Dec05: What is the Gospel?
By Scot McKnight |
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You would think the one thing we could all agree on is the gospel, but the fact is that I think defining the gospel is one of the pressing issues for the emerging movement that is giving shape to the Church for many Christians today. There is a growing conviction that the previous generation packaged the gospel for an easier sell-job and the package not only distorts the gospel, but it distorts the entire Church. Let’s think about these distortions.
Distorting the gospel
The gospel is easy to distort and I see distortions in these ways:
 Some preach what I call a Creation Day Only gospel: they focus on humans as made in the image of God, the Eikon of God, and they see nothing but potential, potential, potential. They see human goodness — and there is plenty to see — and they see human development — and there is plenty to see. And that is all they see. This distorts the gospel.
Others believe in what I call a Fall Day Only gospel: they focus on humans as sinners, as polluted morally, as messed up mentally, as disturbed in the soul, and as inconquerable in the body. In other words, they see nothing but problems, problems, problems. And that is all they see. This, too, distorts the gospel.
This is not an issue of balance; it is an issue of seeing and assuming both: humans are both good and bad. They are not all good with some bad, or all bad with some good. Ordinary humans are capable of being both majestically good and miserably mean. A gospel worth believing will affirm both.
 Others preach a Good Friday Only gospel: they see everything happening at the Cross. The gospel is about forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. I affirm that Jesus died for us, but having my sins cancelled (or whichever term you want to use) is not enough: God wants to do more for us than simply erase our problems. Some see nothing but the Cross. I have no desire to minimize the Cross, but a Good Friday Only gospel is not enough because for the Bible it was not enough. Let us say that we have done something mean to our spouse: being forgiven is not what we want. What we want is total reconciliation, not simply the erasure of what we did. Forgiveness brings us back to level, and we want to ascend into the presence of God.
 Others preach an Easter Day Only gospel: Jesus rose for our sins to liberate us from death and sin. This, too, is not enough. The gospel is more than liberation: it is liberation from a particular problem: Eikonic distortion. We want to be liberated, not for the sake of liberation, but for the sake of becoming what God made us to be: Eikons who, when pressed, give off God’s glory. An Easter Day Only gospel distorts the gospel because it liberates for the sake of freedom and not for sake of Eikonic restoration.
 Finally, others preach a Pentecost Day Only gospel: Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to flood us with his presence. Now, for some this becomes the Ecstasy Gospel of exaggerated experiences, for others it becomes the Empowerment Gospel of Power. The Spirit is designed by God to empower us to become Eikonic in all we do. The Spirit enables us to transcend who we are now so we will become more of what we will be and what we can be.
Again, if the first two days get distorted by emphasizing one or the other, so do the major moments of redemption get distorted by emphasizing one or the other. If I say clearly that Paul emphasizes the Cross, it is most always an empty Cross that Paul emphasizes and to which he often enough attaches the Spirit of God.
The gospel needs each of these elements to be what the Bible wants it to be: we are Eikons, cracked Eikons, who need to be forgiven, liberated, and empowered to be Eikons who live with other Eikons in such a way that “God happens” wherever we are.
What is the gospel? The story’s parts
One would think a question like that would be easy to answer. What is the gospel itself? How do tracts present the gospel? How do churches present the gospel? How do you understand the gospel? Over the next week or two I’ll be examining this question. It would be good for each of us to sit down and simply write out our definition of the gospel (the gospel is…..).
I will begin with the solution that can be found in Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.
I’m looking here at his third chapter, “Magic.”
Overall he presents the gospel as story. He doesn’t quite say this explicitly, but he seems to say that it was when he realized that the gospel itself was a story that he could grasp it.
He sees four elements to a story: setting, conflict, climax, resolution. The big picture is that because these four elements are central to who we are, they must be true. (This sounds a bit like Anselm’s ontological argument for God: God is that which we conceive nothing higher than.)
We have a setting: who we are, where we live, what we like, our personal history, our social history, etc.. The conflict is internal and external, which he sees as rebellion against God and original sin (chapter two of his book). Conflict is something we know, and we could not know it were it not real. Therefore, conflict is real. The climax of the story succumbs to the same logic: the Christian climax is decision. And the resolution is forgiveness and a home in heaven. These are basically his ideas.
Setting: personal.
Conflict: original sin; he mixes in the devil here; he sees symptoms like loneliness.
Climax: decision.
Resolution: forgiveness and heaven, or the alternative.
So, here is the gospel of Blue Like Jazz. The gospel can be broken down into a story with setting (who we are, where we are), conflict (our problem — original sin), the climax (decision), and resolution (good/bad: the good being forgiveness and heaven).
Is this the gospel, I say to myself? I think he’s got the structure right, but I think he’s got the content of those structures narrowed to manageable, but incomplete, proportions.
I think everything hinges and falls with the first two questions: setting (who are we?) and conflict (what is our problem?). I’ll get to these down the road, but to begin with, I think Miller gets the structure right. Not all get the structure right.
Starting at the End
I have been impressed of late with this thought: how people define the gospel is determined by where they start or, even more interesting, where they end up. Put slightly differently, what is the problem being resolved by the gospel? What is its resolution?
It is common to begin, rather abruptly, with the Fall and to see humans as sinners in need of forgiveness. I do not dispute either that we are sinners or that we all need forgiveness. Sometimes, so it seems to me, our sin is understood as little more than a legal standing or a judicial sentence against us, and that means that forgiveness follows in line: it, too, is understood as little more than a standing or judicially.
But, both of these problems — how we understand sin and how we understand forgiveness — are created by beginning at the wrong place.
Instead of beginning the gospel story with the Fall, I am suggesting we begin with the Creation of humans, both male and female, as Eikons of God. That is, as made in the image of God (imago Dei). The gospel begins, and only begins, because humans are Eikons of God.
Instead of seeing humans first and foremost as sinners, we need to see them as Eikons of God, created to relate to God, to relate to others, and to govern the world as Eikons. The Fall affects each of the previous: our relation to God, our relation to others, and our relation to the world. Humans, then, are cracked Eikons. There is all the difference in the world in depicting humans as simply sinners and seeing sinfulness as the condition and behavior of a cracked Eikon. Humans sin, but their sin is the sin of an Eikon. They can’t be defined by their sin until they are seen as Eikons.
The gospel, when it begins with Creation, is God’s work to restore and undo and recreate (whichever image you might prefer) what we were designed by God to be and to do. To begin here means the gospel is about restoring Eikons rather than just forgiving sinners. This gospel is bigger and it is bigger because the human condition is bigger than a Fallen condition.
Sin itself is more than judicial failings and more than offense against the Law. Sin is the disruption of the relationship of loving God, loving others, and governing our world. Which means, the gospel is designed to heal our love for God, our love for others, and our relationship to the world.
I have also been impressed of late with the thought that the final state of humans shapes what the gospel is all about. That is, the various mosaics of the final state of humans tells us a lot about what the gospel is designed to accomplish. Those mosaics, when put together, reveal a singular clarity about the purpose of humans in this world and that the purpose of God comes about through the power of the gospel itself.
We have looked at the beginning of the Gospel Story, and I suggested it is the story of the Eikon. We also need to look briefly at the End of the Story of the Eikon, and I want to make one major suggestion for your consideration. It is this: the gospel is the work of God to get us from the Eikon state, through the Fallen state, and into the Final State and, in the meantime, in our Earthy state to transform our life on this earth in our relation to God, to others, and to the world.
I do not mean to suggest that we ought to abandon life in this world for a life in the next world. Instead, I am suggesting that the language and rhetoric of the Final State is a clue to what life in this world is supposed to be like. Some, of course, might even deconstruct the language of Eternity as warrant for life in this world. I would not follow them “all the way down” (as Rorty would say), but I would say this: the vision of Eternity is not for the sake of curiosity but for the sake of transformation in this world.
And I rely here, of course, on the images of the whole Bible, including the prophetic literature, the vision of Jesus of the Final Kingdom, and of the Revelation of St. John. And there is one expression that sums up the Final State: worshipping fellowship.
Never mind that the worshipping part is the ultimate expression of our love for God and the fellowship part the ultimate expression of our love for others, the point is this: visions of the Kingdom revolve around two behaviors and conditions. Humans worship God and they do so as a fellowshipping community. No vision of single, isolated humans worshipping God in huts, but of humans packed like sardines into the banqueting hall of God, sitting at the table with one another, and offering worship and praise to the Lamb of God.
Now my point about that gospel: the gospel is designed by God to get humans into that very condition — the condition of being a worshipping fellowship.
The gospel: personal development
To make these claims about how I understand the gospel is the result of a journey myself – I’ve changed and adapted my understanding of the gospel, and as I’ve changed I can only hope and pray that I am getting closer to what Jesus wants us to understand.
First, my childhood gospel was a personal forgiveness for eternity gospel. I was taught by parents and pastors and Sunday School teachers that I was a sinner, that I would go to hell for my sins, but that if I accepted Jesus into my heart, I’d be forgiven and would not go to hell but would go to heaven.
Second, my college gospel was a radical obedience and there aren’t many of us who are serious about it gospel. This sense of the gospel, which is not altogether unusual for college-age students or for those who were coming of age in faith in the 70s, came to me through three sources other than the Bible: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Ray Stedman’s Body Life, and Francis Schaeffer’s many books, including True Spirituality and The Mark of the Christian.
Third, my seminary and doctoral study gospel was more along the line of the inaugurated eschatology of the kingdom. I imbibed this with George Eldon Ladd’s New Testament Theology. While in seminary I discovered the Gospels, especially Matthew, so my thought patterns began to take on Kingdom thinking. What amazed me then, and still does so, is how few Christians in the evangelical fold think in terms of the Kingdom. Not that this is the only category, but (after all) it is how Jesus talked — and he must know something about what matters most.
The gospel of the kingdom transformed (for me) the gospel of my childhood and buttressed the gospel of my college experience. But, it was not put on a firmer foundation and for me the gospel had to be connected with the kingdom. But, I am persuaded that far too many kingdom thinkers spent far too much of their time thinking about the “time” of the kingdom and not enough about the substance of the kingdom. In other words, is the kingdom “now” or “later” or “both now and later”? instead of “what is the now that is already now and what difference does it make?” I had to grow into this perception.
Fourth, my teaching career gospel has seen another significant shift in my understanding of kingdom. I was preoccupied with time too much, but I was aware that this was not enough. So, while at TEDS and especially at North Park, I began to work on the substance of the kingdom and how to define it: the old George Ladd definition (the dynamic presence of God) wasn’t enough for it smacked too much of the Liberal Protestant definition (a spiritual life) and not enough of the concrete thinking of the time of Jesus (earthy, structures, systemic evil, etc). So, I came to the conviction that kingdom meant the society in which the will of God is done, or the society in which the Jesus Creed transforms life. For me, it is impossible to define kingdom and not think “society.” This enabled me to make more sense of Paul: prior to this time kingdom and justification were seen as roughly synonymous expressions. That is, if kingdom is central to Jesus and justification to Paul, then they must be talking about the same thing. (This is how I think Ladd ultimately shakes out.) But, I became convinced that the operative parallel for kingdom in Paul’s own language was not justification but “ecclesia” (Church).
Last, the major change for me has been to personalize or relationalize the whole gospel and to anchor it in each of the redemptive events (Cross, Resurrection, Pentecost, Church): not in the older sense that it is personal for me (which it is) but that the entire substance is hyper-relational. The gospel comes out of a God who is hyper-relational within the persons of the Trinity (perichoresis), it is a manifestation of that personal God in the world (cosmic), and it is designed to transform or restore cracked Eikons so that they are drawn back into the perichoretic love of God so that they can love others for the good of the world. None of this is inconsistent with the evangelical gospel of forgiveness, but it is so much bigger and better and biblical.
But, what about me?
Is the gospel God’s work in the world for us or is the gospel what God has done for me? The latter I will call hyper-individualism, because that is exactly what it is. It operates, to borrow an image from Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, as if this world is a movie in which God has appointed me as the central actor (or actress). The former examines the work of God as a universal and cosmic thing in which we get to participate (to be sure as persons).
So, if we look at Romans 8:21 we see that it is the “creation itself” that also will be liberated; if we look at Col 1:15-20 we see that all things hang together in Christ and that Christ is to have the supremacy… and then we merely need to grab some images from Isaiah and tie these into Revelation to see that God’s work is designed to restore the cosmos into its perfected and intended order. The center of that concern of God’s work is humans, and that needs perhaps to be emphasized. But, still, the final visions include the cosmos.
So, let’s begin with the divine telos of it all: where everything finds its proper place before God. The gospel is the power of God to restore it all, it is the effective working power of God to restore it all, to make things new.
This is where we have to begin if we want to understand the gospel: we begin at the End. And, then we go right back to the beginning to see that God’s work was to take the swirling tohu va-bohu and turn into pristine order (the “formlessness and void” was ordered). Then we see the Created Order as it ought to be (Gen 1-2), and then the Fall when the tohu va-bohu begins to creep back into the order.
With these two bookends: Telos and Creation/Fall, we see that the gospel is designed to restore the mess made of it all by the Fall.
This is the big picture of the gospel and we are summoned by God to take part in this process.
Hyper-individualism is the most selfish thing we can do with the gospel. To turn what God is doing in this world exclusively into what he is doing for me is to turn God upside down and stand ourselves up in God’s place. The gospel is not about me, but about what God is doing — and the “me” comes in as part of what God is doing. This difference is not a little matter.
The gospel is the staged drama of God’s work and we get to take part; God is the central character and, to quote someone more famous than Donald Miller, “all the world’s God’s stage” (well, I fudged a bit). Hyper-individualism casts God from the Cast and writes in our name at the top.
What about “evangelism”?
If the gospel is what I am claiming it is, then how does one evangelize? And I’ve been asked this one several times already, and Embracing Grace isn’t even out of the chute, what are the down-in-the-dirt type things you would say to people?
Well, here goes: the question itself that I’m being asked emerges out of a different understanding of the gospel. And this is no small claim, but I’m making it: the question of “what do you say to someone and ask them to do?” is a question that comes from a gospel that is something you can respond to all at once and be done with it.
But, here’s the problem and you won’t be surprised to hear this from me. The gospel is about God’s embracing grace that unleashes our embrace of God and our capacity to embrace others. You don’t respond to grace all at once, any more than you fall in love all at once. For far too many, conversion is seen as a Birth Certificate instead of a Driver’s License. (I said this in Jesus Creed, I think.) Conversion is a marriage rather than the Marriage Certificate. That question I’m being asked, and I don’t mean to be hard on anyone who is asking it, is a question that is asking how you get a Birth or Marriage Certificate, and I think the point is a Driver’s License and a Marriage.
The question the gospel of embracing grace asks is not “what can I do to get in?” but “will I be a part of God’s work?”
Once this is understood, and that the gospel is designed to regenerate our hearts to love God and to love others, then what we are asked to do is as simple as that: we are asked to love God and to love others. That, my friends, ain’t sumfin’ that happens all at once.
I don’t say I love Kris because one time I told her that, and I don’t love God because one time I “asked Jesus into my heart.” Now, don’t get me wrong here: there are beginnings and there are decisive moments, though not all know when they are (and I went to great efforts to make this clear in Turning to Jesus), but the issue is not the beginning but the relationship.
So, how do you do that? Very simple. We summon others to become friends with Jesus and to join us in the work God is doing in this world, in the work God is embodying in a community of faith, and to join us at the Table where God comes to us in the form of bread and wine. (Some will think that last comment is too high-church, but I’ll stick with it because I think it is biblical and historic for the Church. I don’t mean by that one bit that it is not personal; I just want us to see that this is about what God is doing in this world right now.)
 Scot McKnight is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. The author of more than ten books and numerous articles and chapters in multi–authored works, McKnight specializes in historical Jesus studies as well as the Gospels and the New Testament. As an authority in Jesus studies, McKnight has been frequently consulted by Fox News, WGN, US News & World Report, Newsweek, TIME, as well as newspapers throughout the United States.
The Creation and the Expulsion from the Paradise c. 1445
Tempera and gold on wood, 46, 4 x 52,1 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1580s (?)
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, 1541–1614)
Oil on canvas; 41 3/8 x 31 in. (105 x 79 cm)
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.145)
Giovanni Bellini. The Resurrection. 1475-79. Oil on canvas, transferred from poplar panel, 148x128 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany.
Stained Glass Stories: The mighty wind, tongues of fire and a dove represent the coming of the Holy Spirit. |
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