What is the gospel according to Jesus? The answer we give to this question has vast consequence. It will significantly shape our understanding of evangelization, mission, community, and worship.

Contemporary Gospel Presentations

Following are a few examples of popular contemporary attempts to communicate the gospel:

The Four Spiritual Laws. This presentation consists of four simple statements: (1) God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. Man is sinful and separated from God. (2) Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life. (3) Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s plan for your life. (4) We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.[1]

The Roman’s Road. This presentation involves stringing together a series of texts from Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The following passages are usually cited: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23); “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23);  “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); therefore, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

Evangelism Explosion. This presentation hinges on two questions placed before the prospective convert: “Do you know for sure that you are going to be with God in heaven. If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My heaven?’ what would you say?” These two questions are followed by a presentation that loosely follows the four spiritual laws with an emphasis on the insufficiency of human works to achieve salvation.[2]

All of these contemporary gospel presentations are true. All of them bring up significant issues. And yet, none of these presentations are the gospel according to Jesus!

The Gospel According to Jesus

Jesus’ gospel was clear: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15; cf. Matt. 4:17, 23).[3] By stating that “the time is fulfilled” Jesus announced that the critical and climactic moment in God’s redemptive plan had finally arrived. With this one phrase Jesus connected what was about to happen with all of Israel’s rich history, and by extension – since Yahweh was the one true God over the entire world – to all world history. God’s kingdom was “at hand” both temporary and spatially. Temporally, it had arrived in the coming of Jesus. Spatially, it was present in the person of Jesus – “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs and wonders to be observed… for the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21)[4] Now was the time for Israel’s God to act in establishing his kingdom. The only appropriate response to God’s impending action was to act accordingly by “repenting and believing the gospel.”

Contemporary Gospel Presentations vs. The Gospel According to Jesus

When we contrast Jesus’ gospel with the contemporary presentations, we note significant differences between them.

The contemporary gospels are personal and individualistic. The gospel according to Jesus is universal, historic, communal, and global. The scope of Jesus’ gospel is not simply reduced to an individual and his or her relationship with God; the scope is an event in history that has global – even universal! – significance. The gospel does not begin with “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” The gospel begins with “God loves the world.” It is because God loves the entire world that we have the confidence to believe that God loves individuals within the world.

The contemporary gospels are narcissistic. They appeal to an individual’s self-interests. They invite an individual to weigh the risks and benefits of salvation. The gospel according to Jesus calls an individual to self-denial for the sake of the world. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). The appeal is not to individual self-interests, but to God’s interests, and consequently, the world’s interests. The invitation is to not weigh individual risks and benefits but to make the only appropriate response to the invading reality known as God’s kingdom.

The contemporary gospels are rational. They emphasize believing certain propositions. The gospel according to Jesus is holistic. It calls us to indwell God’s story and share God’s mission. The invitation is not simply to believe a few facts, but to follow the living and reigning Savior in the power of his Spirit for the glory of God and the sake of the world. This will involve every fiber of our being – will, affections, intellect, imagination, intuition, etc. It will extend far beyond mere intellectual assent to a few religious facts.

The contemporary gospels are future-oriented. They are primarily concerned with guaranteeing that the prospective convert makes it to heaven and escapes hell. The gospel according to Jesus is oriented in the present. The kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus proclaims an immanent invading reality. His message is not about the far-flung future. His message is about heaven invading earth in the present. He calls his hearers to respond appropriately to this present reality. A misguided emphasis on the future is especially evident in Evangelism Explosion’s gospel presentation. The entire presentation is geared toward giving prospective converts assurance that they will go to heaven, rather than hell, when they die.

The contemporary gospels marginalize the church. It is assumed that the church has no place for the prospective convert before conversion. After the “convert” receives Jesus, they are sometimes (but not always) encouraged to find a church. They are told that the church exists to feed, support, and maintain their own individual relationship with Jesus. Participation in the church is a support to their personal and individual faith, but little more. The gospel according to Jesus is explicitly ecclesiastical. Jesus calls his followers to share his mission in community. He made it clear that his mission was to build a body of people who shared his mission: “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18).

Finally, the contemporary gospels are non-missional. The call they give is not to share God’s mission but to possess personal salvation. The gospel according to Jesus is a call to share God’s missionary heart – to witness in community of God’s good, gracious, global, and peaceful kingdom.

Four Reasons the Gospel has been Reduced

At this point, it should be obvious that the contemporary gospels are not the gospel according to Jesus. This does not mean that they are untrue. It simply means that they are reductionistic. By beginning at the wrong place – with particular individuals rather than with God’s universal reign – they misdirect us from the beginning. And it is hard to correct our course without going back to the beginning and starting anew!

There are at least four reasons for this reduction:

Kingdom language is foreign language to American ears. We are at ease with representative democratic rule. We are familiar with government by the people and for the people. We are not accustomed to monarchy. Following the will, purpose, and plan of a sovereign king does not sit well with Americans. Simply from a linguistic perspective, the language of kingdom suffers a disadvantage. Perhaps this could be corrected if we referred to God’s “kingdom” as God’s “revolution” instead. If we removed any violent or rebellious overtones from the word, it could suitably convey Jesus’ message in our contemporary society.

Secondly, the contemporary gospels are much more suitable to our culture than Jesus’ gospel. The contemporary gospels support the status quo in America; they emphasize all of the things our culture values – rugged individualism, narcissism, nominalism, rationalism, and anti-institutionalism. These “-isms” find little support in Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom, although they are completely compatible with the contemporary gospels.

The ease with which we embrace the contemporary gospels exposes the deeply-rooted cultural captivity of the gospel. We are often unaware of how much our culture shapes our gospel message. When the gospel is first proclaimed in a culture, it challenges the status quo. However, once the gospel is accepted within a culture it quickly becomes domesticated. It supports the status quo. That is what the contemporary presentations do. What we need is a fresh telling of the gospel that challenges cultural assumptions. We make a good start in this direction when we begin to see these assumptions for the intruders that they are.[5]

Thirdly, we value reason over story and the scientific method over personal witness. We are more comfortable with propositional statements that can be completely understood, and thus, in a sense, controlled. We are not comfortable with truth as story or entrusting ourselves and our well-being to the testimony of others. We prefer universal, absolute statements of truth, not the particular, relative witness of people. But God does not give us absolute universal statements. God gives us Jesus, his Spirit, and a community – the church. God gives us a story and eyewitnesses. Though we are often reluctant to admit it, we believe what we believe because of the testimony of others. Jesus did not leave a book; he left witnesses in community – a church. And he called this community to treasure, tell, and indwell this witness to the entire world!

Finally, the postmodern rejection of metanarratives (an overarching story that provides the context for all underlying stories) makes us wary of actually proclaiming the primacy of one metanarrative. Postmoderns reject metanarratives because of their capacity for abuse. A metanarrative can be used to abuse and oppress those who do not share or agree with it.[6] And yet, the gospel is unmistakably a metanarrative. It proclaims the universal reign of Jesus Christ. Perhaps, the postmodern suspicion could be tempered if we emphasized that the kingdom of Jesus is a kingdom unlike any other kingdom. It is peaceful (not violent), global (not nationalistic), and gracious (not moralistic). Unfortunately, it will be increasingly difficult to convince people of this as long as the church willfully applauds violence as a means to peace, national interests over global interests, and morality over dialogue, understanding, and love.

Conclusion

The contemporary gospels allow us to retain without critical examination many negative elements. We can embrace Jesus as our “personal Lord and Savior” and continue to embrace rugged individualism, narcissism, rationalism, and anti-institutionalism. We can speak of how much God loves us personally while forgetting that God loves the whole world passionately. We can pursue pious private devotions and forget devotion to God’s corporate mission in and through God’s church. We can justify violence, nationalism, and moralism without realizing that these are the very things Jesus’ kingdom rejected – and the very things that got him killed!

We desperately need to embrace afresh the gospel according to Jesus. We must allow it to challenge the status quo and free us from cultural captivity. God’s kingdom will always challenge our kingdoms – both personal and corporate.

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005