Thanks for popping by …

am doing a shout out to you on my blog - enjoyed this and other posts i looked out…

thanks!
claire

Just want to clarify one thing here: I am not suggesting the gospel is not “the good news of the Kingdom of heaven”, as you pointed, the Evangelists themselves describe Jesus’ preaching in this way. Rather, I am saying this:

1) That the narrative or theme of Kingdom places the emphasis first on the coming King (see e.g. Wright: The Victory of God))

2) One of Jesus’ roles was to proclaim and announce the Kingdom, and call people to repentance. However…

3) Subsequent to his death/resurrection/etc, the early church saw the gospel=good news of the kingdom as primarily found in the ministry of Jesus himself, especially in his death and resurrection, and by extension (and in and through the former), the Kingdom he preached about, which was “ushered in” by the completion of his ministry. In other words, the narrative of Kingdom, flowing from the OT, through John the baptist, through Jesus, must flow through the Cross and Resurrection and into the early church.

Ultimately, Jesus’ statements about the gospel (and they are very few) must be informed by looking back to the OT, by looking sideways at his culture, and looking forwards to how the early church understood the gospel. We cannot drive a wedge between Paul and Jesus, and we cannot drive a wedge between Jesus and the history of Israel. Nor can we drive a wedge between the OT scriptures and Jesus. So, with all of these in appropriate tension, we then can frame and shape and nuance the meaning of the “gospel”. If we don’t, we risk taking statements out of their full and proper context, even from Jesus’ own mouth.

We then may end up saying that the early church got it completely wrong, or the OT prophecies got it completely wrong; neither of which I can accept! To suggest that Paul understood the gospel in a radically different way from Jesus and his discples also makes no sense in light of the NT record of Paul and the Apostles interacting and double-checking that their message was the same.

An example of why this all makes a difference, take a look at NT ethics or codes of behaviour, for Christians. The NT writers did not derive their ethics, or reformulate their ethics, from abstract notions of Shalom. Rather, the central event behind the bulk of NT ethics is the death, resurrection, and (I think) second coming of Christ, and subsequently how that should inform and shape our behaviour.

In more detail, consider the command “love one another”.

Why? Because “he first loved us”

How has God concretely loved us?

The Father, by sending his Son to die for us
The Son, by dying for us
The Spirit, by filling us with the Love of Father and the Son.

I find this fascinating and had never even noticed this until Wright pointed it out.

Anyway, I guess my point is not simple, but the great thing about blogging is that you get to keep banging on about something until you can say something with clarity

Still, fairly simplistic application of the latter ABC has saved literally millions of lives by now, so ……… lol

On the other hand, to become an expert in practising ABC, i.e. an anaesthetist/emergency/acute medicine consultant, requires 14 years at school, 5 years at university and at least 7? years of postgraduate training. But it’s still ABC.

I may manage that ABC, but I doubt whether even on my deathbed I’ll yet be an expert in accepting, believing in and confessing Jesus’ lordship…

Anyway, enough playing devil’s(?!) advocate!

On the question, What is the gospel? Albo, I’m afraid I have to side firmly with Rupert on this one. Almost every time JESUS refers to the gospel, it is “the good news of the Kingdom of God/Heaven”. Of course, what all is packaged up in that statement is a far greater and broader matter, and from what Jesus is recorded as saying, it encompasses a wide range of things. And if you also add in what the authors of the New Testament thought, you treble or quadruple that.

1 - OK I double checked the Greek for this one. Where our English bibles say “gospel” or “good news”, the Greek has euangelion . This breaks down into two words, thus:

eu — good, benign
angelion — messenger, herald

So as a noun, eu-angelion means “good news”.

However it contains within it the nuance of heralding, or proclaiming, because that is what an angelion is. An “angelion” does not arrive to listen to people; on the contrary he or she arrives with a message to tell! (Note, I am not talking about how to evangelism, simply trying to get agreement on what these words meant in 1stC!)

Concerning the verb “evangelizomai”, this must mean “the act of bringing good news”. I concede here that to define this as “preach good news”, as is often done, may be going beyond the warrant of the text. I think this is the word that was traditionally translated “bring good tidings”. I would accept that “announce”, and “make known” are equally good translations. I would note however, that there are reference works floating about which maintain the definition is “preach the gospel”. I would also comment that the problem is probably with the modern understanding of “preaching” rather than the definition per se.

I would add though, that most of the time the New Testament puts eu-angelion in conjuction with kerussein/kerusso. I’ve actually preached on this in the past, and I can report that this word means preach/proclaim/herald/announce. If you think it doesn’t, I am open to see the evidence!

Going beyond etymology into exegesis, this theme is confirmed and re-enforced by secular and Jewish usages of this word group. See, for example: New Perspectives on Evangelism:
Insights from Biblical Theology.

2 - I cannot agree with this. I don’t see modern scholarship (or traditional scholarship for that matter) supporting this claim. I can’t think of anything Wright has written. Here’s some quotes:

“In a similar vein as Pauline scholars such as Wright, Walter Brueggeman argues that evangelism is best understood as a message about a cosmic victory by God.”

“According to Wright, the gospel is a message about who is king: Jesus.”

“As Wright says, “’the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus.”

(All quotes from the link above)

I just don’t think you get all of the above if you reduce the gospel to the Kingdom.

The thing is, I agree with you, that the gospel is not and should not be a trite method of “how to get saved”. But, on the other hand, its not just about a new era of Shalom that has floated in either! Given that Chalke apparently got most of his ideas about the Kingdom from Wright, I’d rather go back to his statements when it comes to understanding the Kingdom.

3/4 - I think we are in broad agreement here. I think that in Pauline contexts, the Apostle sees the gospel “preached” because he is thinking of a church assembly, or an opportunity to speak at a synagogue. Outside of those appropriate contexts, I think we see much more “witnessing” and “debating”. I am certainly not advocating standing in the street and shouting words of judgement from Revelation, in an attempt to “preach the gospel”!

5 - its clear that different NT authors used the word gospel in different ways. If you want to start with Jesus, perhaps we should not forget Jesus’ own statement about his mission: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”. Again, Wright has argued that Jesus saw the Suffering Servant role as key to his mission. The Christ-Event was indeed to usher in the Kingdom, but the whole point of the Kingdom is that the God himself is going to turn up and sort things out. Jesus is King, and has turned up to defeat evil and usher in God’s new age. The primary way this was accomplished, according to the bible, is by his perfect life leading to his suffering unjust death (and by implication, his resurrection).

I rather suspect that if you look up every time the gospel is implied or defined in the New Testament, you will always see Jesus and his death as central themes. Because of this, I am rather wary of any attempt to redefine the gospel to mean anything else.

My only concession would be that, since the biblical writers had a variety of nuances concerning the gospel, I can see that it is OK for us to come up with different nuances and different slants, to suit our own contexts. But I think there is only so far you can go from the biblical definition before you are no longer using the same word, so to speak. Like the popular understanding of the gospel, as a way to get to heaven, is in a narrow way correct, but is not really the same thing as what Paul, or Mark, or others talked about when they used the same word.

In your case…I have heard of, but don’t know much about the ABC but I’m guessing it’s similiar?
Is that an Alpha Group thing?

It almost seems like we might agree alastair … what do you think????

One thing you mention: “today evangelism is the 4 spiritual laws” — I would counter that by saying that is not true with the people I have done organised evangelism with, and it is not true for me either. I have been a Christian for 10 years and never even heard the 4 spiritual laws (I am in the UK). My understanding is that the 4 spiritual laws was a technique used with much success in U.S. campus ministries in the 1980’s.

But if you look at Paul, or even more importantly the life and words of Jesus, the correcting was done in the light of the knowledge of Christ. Jesus healed, and then said, “Go and sin no more…”

Today, for too many times, we try and correct the outside to look good, or attempt to correct the outside of others to look good so they ‘fit in’ in church. We correct the behavior before Christ is revealed and therefore we fall into some sort of humanistic behavior modification rather than letting Jesus transform us from glory to glory.
Paul was very clear, even in ‘preaching against sin’ that Jesus was the one and only prize. It wasn’t not to sin, but to follow Christ who changes us.

So my point is, is that we should always point others to Christ…not away from sin. Christ will do the rest. We can disciple, but not modify behavior. If I say, “Don’t think of pink elephants!” What to you think of?
If I try and get someone to quite cocaine, and bring them to Christ, I don’t say, “Don’t think of cocaine!”, because if that’s all they try not to think about, that what they end up thinking about, and then they ‘fail’.

I’m probably beating a dead horse, because I think I’m preaching to the choir.

To more quickly answer your other good question… I’m sure people were invited to church (which looked a helluva lot more different than the corner church today) but today evangelism is the 4 spiritual laws and pray they show up at church. Like it’s some big accomplishment if they actually do come! And in todays society I guess it is. But you are correct in your last statement, that we must bring Jesus to them, because even if Jesus lived in the four walls of church (and He does) they usually don’t come anyway…

To add on to your points about the gospel…IMHO, the gospel is the good news…and the good news is that Jesus came bringing the Kingdom of God and to destroy the works of the devil. It includes, but is much more than simple personal salvation.

I hope that’s not too long. hehe

I think the one the main points i was trying to make was the “preach the gospel” isn’t a great translation for the word “evangelizo”.

Don’t want to repeat myself, but you’re going to have to expand a little on this, as I stated above, it seems to me that this is a 100% accurate textbook definition of what the Greek word meant. I would expect that someone doing a transliteration would use those very words to gloss said Greek words. Indeed I would expect the Greek lexicons to have those definitions. For example:

“The relevant Greek words are evangelizo, used 55 times, evangelion, used 77 times, and evangelistes, used 3 times. In Greek, eu means “good” and angelos (nearly always translated “angel”) means “messenger,” “one who is sent in order to announce, teach, or perform anything” (E.W. Bullinger Lexicon). The idea conveyed by the evangelizo word group is that of proclaiming a good message, or good news. “

I am not Greek scholar, but my understanding is that the English word “gospel” is used for the Greek word euangelion, a word that simply means good news (of the best kind, eg. “we’ve won the war”, rather than a mundane, “its sunny today”). The Greek word, apparently, for “to preach” is euaggelizo. And the Greek word for evangelist is euaggelistes. Now I know etymology isn’t the be and end all of meaning, but surely we can conclude that all these words are talking about the same thing.

=> “preaching” is the proclamation of the Good News
=> the “gospel” is the Good News
=> an evangelist is one who proclaims the Good News
=> and therefore by implication, evangelism is the activity of proclaiming the good news.

Now, I think you are saying that opening our King James bibles and shouting verses at people about penal substitution and hell without their leave is not evangelism as carried out by the apostles.

If you are, then you are critiquing two distinct modern practices:
- a particular style and method of communicating the Message
- the content of the Message itself.

You are, then, suggesting that the way we “present” or “share” or “proclaim” the gospel is not the way the Apostles did the same; and you are saying that the very Message we present is not the same one preached either.

(Am I right so far?)

If you are saying this, then we have two different issues here:

1) Of Contextualisation. Just because the Apostles did something in a particular way, or even told a particular story, does not necessarily imply that we should do the same. This is the domain of cultural relevancy, of contextualisation, and of post-modern mission. If you are saying we need to heed all of this, then I completely agree. The very Greek words used to describe what the Apostles did (preaching) indicates that they did not share stories or pitch up and listen to everyone. Presumably this is because proclaiming a message about God was very much in vogue in their culture. I grant this point. But I would imagine that the reason they were “preaching” was not to talk down to people, but was in direct response to the historical events that had unfolded before their very eyes. If a dead man appears to a group of your friends and it turns out he is alive and is the God and King of the Universe, this is not just some personal story that is shared over a cup of coffee. They “preached” because they were proclaiming a life-changing universe-shattering event which they were witnesses to.

One thing I do note is that as the gospel went further from Jerusalem, we begin to read of Paul “reasoning” and debating with people in the synagogue.

But I don’t think we can escape from the fact that as Christians we are bearing witness to the most revolutionary event (Resurrection) and amazing implications (Kingdom now) that the world has ever or will ever hear of. I suggest its the nature of the Message itself that drives the gospel-writers to use words like “preach”. By definition, good news is so exciting and so amazing that it is by definition “preached” — declared, shouted out, enthusiastically presented. It makes no sense to maintain something is good news, and then only to mutter about it if someone pesters you long enough.

HOWEVER, having said all of that, perhaps post-modern contextualisation requires us to listen first, to share, to speak with humility. I get all that. As long as we hold it in tension with the basic meaning of what sharing good news is all about.

2) Of Content. Its clear to me that the Apostles talked about the death and resurrection of Jesus. When Paul in 1 Cor says

“Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you,”

he goes on to say only

“that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day…”

its curious to note he doesn’t say

“that heaven is a party and you’re all invited”

or

“remember that Jewish concept called Shalom? Its available now”

So, the death and resurrection of Jesus as an act of atonement in continuity with the Jewish scriptures forms the core of the historical gospel. I see this as an indisputable historical fact!

So if you are claiming that to speak about such things is not in congruency with what the apostles or early church said, I would respond that history seems to say otherwise!