King Jesus Questions 1

Ben Witherington, Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, read The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, carefully and asked a bundle of questions: here’s the first batch. This was first posted at Ben’s site here at Patheos.

Q.  Let’s start with a question I get asked a lot which usually takes the form—- ‘What!  Another book by you?   What prompted you to write yet another book and why this book in particular?

Yes, I get asked that question at times, and as we enter into … what do we call this part of our careers, Ben?, because we don’t want to admit we are starting to be the veterans in the circle … the writing habit has become part of how we live. But, each book has its own genesis and this began for me years back when I began to ask myself what the “gospel” would look like if I began at the beginning of the Bible and not with Paul’s letter to the Romans. I developed that into Embracing Grace but was not entirely satisfied, and a good reading of the last two chps it may have been clear that I was probing some themes for which I did not have final answers but was exploring some things. Then I wrote A Community called Atonement to explore how atonement and gospel work together.

But I was still not satisfied and I’ll tell you exactly why: working out a more robust theory of salvation, which is what those two books did, does not fit as well as we might like with the sermons in Acts. So all along I kept saying to myself: “Scot, you’re OK on this salvation and atonement stuff, but you still need to think through the gospel sermons in Acts a bit more.” So when I was invited to Stellenbosch to speak to an academic conference on the Book of Acts, I gave a paper on the gospel in Acts and it pushed me beyond where I thought I would go. I realized I was part of the problem in equating gospel with salvation, and Acts said “You’re wrong.” This book is the book that sets the record straight for me on the meaning of gospel.

Q.  You talk a lot in this book about the difference between the ‘soterian’  Gospel which is not a full presentation of the Gospel  and what you view as the full Evangelical Gospel.  Can you explain this distinction and what you are wanting to stress by making it?

In part that is answered in the first one, but now I can say it differently. The fact is that if  you ask most of us what “gospel” means they will give us something to do with salvation, and that will involved God’s love and grace and holiness and Christ’s atoning death and our need to believe. And if you ask people to present the gospel they will order a rhetoric that seeks to compel people to get saved. But the gospel – the Greek word is euangelion and we get the word “evangel” and “evangelical” and “evangelism” from that Greek word – cannot be reduced to salvation in the New Testament. So The King Jesus Gospel seeks to show that salvation is not the same as gospel, that salvation needs to be seen as something that flows from gospel, but that gospel is something bigger and different. The gospel is to declare something about Jesus, from whom our salvation comes.

Q.  I can see that one of the immediate misunderstandings or objections to your book will be—- Are you really saying that the Gospel is not mainly about soteriology or salvation?

I’m really saying that, but I’m saying that because that is what the New Testament really does teach.

Q.  What precisely is wrong with someone who says ‘Paul preached the Gospel, but Jesus actually didn’t?’

Nothing I suppose, if what we are talking about doesn’t matter. If we say Jesus didn’t even talk about elders and Paul did, I can’t say that I think it matters that much to have a word from Jesus about elders and their qualifications. And I’m not sure it matters if Jesus talked about spiritual gifts. But we are not talking, when we talk about “gospel,” about something that is of secondary importance. We are talking about top shelf, first order theological truths that we embrace. It is exceedingly hard for me to think Jesus taught and taught and did and did but neither talked about nor did gospel in his day. It is this tension that has animated so much of the struggle in composing a New Testament theology: it is the instinct of Christians to want Jesus – after all, we claim he’s God, he’s the truth, he’s the one on whom we rely and under whom we live et al – to be on the side of Paul or Paul to be on the side of Jesus when it comes to first order theology.

Here’s my instinct: if we think something is cardinally important and we think Jesus never talked about it, I think we want to ask if we have got what’s cardinally important right.

The most exciting thing about the work for this book was the discovery that Paul’s gospel and Jesus’ gospel are not just connected, but virtually identical. Jesus preached Paul’s gospel because Paul preached Jesus’ gospel.

Q.  Explain what you mean by Kingdom of God?   What has that got to do with human salvation?

Ben, I think we’ve got kingdom a bit blurry today. And I may write a book on this some day, and I may not. We’ll see. Here’s how I see it, and I say a few things about this in my book One.Life. The liberals saw kingdom as little more than God’s work in the world to progress society toward the good society. Now that’s simplistic and it needs to be nuanced a hundred times. But culture and kingdom are not that far apart for liberal theology. On top of this, Schleiermacher famously shaped religion in the direction of the sense of being utterly dependent upon God and this got connected in liberalism to kingdom of God. Kingdom happens when we utterly depend on God, personally and socially. Then along came George Ladd, whose biggest theological and intellectual battles were with the Dallas folks who were defining kingdom more along the lines of an eschatological Davidic kingdom, and Ladd – so it seems to me – unintentionally but ultimately landed on the same side of the fence as the liberals in making kingdom of God the “reign” of God as a dynamic relationship. Ladd was more nuanced than this, but his successors have more or less made kingdom mean what the liberals more or less meant: that is, it means to enter into a saving personal dynamic with God as king, personally (and then socially). But the one thing Ladd wanted to avoid was any suggestion that the kingdom was that future Davidic kingdom. That Davidic kingdom would be a social arrangement, to be sure. David, Land, temple, etc..

It is my contention that when Jesus said “kingdom” his contemporaries didn’t think “good then, now we can get saved.” They thought, “Where’s David? Why are the Romans here? Let’s get to Jerusalem.” In other words they thought in terms of a socio-political reality. Jesus, oddly enough, said “It’s already breaking in.” But too many then want to equate “breaking in” with “spiritual” and the next thing “kingdom” means what it could not simply have meant: a purely spiritual thing.

So, Ben, this is getting long and I’ll end it with this: kingdom for Jesus is closer to “church” than many of us have been thinking. I don’t want to equate the two, but I do want to see the church, the local one, as the outcroppings and advance stations of the kingdom of God in the now as societies wherein the will of God – God’s shalom – flourish now as anticipations of the Day when it will be complete.

So salvation is connected but kingdom and salvation are not the same thing.

Q.  One of the repeated themes of the book is— the story of Jesus is the completion of the story of Israel.  Explain what you mean by this.  Completion in what sense?  Does Israel not still have a future in the plan of God?

Good on you for asking this Ben. By “complete,” and I have some explanation of this at one point in the book, I want to sum up terms like fulfill, salvation historical fulfillment, not supersessionism but fulfillment, the way the cross completes the sacrificial system and the way Jesus’ ethics complete the Torah, that sort of idea. It is front left right and center about the plan for history coming to what God designed it to do.

Yes, I think Israel has a future (and a past and a present). That was not discussed in the book, and it could have been done, but that would have meant one or more chapters, and that might mean even more. I’m not in total agreement, but I like much of what I see in Kendall Soulen on this.