The Gospel is not an "it"

Alan made this amazing statement in class yesterday as we were talking about how we go about constructing local theologies. Even if you have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "local theologies" you can probably discern, right on the surface, that it somehow involves the missionary practice of being deeply present in a place and coming to understand the gospel in that place. This is extremely difficult and patient work.

Anyway, Mark made this really amazing statement that was something like, "You can't understand the gospel until you get into the community and begin to engage with it in a deep way." My immediate reaction was to sense that this was true. I mean, I knew this was true but wasn't sure why. Later in the conversation Alan said, "The gospel is not an 'it'."

Most Christians in America think of the gospel in this Kantian way. That if you take the Bible and squeeze out of it the principles you will get the essence of the gospel. But there is no essence like that. There is only embodied and incarnated reality. When you take this Kantian approach the gospel becomes something I can "know" empirically, independent of time, place and people, and I can then take this "gospel" and give it or do it to someone else who doesn't have it or doesn't get it. In this way evangelism become violence towards people and community.

But if this were true - if the gospel were an 'it' - then Jesus wouldn't have needed to be incarnated in human flesh and live among us for 33 years. He could have just give us 'it.' Right? But He didn't do that. And we don't see Paul conducting his ministry that way either. Instead we see Jesus and Paul expressing that in Jesus the realm of  God's good way - the kingdom - has been opened to ordinary people and that because of God's remarkable grace, we can receive that grace and enter his kingdom. But the way that kingdom is taking shape is unique to each local context. Hence Mark can say, unless you enter the community fully and experience life there as a human being, you cannot know the gospel in that place. You cannot know what the Spirit of God is doing in that place at that time.

This was a tremendous insight and something that I'll be thinking about for weeks and months to come. What is God asking us to be and do as the people of God in Hollywood?

Comments

[Monte Sahlin]

This insight is a large part of the concept of a personal God, or more precisely, God who is a person. A person always lives within a real-world context of language, culture, memory, values, personality, etc. Much of history focuses on the physical context, but more and more, with travel and the media we now have, it is clear that the physical context is not all that important and so it is easier to understand a God that transcends physical context in many ways. But that should sharpen our awareness of how God's personality, expression, etc. are particular to each relationship in the same way that our relationship with any other person (if it has character and depth of any kind) has particularity.