“The Blessing and the Demand of the Kingdom”
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REFLECTIONS ON EVANGELISM
Chris Wright
John Stott was an evangelist at heart, from the earliest days following his spiritual birth as a Christian to the latest days of his life on earth. Led to faith in Christ as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy by the remarkable evangelist E. J. H. Nash (affectionately known as “Bash”), he quickly became a leader in the evangelistic camps for boys at Iwerne Minster. He became a renowned university evangelist, first in his own alma mater, Cambridge University, then on campuses in the United States, Canada and internationally. He led his church, All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, to be a model of parish evangelism, mobilizing an army of laypeople in the skills of personal witnessing and systematic discipling of new believers. And on one occasion when I visited him at the care home where he spent his last four years in increasing incapacity, his face lit up as he told me how he had shared the way of salvation with one of the staff in response to a question, as she wheeled him back from the dining room to his own small apartment.
So it is not at all surprising that he begins his chapter on evangelism by repeating the statement of the Lausanne Covenant paragraph 6 (which he himself had drafted), “In the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary.” He has already made it clear that he does not mean by this that evangelism is the only task of the church. Rather, in his opening words, “the word mission . . . is a properly comprehensive word, embracing everything that God sends his people into the world to do. It therefore includes evangelism and social responsibility.” Nevertheless, within this nonnegotiable breadth and wholeness of the church’s missional task (which Stott staunchly upheld all his life), evangelism has priority. How that double commitment both to the intrinsically holistic nature of mission and to the primacy of evangelism within that holism was to be worked out in theory and practice was something to which he devoted a lot of attention in consultations and writing over the following decades.
As I argued above, I myself would prefer to speak of the centrality of the gospel, rather than the primacy of evangelism, in seeking to define what is meant by holistic and integrated mission. And I do so with a subtle change of emphasis from the way Stott (along with many others) justifies the assertion of the primacy of evangelism on the basis of what constitutes humanity’s greatest need. I do not, of course, in any way question the radical biblical diagnosis of the human condition as one of fundamental alienation from God, lost in rebellion and sin and facing God’s judgment. People need to hear the good news that addresses that reality. But to speak of the centrality of the gospel points us not first of all to humans in their need, but to God in his grace and to the biblical story of what God has done in Christ to save the world. And by pointing us to the great biblical narrative as constitutive of the gospel, it necessarily integrates into that good news all the biblically revealed dimensions of God’s good purposes for human life, recognizing but not dichotomizing spiritual and material, eternal and earthly, and so on, dimensions thereof.
I think there is very little difference in practice between this way of expressing the point and how Stott actually does work out his balance of “holism with priority.” For in this chapter, after his short discussion of how evangelism should be defined, he immediately goes on to his majestic exposition of the gospel that forms the bulk of the chapter (the gospel events, witnesses, affirmations, promises and demands). One might say that for Stott, it was the centrality of the gospel that generated the primacy of evangelism, whereas for me the centrality of the gospel generates the ultimacy and necessity of evangelism within an integrated understanding of mission as a whole. This kind of centrality is not such as makes everything else merely peripheral, marginal and unimportant, but rather the centrality around which everything else is integrated, held together and given direction and meaning.
Two of Stott’s points in this chapter seem to me to deserve further reflection and greater expansion—in ways that, again, I believe he would have approved. In each case they can be introduced by a quotation from the chapter itself.
“The Whole Bible Is God’s Good News”
In a few powerful sentences, Stott articulates a view of the gospel that remarkably foreshadows recent efforts to call evangelicals back from using the term gospel as if it meant only a “plan of salvation,” or a few spiritual laws that provide a mechanism for individuals to ensure their place in heaven when they die. Rather, we need to speak about the gospel in the way the New Testament itself does, as fundamentally the good news constituted by the whole-Bible story of all that God both promised and accomplished and will bring to completion through Jesus of Nazareth, as promised Messiah, atoning Savior and returning King.
What is the gospel? Stott writes, “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. . . . In a single word, God’s good news is Jesus.”
Working backwards through Stott’s concise logic, his point is this:
Now all this is incontrovertibly true, and just as it stands it counteracts the tendency to reduce the gospel to a few extracted biblical verses, arranged in a sequence that focuses first on my personal sin problem, and then on the death of Jesus bearing my sin in my place, and finally on the promise of forgiveness and eternal life—for me. I do not for one moment deny the glorious truth of those verses and the eternal consequences they generate for those who are led to put their faith in Christ through them, including myself. But this personalized salvation plan, though it is accomplished and guaranteed within the gospel, is not the whole story. Or to be more precise, it is not the whole story that the gospel fundamentally is and tells.
When Stott goes on to support his claim that the gospel involves the whole Bible, he does it in two ways. First (in “The Gospel Events”), he points to the biblical record of historical events—the things that actually happened in Jerusalem: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But these events, he points out, are given their saving significance because of the scripturally revealed plan and purpose of God and the interpretation of the Messiah’s death already provided in the Old Testament. And second (in “The Gospel Witnesses”), he emphasizes the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, as highlighted by Jesus himself when he said to his disciples, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations” (Luke 24:46-47 NIV).
These two points are, of course, true, but they do not quite go far enough in clarifying the relationship of the Old Testament to the gospel. For it is not just a book of prophecies about Christ. Rather, it tells the first part of the overarching biblical story that establishes the whole framework within which the identity and work of Jesus Christ make sense and constitute good news for all nations. The gospel is good news within an understanding of the world and humanity and the future of both that is rendered to us by the whole Bible story. Without the biblical worldview, constituted by the biblical story, our understanding and presentation of the gospel will be deficient.
When Jesus referred his disciples to “the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms” (Luke 24:44), he was specifying not merely the predictive prophecies but the whole canon of what we now call the Old Testament, in the full sweep, direction and flow of its grand narrative. The Torah includes the story of creation, the fall, God’s covenant promise to Abraham with its universal vision, the exodus redemption of Israel, the Sinai covenant, and the anticipation of a future that would see the ultimate triumph of the faithfulness and grace of God over the rebellion and judgment of his people. “The Prophets,” in the Hebrew canon, include the Former Prophets (the so-called Deuteronomic History from Joshua to 2 Kings), telling the story of the gift of the land, the emergence of monarchy and the covenant with David, the long decline into the death of exile, and the “resurrection” of the return from exile. And in the course of this great story, in passages drawn from all three sections (Law, Prophets and Psalms [“Writings”]), we find again and again the note of God’s universal purpose for all nations. We are reminded often that this story is ultimately one that will embrace all nations and indeed all creation within God’s redemptive covenant blessing. The Old Testament is, in fact, a good news story, even if the good news has not arrived yet.
Sadly, the Old Testament is often presented as a kind of negative backdrop, a contrasting foil for the gospel—something from which the gospel actually rescues us. We easily treat the distortion of the Old Testament by the apostle Paul’s opponents as if it were what the Old Testament itself taught. Now of course, as Paul fully acknowledged (in company with Jesus, Moses and all the prophets), the people of Israel failed miserably, proving themselves to be just as much sin-laden, fallen rebels as the rest of the human race. But the purposes of God were not nullified by the failure of Israel. On the contrary, the good news of the Old Testament is precisely the promise and undying hope that Yahweh, the God of Israel, would triumph over evil, would reign as king and would bring salvation to the ends of the earth. That “gospel” was first announced to Abraham, says Paul, quoting Genesis 12:3 (Galatians 3:8). And even the key New Testament gospel words euangelion, and euangelizomai come from the Greek translations of Old Testament “good news” texts about the reign of God among the nations, such as Psalm 96:1-3 and Isaiah 52:7-10.
So when Jesus came announcing that the kingdom of God was breaking into history in his own person, people did not need to check a dictionary to find out what he meant by “believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). They knew the story they were in. They knew their God (Yahweh the Holy One of Israel) and his promises. They may have had many confused ideas about what it would mean when their God fully established his reign (which Jesus spent a lot of time correcting), but they knew that only when “our God reigns” would there be good news for the celebration of “the ruins of Jerusalem,” for all nations and the ends of the earth—and indeed for the rejoicing of all creation (Isaiah 52:9-10; Psalm 96:10-13). The good news was that God had kept his promise to Abraham, though he had done so through the paradoxical path of the incarnation, life, rejection, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. So to those who joined themselves to Christ in repentance, faith and obedient discipleship, there comes the further good news of the assurance of future participation in the “good ending” of the story, in the resurrection of the dead and eternal life in the new creation.
In other words, although we must agree and insist with Stott that the gospel is indeed constituted by Jesus Christ himself, and centers on his atoning death and victorious resurrection, we must also see that “Christ-story” within the framework of the whole-Bible story, from creation to new creation—which I think is probably what Paul meant when he refers to “the whole counsel/plan/will of God” (Acts 20:27; compare Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:15-23). Ben Witherington III has explored in great depth how Paul’s whole thinking, preaching and teaching was shaped by that scriptural story—including the way he understood and preached the gospel itself.
Paul’s thought, including both theology and ethics, is grounded in the grand narrative and in a story that has continued to develop out of that narrative.
This Story is a tale as large as the universe yet as small as an individual human being. It is, however, not a Story about everything, not even about all of human history. It is a Story that focuses on God’s relationship to humankind, from the beginning of the human race in Adam to its climax in the eschatological Adam, and beyond. It is a Story about creation and creature and their redemption by, in, and through Jesus Christ. It is a Story about a community of faith created out of the midst of fallen humanity. It involves both tragedy and triumph, both the lost and the saved, both the first and the last. Its focus is repeatedly on divine and human actions on the stage of human history. It is out of this Story, which Paul sees as involving both history and His story (i.e. Christ’s), that he argues, urges, encourages, debates, promises and threatens.
That great story as a whole—Bible-revealed, God-driven, Christ-centered and hope-filled—constitutes the good news that we are called first to participate in by faith and life, and then to share in the “gospeling” work of evangelism.
At one point, Stott laments the loss of urgency in evangelism, which he attributes to our loss of confidence in the gospel itself. “Nothing hinders evangelism today more than the widespread loss of confidence in the truth, relevance and power of the gospel.” I agree. But I would add that one reason for that loss of confidence in the gospel is that so many Christians, including evangelicals, have simply forgotten the story we are in (or never really learned it)—the story within which the gospel is constituted. They have accepted the gospel as an individualized guarantee of a future “in heaven” through faith in the atoning work of the cross. But then they continue to live in this world by this world’s story—whatever story that happens to be in their particular cultural milieu. They have not allowed the gospel to transform their worldview at its deepest level, as the true story of the universe and the stance from which to interpret history, the present and the future. Basically, they have “added Jesus” to provide a happy ending to an otherwise unaltered personal and cultural story.
How else can we explain the massive syncretism of Western Christianity, for example, in which there seems so little difference between even evangelical Christians and the ambient idolatrous consumerism with its underlying myths of progress and “growth”? Even those who claim to “believe the gospel” show few signs of knowing, believing and living by the only story, the biblical story, that makes the gospel to be good news at every level, from personal to cosmic. For that reason, we should welcome every effort and every publication or course that helps Christians to know the story they are in—that is to say, to have an overarching understanding of the Bible as a whole story (which is not the same thing as comprehensively knowing all the details of the Bible—as if our salvation or our sanctification depended on passing a trivia competition on Bible knowledge).
In 2004 I was invited by the board of directors of the Lausanne Movement to take the chair of the Lausanne Theology Working Group—a position that John Stott had occupied in the years of theological wrestling that followed the first Lausanne Congress in 1974. In the years immediately prior to the third Congress in Cape Town 2010, we embarked on a series of consultations on the Lausanne slogan, “the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.” What does each phrase actually mean, in biblical and missiological perspective?
The first consultation, in Chiang Mai in 2008, was on “The Whole Gospel.” The statement issued from that event identified several ways in which the apostle Paul uses the euangel- words, as noun or verb. The first point of the statement expresses the narrative nature of the gospel:
A. The gospel tells the story of Jesus in the light of the whole Bible.
1. The gospel for Paul is above all else the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth through whom God has accomplished salvation. The gospel is an account of the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, understood in the light of the scriptures of the Old Testament. . . . “According the Scriptures” means “in accordance with the Old Testament”—i.e. with the narrative of all that God had done and had promised in Old Testament Israel that had now been fulfilled in the Messiah Jesus (Acts 13:32-39). . . .
2. Paul’s definition of the gospel, then, includes both the central historical facts (Christ died for our sins, was buried and was raised on the third day), and their scriptural context and frame of meaning. . . .
3. Drawing our understanding of the whole gospel from the whole Bible will protect us from a reductionism that shrinks the gospel to a few formulae for ease of communication and “marketing.”
The Chiang Mai statement goes on to summarize Paul’s use of the term gospel in the following terms (in each case a short extract from the full statement is quoted):
B. The gospel creates a new reconciled humanity in the one family of God.
1. For Paul, as “apostle to the Gentiles,” clearly the good news about Jesus was a universal message for all the nations. And that too had deep Old Testament roots. God’s plan, announced to Abraham, had always been to bring blessing through Israel to all the nations of the world. But the nations were utterly outside and alienated from the covenantal grace of God and membership in God’s household (Eph. 2:11-12). The gospel transforms this situation. . . .
2. It is important to see how this “peace-making” work of the cross—reconciling Jews and Gentiles, and creating one new humanity—is not just a by-product of the gospel, but is of the essence of the gospel itself (Eph. 3:6). Paul includes it in the work of the cross. . . .
C. The gospel proclaims the saving message of the cross.
1. The very nature of “gospel” is that it is good news that has to be announced (as the biblical roots of the word show, Isa. 52:7). For Paul, the gospel must be heard as “word of truth” (Eph. 1:13; Col. 1:5, 23), and on being heard, it needs to be received and believed for what it is (1 Thess. 2:13). This message is to be preached to all nations in fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham. . . .
D. The gospel produces ethical transformation.
1. “Repent and believe the gospel,” said Jesus (Mk. 1:15). Radical change of life goes along with faith in the good news. They cannot be separated. For Paul, the gospel involved putting off the filthy clothes of the old humanity and putting on the clothes that bore the aroma of Christ-likeness. . . . It is not the case that one is “gospel” and the other is “ethics.” This common way of summarizing the two “halves” of Ephesians is vulnerable to misunderstanding—as if one could separate doctrinal believing from ethical living. The belief of faith and the life of faith cannot be separated. Both are intrinsic to the gospel itself.
“Although we cannot be saved by good works, we also cannot be saved without them. Good works are not the way of salvation, but its proper and necessary evidence. A faith which does not express itself in works is dead,” Stott says.
E. The gospel declares truth and exposes evil before God’s judgment.
1. According to Paul, the gospel is also truth that needs to be defended, against denial or perversion. So there is a polemical dimension to the gospel. . . .
F. The gospel has cosmic power through the mighty working of the Holy Spirit.
1. The gospel is the power of God at work in history and creation. For Paul this was something to marvel at and celebrate. The gospel seemed to have life of its own, such that Paul could personify it as being at work, active, spreading and bearing fruit all over the world (Col. 1:6). . . .
2. In Paul’s most eloquent summary of the gospel, he proclaims that all things in the universe have been created by Christ, and are being sustained by Christ, and will be reconciled to God by Christ through the blood of his cross. That is the breathtakingly universal scope of the gospel (Col. 1:15-23). And only after that survey of the cosmic significance of Christ, his church, and his cross, does Paul move to the personal reconciliation of believers.
“The Blessing and the Demand of the Kingdom”
Stott’s short section “The Gospel Demands” is very much in line with point D above—The gospel produces ethical transformation. Or, to be more precise, it does so when it meets with the response of repentance and faith.
At the beginning of the chapter, Stott stresses that, in his definition, evangelism is simply the faithful presentation of the gospel. While evangelism has as its goal the desire that people should be persuaded of the truth of the gospel and respond to it in saving faith, such results are not intrinsic to the definition of evangelism itself. Nevertheless, having made that clarifying point about the nature of evangelism (as something we humans do), he expounds the gospel (as the good news of what God has done) to show that it comes to us not only as affirmation, but also as promise and demand. Precisely because the gospel tells the story of what God has done, it cannot confront us merely as a record of objective facts, even though they are intrinsic to it. The gospel is indicative, promissory and imperative simultaneously. It affirms, it promises and it commands. Such is its very nature, for it addresses us as the voice of our Creator.
That is why Stott can correctly say that preaching the gospel is proclaiming the kingdom of God—since the two are equated in the mouth of Jesus, according to the Gospels themselves. Once again, Stott manages to condense into a few prime sentences a perception that has come to prominence decades later—the recognition of the importance of the kingdom of God as “gospel,” and the extent to which that connection has been overlooked among evangelicals particularly, and is strangely lacking in much 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 human life 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). (italics added)
At a theological conference I recently heard a renowned evangelical leader say, “The kingdom of God is not the gospel.” My first instinct was to retort that Jesus would have disagreed (compare “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world,” Matthew 24:14). But I knew what he meant. The mere declaration that God is king is not good news for individuals, unless and until they respond in repentance and faith, as Jesus called for. Nevertheless it is good news that God reigns and that his reign will ultimately extend over all creation and all nations. It is good news that evil will not have the last word in the cosmos. It is good news that God’s reign will usher in a new creation of justice and peace from which all evil, suffering, death and curse will be banished eternally. In these senses, unquestionably the proclamation of the kingdom of God is gospel.
But when the message of the reign of God confronts people (as a community or as individuals), it necessarily demands a response. That is unavoidable, because the Bible has shown ever since the Garden of Eden that human beings cannot encounter God without responding. Even Cain, in denying that he had any accountability for his brother, still had to answer God in doing so. And since any person or persons may respond with continued rejection and rebellion, for them the reign of God is very bad news indeed. For the God who is king is the God who is judge—the whole Bible affirms that and anticipates it. Not only so, but it affirms that the future reality of God’s judgment is actually part of the gospel. Evil and unrepentant evildoers will not ultimately or eternally flourish. So Paul can speak about “that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Jesus Christ” (Romans 2:16, italics added). For Paul too, as for Jesus, preaching the gospel included explaining and proclaiming the kingdom of God, as both judgment and salvation. He finished his life doing exactly that (Acts 28:23, 31).
The response to the gospel of the kingdom of God that was called for by Christ himself, by the apostles and by all faithful evangelists ever since, is the twin response of repentance and faith. They are the demands that come along with the promise—both demand and promise being intrinsic to the nature of the reign of God. If God is king then salvation is promised. But if God is king then change is required. Or as Stott succinctly puts it, “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” (italics added).
But repentance is much more than the “change of mind” that popular preaching often explains as the meaning of metanoia. With its deep roots in the Old Testament, it involved a turning away from the idolatries and evils of life lived in rebellion against God, and a turning back to God in radically changed life and behavior (see, for example, the strong definition of what repentance means in Jeremiah 7:3-7). Jesus cannot have meant anything less in his call for repentance than what John the Baptist had already outlined in explanation of what some typical “fruits that befit repentance” might look like (Luke 3:8).
Rightly, then, and with full biblical authenticity, Stott quotes René Padilla with approval, that “without ethics there is no real repentance.” And since biblical ethics includes more than our personal piety but also our social engagement in the world we live in, he makes this remarkable, powerful and challenging assertion, “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 without being thereby converted to our neighbor.” Paul would have agreed and added that it is impossible to be truly reconciled to God without being reconciled to your enemy (Ephesians 2:14-18). John too would have agreed, and added that it is impossible to claim to love God without loving your brother and sister (1 John 4:20-21).
The gospel of the kingdom of God then is good news for the world, but it also becomes good news for people when they respond in faith and in repentance that is demonstrated in obedience, that is, in practical, ethical change of life.
Stott rightly castigates those who drive any kind of wedge between accepting Jesus by faith as Savior and submitting to him in obedience as Lord. He acknowledges that some people do so with the worthy motivation of protecting the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone, but he urges that the separation between faith and obedience (as if you could have one without the other) is unbiblical. I agree. Paul’s expression “the obedience of faith,” standing as his missionary goal at the beginning and end of Romans (Romans 1:5; 16:26), captures precisely the integration of both, in a way that shows he would have agreed entirely with James that justifying faith has to be faith that proves itself in obedience (James 2:14-26). The same controversy is still around today in the arguments of those who insist on a sharp demarcation between justification and sanctification. Again, the motivation is understandable—that we must not import good works into the grounds of our salvation. Nothing could be clearer than Paul’s words in Titus 3:5, “He saved us, not because deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy.” But equally nothing could be clearer than Paul’s insistence (repeatedly in Titus) that “those who have believed in God may be careful to apply themselves to good deeds” (Titus 3:8; compare Titus 1:8; 2:7, 14; 3:1, 14). Faith and good works are not the same thing, but they belong integrally together in what it means to be a true disciple of Jesus. That distinction and yet integration is classically captured in Ephesians 2:9-10—“not because of works. . . . created in Christ Jesus for good works”—and commended in the lives of new believers when Paul thankfully observes their “work of faith” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).
Stott concludes his chapter with a quotation from the Lausanne Covenant (paragraph 4 on “The Nature of Evangelism”). So perhaps it is appropriate, in the same tradition, to conclude these reflections with a quotation from the Cape Town Commitment. The biblical texts referenced in brackets are part of the original document.
We Love the Gospel of God
As disciples of Jesus, we are gospel people. The core of our identity is our passion for the biblical good news of the saving work of God through Jesus Christ. We are united by our experience of the grace of God in the gospel and by our motivation to make that gospel of grace known to the ends of the earth by every possible means. . . .
The section continues with three paragraphs headed: “a) We love the good news in a world of bad news; b) We love the story the gospel tells; c) We love the assurance the gospel brings.”
It then continues:
d) We love the transformation the gospel produces. The gospel is God’s life-transforming power at work in the world. “It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” [Romans 1:16]. Faith alone is the means by which the blessings and assurance of the gospel are received. Saving faith however never remains alone, but necessarily shows itself in obedience. Christian obedience is “faith expressing itself through love” [Galatians 5:6]. We are not saved by good works, but having been saved by grace alone we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works” [Ephesians 2:10]. “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” [James 2:17]. Paul saw the ethical transformation that the gospel produces as the work of God’s grace—grace which achieved our salvation at Christ’s first coming, and grace that teaches us to live ethically in the light of his second coming [Titus 2:11-14]. For Paul, “obeying the gospel” meant both trusting in grace, and then being taught by grace [Romans 15:18-19; 16:19; 2 Corinthians 9:13].