A Gospel of Grace Has Never Been a New Thing

via st-takla.org

So, it turns out legalism wasn’t really the it thing in first century Judaism.  As a result, it seems that Luther’s basis for declaring Judaism a works-based religion has been displaced.  The question still remains, What does that have to do with us in the 21st century?

It has been in vogue among evangelicals to tout Christianity as unique (and therefore superior) among religions because it is fundamentally grace-based.  “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast” (Eph 2:8-9, NASB).  We shout it from the rooftops: Our salvation is a gift from God; we could have done nothing so good as to deserve it!  And rightfully so.

Those wanting to communicate the essence of Christianity often begin right here.  We endeavor to convince those outside the fold that they can never be good enough to warrant entrance into the family of God.  The chasm is too wide, the path too narrow, the way too steep.  I’ve got a brief little volume from the pastor of America’s largest church on my desk meant for those curious about the faith: Andy Stanley’s How Good Is Good Enough?  Our evangelistic messages often begin right here.

That’s been our method.  Convince folks they’ll never be good enough to get in, then share the good news that God has done the work for them through Christ.  Why?  Because it’s all about grace, and no other religion can hold a candle to grace.

Except that now we’re learning that Judaism has, all along, been about grace.  The Israelites were no dummies.  (At least, no dumber than we are.)  They knew that God was holy and that they, well, weren’t.  For us Christians, Paul’s words elicit deep gratitude: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).  The ancient Hebrews could very well have recited a similar refrain, mutatis mutandis: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, He delivered us from Egypt.”

Can we continue to say that Christianity is (and has been) the only grace-based religion in the world?  I suppose not.  The advent of Christ was not about the Creator introducing a grace-based method of salvation over against His earlier legalistic system.  It was about fulfilling earlier stages of the same gracious covenant He held with His people.  It was about establishing a means by which God could pour His Spirit upon all flesh, Jew and Gentile.

The Gospel certainly was a new thing that God was doing, but it was a new thing inasmuch as it was the fulfillment of what the Lord had already been up to for centuries.  The Gospel was new in that it began a bright new chapter in an already epic book.

EP Sanders and the Truth about Jewish Legalism

I’ve only just recently (some might say finally) picked up EP Sanders’s monumental Paul and Palestinian Judaism.  For those that don’t know, Sanders’s 1977 study was an attempt to take a careful look at extra-biblical Judaic literature around the turn of the ages.  The goal was to begin to sketch out the cultural landscape of Judaism in first century Palestine and then review Paul in light of that material.

One does not get far into the book before realizing that some major mountains of our traditional understanding of Christianity are being moved.

For example, among the hallmarks of Western Christianity’s understanding of first century Judaism has been its rampant legalism.  In fact, I recall learning at some point in Sunday school that a Pharisee’s raison d’etre was to get the people of Israel to follow the law with such precision that God had no choice but to honor their good deeds.  (I doubt we were using the phrase raison d’etre in middle school, but memory is a funny thing.)

Yet rather early in Sanders’s study we find these foundational statements regarding the nature of at least one brand of Judaism from the ancient world.

Keeping the commandments is Israel’s response to the God who has chosen them, who has made a covenant with them, and who dwells with them – even when they are not perfectly obedient. … The only reason for elaborating and defining man’s obligations under the covenant is that God’s faithfulness and justice in keeping his side are beyond question (82, emphasis mine).

Judaism, at its core, has always been about the grace of God towards the people of Israel.  They have been chosen and saved for no particular reason other than the fact that the Creator elected them to be his vessel through which to save all of creation.  The law that comes from that, and later the interpretations of the law in later Judaism, is the appropriate grateful response to God’s first act of provision.  This is not a religion of legalism, but of grace.

This belief about first century Judaism’s legalism (and, subsequently, the claims of both Jesus and Paul) has been rooted in Luther’s reading of the New Testament in light of 16th century Catholic indulgences.  Although Luther’s reactions to the Catholic church in his own day were altogether appropriate and rightly corrective, the crisis of his times colored his interpretation of Paul and the Judaism from which Paul emerged.

Luther saw people throughout Europe literally buying their way to heaven and railed against it.  He then read Paul’s justification-by-grace-through-faith-and-not-by-works as meaning that Paul was fighting essentially the same problem 1500 years earlier.

While it turns out that may not have been the case – that Paul was actually fighting some other battle – few Christian scholars in the last 500 years have been able to mount much of a challenge to Luther’s interpretations.  So we’ve largely inherited this notion that the Gospel is really a battle against an inherent and sinful legalism residing in every human being.  And it’s the grace of God, only exhibited in Jesus’ death on the cross, that really gets us where we’ve been trying so hard to go.

OK, so this has largely been an information dump as background to where I really want to go with this.  Tomorrow I want to ask the question as to what this may actually mean for our presentations of the Gospel.  Stay tuned.

The New Old Gospel

Lord of the Rings: Top 10 among travel movies.

If you weren’t already aware, there’s a movement afoot in contemporary Christianity. I personally cannot attest to its reach, whether it extends beyond the West, but you can be sure that it is making serious headway here among us. Further, the impact of this movement is and will continue to dramatically alter the face of Western Christianity. I doubt the change will be as “violent” as the Reformation of Luther and Calvin, but its impact will be as deep.

I am speaking of a new way of understanding the gospel, which, like all good things, is nothing new at all.

Luther’s understanding of the gospel as a message of atonement – that Christ died to save me from my sins so that I might enter heaven upon my death – is being overcome.  Christians everywhere are beginning to understand that as important as this doctrine is, it is the tiniest piece of what Jesus was doing, what the apostles understood him to be doing, and what the early church believed had happened.

Instead, we are beginning to realize that the Gospels – and really the entire New Testament – are about the Kingdom of God (that is, God’s jurisdiction, His rule, where what He wants is done) becoming reality in and through the person of Jesus.  The gospel is God regaining His throne over creation.

It is like summarizing The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a series of travel movies.  Well, sure, Frodo and the gang do a lot of traveling, but the purpose is much, much greater.  It’s all about the destruction of that ring and the rescue of Middle Earth from falling under a great shadow.

Anyway, we’re rediscovering the gospel, and it’s going to change everything.

The King Jesus Gospel: How Did Salvation Take over the Gospel?

Since in chapter 4, McKnight examined Paul’s concept of the gospel, he presents a question here in chapter 5. How did we get to a Christian culture that now promotes salvation over the fuller biblical expression of the gospel?

This chapter is altogether too brief, as McKnight uses just 15 pages to explore two millennia of credal developments in the West. Nevertheless, it is helpful to see what he’s done in touching down on the historical places he does.

Firstly, McKnight contends that the early councils of the first few centuries basically got it right. Both Nicea and Chalcedon were on target as they sought to articulate the gospel. He writes, “careful attention … has now convinced me that ‘creed’ and ‘gospel’ are intimately connected, so intimately one can say the creed is the gospel” (63, emphasis mine).

Doctor McKnight goes on to trace the early progression from the 1 Corinthians 15 gospel statement to the early Rule of Faith (very early, very brief credal statements) to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Using a transitive property of sorts, he concludes that “the Nicene Creed is preeminently a gospel statement” (64). This is flawed thinking, unfortunately. It is the same logic, applied in reverse, that McKnight had used to bemoan our own “salvation culture,” that just because a salvation message flowed from the gospel does not mean that they are equivalent.

At any rate, McKnight proceeds to move from these well-framed early creeds to the Reformation statements that, he believes, began to shift the focus towards salvation and away from the holistic gospel story. Both the Lutheran and Calvinist approaches to the gospel, as laid out in the Augsburg and Genevan Confessions, moved towards statements about the salvific power of Christ at the diminution of Christ’s role as the culmination of Israel’s story.

Leap, then, 500 years to today’s evangelical approach, which is essentially existentialist, and you’ve got a culture that values the individual experience of salvation above all else. The quintessential characterization of this culture comes from none other than John Wesley, whose strangely warmed heart is the measuring stick. The result, according to McKnight, is that “for this culture, it is the ability to witness personally to the experience of conversion that matters most. Once one has had this experience, it’s all over … until the final party arrives” (74).

There are, to be blunt, huge leaps made in McKnight’s historical analysis here, and it is intriguing the way in which he highlights the creeds positively, where Wright had identified their current usage as part of the problem (more on that another day). But it is important to focus on the larger point that McKnight is making, that today’s Western Christianity largely discards the actual historical element in the gospel in favor of a de-historicized propositional salvation message and somewhat mystical experience. Of course, we must not discount an individual’s or community’s experience of the living Christ, nor can we say there are no propositions present in the basic gospel message. Nevertheless, McKnight wants us to be focusing elsewhere, on an element that has been buried for some time – the robust story of which the gospel is the culmination.