All Things Seen & Unseen

John Piper, a noted evangelical pastor-scholar, Calvinist , and charismatic to boot presents the gospel to hearers in six minutes. He says it can be given in one sentence: The Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for our sins and rose again, eternally triumphant over all his enemies, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy.   My concern with this excellent kernel and his subsequent elaboration is tha t I wonder how his particular approach would be received by those outside the Faith with little knowledge of Christia nity ? In other words, it assumes much that we Christians just take for granted because we have been raised in the Faith and/or taught the Faith by the faithful teach ers in our churches .

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 believe that Christians should take the opportunities they receive in their daily lives to speak the good news of God to others they meet.  I n this post I will be trying to lay out one way of understanding what lies behind such witness.  I t's common to represent initiation into the Christian walk as the beginning of a relationship with God . And there's nothing wrong with this conception as long as we keep in mind some important differences between human relationsh ips and relationships with God. 1. God I s N ot A P erson It 's common to hear f o lk say that God is a person. In the evangelical world it's almost a fundamental doctrine and taken for granted.  H owever, although God relates to us in a personal way for we are persons, his being--to use C. S. Lewis' gra phic term--is 'sup er - personal'. What Lewis meant by this language is that God transcends or is beyond what we describe as a person.

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...

Happened to listen to a YouTube featuring a Muslim speaker using the NT to deride the fact that Jesus is God. He reeled off the normal scriptures from John's gospel account that the cults use against the deity of Christ which I found ironic. Got into discussion with a Muslim after I commented and we exchanged a few points of difference. But he (she?) started to become more aggressive and scornful. Faced with such a response one can either not reply, assertively reply in kind or do something else. I did something else. I was enabled to do something else. It was as if God's Spirit said to me, 'Deal gently with this person for My sake'. I can't remember feeling quite like that before but am convinced that the Spirit of gentleness overcame any wish on my part to retaliate. I told him that he wasn't dealing fairly with me but also said that according to Jesus he was my neighbour and hence I wished him the best in his life. He responded positive...