Christoph Keller III

Rev. Chris Keller wants to reach nonchurchgoers who have a “little bit of hope and some curiosity.”

Rev. Chris Keller is the new dean and rector of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. “I have total sympathy for people who are questioning anything including faith. Our capacity to ask the question is the font of reason.”
Rev. Chris Keller is the new dean and rector of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. “I have total sympathy for people who are questioning anything including faith. Our capacity to ask the question is the font of reason.”

"I think that we have an opportunity to do something distinctive at Trinity," the Rev. Chris Keller told the congregants gathered for coffee and doughnuts after a service earlier this month.

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Rev. Chris Keller is the new dean and rector of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. "Jesus in the Gospels is the son of Mary, the son of David, according to the flesh,” and his story “is about the world rising spiritually toward God through the humanity of Jesus, because he exemplifies what human life can be … and that’s kind of the ascent of humanity. But at the same time, it’s the descent of divinity into humanity. So while we work at being spiritual, God works at being human.”

"I want this to be the kind of place where somebody can come in with nothing more than maybe just a faint little bit of hope and some curiosity that there might be something to all this talk about the grand things we say about God in the world."

Date and place of birth: Jan. 4, 1955, in El Dorado

Family: wife, Julie; adult children Christoph Keller and Mary Olive Keller

My morning routine: Awake at 5:30, a shower and a bowl of Wheat Chex and Corn Chex mixed. I’m here at 6:45 with the door closed, working on sermons until 9. Then, I open the door and start the flux of things.

My evening routine: Home after 5:30. My wife and I practice a dance move for a minute at 6 o’clock, eat supper about 6:30. Lately, I’m watching Blue Bloods, and then … in bed by 9:30.

The Bible passage I quote most often in times of consolation: Romans 12:12, Let hope keep you joyful; in trouble stand firm ; persist in prayer.

The Bible passage I struggle with the most: Do unto others as you would have them do onto you, or love your neighbor as yourself.

I’m a sucker for anyone with an Ozark mountain accent.

The menu for my last meal: fried chicken and mustard greens, field peas, sweet corn and hot water cornbread.

Dessert? Pecan pie a la mode.

The other book that had an impact on me: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Why? It both got me headed in a scholarly direction, and … Agee’s faith, his so deeply uncynical view of the people he was living with, his recognition of their value before God, affirmed my faith.

One word to sum me up: Inquisitive

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, he officially presides over services as dean and rector of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where his father sat as Episcopal bishop of Arkansas ("cathedral" comes from a Latin word meaning "chair"). Next Sunday, he'll be formally installed.

That this 60-year-old would accede to the rectorship is both a bit of a surprise and wholly unsurprising. Keller had agreed to be interim dean while a parish committee searched for and vetted a fully vested replacement. At "the 59th minute of the 11th hour," the candidate backed down, and Keller -- who'd agreed to serve as interim only if he was overlooked by the committee -- retracted that condition and was considered. On the other hand, the previous three generations of Keller men have all been Episcopal rectors, and Christoph Keller II was the 10th Episcopal bishop of Arkansas.

That Keller would extend his mission to the penumbra that isn't churchgoing but isn't atheistic, that nurtures "a faint little bit of hope and some curiosity," is proactive. Earlier this month the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life published a report claiming that slowly, but measurably, the nation is "becoming less religious." A 2014 Religious Landscape Study of 35,000 adults found fewer people are going to church, at least since the Pew Center's last such survey in 2007.

"I have total sympathy for people who are questioning anything, including faith. Our capacity to ask the question is the font of reason," he says.

Theology is faith seeking understanding, he says. It is mystery. "You're not just lining up probabilities."

"The moment of conversion when you go from seeing faith as plausible, which, when you understand the Christian faith long enough you will see its plausibility, to the conviction in the head and the heart that, 'Yeah, I believe that, and I'm going to commit to it.' People who are stuck between seeing its plausibility and making that commitment, there's something sacred about that."

(On the other hand, anyone who denies the plausibility of Christianity, who maintains that reason is the antidote to faith, that's a nonstarter. Those people "are just not well informed about what reasonable people can and can't believe," he says.)

THEOLOGICAL DEBATE SOCIETY

This spirit spurred him to start a high school theological debate society, Summa, three years ago. Last summer, the program was picked up by The Beecken Center of the theological school at Sewanee: The University of the South. Many of the 40 or so students in Summa: A High School Theological Debate Society are recruited through Arkansas Commitment, a college-prep program for black students in Arkansas.

"It's often said of churches, they're the most segregated sector of society. One reason is," he says, "in the South, the black church is frankly stronger than the rest of us, in terms of its position within its own community." That said, as it pertains to Summa, "we're not trying to steal the sheep. We're happy for those kids to go right back to their churches."

It will not surprise many to learn that Keller is the son of the former bishop of the Episcopal Church in Arkansas, but it might surprise people to know that he sits on the board of directors for Murphy USA and Deltic Timber Corp. His first cousin Claiborne Deming is the former chief executive officer of Murphy, and his father, Christoph Keller II, was, before seminary, an executive vice president at the company.

"We come from a family of pretty ambitious intellectual people," Deming says, adding that Keller stands out. "Being a good board member is really more about judgment than anything else," and Keller "sees all sides of an issue, and not many people see all sides ... not the whole 360 of why a person would think a certain way and really understand the circumstances. He does, and gives good advice as a result."

When our subject was just a year old, Chris the father moved to New York for seminary. By the time the son could remember, the family was living in Harrison, "where I learned to talk." (His accent is more twang than drawl.)

On the wall of his office at Trinity is a black and white Associated Press photo of his white father with a quartet of black women on the steps of St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson, Miss. Chris Keller was still young when the family landed in Jackson, and the photo was taken the Sunday after civil rights worker Medgar Evers was assassinated. The women had gone to services at the cathedral as a quiet protest, a display of integrationism. The elder Keller welcomed them and asked if they would return.

As a parent, his father was neither aloof nor authoritarian. If the expectation is always that those children will be either straitlaced or off the rails, Chris Keller was neither. "I was in a generation that, we were all rebelling in some way."

On the other hand, of the Bishop's six adult children, three married ministers, two went to seminary and one of those is the new dean at Trinity.

'QUESTIONED THE FAITH'

Did he ever question his denomination or the existence of God? "I've certainly questioned the faith that I was handed, but not really existentially. I asked the questions that it would occur to you to ask about. Does God exist, and why do we do this or that? That kind of questioning was not considered irreligious."

He was a sophomore at Hall High School before the summer of 1971, when a federal judicial order steered him by bus to Little Rock Central High School, where he eventually graduated. Later, at Amherst College in Massachusetts and majoring in American studies, he won a prize for the best senior thesis. It was on busing and the difference it can make for a disadvantaged student -- turns out, not much. (Keller wrote in support of busing, but his research and, specifically, two separate sociological texts averred that, among the factors that predict success in education, the quality of the school matters surprisingly little.)

Did you know that Keller introduced organized soccer to central Arkansas? If that sounds a little like "Al Gore invented the Internet," this one's easier to track (and believe). As student body president of Central High, he challenged other student body leaders to form teams. In the fall of '72, a four-team league kicked off, with Keller at striker -- Keller the Killer Striker? No, no one called him that -- and Central has not missed a season since.

He was accepted into the history of American civilization graduate program at Harvard University, but after one year he jumped bus lines and began attending the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. Actually, it was the same bus line. Meanwhile, wife Julie Keller (nee Honeycutt) got a master's degree in journalism and Afro-American studies across the Charles River at Boston University.

After 16 years as a minister -- in Pine Bluff, Van Buren, and Little Rock, where he founded St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in one of the Market Street Cinema theaters -- Keller went to New York for a doctorate that took five years. His thesis -- which is online in its entirety -- is "Darwin's Science and Chalcedonian Imagination: Barth, Double Agency and Theistic Evolution."

DEEP ENOUGH

Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection suggests life as we know it could have sprung from cosmological hugger-mugger. Throw enough atoms together and eventually there's life, then reproduction. Complex life forms aren't designed so much as serially adaptive, and within the crucible of competition, eventually you will have monkeys -- and that's what we are.

Keller doesn't dispute Darwinism, but neither does he accept that Darwinism disputes his Creator.

"Somebody could say, 'Well, there's no God in that.' Well, if you understand the difference between God the creator and the activities within the creation. ... The hand of God can be in all of that."

"'Course it's contentious," says Jack Harvey, senior warden of the cathedral, but "he can make a believer out of you, I believe, whichever side you're on."

"Just a little thin theology that won't stand the pressure of intellectual arguments and the pressure of suffering?" the Rev. Susan Sims Smith says. "Chris is a counterpoint."

Keller was Smith's first Episcopal pastor, long before her midlife course correction from psychoanalyst to seminarian. She was there in the cinema at the start of St. Margaret's.

She says, "He works to give us a deep enough and rich enough and intellectually satisfying enough theology that when we push on it hard during challenging times, it stands up, and holds us up."

Deep, rich, intellectual theology is what Keller is calling Chalcedonian imagination. The fifth-century Council of Chalcedon wrestled with the riddle of how Jesus Christ, a human, could also be a god -- the God, in fact. The resolution, that Christ was fully two natures -- human, divine -- was a theological watershed (albeit a discussion that persists), and that moment of theological expansion is what Keller calls "imagination." He says we need it today.

"By analogy, a natural process with randomness included like natural selection can be both fully natural and fully an instrument of God's will," Keller says.

'FULLY HUMAN, FULLY DEVINE'

Back at the Dean's Class, Phyllis Rainey asked if Keller would explain this "fully" business, as in Jesus is "fully human and fully divine."

"Think about all the parts that belong to your life," he obliges. "The things that make you happy or anxious, a complex set of memories about childhood, losing friends and gaining friends. He had those. There's a sense in which sometimes he wondered what he was supposed to do" -- in the Garden of Gethsemane, and on the cross. "When he does, he speaks of God as an 'other.'"

Consider -- and here he goes off on an extended analogy that marks him as Episcopal, or at least, not Southern Baptist -- Harry Potter. Here's a boy given life by a creator (J.K. Rowling) to accomplish wondrous heroism and save goodness in his world, but to Dumbledore and Hermione, he's just Harry. What's more, with each passing event, Harry pulls Rowling the author farther into his world. So "there's another story that is going on at the same time, which is the story of the author engaged with the world she has made. That is the divine part. That is the divine story," Keller says.

"Jesus in the Gospels is the son of Mary, the son of David, according to the flesh," and his story "is about the world rising spiritually toward God through the humanity of Jesus, because he exemplifies what human life can be ... and that's kind of the ascent of humanity. But at the same time, it's the descent of divinity into humanity. So while we work at being spiritual, God works at being human."

This is where Keller would set the bar for the cathedral. Too high?

"No, not at the cathedral," says Linda Brown, a past senior warden. "They may wish they could grasp more everyday things from his sermons, but our cathedral always had a high respect for scholarly work, and he's definitely that."

Anyway, he isn't always so serious, at least, to his friends. "Chris' said many times, our spiritual journey as we grow with God is designed to make us more joyful, more loving, more fun," Smith says. "If we find that our spiritual lives are making us dour, crabby, unavailable, more shut down with the people that we love, then we're on the wrong track."

"The person growing spiritually will be more engaged, more fun, and in healthy relationships."

NAN Profiles on 11/29/2015

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