However …
For centuries,
saints have argued that the ‘gospel’ that is heard throughout the world is not
the good news of the kingdom of God, but a later version of the gospel of the
Pharisees. And they have, at times, been
assassinated for doing so. I am one of
them. Forty years ago, when I dared to
raise this point, I was publicly ridiculed and disdained, and the show just
went on as planned. Eventually, I chose
to not get involved in the so-called evangelism events because, to me, they had
nothing good to offer listeners except the false hope of some notion of heaven
when you die. They were not offering
Jesus, but acceptability to the prevailing religious authorities.
At this point,
I would like to draw your attention to something that happened in 1974/5. It occurred at the International Congress on
World Evangelisation in Lausanne, Switzerland.
I wasn’t there, but at the time, it was a hot topic and the subject of
lots of discussions all around the world.
I was involved with a Christian Fellowship group on a College campus in
Australia at the time. I had just
graduated from bible college in Sydney and returned to Brisbane. The Principal of that college was in
attendance, as were a number of people I knew.
Student
Christian Fellowship groups in Australia at the time were buzzing with the
sounds of the ‘revival’ that appeared to be taking place in Latin America and
one of the people often referred to in these circles was René Padilla. He was, at the time, Associate General
Secretary for Latin America of the International Fellowship of Evangelical
Students (IFES) headquartered in Buenos Aires.
Now I mention
this because way back then, my concerns about the so-called ‘gospel’ I heard
being preached in local congregations and in mass crusades were being raised by
Dr Padilla. I am writing this in 2012
and it was only last month that I finally found a copy of the printed book of
proceedings from that Congress. For most
of the past fifteen years or so, I believe we have been seeing the results of
much of what Dr Padilla said in 1974 being at best ignored, at worst, disdained
and flatly rejected in the West.
As I said,
‘gospel’ is not a New Testament word, so anybody who wants to ‘preach the gospel’
only has to preach; there is no biblical definition, so each preaches what he
or she wants to preach, moderated only by what the preacher believes – and what
his or her sponsors will accept or tolerate.
In the early days of my former enthusiasm, I did this myself for a time.
Interestingly,
in 1974, Padilla had identified and articulated what Gene Edwards (in How to Meet) described of his experience
going into Albania when, as Edwards himself puts it, “The world’s first and
only atheist county had just opened to the outside world.” (This occurred in the early 1990s.)
You can read
the detail of Edwards’ experience for yourself in How to Meet. What Padilla
identified and articulated at the Lausanne Congress in 1974 (Let The Earth Hear His Voice, World Wide
Publications, Minneapolis, 1975) was what he termed “American Culture
Christianity” and that is precisely what Edwards ran into in Albania when he
visited there some fifteen years later.
Obviously, the Congress had little impact on the behaviour of some.
At one point,
Padilla spoke about the inroads of what he called “Secular Christianity” into
the purity of the good news of Jesus and the first apostles. He then followed with these words: “No less
harmful to the cause of the Gospel than ‘secular Christianity’ is the
identification of Christianity with a culture or a cultural expression… Today … there is another form of ‘culture
Christianity’ that has come to dominate the world scene – the “American Way of
Life”. This phenomenon is described by a
North American Christian writer in these terms”:
“A major source of
the rigid equation of socio-political conservatism with evangelicalism is
conformity with the world. We have
equated ‘Americanism’ with Christianity to such an extent that we are tempted
to believe that people in other cultures must adopt American institutional
patterns when they are converted. We are
led through natural psychological processes to an unconscious belief that the
essence of our American Way of Life is basically, if not entirely, Christian.” (David O Moburg, The Great
Reversal, 1972, page 42)
Revisit your bible, if you will.
This is exactly what happened to the ‘gospel’ that Paul received by
revelation from the Father and took to the Gentiles in the first century: the believing
Jews kept on insisting that Jewish practices had to be observed, otherwise the
new converts weren’t really saved! Paul
died for this! He called it a “different
gospel” which is really no gospel at all.
Yet here we are in 1975 having to fight for the same issue; here we are
in the early 1990s and we haven’t learned a blasted thing! We cannot plead ignorance. Clearly, some believe they are right and Paul
was wrong. “The Church” has to be right
– or else the whole structure of our ‘christianity’ will come crumbling down. That seems to be our biggest fear.
Fortunately,
God didn’t give up. He continues to this
day to save people despite our bad preaching and our best efforts at the
church’s story of God and the Pharisees’ story of God. But how many of earth’s inhabitants and how
many nations are yet to hear and see and experience “this good news of the
Kingdom of God”?
What most have heard is the bad news of religion
and church. And I know this because
after many hundreds of years of our ‘gospel’ most people have no idea of the
nature or the meaning of salvation, redemption, righteousness or justification
– the four pillars of God’s kingdom, the core business of His household, the
content of the evangel, and the subject of kerygma. Church has gospel (its version of the story
of God); ecclesia has good news of the kingdom of God.
Ecclesia – not this
diseased, corrupted and moribund thing we call “the church” – is ‘the household
of God and the pillar and ground of the truth’; and the truth is, in its
essence, the good news of the kingdom of God.
Ecclesia has good news,
‘Church’ has ‘gospel’; one is light, love and truth, the other is a man-made
clone.
Let’s get one
thing very clear. From the very earliest
days and the first ‘converts’ to the good news of the kingdom of God, the then
equivalent of ‘the church’ did its best to ensure their requirements for
acceptability were added to the message being preached. It came to a head in the ‘Jerusalem Council’
recorded in Acts 15. Luke records that,
“Certain ones of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed, stood up, saying, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them, and to
direct them to observe the Law of Moses’.” (Acts 15:5) If you look back at verse 1, some men who
‘came down from Judea’ were actually teaching that “Unless you are circumcised
according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”
And according
to verse 2, the matter raised “great dissension and debate”. The apostles argued long and hard and won the
battle – or did they? It would seem they
did lose the war. For a brief time the
apostles’ view stood firm. But the
Pharisee sect didn’t give up and today they dominate. To me, the Pharisee sect of Acts 15:5 is the
‘tares’ sown by the enemy amongst the ‘wheat’ in Jesus’ parable. And it seems to me there is so much tares it
is strangling the life out of the wheat.
Using a
different analogy, it’s a bit like the graphic below.
In those days, the Pharisee sect kept insisting on the need for the Law of Moses, especially circumcision. Nothing much has changed in almost two thousand years. Until recently, actual circumcision was still practiced by many for no other reason than a religious one. Many still believe Acts 15:1 – without circumcision, you cannot be saved; without circumcision, you’re an outsider.
Then there’s
all the rest of the Law of Moses. As far
back as I can remember, the church has been incredibly sneaky about it. All you have to do, they say, is ‘pray this
prayer after me’ and you’re saved; once you’re saved, they give you the long
list of the do’s and don’ts that they insist upon. But they deceive people by not telling them
the second bit up front.
And not only does
the church insist on the Law of Moses, it adds its own laws as well: you must
pray a certain amount, regularly read your bible, have daily ‘quiet times’, join
a church, attend church meetings, give at least ten percent of your money (to
the church), support ‘family’ programs and ideals, don’t smoke, drink or
‘swear’, get a ‘real’ job – oh, and vote conservative! If a person is failing to do all or some of
these things, serious doubt will be cast over that person’s faith, salvation
and redemption. At best, he/she will be
considered a ‘backslidden christian’; at worst, like the Pharisee sect in Acts
15, they will say, “you cannot be saved”.
And then
there’s the extra laws added by the particular denomination or local group one
associates with – whether Roman Catholic, congregational or Pentecostal.
And all of this
tells me we haven’t got the slightest clue what we’re doing. We are so adamant and insistent about our
precious bibles, but most of us don’t read them much and when we do, we
interpret them as we are told or as we independently decide what suits our
particular preferences. The bible says
there are apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists and pastors (all working
together), not Pastors, Priests, Reverends or Fathers as CEOs. The bible says it is first apostles, second
prophets, third teachers, then all the rest, but we prefer our own ideas. The bible insists there is no law to be added
so as to burden God’s children, but we don’t care, we make whatever rules we
like and attribute them to God.
Almost every
page of our precious New Testament contains some teaching or instruction that
the church flagrantly contradicts or ignores in the course of its
self-delusion. It is all the Pharisee
sect and they own and run everything now.
Well, my job is
to confront the Pharisee sect and ask, ‘who died and made you king?’ And in a way, I have an answer: Jesus
died. What do you mean, Jesus died? We know that – and he rose again and then
ascended to heaven – we get that. Do
you? It doesn’t look like it. If he died, rose again, ascended to the
Father’s side and they, together, sent the Holy Spirit; and if he therefore is
the inaugurator and head of the new covenant and ecclesia, why are you acting
like you are the owner and the CEO?
The answer is
quite simple: church and ecclesia are not the same thing. Church is man’s, ecclesia is God’s; man is
owner and CEO of church, Jesus is Lord and Head of ecclesia.
And when it comes
to our present topic: evangel and kerygma go with ecclesia, gospel and sermon
go with church. Gospel and sermon are
human constructs of the church; evangel and kerygma are constructs of eternity,
where God dwells.
Read your
bible. Look at Exodus 32. While Moses is away meeting with God for His
people, those very people decide to take matters into their own hands and turn
their gold into an idol and worship it, thinking all the time they are
worshipping God. Why? Well, Moses was away a bit too long for them
and they couldn’t be sure if he was dead or alive.
Now read 2
Peter 3: “In the last days mockers will
come with mocking following after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all
continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.’” It’s like they said, ‘Obviously, we believed
in Jesus’ return in vain. He’s not
coming back, so let’s take charge of things and make the best of a bad
situation. We’ve known for centuries how
to ‘do church’, so let’s do that – ‘church’ is God’s idea anyway, so He won’t
mind.’
Like the
Hebrews said concerning Moses: “as for this fellow Moses, we do not know what
has become of him”, we are acting as if our thinking goes like this: “as for
this fellow Jesus, we don’t know what has become of him.”
“Come, make us
a god who will go before us”, they said – and so was created the golden calf, a
god made in the image of man or beast.
But they knew that it was written in their ‘bible’ not to do that. It’s not so different today. Jesus is away too long, so we cobble together
something out of our own imagination and using what resources we have to hand
and then we worship it – and insist that all ‘our’ people worship it too,
whatever it is. It is a god made in the
image of man, even though we know that it is written in our ‘bible’ not to do
such a thing.
We can’t create
light, so we make our own version of it – at least that way we can make it look
very real. The problem is that it has
darkness at its heart.
We’re not
producing fruit, so we make papier-maché fruit and hang them on our
mass-produced trees – at least that way it looks like everything’s fine. The problem is that the trees are lifeless,
the fruit can’t be eaten and there are no seeds for reproduction.
We’re not
experiencing God’s love being poured out within our hearts by the Holy Spirit
who is given to us, so we establish programs and dig up bible studies on loving
and caring for one another – at least that way it looks like we’re good
christians. The problem is that our
impatient, self-seeking or unforgiving nature denies our bible quotations.
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