All Things Seen & Unseen

Dr D A Car son, a noted New Testament scholar, is a sked :   'How would you explain the gospel in five minutes to someone who has no understanding of God, Jesus or sin?' Carson clear ly recognises that for many people in present, Western society the terms of the Christian gospel as used 30 years ago are no longer familiar. Pe ople typically don't know the Bible has two Testaments, the Old and the New. That the Old is pr imarily about the Messiah's p e ople, Isr ael ; the New Testament is about the Messiah and his New people, the Church made up of Jew and Gentile.

I want to pause from outlining the Anglican Service of Holy Communion and examine the question of the preaching the Gospel in this service. Sometimes it can be too easy for preachers to re-tell a bible story and with that re-telling intersperse a number of moral exhortations. However entertaining this action may be, it is not preaching the gospel. It is presenting a moralistic discourse with lots of ethical crumbs which don't add up to the solid food of the whole Word of God. Ethical urgings are just a form of law after all. Nor by that comment am I disparaging the law. 'The law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous and good' (Rom 7.12). To be opposed to the Law is to fall into the error of antinomianism (anti-, nomos [law]). But keeping the law cannot save us. The law simply arouses our sinful desires (Rom 7.5). Hence, although the law is part of the Word of God unless the gospel of free grace (Eph 2.8, 9) is also preached the congregation will go away believing ...

The next major section in the Anglican Holy Communion service is titled, The Ministry of the Word. For evangelicals in particular, this section is the highlight of the service because the Church in this section hears the Word of God read. On a personal note, in the first Anglican service I attended it was this section of the service that amazed and delighted me. Before that service, I had honestly believed that Anglicans could not be classed as biblical Christians at all but as Romanists (Roman Catholics) who rarely if ever opened their bibles. However, I was confronted with four Scripture readings done with such reverence and solemnity that I hadn't heard delivered in such a way before. And this was in a high Anglican service with crossing and genuflecting! Of course, I had heard the Scriptures read in former churches but usually just one passage and often that would be truncated. (Nevertheless, I now know that my background furnished me with a knowledge and appreciation for the S...

Of course, I'm wondering with all this whether Scott McKnight has got it right. Certainly a few others think the same way. See here and here for examples.  Not to say that McKnight isn't a writer to be read and listened to. I think he says some valuable things which the evangelical churches and mainline churches need to hear. But just a few points that I noticed that I would need more detail about are: His distinction between gospel and salvation I'm not sure that this distinction can be so easily sustained. I appreciate what McKnight is wanting to say: the message of the gospel is not the same as its effects (salvation); gospel doesn't equal salvation because God is more concerned about gospel than salvation it seems. For a theologian who is a theoretician by training distinctions are always important. However, when one gets into church ministry settings I wonder whether such issues have much moment.

Scot McKnight believes that the question, What is the gospel? , is a crucial question for the church. He also believes the church to be confused about the 'real' answer to the question, the biblical answer. I've not long finished a stimulating book by McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel : The Original Good News Revisited (2011). Provocatively he argues that Evangelicals (those supposedly concerned about the evangel, the gospel, good news) today are not really evangelical at all! They are more accurately called soterians ! (He's coined this word to denote those who are primarily concerned with salvation at the expense of the gospel.) He believes that evangelicals--and included in this description would be many charismatic and Pentecostal churches as well--have built 'salvation cultures' (p. 29) rather than 'gospel cultures'. The two he affirms are not the same thing even though the former is part of the latter. Once might say that the gospel is the...