In Why Christianity Must Change Or Die, Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong argued that the Christian faith needs to develop a contemporary understanding of the world, morality, and God in order to be seen as “relevant” to today’s secular culture. Spong’s idea is not new. The church has always had problems with what’s called being “syncretized” with “host” cultures—that is, of losing its own identity while trying to share the “good news” of the Christian Gospel with a culture that doesn’t care much about it.
In a series of articles, Pastor Mike Gunn is examining what the nature of the Gospel really is and how it collides with our Hollywood-dominated pop culture.
In Part I, Mike looked at the notion that the guardians of the Gospel—the “Good News”—have corrupted its message by (very naturally) getting too caught up in Western thinking. This month, he takes a look at the good news no one seems to give a good rip about.
So we’ve been told that God is willing to take the dirty rotten and lost, and make them whole and new through an unmistakable, irresistible call toward Him. If this is really good news, there’s got to be a catch, right? Judging by the way the message is often pitched, I’d have to agree.
We begin our search for the Gospel—God’s good news—by deconstructing the idols that we have worshiped for years. Our number one idol is the idol of the self. I am not speaking of a purely Buddhist notion of anatta, which attempts to obliterate the self through denial, but of the Western idea of the seat of knowledge: the purely “rational” self. Do we know things purely through reason, or do we know things because they are revealed to us?
We’re not going to get far into the Good News without the presupposition that knowledge is revealed by one who reveals (i.e., God), and that without this revelation, we could not know anything about God or ultimate reality. It would be akin to trying to determine the purpose of a car engine without procuring any information about the car or its intended use from its creator. We could gain knowledge about it through observation, sure; but its true purpose would be based on a biased guess. Lesslie Newbigin writes,
The person who has this knowledge (knowledge gained through scientific reason) would know precisely nothing, since the knowledge of the atomic particles of which a thing is composed is not knowledge of the thing. The deceptive power of the formula is that it suppresses what Polanyi calls the “tacit dimension” of knowledge without which knowing is an impossible undertaking. (Foolishness to the Greeks, 65)
So believing that God has good news for us starts with accepting that all “knowing” begins in revelation. We can know God and his purposes because He has revealed Himself to us. The Bible tells us that God reveals Himself to us through nature (Psalms 19:1); through our conscience (Romans 2:15); through His prophets (Hebrews 1:1); through Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19,20); through dreams and visions (Job 33:14-16); through the Holy Spirit (John 16:13-15); and finally in His Son Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-3). And connected to the idea that God reveals Himself to us is that we further our knowledge of Him through a life of faith (Romans
These are the presuppositions Christians work within. They are a priori commitments, and are the foundation of the Christian worldview. And these commitments are in direct tension with competing views that only reason and/or experience can validate truth.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Excellent, Mike. How about this?: The Gospel is not relevant because we make it relevant to people, but because it IS relevant. Also, the Good News is not good just because it is right (correct), but because it is good.
You say, “It’s not the Good News no one cares about anymore. It’s the messengers.” Unfortunately, much of this is because many of the messengers have either stopped caring about people, or have no real message for them. One element of Christianity has “a form of godliness while denying the power of it” (2 Timothy 3:5 NKJV), while the other extreme claims the power while forsaking the “pure religion” that helps the orphans and widows (James 1:27).