When I asked my students this morning, "What is the gospel?" I was somewhat surprised at the answers I received:
"God is there." "There is hope." "We must respond in keeping with God's act of kindness."
In light of these answers, I asked if the students were intentionally avoiding "traditional" evangelical answers that quickly take us to Jesus paying for our sins, God loving us and having a plan for our lives, etc.
One students said that as a Campus Crusade staff worker he quickly found that "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" carries with it a load of assumptions that students on the Ivy League campus to which he was assigned did not resonate.
I guess it's a problem when folks don't mean the same thing as you do by "god," "love," "you," "wonderful plan," or "your life"!
This surprised me, because it was the first time that I found myself in a room full of future Christian leaders who had existentially felt that old ways of articulating the gospel simply did not work with their generation. I knew that, hypothetically, it should be happening, but I hadn't seen it yet.
I should add, here, that I was a bit concerned that some of the "gospel" stories were not sufficiently sharply focused on Jesus. (Before you get huffy and say that this is what new-fangled articulations do, remember that it's just as possible for "justification by faith" to become an articulation of the gospel that fails to mention Jesus.)
So what do you guys think? How do you briefly conceptualize the "gospel," and do people seem to have categories for the story as you tell it?
6 comments:
Is it cheating if we've already read N. T. Wright, and therefore know the right answer?
No. Because there are some here who haven't read/don't like NTW, so they can fight with you about it.
Also, if you think you know the right answer you're probably missing something. And I delight to tell people what they're missing if they want to be more like Jesus (Ok, I mean "me")...
OK, well "Jesus is Lord" is probably the most concise formulation of the gospel possible. That the man, Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, has risen and conquered sin and death, putting the world right with God, and is now exalted high above all powers, so that everyone owes him their believing allegiance as God and King.
"Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."
or
"Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and he was buried and he rose again on the third day, according to the scriptures."
Nice. I like that you both focused on "what Jesus did" approaches ("Christ-event") rather than what happens to us ("application" approaches such as "justification by faith" or "being joined to Christ"). I think that falling on the application-oriented approach is a huge conceptual mistake for articulating the gospel.
Even the 1 Cor 15 thing, though, does raise the question: If you say that Jesus died for our sins to someone, a non-x-n, would they need a whole lot of story and conceptual apparatus to get their minds around that?
Even saying, "God" doesn't communicate a shared referent in this day and age. I was walking by a park bench the other day and heard a young woman say to her companion: "I think that the gods all..." Yep. Polytheism. Paganism? Maybe. Right here in the good ol' twenty first century. That makes a difference for how we articulate the gospel, no?
I'm not sure i can really "briefly conceptualize the gospel" precisely because so many people have so many categories for understanding what you're saying. I agree with how others of you have stated the Gospel in brief . . . but the only reason I even understand what you've said is because I am a Christian and have developed the categories for understanding what those statements mean.
I think you're exactly right, Daniel, a statement of truth about Jesus, such as Jesus died for our sins, does require a whole lot of story and conceptual apparatus. We learn that way as Christians and most of us have developed categories for understanding these things, but it's probably particularly important when discussing these things with a non-x-n.
The gospel is simple and complex. This whole discussion about conceptualizing the gospel is a great argument for taking a relational approach to evangelism. How can we even begin to unpack some of this stuff with a person (or begin to understand what their categories are) in one short street corner conversation? It takes time these days (as Daniel points out) just to clarify what people mean when they say things like "God".
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