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Ken Ham Accuses Tim Keller of ‘Lukewarmness,’ ‘Compromising’ Following Announcement of Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics

“So Tim Keller says ‘American Christianity Is Due For A Revival,’” Ham tweeted on Sunday (Feb. 12), quoting the title of a Keller authored op-ed recently published in The Atlantic, “but I don’t believe true revival can happen until there’s a new reformation to call church leaders (like Tim Keller) back to the authority of the Word of God beginning in Genesis.”

“Much of the lukewarmness of the church today in our era started as church leaders began to compromise with the religion of naturalism in the 1800’s,” Ham continued. “This first began by trying to add [a] millions of years belief into the bible resulting in all sorts of compromise positions like the Gap Theory, Day Age, etc.”

Ham added, “Then many church leaders accepted varying degrees of Darwinian evolution & eventually the Big Bang. All this undermined the authority of Scripture & resulted in generations being raised without the foundation of Genesis 1-11, which is the foundation for all doctrine, the rest of the bible, the Christian worldview, & really everything.”

“A Tim Keller apologetics center won’t help this situation because he has adopted evolutionary ideas into Genesis. True revival can’t take place without the right foundational history,” Ham argued. “Christians need to wake up and understand the foundational importance of the book of Genesis.”

Ham went on to point out that Keller has written for BioLogos, an apologetic resourcing organization seeking to reconcile Christian beliefs with scientific discovery. 

BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, respected geneticist who went on to become the longest standing director of the National Institutes of Health, serving under three presidents across 12 years. Though an evangelical Christian himself, Collins has nevertheless been much maligned by members of his own theological tribe in recent years for his unwavering advocacy for COVID-19 pandemic safety measures, including vaccinations.

In his Twitter thread, Ham described BioLogos as “one of the leading compromise organizations trying to get the church to reject a literal Genesis,” linking to a 2012 blog post wherein he further criticized Keller. 

In that post, Ham quoted Keller as having written, “Many secular and many evangelical voices agree…that if you are an orthodox Christian with a high view of the authority of the Bible, you cannot believe in evolution in any form at all. New Atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and creationist writers such as Ken Ham seem to have arrived at consensus on this…”

Keller went on to argue that there exist arguments from Christians with a high view of Scripture that don’t include strict six-day creationism.

In response to the quote, Ham wrote, “It’s sad that he would place arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins and me in the same sentence. I’m assuming he considers both of us to be extremes. Since Richard Dawkins as a radical atheist is one extreme, then am I as a six-day, young-earth creationist the other extreme?”

“And for whatever reason, these conservative scholars like Tim Keller seem to be blind to the fact they have two different approaches to hermeneutics—one approach for Genesis 1–11 and one for the rest of Scripture,” Ham wrote.

For their part, the Keller Center has launched learning cohorts for pastors and church leaders grappling with how to understand the intersection of biblical principles with hot button cultural issues, such as critical theory, the Christian sexual ethic, and other cultural challenges facing the church in the Western world.