From Byron Borger at Hearts and Minds: I think this book snuck out without much ado, and the reference to Easter in the subtitle caused some to think it was too seasonal to be of lasting interest. Forgive me if I pull in the Apostle Paul to remind us all that if the Easter resurrection did not happen, then we are to be pitied. Which is to say, this book is perennial and you should overlook the publisher’s strategic error of pitching it as a holiday title.

Look: Keller is coping with a life-threatening form of serious cancer. He has struggled to be a person of integrity and care, perhaps too conservatives for our progressive activist friends and, curiously, has been criticized for decades by some in his PCA denomination and beyond. My respect for him has always been high and as he has navigated his illness, his politics, and his shift from pastoring to a broader role in resourcing churches (through Redeemer’s City-to-City movement) our appreciation endures. And this book is one we need, that is helpful and inspiring. It is intelligently written and well informed by excellent scholarship, but Keller is a preacher and writes with a pastor’s care for real people and their real, daily concerns.

There are several things going on here in Hope in Times of Fear and to say it explores the vast implications of the “great reversal” of things inaugurated by Christ’s death and resurrection is really to say too little. But in this short space allow me to just assure you it is a vital, solid, reasonable and faithful book, good for skeptics, for those unsure of the gospel-centered goodness of the Christian faith, and for anyone who needs to plumb the multi-faceted implications of the hope we have in the resurrection. Even for those going through painful times.

I grinned when I read the first line of the preface:

When I had thyroid cancer in 2002 I read an eight-hundred page masterwork, The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright.

I suppose we know his love language: books! He gets a cancer diagnosis and dives into a huge, dense, theological tome. Ha!

Keller continues:

It was not only an enormous help to my theological understanding but, under the circumstances, also a bracing encouragement in my face of my own heightened sense of mortality. I was reminded and assured that death had been defeated in Jesus, and that death would also be defeated for me.

Now, nearly twenty years later, I am writing my own book on the resurrection of Jesus, and I find myself again facing a diagnosis of cancer. This time I have pancreatic cancer, and by all accounts, this condition is much more serious and the treatment a much bigger challenge.

He also notes, of course, that he is writing in the midst of the worst world pandemic in a century, in New York, no less. This, friends, is how it is done, preaching good, good news with realism and clarity. You may not even have heard of it, but Hope in Times of Fear is surely one of the best books of 2021.