Tim Keller

Scripture is the final authority, and Keller puts it in the first person rather than leaving it to confessional inheritance: because the Bible has the right to interpret our experience and to critique every culture, it is what we must look to as final. Setting out what defines an evangelical he names the full authority of the Bible as the sole and supreme rule of faith and practice, and 'sole' is doing work — it leaves no co-ordinate authority in tradition or in a teaching office. On disputed texts he holds that the arbiter is Scripture itself: only the Bible can tell us how to read the Bible.

WORTH CORRECTINGThe third stance — Scripture supreme but recognized and interpreted through the church — is the live alternative here and was weighed rather than waved off. Keller held that every reader comes to the text through a partly distorting cultural lens, and when judging a novel reading he leaned hard on the unbroken agreement of the church across centuries, cultures and the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant divisions. But that use of the church is evidential, not magisterial: consensus is evidence about what the text says and a check on the reader's blind spots, never a second authority standing beside the text. Sola scriptura in its classical sense has always made that ministerial use of tradition, so his catholicity is not a departure from the stance.

Unconditional election, within PCA confessional bounds.

Forensic imputation, and characteristically pressed as the answer to both moralism and irreligion — the elder-brother and younger-brother problem in Luke 15.

Perseverance of the saints.

Total depravity.

The armour of Ephesians 6 is the gospel applied: putting it on means taking the benefits of the gospel and using them in your life. Most satanic influence works through the imagination, in things like worry. The sermon read never mentions exorcism, deliverance or possession.

WORTH CORRECTINGQuoted from a machine transcript of the freely published sermon audio. Two other free sermons on this text, "Spiritual Warfare (Part 1)" (1991) and "The Flesh and the Devil" (1994), have no transcript and were not read.

"Putting on the armor means taking the benefits of the gospel and beginning to use them in your life."Sermon, "The Whole Armor of God", 19 January 1992, c. 25:29

Infant baptism as a covenant sign, per Presbyterian confessional standards — the one locus where he differs from most of the contemporary figures here.

Open in principle, cautious in practice.

Spiritual presence received by faith.

Amillennial.

Affirmed the reality of hell and wrote in defense of it, while framing it in terms of freely chosen self-exclusion from God — a presentation some critics judged to soften the traditional account.