Cause and Effect of the Gospel

As I have written earlier last week, I am deeply involved in reading N.T. Wright’s work on the early church and Paul. It is challenging and radical, in a way; it is grounded in history and the Hebrew Bible in another. I confess to getting annoyed by his statements such as “In Ephesians 1, if Paul did write it…” Well, sorry. Why put it in a book about Paul’s theology if you don’t think it’s Paul’s? I think he does this for those “scholars” of the New Testament who question the authorship of certain books we conservatives take for granted (and the church did for 1900) years. I think he personally does believe Paul wrote what he is recorded as writing.

One thing he has caused me to reflect on is the different between the gospel and the effects of the gospel. We in the contemporary, rather shallow 2020 church take the gospel to be our personal salvation. That is the effect of the gospel, not the gospel itself. When we take I Corinthians 15:1-8 as the entirety of the gospel, I think we are wrong. It states the historical events and facts upon which the gospel is based, but there is more to it. What, I am still figuring out.  There is no gospel without those historical facts, and his use of “Christ” is a defining feature; a man named Jesus was not who died, but Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, Anointed One, who is called kyrios, Lord, in other passages even in this context.

But why? Why did the Messiah come. To the praise of God’s glory, Eph. 1:3-14. For the final redemption of the creation. To fulfill the plan given to Abraham, who would be the father of all nations, not just Semitic ones. And in completing that, we receive abundance of blessings. The purpose was not to shower us with an abundance of spiritual blessings such as power, love, a sound mind, forgiveness, and so many others that would take a page to write about. He could have just showered us with blessings and skipped the justice and holiness and wrath parts. There was something much bigger going on. In our hyper individualized theology (really humanology) we skip the praise of His glory and end to the groaning of creation and the salvation of Abraham’s faithful descendants. It’s all about us, fragmented us. 

For the church to move forward, I believe we must learn this, accept it, embrace it, live it. We will be so much happier in our right place in the universe.