We pick out constellations in the stars and name them. But astronomy tells us those shapes represent no actual relations. The stars of Orion's belt are separated by light years of empty space. And a September moon to us is far bigger and brighter than the Andromeda galaxy behind it.
When we decide to look beyond the constellations of the way we define the gospel and begin trying to see it as it is in the universe of scripture, the change is no less drastic. I expect we will end up knowing far more than we did. But the gospel we started with may look far, far different in the end. That is what is happening to me.[1]
These were my astronomers. I took a course in the minor prophets from Walter Kaiser and was changed by the encounter. I studied Galatians under T. David Gordon. Gordon was the first professor I ever met who embraced the New Perspective on Paul. Greg Beale introduced me to the profound and intimate relationship between the New Testament and the Old. N. T. Wright helped those seeds grow, as did Michael Heiser and Carmen Imes. And Juergen Moltmann and Johannes Metz made me see that eschatology is fundamentally political and the gospel is fundamentally political theology. The gospel is a political theology if nothing else. And if it is not political theology, it is not the gospel. Political theology is thinking about scripture that begins, is shaped by, and is applied to communities of purpose. I specify purpose because these communities are working together to achieve real ends, and this means that there is a need for theology, there is a need for the gospel. Perhaps it is impossible to have a community without some sort of purpose. (I do not call crowds communities, but mobs rudely are.)
It is not American Individualism
I used to understand the gospel as an appeal to the individual to "Save yourself from this corrupt generation" (Acts 2:40 NRSV). You confessed, believed, and were baptized. You got saved and belonged thereafter to God. This is not untrue, but it is uncontextual.
When a collection of beliefs is lifted out of actual human ways of being, they cannot be lived or practiced but only assented to. Such a cerebral anthropology has little of incarnational, communal Christianity in it.~ C. Humphry
It is not Classic Liberalism
Theologian Roger Olson defines classic liberal theology as "theology centered around symbolic realism-—Christianity mostly cut off from history except for transforming symbols such as the cross and resurrection and Parousia. . . Christianity is largely reduced to spiritual formation and social transformation."[2]
Note this bit from a recent piece about conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson in the New Statesman, "Peterson said to me that religion is a feeling or experience rather than a statement about the existence of God. Religion manifests in the deep sense of awe and the infinite one might experience when reading literature or gazing upon a sunset, he said. He thought that technically there was no difference between great literature and religious experience. If religion is about deep biological experience, couldn’t you say that sex is religious, too? 'It should be, but it depends on how well it’s done,' he said."[3]
So What is It?
The gospel is necessarily political faith, hope, and love
Amos 5
Part of the original Christian message was a radical revaluation of Israel’s legal and prophetic tradition and a thoroughgoing denunciation of the power of Rome and all other empires. Flat things exist on two dimensions. And I, too, am learning to think differently in two ways. One is to fix New Testament language about salvation deeply into its Old Testament context. The other is to understand it in its ecclesial setting and not through the lense of American individualism. I started with a pseudo-Reformational framework sucked through the straw of a me-and-Jesus vertical whose horizontal was only transactional: save the lost. This cannot be correct. The New Testament does not alter so greatly that one cannot talk about an Old Testament church. If anything, the social ethics central to Old Testament piety are not erased by the New but highlighted with eschatological fire.
It is necessary to understand New Testament things within their Old Testament wineskins. So, for example, baptism is circumcision. Missions is the regathering of the lost ten tribes back to the mountain of God. Good works is Torah keeping. Christians are renewed priests in Jesus's living temple. What is salvation, then? Is it an ethical change, like repentance; a change of direction toward the right way? Is it an ontological change from one kind of being into another kind of being? Or is it a covenant marker: one goes from being a pagan outside of the covenant community to which God has made promises to being a member in that community. That community has always been there. Its covenant markers have simply enlarged to include Gentiles. The promise to this community is the eternal, living Spirit. The fire of Sinai only descended on the mountain and on Moses. At Pentecost, each believer became a little Sinai upon whom the glory came to rest. The fire burned inside the living tree of the people of God, and they did not burn up.
The gospel is necessarily good news for matter and our bodies
In an October 27, 2020, podcast of "OnScript," Dr. Esau McCaulley, being interviewed about his book Reading While Black (IVP Academic, 2020), concluded his interview with a discussion about the misshapen priorities which govern the fields of New Testament and Pauline Studies. The emphases of the Protestant Reformation dictate what is considered of primary importance in these fields. This means that a brilliant book on, say, Paul's pneumatology will not be considered a brilliant book on Paul in the same way that a book on grace will, such as John Barclay's Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans 2015). Similarly, the best book on Hebrews ever written will not be called the best New Testament book. The academy privileges certain topics and downplays others. Works on community, eschatology, the Trinity, etc. just cannot be valued in the same way by the academy as, say, a work on Galatians.[4] McCaulley continues:
"Here's a question, Biblical scholars: How do we never talk about policing in our scholarship, when black people have been talking about policing for a hundred fifty years! Why don't we talk about it? What I'm saying is that we have to do better in the things that we center. And there's a reason why this is all masculine, right? It is all masculine in the sense that when you look at the kinds of things that our female scholars--and I'm not saying that female scholars do not write about grace--but look at their interests and look at the things that they write about, and do we consider those things worthy in their own right? . . . [Interviewer Dru Johnson: "You can argue infinitely about it in etheral space, and it never has to get grounded in a body. You can talk about how it comes down to a body--"] See. And this is the question . . . we are talking about New Testament scholarship more broadly. It is a manifestation of privilege to argue for over two hundred years about how we should think about something and not, while at the same time, ignoring so many issues in the Biblical text that touches on the lived experience of oppressed peoples. . . . [Is justification] the only thing?"[5]
The gospel is necessarily good news for the bodies of others, individually and corporately, human and otherwise.
I think of Howard Thurman's poem, "The Work of Christmas"--
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
Or consider the Christology of John Keble's hymn "Blessed Are the Pure in Heart"
The Lord, who left the sky
our life and peace to bring
to dwell in lowliness with us,
our pattern and our king.
The gospel will simultaneously and necessarily include the horizontal and the vertical
The gospel is how Jesus is
More later
1. To see the extent of this change, let me copy here a note I made a few months ago in response to a question from one of my kids: "What is God doing now?" I told them, "God is holding the cosmos in being and directing it toward his desired purpose: to bring all things under the rule of Jesus. Therefore, having installed Jesus on the everlasting throne of David, the Father has sent the Spirit who, through the church, his priestly nation, is regathering the ten lost tribes from the nations (which is the mission work of the New Testament.) This regathering will reach its climax in the return of Jesus. Meanwhile, the preaching of the church is putting the Principalities and Powers on notice that their pagan tyranny is over. And the reborn people of the church are displaying the image of God to all creation. The Spirit sanctifies the church and gifts it for participation in the regathering and for displaying to all who God is. The church prays by the Spirit for God to hallow his name, bring in his kingdom, and enact his will in its worldwide situation, and it cooperates with him by grace in the doing of it.
[2] Roger Olson, "What is 'Progressive Christianity" https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2021/11/what-is-progressive-christianity/ accessed 11/19/2021.
[3] Freddie Hayward, "Why do students still want Jordan Peterson to tell them how to live?" The New Statesman. UK ed. 1 December 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2021/12/why-do-students-still-want-jordan-peterson-to-tell-them-how-to-live accessed 12/3/2021.
[4] This is Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic framework from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions applied in the humanities. Just as science operates within sets of beliefs called paradigms which are passively enforced by a system of social and financial rewards and punishments. Scientific research, then, is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (UCP. 1962, 5).)
[5] OnScript podcast "Esau McCaulley -- Reading While Black" aired October 27, 2020. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://onscript.study/podcast/esau-mccaulley-reading-while-black/.
