The 8 Marks of a Robust Gospel

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4 responses to “The 8 Marks of a Robust Gospel”

1. 

   J. K. Gayle

   March 5, 2008

   I don’t want to be too much of an antagonist or postmodernist here, but I do think Scot McKnight’s goals for a “robust gospel” may get short cut by his list of minimalist features of such a “big” gospel. In other words, McKnight wants the gospel to be hugely relevant but his list of items just doesn’t make it so.
   Two things are missed (at least):
   1) There’s an irony, a paradox, in a small — NOT robust — gospel that makes it big. Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed dying gets to that. And, with respect to the gospel of Jesus, Philip Yancey in The Jesus I Never Knew puts it this way: “I hope, as far as is possible, to look at Jesus’ life ‘from below’. . . I hope, in Luther’s words, ‘to draw Christ as deeply as possible into the flesh.’” (page 24). It’s not the “grand” abstract overview that necessarily makes the big impact. No, it’s the unlikely stuff that hits me individually and subjectively, sometimes in the least expected, and smallest ways, that make Jesus profound, and deeply relevant.
   2) Sometimes knowing the outcome makes the story less grand. Now, I’m picking on “mark” 1 and 4 of McKnight’s 8. In 1 (in the article you’re reproducing from Christianity Today), McKnight says:
   “Jesus’ birth came in the midst of a story with a beginning, a problem, and a lengthy history. . . the first thing his hearers would have focused on was not the word gospel but the word kingdom—the climax of Israel’s story . . . Gospel-preaching for Jesus had the same hope and vision . . . namely, the fulfillment of the whole story’s hope, the kingdom of God.”
   I’m afraid this is how the great Aristotle would tell the story, and would tell it rigidly, and ultimately NOT robust at all! Aristotle was big on this organizing principle: beginning, middle, and ultimate end.
   But the gospels of Jesus are fraught with something much more powerful than Aristotelian order.
   N. T. Wright gets to that, when he says the disciples of Jesus, immediately before his resurrection, had no clue and no belief–actually had a death of belief–that things would be okay again, if they would never be grand at all.
   So Yancey understands this as well:
   “Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman insists on one rule in writing history: no ‘flash-forwards.’ . . . A historian who wants to retain any semblance of tension and drama in events as they unfold dare not flash-forward to another, all-seeing point of view. . . Do so, and all tension melts away. Rather, a good historian re-creates for the reader the conditions of the history being described, conveying a sense that ‘you were there.’ That . . . is the problem with most of our writing and thinking about Jesus. We read the Gospels through flash-forward lenses . . . through the church’s studied attempts to make sense of him” (page 24).
   May I end with a long quotation from C. S. Lewis, writing of Jesus in the would-be “robust” gospel?
   “We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the ‘wise-crack’. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be ‘got up’ as if it were a ‘subject’. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, ‘pinned down’. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.” (Reflections on the Psalms page 109)
   Maybe the gospel isn’t meant to be “robust” the way Aristotle and today’s modernists want it to be.

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2. 

   Michael W. Kruse

   March 5, 2008

   Thanks for sharing these insights, J.K. Here are a few reflections.
   I can’t speak much to Aristotle’s notion beginning, middle and ultimate end. This certainly is how I view revelation. It is the future that is certain and the present that is uncertain.
   If asked who I am and where I came from, I will begin tell you when and where I was born; I’ll tell what family I was one born into, where I lived and where I went to school; I’ll tell of who I married and the children I have; I’ll tell of my work and my ambitions; I’ll probably tell about my visions and hopes for the future. In other words, I’ll abstract details and events from my life experience and weave them into a narrative that tells you who I am. That abstraction and weaving are inescapable. Yet having done that, I don’t remotely believe I’ve begun to capture for you the richness of who I am and the complexity that has been my life.
   I think the same is true of God’s revelation. We do not have a narrative presented to us in the form of a novel but we do have “testimony” across diverse times, peoples, and places about God’s interaction in specific contextual circumstances. It is by entering into God’s revelation with all its contextual richness that we vicariously enter into those events. I don’t have a problem with people thinking systematically about what revelation contains so long as we recognize that this only one lens through which we interact with scripture.
   Peter Rollins in “How (Not) to Speak of God” uses the analogy of infinite vs transfinite. Most of us appreciate that there is an infinite set of numbers. Yet Rollins asks us to envision a number line showing all possible fractions between the numbers 1 and 2. You can’t do it because there are an infinite number of possibilities between these two finite realities. God has boundaries, and there is shape to the story unfolding in the world. Yet within those boundaries is rich complexity of transfinite possibilities.
   Kenneth E. Bailey has had a major impact on my understanding. Now in his 80’s, Bailey has lived most of his life in the Middle East. His life work has been looking at the Bible through Middle Eastern eyes, using a cultural-literary approach, particularly looking at metaphorical theology. Bailey demonstrates that to this day in isolated Middle Eastern villages, truth and “theology” are communicated not through didactic linear methods but through passing on a set of stock stories. Investigation of moral and existential questions are done by entering these stories and then teachers tweak elements of them, causing students to reflect on the interconnected consequences of the alterations.
   Bailey points that when we think of theology in the Bible, we think of Paul, not Jesus. Jesus is our savior and the center of the story but in his ministry he mostly traveled from place to place teaching nice stories which we’ve all learned in Sunday School. Paul was the theologian. Bailey’s work magnificently uncovers the earth-shakingly profound use of metaphorical theology used by Jesus. We westerners think in terms of explaining a theological point and then telling a story to clarify if necessary. For the Rabbi’s, the story was the theology that occasionally needed an explanation for those who didn’t get it. When we begin to see Jesus’ profound use of metaphor, his symbolic acts, and his reformulations of the stock stories and images of Israel, we begin to see how profound a theologian Jesus was. Bailey’s “Jacob and the Prodigal: Jesus’ Retelling of the Story of Israel” is a wonderful example of this.
   Anyway, I recognize the audience to whom Scot is writing and I don’t have a problem with his attempts at delineation as long as we keep the above in mind.

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3. 

   J. K. Gayle

   March 5, 2008

   Michael,
   Thanks for your response. Kenneth E. Bailey sounds amazing. Any idea where one can find “Jacob and the Prodigal: Jesus’ Retelling of the Story of Israel”?

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4. 

   Michael W. Kruse

   March 5, 2008

   I got the name of the book slightly wrong. Here is a link at Amazon:
   Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story
   He has just published another book which I’m just beginning. I expect to an extensive multiple post review eventually here at the KK:
   Jesus Through Middle Easter Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospel
   And here is his website:
   http://www.shenango.org/bailey.htm

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