Evangelism: February 2005 Archives
Matt Hand brought it to my attention that Graeme Goldsworthy addresses the same issue with which we have been concerned in our Gospel and evangelism posts. In light of the importance of this particular topic for the church I decided to post Goldsworthy's comments for your reflection.
“My concern about evangelism is that sometimes there is a greater emphasis on the need for some kind of response than on the c lear exposition of the gospel. Telling people they need to come to Jesus, that they must be born again, that they should commit their lives to Christ, and so on, is not preaching the gospel. It is, at best, telling them what they ought to do or, in the case of the new birth, what has happened when they have received the gospel. It is a remarkable thing in Acts 2 that Peter’s sermon contained no appeal. The appeal came from the congregation: ‘What should we do?’ It was the power and clarity of the gospel message that impressed them with the need to do something about it.
The evangelistic sermon, as we see in Acts, will therefore contain elements other than the gospel. Telling people their need for the gospel, both their felt need and the real need, is plainly important, but it is not itself the gospel. When we have explained what God has done for us in Christ –the gospel – then we may go on to explain the benefits of receiving the gospel and the perils of ignoring it. However, telling people that they can choose either heaven or hell is not telling them the gospel. Telling them, as Peter did, that repentance and faith go hand in hand with the gift of the Holy Spirit is important, but it is not the gospel. Whenever people’s sense of assurance of salvation is expressed in the first person, something is amiss. When the question ‘How do you know God will accept you?’ is answered by ‘I have Jesus in my heart,’ ‘I asked Jesus into my life,’ ‘The Holy Spirit is in me,’ and so on, the real gospel basis for assurance needs to be reviewed. We rejoice when the answer comes in the third person: ‘God gave his only Son to die on the cross for me,’ ‘Jesus died, rose, and is in heaven for me.’ When the focus is on the finished and perfect work of Christ, rather than on the unfinished work of the Spirit in me, the grounds for assurance are in place” (Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, p. 95).
Comment from yesterday’s post: How would Torrance understand the commands of personal responsibility to ‘believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved’? Or ‘repent…everyone of you…for the forgiveness of sins’?
The following statements find no biblical basis, to be sure: “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.”
But how, if at all, does Torrance verbalize man’s personal responsibility toward the message of the gospel and person of Christ?
Better yet, what gospel-centered personal responsibility toward the message and Man of the gospel look like and how is it to be exercised?
My answer: I’m not sure how Torrance understands the commands of personal responsibility to repent and believe. He does not specifically address that issue in The Mediation of Christ. But here are my brief thoughts on the subject. (1) Graeme Goldsworthy makes some helpful comments: “According to Mark 1:14-15, Jesus began His ministry preaching the gospel of God, a message summed up as ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.’ The response demanded by this gospel is ‘Repent, and believe the gospel.’ It hardly needs to be said that this indicates a distinction between the gospel and the appropriate response to it. If we take the imperative to repent and believe as part of the gospel we end up with faith in faith. The distinction between the message and the demand to believe it is vital. It means preaching the gospel must involve more than simply calling on people to make a decision” (Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, p. 82). So I think it’s helpful to keep the distinction between the Gospel and its demands for faith and repentance in mind. Goldsworthy continues, “Only the message that another true and obedient human being has come on our behalf, that He has lived for us the kind of life we should live but can’t, that He has paid fully the penalty we deserve for the life we do live but shouldn’t—only this message can give assurance that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (ibid., pp. 83-84). I think a truly evangelical presentation of the gospel puts the stress primarily not upon what the hearer must do, namely, repent and believe, but on what Christ has already done in His vicarious life and death (if you want to read more about the vicarious life of Christ, go to http://www.eucatastrophe.com/blog/archives/2005/01/24/). If our stress is primarily upon the hearers' responsibility, we are encouraging them to look primarily within, that is, at the quality and sincerity of their own faith/repentance, rather than to look primarily without, that is, at the saving life and death of Christ. So I think that we stray from Gospel-centered evangelism when our presentation leads them to think mainly upon what they must do rather than mainly upon what Christ has done.
(2) Also, I think it is important to remember that what the Gospel demands from us it also provides for us. In other words, the Gospel itself is the power of God unto believing and repenting. Romans 1:16-17 is key for me on this point. Paul says that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation precisely because it reveals the righteousness of God. This revealing does not merely refer to our mental apprehension of this righteousness which God provides through faith in Christ. Paul is speaking of a revealing that happens with saving effect. In other words, Paul is teaching that this righteousness of God is dynamically revealed unto our salvation. It is an operative revealing, a saving revealing, and this saving righteousness is revealed in the preaching of the Gospel, that is, in the message “that another true and obedient human being has come on our behalf, that He has lived for us the kind of life we should live but can’t, that He has paid fully the penalty we deserve for the life we do live but shouldn’t.” Therefore, in our calling on people to repent and believe the Gospel, we need to keep in mind that their repentance and faith will not be self-produced, but rather Gospel produced by the righteous that is revealed with saving effect. With those brief comments said, below is more of Torrance’s thoughts on the Gospel and evangelism.
Torrance continues: “How, then, is the Gospel to be preached in a genuinely evangelical way? Surely in such a way that full and central place is given to the vicarious humanity of Jesus as the all sufficient human response to the saving love of God which He has freely and unconditionally provided for us. We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this: God loves you so utterly and completely that He has given Himself for you in Jesus Christ His beloved Son, and has thereby pledged His very Being as God for your salvation…From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you He has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that He acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in Him, who has already believed in God through Him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which He has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by Him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
“To preach the Gospel of the unconditional grace of God in that unconditional way is to set before people the astonishingly good news of what God has freely provided for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to Him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see…whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what He is and always will be as He stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of His vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be” (T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 94-95).
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).
Over the next few days we will be considering some of the implications of a Gospel-centered approach to evangelism (you would think that all evangelism within evangelicalism would be Gospel-centered!) from Thomas F. Torrance's The Mediation of Christ. Although you may not agree with all of his conclusions, I think his thoughts concerning the Gospel and evangelism will help to deepen your understanding of the Gospel itself. So enjoy!
"The Gospel is to be proclaimed in such a way that full place is given to the man Jesus in his Person and Work as the Mediator between God and man, otherwise it is not being proclaimed in a way that corresponds with its actual message of unconditional grace and reconciling exchange. The pattern had already been c learly set by our Lord when he proclaimed that all who wished to be his disciples must renounce themselves, or give up all right to themselves, take up the cross and follow him, and when he laid it down as a basic principle that those who want to save their lives will lose them. Face to face with Christ all would-be followers find themselves called into radical question, together with their preconceptions, self-centered desires and self-will, for to have him as Lord and Savior means that he takes their place in order to give them his place. The preaching of the Gospel in that radical form is not easy, for when we call upon people to repent and believe in Jesus Christ that they may be saved, we have great difficulty in doing that in such a way that we do not throw people back upon themselves in autonomous acts of personal repentance and decision, or encourage them to come to Christ for their own sake rather than for Christ's sake, in direct conflict with the very principle about motives laid down by Jesus" (pp. 92-93).
