King Jesus Questions 2

This is our second batch of responses to Ben Witherington’s questions about The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited…

Q.  You seem to put a lot of weight on 1 Corinthians 15 as giving us clues as to what the original Gospel preaching looked like.  Can you unpack this for us?   In what sense does this become normative for our preaching today?

If we ask “what does gospel mean?” and we want to answer that by probing the Bible, then I suggest that the one place where someone up and “defines” gospel is 1 Corinthians 15. Everyone, so it seems to me, admits this, even if they then swarm what Paul says with a soterian approach. 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, or 15:3-8, or 15:3-28, defines the gospel. This is the outline that we find expounded in the sermons in Acts and then the outline that is developed completely in the Gospels themselves.

Well, if we want to preach the gospel today then I suggest we have to give full weight to this trajectory or matrix of meaning: 1 Corinthians 15, the sermons in Acts, and the one and only gospel in the Gospels.

Q.  One of the major ways you connect all the stories in the Bible is by highlighting the fact that God created human beings to be kings and priests on the earth, beginning with Adam, then Abraham, then Israel, then Jesus, then the church.   What does it mean for us to be a king or priest on this earth, especially as Christians since Christ is our heavenly high priest and our king?

Our responsibility, according to Genesis 1 (as image of God), is to represent God on earth. But we chose the way of usurpation. Instead of being images or under-representers of God, we chose to be gods and goddesses, which is disastrous. God worked with us and let one of us be king, folks like David and Josiah, but we still failed. So God gave us the one true king, who is also – not accidentally – the one true image of God, and that image is the true king of the world, Jesus of Nazareth.

We are kings and priests, which I haven’t developed above much, when we live below Jesus as king and let his kingship and priesthood flow through  us to others in this world, when we rule and mediate on God’s behalf, etc..

Q. Another major stress in this book is that the four Gospels in fact contain the Gospel, and that Jesus and Peter and Paul preached basically the same thing— namely King Jesus, and his becoming King on earth as in heaven.    This will seem strange to the soterians who thinking the Gospel is justification by grace through faith.   Are you simply focusing on the person of Christ rather than on his soteriological benefits?

Yes, I think – with John Dickson, that fine young evangelical pastor down in Sydney, and Pope Benedict’s exceptional study on gospel – that the Gospels are the gospel. Dickson even says the fullest preaching of the gospel in the NT is the Gospels. I agree.

Here’s a big point, and I’ll move on: these books were not called “gospel” because they did a search in the library on genre questions and decided that “gospel” is a little more accurate than “biography.” No, they called these books “The [one and only] gospel according to Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, or John.” They were not giving us a genre classification so much as a substance declaration. They were saying these books tell us the gospel. Liturgical churches make this clear every week because they not only stand for the reading from the Gospels, and they sit for everything else, but they call that reading not a “reading from the Gospels” but simply “The Gospel.” That’s exactly right.

Q.  At various points in the discussion a good deal of this sounded like things Tom Wright has also been stressing.   How would you distinguish your views from his, if you would, when it comes to the story of Israel and the story of Jesus?

Tom and I are on the same wavelength, but no two scholars would ever want to agree totally – would we? Frankly, Tom’s work has been very influential on me. First, as a young professor I read his The New Testament and the People of God and liked it a lot; then I discovered, and one time Tom and I talked about this, G.B. Caird’s incredible little booklet called Jesus and the Jewish Nation, and it was that book that influenced me to write A New Vision for Israel, and after I had sketched much of that book Tom came out with Jesus and the Victory of God.

I became convinced from Bible reading that the soteriological scheme for reading the Bible left a lot out, not the least of which was why in the world we even needed the history of Israel. I’ve often said most skip from Genesis 3 to Romans 3 anyway. I wanted to know why God, page after page, wanted us to know the Story of God’s ways with Israel. And Tom’s approach here, which revisions some of what I had read in Gerhardus Vos years back as a college student, crystallized the thoughts of many: the way to tie the two testaments together was not best done with soteriology or even a historical-critical approach, as if it is nothing but history, but an interpretive grid for understanding the ways of God in history, and that history is for the world through Israel as completed in the Story of Jesus and the church.

How do we differ? Well, I’d have to give that more thought because I don’t spend much of my time thinking about the details of difference but more on the substance of similarities.

Q. How exactly do we explain why the preaching of the Gospel got so truncated, limited to the plan of salvation?   Are we Protestants in fact the major cause of this ‘limited edition Gospel’?

No, not really. The Orthodox and the Catholics and we Protestants are all culprits in narrowing the gospel to the plan of salvation, in their case more sacramentally and in our case more decisionally. So it’s not just us.

But it is us, and maybe we are more to blame than them. Here’s how I see it, and I trace this in the book. I’d pin two major moments: the Reformers, and I’m with them here, chose to reframe theology and the creed through the lens of confessions, Luther’s Augsburg (and subsequent developments alter the details) and Calvin’s Geneva Confession. Read the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed and then those confessions and you will see the dramatic reframing of the whole through the lens of soteriology.

To be sure, Augustine’s Enchiridion did this some, and there are glimpses of this in Aquinas, but the big point is not historical nuance but the substantive reframing of the whole through the lens of soteriology that was done so powerfully by the Reformers. Before I get to the second moment, this: Luther and Calvin both sustained a serious interest in the Nicene Creed, or the creeds in general.

But the second moment didn’t: revivalism led not only kept that soteriological reframing but reduced it dramatically into what is now the four or five point scheme of the plan of salvation.

When we compare current “plans of salvation” with 1 Corinthians 15, we have to admit something really dramatic has happened. So much so that many today wonder if we should even call 1 Corinthians 15 the gospel. I contend it is we who are wrong on this one, and we need to go back and rediscover that original gospel.

Q.   Towards the end of the book, you talk about creating a Gospel culture?  What do you mean by a Gospel culture, and how do we go about doing it?

A gospel culture is one that is shaped by 1 Cor 15, the sermons in Acts and the Gospels, not to exclusion of soteriology or to the rest of the NT, but one that genuinely lets that gospel reorder our thinking into genuine, apostolic gospel thinking.

I suggest this means we have to recover the Old Testament as our story and let that story over and over shape us so that we see the profundity of what God has done for us in sending Jesus as Messiah, Lord and Savior – for all of us.