keller? ›Later life and death
Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday.
Most students learn that Keller, born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Ala., was left deaf and blind after contracting a high fever at 19 months, and that her teacher Anne Sullivan taught her braille, lip-reading, finger spelling and eventually, how to speak.
Did the Keller family live in Alabama? ›At her birthplace and childhood home known as "Ivy Green" in Tuscumbia, Alabama, visitors can see the Keller family's original furnishings, hundreds of personal mementos, gifts, and books from a lifetime of travels.
What do calvinists believe about election? ›In Calvinist theology, unconditional election is considered to be one aspect of predestination in which God chooses certain individuals to be saved. Those elected receive mercy, while those not elected, the reprobates, receive justice without condition.
What is the Calvinist church? ›Calvinism is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice of John Calvin and is characterized by the doctrine of predestination in the salvation of souls.
What does Timothy say about preachers? ›
We must remember that we are not good enough to be pastors; there is only One who is. We must remember that it is not our qualifications that establish our calling; rather we minister on the basis of the One who called us.
What is considered a false gospel? ›The Self-Esteem Gospel
This dangerous false gospel masquerades sin as “insecurity” or “negative self-image,” rather than calling it what it is. Remember, belittling sin does not make it go away. When we belittle sin, we lose the gospel. For Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Calvin's belief in the uncompromised "sovereignty of God" spawned his doctrines of providence and predestination. For the world, without providence it would be "unlivable". For individuals, without predestination "no one would be saved". Calvin's doctrine of providence is straightforward.
Why is the doctrine of election wrong? ›Loss of Control
Many people disapprove of the doctrine of election because they feel that by embracing God's sovereignty in grace, they somehow lose control. The more we read and study the Bible, the more we come to the knowledge of how small, weak, and powerless we are in comparison to God.
At its heart is the concept of predestination. Calvinists believe that, at the beginning of time, God selected a limited number of souls to grant salvation and there's nothing any individual person can do during their mortal life to alter their eternal fate.
Is a Baptist a Calvinist? ›The Particular Baptists adhered to the doctrine of a particular atonement—that Christ died only for an elect—and were strongly Calvinist (following the Reformation teachings of John Calvin) in orientation; the General Baptists held to the doctrine of a general atonement—that Christ died for all people and not only for ...
Do Calvinists believe God loves everyone? ›While some Calvinists forthrightly deny that God loves everyone, more commonly Calvinists attempt to affirm the love of God for all persons in terms that are compatible with their doctrines that Christ died only for the elect--those persons God has unconditionally chosen to save.
Which three activities did Calvinism forbid? ›life: it made church attendance mandatory, encouraged simplicity in dress, and forbade many forms of enjoyment such as dancing, singing, and playing cards.
Who is higher than a pastor? ›Bishops exist in the church hierarchy above the level of pastors and priests. They provide administrative supervision, theological guidance, and moral foundations for the many local churches under their oversight.
What is the warning in Timothy? ›1 Timothy 4
Paul warned Timothy that some people will be deceived by false teachings regarding marriage and dietary practices. He spoke about the importance of marriage and of receiving God's creations with thankfulness. Paul taught Timothy how to deal with the false teachings of his day and those that would soon come.
What is the difference between a pastor and a preacher? ›
What's the difference between a pastor and a preacher? While a pastor's role is incredibly varied, a preacher is someone who preaches. Simply put, all pastors are preachers, but not all preachers are pastors.
Which gospel is the truest? ›Scholars since the 19th century have regarded Mark as the first of the gospels (called the theory of Markan priority).
What are the banned Gospels? ›Thomas's Gospel Of The Infancy Of Jesus Christ; The Gospel Of Nicodemus, Formerly Called The Acts Of Pontius Pilate; The Epistles Of Jesus Christ & Abgarus King Of Edessa; The Epistle Of St. Paul The Apostle To The Laodiceans; The Epistles Of St. Paul The Apostle To Seneca, With Seneca's To Paul; The Acts Of St.
What is the real gospel in the Bible? ›The word itself comes from a Greek word euangelion, which literally means “good news.” In the New Testament, it refers to the announcement that Jesus has brought the reign of God to our world through his life, death, and resurrection from the dead.