JR Woodward :: Blog :: What is the Gospel?

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I've been reading the book The Church Between Gospel and Culture and found this gem of a passage.  The book is a collection of essays dealing with mission in North America.  This passage is found in an essay by David Lowes Watson entitled:  Christ All in All: The Recovery of the Gospel for Evangelism in the United States. In the second half of his essay he asks and answers four questions:

1. What is the Gospel?



2. What is Our Context?



3. What Makes the Gospel Good News in This Context?



4. How Does Contextual Response to the Gospel Further Illumine Its Good News?

Here is a passage from the first section:  What is the Gospel?  A very important question for our day and in our context.  He says, "Mortimer Arias... draws attention to the fact that there are two dimensions to the gospel: the gospel about Jesus, and the gospel of Jesus.  The gospel about Jesus is the message that gives our evangelism is personal form and includes the priestly work of Christ and the atoning grace through which we are reconciled to God.  The new life we experience through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit is pivotal to this message, which brings lost, sinful human beings to repentance and forgiveness.  It is at the very heart of the gospel.

No less at the heart of the gospel, however, is the prophetic announcement of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth: the promise of good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. (Luke 4:18-19).  If, however, the only aspect of the gospel with which we evangelize is the invitation to personal forgiveness and reconciliation, our message can easily become personalized to the point of gnosticism.  When this happens, the prophetic good news of Jesus Christ - his advocacy of God's justice for the poor and abused of the world - is by definition consigned to other ministries of the church, to be addressed as a consequence of evangelism (perhaps), but not as an integral part of the gospel we are commissioned to take into the world. The promise of Jesus announcing God's coming shalom are then proclaimed not as good news for the world here and now but as projections for the hereafter, thereby setting the tone for a discipleship that minimizes Christ's directive to join him at work in the world, ministering to the little ones who still suffer and starve.

This bifurcation of the gospel is at the heart of the age-old divide between evangelism and social ethics, a divide that remains theologically unbridged, albeit heavily veneered at present with collegialities of common social concern.  Until the issue is addressed hermeneutically, however, these collegialities will have little impact one the average American congregation, the hermeneutical locus of evangelism.  The question is not how to link evangelism with social ethics, but rather how to incorporate the social and systemic hope of the gospel into our evangelism at the outset.  The evangel must be the cutting edge of social and systemic, no less than personal, transformation.  If not, the prophetic tradition of the Scriptures is severed, and the social and systemic dimensions of the gospel cease to be good news from God.  They focus instead on what is wrong with the world, rather than on what God is doing to put it right.  Much more detrimental to the coming basileia tou theou, Jesus of Nazereth becomes a gnostic Christ available only to the privilaged - who are by no means always the poor, the blind, the captives or the oppressed."

This guy sums up what I wrote in a series not too long ago entitled A Holistic Gospel.  Check it out if you haven't read it yet.