The Context of Evangelism
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EVANGELISM
John Stott
The word mission, I have so far suggested, is properly a comprehensive word, embracing everything that God sends his people into the world to do. It therefore includes evangelism and social responsibility, since both are authentic expressions of the love that longs to serve others in their need.
The Priority of Evangelism
Yet I think we should agree with the statement of the Lausanne Covenant that “in the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary.” Christians should feel an acute pain of conscience and compassion when human beings are oppressed or neglected in any way, whether what is being denied them is civil liberty, racial respect, education, medicine, employment, or adequate food, clothing and shelter. Anything that undermines human dignity should be an offense to us. But is anything so destructive of human dignity as alienation from God through ignorance or rejection of the gospel? And how can we seriously maintain that political and economic liberation is just as important as eternal salvation? Both are certainly challenges to Christian love. But listen to the apostle Paul when he writes with solemn emphasis about his concern for his fellow Jews: “I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race” (Romans 9:1-3). What was the cause of his anguish? That they had lost their national Jewish independence and were under the colonial heel of Rome? That they were often despised and hated by Gentiles, socially boycotted and deprived of equal opportunities? No. “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (Romans 10:1), and the context makes it plain beyond doubt that the “salvation” Paul desired for them was their acceptance with God (Romans 10:2-4). That few if any of us feel this inward agony is a mark of our spiritual immaturity.
Moreover, in our evangelistic concern our chief burden should be for those millions of unreached peoples of the world. In relation to them the Lausanne Covenant stresses the urgency of the evangelistic task in the following way:
More than two-thirds of all humanity have yet to be evangelized. We are ashamed that so many have been neglected; it is a standing rebuke to us and to the whole church. . . . We are convinced that this is the time for churches and para-church agencies to pray earnestly for the salvation of the unreached and to launch new efforts to achieve world evangelization. A reduction of foreign misisonaries and money in an evangelized country may sometimes be necessary to facilitate the national church’s growth in self-reliance and to release resources for unevangelized areas. Missionaries should flow ever more freely from and to all continents in a spirit of humble service. The goal should be, by all available means and the earliest possible time, that every person will have the opportunity to hear, to understand, and to receive the good news.
The Meaning of Evangelism
Granted, then, the priority of evangelism, how is it to be defined? In a few words, euangelizomai means to bring or to announce the euangelion, the good news. Once or twice in the New Testament it is used of ordinary, one might almost say “secular,” news items, as when the angel Gabriel told Zechariah the good news that his wife Elizabeth was to have a son (Luke 1:19), and when Timothy brought Paul the good news of the Thessalonians’ faith and love (1 Thessalonians 3:6). The regular use of the verb relates, however, to the Christian good news. It is the spread of the gospel that constitutes evangelism, and this fact enables us to begin negatively by stating what evangelism is not.
First, evangelism must not be defined in terms of results, for this is not how the word is used in the New Testament. Normally the verb is in the middle voice. Occasionally it is used absolutely, for example “there they evangelized,” meaning “there they preached the gospel” (Acts 14:7; compare Romans 15:20). Usually, however, something is added. Sometimes it is the message they preached, for example, they “went about evangelizing the word” (Acts 8:4, my translation), while Philip in Samaria “evangelized concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 8:12, my translation). Sometimes, however, what is added is the people to whom or the places in which the gospel was preached. For example, the apostles “evangelized many villages of the Samaritans” and Philip “evangelized all the towns” along the Palestinian coast (Acts 8:25, 40, my translation). There is no mention in these verses whether the word that was “evangelized” was believed, or whether the inhabitants of the towns and villages “evangelized” were converted. To “evangelize” in New Testament usage does not mean to win converts, as it usually does when we use the word. Evangelism is the announcement of the good news, irrespective of the results.
So although the word is often defined in popular missionary writing and speaking as bringing people to conversion, that result is not included in its New Testament meaning. Evangelism is neither to convert people, nor to win them, nor to bring them to Christ, though this is indeed the first goal of evangelism. Evangelism is to preach the gospel.
Dr. J. I. Packer justly criticized the famous definition of evangelism first formulated in England in 1919 by the Archbishops’ Committee of Enquiry into the Evangelistic Work of the Church. It begins, “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit that men shall come to put their trust in God through him.” Dr. Packer draws attention to the form of the sentence “so to present Christ Jesus . . . that men shall . . .” This is to define evangelism in terms of success. But to evangelize is not so to preach that something happens. “The way to tell whether in fact you are evangelizing is not to ask whether conversions are known to have resulted from your witness. It is to ask whether you are faithfully making known the gospel message.” He adds that “the results of preaching depend not on the wishes and intentions of men, but on the will of God Almighty.” Now of course our objective is that something will happen, namely, that people will respond and believe. That is why we plead with them to “be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). At the same time we must not confuse an objective (what we want to happen) with a consequence (what actually does happen). If we want to be biblically accurate we must insist that the essence of evangelism lies in the faithful proclamation of the gospel. It is with a view to persuasion indeed. We are not indifferent to results. We long for people to be converted. But it is still evangelism whether in fact people are persuaded to embrace it or not. I shall say more about the element of persuasion later.
Second, evangelism must not be defined in terms of methods. To evangelize is to announce the good news, however the announcement is made. It is to bring the good news, by whatever means it is brought. In different degrees we can evangelize by word of mouth (whether to individuals, groups or crowds); by print, picture or screen; by drama (whether what is dramatized is fact or fiction); by good works of love (Matthew 5:16); by a Christ-centered home; by a transformed life; and even by an almost speechless excitement about Jesus. Nevertheless, because evangelism is fundamentally an announcement, some verbalization is necessary if the content of the good news is to be communicated with any precision.
After these negatives, we come back to the positive statement that evangelism may and must be defined only in terms of the message. Therefore biblical evangelism makes the biblical evangel indispensable. Nothing hinders evangelism today more than the widespread loss of confidence in the truth, relevance and power of the gospel. Paul said he was “eager” to preach the gospel in Rome. But then he was convinced that it was God’s power for salvation (Romans 1:14-16).
Is There a New Testament Gospel?
What, then, is the New Testament gospel? Before we are in a position to answer this question, two preliminary problems stand in our way.
First, is there in fact one New Testament gospel? The New Testament certainly presents us with no wooden and unbending stereotype. There are clear differences of emphasis, owing to the author’s own background and temperament, and to the Holy Spirit’s revelation, so that the apostle Paul can dare to write of “my gospel” when he is referring to the particular “mystery” that has been disclosed to him.
There is also some historical development, even in the same author, so that what Paul writes in his later letters is recognizably different from what he has written earlier. Different situations also called forth different treatments. The apostolic approach was “situational,” that is, a sensitive response to each particular challenge. Paul’s synagogue sermon in Antioch diverged widely from his Areopagus address in Athens; so did his letter to the Romans from those to the Corinthians. Nevertheless, having allowed for all these variations, and despite all the rich diversity of theological formulation in the New Testament, there was only one basic apostolic tradition of the gospel. Paul insists to the Galatians that the Jerusalem apostles had given him “the right hand of fellowship” as a sign of their acknowledgment of his mission and message (Galatians 1–2, especially Galatians 2:9). In the same chapters he affirms vehemently that there is no other gospel, and calls down the curse of God on anybody, angelic or apostolic—indeed even himself—who should presume to preach a different gospel. Later, in 1 Corinthians, after summarizing the gospel and listing the resurrection appearances, he concludes: “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). This cluster of personal pronouns—I, they, we and you—is very impressive. It is an assertion that he and the Jerusalem apostles were agreed about the gospel, that together the whole apostolic band proclaimed it, and that together the whole Christian church received and believed it. There is only one gospel.
The second preliminary question is whether the one New Testament gospel is transient because it was culturally conditioned, or whether it is changeless. There can be no gainsaying the fact that in the purpose of God his revelation reached its culmination in the first century A.D., in Christ and in the apostolic witness to Christ, and therefore in what to us is an ancient culture of mixed Hebrew, Greek and Roman ingredients. Nor can there be any doubt that, in order to grasp his revelation, we have to think ourselves back into that culture. But the fact that God disclosed himself in terms of a particular culture gives us not a justification for rejecting his revelation, but rather the right principle by which to interpret it, and also the solemn responsibility to reinterpret it in terms meaningful to our own culture. But there is only one gospel, and in its essence it never changes.
Let me say something more about revelation and culture. I am arguing that evangelism must be defined in terms of the message that we share with others. We have good news to communicate. So if evangelism is to take place, there must be communication—a true communication between ancient revelation and modern culture. This means that our message must be at the same time faithful and contemporary. First it must be faithful—faithful, that is, to Scripture. We find our message first and foremost not in any existential situation, but in the Bible. As Dr. Visser ’t Hooft wrote, “I do not believe that evangelism is adequately described as answering the questions which men are asking, however deep those questions may be. For evangelism is in the first place the transmission of God’s question to man. And that question is and remains whether we are willing to accept Jesus Christ as the one and only Lord of Life.” But he goes on to say that we must “try to relate God’s question to the existential situation of men and show that as they answer God’s question they find at the same time the answer to their deepest concerns.”
Now it is comparatively easy to be faithful if we do not care about being contemporary, and easy also to be contemporary if we do not bother to be faithful. It is the search for a combination of truth and relevance that is exacting. Yet nothing else can save us from an insensitive loyalty to formulas and shibboleths on the one hand, and from a treasonable disloyalty to the revelation of God on the other. We need both to be true to the Bible, and also to be timely in our culture.
We come back now to our earlier question: what is the one, the changeless New Testament gospel? And in stating it can we indicate at all its contemporary power? The first and best answer would be to say that the whole Bible is God’s good news in all its astonishing relevance. Bible and gospel are almost alternative terms, for the major function of the Bible in all its length and breadth is to bear witness to Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, God’s revelation recorded in Scripture has been distilled for us in the good news the apostles proclaimed. What is it?
C. H. Dodd produced a seminal analysis of the sermons of the apostles. He made a distinction between kerygma and didachē, that is, between the proclamation of the gospel and the ethical instruction of converts. Then he presented systematic reconstructions of the kerygma as preached by Paul, and as seen in the speeches attributed to Peter in Acts—showing the remarkable amount of common structure and content that they exhibit. The points below build on Dodd’s helpful analysis.
In a single word, God’s good news is Jesus. On the day of Pentecost, after quoting from Joel, Peter began his sermon proper: “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus . . .” (Acts 2:22). His first word was Jesus, and Jesus must be our first word too. Jesus Christ is the heart and soul of the gospel. When Philip sat down beside the Ethiopian, we are told literally that “he evangelized to him Jesus,” that is, he shared with him the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:35, my translation). Similarly, Paul began his great manifesto to the Romans by describing himself as “set apart for the gospel of God . . . concerning his Son . . . Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:1-4). And we must all be profoundly thankful that the personality of Jesus retains its powerful hold over human minds. When people take any serious interest in Jesus, whether they come from a background of other faiths, or secularism, or youthful counterculture, they often feel his fascination.
But how did the apostles present Jesus? Their good news contained at least five elements.
The Gospel Events
First, of course, there were the gospel events. For certain “things” had “happened” in Jerusalem and “been accomplished” among them (Luke 1:1; 24:14, 18), which nobody could deny. In particular, Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and resurrected. So Paul summarizes the gospel tradition: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins . . . , that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day . . . , and that he appeared” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). He actually mentions four events—the death, burial, resurrection and appearance of Jesus. Yet it is clear that his emphasis is on two, namely, that Christ died (and was buried in order to prove it) and that Christ rose (and was seen in order to prove it). The appearance attested the reality of his resurrection, as the burial attested the reality of his death.
The same stress on the resurrection of Jesus is clear in the speeches of the Acts. Sometimes the apostle Peter would begin with a reference to the life and ministry of the man Jesus (Acts 2:22; 3:22; 10:36-39; compare Acts 13:23-25), and sometimes he went on to his exaltation, reign and return. But Peter’s message, like Paul’s, focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection. Both events were real, objective and historical. And surely the right response to the existential mood of today is not to create a parallel Christian existentialism that despises history in favor of experience, and demythologizes the resurrection into an inward encounter with reality, but rather to offer to the modern mind as it flounders in the quicksand of subjectivity the objective bedrock of Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection are solid historical events.
The apostles did not present their Lord’s death and resurrection merely as historical events, however, but as significant events, as saving events. Paul was clear that he “died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3; compare Galatians 1:4) and was “raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). It is sometimes said that, by contrast, the apostle Peter in his early Acts speeches had no doctrine of the cross, but proclaimed it as untheological history. This is C. H. Dodd’s position, for example. Yet one wonders whether he allows sufficiently for the implications of what Peter said. First, he attributed the cross as much to “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” as to “the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23), and if the cross was part of a divine purpose, it must have had a meaning. Second, he designated Jesus God’s “servant,” which must be an allusion to the Suffering Servant who bore the sins of many (Acts 3:13; 4:27; compare Acts 8:32-33). Third, there is the surprising description of the crucifixion as a “hanging” of Jesus on a “tree” (Acts 5:30; 10:39; compare Acts 13:29). This example of apostolic shorthand looked back to Deuteronomy 21:23, which said that any man hanged on a tree was under the curse of God, and so also anticipated the developed doctrine of Christ bearing our sin and even the curse of the law, which we find later in the letters of both Paul and Peter (Galatians 3:10, 13 and 1 Peter 2:24).
Certainly too the resurrection was more than a historical event. It was a divine vindication of Jesus. “You killed him,” Peter repeated several times (Acts 2:23; 3:15; 5:30-31), “but God raised him,” thus reversing the verdict of men, snatching him from the place of a curse and exalting him to his own right hand as Lord, Christ and Savior (Acts 2:24; 3:13-15; 5:30-31).
The Gospel Witnesses
The second element in the apostles’ message is the gospel witnesses, by which I mean the evidence to which they appealed for its authentication. This was twofold, in order that in the mouth of two witnesses the truth of the testimony might be established.
The first witness was the Old Testament Scriptures. Paul emphasized this by repetition in his succinct statement of the gospel (1 Corinthians 15:3-4): “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” and “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” And Peter kept quoting Scripture in his Acts speeches, to demonstrate that the Christ of Old Testament expectation was Jesus. We can say with confidence that the apostles had learned from Jesus himself this truth of the fulfillment of Scripture in his death and resurrection. They learned it partly during his public ministry, but especially after his resurrection, as Luke records. They would never forget his words, that “ ‘everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead’ ” (Luke 24:46). In this way the apostles urged that they were not innovators. They had not invented their message. As Paul was to claim later, when standing on trial before Agrippa: “So I stand here testifying both to small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Christ must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to the people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:22-23).
The emphasis on Scripture had another significance. Since the death of Jesus, his resurrection and his subsequent outpouring of the Spirit were all in fulfillment of messianic prophecy, it was evident that the new age had dawned and that Christ had ushered it in. As C. H. Dodd puts it, “The Pauline kerygma . . . is a proclamation of the facts of the death and resurrection of Christ in an eschatological setting which gives significance to the facts,” indeed a “saving significance.”
The second witness was the evidence of the apostles’ own eyes. Jesus himself had linked the forthcoming apostolic witness to the prophetic witness of the Old Testament when he added to his reference to Scripture “you are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:48). He did it again before the ascension: “you shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). They knew they were uniquely qualified to witness to Christ, not just because they had been “with him from the beginning” (compare Mark 3:14; John 15:27; Acts 1:21-22), but especially because they had seen the cross and the risen Christ with their own eyes. So Peter regularly included in his sermons a reference to the apostolic witness:
This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. (Acts 2:32)
You . . . killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. (Acts 3:15)
And we are witnesses to these things. (Acts 5:32)
To Cornelius, Peter was even more explicit:
And we are witnesses to all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify. (Acts 10:39-42)
Thus the apostles joined together the witness of the Old Testament prophets and their own witness, which came later to be recorded in the New Testament.
This double authentication is important for our own day. We have already noted the fascination that the person of Jesus has for our contemporaries, and that this often gives us a meeting point with them. But which Jesus are we talking about? Even Paul in his day recognized the possibility of teachers proclaiming “another Jesus” than the Jesus he preached (2 Corinthians 11:4). And there are many “Jesuses” abroad today. There is Jesus whom some scholars treat as a myth. There is Jesus the tragic, failed revolutionary. There is Jesus as portrayed in musicals and movies. It is over against these human reinterpretations that we need urgently to recover and reinstate the authentic Jesus, the Jesus of history who is the Jesus of Scripture.
This means, further, that we have no liberty to preach Jesus Christ according to our own fantasy, or even according to our own experience. Our personal witness does indeed corroborate the witness of the biblical authors, especially that of the apostles. But theirs is the primary witness, for they were “with Jesus” and knew him, and they have borne witness to what they heard with their ears and saw with their eyes. Our witness is always secondary and subordinate to theirs. So there is no escape from the continuing work of conservative scholars who are seeking to defend the reliability of the gospel portrait of Jesus and to reestablish public confidence in the apostolic witness. Our responsibility in evangelism is neither to create a Christ of our own who is not in Scripture, nor to embroider or manipulate the Christ who is in Scripture, but to bear faithful witness to the one and only Christ there is as God has presented him to the world in the remarkably unified testimony of both the Old and the New Testament Scriptures.
The Gospel Affirmations
Third, there were and still are the gospel affirmations. As we have seen, they center on Jesus Christ. They concern not simply what he did more than nineteen centuries ago, however, but what he is today in consequence. The historical Christ is the contemporary Christ. In New Testament terms, the fundamental affirmation is that “Jesus is Lord.” If we confess with our lips that “Jesus is Lord,” Paul wrote, and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved (Romans 10:9). Indeed, the end for which Christ died and rose again was “that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Romans 14:9). For God has highly exalted Jesus and bestowed on him the name above every name that every knee should bow to him and every tongue confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:9-11). It is an essentially Christian affirmation, for no one can make it but by the illumination of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3).
What Paul insists on in these texts is that the lordship or sovereignty of Jesus is a direct consequence of his death and resurrection. Peter taught the same in his Acts speeches. It is the Jesus who died and whom God raised up who is now “exalted at the right hand of God” (Acts 2:32-33; compare Acts 3:13; 4:11). This was in fulfillment of the great messianic promise “Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool” (Psalm 110:1), which not only looked back to the Savior’s completed work from which he was now resting, as the writer to the Hebrews shows (Hebrews 10:12), but also looks on to the final triumph for which he is now waiting. Yet this is assured. Already in anticipation, Peter could say to Cornelius, albeit in a parenthesis, “he is Lord of all” (Acts 10:36).
The “right hand of God” at which Christ “sits” is then symbolic of his universal authority, because of which he is able both to bestow blessing and to require submission. First, the blessing. It was after his exaltation to God’s right hand that he “received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit” and poured out on his church this distinctive blessing of the new age (Acts 2:33). According to the Joel prophecy that Peter said had been fulfilled, it was God himself who had promised “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17). Yet, knowing this, Peter does not hesitate to attribute the outpouring to Jesus, who occupies the position of supreme honor and authority at the Father’s right hand.
If from the throne Jesus bestows blessing on his people, he also expects them to submit to him, to bow their knee to him. “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). These words formed the climax of Peter’s sermon. They cut his listeners to the heart and made them cry out for instruction on what to do. They must repent, Peter said. God had reversed their verdict on Jesus, for they had killed him but God had raised him. Now they must reverse their verdict too. They must bring the whole of life, individual and social, under the sovereign lordship of Jesus. To be in his kingdom or under his rule brings both total blessing and total demand.
Thus the symbolic statement that Jesus is “at God’s right hand” comprises the two great gospel affirmations that he is Savior (with authority to bestow salvation) and that he is Lord (with authority to demand submission). The two are joined by Peter in his second speech to the Sanhedrin: “God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31).
Moreover, both affirmations are part of the absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ. If we are asked in today’s increasingly syncretistic culture wherein lies the uniqueness of Jesus, I think we should have to answer “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus is Savior.” Theologically speaking, these affirmations express the great doctrines of incarnation and atonement, and there is nothing comparable to them in other religions. The claimed “avatars” (“descents” or so-called incarnations) of Hinduism not only lack historical foundation, but their incidental nature and their plurality set them apart from the central Christian claim that once only and in verifiable history God became man in Jesus. And the repeated promises in the Qur’an of the forgiveness of a compassionate and merciful Allah are all made to the meritorious, whose merits have been weighed in Allah’s scales, whereas the gospel is good news of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales. The world is still waiting to hear these gospel affirmations, and to hear them in the present tense that speaks to people today, namely, “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus is Savior.”
The Gospel Promises
Fourth, we turn logically from the gospel affirmations to the gospel promises, to what Christ now offers and indeed promises to those who come to him. For the good news concerns neither just what Jesus once did (he died and rose again), nor just what he now is (exalted to God’s right hand as Lord and Savior), but also what he now offers as a result. What is this? At the end of his Pentecost sermon Peter promised the crowd with great assurance that if they repented and were baptized they would receive two free gifts of God, namely, “the forgiveness of sins” and “the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Forgiveness is an essential ingredient of the salvation offered in the gospel. The risen Lord had commanded that “forgiveness of sins” be proclaimed to all nations on the basis of his name (Luke 24:47), and the Reformed understanding of his statement “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” (John 20:23) has always been that he was telling them to preach the terms of the divine forgiveness with boldness and authority. Certainly this is what the apostles did. “Repent,” cried Peter, “and turn again that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). And he assured Cornelius: “Every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43). Similarly, Paul declared in the synagogue in Antioch, “Through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you” (Acts 13:38). However unpopular this message may be today, forgiveness remains humanity’s chief need and an indispensable part of the good news.
But Christ offers more than the forgiveness of our past. He offers too a new life in the present through the regeneration and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who is also the guarantee of our future inheritance in heaven. We must not separate the two gospel promises that God has joined together, forgiveness and the Spirit. Both belong to the “salvation” that Peter insisted was in Jesus Christ alone (Acts 4:12), and both are part of the “liberation” that so many people seek. True freedom is more than deliverance from guilt; it is deliverance also from self, from what Malcolm Muggeridge once called “the dark little dungeon of my own ego.” Once rescued from guilt and self-centeredness, we can give ourselves to the service of God and others. And only in this servitude is true freedom to be found.
The Gospel Demands
Fifth, we come to the gospel demands. We move from what Jesus did, who Jesus is and what Jesus promises, to what Jesus requires of us today. We have already seen that Peter’s first word in answer to the crowd’s conscience-stricken question of what they should do was repent. It was his first word again at the conclusion of his second sermon: “Repent therefore” (Acts 3:19). And Paul ended his sermon to the Athenians with the statement that God “now commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).
To repent was to turn from their sin, and in particular their grievous sin of rejecting Jesus. Their metanoia or “change of mind” was, then, a reversal of their opinion of Jesus and of their attitude toward him. They had repudiated him and expressed their rejection in the crucifixion; now they were to believe in him as Lord, Christ and Savior, and express their acceptance in their baptism. For, although baptism no doubt means more than this, it cannot mean less. They were to be baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ.” That is, they were to submit humbly to baptism in the name of the very person they had previously sought to destroy. Nothing could indicate more clearly than this their public and penitent faith in him. Further, their repentance and baptism introduced them into the new community of Jesus. There was no conversion without church membership, as I shall argue at greater length later.
At the Lausanne Congress in 1974, the speaker who laid greatest emphasis on the indispensable necessity of repentance was Dr. René Padilla from Argentina. He also insisted on the social dimension of repentance. In that section of his pre-Congress paper that was titled “Evangelism and Repentance Ethics,” he wrote, “This new reality (sc. the arrival of the Kingdom) places men in a position of crisis—they cannot continue to live as if nothing had happened; the Kingdom of God demands a new mentality, a reorientation of all their values, repentance.” Also, “the change imposed involves a new life-style. . . . Without ethics there is no real repentance. . . . And without repentance there is no salvation.” Further, “Repentance is much more than a private affair between the individual and God. It is the complete reorientation of life in the world—among men—in response to the work of God in Jesus Christ.”
Thus social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God (as we shall consider in the last chapter) without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
Conversion includes faith as well as repentance. It is true that Peter’s command to the crowd was to “repent” rather than to “believe.” Yet, those who received Peter’s word, repented and were baptized are a few verses later referred to as “believers” (Acts 2:44). “Every one who believes in him receives forgiveness,” Peter said to Cornelius (Acts 10:43). “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” Paul said to the jailer at Philippi (Acts 16:31).
So the gospel demands are repentance and faith—and (in public) baptism. This leads me to mention a controversy in certain evangelical circles. Some have been so determined to maintain the doctrine of justification by faith alone that they have not been able to accommodate themselves to the addition of repentance. They distinguish sharply between the acceptance of Jesus as Savior and the surrender to him as Lord, and they even promulgate the grotesque notion that to insist on surrender in addition to acceptance is to distort the gospel. Well, I honor their conscientious desire to protect the gospel from all perversions. And certainly justification is by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone. Further, we must be careful never to define faith in such a way as to ascribe to it any merit. The whole value of faith lies in its object (Jesus Christ), not in itself. Nevertheless, saving faith is not an “acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior” within a kind of mystical vacuum and without any awareness either of the Christ being “accepted” or of the concrete implications of this acceptance. Saving faith is a total, penitent and submissive commitment to Christ, and it would have been inconceivable to the apostles that anybody could believe in Jesus as Savior without submitting to him as Lord. We have already seen that the one exalted to God’s right hand is Jesus the Lord and Savior. We cannot chop this Jesus into bits and then respond to only one of the bits. The object of saving faith is the whole and undivided person of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
One other point before I leave the gospel demands. We must not miss the note of urgency as well as authority in which the apostles issued their call to repent and believe. They were conscious not only that the summons came from the throne where Jesus reigned but also that this same Jesus would return as Judge. The God who “now . . . commands all men everywhere to repent” had already fixed the judgment day and appointed the Judge. He is Jesus, the same one who had died and been resurrected (Acts 17:30-31; compare Acts 3:20-21; 10:42; 13:40-41).
The Context of Evangelism
Evangelism, then, is sharing the good news with others. The good news is Jesus. And the good news about Jesus that we announce is that he died for our sins and was raised from death, and that in consequence he reigns as Lord and Savior at God’s right hand, and has authority both to command repentance and faith, and to bestow forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit on all those who repent, believe and are baptized. And all this is according to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is more than that. It is precisely what is meant by “proclaiming the kingdom of God.” For in fulfillment of Scripture God’s reign has broken into the life of humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus. This reign or rule of God is exercised from the throne by Jesus, who bestows salvation and requires obedience. These are the blessing and the demand of the kingdom. As Jesus himself had put it at the very beginning of his public ministry, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).
Finally, having tried to define evangelism in terms of the evangel, I think I need to say something about its context, for the proclamation of the gospel cannot be seen as an activity in isolation. Something precedes it and something follows it. What precedes it may justly be called “presence” and what follows it “persuasion.”
The first word is presence. The notion of the “Christian presence” has not always commended itself because its advocates have sometimes spoken of a “silent presence” or an “authentic silence.” No doubt there are occasions when it is more Christian to be silent than to speak. Yet the Christian presence in the world is intended by God to lead to the Christian proclamation to the world. On the other hand, we can accept that those who advocate a degree of “silent presence” may be reacting justifiably against some of our brash and aggressive evangelical forms of evangelism. If, however, generally speaking, there should be no presence without proclamation, we must equally assert that there should be no proclamation without presence. The risen Lord’s first word of commission was not preach but go. And going into the world means presence.
Moreover, it is to be the visible presence of a church that bears an attractive aspect. As Samuel Escobar wrote in his paper for the 1974 Lausanne Congress, “The primitive church was not perfect, but evidently it was a community that called the attention of men because of the qualitative differences of its life. The message was not only heard from them, it was also seen in the way they lived.” There can be no evangelism without the church. The message comes from a community that embodies it and that welcomes into its fellowship those who receive it.
The second word is persuasion. I mentioned earlier J. I. Packer’s criticism of the archbishops’ definition of evangelism. I have argued that we should not define evangelism in such a way as to include the element of persuasion within that definition of the activity itself. Evangelism is to share the good news of the facts of what God has done through Christ for the salvation of the world. Of course, we must certainly accept that Paul described his evangelistic preaching by the statement “we persuade men” (2 Corinthians 5:11), and that many times in the Acts Luke describes him doing so, adding that many were “persuaded.” This is not in dispute; but to make the persuasion of our hearers a part of our definition of evangelism is to confuse the activity itself with its goals. Our goal is indeed to persuade people to repent and trust in Christ. We have this liberty to state our purpose: yet it is not for us to determine the result. Some speak of “persuasion” as if the outcome could be secured by human effort, almost as if it were another word for “coercion.” But no. Our responsibility is to be faithful; the results are in the hand of Almighty God.
I do not think I can conclude more appropriately than by quoting paragraph 4 of the Lausanne Covenant, which is titled “The Nature of Evangelism”:
To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. Our Christian presence in the world is indispensable to evangelism, and so is that kind of dialogue whose purpose is to listen sensitively in order to understand. But evangelism itself is the proclamation of the historical, biblical Christ as Saviour and Lord, with a view to persuading people to come to him personally and so be reconciled to God. In issuing the gospel invitation we have no liberty to conceal the cost of discipleship. Jesus still calls all who would follow him to deny themselves, take up their cross, and identify themselves with his new community. The results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his church and responsible service in the world.