For and Against What

What is a Christian? Scot McKnight used to answer this question incorrectly.  In his book One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), he used to say: “A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus; and the Christian life is the development of personal (private) practices of piety, separation from sin and the world, and a life dedicated to rescuing sinners from hell” (p. 13). This answer is driven by what he calls the plan of salvation. This is what Christians believe; this is the way we live out the “gospel.” Very unfortunate, of course.

The danger of limiting the gospel of Jesus to accepting Jesus, practicing personal spirituality (e.g. bible reading, prayer, etc…), and waiting to get into heaven is as follows: “Every time the single-moment act of accepting Christ becomes the goal instead of the portal, we get superficial Christians. And every time personal practices of piety wiggle away from the big picture Jesus sketches before his followers, it becomes legalism” (p. 14).

As a result, we are either superficial or become a bunch of legalists.

What is a Christian?

His new answer:

“A Christian is someone who follows Jesus” (p. 15).

It sounds simple. But when I ponder upon it, it sounds radical. What if I follow the teachings of Jesus in the four Gospels? If the gospel that I believe is much more than the plan of salvation, if the gospel is the story of Jesus as the completion of the story of Israel, if…if…if…then I am called to follow Jesus and do what Jesus did and taught. The four Gospels always put the emphasis on “following Jesus,” not just “believing in Jesus.” Following entails trusting; trusting may not involve following. How many professing Christians are there in the church? I used to say that Jesus calls us to be disciples, not believers. We are called to follow him, not to believe him. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19). Jesus calls. We believe. But do we follow? 

I really like what Scot McKnight writes about what it means to follow Jesus and live a Justice.Life:

Jesus was a Galilean prophet. The top two lines on every prophet’s job description look like this:

Speak openly and clearly about what God is for.

Speak openly and clearly about what God is against.

The third and fourth lines look like this:

I [God] am with you.

Have courage.

Often you can learn what a person is for by listening to what they are against. I’ll give you what Jesus was against, and you can infer what he was for:

Jesus spoke against authorities who ignored oppression.

He spoke against the tax collectors who ripped people off.

He spoke against his disciples when they ignored the children.

Once you determine what Jesus was against in these lines, you can determine two things: what he was for and why Jesus came to earth. There’s nothing wobbly about Jesus when it comes to what he was for and why he came—he’s for proper uses of power, for justice, for the value of everyone. He knew God was with him, and he had courage (p. 59).

Openly and clearly we know what Jesus was for and against in the Gospels. As Jesus’ followers, what are we for and against? One of the great sins that we commit and do not repent is that we are silent (or we are indifferent to a lot of things) and no one knows what we are for and against.

You can tell people that you are a Christian. But if you don’t know where you stand or you are afraid of speaking openly and clearly about what you are for and against, who cares?

You are saved, but you are definitely not following.

Peterson's Dog

In my last blog A Gospel Culture, according to Scot McKnight, one of the ways to create a gospel culture in our salvation culture is to immerse ourselves into the Story of Jesus as much as we can. Over the years, an imagery has always been stuck in my mind whenever I lost the interest of reading, studying, and meditating on the Scriptures. This imagery comes from Eugene Peterson.

In Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), Eugene Peterson writes:

I always took delight in my dog’s delight, his playful seriousness, his childlike spontaneities now totally absorbed in “the one thing needful.” But imagine my further delight in coming upon a phrase one day while reading Isaiah in which I found the poet-prophet observing something similar to what I enjoyed so much in my dog, except that his animal was a lion instead of a dog: “As a lion or a young lion growls over his prey…” (Isa. 31:4). “Growls” is the word that caught my attention and brought me that little “pop” of delight. What my dog did over his precious bone, making those low throaty rumbles of pleasures as he gnawed, enjoyed, and savored his prize, Isaiah’s lion did to his prey. The nugget of my delight was noticing the Hebrew word here translated as “growl” (hagah) but usually translated as “mediate,” as in the Psalm 1 phrase describing the blessed man or woman whose “delight is in the law of the Lord,” on which “he meditates day and night” (v. 2)…But Isaiah uses this word to refer to a lion growling over his prey the way my dog worried a bone.

Hagah is a word that our Hebrew ancestors used frequently for reading the kind of writing that deals with our souls.

When Isaiah’s lion and my dog meditated they chewed and swallowed, using teeth and tongue, stomach and intestines: Isaiah’s lion meditating his goat (if that’s what it was); my dog meditating his bone. There is a certain kind of writing that invites this kind of reading, soft purrs and low growls as we taste and savor, anticipating and take in the sweet and spicy, mouth-watering and soul-energizing morsel words—“O taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 34:8). (p. 2)

The way we read the Bible should be the way Peterson’s dog plays with the bone. The dog licks it, plays with it, turns it over, and licks it again. Then, the dog moves it to another place and does it all over again.

The dog does it only because he loves the bone.

This is how we immerse ourselves into the Scriptures.

A Gospel Culture

In The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), Scot McKnight argues that the church has been dominated by the salvation culture in which the gospel is understood only in relation to Jesus’ saving purpose for humanity and its consumer-oriented outcome—going to heaven after death. The church should be very aware of this salvation culture because such a culture tends to reduce God’s salvation in Christ to personal forgiveness. It is what Dallas Willard calls the gospel of sin management [see Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), chapter 2].

The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than the gospel of sin management. The gospel is not just about Jesus as our personal Savior.  But most importantly, Jesus is the Lord of all and the promised Messiah for Israel. When we are called to follow Jesus, not only are we called to believe Him as the Savior, but also to center our lives on the lordship of Jesus. When we know that the gospel of Jesus is the completion of the story of Israel, we don’t privatize our faith as if there were nothing else between me and Jesus.

Scot McKnight writes:

But we would be mistaken to reduce these themes to nothing more than individualism. Peter’s summary in Acts 5:29-32 sees forgiveness for “Israel.” God is at work in his people and therefore in individuals, and we need to see that one of the problems is the people of God who need to become the true people of God. The New Testament expresses this new people of God in the word church (p. 136).

We enter into the story of Jesus by gracious invitation. We are also part of Israel’s story. We are part of something that is bigger than our personal stories. We are part of God’s saving story in which we represent God as kingly priests just as Israel functions as a kingdom of priests in the Old Testament. To know that we belong to this marco-Story helps us place our micro-stories into perspective. In other words, it helps us place the plan of salvation in the story of Jesus, which is the telos of Israel’s story.

Scot McKnight suggests that in order to fight against the salvation culture in the church, we must guard against it by creating a gospel culture. Two of his suggestions are that we need to become people of the story and immerse ourselves even more into the story of Jesus. “To become a gospel culture we’ve got to begin with becoming people of the Book, but not just as a Book but as the story that shapes us…We need to soak ourselves in the Story of Jesus by reading, pondering, digesting, and mulling over in our heads and hearts…” (p. 153).

Evangelism, what is it? To “evangelize” or to “gospel” is to tell the Story of Jesus as a saving story that completes Israel’s Story. What is the best way to evangelize today? (p. 112)

This kind of evangelism does not just lead to decision, but discipleship. But the prerequisite is that we must constantly immerse ourselves into the Story.  

The Decided vs. The Discipled

I am reading Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011). In the book, McKnight attempts to show that the gospel of Jesus has been watered down in the church by the plan of salvation: Jesus merely comes to die for our sins and bring us to heaven. The plan of salvation gets people to make a decision. However, it usually fails to present the whole gospel. “Our focus on getting young people to make decisions—that is, ‘accepting Jesus into our hearts’—appears to distort spiritual formation” (p. 20). In other words, as McKnight comments,

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples…Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and—yes, the word is appropriate—aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at disciples slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles (p. 18).

I wholeheartedly agree with his observation and critique.

The “the gospel” we have been sharing is not the full gospel of Jesus according to the Bible. To use N. T. Wright’s words, “I am perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say ‘the gospel.’ I just don’t think it is what Paul means. In other words, I am not denying that the usual meanings are things that people ought to say, to preach about, to believe. I simply wouldn’t use the word ‘gospel’ to denote those things.” (Quoted by McKnight, p. 58).

I agree with McKnight that we should define the gospel by first referring to 1 Corinthians 15.

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain (vv. 1-2).

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (vv. 3-5).

The earliest gospel is concerned about the four things/events in the life of Jesus Christ: Christ died, Christ was buried, Christ was raised, and Christ appeared. And the story of Jesus is not separated from the story of Israel, for the phrase according to the Scriptures indicates that the story of Jesus is the resolution of the problem of Israel’s story and the fulfillment of the story of Israel. To share the gospel is to share the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of the story of Israel.

The word gospel was used in the world of Jews at the time of the apostles to announce something, to declare something as good news—the word euangelion always means good news. “To gospel” is to herald, to proclaim, and to declare something about something. To put this together, the gospel is to announce good news about key events in the life of Jesus Christ. To gospel for Paul was to tell, announce, declare, and shout aloud the Story of Jesus Christ as the saving news of God (pp. 49-50).

One of the problems of the plan of salvation—Jesus dies on the cross, saves us from our sins, and leads us into heaven—is that it diminishes the story of Jesus as the apex of God’s saving story from creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. “Equating the Plan of Salvation with either the Story of Israel or the Story of Jesus distorts the gospel and at times even ruins the Story. It is customary in America to refer to the ‘gospel plan of salvation,’ by which we mean how an individual gets saved, what God has done for us, and how we are to respond if we want to get saved” (pp. 37-38). The plan of salvation is not the whole gospel story. It is only part of the saving story.

In regard with the woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of costly ointment before the passion of Jesus as a prophetical act for his burial, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). Scot McKnight writes:

Why? Because Jesus assumes the preaching of the gospel will mean telling stories about the life of Jesus, including this very story of the woman who had just poured oil on him. I have had Christian students tell me that they know the gospel well but have never heard this story, and whatever you think of their reading habits, what this “never-heard-of-it” says is that gospel and four Gospels are not connected tightly enough. We do know that in the earliest churches the leaders publicly read from the gospel weekly, something we need to revive once again in our churches. It was this constant immersion in the Gospel[s] that created the potential for a gospel culture (p. 91).

Mark 14:9 makes sense in my head the first time in the context of understanding the Gospel as the story of Jesus instead of the plan of salvation.

Their Own Interests

In Paul’s ministry, he has different companions working along with him in the work of the gospel. He calls Epaphroditus as “my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier” (Phil. 2:25). In this short-term mission trip, Paul and Epaphroditus become gospel-partners. Their relationship reflects the beauty of the gospel as well as the essence of the church: unity, friendship, love, and sacrifice. In Philippians 2:19-24, Paul mentions another person in his life journey—Timothy. “But you know Timothy’s proven worth, how as a son with a father he has served with me in the gospel” (v. 22). This is a father-son relationship. It is more intimate than a co-worker relationship. This is a life-long partnership in the gospel. Paul has Timothy to serve with him in the gospel; Timothy has Paul to guide him into the complexity of ministry as a father. We see that there is no hierarchy in the relationship. Rather, this relationship is sustained by friendship, mutuality, and intimacy.

In the discussion of The Church of Jesus Christ in The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), Jurgen Moltmann writes about the concept of friendship:

Friendship unites affection with respect. There is no need to bow before a friend. We can look him in the eye. We neither look up to him nor look down on him. In friendship we experience ourselves for what we are, respected and accepted in our own freedom. Through friendship we respect and accept in our own freedom. Through friendship we respect and accept other people as people and as individual personalities. Friendship combines affection with loyalty…A friend remains a friend even in disaster, even in guilt. Between friends the determining factor is not an ideal, a purpose or a law, but simply promise, loyalty to one another and openness. Finally, friendship is a human relationship which springs from freedom, exists in mutual freedom and preserves that freedom. Friendship is ‘the concrete concept of freedom…’ Friendship is the reasonable passion for truly human fellowship; it is a mutual affection cemented by loyalty. The more people begin to live with one another as friends, the more privileges and claims to domination become superfluous. The more people trust one another the less they need to control one another (pp. 115-116).

Even though Paul is in chain, Timothy and Epaphroditus set Paul free. Jesus as a friend (Jn. 15:15) sets these gospel workers free. Their fellowship is not dominated by manipulation, domination, insecurity, and blindness. Rather, it is sustained by loyalty, mutual affection, freedom, and trust. Such a horizontal relationship glorifies God, honors Jesus, and magnifies the Spirit.

In conversing with others recently, an ecclesiastical topic always comes up. I admit that this is a topic we cannot ignore and get around it as if it weren’t matter. In systematic theology, we usually discuss the doctrine of the church at the end. It gives us a wrong impression that the doctrines of revelation, God, Christ, and the Spirit are much more important than the doctrine of the church. For the sake of understanding and discussion, we have to put all sorts of doctrines in order. But there is no intention to say that certain doctrines are more significant than others. The church is always the center of Christian spiritual formation, which is always communal.

In the church, the sad thing is that we do not always experience friendship which is characterized by freedom, trust, and mutual affection. Rather, the relationship is distorted by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, domination, and dishonesty. Paul said, “They all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 2:21). Their own interests twist their concept of the church. The interests of Christ and of others come after their own interests. Didn’t Paul say to the Philippians, “Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh” (Phil. 3:2)?

Flaws in Marriage

In The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (New York: Dutton, 2011), Timothy Keller writes:

What are the flaws that your spouse will see? You may be a fearful person, with a tendency toward great anxiety. You may be a proud person, with a tendency to be opinionated and selfish. You may be an inflexible person, with a tendency to be demanding and sulky if you don’t get your way. You may be an abrasive or harsh person, who people tend to respect more than they love. You may be an undisciplined person, with a tendency to be unreliable and disorganized. You may be an oblivious person, who tends to be distracted, insensitive, and unaware of how you come across to others. You may be a perfectionist, with a tendency to be judgmental and critical of others and also to get down on yourself. You may be an impatient, irritable person, with a tendency to hold grudges or to lose your temper too often. You may be a highly independent person, who does not like to be responsible for the needs of others, who dislikes having to make joint decisions, and who most definitely hates to ask for any help yourself. You may be a person who wants far too much to be liked, and so you tend to shade the truth, you can’t keep secrets, and you work too hard to please everyone. You may be thrifty but at the same time miserly with money, too unwilling to spend it on your own needs appropriately, and ungenerous to others.

Others have seen these flaws in you. Your parents certainly have, and others that have lived with you, such as siblings or college roommates or friends, have seen them, too. But if they spoke to you about them, you could either write them off as being biased or mistaken, or you could escape from the weight of the criticism by vaguely promising to do better in the future. However, your confronters didn’t keep up their confrontations, and you haven’t really admitted the severity of the problem. The reason was that the flaw did not pose the same kind of problem for them as it will for your spouse.

But while your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage (138-139).