~ Chapter Two ~
Gospels of
Sin Management
Is the Gospel
Just About Forgiveness of Sins? “Just
forgiven? [Is] that really all there is to being a Christian? The gift of
eternal life comes down to that? Quite a retreat from living an eternal kind of
life now! Christians certainly aren’t perfect. There will always be need for
improvement. But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being ‘just
forgiven’… You could be much more
than forgiven and still not be perfect. Perhaps you could even be a person in
whom Jesus’ eternal kind of life predominates and still have room for growth.”
[43]
The Danger of
Being ‘Just Forgiven.’ “[We] are in danger… of missing the fullness of life
offered to us. Can we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us
that essentially bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves
human character untouched? Would he leave us even temporarily marooned with no
help in our kind of world, with our kinds of problems: psychological,
emotional, social, and global? Can we believe that the essence of Christian
faith and salvation covers nothing but death and after? Can we believe that
being saved really has nothing whatever to do with the kinds of persons we are?
And for those of us who think the Bible is a reliable or even significant guide
to God’s view of human life, can we validly interpret its portrayal of faith in
Christ as one concerned only with the management of sin, whether in the form of
our personal debt or in the form of societal evils?... Are we to suppose that
everyone, from Mother Teresa to Hitler, is really the same on the inside, but
that some of us are just vigilant or ‘lucky’ enough to avoid doing what we all really want to do? Are we to suppose
that God gives us nothing that really influences character and spirituality?
Are we to suppose that in fact Jesus has no substantial impact on our ‘real
lives’?” [46-47]
What Does It
Mean to Be a Christian? “The influential Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill
[says] simply, ‘To be a Christian means to be like Jesus Christ.’ And, ‘Being a
Christian depends on a certain inner relatedness to the living Christ. Through
this relatedness all other relationships of a man—to God, to himself, to other
people—are transformed.” [50]
On the Atonement.
“If you ask anyone from [the] 74 percent of Americans who say they have made a
commitment to Jesus Christ what the gospel is, you will probably be told that
Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this,
we will go to heaven when we die. In this way what is only one theory of the ‘atonement’
is made out to be the whole essential message of Jesus. To continue with
theological language for the moment, justification
has taken the place of regeneration,
or new life. Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life
‘from above.’ For all of the talk about the ‘new birth’ among conservative Christians,
there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in
practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted
righteousness. Moreover, what it is to
believe that Jesus died for us is currently explained in various ways, with
differing degrees and forms of creedal content or association with a local
church or denomination. Indeed, [this] issue—what the faith that saves is—is a
flash point of current controversy. But for some time now the belief required
to be saved has increasingly been regarded as a totally private act, ‘just
between you and the Lord.’… And so the only sure outcome of belief is that we
are ‘just forgiven.’ We are justified, which is often explained by saying that,
before God, it is ‘just-as-if-I’d’ never sinned at all. We may not have done or
become anything positive to speak of. But when we come to heaven’s gate, they
will not be able to find a reason to keep us out. The mere record of a magical
moment of mental assent will open the door.” [51]
God Involved in
Our Lives. “[We] get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and
forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal
kind of life—as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that
this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as
natural parts. And in this he only continues the teachings of the Old
Testament. The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the
intimate involvement of God in human life—or else alienation from it. That is the
biblical alternative for life now. ‘The crooked man is an abomination to the
Lord,’ as the proverb sums it up, ‘but He is intimate with the upright.’ (Prov.
3:32 NAS).” [56]
Do We Trust
Christ or His Work? “The issue,
so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to
God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that
constitutes a new kind of life, life ‘from above’? As the apostle John says in
his first letter, ‘God has given undying life to us, and that life is in his
Son. Those who have the Son have life.’ (1 John 5:11-12). What must be
emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real
person of Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some
arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as
guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in
every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and
adequate to everything.” [57-58]
The Foundational
Flaw. “The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our
lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing
Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable
reason, just thinks it is appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit
account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and
finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if
we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.” [58]
What is the ‘Gospel’
in the Gospels? “’The gospel’ is the good news of the presence and
availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus
the Anointed. This was Abraham’s faith, too. As Jesus said, ‘Abraham saw my
time and was delighted’ (John 8:56). Accordingly, the only description of
eternal life found in the words we have from Jesus is ‘This is eternal life,
that they [his disciples] may know you, the only real God, and Jesus the
anointed, whom you have sent’ (John 17:3). This may sound to us like ‘mere head
knowledge.’ But the biblical ‘know’ always refers to an intimate, personal,
interactive relationship… The eternal life of which Jesus speaks is not
knowledge about God but an intimately interactive relationship with him.”
[58-59]
The Disconnect
of Life from Faith. “[As] things now stand we have, on the one hand, some
kind of ‘faith in Christ’ and, on the other, the life of abundance and
obedience he is and offers. But we have no effective bridge from the faith to
the life. Some do work it out. But when that happens it is looked upon as a
fluke or an accident, not a normal and
natural part of the regular good news itself… We settle back into de facto alienation of our religion from
Jesus as a friend and teacher, and from our moment-to-moment existence as a
holy calling or appointment with God. Some will substitute ritual behavior for
divine vitality and personal integrity; others may be content with an isolated
string of ‘experiences’ rather than transformation of character. Right at the
heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives.
Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.”
[64]
Jesus as Our
Teacher. “We do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live,
hence we cannot think of ourselves,
in our moment-to-moment existence, as his students or disciples. So we turn to
popular speakers and writers, some Christian and some not—whoever happens to be
writing books and running talk shows and seminars on matters that concern us.”
[67]
A First Word to
Ministers. “The situation we have just described—the disconnect of life
from faith, the absence from our churches of Jesus the teacher—is not caused by
the wicked world, by social oppression, or by the stubborn meanness of the
people who come to our church services and carry on the work of our
congregations. It is largely caused and sustained by the basic message that we
constantly hear from Christian pulpits. We are flooded with what I have called ‘gospels
of sin management,’ in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal
life now—right in the midst of work, business, and profession—remains for the
most part ignored and unspoken. Must not all who speak for Christ constantly
ask themselves these crucial questions: Does the gospel I preach and teach have
a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of
Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural ‘next
step’? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually
believing the substance of my message?” [67]
A Second Word to
Ministers. “We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly
presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are
what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject these
gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ
himself—when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it. And so we have the result
noted: the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is
no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one
for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the
plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which
they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. To counteract this we must
develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of
life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus.
In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn
from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can
enter his eternal kind of life now.” [68]
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