On the Gospel, Part II

Given the number of electrons harmed in the writing of the preceding posts, I thought it worth a few more for sake of summary. It may be tempting to assume that my 10-word summary of the gospel (that it reveals God to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ) is a aphorism used to read the Bible in a particular way; but my experience has largely gone the other way round.

I first remember looking at the gospel in the Old Testament in 1997 or 1998 in a Sunday School class on Luke. It is to this class that I owe the basis for these posts and the rewriting of my transactional understanding of the gospel into something rather broader and more devoted to the revelation of God. While I at that point did not have any substantial opinions on the Trinity (those would wait almost ten years to really develop), it formed a solid foundation for seeing the gospel in the context of the revelation of God's divine and eternal attributes: his righteousness, mercy, faithfulness, and so on.

Between the time of this view of the gospel and a renewed interest in Trinitarian theology, the Psalms opened a new way of seeing Christ. While I occasionally strain to read Christ into the Psalms in a way that is familiar to me, even the few that I have been able to read from his perspective provide insight into his own life and role. It was in these intervening years that I could see Jesus not only as Savior, but also as the great Worship Leader (viz. Psalm 34) who directs our praise to God for his vindication (ultimately evidenced by the resurrection). Here, finally, in my own introverted narcissism, I found Jesus Christ waiting: he took from me the grief of Psalm 88 to return to me the rejoicings of Psalm 89. In the Psalms more than other books (though they are all thus directed), I was able to see Jesus in ways that are not so explicitly shown in the gospels, thus clarifying some of the opaqueness of the New Testament narrative.

When I happened upon Irenaeus (via, it must be said, Sara Groves), it struck me immediately that his perspectives were largely Christological. It is fair to say that man fully alive is the glory of God precisely because Jesus is God, and he is the one man of whom we may say, "In him was life." My thoughts on the Trinity had mostly settled by then, at least in the large, but here was a new revelation about the humanity of Jesus Christ. I suppose in my own heresies I tend more toward docetism than to Arianism, yet Irenaeus seemed somehow to have understood the humanity of Jesus in a way that I didn't. He confirmed in my thinking that Jesus really was more human than I. (It was only after this that I read On the Incarnation by Athanasius.)

It is in this that I found a strange loop in my understanding of the gospel itself. I was confronted with the divine person of Jesus Christ, one who can say that having seen him, we have seen the Father. Irenaeus connects this explicitly to Exodus 33:20, that to look on God was to die. He arrives at the terrible conclusion that even though God's glory gives life, it is paired with God's inexhaustible holiness in whose presence none can stand. The only solution to this problem is the person of Jesus Christ. He is God Incarnate, and must be (I finally understood the bedrock reason for the necessity of the Trinity, at least from my human perspective), or else it were impossible for me to know God. And that is eternal life.

The revelation of God in the gospel consists in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He shows us who the Father is by making him accessible to us; God is finally someone we can reach out and hold onto. Yet we see also in Christ the terror of his righteousness and extent of his wrath. The hypostatic union not only unifies the nature of man and God, yet also reconciles what we might see as conflicting attributes of God.

This, therefore, is why the gospel begins with the terror of God, for to persuade men. It is not because these other things are unimportant. Far from it! It is that God made a special point of condescending to man; he became man, as Irenaeus says, to bring man to God. It is with man that he is chiefly concerned, and in the True Man that he is chiefly glorified. It is therefore quite reasonable, in my opinion, to bring the gospel to man in this fashion.

It is why I have stated that the gospel must begin with the hiddenness of God from man, with sin as the chief problem. We may begin with nature, to which all must pay a final due, or with the Law, to which all our consciences assent. The idolatry of our hearts, that God is somehow fallen like us, is dealt with finally in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. It is this historical narrative understood in the light of our universal problem that forces our hand. Properly spoken, the message of grace divides; it separates us from who we were into who we are and shall be in Christ. Its warning cannot be ignored, only accepted or refused.

Yet the gospel does not stop here. It is not something that we are to grow out of, but rather to grow in to. It is for this reason that the gospel cannot simply stop at a transaction or switch in destiny, significant as it may be. It is for this reason I would argue that we can explore the gospel endlessly (indeed the reason we shall evangelize each other in heaven). It is in the gospel that we see the revelation of God, and it is through the gospel that our relationship with him grows and matures.

I think Lewis would not take too much umbrage if I were to co-opt his famous phrase "Further up and further in" to describe just this purpose. It is as unbelievers that we are outside the gospel; but as believers, we are always moving further up and further into the gospel. (I would be remiss not to say that I find Lewis' inside-bigger-than-the-outside also poignant and utterly necessary to the metaphor also. The gospel always seems small until you get inside of it, and every layer you expose is larger still.)

And thus one finds in the gospel not just empty forgiveness, as though the cosmic ledger is finally balanced and we can go off on our own debt-free. It is more than this. It is a journey to travel, and one I hope I can share more of, Lord-willing.