Abstract
Any of our evangelistic efforts to attend to clarity, fidelity, and potency in our grasp of the gospel must engage an element at the core of the gospel that has become largely missing in our ways of telling it. God raised Jesus from the dead. What we have allowed to be peripheral is in fact an action of God by which all else has a place to stand. Restoring it at the heart of our grasp of the gospel establishes and renews every other dimension of the good news.
With several friends, I was in a sidewalk conversation one day with M.M. Thomas, the Indian theologian, ecumenical leader, and social theorist. Mid-conversation he stopped all of a sudden, turned to us and said, “Really, there is only one question to which all theology is an answer: What is the gospel?” That being the case, the topic I supplied months ago to the planners of this meeting must surely have sounded ambitious, maybe even audacious: “Discerning the very good news God has given the world: attending to clarity, fidelity, and potency in our grasp of the gospel.” It is not the intention of this essay to unpack all that the title might imply. Rather, the title was my way of stepping into the orbit of imagination responding to our necessary, perennial question, “What is the gospel?” Such discerning as this, attending as it must to “clarity, fidelity and potency,” constitutes an essential subfield in the discipline of evangelism studies, which I suggest may be called Evangelology—discerning the evangel of evangelism.
The wider discipline engaged by the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education includes a historical component, a social research component, a practical methodology one, a communication theory one, an ecclesiological one, a psychological one, and much more. But it also, by its name, implies being attentive to the way we have grasped answers to the question, “What is the evangel?” Hence, Evangelology.
Two observations motivate me as I come to this inquiry.
First, I hear the word gospel used in numerous contexts and conversations, but rarely offering specificity about what, exactly, is meant by the word. It assumes concurrence among us believers, because we all are presumed to know what it is and to share the same sense of its meaning. In that way, it functions more like Christian code (ambiguous code) for something taken to be so commonly conceived, immediately recognizable, and full of authority, that it needs nothing more to define it. Finally, without saying something more specific, the word by itself hardly lends, to the general populace listening in, a sense of what the Christian message is, as if what it means is automatically clear and needs no further indication of its meaning. Hence the importance of the subfield.
Second, reflecting on our society’s cinematic arts and media, I sense that if some character in a particular drama has now gotten “born again,” starts believing in Jesus, or is now going to church all the time with “that group,” the response of that character’s friends is that such a thing is silly. Not dumb, not irrational, not stupid, certainly not interesting. Given the absence of a more substantial sense of what the Christian faith is about, the general populace is left with this: it is all simply silly. 1
What if something important has been left aside, or left out?
I am not the first to raise questions about the adequacy of what we take to be the content of our “gospel,” nor call attention to missing elements in it, nor propose how to fill out what may be missing. David Lowes Watson, a Past President of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education (AETE) and the Founding Editor of its journal, now called Witness, engaged these issues in his essay, “Christ all in all” (1996), a chapter in the edited volume of the Gospel and Our Culture Network entitled, The Church between Gospel and Culture. 2 He opens a section entitled “What is the gospel?” with this observation: “Interestingly—and significantly—this question is rarely encountered in the vast literature available on evangelistic methods and strategies. Yet when the question is posed and answered, much of American evangelism is shown to be defective in content” (Watson, 1996: 189). He notes recent work that helps on this score but concludes that “there are certain basics to the gospel that our anthropocentric evangelism persistently ignores” (Watson, 1996: 189).
It is Mortimer Arias whom Watson finds to be especially helpful. Arias (1984) took on the scholarly tendencies to drive a wedge between the gospel of Jesus (i.e., his announcement of the reign of God, according to the synoptic gospels) and the gospel that is Jesus (i.e., his divine identity, according to the affirmations of early apostolic preaching). While demonstrating a more wholistic reading of the New Testament, Arias (1984: 55–67) nonetheless laments what he sees to have been the “eclipse of the kingdom” in the imagination and proclamation of early Christian communities, persisting too easily in one form or another throughout the church’s history. He finds “today’s eclipse of the kingdom in the theology for evangelization, and in the evangelistic message” to be especially
painful and serious. In our own contextualization of the gospel we have not only built up our evangelistic theology from an exclusively Pauline perspective, or from a purely apocalyptic world view, but we have also lost sight of the kingdom perspective and content. (1984: 66)
I long before had absorbed Arias’ “eclipse” argument myself, and have focused my missiological vision on the announcement of the reign of God, as he suggests, seeking in that way to move beyond the radical divorce of the “reign of God” and a personal “plan of salvation.” In our present time, it is my contention that there is yet another eclipse within our contemporary gospel-telling traditions, related to the one Arias describes but calling for its own deliberate attention. God raised Jesus from the dead. Attending to the significance of that holds promise for strengthening Arias’ argument and leading our evangelism into fresh territory. My thesis is this: we have leaned so heavily into the cross and atonement theory that the resurrection of Jesus has been eclipsed. We are quick to bear witness to the one, but hardly remember how to bear witness to the other. 3
David Bosch points in the same direction. In the concluding chapter of his magnum opus, Transforming Mission (1991), Bosch develops a sense of mission and evangelism along the lines of what is sometimes called the kerygma, the salvific actions of God in Jesus Christ that the early church proclaimed: incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, the gifting of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost), and the parousia. It is with respect to the resurrection that he notes how missing it has become: “The Western Church has been tempted to read the gospels—in [Martin] Kahler’s famous phrase—as ‘passion histories with extensive introductions.’” That way of reading
betrays the preoccupation of the Western church—Catholic and Protestant—with the passion and crucifixion of Jesus. To the question, What is the essence of the gospel?, most Western Christians would probably reply, “It is that Christ died for my sins on the cross.” (1991: 513)
That certainly was the dominating message of the rash of evangelistic “summaries” of the core “gospel” that swirled around this young evangelical Presbyterian as I was cutting my evangelistic teeth. In my high school days in Miami, I was trained to be a counselor for Billy Graham’s 1961 Crusade, and later absorbed the gospel script commended by the small book, Soul-Winning Made Easy (Lovett, 1959). During my college and seminary years, I was trained in the Four Spiritual Laws at Arrowhead Springs, and in the Evangelism Explosion program at its mothership, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. Along the way, I picked up other similar “tools” (the Navigator’s Bridge, the Romans Road outline, etc.). The storylines in these “short-view gospel presentations” 4 were remarkably the same. They all seemed to have the same “four things” (variously called steps, spiritual laws, principles, road markers) designed to tell a person how Jesus’ death was a substitutionary atonement offering forgiveness for one’s sins and the removal of one’s guilt. 5 They promised things like: a wonderful plan for your life, peace with God, eternal life, certainty about going to heaven when you die, a way of knowing God personally.
That was all done with very little effort to say who this Jesus was or what he had been doing and saying that brought him to this public accounting before the human standard-bearers of justice. Nor do they suggest much about where the story goes next after Jesus’ death on the cross. In their present-day iterations, little has changed. For most of these, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead has no real play in the story-line. In a couple of cases, the scripture verses used to support the case about atonement do include a mention that Jesus had been raised from the dead (Rom. 4:25, Rom. 10:9). 6 But for most, that leads to nothing further. 7
Bosch (1991: 515), for his part, contests these trends: “Jesus’ death on the cross remains meaningless without the resurrection. Early Christians viewed the Easter event as the vindication of Jesus.” He concurs with Hendrikus Berkhof (1966: 180) that: “Cross and resurrection are not in balance with each other; the resurrection has the ascendency and victory over the cross.” “The most common summary of the early church’s missionary message was that it was witnessing to the resurrection of Christ” (Bosch, 1991: 515).
Similarly, Jurgen Moltmann (1990: 213) affirms:
it is in fact true that the Christian faith stands or falls with Christ’s resurrection. At this point faith in God and acknowledgment of Christ coincide. The cross and the resurrection are mutually related, and they have to be interpreted in such a way that the one event appears in the light of the other.
With such remarks as these, we are following in the clearly expressed path of the Apostle Paul himself. In the first of the New Testament letters we have from Paul to the church in Corinth, he says of the message he had given them when he was first there: “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1–2). What he says later in the same letter, however, disallows a slavishness of interpretation of that earlier comment, as if the cross is enough to say, nothing else is needed. In fact, Paul interprets the early comment with a later one, itself a summary of the good news he had proclaimed at the first, which the Corinthians had received, and through which they were being saved:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. (1 Cor. 15:3–4)
To this he appends a list of people to whom Jesus appeared, himself the last on the list as “one untimely born” (15:5–9).
It might seem that not much more is added in chapter 15 to that which was asserted in chapter 2. But without that something more—the resurrection of Jesus!—the earlier assertion by itself is irrelevant, empty, or powerless. Paul challenges those in Corinth that may have been wishing to dissuade others from believing in a resurrection of the dead. If they are right and if that is an inviolable fact, he argues, then not even Jesus was raised from the dead. And
if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (15:14, 17–19)
No resurrection of Jesus? Then all of this is. . . well, “silly.” 8
And to be sure, devastatingly so. Come with me to a cold, lonely place. It is a sabbath, so very quiet. Something has just happened here. A freshly deceased body has been prepared and wrapped and placed into a nearby crypt, behind the watchful guard of a very heavy stone.
Yes, it is, as the church testifies, Holy Saturday. Not the first day when the life of the corpse had been snuffed out. Nor yet the third day. On this second day, any lingering hopes for what might have been are now growing dimmer by the minute. Not likely. We saw it. We know it. The man we travelled with and watched and listened to, the one in whom we had found such hope. Now he is gone, it is over, there is nothing more. He is dead. As a latter-day poet-scholar says it: “It makes a big difference whether we think someone is dead or alive” (Johnson, 1999: 3). At that moment, it was certainly the former.
We are led to linger here by Alan Lewis, the author who literally wrote the book on this day. He invites us to dwell in this day that lies Between Cross and Resurrection (2001): “[W]e have not really listened to the gospel story of the cross and grave until we have construed this cold, dark Sabbath as the day of atheism” (2001: 56). God is silent, nestled there in the crypt:
The barrier of the second day, obstructing any view of the horizon and obscuring the approaching light, has compelled us to “continue under the power of death for a time,” enduring the total darkness of the cross, the grave, and their uncompromised finality: the end of Jesus, the end of God, the end of everything. For all we knew the drama had run its course and reached its tragic denouement—the inaction on the stage indicating not that we should wait for more, but that the play had ended: it was time to go home. (2001: 57)
Think about it. What Judas feared (perhaps, hoping to force Jesus’ hand to stop it) had nonetheless happened. What Peter rashly thought he could halt (by cutting off the ear of Malchus, which Jesus gently paused to replace and heal we might imagine). But the healer could not, or would not save himself. All is done, all is finished. We had thought that. . ., but no, it was not to be. Like his enemies would conclude, a dead Messiah is no Messiah. Were he truly the Messiah, either God would not have allowed his death, or maybe God also isn’t.
And on this of all days, the infamous second day, all those who had followed, echoed, even healed in his name, were completely crushed. This is the end. There is no more. There will be no tomorrow.
Supposedly, it was to have been this unjust death, his succumbing to the powers, that would undo them. “Humility beats power.” This was to be conquest. But now, platitudes fail us. This is death, right here. It is all cut off. He is cut off. It really is finished. And with him, we are finished.
Lewis (2001: 57), who invited us to pause here on the second day to ponder the “gravity” of the situation (pun shamelessly intended), moves quickly to announce:
Yet suddenly the curtain rises and lights come up again; the brightness dazzles eyes grown accustomed to the dark, making it impossible to see and understand exactly what is happening, yet revealing enough to let us know that a new act is taking place, incredible and stunning in its contrast to all that went before.
On the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead. This was in the moment an earth-shattering, world-intruding, history-setting event. While we are told that Jesus had anticipated it with his closest followers, and that the Hebrew scriptures had anticipated it before them, they were not ready for this. Too crushing had been the fact that Jesus was very much dead.
We are used to seeing cross and resurrection, Lewis (2001: 58) suggests, as the New Testament preachers and gospel writers so naturally did, “as a linear chain of homogenous episodes” that “constitute a single drama, with continuity of character, setting, and reference.” But the companion point is true also: “within this single sequence, with its homogeneity and linearity, the combined meaning of the two episodes lies exactly in the contrast between them” (2001: 59; emphasis in original). We should consider both points.
The linear chain
Let us look first at the linear chain cross and resurrection form together. Moltmann (1990: 213) conjoins them in this way:
The cross of Christ is the cross of the Lord who was raised by God and exalted to God. It is only in this correlation that the cross acquires its special saving meaning. The raising by God was experienced by the Christ who “was crucified, dead and buried.” It is only in this interrelation that the raising acquires its special saving meaning.
The resurrection of Jesus has essential connections with the drama that thus far had led to the grave. It melds, completes, fills out, yields meaning, and vindicates. And in that respect, it is gospel, without which the previous faith remains buried in the crypt, in the grip of the enemy not yet defeated, death.
One way to portray some of the completion this achieves, might be to revisit Romans and see if we might find there another Road, one less traveled. What might we see to be the evangelical promise in announcing the resurrection. (I know, proof texting has its dangers. And cherry picking which texts—even if within a single document—is an especially dicey proposition. But let me counter the traditional “Romans Road” 9 for a moment, and share the themes and connections within which Paul places the importance of the resurrection of Jesus in his letter to the Romans.)
The Romans Road, revisited! (“Resurrected”)
Romans 1.3–4: “. . .the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
10
Some of those in Jerusalem on that second day remembered that following Jesus’ baptism “a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’” (Matt. 3:17). And once, a few saw him transfigured, with Moses and Elijah alongside, and “from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Matt. 17:5). But on the second day they wondered, can this be true? Was it ever true, if Jesus remains in the grasp of death? But God declares, no more. Death, release him! So, it is true after all! The claim is validated.
Romans 4.24–25: “[righteousness] will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”
The evangelical New Testament scholar, Knox Chamblin observes that in 1 Corinthians 15 “Paul declares that ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Cor. 15:3). Yet a little later he says: ‘If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain . . . you are still in your sins’ (1 Cor. 15:14, 17 ).” He adds:
Had [Jesus] not risen from the dead, one could only conclude that he remained under [our!] sentence of condemnation and that the wrath of God and the destructive consequences of sin had not exhausted themselves but were still at work upon him. (Chamblin, 1993: 80–81)
Jesus was raised for our justification.
“Justification” may here bear the sense of vindication. Of Jesus and his self-giving sacrifice. Of God who had allowed death and kept silent on the second day. Of all who believed that Jesus had the words of eternal life (cf. John 6:68).
Romans 6.4: “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
A new path of life has been opened up on this side of despair.
Romans 6.5: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Romans 6.9: “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.”
This is a basic and determinative clue. The transformed body in which he appears is not just the old one resuscitated, which may (will) die again. The many ambiguities in the accounts of his appearances—sometimes recognizable, sometimes not so easily; seemingly unhindered by the kind of body that locates one in time and space; bearing and showing the unrepeatable scars of his crucifixion on his hands and his side—these and more move us to another sense of the kind of body he now possesses. 11 His resurrected body is not subject to decay, to corruption, to death. He has not risen merely to delay the inevitable. His transformed body is no longer subject to death.
Romans 7.4: “In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.”
Paul says it of himself: “I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil. 3:12). [Moltmann (1990: 216) translates it, “I was seized by Christ.”] The purposeful meaning of one’s life derives from the resurrection of Jesus. This notion forms Lesslie Newbigin’s (1995: 17) characteristic way of describing himself—“I make this confession only because I have been laid hold of by Another and commissioned to do so” (emphasis added). 12
Romans 8.11: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” Life now, not only in eternity.
13
Romans 8.34: “Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” The judge and our advocate are one and the same! Romans 10.9: “because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” [And may we add a supporting word from Peter?] 1 Peter 1:3: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
The dramatic contrast
We’ve heard Lewis (2001: 57) use words like these: “incredible and stunning in its contrast to all that went before.” This is the “companion point” to the linear links between cross and resurrection, that “within this single sequence, with its homogeneity and linearity, the combined meaning of the two episodes lies exactly in the contrast between them” (emphasis in original). In Easter “we are met with an entirely new and unexpected vista, astounding in its reversal of the previous tragedy.”
At the most basic level, the crucifixion was fundamentally an action of human powers and forces imposed on Jesus. The stark difference in the resurrection is that it is a direct, intruding action of God, un-reliant on human processes of will or action. God very literally breaks in and alters the historical momentum of action and reaction. Something is afoot that seizes the reins of governance and history. 14
This initiated a shift in the language of belief about who Jesus was and what authority he possessed. So enters the language of rule and divine authority. Peter at Pentecost concluded his address to the crowds, “therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).
And there is another interesting word that enters, which is very little noted. I found it in my explorations of Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:22–31). He had noticed an altar “to an unknown God,” and proceeded to introduce that God to them as the one who created all things and gives life to all the living. This Lord of heaven and earth does not need a shrine or stone figure to live in, and in fact made all the nations and allotted the times and boundaries of their existence. This God is patient and close enough to be found, and calls on all people everywhere to repent,
because he has fixed a day on which he will have the [whole inhabited earth] judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (v. 31)
The resurrection was God’s assurance that this is the very man by whom God will judge the world! Well, then, some began to heckle and mock Paul. But some wanted to talk further with Paul, and some believed. (Evidently, this will preach!)
Recently, I discovered in my re-reading of Acts this year that Paul was not alone in recognizing Jesus’ judgeship. Acts 10 reports that at one particular moment, Peter was nudged (cajoled?) by a vision to accept an invitation to the house of a Gentile, Cornelius, a Roman Centurion (as well as a God-fearer). Cornelius had likewise had a vision, indicating that he should invite Peter. “What message do you have for us, Cornelius said.” Peter rehearsed the life and ministries of Jesus throughout the region, and then said:
they put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear . . . He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. (10:39–42)
This gospel of the Crucified and Risen Lord ushers the world into a new era, one of the ultimate fulfillment of God’s purposes for all things. God’s first act of doing death to death by raising Jesus sets in place the parousia, the return of Jesus at the final eschaton, the Day of the Lord, the day of judgment and the time of new creation and the resurrection of the dead! Bosch (1991: 515) concludes: “In the resurrection of Christ the forces of the future already stream into the present and transform it, even if everything that meets the eye appears to be unchanged.”
John Flett (2010: 253), interpreting Karl Barth, fills out the implications for the time we now inhabit:
The parousia determines the whole of human existence. It is a total event, for the reality it declares is not merely one possible future awaiting actualization, but is already actual and becoming fulfilled. It is a definite event, for God’s judgment spoken in the resurrection of Jesus Christ includes the final judgment within it, and this directs the human response. It is a universal event, for it takes an expressly missionary form. (emphasis in original)
The difference it makes for Christ
I have found Jurgen Moltmann (1993 [1977]: 56) especially helpful for understanding what is happening in this shift, and understanding Jesus in the midst of it:
The history of Christ . . . can be viewed from two sides: from its origin and from its future. If our inquiry is directed towards the past, then this history is understood in the light of the sending and mission of Christ. If we think forwards, then it is seen from the point of view of its goal. Its origin stands in the light of his messianic mission. Its future stands in the light of the resurrection from the dead. Both perspectives belong to a full understanding of the history of Christ . . . Both angles are continually related to one another.
Luke Timothy Johnson (1999: 15) plays out the ramifications of this:
Thus the resurrection is not a continuation of Jesus’ former life, but is his entry into a new mode of existence that is more powerful, more “alive,” than before. It is, indeed, Jesus’ entry into the life of God, his “enthronement at the right hand of God,” his establishment as “Lord” (see Acts 2:32–36).
Two concluding notes
The gospel as public truth
The resurrection of Jesus and its “apocalyptic” vision remind us that the gospel is public truth in the sense that it is about the public life of the world. The gospel renders the world’s meaning and its destiny. In fact, the whole of the Christian scriptures can be found to be “a quite unique interpretation of universal history and, therefore, a unique understanding of the human person as a responsible actor in history” as Lesslie Newbigin’s “learned Hindu friend” reminded him often about the Christian Bible, which the missionaries tended to misconstrue as a “another book of religion” (Newbigin, 1989: 89). A personalized, individuated salvation fails to reckon with this. The resurrection reclaimed will assure that we cannot so easily set aside this public dimension. 15
The kingdom of God is more vivid than ever
We saw earlier how Arias struggled with the scholarship that suggested Jesus’ core theme, the kingdom of God, was somehow lost in the post-resurrection focus on the identity of Jesus in terms of his exaltation: He is Lord, He is Christ, He is judge. If we move from the events of Jesus’ life and teaching to the conversation of the earliest Christians (in Acts), or canonically from the Gospels at the beginning of the New Testament to the Acts and the epistles that follow, it might appear so. But I argue another way around. First, the simple fact that whatever vision dominated the early church, it was decades into this resurrection life when the Gospels were written! So, the theme of the kingdom of God was far from submerged. We know about it because it seemed important to the post-resurrection community to remember Jesus’ life and message and record it. To that should be added that the lofty language about Jesus, post-resurrection, is itself of the sort that acknowledges his Lordship, his rule and judgment. The resurrected Jesus was the reigning monarch of this very thing: the kingdom of God. The writing of the Gospels in the midst of what now had become the fulfillment of the kingdom of God—in full force—makes of them a testament to and from resurrection people that re-iterates what Jesus had earlier said is the way things go in this kingdom. This suggests that the resurrection of Jesus is the necessary hermeneutic for reading the Gospels.
Perhaps we can allow David Bosch to send us on our way
Missiologically this means, first, that the central theme of our missionary message is that Christ is risen, and that, secondly and consequently, the church is called to live the resurrection life in the here and now and to be a sign of contradiction against the forces of death and destruction—that it is called to unmask modern idols and false absolutes. (Bosch, 1991: 515)
Footnotes
Editor’s note
This essay was presented on June 16, 2023 as the Keynote Address for the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education (AETE).
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
