Where Has The Gospel Gone - Part Deux

So yesterday I said that one of the reasons why the American Southern Suburbs (thanks to the two of you who pointed out how that works out as an acronym...completely unintentional on my part) are so frustrating is because we are very religious. Jesus and the Bible still have a place in our world - at least in buildings that people inhabit on Sundays - but tragically, for all of our Jesus and Bible, the life-transforming hope and power of the Gospel is largely absent from our cultural consciousness, even in the Church.

The truth is that while most Christian-type people I come across 'believe' in the historic reality of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, we all struggle with and few people bank their lives on that reality. Rather than living in light of what Christ has done for us, our tendency is to try to earn God's favor, love, acceptance and blessing on the basis of our goodness and morality.

In some sense, the Gospel makes perfect sense to Christian-type people. But most of us fail to see how we regularly walk away from the Gospel. In Graeme Goldsworthy's Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics, he lists eight ways that Christian-type people pursue 'religion' ('I obey, therefore I'm accepted) instead of the Gospel ('I'm accepted, therefore I obey). Let me pull out one that I think is at the heart of some of the fastest growing churches in places like Athens and Birmingham:

When the gospel is reinterpreted primarily as how God does good and useful things in our lives now, a pragmatic hermeneutic (method of interpreting the Bible) may take over. this can take many forms, but the same basic problem is the constant of these aberrations. Good and important biblical truths are allowed to crowd out the central truths of the historic events of the gospel. Theologically speaking, this usually involves allowing the present experience of the Christian, rather than the finished work of Christ, to become the hermeneutical norm. It means focusing on the continuing work of the Spirit at the expense of the finished work of Christ. It undermines the centrality of our justification in Christ. Such distortions are easy to fall into, and they are also easy to accept when they are confidently taught as biblical truth. The problem lies in the fact that these things are not themselves the gospel, yet the gospel does not take place without them. Dehistoricizing the gospel undermines its reality and puts the believer's assurance in jeopardy. Instead of contemplating the finished and perfect work of Christ, one is tempted to focus on the incomplete work of the Spirit within us. We then easily adopt a pragmatic approach to what we consider to be the Spirit's work.

Evangelical pragmatism takes on many forms...pragmatism is the view that what works is true. It ignores the issue of how we determine what kind of results we should look for. Thus, if it feels good it is true; if it brings people to church it is valid and right; if we get the numbers and a good cash flow our methods are correct. We conclude from good results that we must be acting biblically. Once again, it need only be said that the gospel hermeneutic does not necessarily support these views. Pragmatism is really a hermeneutical framework that is used to determine not so much the meaning of texts, but the meaning of events. It is at its core a trinitarian error and a form of religious humanism.

Comments

[andy]

thanks. this is rich stuff