By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute
A big God requires that we think big. Perhaps the reason our churches aren’t thriving is because we haven’t thought big enough? Right?
So, we set big goals for ourselves and our places of ministry, our churches. BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goals—is the battle cry from a couple of years ago. Big Hairy Audacious Goals for prayer: (“It’s not enough for a few people to pray. Imagine what God could do if thousands of people prayed for the same thing at the same time, preferably at the same place?”). Big Hairy Audacious Goals for evangelism: (“Pick a number, any number; how many dare we save for Christ?”) Big Audacious Hairy Goals for missions: (“Dare we strategize campaigns that would encompass whole countries, even entire continents?”). “We receive not because we ask not.”
To drive these goals, we, of course, need a vision. A neighborhood corner store kind of vision will not do. We need a mega-store, WalMart-Home Depot kind of vision. We need an expansive vision, a great vision that matches the bigness of God. Dare I say, to truly honor God, we need a vision that explores the very frontiers of God’s providence in our lives? “If there is no vision, the people perish.”
And, of course, a big vision requires a certain type of leader. Big, thick, deep voices are required to not only think and articulate big, deep, expansive thoughts, but also provide the will to see these mega-visions through to their end. Leaders need to be out front, way out in front of their organizations, calling their people to the kind of obedience required to fulfill these big visions. We need more big daydreamers, daydreamers for God’s glory.
In the midst of all this mega-vision casting we hear a thin small voice: “God hates visionary dreaming.” Come again? A wisp of a voice it is, indeed, almost inaudible. Have we heard him right? The logic of the words runs so counter to the current orthodoxy of obedience. There it is again: “God hates visionary dreaming.”
Allow me to put the words into context, quoting from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together: “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself. Accordingly, he stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”
Bonhoeffer's creaky, more than 60-year-old words about Christian community fall like a thud on the current evangelical landscape. They just do not add up in our current economics of obedience. The words sound downright counter-intuitive to what we know of the way God works in our lives and expects of us. But are they wrong?
Perhaps Bonhoeffer's words expose a growing theological presumption on our part, a presumption driven by a deficient understanding of who God is in the economy of His design for His world. As well intended as our big designs are on behalf of God and His Kingdom, are they not sometimes tainted ever so lightly with our own hubris? Does God need us to fulfill His Kingdom here on earth? Certainly. By an act of His grace, He has providentially written us into His grand redemptive story. But, does He really need us in the ways we often design for Him? I sometimes think if God were somehow written out of the big plans we have for Him in fulfilling His Kingdom, it would take an uncomfortable amount of time for us to realize His absence. At the end of the day, our grand designs for God are wonderfully expendable.
Perhaps the net effect of our well-intended pandering to do great things for God is that our big goals and big visions and big plans sometimes overshadow the hard work of obedience. Cast our eyes back to the narrative of Scripture and Church History. What is the pattern we see? Do we really see the great imprint of God’s work in redemptive history as the product of well-conceived, humanly orchestrated, BHAG plans? Not really. More times than not, God’s story is one of steadfast, obedient people being caught up and transformed by a divine plan that extends far beyond their own best intensions. It may be that God’s work is periodically manifested in wonderfully dramatic fashion. More often than not, however, the work of God is an exercise in plain, hard obedience.
But, finally, Bonhoeffer's words are mostly directed toward church leaders. Leadership is a delicate thing, isn’t it? Looking across the landscape of the church today, don’t we see enough examples of leadership blinded by ambition, but falsely camouflaged as faithfulness? This is not to say that Christian leaders with big, deep visions aren’t sincere, but, isn’t this the point? Sincerity is a dangerous gatekeeper to what is truthful and right. Our hearts are so vulnerable to our own self-deceptive ways.
What is the antidote to this self-deception for those of us in leadership roles in the Church. Joseph Stowell’s observation at a recent lectureship in chapel comes to mind. He observes that, contrary to what we would guess by looking at row upon row of books on leadership at Borders and our neighborhood Christian bookstore, the New Testament really speaks very little about being a good leader. There really is so little biblical evidence for the need for big visionary dreamers. The clarion call of the Gospels is all about being good followers. This is what Jesus asks of us: to be humble dreamers with enough sense to follow Him.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Welcome to Your Nightmare
By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament
It's my dream, but many of you have had it too: I am enrolled in a college course, it's more than halfway through the semester…and I have done nothing. No lectures. No reading. No thinking. In its most virulent form, the dream pops up every week or two; the semester marches on even in dreamland, but I continue to do nothing.
I suspect seminary graduates may have their own variation on this nightmare. You are tucked away in your study, happily going about your sermon preparation, when you feel a cold breath on the back of your neck. You turn in horror to see the ghost of J. Gresham Machen, or the spectre of Bill Mounce, standing behind you. He speaks no word, but only points to your Greek New Testament sitting unused on your bookshelf, and then disappears. You awake in a cold sweat.
Let me offer a few words of encouragement for those of you drowning in a sea of Greek Guilt (those of you with Hebrew Humiliation will have to wait for now). First of all, remember that you can derive all sorts of benefit from reading the Greek text even if you can't tell a passive periphrastic from a Pittsburgh Penguin. In fact, if you do nothing but notice repeated words in the Greek text, you will find your sermon preparation is made easier, not more difficult, by examining the original text. More often than not, the New Testament writers make their main point clear the same way you make your own main points clear: by repeating them.
Here are few quick examples. We all know the story of the Wee Little Man, Zacchaeus. (You can repeat the lyrics in your head here now to refresh the tale.) But did you know that Luke says literally that “Zacchaeus was seeking to see Jesus…” (Luke 19:3)? When you work your way to v.10, you see the same word appear: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” With that simple observation, you come upon the heart of the story: Zacchaeus is indeed seeking Jesus…but Jesus' seeking of Zacchaeus is deeper and truer and more enduring than Zacchaeus' seeking of Jesus could ever be.
Luke does something similar back in chapter 4, when Jesus speaks to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. In v.19, Jesus concludes his Scripture reading from Isa. 61:1 by saying he is proclaiming “the acceptable year of the Lord”. The word for “acceptable” is dektos (and its importance is highlighted by the fact that it is the final word of the quotation). When Jesus goes on to rebuke the crowd and say, “No prophet is accepted in his home town…” (v.24), “accepted” is, you guessed it, dektos. This gives us the central tension of the story: God is now willing to accept people into his kingdom, but the people of Nazareth are unwilling to accept his king.
Paying attention to repeated words can also help make sense of bigger portions of Scripture. If you read carefully through Philippians, for instance, you will see that much of the vocabulary in the “hymn to Christ” in 2:5-11 is picked up in the rest of the letter. Perhaps the most striking example comes in 2:30, where Paul says that Epaphroditus came “unto death” for his faith in Christ. While of course Epaphroditus recovered from his illness, it is no coincidence that the phrase Paul uses is identical to the one he uses in 2:8 to describe Christ's death. The lesson is clear. Epaphroditus is living out Christ's story, and the Philippians are to go and do likewise.
Be encouraged! None of this is beyond your grasp. With a little work brushing up what you already know, you can make your sermon preparation simpler, faster, and more faithful to the intent of God's word. That sounds like a dream come true.
Associate Professor of New Testament
It's my dream, but many of you have had it too: I am enrolled in a college course, it's more than halfway through the semester…and I have done nothing. No lectures. No reading. No thinking. In its most virulent form, the dream pops up every week or two; the semester marches on even in dreamland, but I continue to do nothing.
I suspect seminary graduates may have their own variation on this nightmare. You are tucked away in your study, happily going about your sermon preparation, when you feel a cold breath on the back of your neck. You turn in horror to see the ghost of J. Gresham Machen, or the spectre of Bill Mounce, standing behind you. He speaks no word, but only points to your Greek New Testament sitting unused on your bookshelf, and then disappears. You awake in a cold sweat.
Let me offer a few words of encouragement for those of you drowning in a sea of Greek Guilt (those of you with Hebrew Humiliation will have to wait for now). First of all, remember that you can derive all sorts of benefit from reading the Greek text even if you can't tell a passive periphrastic from a Pittsburgh Penguin. In fact, if you do nothing but notice repeated words in the Greek text, you will find your sermon preparation is made easier, not more difficult, by examining the original text. More often than not, the New Testament writers make their main point clear the same way you make your own main points clear: by repeating them.
Here are few quick examples. We all know the story of the Wee Little Man, Zacchaeus. (You can repeat the lyrics in your head here now to refresh the tale.) But did you know that Luke says literally that “Zacchaeus was seeking to see Jesus…” (Luke 19:3)? When you work your way to v.10, you see the same word appear: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” With that simple observation, you come upon the heart of the story: Zacchaeus is indeed seeking Jesus…but Jesus' seeking of Zacchaeus is deeper and truer and more enduring than Zacchaeus' seeking of Jesus could ever be.
Luke does something similar back in chapter 4, when Jesus speaks to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. In v.19, Jesus concludes his Scripture reading from Isa. 61:1 by saying he is proclaiming “the acceptable year of the Lord”. The word for “acceptable” is dektos (and its importance is highlighted by the fact that it is the final word of the quotation). When Jesus goes on to rebuke the crowd and say, “No prophet is accepted in his home town…” (v.24), “accepted” is, you guessed it, dektos. This gives us the central tension of the story: God is now willing to accept people into his kingdom, but the people of Nazareth are unwilling to accept his king.
Paying attention to repeated words can also help make sense of bigger portions of Scripture. If you read carefully through Philippians, for instance, you will see that much of the vocabulary in the “hymn to Christ” in 2:5-11 is picked up in the rest of the letter. Perhaps the most striking example comes in 2:30, where Paul says that Epaphroditus came “unto death” for his faith in Christ. While of course Epaphroditus recovered from his illness, it is no coincidence that the phrase Paul uses is identical to the one he uses in 2:8 to describe Christ's death. The lesson is clear. Epaphroditus is living out Christ's story, and the Philippians are to go and do likewise.
Be encouraged! None of this is beyond your grasp. With a little work brushing up what you already know, you can make your sermon preparation simpler, faster, and more faithful to the intent of God's word. That sounds like a dream come true.
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Templeton 2008 Science for Ministry Initiative
By John Jefferson Davis, PhD
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics
David Horn and I recently returned from a conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in connection with the foundation’s new “Science for Ministry” initiative. The Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a series of grant funded initiatives that would encourage seminaries and other parachurch and educational organizations to think in more focused ways about how ministers could be more effectively trained and supported to minister in a culture so heavily influence by modern science and technology. During the next several months Dave and I will be revising an earlier proposal that would involve producing my course “Frontiers of Science and Faith” to be made available online, and developing focused seminars and pastor’s sabbaticals that would bring together pastors, working scientists, and seminary professors to engage with issues raised by modern science. Our hope is to leverage the existing infrastructure of the Ockenga Institute for continuing and distance education, and to be able to serve alumni like you in new ways.
The conference was attended by a broad spectrum of evangelical and mainline schools including Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Austin Theological seminaries, Asbury, Gordon-Conwell, Calvin, Moody, the Trinity Forum, Baylor, Regent College, the Alban Institute, and others. The speakers and workshops addressed a broad range of topics including creation and evolution, the preaching and teaching of biblical texts relating to modern astronomy and cosmology, the nature of scientific research, new discoveries in neuroscience, stem cell research, global warming and the environment, and much more.
I think it would be fair to say that we both came away from the conference with fresh energy that should stimulate my teaching in these areas and David’s planning for future continuing education events.
If you would like to know more about the work of the Templeton Foundation and this initiative, you can visit their website at www.templeton.org. Excellent resources in the area of modern science and the Christian faith can be found at the website of the American Scientific Affiliation, www.asa3.org. If you are interested in doing some reading this summer in the area of science and the Christian faith, I would mention my own book, Frontiers of Science and Faith: From the Big Bang to the End of the Universe (InterVarsity Press), and a new book by Keith Ward, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (Templeton Foundation Press).
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics
David Horn and I recently returned from a conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in connection with the foundation’s new “Science for Ministry” initiative. The Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a series of grant funded initiatives that would encourage seminaries and other parachurch and educational organizations to think in more focused ways about how ministers could be more effectively trained and supported to minister in a culture so heavily influence by modern science and technology. During the next several months Dave and I will be revising an earlier proposal that would involve producing my course “Frontiers of Science and Faith” to be made available online, and developing focused seminars and pastor’s sabbaticals that would bring together pastors, working scientists, and seminary professors to engage with issues raised by modern science. Our hope is to leverage the existing infrastructure of the Ockenga Institute for continuing and distance education, and to be able to serve alumni like you in new ways.
The conference was attended by a broad spectrum of evangelical and mainline schools including Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Austin Theological seminaries, Asbury, Gordon-Conwell, Calvin, Moody, the Trinity Forum, Baylor, Regent College, the Alban Institute, and others. The speakers and workshops addressed a broad range of topics including creation and evolution, the preaching and teaching of biblical texts relating to modern astronomy and cosmology, the nature of scientific research, new discoveries in neuroscience, stem cell research, global warming and the environment, and much more.
I think it would be fair to say that we both came away from the conference with fresh energy that should stimulate my teaching in these areas and David’s planning for future continuing education events.
If you would like to know more about the work of the Templeton Foundation and this initiative, you can visit their website at www.templeton.org. Excellent resources in the area of modern science and the Christian faith can be found at the website of the American Scientific Affiliation, www.asa3.org. If you are interested in doing some reading this summer in the area of science and the Christian faith, I would mention my own book, Frontiers of Science and Faith: From the Big Bang to the End of the Universe (InterVarsity Press), and a new book by Keith Ward, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (Templeton Foundation Press).
Monday, May 5, 2008
The Gospel: Is Wright Wrong? Yes and No... (Part 2)
By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament
In my previous post I addressed a key aspect of N. T. Wright’s view of the gospel that I thought was right and important, namely that it is not an anthropocentric message, but a Christocentric message. It isn’t fundamentally about us, but about Jesus Christ as Lord. To preach the gospel is not to preach an abstract system of salvation but to preach Christ, especially Christ as Lord (cf. Philippians 1:7-18).
I agree with much of what Wright has to say about the gospel, and think he offers important correctives to popular evangelical approaches that lead people to think it is about how we can get eternal fire insurance or that it is all about how God will help us be successful and prosperous in this world. In their book, Cat & Dog Theology (Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Lifestyle, 2003), Bob Sjogren and Gerald Robison develop a theological insight from a joke about cats and dogs: “A dog says, ‘you pet me, you ,feed me, you shelter me, you love me, you must be God.’ A cat says, ‘you pet me, you ,feed me, you shelter me, you love me, I must be God’” (p. 15). Too many evangelicals have a cat theology in which God’s grace to us in Christ is taken as evidence that Christianity is all about us after all. But we are not at the center of the universe. Christ is.
While I agree with much of what Wright says about the gospel I have a problem with his insistence that it is simply a message about Christ. It seems to me that his understanding of the gospel leaves out something that must be included. And Paul’s letter to the Galatians is very concerned about precisely the part that Wright leaves out. There is no real evidence that the false teachers Paul is concerned about in Galatia were teaching a different message about who Christ is or what he had done than what Paul was saying. They did not deny that he had died for our sins, been raised from the dead and was Israel’s Messiah and Lord over all creation. It seems on those points they were on the same page as the apostle Paul. Where they differed, however, was in what they taught about how one needed to respond to that wonderful news about Christ the Lord. In their view it was not sufficient to turn to Christ in faith (a faith that would be manifest in obedience as well), but it was also necessary to become Jews through circumcision and obey the Law of Moses. It was not their message about Jesus himself that was different, but their message about the required response. Still, Paul describes such a message as “another gospel” – a false gospel (Galatians 1:8-9). This suggests Wright is working with a truncated version of the gospel when he strictly limits its contents to statements about Jesus and resists including within the gospel message the parts that explain how – on what terms – it becomes good news for us. Paul anathematizes the false teachers in Galatia for preaching a false gospel when the primary difference seems to have been regarding the necessary response to Christ’s death, resurrection and lordship, not Christ’s nature or role as Lord or the narrative of his death and resurrection.
In fact, there are a number of other texts that suggest that in an important sense the gospel message is in fact a message about us. In Galatians 3:8 Paul indicates that “the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’” Here the gospel is not only identified with God’s promise to bless all the nations (Genesis 12:3), but Paul says it is based on God’s intention to justify the Gentiles by faith. So the gospel is not only a story about Jesus Christ, but also has to do with the blessings we receive and with justification in particular. Wright wants to sharply distinguish between the gospel and the doctrine of justification. He emphasizes that the preaching of the gospel is not the same as the message of justification. He is right to say they are not synonymous but implies a greater distinction between them than Paul’s own language suggests. Galatians 3:8 is exhibit A to that effect. The whole argument of his letters to the Romans and Galatians also reinforces the strong relationship between the two. Surely one of Paul’s purposes in the writing of Romans is to expound his understanding of the gospel for the sake of Roman Christians who have no first-hand knowledge of it. The gospel is what Paul is talking about both in Romans 1:1-6 and in 1:14-17 and in 1:14-17 it is explicitly the relationship between the gospel and justification that is highlighted. Wright has argued that actual the nature of the gospel is given in 1:1-6 and that 1:14-17 brings in the related but different issue of its effects. But the bulk of Romans 1-8 (at least) is dedicated to unpacking the contents of 1:16-17 and the understanding of justification that flows from Habakkuk 2:4, Genesis 16:5 and other OT texts (see the outline for chapters 1-8 in Cranfield’s commentaries and the discussion of the relationship between 1:16-17 and the following chapters (especially 3:21-22) in the first chapter of Francis Watson’s Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith). When Paul wants to expose the Romans to the nature of his preaching of the gospel he spends a large chunk of his time explaining his understanding of justification.
A similar thing happens in Galatians. In Galatians 1:8-9 Paul makes it clear he is concerned about people preaching a different gospel, a false gospel. In Galatians 1:11-12 he emphasizes the divine rather than human origin of his gospel message. The fact that Paul gives so much attention to the issue of justification in 2:16-5:11 is because his gospel can hardly be separated from his teaching on justification. Paul’s gospel and his teaching on justification are not exactly the same thing, but, to steal the language of the Chalcedonian definition on the two natures of Christ, one might say there is no “confusion, change, division, or separation" between justification and the gospel in Paul’s thought.
Romans 10 does a fine job of revealing the Christocentric nature of the gospel message as well as the fact that it includes an explanation of the required response to the message about Christ and is tied to justification so that while the message of the gospel may not be exactly the same as the doctrine of justification they are quite closely related. In Romans 10:5-18 the message of Christ’s death and resurrection is referred to as “the word of faith that we proclaim” (v. 8; this and other scriptural quotations in this posting are from the ESV). And Paul insists that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (v. 9). Note the scriptural verses Paul quotes from the OT to back up this understanding of the gospel in the following verses. In v. 11 Paul cites from Isaiah 28:16: “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame" and in v. 13 he cites Joel 2:32: “"everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." In v. 15 he cites Nahum 1:15: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!" In v. 16 he points out that “not all obeyed the gospel.” The texts from Isaiah and Joel, like the quote from Genesis 12:3 in Galatians 3, stress the role of and the blessings experienced by those who believe, those who call on the name of the Lord. The Nahum text confirms that what Paul has been discussing throughout the passage is the preaching of the gospel – “the good news.”
While this posting focuses on Wright’s view of the contents of the gospel message and not on the strengths and weaknesses of his views on justification (despite the close relationship between the two) I feel the need to point out in passing that I think Wright is also wrong to argue that justification is not entrance language. (“Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian” What Saint Paul Really Said [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997], p. 125.) God’s declaration that we are righteous is a speech act which actually makes it so, rather than simply a recognition of something that was already true before the statement is made. Wright seems to recognize this on page 98 of What Saint Paul Really Said (“for the plaintiff or defendant to be ‘righteous’ in the biblical sense within the law-court setting is for them to have that status as a result of the decision of the court”; emphases his), but the rest of his discussion leaves that insight behind. We could also bring up the evidence pointed out by Simon Gathercole and others that E.P. Sanders’ understanding of first century Judaism (which Wright seems to accept without qualification) does not do justice to all the evidence available (see Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting?: Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul's Response in Romans 1-5 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002]). Again, a full full-fledged discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s understanding of justification would require a much longer treatment and will not be undertaken here.
Wright often uses a rhetoric that of the type “It [whatever the theological topic is] is not this [whatever the common view has been] but that [his new understanding]. Usually I find myself agreeing that he has put his finger on something very important and has made a point that needed to be made. Often, however, I also conclude that his new dichotomy does not really do full justice to the issue. In this case he is right to point out that the gospel does not consist of an abstract theory of salvation and is not really about us and our blessings, but about Christ – his death, resurrection and reign – but it also includes the blessings that our ours as by faith we participate in his death, resurrection and reign. And the nature of the appropriate response to the message about Christ is essential enough to the gospel itself that to get that wrong is to preach a different gospel, a false one. I’m grateful for Wright’s informed and stimulating writings on so many important issues even though I don’t think he always gets things exactly right. But then I don’t suppose I do either. Through much of my Christian life I’m sure my own understanding and teaching of the gospel reinforced the idea that I was at the center of God’s universe (good old “cat theology”) and failed to emphasize the point that Christ is the center of the universe and to understand that is to understand that life only makes sense if he is at the center of our own personal universe as well. Did I really understand the gospel back then? Well, yes and no…
Associate Professor of New Testament
In my previous post I addressed a key aspect of N. T. Wright’s view of the gospel that I thought was right and important, namely that it is not an anthropocentric message, but a Christocentric message. It isn’t fundamentally about us, but about Jesus Christ as Lord. To preach the gospel is not to preach an abstract system of salvation but to preach Christ, especially Christ as Lord (cf. Philippians 1:7-18).
I agree with much of what Wright has to say about the gospel, and think he offers important correctives to popular evangelical approaches that lead people to think it is about how we can get eternal fire insurance or that it is all about how God will help us be successful and prosperous in this world. In their book, Cat & Dog Theology (Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Lifestyle, 2003), Bob Sjogren and Gerald Robison develop a theological insight from a joke about cats and dogs: “A dog says, ‘you pet me, you ,feed me, you shelter me, you love me, you must be God.’ A cat says, ‘you pet me, you ,feed me, you shelter me, you love me, I must be God’” (p. 15). Too many evangelicals have a cat theology in which God’s grace to us in Christ is taken as evidence that Christianity is all about us after all. But we are not at the center of the universe. Christ is.
While I agree with much of what Wright says about the gospel I have a problem with his insistence that it is simply a message about Christ. It seems to me that his understanding of the gospel leaves out something that must be included. And Paul’s letter to the Galatians is very concerned about precisely the part that Wright leaves out. There is no real evidence that the false teachers Paul is concerned about in Galatia were teaching a different message about who Christ is or what he had done than what Paul was saying. They did not deny that he had died for our sins, been raised from the dead and was Israel’s Messiah and Lord over all creation. It seems on those points they were on the same page as the apostle Paul. Where they differed, however, was in what they taught about how one needed to respond to that wonderful news about Christ the Lord. In their view it was not sufficient to turn to Christ in faith (a faith that would be manifest in obedience as well), but it was also necessary to become Jews through circumcision and obey the Law of Moses. It was not their message about Jesus himself that was different, but their message about the required response. Still, Paul describes such a message as “another gospel” – a false gospel (Galatians 1:8-9). This suggests Wright is working with a truncated version of the gospel when he strictly limits its contents to statements about Jesus and resists including within the gospel message the parts that explain how – on what terms – it becomes good news for us. Paul anathematizes the false teachers in Galatia for preaching a false gospel when the primary difference seems to have been regarding the necessary response to Christ’s death, resurrection and lordship, not Christ’s nature or role as Lord or the narrative of his death and resurrection.
In fact, there are a number of other texts that suggest that in an important sense the gospel message is in fact a message about us. In Galatians 3:8 Paul indicates that “the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’” Here the gospel is not only identified with God’s promise to bless all the nations (Genesis 12:3), but Paul says it is based on God’s intention to justify the Gentiles by faith. So the gospel is not only a story about Jesus Christ, but also has to do with the blessings we receive and with justification in particular. Wright wants to sharply distinguish between the gospel and the doctrine of justification. He emphasizes that the preaching of the gospel is not the same as the message of justification. He is right to say they are not synonymous but implies a greater distinction between them than Paul’s own language suggests. Galatians 3:8 is exhibit A to that effect. The whole argument of his letters to the Romans and Galatians also reinforces the strong relationship between the two. Surely one of Paul’s purposes in the writing of Romans is to expound his understanding of the gospel for the sake of Roman Christians who have no first-hand knowledge of it. The gospel is what Paul is talking about both in Romans 1:1-6 and in 1:14-17 and in 1:14-17 it is explicitly the relationship between the gospel and justification that is highlighted. Wright has argued that actual the nature of the gospel is given in 1:1-6 and that 1:14-17 brings in the related but different issue of its effects. But the bulk of Romans 1-8 (at least) is dedicated to unpacking the contents of 1:16-17 and the understanding of justification that flows from Habakkuk 2:4, Genesis 16:5 and other OT texts (see the outline for chapters 1-8 in Cranfield’s commentaries and the discussion of the relationship between 1:16-17 and the following chapters (especially 3:21-22) in the first chapter of Francis Watson’s Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith). When Paul wants to expose the Romans to the nature of his preaching of the gospel he spends a large chunk of his time explaining his understanding of justification.
A similar thing happens in Galatians. In Galatians 1:8-9 Paul makes it clear he is concerned about people preaching a different gospel, a false gospel. In Galatians 1:11-12 he emphasizes the divine rather than human origin of his gospel message. The fact that Paul gives so much attention to the issue of justification in 2:16-5:11 is because his gospel can hardly be separated from his teaching on justification. Paul’s gospel and his teaching on justification are not exactly the same thing, but, to steal the language of the Chalcedonian definition on the two natures of Christ, one might say there is no “confusion, change, division, or separation" between justification and the gospel in Paul’s thought.
Romans 10 does a fine job of revealing the Christocentric nature of the gospel message as well as the fact that it includes an explanation of the required response to the message about Christ and is tied to justification so that while the message of the gospel may not be exactly the same as the doctrine of justification they are quite closely related. In Romans 10:5-18 the message of Christ’s death and resurrection is referred to as “the word of faith that we proclaim” (v. 8; this and other scriptural quotations in this posting are from the ESV). And Paul insists that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (v. 9). Note the scriptural verses Paul quotes from the OT to back up this understanding of the gospel in the following verses. In v. 11 Paul cites from Isaiah 28:16: “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame" and in v. 13 he cites Joel 2:32: “"everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." In v. 15 he cites Nahum 1:15: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!" In v. 16 he points out that “not all obeyed the gospel.” The texts from Isaiah and Joel, like the quote from Genesis 12:3 in Galatians 3, stress the role of and the blessings experienced by those who believe, those who call on the name of the Lord. The Nahum text confirms that what Paul has been discussing throughout the passage is the preaching of the gospel – “the good news.”
While this posting focuses on Wright’s view of the contents of the gospel message and not on the strengths and weaknesses of his views on justification (despite the close relationship between the two) I feel the need to point out in passing that I think Wright is also wrong to argue that justification is not entrance language. (“Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian” What Saint Paul Really Said [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997], p. 125.) God’s declaration that we are righteous is a speech act which actually makes it so, rather than simply a recognition of something that was already true before the statement is made. Wright seems to recognize this on page 98 of What Saint Paul Really Said (“for the plaintiff or defendant to be ‘righteous’ in the biblical sense within the law-court setting is for them to have that status as a result of the decision of the court”; emphases his), but the rest of his discussion leaves that insight behind. We could also bring up the evidence pointed out by Simon Gathercole and others that E.P. Sanders’ understanding of first century Judaism (which Wright seems to accept without qualification) does not do justice to all the evidence available (see Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting?: Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul's Response in Romans 1-5 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002]). Again, a full full-fledged discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s understanding of justification would require a much longer treatment and will not be undertaken here.
Wright often uses a rhetoric that of the type “It [whatever the theological topic is] is not this [whatever the common view has been] but that [his new understanding]. Usually I find myself agreeing that he has put his finger on something very important and has made a point that needed to be made. Often, however, I also conclude that his new dichotomy does not really do full justice to the issue. In this case he is right to point out that the gospel does not consist of an abstract theory of salvation and is not really about us and our blessings, but about Christ – his death, resurrection and reign – but it also includes the blessings that our ours as by faith we participate in his death, resurrection and reign. And the nature of the appropriate response to the message about Christ is essential enough to the gospel itself that to get that wrong is to preach a different gospel, a false one. I’m grateful for Wright’s informed and stimulating writings on so many important issues even though I don’t think he always gets things exactly right. But then I don’t suppose I do either. Through much of my Christian life I’m sure my own understanding and teaching of the gospel reinforced the idea that I was at the center of God’s universe (good old “cat theology”) and failed to emphasize the point that Christ is the center of the universe and to understand that is to understand that life only makes sense if he is at the center of our own personal universe as well. Did I really understand the gospel back then? Well, yes and no…
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