A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [67]
All of Isaiah’s powerful images are interwoven with the dream of a peaceable kingdom, one that fulfills the unfulfilled promise of David’s kingdom (9:7; 16:5; 22:22; 55:3; 11:1; 11:10). Of course, Isaiah is only one of many prophets who fund our imaginations with the peaceable-kingdom dream, and John similarly draws from other prophets too (for example, note how strikingly John 12:13–15 echoes Zech. 9:9).
But even these few examples, selected from so many more, make it clear that Jesus, contrary to my dear loyal critic’s assertion, did not come merely to “save souls from hell.” No, he came to launch a new Genesis, to lead a new Exodus, and to announce, embody, and inaugurate a new kingdom as the Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6). Seen in this light, Jesus and his message have everything to do with poverty, slavery, and a “social agenda.”
When we try to read John as well as the other gospels within the flat, six-line Greco-Roman narrative, the sandal just doesn’t fit. But when we see Jesus in the three-dimensional Jewish narrative, we discover a gift from the Jews to the whole world—good news (that pregnant term being another powerful resonance with Isa. 40:9; 52:7; 61:1) of a new Genesis, a new Exodus, and a new kingdom come.
So many people are like my loyal critic; they have so utterly bought into the six-line, black-and-white, soul-sorting heaven-or-hell Greco-Roman narrative that it has become the precritical lens through which they see everything, causing them to see some things that aren’t there and rendering invisible many things that are. If they could only take off that set of glasses long enough to see Jesus in full color, in three dimensions, everything would look different. If only.
Thankfully, more and more people are realizing that there’s a renaissance under way regarding our understanding of Jesus. More and more of us are discovering Jesus as Word and Lord colored outside the conventional six lines. This Jesus, we discover, is far more wonderful, attractive, compelling, inspiring, and unbelievably believable than Jesus shrunk and trimmed to fit within them.
PART V:
THE GOSPEL QUESTION
14
What Is the Gospel?
Like a lot of Protestants, for many years I “knew” what the gospel was. I “knew” that the gospel was the message of “justification by grace through faith,” distorted or forgotten by those pesky Catholics, but rediscovered by our hero Martin Luther through a reading of our even greater hero Paul, especially his magnum opus, the Letter to the Romans. If Catholics were called “Roman Catholics” because of their headquarters in Rome, we could have been called “Romans Protestants,” because Paul’s Roman letter served as our theological headquarters. As its avid students, we “knew” without question what it was about. To my embarrassment, though, about fifteen years ago I stopped knowing a lot of what I previously knew.
A lunchtime meeting in a Chinese restaurant unconvinced and un-taught me. My lunch mate was a well-known Evangelical theologian who quite rudely upset years of theological certainty with one provocative statement: “Most Evangelicals haven’t got the foggiest notion of what the gospel really is.” He then asked me how I would define the gospel, and I answered as any good Romans Protestant would, quoting Romans. He followed up with this simple but annoying rhetorical question: “You’re quoting Paul. Shouldn’t you let Jesus define the gospel?” When I gave him a quizzical look, he asked, “What was the gospel according to Jesus?” A little humiliated, I mumbled something akin to “You tell me,” and he replied, “For Jesus, the gospel was very clear: The kingdom of God is at