The Gospel according to
... me, in my early Christian years. Recently I was trying to summarise how I conceived the gospel in the first years of my Christian life and I came up with the following 8 points. It is meant to be represent a popular evangelical perspective with a slight charismatic twist. Would you add anything?
1) God is holy. 2) Humans are sinful and therefore provoke God's just wrath. 3) In order to be reconciled to the holy God, God's wrath needs to be satisfied. 4) Jesus died on the cross to pay this price for my sin. 5) His death averted God's wrath against sin from me, and enabled me, by believing in Jesus, to approach the holy God. 6) If I pray and ask God for forgiveness because of Jesus, I will be saved and spend eternity enjoying God's glory in heaven, instead of eternity in hell (all of this is often assigned the heading 'justification')
Associated with this are various other points which, though not the gospel directly, are associated with it: 7) Salvation begins in this life. I can experience God's life, healing and power in my life, so that I can live with victory over personal sin, pray for the sick and see them healed, experience God's provisions and blessing in my finances, job and marriage. This is another way of separating the 'justification' spoken of above from the 'sanctification' implied here. 8) The heart and centre of all of this is a relationship with Jesus, and this is sustained by daily prayer and bible reading.
In a bible course I am running I have drafted a few questions and problems for people to discuss in relation to this definition. Would you add anything to the following questions and statements? Or change any of them?
- Does God need to punish someone in order to forgive? Jesus said to forgive your enemies. Does this understanding of the gospel imply God doesn't forgive until he has let Jesus suffer and die?
- The gospel as outlined above assumes that the reaction of God's holiness to human sin is the problem the gospel solves. But doesn't Paul speak about God reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not about God being reconciled to us (2 Cor. 5:15-21)?
- Why doesn't Paul simply say the above if the gospel is so easily reducible to a set of propositions?
- The focus on sin often boils down to a focus on guilt, but do all understand the concept that well? Why do other people groups speak, for example, about shame instead?
- In order to make people feel guilty, we invent ways of convincing people that they are sinners. We have to make a problem for them, for Jesus to be a real solution. But is that really what the gospel is about? And how do we try to make a problem for people? We try to argue that all are murderers, or all are like Hitler before God. But does this argument convince you? What does it say about God?
- Is not this gospel a product of an older age, one that does no resonate well with many people today? I.e. the focus is on the individual, what the individual 'gets', the format of the gospel as a set of propositions divorced from its original narrative shape, the focus on heaven (spiritual reality), etc.
- And as such, does it not fail to really connect with late or post modern people? Why is this? What are post or late modern people concerned about?
- What about community? Is it really all about me and my personal relationship with Jesus sustained by praying and reading the bible in private (with 'go to church' tagged on at the end as a moral imperative)?
- What about real problems in the world like poverty, child death rates in poor countries, social inequalities keeping people groups out of work, the abuse of the environment, broken marriages, drug abuse, prostitution, obesity, dissolving communities etc.? Why did things like this not find expression in the core group of issues describing the gospel?
- Why does Paul not divorce 'justification' and 'sanctification'? Indeed, why does he mix them?
- How many really believe this gospel? How do you feel about the implication that most won't 'go to heaven', on this basis? And how about the notion that those who don't go to heaven don't do so simply because they didn't pray a sinners prayer, or consent to the idea that they are sinners like Hitler? Why did God create all of these people if he knew they would end up in hell?
- And why do we talk about 'going to heaven' all the time? What did Paul speak about? In what ways is that different?
- What is good and what appeals to you about the above?