Beyond Four Walls. Группа авторов

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Beyond Four Walls - Группа авторов Australian College of Theology Monograph Series

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that offer the academic community, scholars, church leaders and the wider community uniquely Australian and New Zealand perspectives on significant research topics and topics of current debate. The ACT also provides opportunity for contributors beyond its graduates and affiliated college staff to publish monographs which support the mission and values of the ACT.

      Rev. Dr. Graeme Chatfield

      Series Editor and Associate Dean

      1

      Church as Gospel

      Scot McKnight

      You probably know that I am from Illinois in the United States, and so I want to introduce you to an Illinoisan expression. When we wonder in Illinois if something is credible and real, practicable and true, we ask “But will it play in Peoria?” If it plays in Peoria, an ordinary blue-collar community in Illinois, it will play everywhere. My claim today is that the proposal being made today about the gospel is the sort of thing that will play in Peoria. My two claims are these: As evangelicals, and even more broadly, we have misdefined the gospel. And second, the church—both the universal and the local—is the gospel. Both of these, of course, need nuances, and I shall proceed now to make my case for both.

      The Gospel

      Before I sketch how Jesus and the apostles understood the gospel, I want to make three brief points. The first is that many of us, and I include myself, came to Christ when someone preached that gospel as the gospel. So, whatever I have to say in what follows does not diminish that this gospel has worked, works, and will probably continue to work. Second, this word “works” deserves attention. The correlation of those who respond to that four- or five-step gospel and those who follow Christ as disciples is not high. David Kinnamon, who is now President of the Barna Research organization, showed me some numbers once wherein it was clear that about 90 percent of children who grow up in evangelical homes “make a decision for Christ” but only about 20 percent can be said to be “following Christ” when they are in their thirties. The research doesn’t show this, but does anyone doubt that the gospel those 90 percent heard was more or less the gospel we sketched above? The third point now will begin to scrape the chalkboard: the four-point approach in the standard evangelical gospel is our doctrine of salvation arranged into a compelling, convicting, guilt-producing, rhetorical bundle. What drives this gospel, though, has begun to change in the last decade or so, with a marked decline in the idea that God is the kind of judge who will send someone to suffer consciously in hell for all eternity if they don’t respond to the offer of the good news. What many of us grew up with then was a rhetorically effective bundling of the doctrine of salvation shaped to precipitate decisions that would relieve our deepest angst about God and our eternal state, and what drove that bundle was the threat of judgment and hell. Jesus, then, was sent to give us a chance to escape the wrath of God.

      Again, I do not question any of the four points or anything I’ve said about salvation in the previous comments. I believe in God’s judgment, and I believe that Jesus saves us, and I believe that God loves us. But, and here’s the scraping part, this is not what Jesus, or Peter, or Paul meant when they used the word “gospel.” What, then, did they mean?

      Leg One: 1 Corinthians 15

      To answer this question, we have to ask how we are to answer this question. In good Protestant fashion we have to go to the Bible, and that means we are in search of a text that defines gospel, and happily we’ve got one: 1 Corinthians 15. But when we go to 1 Corinthians 15, something in the text immediately jumps up at us and says “Surprise, surprise!” Why? Because the one text that defines gospel in the entire New Testament tells us that the gospel is neither “justice” nor “justification.” Instead, it tells us that the gospel announces the resolution to a story. To be sure, that story saves, effecting both justification and justice, but what drives the gospel according to 1 Corinthians is neither the injustice of this world that needs to be set aright, nor our sins—Adamic and personal—that need to be forgiven. And neither does it suggest that the problem the gospel resolves is God’s wrath. What drives the justice gospel is social systems gone awry and what drives the justification gospel is personal rebellion leading to guilt, but what drives the apostolic gospel of 1 Corinthians 15 is something else.

      I will make seven observations about the apostolic gospel, and I will then suggest that this fresh perspective on the gospel throws piercing light on church praxis and mission in our world today. Rerun: what played in the original Peoria of the New Testament will play as well in modern and postmodern Peorias. But it will require that we make some adjustments in our minds and praxis.

      First, a historical claim: before there was a New Testament, before the apostles wrote letters, before the Gospels were written, there was the gospel. When it comes to the Christian faith, in the beginning was the gospel. The gospel created the church, and the Gospels. The gospel created the Epistles, and the gospel created the New Testament, and the canon.

      Second, there is dispute about which verses of this text are the gospel. Some say only verses three to five refer to the gospel while others see it extending from verse three through to verse eight.

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