The Gospel is Jesus Happening to Us
To be itself, the gospel must change, for part of what the tradition remembers is that Jesus is not dead.
In writing recently about the Reformers’s distinction between historical faith versus lively faith, I made the following assertion.
To be itself, the gospel changes.
Indeed as the power of lively faith, the unconditional promise called gospel can never be preached the same way twice because the promise must address the living hopes and fears of its actual hearers. That the gospel can free from any and every bondage is its peculiar, all-encompassing power of which Paul announces that he is not ashamed. Just so, for the gospel to be itself, I cannot, in my attempts to gospel another, merely repeat biblical verses or Sunday School formulas. The gospel must proclaim Jesus as the hope of new possibilities and unique fears that present themselves today.
The criterion for whether the gospel is gospel, then, is simply whether the proclamation is 1) promissory in nature— and, as promise, it logically presents God as the primary protagonist of the story you call you— and 2) whether it sets sinners free for the future.
To be itself, the gospel changes.
This leads to the question a reader submitted in response.
“Just how does the gospel change without ceasing to be the gospel? We’re all aware, I imagine, of churches that, in the desperate quest for relevancy, have seemingly lost the gospel? What is to prevent the gospel from getting lost if it does not merely repeat the tried and true formulas of the tradition?”
The answer is Jesus.
In commenting on Karl Barth’s work on the Barmen Declaration, the theologian Eberhard Busch, summarized the third thesis with the warning, “Woe to the church who speaks of Jesus in the past tense!” The apparent simplicity of the admonition is deceptive as it is but a reminder of the dogma established by the Second Helvetic Confession:
“The preaching of the word of God is the word of God.”
That is—
Jesus is both gospeling’s object and its subject.
As the crucified Jesus, Christ is the object of gospel proclamation. He is, as Robert Jenson says, “the given about whom we speak.” Canon and creed establish his objective identity; so that, the church who still seeks him there will not wander from his gospel. However, just as the church is not the Jesus Memorial Society, the gospel is not simply the spoken memory of the crucified Christ. In fact, the church would have no word of the cross if Christ were crucified only.
The church would have no word of the cross if Christ were crucified only.
As risen, Jenson writes, "Jesus is the final future who ever opens new promises beyond those already made.” All gospeling is in the power of his Name and to him; so that, the Risen Jesus is the free subject of the address, initiating its surprising twists and new beginnings.
Thus, the gospel can change— must change, will change— without ceasing to be the gospel because Jesus is at once, simultaneously, the gospel’s fixed object and innovating subject. And this claim about the nature of the gospel rises to level of dogma exactly because part of what we remember about the fixed object is that he lives with death behind him.
To be itself, the gospel must change, for part of what the tradition remembers is that Jesus is not dead.
Jesus is free future not dead past.
For the gospel to be gospel, in other words, it must bear two marks of authenticity. It must be talk of Christ that is:
Faithful to the remembered Jesus
Free response to the futurity of Jesus
Once again, the gospel is not a word about Christ.
It is Christ’s own word.
The gospel, as Jenson says, is Jesus happening to us.
(art: “Preacher Man” by Chris E.W. Green)