Chris Green Apollos/Inter-Varsity Press, UK, 2006.) He writes that Paul’s good news was, first, that Jesus was the promised Messianic King and Son of God come to earth as a servant, in human form. (See “The Gospel of Paul and the Gospel of the Kingdom” in God’s Power to Save, ed. Simon Gathercole distills a three-point outline that both Paul and the Synoptic writers held in common. We see in John and the Synoptics two more forms of the gospel-one that stresses the individual and the other the corporate aspect to our salvation. On the other hand, when the Synoptics talk of the kingdom, they lay out the real social and behavioral changes that the gospel brings. He is at pains to show that it is not basically an earthly social-political order (John 18:36). Why, then, the difference in vocabulary between the Synoptics and John? As many scholars have pointed out, John emphasizes the individual and inward spiritual aspects of being in the kingdom of God. Reading Matthew 18:3, Mark 10:15 and John 3:3, 5 together reveal that conversion, the new birth, and receiving the kingdom of God “as a child” are the same move. However, when we compare Mark 10:17, 23-34, Matthew 25:34, 46, and John 3:5, 6 and 17, we see that “entering the kingdom of God” and “receiving eternal life” are virtually the same thing. Readers have always noticed that the kingdom language of the Synoptic Gospels is virtually missing in the Gospel of John, which usually talks instead about receiving eternal life. These two approaches can be discerned in Paul’s speeches in the book of Acts, some to Jews and some to pagans. One of Paul’s gospel forms was tailored to Bible-believing people who thought they would be justified by works on judgment day, and the other to pagans. When he spoke to Jews, he confronted their culture’s idol of power and accomplishment with the “weakness” of the cross, and then presented the gospel as true power (1 Cor. When Paul spoke to Greeks, he confronted their culture’s idol of speculation and philosophy with the “foolishness” of the cross, and then presented Christ’s salvation as true wisdom. 1:8), he then speaks of being entrusted with “the gospel of the uncircumcised” as opposed to the “gospel of the circumcised” (Gal. After insisting there is only one gospel (Gal. This is the Bible’s own way of speaking of the gospel, and we should stick with it. So yes, there must be one gospel, yet there are clearly different forms in which that one gospel can be expressed. This statement assumes a single body of gospel content. “Whether it was I or they,” Paul says, referring to Peter and the others, “so we preached and so you believed” (1 Cor. Paul is emphatic that the gospel he presents is the same as the one preached by the Jerusalem apostles. Now hundreds of websites of young Christian leaders complain that the older evangelical church spent too much time reading Romans rather than Jesus’ declaration that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” But to be true to first-century Christians’ own understanding of the gospel, I believe we must side with Dodd over Dunn. Then, in turn, James Dunn argued in Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977) that the gospel formulations in the Bible are so different that we can’t come up with a single outline. Dodd countered that there was one consensus gospel message in the Bible. In the 20th century, British professor C.H. The belief that there is no single basic gospel outline in the Bible goes back at least to the Tubingen school of biblical scholarship, which insisted Paul’s gospel of justification was sharply different from Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom. A second criticism is that there is no one “simple gospel” because “everything is contextual” and the Bible itself contains many gospel presentations that exist in tension with each other. Many say that it is too individualistic, that Christ’s salvation is not so much to bring individual happiness as to bring peace, justice, and a new creation. There are today at least two major criticisms of this simple formulation. (3) Jesus took the punishment your sins deserved, (4) so if you repent from sins and trust in him for your salvation, you will be forgiven, justified, and accepted freely by grace, and indwelt with his Spirit until you die and go to heaven. Humans are by no means angels, however, so rather than contemplating it, we argue about it.Ī generation ago evangelicals agreed on “the simple gospel”: (1) God made you and wants to have a relationship with you, (2) but your sin separates you from God. Indeed, even angels never tire of looking into it (1 Peter 1:12). It is both simple enough to tell to a child and profound enough for the greatest minds to explore.
The gospel has been described as a pool in which a toddler can wade and yet an elephant can swim. Like God, the gospel is both one and more than that.īy Tim Keller | posted in
0 kommentar(er)
