Once for all, and more and more
Introduction
Evangelical essentials
‘The harvest of people into the Kingdom of God in recent years has been unprecedented. Never in history has such a high percentage of the world’s population been exposed to the gospel, nor the increase of evangelical Christians been so encouraging.’ In parsticular, ‘the growth of evangelical believers in the Third World has accelerated dramatically since World War II . . .’
Yet in spite of this worldwide expansion (even explosion), evangelical believers have often suffered from a bad press, being misunderstood and misrepresented.
Canon Michael Saward (formerly of St Paul’s Cathedral) told the story of a pretty but ignorant Press Association reporter, who turned to him in Church House one day and asked, ‘These Evangelicals, are they . . . snake worshippers?’
A bit more accurate, but still unfriendly, is David Hare’s portrait of the Rev. Tony Ferris in his book and play entitled Racing Demon. He attributes people’s different theological views to their social class. ‘Educated clerics don’t like evangelicals’, he writes, ‘because evangelicals drink sweet sherry and keep budgerigars and have ducks in formations on their walls . . . Yes, and they also have the distressing downmarket habit of trying to get people emotionally involved.’
Turning to the North American scene, Professor James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia gives his readers a rich sample of contemporary slander. Leading academics, he writes, apparently describe evangelicals as ‘right-wing zealots’, ‘religious nuts’, ‘a misanthropic cult’, ‘fanatics’, ‘demagogues’, ‘anti-intellectual and simplistic’, while our message is considered ‘vicious’, ‘cynical’, ‘narrow’, ‘divisive’ and ‘irrational’.
What then is evangelical Christianity or the evangelical faith, which arouses such a combination of popularity and unpopularity, which on the one hand is growing so rapidly and on the other provokes so much scorn? Let me begin by telling you what it is not.
First, the evangelical faith is not a recent innovation, a new brand of Christianity which we are busy inventing. On the contrary, we dare to claim that evangelical Christianity is original, apostolic, New Testament Christianity. The very same claim and counterclaim were made during the sixteenth century. The Reformers were often dubbed innovators by the Roman Catholic Church, but they refuted the accusation. It was the medieval schoolmen who were the innovators, they maintained, whereas the Reformers were renovators, seeking to go back to the beginning and recover the authentic, original gospel. ‘We teach no new thing,’ wrote Luther, ‘but we repeat and establish old things, which the apostles and all godly teachers have taught before us.’ Hugh Latimer, the popular preacher of the English Reformation, made the same claim: ‘Ye say it is a new learning. Now I tell you it is the old learning.’ More eloquent still was the insistence of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury from 1560, in his famous Apology (1562): ‘It is not our doctrine that we bring you this day; we wrote it not, we found it not out, we are not the inventors of it; we bring you nothing but what the old fathers of the church, what the apostles, what Christ our Saviour himself hath brought before us.’
The same criticism that evangelical Christians are innovators has been heard in every generation, and the same rebuttal too. John Wesley, for example, was often accused of introducing new doctrines into the Church of England. He vigorously denied it: ‘It is the plain old Christianity that I teach,’ he insisted.
Towards the beginning of Billy Graham’s astonishing evangelistic career, he was accused not of novelty but of being hopelessly out of date, setting back the cause of religion a hundred years. Yet his rejoinder was the same. ‘I replied that I did indeed want to set reliogion back – not just 100 years but 1900 years, to the Book of Acts, where first century followers of Christ were accused of turning the Roman Empire upside down.’
Secondly, the evangelical faith is not a deviation from Christian orthodoxy. It is neither an eddy nor a backwater but mainstream Christianity. Evangelical Christians have no difficulty in reciting the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, without mental reservations, and without needing to cross their fingers while doing it. ‘Evangelical’, in spite of the antipathy it has aroused, is in fact a proud word with a long and honourable pedigree.
It came into widespread use only in the early eighteenth century, in relation to the so-called ‘Evangelical Revival’ associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield. But in the seventeenth century it had been applied both to the Puritans in England and to the Pietists in Germany, and in the sixteenth century to the Reformers. They called themselves evangelici, short for evangelici viri, ‘evangelical men’, a designation which Luther adopted as die Evangelischen.
Even this was not the beginning, however. In the fifteenth century John Wycliffe, sometimes described as the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation’, was called doctor evangelicus. Earlier still we acknowledge as proto-evangelicals all those other Christian leaders who attributed ultimate authority to Scripture and salvation to Christ crucified alone. This could include even the great church father Augustine, who proclaimed divine grace as the only remedy for human guilt. From him it is but a short step back to the New Testament itself, and to its gospel or ‘evangel’, from which evangelical Christians derive their name.
It is in more recent church history, however, that the terms ‘evangelical’ and ‘evangelicalism’ became current. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, a number of evangelical leaders gained national prominence. Charles Simeon, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, for fifty-four years (1782–1836), had an enormous influence on generations of students through his expository preaching. William Wilberforce, who campaigned for forty-five years on behalf of African slaves, along with his allies achieved the abolition first of the slave trade in 1807 and then of slavery itself in 1833. Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), found inspiration for his many social reforms in his evangelical convictions. And J. C. Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 to 1900, was an able, outspoken champion of evangelical truth over against the tendencies he called ‘Romanism’ and ‘scepticism’.
There were also prominent nineteenth-century evangelical leaders in North America. Charles G. Finney (1792–1875), for example, was committed equally to evangelism and to social reform. He founded a whole series of ‘benevolent societies’ for every conceivable kind of philanthropy, and one of his disciples was Theodore Weld, who dedicated his whole life to the anti-slavery struggle. D. L. Moody (1837–99) is well known too for his effective evangelism in both Britain and America. But he was also committed to education, and his personal influence was extremely widespread. Another educationist was Charles Hodge (1797–1878). A professor at Princeton Theological Seminary for fifty-six years, he not only championed evangelical orthodoxy but is said to have taught over 3,000 students. Mention should also be made of the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, successful businessmen, who generously funded social reform, missions and evangelism, Bible distribution, Christian education and the anti-slavery movement.
It was in 1846 that the so-called World Evangelical Alliance came into being in Britain, although it was a misnomer from the start because it was a British, not an international, body. So in 1951 the World Evangelical Fellowship was founded, while at the same time the World Evangelical Alliance adopted the more modest (and more accurate) name British Evangelical Alliance and became one of the founding members of the World Evangelical Fellowship.
Thirdly, the evangelical faith is not a synonym for fundamentalism, for the two have a different history and a different connotation.
‘Fundamentalism’, which today is frequently used as a theological smear word, had very respectable origins. It arose from a series of twelve paperbacks entitled The Fundamentals, which were distributed between 1909 and 1915 by Lyman and Milton Stewart, brothers from Southern California. Each booklet contained several papers by different authors. They circulated free of charge in their millions. The ‘fundamentals’ concerned included basic Christian truths like the authority of Scripture, the incarnation, the deity, virgin birth, atoning death, bodily resurrection and personal return of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, salvation and judgment, worship, world mission and evangelism. The word ‘fundamentalist’ was coined to denote anybody who believed the central affirmations of the Christian faith. The authors of The Fundamentals were all from Britain or North America, and included such evangelical stalwarts as R. A. Torrey, B. B. Warfield, A. T. Pierson, James Orr, Campbell Morgan, and Bishops J. C. Ryle and Handley Moule.
Originally, then, ‘fundamentalist’ was an acceptable synonym for ‘evangelical’. Take as an example Dr Carl Henry’s influential little book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947. In it, while complaining that ‘evangelical Christianity has become increasingly inarticulate about the social reference of the Gospel’, he drew no distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Gradually, however, fundamentalism became associated in people’s minds with certain extremes and extravagances, so that by the 1950s evangelical North American leaders like Carl Henry himself, Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga were promoting what they called ‘the new evangelicalism’ in order to distinguish it from the old fundamentalism which they had rejected.
Because of this, evangelical Christians are understandably dismayed by such books as Fundamentalism by Professor James Barr and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop Jack Spong, which, whether from ignorance, misunderstanding or malice, perpetuate the old identification. They write as if the only choice before the church is between an enlightened liberalism and an obscurantist fundamentalism.
But let it be said here and now, with clarity and conviction, that the great majority of evangelical Christians (at least in Europe) repudiate the ‘fundamentalist’ label, because they disagree with many self-styled fundamentalists at a number of important points.
The difficulty in establishing what these points are is due to the fact that fundamentalism has never clearly defined itself over against evangelicalism or published a broadly acceptable doctrinal basis. In seeking now to do the opposite, namely to distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism, I shall no doubt be guilty of generalizing and caricaturing. But I ask my readers to bear in mind that what I am attempting to portray below is not identifiable individuals or groups, but certain contrasting tendencies. I fully recognize that my portrait of fundamentalism may fit an old-style American version, but not some of our contemporaries who retain the label while rejecting some of the substance. Similarly, my portrait of evangelicalism is idealized, for alas! some contemporary evangelicals claim the name but do not live up to the ideal.
There seem to me to be at least ten tendencies to consider.
1. In relation to human thought, fundamentalists of the old school give the impression that they distrust scholarship, including the scientific disciplines; some tend towards a thoroughgoing anti-intellectualism, even obscurantism. Authentic evangelicals, however, acknowledge that all truth is God’s truth, that our minds are God-given, being a vital aspect of the divine image we bear, that we insult God if we refuse to think, and that we honour him when, whether through science or Scripture, we ‘think God’s thoughts after him’ (Johann Kepler).
2. In relation to the nature of the Bible, fundamentalists are said by the dictionaries to believe that ‘every word of the Bible is literally true’. This is surely a slander, since the adverb ‘literally’ is used here too sweepingly. Yet it cannot be denied that some fundamentalists are characterized by an excessive literalism. Evangelicals, however, while believing that whatever the Bible affirms is true, add that some of what it affirms is figuratively or poetically (rather than literally) true, and is meant to be interpreted thus. Indeed, not even the most extreme fundamentalist believes that God has feathers (Ps. 91:4)!
3. In relation to biblical inspiration, fundamentalists have tended to regard it as having been a somewhat mechanical process, in which the human authors were passive and played no active role. Thus the fundamentalist view of the Bible, as having been dictated by God, resembles the Muslim view of the Qur’an as having been dictated by Allah in Arabic through the angel Gabriel, while Muhammad’s only contribution was to take down the dictation. In this way, the Qur’an is believed to be an exact reproduction of a heavenly original. Evangelicals emphasize, however, the double authorship of Scripture, namely that the divine author spoke through the human authors while they were in full possession of their faculties.
4. In relation to biblical interpretation, fundamentalists seem to suppose that they can apply the text directly to themselves as if it had been written primarily for them. They then ignore the cultural chasm which yawns between the biblical world and the contemporary world. At least in the ideal, however, evangelicals struggle with the task of cultural transposition, in which they seek to identify the essential message of the text, detach it from its original cultural context, and then recontextualize it, that is, apply it to our situation today.
5. In relation to the ecumenical movement, fundamentalists tend to go beyond suspicion (for which indeed there is ample justification) to a blanket, uncritical, even vociferous rejection. The most strident expression of this attitude was seen in the American Council of Christian Churches, which was founded by Carl McIntyre in 1941. Many evangelicals, however, although critical of the liberal agenda and frequently unprincipled methodology of the World Council of Churches, have tried to be discerning, affirming in ecumenism what seems to them to have biblical support, while claiming the freedom to reject what has not.
6. In relation to the church, fundamentalists have tended to hold a separatist ecclesiology, and to withdraw from any community which does not agree in every particular with their own doctrinal position. They forget that Luther and Calvin were very reluctant schismatics, who dreamed of a reformed catholicism. Most evangelicals, however, while believing it right to seek the doctrinal and ethical purity of the church, also believe that perfect purity cannot be attained in this world. The balance between discipline and tolerance is not easy to find.
7. In relation to the world, fundamentalists have tended sometimes to assimilate its values and standards uncritically (e.g. in the prosperity gospel) and at other times to stand aloof from it, fearing contamination. By no means all evangelicals escape the charge of worldliness. Nevertheless, at least in theory, they seek to heed the biblical injunction not to conform to this world, and are also anxious to respond to the call of Jesus to penetrate it like salt and light, in order to hinder its decay and illuminate its darkness.
8. In relation to race, fundamentalists have shown a tendency – especially in the United States and in South Africa – to cling to the myth of white supremacy and to defend racial segregation, even in the church. Racism without doubt lingers among evangelicals too. Yet there is a widespread desire to repent of it. Most evangelicals, it can be claimed, proclaim and practise racial equality, originally by creation and supremely in Christ, who broke down the walls of racial, social and sexual separation in order to create a single, united humanity.
9. In relation to the Christian mission, fundamentalists have tended to insist that ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ are synonyms, and that the vocation of the church is simply to proclaim the gospel. Evangelicals, however, while continuing to affirm the priority of evangelism, have felt unable to sunder it from social responsibility. As in the ministry of Jesus, so today, words and deeds, proclamation and demonstration, good news and good works supplement and reinforce one another. Their separation, wrote Carl Henry, is ‘Protestantism’s embarrassing divorce’.
10. In relation to the Christian hope, fundamentalists tend to dogmatize about the future, although to be sure they hold no monopoly on dogmatism. But they often go into considerable detail about the fulfilment of prophecy, divide history into rigid dispensations, and also espouse a Christian Zionism which ignores the grave injustices done to the Palestinians. Evangelicals, however, while affirming with eager expectation the personal, visible, glorious and triumphant return of our Lord Jesus Christ, prefer to remain agnostic about the details on which even firmly biblical Christians have differing viewpoints.
While expounding my three disclaimers, I have no doubt been too negative so far. It is high time to be positive. We have considered what the evangelical faith is not. So what is it? Before trying to answer this question, it is important to recognize that, as the evangelical movement has grown throughout the world, so too has it diversified, not least among Anglicans. During or after the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress, held at Nottingham University in 1977, Canon Colin Craston remarked that Anglican evangelicals were now no longer a party but a coalition.
Several attempts have been made to classify the different evangelical ‘tribes’. In a playful mood in April 1998 the Editor of the Church of England Newspaper suggested that there were ‘57 varieties of evangelicals’ (corresponding to the famous 57 varieties of Heinz grocery products). Rowland Croucher in Australia mentions an unnamed Californian seminary professor who claimed he could identify sixteen kinds of evangelical, while Clive Calver writes about the twelve tribes of evangelicalism. Other observers have reduced this number by half.
In 1975, the year following the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Professor Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen distinguished six different evangelical groupings:
1. The New Evangelicals (including Billy Graham himself), who distance themselves from fundamentalism’s science-phobia and political conservatism, and strive for the greatest possible collaboration.
2. The Strict Fundamentalists, who are uncompromising in their separatist attitude.
3. The Confessing Evangelicals, who attach importance to a confession of faith and a rejection of contemporary doctrinal error.
4. The Pentecostals and the Charismatics.
5. The Radical Evangelicals, who acknowledge a sociopolitical commitment and strive to unite evangelistic witness and social action.
6. The Ecumenical Evangelicals, who are developing a critical participation in the ecumenical movement.
Nearly twenty years later, in his book Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective (Eerdmans, 1993), Gabriel Fackre of Andover Newton School of Theology published his similar list of six categories: fundamentalists (‘polemical and separatist’), old evangelicals (emphasizing personal conversion and mass evangelism), new evangelicals (acknowledging social responsibility and apologetics), justice and peace evangelicals (sociopolitical activists), charismatic evangelicals (stressing the work of the Spirit in tongue-speaking, healing and worship) and ecumenical evangelicals (concerned for unity and cooperation). It is an interesting classification of trends, some of which overlap with one another.
We still have to ask what tenets evangelical Christians have in common. For if it is true that a certain continuity of evangelical belief and practice can be traced down the centuries of church history, burning now brightly, now dimly, of what does this continuity consist? Of course there has been development, and, as the challenges have changed, so have the responses. Nevertheless, most observers agree that a genuine consensus has become discernible.
In particular, a careful study of essential evangelicalism has been made by two British scholars, the one a theologian and an Anglican, the other a historian and a Baptist. I am referring to J. I. Packer’s monograph entitled The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem (1978) and to D. W. Bebbington’s comprehensive survey, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989).
Dr Packer’s ‘anatomy of evangelicalism’ was characteristically thorough. It consisted of four general claims and six particular convictions. The claims were that evangelicalism is ‘practical Christianity’ (a lifestyle of total discipleship to the Lord Christ), ‘pure Christianity’, indeed ‘mere Christianity’ (since ‘you cannot add to the Christian faith . . . without subtracting from it’), ‘unitive Christianity’ (seeking unity through a common commitment to gospel truth), and ‘rational Christianity’ (over against the popular preoccupation with experience).
Following these four general claims, Dr Packer identified six evangelical fundamentals as follows (the headings are his, the brief parenthetical summaries mine):
1. The supremacy of Holy Scripture (because of its unique inspiration).
2. The majesty of Jesus Christ (the God-man who died as a sacrifice for sin).
3. The lordship of the Holy Spirit (who exercises a variety of vital ministries).
4. The necessity of conversion (a direct encounter with God effected by God alone).
5. The priority of evangelism (witness being an expression of worship).
6. The importance of fellowship (the church being essentially a living community of believers).
About a decade later, Dr David Bebbington’s magisterial survey Evangelicalism in Modern Britain was published. In it he outlined what he regarded as evangelicalism’s four ‘main characteristics’. Here they are: ‘conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross’. ‘Together’, David Bebbington concluded, these ‘form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism.’ Dr Derek Tidball concludes that the Bebbington quadrilateral ‘has quickly established itself as near to a consensus as we might ever expect to reach’.
We may not particularly relish Dr Bebbington’s four rather esoteric ‘ism’ words. But we cannot fail to notice his selection of the Bible and the cross, evangelism and conversion, which Dr Packer had also stressed. It illustrates David Bebbington’s judgment that, although evangelicalism has been continuously ‘moulded and remoulded by its environment’, it nevertheless has ‘a common core that has remained remarkably constant down the centuries’.
At the same time, as I have reflected on these two similar lists of evangelical distinctives, I confess to a certain uneasiness. Is it altogether appropriate, I ask myself, that an activity like evangelism, an experience like conversion and an observation like the need for fellowship, even with their theological underpinnings, should be set alongside such towering truths as the authority of Scripture, the majesty of Jesus Christ and the lordship of the Holy Spirit? They seem to belong to different categories. Perhaps I am asking for no more than a reshuffling of the cards. Yet it seems to me important, when we are trying to define our essential evangelical identity, that we distinguish between divine and human activity, between the primary and the secondary, between what belongs to the centre and what lies somewhere between the centre and the circumference.
For this reason I take the liberty of suggesting an adjustment. In the list of evangelical essentials proposed by Jim Packer and David Bebbington, the first three relate (deliberately, without doubt) to the three persons of the Trinity – the authority of God in and through Scripture, the majesty of Jesus Christ in and through the cross, and the lordship of the Holy Spirit in and through his manifold ministries. But the next three evangelical characteristics (conversion, evangelism and fellowship) are not so much an addition to the first three as an elaboration of them. For it is God himself, the Holy Trinity, who causes conversion, promotes evangelism and creates fellowship. It would therefore, in my view, be a valuable clarification if we were to limit our evangelical priorities to three, namely the revealing initiative of God the Father, the redeeming work of God the Son, and the transforming ministry of God the Holy Spirit. All our other evangelical essentials will then find an appropriate place somewhere under this threefold or trinitarian rubric.
Let me put it another way. In seeking to define what it means to be evangelical, it is inevitable that we begin with the gospel. For both our theology (evangelicalism) and our activity (evangelism) derive their meaning and their importance from the good news (the evangel). And whenever we are thinking about the gospel, three fundamental questions and answers are bound to formulate in our minds regarding the origin, the substance and the efficacy of the gospel. They occur in 1 Corinthians 2:1–5, where Paul states his position over against the false teachers who were disturbing the Corinthian church.
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. 4My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
The origin of the gospel
Question: Where does the gospel come from?
Answer: It is not a human invention or speculation, but the revelation of God. It is not ‘human wisdom’ (1 Cor. 1:17) or ‘the wisdom of the world’ (1 Cor. 1:20; cf. 2:6); on the contrary, Paul calls it ‘God’s wisdom’ (1 Cor. 1:24; 2:7).
There are several uncertainties about the correct translation of 1 Corinthians 2:1. Certainly Paul is describing his proclamation when he arrived in Corinth. But is he calling it a ‘testimony’ (martyrion) or a ‘mystery’ (mysterion)? The Greek readings are fairly evenly balanced. Also, is he proclaiming God’s testimony or mystery, or a testimony or mystery about God? Although we are not sure how to answer these questions, it does not really matter. What does matter is that in either case Paul identifies his message as truth, indeed as revealed truth. The gospel is God’s good news for the world.
The substance of the gospel
Question: What does the gospel consist of?
Answer: In the eyes of the non-Christian world it is not wisdom, but foolishness; not power but weakness. It does not flatter human beings. It gives us nothing to boast about. Nevertheless, it is God’s wisdom and God’s power. Where are these to be found, then? Only in ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (verse 2).
We note that Paul ‘resolved’ to proclaim nothing but Christ and the cross. This implies that he had endured a previous period of irresolution. Why was this? It was Sir William Ramsay who popularized the theory that Paul’s preceding visit to Athens had been a failure, because he had preached creation instead of the cross; and that on his way to Corinth he ‘resolved’ not to repeat his mistake. But there is no evidence that his mission in Athens had been a failure or a mistake. Certainly Luke does not give this impression. On the contrary, he records Paul’s speech to the Athenian philosophers as a fine example of his gospel approach to thoughtful Gentiles. In any case, he must have preached the cross, since he proclaimed the resurrection (Acts 17:31), and one cannot preach either without the other. Luke also tells us that there were a number of converts.
So the explanation of Paul’s firm decision to proclaim only Christ and him crucified was different. It is to be found not in Athens, but in Corinth; not in a past failure but in a future challenge. He knew that the inhabitants of Corinth were proud, idolatrous, materialistic and immoral. He also knew that such people would not be friendly to the gospel. For the gospel of the cross is folly to the intellectually arrogant and a stumbling-block to the morally self-righteous. It humbles vanity and condemns idolatry. It calls the covetous to contentment and sinners to repentance and self-denial. No wonder Paul needed to make a firm decision to limit his message in Corinth to ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’. Apprehensive about the reception he would get, he arrived ‘in weakness and fear, and with much trembling’ (verse 3).
The apostle was still focusing on the same gospel of the cross near the end of his first letter to the Corinthians, as he had been near its beginning. He made a formal statement about it:
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared . . .
(1 Cor. 15:1–5a)
Six aspects of the gospel are noteworthy.
1. The gospel is Christological. The heart of the Christian message is that ‘Christ died for our sins . . . [and] that he was raised’. The gospel is not limited to these events, but they are its priority truths, which are ‘of first importance’ (verse 3). The gospel is not preached if Christ is not preached, and the authentic Christ is not proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central.
2. The gospel is biblical. The Christ Paul proclaimed was the biblical Christ, who died for our sins ‘according to the Scriptures’ and who was also raised ‘according to the Scriptures’ (verses 3–4). Which Old Testament scriptures he has in mind Paul does not tell us, but no doubt they will have included those which Jesus had used when ‘he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself’ (Luke 24:25–27; 44–46), those which Peter had used on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:25–31), and notably Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. The first Christian evangelists made much of the fact that the death and resurrection of Jesus were corroborated by two witnesses – the prophets and the apostles, or, as we would say, the Old Testament and the New Testament.
3. The gospel is historical. We need to notice the reference both to Jesus’ burial and to his appearances. For the burial testified to the reality of his death (since we bury the dead, not the living), while the appearances testified to the reality of his resurrection. Moreover, what was raised was what had been buried. In other words, it was the body of Jesus which was raised and changed. The resurrection was also a datable historical event, since it took place ‘on the third day’.
4. The gospel is theological. The death and resurrection of Jesus were not only historical events; they had a theological or saving significance. He not only died, but ‘died for our sins’. Since sin and death are related to one another throughout Scripture as an offence and its just reward, and since Jesus committed no sins of his own for which he needed to die, he must have died for our sins. The sins were ours, but the death was his. He died our death. He bore our penalty. Only thus could we be ‘saved’ (verse 2). This points clearly to the substitutionary nature of the cross, to which we will return in chapter 2.
5. The gospel is apostolic. That is to say, it is an essential part of the authentic message received and transmitted by the apostles. It belongs to the apostolic tradition. In verse 11 Paul concludes, ‘Whether, then, it was I [Paul] or they [the Twelve], this is what we [all the apostles] preach, and this is what you [the church] believed.’ This cluster of personal pronouns (I, they, we, you) is extremely impressive. It indicates a unity of faith between Paul and the Twelve, and between the apostles and the church, indeed between the first generation of believers and all subsequent generations.
6. The gospel is personal. That is, the death and resurrection of Jesus are not just history and theology but the way of individual salvation. The Corinthians had received it, taken their stand on it, and been saved by it, so long as they continued to hold firmly to it (verses 1–2).
The efficacy of the gospel
Question: how does the gospel become effective?
Answer: it does not require the contrived, flowery eloquence of the Greeks to make it work. Paul had renounced both philosophy and rhetoric. In place of philosophy he had preached ‘Christ and him crucified’; in place of rhetoric he trusted in the Holy Spirit. For he put no confidence in his own wisdom or power. On the contrary, because of his personal ‘weakness, fear and trembling’, he looked for ‘a demonstration’ (apodeixis, ‘proof’) of the Spirit’s power.
This does not mean that Paul rejected apologetics. For when he reached the Greek city of Corinth, according to Luke’s account in Acts, he was still reasoning with people and ‘trying to persuade Jews and Greeks’ (Acts 18:4). It is quite wrong to set human reasoning and trust in the Holy Spirit over against each other as if we have to choose between them. As the Spirit of truth, he brings people to faith in Christ not in spite of the evidence but because of it, when he opens their eyes to attend to it. What happened in Corinth was that he spoke in human weakness and trepidation, and that the Holy Spirit took his feeble words and carried them home with divine power to the mind, heart, conscience and will of their hearers.
To sum up, the origin of the gospel was not speculation but revelation; its substance was not the world’s wisdom but Christ’s cross; and its efficacy was due not to rhetoric but to the Holy Spirit’s power. Thus, the gospel comes from God, centres on Christ and his cross, and is confirmed by the Holy Spirit.
At this stage we need to pause and reflect. The first two of the trinity of evangelical essentials belong closely together, and there are striking parallels between them. They relate to the basic topics of every religion, namely the questions of authority (by what authority do we believe?) and salvation (by what means can we be saved?); or in evangelical terms they allude to revelation and redemption, the Bible and the cross. Both were key issues to the Reformers, who referred to sola Scriptura (Scripture alone for our authority) as the ‘formal’ principle of the Reformation, and to sola gratia (grace alone for our salvation) as its ‘material’ principle.
Next, both are due to the gracious initiative of God, who speaks and acts. Both focus on Christ, in and through whom God has spoken and acted. Moreover, both are hapax (once and for all), expressing the finality in Christ of God’s revelation (his Word has been spoken) and of God’s redemption (his work has been done).
With regard to God’s revelation, Jude wrote, ‘I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all [hapax] entrusted to the saints’ (Jude 3). It was against the background of serious false teaching that Jude wrote. Jude’s readers would be able to refute them only by defending God’s revealed truth which had been committed to them once and for all.
With regard to God’s redemption, Paul, Peter and the writer to the Hebrews all apply the adverb hapax not only to Christ’s first coming in general but specifically to his cross, from which he cried out in triumph, ‘It is finished.’ Here are some examples:
Paul: The death he died, he died to sin once for all [hapax] (Rom. 6:10).
Peter: Christ died for sins once for all [hapax], the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God (1 Pet. 3:18).
Hebrews: Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all [hapax] when he offered himself (Heb. 7:27; cf. 9:12, 26–28; 10:10–12).
It is because we have grasped the finality of what God has said and done in Christ that we evangelical people are determined to hold both fast. It is inconceivable to us that any truth could be revealed that is higher than what God has revealed in his own incarnate Son. It is equally inconceivable that anything should be deemed necessary to our salvation in addition to the cross. To add any word of our own to God’s completed Word in Christ, or to add any work of our own to God’s finished work in Christ, would be gravely derogatory to the unique glory of Christ’s person and work. It would be to imply that God’s Word and work are imperfect, and that we need to supplement, improve and even perfect them. No, we are fully content with what God has said and done in Christ; he has nothing more to say or do, at least in this life.
Our critics immediately pounce on this insistence on the finality of the incarnation and the atonement. They accuse us of restricting God’s saving activity to the first half of the first century ad, and of relegating Christianity to a historical museum. ‘Does God have no ministry today?’ they ask incredulously. ‘Is he imprisoned in the Bible and the cross?’
Questions like these can be asked, however, only by those who have overlooked the contemporary ministry of the Holy Spirit as the third evangelical essential. In one sense his coming too was hapax, for the Day of Pentecost was as unique and unrepeatable as Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Day and Ascension Day. That is to say, Jesus Christ was born once, died once, rose once, was exalted once and poured out the Holy Spirit once, as the final act of his saving career (Acts 2:33). Yet, although the Holy Spirit was given once and for all, to be with us ‘for ever’ (John 14:16), yet his ministry is continuous and contemporary.
So the appropriate adverb to describe the Holy Spirit’s activity today is not hapax (‘once and for all’) but mallon (‘more and more’). For the Holy Spirit is constantly, and indeed increasingly, showing Christ to us and forming Christ in us. The once-for-all bestowal of the Holy Spirit on the church has vital ongoing implications in relation to God’s revelation and redemption through Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who, as ‘the Spirit of wisdom and revelation’ in our knowledge of Christ (Eph. 1:17ff.), opens our eyes to see ever more of what God has revealed in him.
It is also the same Spirit who enables us to inherit the full riches which are already ours through union with Christ (Eph. 3:14ff.). In this way we ‘grow in grace’, so that ‘from the fulness of his grace’ we receive ‘one blessing after another’ (2 Pet. 3:18; John 1:16). Also, we ‘are being transformed into the same image [sc. of Christ] from one degree of glory to another’ by the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18, nrsv). The same truth of gradual transformation into the image of Christ is implied in Paul’s metaphor of ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:22–23), for fruit ripens slowly, and so does Christian character. Here, then, are some Pauline verses in which the adverb mallon is applied to our Christian behaviour.
This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more [mallon] in knowledge and depth of insight.
(Phil. 1:9)
Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more [mallon].
(1 Thess. 4:1)
Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. 10And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more [mallon].
(1 Thess. 4:9–10)
So in the two fundamental duties of pleasing God and loving one another there must be no complacency. On the contrary, we are to be constantly growing. For although our justification is hapax (once and for all), our sanctification is to be mallon (more and more).
Thus the essentials of evangelicalism may be encapsulated in the combination of the two adverbs hapax and mallon.
God has spoken hapax in Christ (including the biblical witness to Christ), revealing himself and committing his revelation to the church. Yet our responsibility is to delve ever more deeply (mallon) into what he has revealed. Similarly, God has acted hapax in Christ, giving his Son to die for us. Yet our responsibility is to enter ever more fully (mallon) into the benefits of his death.
God has no more to teach us than he has revealed hapax in Christ; but we have much more to learn, as the Holy Spirit witnesses to Christ, not least through the multicultural fellowship of the church, and so enables us to understand God’s revelation ever more fully (mallon).
And God has no more to give than he has given us hapax in Christ; but we have much more to receive, as the Holy Spirit enables us to appropriate God’s gifts ever more fully (mallon).
This recognition of the need for mallon is well expressed in the bishop’s prayer in the 1662 Confirmation Service:
Defend, O Lord, this thy Child with thy heavenly grace, that he [or she] may continue thine for ever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom.
We have considered in this introduction the three essentials to which evangelical people are determined to bear witness. They concern the gracious initiative of God the Father in revealing himself to us, in redeeming us through Christ crucified, and in transforming us through the indwelling Spirit. For the evangelical faith is the trinitarian faith. This is why evangelical Christians place such emphasis on the Word, the cross and the Spirit. We now devote a separate chapter to each.
David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Unwin Hyman, 1989)
Derek J. Tidball, Who Are the Evangelicals? (Marshall Pickering, 1994)