Guest Post: #ReExamine The Gospel

[Reimagine Curator]

5 Views on the Gospel NOTE: I post this as a simple example of how even within Evangelicalism, there are various and sometimes widely divergent theological perspectives. This is my call for humility within our dogmatic "certainty." {Phil Miglioratti} Scot McKnight     Tonight is the webinar for the authors of the chapters in Five Views on the Gospel, and the authors are named with a summary below, which is taken from the Introduction to the volume: As part of the exploration of the gospel in this volume, we have asked the contributors to address several things to make these conversations happen. First, the contributors were asked to write about the gospel with a view to explaining what the gospel means to them in light of their reading of Scripture, from the perspective of their religious tradition, and from the crucible of their own experiences. To that end, we have asked each contributor to do several things: 1. Provide a Twitter length opening definition and summary of the gospel. 2. Explain the proper context for understanding the gospel. Is it the Old Testament, first-century Judea, the Roman imperial cult, human sin and fallenness, the Reformation, the surrounding culture, the experience of oppression, or something else? Why do we need the gospel? 3. Identify the primary biblical texts that express the gospel and how it is to be understood. 4. Explain how people are meant to respond to the gospel and what benefits are promised to us in the gospel. 5. Answer the question, “What does it mean to live a life worthy of the gospel?” 6. Provide further thoughts on the content, meaning, and significance of the gospel as required. This is the task the contributors were given, but this volume is more than stating what the gospel means for them; it included an additional task. The nature of Zondervan’s Counterpoints series is that it does not allow authors to state their own position, then leave their perspective siloed and juxtaposed. Instead, it helpfully asks the contributors to enter into dialogue with each other. That is why the second task that each of the contributors was assigned was to write responses to each other in order to provide a mixture of mutual affirmation and critical interaction. This allows us to observe patterns of convergence as well as points of difference among the views. It makes for a beneficial exercise to see these learned biblical scholars and theologians wrestle with each other about the gospel. A Summary of the Gospel Perspectives Scot McKnight presents the King Jesus Gospel position. According to McKnight, the New Testament gospel is indebted to the storyline of Scripture, a story that climaxes in the revelation of Jesus the Messiah, the king, who rescues his people and makes them his royal subjects. What is more, the gospel is something that Jesus preached, it was a gospel about a kingdom, and a kingdom is a people ruled by a king. The context for understanding the gospel is the intrusion of evil into the world, the eschatological promises for redemption given in Scripture, and the empires of the ages that represent the sum of anti-God forces in our world. McKnight believes that the gospel calls for people to surrender to God in faith, embrace the lordship of Jesus, and live out the gospel story of healing and hope in our own everyday lives. The biblical texts that McKnight regards as paramount for understanding the gospel are Isaiah 40:3, Mark 1:15, Acts 2:36, 38, 13:38–39, and 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. The impact that the gospel makes is for believers to submit to Christ by adopting a pattern of life typified by Christoformity with cruciformity. Next, Michael Horton expounds the Reformation Gospel position indicative of the Calvinistic and Westminster tradition. Horton takes as central Jesus’s work as prophet, priest, and king, who imputes righteousness to believers, taking them from condemnation to righteousness. He closely coordinates the gospel with a forensic understanding of justification by faith. Viewed this way, the context of the gospel is the biblical narrative of plight and solution, with the plight construed as curse and condemnation, and the solution construed as righteousness and eternal life. The texts that Horton regards as the most salient for his case are Luke 18:9–16, Acts 15:8–11, and Romans 4:3–6, with manifold references to Romans and Galatians along the way. For Horton, the gospel demands faith, not a passive faith but a faith that yields holiness and obedience. To live a life worthy of the gospel means, under Horton’s Reformed perspective, to ensure that faith operates in, through, and for love. David A. deSilva articulates a Wesleyan Gospel that has currency in Methodist circles and various holiness movements influenced by John and Charles Wesley. For deSilva, the gospel is the story of how God’s grace undoes the penalty and power of sin and concurrently draws us into a life of holiness. The context for the gospel is the conviction that human beings have failed to worship God and need a change of heart to render to God the holy worship due to God as our Creator and Redeemer. Several texts are central in that articulation for deSilva, including John 3:3, Romans 6:1–11, 13:11, and Hebrews 12:14. He sees the gospel calling people to faith, the experience of new birth, a sense of assurance, with the Spirit given as a power toward perfection. Believing the gospel should result in intentional discipleship, a reliance on the Holy Spirit, divesting oneself of sin, and investing in a Christian community. Julie Ma advocates for a Pentecostal Gospel shaped by her Asian heritage and ministry experience and resourced from the Pentecostal tradition. Ma contends that the gospel is principally concerned with the liberating work of the Holy Spirit. The gospel meets our need to escape marginalization and to receive blessings. Human beings are alienated from God and need to return to the abundant, precious blessings that God designed us to enjoy. What stands in the way is not only our sin but the sinful institutions and structures around us. Biblical texts that strike Ma as important include Luke 4:18–19, Acts 1:8, 2:1–12, and 1 Corinthians 12:7–9. The benefits that the gospel confers are empowerment for our own participation in the mission of God in our world. The result of our gospel-experience should be, argues Ma, a holistic spirituality where we seek to care for each other in body, mind, and spirit. Shively T. J. Smith presents a Liberation Gospel in the tradition of African-American experience and religious testimony. For Smith, the fact that Jesus died a slave’s death means that the gospel is concerned with liberation, both spiritual and social, to set people free from the forces of death and exploitation. The context for the gospel is the human experience of depravation caused by our own sinning and deprivation caused by the sinful behavior of others. Manifold texts speak about the human experience of illness, poverty, ethnic and racial discrimination, gender bias, social-class stratification, dispossession, disinheritance, and marginalization. Thus, for Smith, biblical texts that she finds important are stories like the good Samaritan from Luke 10:25–37 and others that speak about and emphasize human dignity and accompaniment as a necessity for resolving human misery, exploitation, and struggle. The gospel, then, should drive persons toward caring for others and dismantling systems that harm people and even creation itself. Smith believes that when the gospel is practiced, it results in the witness of inclusion, equality, and freedom. An essential benefit of the liberation gospel, in Smith’s mind, is championing our moral responsibility to each other.