As a college student I was trained to use the Four Spiritual Laws in evangelism, and even then I felt uncomfortable with it, as it struck me as the sort of sales pitch an insurance salesman would use. I don’t think we should feel bad if we are reluctant to reduce the Gospel to a sound bite, a commercial, or a 30-second elevator pitch. In some way, feeling bad about our inability to condense God’s truth in that way shows we are still subject to the influence of Protestant reductionism.
That said, of all the things in the Orthodox Church, the one that to me provides a clear headline to the Gospel is the Paschal Troparion: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” Further details of the Gospel need to not merely be read or spoken but actually experienced within the life of the Holy Spirit in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
I don't have a good definition of "the Gospel," other than to point out that if the standard evangelical Protestant definition is correct, then the "Gospels" themselves are abject failures, or at least chronically off-topic. Moreover, salvation as "assent to a particular definition of salvation" (which is what the standard American Protestant "gospel message" really is) strikes me as basically a form of works-righteousness in disguise, only the effort becomes intellectual instead of moral. It's still a form of saving yourself, at least according to Protestant logic.
Actually, there's always Larry Norman: "They nailed him to the cross and the laid him in the ground, but they should have known you can't keep a good man down."
I think gospel formulas can help a lot of people, but my baggage with evangelicalism has given me an aversion to trying to reduce it down into a proposition. Related to this, George MacDonald has so many bangers in his Unspoken Sermon on Justice, but he's mainly critiquing atonement theories:
"Instead of giving their energy to do the will of God, men of power have given it to the construction of a system by which to explain why Christ must die, what were the necessities and designs of God in permitting his death; and men of power of our own day, while casting from them not a little of the good in the teaching of the Roman Church, have clung to the morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction held by pagan Rome, buttressed by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and in its very home, alas, with the mother of all the western churches! Better the reformers had kept their belief in a purgatory, and parted with what is called vicarious sacrifice!"
"No atonement is necessary to him but that men should leave their sins and come back to his heart. But men cannot believe in the forgiveness of God. Therefore they need, therefore he has given them a mediator. And yet they will not know him. They think of the father of souls as if he had abdicated his fatherhood for their sins, and assumed the judge. If he put off his fatherhood, which he cannot do, for it is an eternal fact, he puts off with it all relation to us."
A single sentence statement of the gospel ? First, it has to be a sentence that can be proclaimed from pulpits and street corners. Second, it has to be firmly grounded in the biblical story. I cannot think of a better declaration than this: Jesus is risen! Robert Jenson taught me 40 years ago that theology is an unpacking of these three words.
Jesus is all that God is who became all that we are and united it all, including pain and death, with God so that we can live as human beings as God is.
It was Douglas Campbell's work that helped me realize the importance of theologizing "backwards". I was happy to discover (after becoming Orthodox) how much the Fathers do the same.
Campbell's contention is that Paul in Ephesians (Campbell insists Paul wrote Ephesians) starts with Christ and then works backwards into eternity and the divine plan before the foundation of the world (Eph 1). This good news is announced *prior to* any discussion of our sinfulness or enmity with God (Eph 2).
I was recently at a gas pump getting ready to swipe my credit card when I noticed there was a business card in the slot. Turns out it was a "four spiritual laws" gospel tract. Frankly, I don't know how to articulate this "backwards" gospel (which I believe *is* the gospel) in such a way that it can fit on a 2" x 3" card, but point #1 has to be relentlessly Christological. There can't be talk of a vague "God" who is love but is also just, etc. etc. Jesus can't enter the discussion at law or point #3.
This apocalyptic "backwards" gospel means any attempts to present the gospel in the form of a "forward" chronological narrative (salvation history, talk of Adam and Eve, Abraham, the Israelites, and then maybe after 10 minutes you finally get to talking about Jesus) is hopelessly misguided and compromises what we're trying to say. It's a bad cover version of St. Paul.
I can't properly articulate this (because I haven't thought it through), but something about Schmemann's contention that in the liturgy the future (God's coming kingdom) is rushing toward us in the present fits neatly with this "backward" theology
Your move away from Pentecostalism to Orthodoxy is moving and enlightening. One of my concerns about the Pentecostal church is this: what does it mean to ACCEPT Jesus as Lord and Saviour. Once that is spelled out in full we will inevitably move towards your kind of position. At the very least, if we do accept, and not just say some words, then the Holy Spirit will live in us and that will have enormous effects on our character. I am rather against summaries, but if ware to have one, I doubt yours can be bettered.
Maybe something like “Jesus has saved us from sin, death, and the Devil and grants us his all his rewards and benefits as if we lived his perfect life.”
Hmmm... "rewards" and "as if" sounds kinda like the Protestant juridical "justification is "just as if I never sinned", which is the forensic imputed righteousness idea. The first part sounds good but then it kinda veers off course in my mind. :)
Well, I am a protestant and I do think that the pauline metaphorical language of the courtroom like in Romans is perfectly valid, ancient, and biblical way to speak about things. It’s one analogy used to understand salvation, but, or course, any analogy could be taken beyond its useful limits. That said imputed righteousness is, for me, key to understanding what makes the news “good,” otherwise it’s kinda like any other news, just more, “be better, for God’s sake!” I’m not sure how to read the distinction between the Law and the Gospel that Paul wants to draw out in Galatians, if imputation isn’t part of the Gospel.
Yours is essentially John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
Which is an oldie and a goodie.
But it always comes back to what does “believe in him” mean. Penal substitution? Recapitulation? Ransom? Exemplar ?
I don’t often listen to online religious debates, but something prompted to me to listen to Fr. Stephen De Young and Gavin Ortlund. Ortlund had a formulaic “Gospel” presentation and Fr. De Young simply said The Creed would be his Gospel presentation. And I remember Ortlund stopping in his tracks, because that is admittedly not a very common answer, but the more I think about it the more I like that
I don't disagree with your "gospel in brief", but I'm not quite sure it really declares the essence of the Scriptures, and I increasingly wonder whether talking about salvation in such abstract terms apart from the Scriptures really gets us to the heart of the matter.
In the Bible, salvation is Israel-shaped. I think that, for the Church, Israel was allegorized out of existence by the end of the second century, and then almost entirely forgotten or simply unknown in a community that was by then, after all, entirely gentile and preoccupied with metaphysical questions about being, person, activity, and so forth.
Nevertheless, salvation is basically defined by the Bible. And if the Bible is _Israel's_ story about her exile with her One Creator God in the desert of empire (cf Ez 20.35)— and the arrival right there of God's reign on earth as it is in heaven— then that gives "salvation" a context that is far more concrete and historical than just the incarnation of one of the Trinity, his general conquest of death, and some idea of union with God based on those things. Not that those things are wrong, but they seem abstract and general in a way that they actually weren't and aren't— at least for the biblical writers, specifically including Matthew Mark Luke John and Paul, but not overlooking Moses Jeremiah Isaiah Ezekiel and the others.
Among other things, what the Bible calls "salvation" always includes the experience of social justice within a covenant community, and the destruction of the Empire— that is, of the oppressors who are opposed to God's people and to his will for his creation. In Daniel 7, the Son of Man, who represents the people of the saints of the Most High (i.e., Israel), is given an everlasting throne and lordship over all of history, and all of the kingdoms starting with Assyria have been destroyed. Jesus identifies Himself with that Son of Man and announces that He must be killed and rise again before the story is complete. But my point is that that is the completion precisely of _that_ story that he wishes to complete.
Also, you mention that God "invites us into the life of his kingdom". I wonder if you don't primarily envision that "kingdom" as a _place_ where we might go and share some kind of life, perhaps in the manner of eucharistic banquet. Again, that wouldn't be wrong, but the word βασιλεία doesn't refer to a _place_ so much as to the _activity_ of ruling— not God's "kingdom" so much as his "reign".
So, would you say that we're being invited to a banquet hall, or to be part of a government? The first image isn't wrong— but is the second one even on the radar, when we think of "salvation"?
I think it was Met. Kallistos Ware who (in "The Orthodox Way") impressed on me the importance of *sharing* in the Orthodox understanding of salvation, of the Son of God sharing in the fullness of our humanity--including our suffering and death--so we can share, both in body and in soul and with His Saints, in the divine life He has always shared with the Father and the Spirit. (Orthodox-speak about theosis and about God becoming man so man could become god are helpful to understand within the Church, but I don't think that sort of language is very accessible to most non-Orthodox people today, even if they are Christian.) Divine sharing with impoverished humanity has lots of implications, not only for how we believe, but also for how should worship (sacramentally and with an awareness of God at work in history) and how we should live in a world in which evil and death work to corrupt the goodness of God's creatures and divide them from God and each other.
As a college student I was trained to use the Four Spiritual Laws in evangelism, and even then I felt uncomfortable with it, as it struck me as the sort of sales pitch an insurance salesman would use. I don’t think we should feel bad if we are reluctant to reduce the Gospel to a sound bite, a commercial, or a 30-second elevator pitch. In some way, feeling bad about our inability to condense God’s truth in that way shows we are still subject to the influence of Protestant reductionism.
That said, of all the things in the Orthodox Church, the one that to me provides a clear headline to the Gospel is the Paschal Troparion: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” Further details of the Gospel need to not merely be read or spoken but actually experienced within the life of the Holy Spirit in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
I don't have a good definition of "the Gospel," other than to point out that if the standard evangelical Protestant definition is correct, then the "Gospels" themselves are abject failures, or at least chronically off-topic. Moreover, salvation as "assent to a particular definition of salvation" (which is what the standard American Protestant "gospel message" really is) strikes me as basically a form of works-righteousness in disguise, only the effort becomes intellectual instead of moral. It's still a form of saving yourself, at least according to Protestant logic.
Actually, there's always Larry Norman: "They nailed him to the cross and the laid him in the ground, but they should have known you can't keep a good man down."
I think gospel formulas can help a lot of people, but my baggage with evangelicalism has given me an aversion to trying to reduce it down into a proposition. Related to this, George MacDonald has so many bangers in his Unspoken Sermon on Justice, but he's mainly critiquing atonement theories:
"Instead of giving their energy to do the will of God, men of power have given it to the construction of a system by which to explain why Christ must die, what were the necessities and designs of God in permitting his death; and men of power of our own day, while casting from them not a little of the good in the teaching of the Roman Church, have clung to the morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction held by pagan Rome, buttressed by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and in its very home, alas, with the mother of all the western churches! Better the reformers had kept their belief in a purgatory, and parted with what is called vicarious sacrifice!"
"No atonement is necessary to him but that men should leave their sins and come back to his heart. But men cannot believe in the forgiveness of God. Therefore they need, therefore he has given them a mediator. And yet they will not know him. They think of the father of souls as if he had abdicated his fatherhood for their sins, and assumed the judge. If he put off his fatherhood, which he cannot do, for it is an eternal fact, he puts off with it all relation to us."
A single sentence statement of the gospel ? First, it has to be a sentence that can be proclaimed from pulpits and street corners. Second, it has to be firmly grounded in the biblical story. I cannot think of a better declaration than this: Jesus is risen! Robert Jenson taught me 40 years ago that theology is an unpacking of these three words.
Jesus is all that God is who became all that we are and united it all, including pain and death, with God so that we can live as human beings as God is.
It was Douglas Campbell's work that helped me realize the importance of theologizing "backwards". I was happy to discover (after becoming Orthodox) how much the Fathers do the same.
Campbell's contention is that Paul in Ephesians (Campbell insists Paul wrote Ephesians) starts with Christ and then works backwards into eternity and the divine plan before the foundation of the world (Eph 1). This good news is announced *prior to* any discussion of our sinfulness or enmity with God (Eph 2).
I was recently at a gas pump getting ready to swipe my credit card when I noticed there was a business card in the slot. Turns out it was a "four spiritual laws" gospel tract. Frankly, I don't know how to articulate this "backwards" gospel (which I believe *is* the gospel) in such a way that it can fit on a 2" x 3" card, but point #1 has to be relentlessly Christological. There can't be talk of a vague "God" who is love but is also just, etc. etc. Jesus can't enter the discussion at law or point #3.
This apocalyptic "backwards" gospel means any attempts to present the gospel in the form of a "forward" chronological narrative (salvation history, talk of Adam and Eve, Abraham, the Israelites, and then maybe after 10 minutes you finally get to talking about Jesus) is hopelessly misguided and compromises what we're trying to say. It's a bad cover version of St. Paul.
I can't properly articulate this (because I haven't thought it through), but something about Schmemann's contention that in the liturgy the future (God's coming kingdom) is rushing toward us in the present fits neatly with this "backward" theology
I think that's enough from me for now.
Destructive aspect of Great Awakening.
How about "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself"?
Your move away from Pentecostalism to Orthodoxy is moving and enlightening. One of my concerns about the Pentecostal church is this: what does it mean to ACCEPT Jesus as Lord and Saviour. Once that is spelled out in full we will inevitably move towards your kind of position. At the very least, if we do accept, and not just say some words, then the Holy Spirit will live in us and that will have enormous effects on our character. I am rather against summaries, but if ware to have one, I doubt yours can be bettered.
Maybe something like “Jesus has saved us from sin, death, and the Devil and grants us his all his rewards and benefits as if we lived his perfect life.”
Hmmm... "rewards" and "as if" sounds kinda like the Protestant juridical "justification is "just as if I never sinned", which is the forensic imputed righteousness idea. The first part sounds good but then it kinda veers off course in my mind. :)
Well, I am a protestant and I do think that the pauline metaphorical language of the courtroom like in Romans is perfectly valid, ancient, and biblical way to speak about things. It’s one analogy used to understand salvation, but, or course, any analogy could be taken beyond its useful limits. That said imputed righteousness is, for me, key to understanding what makes the news “good,” otherwise it’s kinda like any other news, just more, “be better, for God’s sake!” I’m not sure how to read the distinction between the Law and the Gospel that Paul wants to draw out in Galatians, if imputation isn’t part of the Gospel.
This reads like the dissertation it is, but provides the answer to your question https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/pauls-works-of-the-law-in-the-perspective-of-second-century-reception_matthew-j-thomas/26577835/item/41828185/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_new_books_nca_18452111988&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=18452114577&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45ibxMXdI-VoKDTVZ06r_Igtw&gclid=CjwKCAjwsfzSBhB5EiwAOGyqSV68zp7eMidOX7j7ikJhII2XYIdegZ6iap3lqnslB9L0agk1uuCL6BoCiHAQAvD_BwE#idiq=41828185&edition=32932160
Yours is essentially John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
Which is an oldie and a goodie.
But it always comes back to what does “believe in him” mean. Penal substitution? Recapitulation? Ransom? Exemplar ?
I don’t often listen to online religious debates, but something prompted to me to listen to Fr. Stephen De Young and Gavin Ortlund. Ortlund had a formulaic “Gospel” presentation and Fr. De Young simply said The Creed would be his Gospel presentation. And I remember Ortlund stopping in his tracks, because that is admittedly not a very common answer, but the more I think about it the more I like that
I don't disagree with your "gospel in brief", but I'm not quite sure it really declares the essence of the Scriptures, and I increasingly wonder whether talking about salvation in such abstract terms apart from the Scriptures really gets us to the heart of the matter.
In the Bible, salvation is Israel-shaped. I think that, for the Church, Israel was allegorized out of existence by the end of the second century, and then almost entirely forgotten or simply unknown in a community that was by then, after all, entirely gentile and preoccupied with metaphysical questions about being, person, activity, and so forth.
Nevertheless, salvation is basically defined by the Bible. And if the Bible is _Israel's_ story about her exile with her One Creator God in the desert of empire (cf Ez 20.35)— and the arrival right there of God's reign on earth as it is in heaven— then that gives "salvation" a context that is far more concrete and historical than just the incarnation of one of the Trinity, his general conquest of death, and some idea of union with God based on those things. Not that those things are wrong, but they seem abstract and general in a way that they actually weren't and aren't— at least for the biblical writers, specifically including Matthew Mark Luke John and Paul, but not overlooking Moses Jeremiah Isaiah Ezekiel and the others.
Among other things, what the Bible calls "salvation" always includes the experience of social justice within a covenant community, and the destruction of the Empire— that is, of the oppressors who are opposed to God's people and to his will for his creation. In Daniel 7, the Son of Man, who represents the people of the saints of the Most High (i.e., Israel), is given an everlasting throne and lordship over all of history, and all of the kingdoms starting with Assyria have been destroyed. Jesus identifies Himself with that Son of Man and announces that He must be killed and rise again before the story is complete. But my point is that that is the completion precisely of _that_ story that he wishes to complete.
Also, you mention that God "invites us into the life of his kingdom". I wonder if you don't primarily envision that "kingdom" as a _place_ where we might go and share some kind of life, perhaps in the manner of eucharistic banquet. Again, that wouldn't be wrong, but the word βασιλεία doesn't refer to a _place_ so much as to the _activity_ of ruling— not God's "kingdom" so much as his "reign".
So, would you say that we're being invited to a banquet hall, or to be part of a government? The first image isn't wrong— but is the second one even on the radar, when we think of "salvation"?
I think it was Met. Kallistos Ware who (in "The Orthodox Way") impressed on me the importance of *sharing* in the Orthodox understanding of salvation, of the Son of God sharing in the fullness of our humanity--including our suffering and death--so we can share, both in body and in soul and with His Saints, in the divine life He has always shared with the Father and the Spirit. (Orthodox-speak about theosis and about God becoming man so man could become god are helpful to understand within the Church, but I don't think that sort of language is very accessible to most non-Orthodox people today, even if they are Christian.) Divine sharing with impoverished humanity has lots of implications, not only for how we believe, but also for how should worship (sacramentally and with an awareness of God at work in history) and how we should live in a world in which evil and death work to corrupt the goodness of God's creatures and divide them from God and each other.