1 Corinthians 15:12-19 “Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up-if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.”
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What is the Gospel?
At several points this past week, the resurrection of Christ came up in the conversation, either through the text of the book or in listening to the radio interview that Tony did with Todd Wilken on Issues, Etc. In light of the coming celebration of Easter Sunday, a conversation about the resurrection is appropriate.
The bottom line on his view of the resurrection is that people who do not believe that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead are considered to be fellow believers, or Christians. I do not know if he believes in the resurrection. So far, in my reading and listening, he hasn’t said. But what he has said is somewhat troubling.
His use of the word “Christian” is almost always done with a qualifier attached to it. It will be “Anglican Christian”, “Baptist Christian”, “Roman Catholic Christian”, or some other denominational moniker stuck on the front end. His has a very shallow view of what it means to be a Christian, with no consideration given to the distinctive doctrinal positions of any of the groups that have gathered themselves around the various denominational labels. He often cites an undocumented statistic that there are supposed to be some 18,000 or so denominations as evidence that man has fractured the community of “Christians” into some kind of meaningless sectarian (similar to congressional redistricting) division of Christianity to suit the divider’s own political ambitions.
Or something like that, because he isn’t exactly the most coherent communicator. Even when he tries to define words and terms, it almost always comes across as mush. Take his definition of the Gospel for instance:
“The irreducible good news of God, ultimately delivered in the person of Jesus Christ. In other words, a reality that can not be summed up in a call-out box.”
Huh? If you take out the fluff, it is the “good news of God”. What good news? About what? Which God? Why should I care? This is really a non-definition. He considers this type of “definition” to be good, I suppose, because it is like an ice breaker at a party, and gets the conversation started. But will a conversation really meet their need?
If you meet a man who is dying of thirst, he doesn’t want a conversation about water, HE WANTS THE WATER! And what about the woman who doesn’t know she is dying? Time and time again, both in his book and listening to him give an interview, he never “lands the plane”. He doesn’t like landing the plane, and apparently thinks that it is cute to withhold vital information from dying people. If he really wanted to define the Gospel, he could have quoted 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. (If you haven’t lost your Bible, look it up for yourself and read what a real definition looks like.)
But I suspect that he revels in the confusion he creates with his words. Aside from mockery, that is one of the main characteristics of his writing. He is purposefully confusing because he does not believe that handing out answers to theological questions facilitates his creativity. Give me a break.
As a self described theologian of sorts, his theology is muddled at best. That he rejects the authority of Scripture is simply demonstrated by his reticence (or inability) to deliver even the tiniest exposition of the Scripture as the answer to his, or anyone else’s, questions. And his rejection of the Bible as both authoritative and infallible is clear on page 124 as he mocks “creationism” and their belief in a “young earth” in spite of the “scientific consensus” to the contrary.
As an aside, and regarding so-called scientific consensus, one wonders if the author has ever considered that the scientific consensus at one point in human history was that the world is flat? He rails against certainty in matters of faith, in spite of overwhelming evidence that testifies to the veracity and perspicuity of God’s Word. Claiming that we can’t know tomorrow what we might be wrong about today, he apparently accepts as fact the theory of evolution citing “scientific consensus”.
Now think with me for a moment. If you can’t trust God is Genesis, why trust Him in the rest of the Book? If Genesis is wrong, what is the point of inviting someone to become a follower of Jesus in any context? What is the point of being a follower of Jesus at all?
Is it because you live a better life, in harmony with nature and your fellow man, and at peace with the God who claimed to have created the universe out of nothing but was really lying? Better than whom? Atheists are capable of living an ethical lifestyle with a low carbon footprint. What do you really need a god for?
Other than providing a psychological crutch to help you make it through life, the author’s god is both small and unnecessary. If his god can’t be trusted to tell the truth, why follow him?
The Sacred vs. The Secular
It is clear from his retelling of the beginnings of “emergent” that this movement has chosen to follow the philosophies of men rather than the Word of God. He rejects the separation between the secular and the sacred, and holds that up as a virtue of the emerging church. And he does so with an apparent blindness to the warnings from God in the pages of the both the Old and New Testament that the people of God are called to be separate from the culture of the world.
In the Old Covenant, the nation of Israel was called to be separate from the nations that surrounded them, warned against following after their gods, adopting their worship practices, absorbing their culture. In the New Covenant, the church is the ecclesia which literally means “called out ones”. If you want to ask a question, maybe you should start with “called out of what?”
It is because of his rejection of the authority of Scripture that he is unwilling to offer the Word of God as a definitive answer to any question. That is why he does not recognize the doctrinal distinctive that make the denominations unique, and does not have the ability to distinguish between true and false “Christians”, a concept presented very clearly in God’s Word.
What is a “Christian?”
He often quotes statistics that there are billions of “Christians” in the world today, yet his definition of what it means to be a “Christian” is apparently so loose that one wonders if the only requirement, and that may be asking a bit much, is that the candidate have a pulse. That is why, in spite of the passage I quoted at the beginning, he can consider as his fellows those who deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Read that passage again carefully. If Jesus of Nazareth has not risen, if He is not physically alive right now as you are reading this, then your faith in is vain, and you are still in your sins. So is everyone who denies the resurrection. Get that? “Still in your sins!” And in spite of the author’s insistence that preaching repentance and forgiveness of sins for the purpose of seeing people obtain eternal life is not the aim of the Gospel, God, through Paul, adds the following: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.”
Life without the Risen Christ is a pitiful life. If there is no resurrection, there is no hope. And if you don’t believe the God who has revealed Himself in the pages of Scripture, starting with the book of Genesis and His own account of creation, then you have constructed a false god of your own making and have believed a lie.
The author’s version of Christianity is a mosh pit of uncertainty, populated by the lost, clawing and scratching their way to a god of their own design through the folly of human effort. If you choose to put your trust in human wisdom and the philosophy of men you are identifying yourself with the darkness of this world and stand condemned. That is the condition of the sinner, and the fate that awaits the one who rejects God as He has revealed Himself.
Only One Gospel
That is what His Word says. In plain speaking language that can be easily understood by those who have ears to hear and eyes to see the truth. There is only one Gospel, and the gospel of the emerging church is not it. Their gospel will not lead you to the true Christ, to the one who can save you from your sins and give you living water. The man or woman who drinks from this water, that is Christ, will never thirst.
Your sin is the problem, and it won’t be solved by “doing something” or working within the context of the “kingdom of God”. Your most important problem is not with the church, or the evangelicals, or the main line denominations. It is not with the right vs. left, politics, or global warming. It is not found in the angst that you feel inside, or the problems of your past, or the bad experience you had with the cranky old church lady who gave you a dirty look because you sat in her pew.
It is not the fundamentalists who keep you from finding the true Kingdom of God. It is your sin and your love of the darkness that keeps you from the truth. That is what the Word of God says, and you are why He said it. He does not desire that you should perish, but that you should come to repentance. And repentance means that you and I need to turn from our sin and the darkness and the culture, 180 degrees, and accept the Risen Christ and all that He is and has done on our behalf. We accept as true what he says about us, our sin, and the solution for that sin. We accept as true what Jesus says about Himself, about God, and about the reality of the eternity that awaits us all.
Having done that, we accept as true what he says about the world around us, the culture, and our place in that world. He calls those of us who have been saved from our sin to be faithful to His Word, to meditate on it, and to learn from it. He calls us to reject the culture of sin, and to embrace the culture of Christ. He calls us to be separated from the world’s system, which He calls evil. He calls us to walk with him as He lives inside of us.
The Christ living inside of very true Christian is the creator of all that is, who came here to live among us, to die and rise again in victory over sin and death, and who gives us eternal life when we trust in Him alone for salvation from this sin, and the culture of sin, that is our ruin. In Him we have the certain hope that we who have embraced Him, (and all that He says He is through His revealed Word) in this life will be embraced by Him in the life and world to come.
And while we are not always successful, we stumble and fall, we hurt one another and cause great pain in our lives and the lives of those around us, He calls us to live lives of repentance and reconciliation. To come again to the living water of Jesus Christ, to drink and be refreshed. To begin again.
We live these new lives in community with our fellow believers, those who have accepted the crucified and risen Christ and take Him at His Word. We live because of the life that is within us, because of Christ, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and walk by faith that is certain and have a hope that is sure. That is what God’s Word says. That is what a Christian believes.
Who are you going to believe, God or Tony Jones?
Until next time, peace.
Doug
pastorboy
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