I'm blogging about things I might believe differently now than I once did. The introduction is the place to start. This is an essay on how I'm trying to understand what being saved is all about.
One day, when I was a graduate student, one of my friends put me on the spot and forced me to explain the gospel, as if to a dying man. I think he wanted to check that I was 'sound'. At the time, I demurred, arguing that I wasn't fond of the hypothetical and that any real discussion would have a context. But eventually I think I passed the test: I successfully explained the evangelical gospel.
For it is, surely, a sectarian idea of the gospel which gets propounded in the churches of my acquaintance. Perhaps you could point to a broad sweep of reformation thinking and say that there is a protestant gospel, but even within that picture you would find nuanced accounts. Whether its the TULIPs of Calvinisim or the tongues of Pentecostalism, or, in classic opposition to the first, the wider doors of Arminianism. I've heard it said that the chief ongoing dispute between Protestants and Catholics stems from differing definitions of the term 'justification' - the former seeing it as a one-off; the latter having it encompass what the former would call 'sanctification'. I don't know if that's a fair characterization, but it sounds plausible. And then, at opposite extremes you have gospels of universalism on the one hand and a very particular elect (144,000) for the JWs - many would deny that either of these is a Christian doctrine, I guess.
Presumably, all of this matters very much. Is the objective of evangelism that those outside the church should come to understand that they are sinners, alienated from God, that Jesus died for their sins, and that they need to pray the sinner's prayer? Or is that born of a mis-reading of Paul's response to the Philippian gaoler's question "What must I do to be saved?" For that man and a great number of others in the New Testament, baptism followed immediately - are we propounding a New Testament faith if we do otherwise? Is mental assent to a series of propositional truths the essence of salvation, anyway?
Though we get some of this sense from Paul's sermons, you can't really - with integrity - describe the whole evangelical gospel from a single passage of scripture. Your handy tract on "Two ways to live" or "Journey into life" or "The bridge" or whatever, draws on proof texts from all over the new testament. If there was a single way to describe the gospel, wouldn't you expect to find it all together somewhere? Preferably in the teaching of Jesus?
I skated over the line above "Jesus died for their sins" above, but similarly, in the doctrine of the atonement we have a great many pictures on offer in the bible. And too easily, I think, we impose our particular favourites onto proof texts that could mean all sorts of other things. So penal substitutionary atonement has its firm proponents and trenchant critics, both arguing from scripture and both arguing that the other's perspective is nonsensical and unbiblical. [hm. my spell-checker didn't like 'unbiblical' and suggested 'Republican' instead. LOL]. These are not unimportant peripheral topics, they go to the heart of what Christian faith is all about. So it bothers me that I sincerely doubt that most sitting in our churches - our evangelical churches - could explain more than one, or at most two, pictures of what the atonement is all about, and the extent to which the pictures support and reinforce one another.
Perhaps I'm pessimistic in the preceding paragraph, but my preacher's experience, and my experience of bible study groups doesn't fill me with confidence. My fear is that we spend too long defining the gospel in terms of propositions that must be believed, and too little defining it in terms of living lives characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Is that a retreat from a gospel of salvation by grace, through faith, not by works? Not at all, but I'll settle for mustard-seed-sized faith.
Walking with God doesn't, surely, depend on being able to explain Christus Victor any more than it means being able to draw the pictures of two ways to live. It does mean following in the way of the risen Christ. Isn't that what the gospel is all about?
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