The Gospel and Evangelism - Part Two

Today's post is part two in a series where we are considering some of the implications of a Gospel-centered approach to evangelism from Thomas F. Torrance’s The Mediation of Christ. The section on evangelism in Torrance's book appears toward the conclusion of the book. So it based upon his earlier discussions on the reconciling vicarious life and death of Jesus.

"There is, then, an evangelical way to preach the Gospel and an unevangelical way to preach it. The Gospel is preached in an unevangelical way, as happens so often in modern evangelism, when the preacher announces: this is what Jesus Christ has done for you, but you will not be saved unless you make your own personal decision for Christ as your Savior. Or: Jesus Christ loved you and gave his life for you on the Cross, but you will be saved only if you give your heart to him. In that event what is actually coming across to people is not a Gospel of unconditional grace but some other Gospel of conditional grace which belies the essential nature and content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. It was that subtle legalist twist to the Gospel which worried St. Paul so much in his Epistle to the Galatians, a distortion of the truth which can easily take a 'gentile' as well as a 'Jewish' form. To preach the Gospel in that conditional or legalist way has the effect of telling poor sinners that in the last resort the responsibility for their salvation is taken off the shoulders of the Lamb of God and placed upon them--but in that case they feel that they will never be saved. They know perfectly well in their own hearts that if the chain that binds them to God in Jesus Christ has as even one of its links their own feeble act of decision, then the whole chain is as weak as that, its weakest link. They are aware that the very self who is being called upon to make such a momentous decision requires to be saved, so that the preaching of the Gospel would not really be good news unless it announced that in his unconditional love and grace Jesus Christ had put that human self, that ego of theirs, on an entirely different basis by being replaced at the crucial point by Jesus Christ himself" (Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p. 93).