The Reduced Gospel of Jesus

This next post has been lifted from Donald Miller's book Searching For God Knows What. It's about how the Gospel is more elaborate and beautiful than the "reduced version" that we find in Christian tracts and pamphlets. It's largely because of writing like this that Donald Miller has become my favourite author, beating out more obvious picks like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, or Kevin DeYoung. I have edited Don's format just a little bit to fit the style of most of my Searching For A City posts.

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"THE GOSPEL OF JESUS" 
'My friend Greg and I have been talking quite a bit about what it means to follow Jesus. Greg would not consider himself as somebody who takes Jesus seriously, but he admits to having questions. I didn't have a formula for him to understand how a Christian conversion works, but I told him that many years ago, when I was a child, I had heard about Jesus and found the idea of Him compelling, then much later, while reading the Gospels, came to believe that I wanted to follow Him. This changed things in my life, I said, because it involved giving up everything and choosing to go into a relationship with Him.

Greg told me he had seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. "Those would be the facts of the story," I said, "but that isn't the story." "Those are the ideas, but it isn't the narrative," Greg stated rhetorically. "Yes," I told him.

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE IT CAN BE SUMMED UP THIS SIMPLY
Earlier that same year I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a Bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar that they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the backbone of the Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?" 

"But the Scripture references are right here," I said curiously, showing Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea. "I see that," he said. "But in the Bible they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They are spread out all over the book." "But this pamphlet is a summation of the ideas," I clarified. "Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would have taked the time to make bullet points out of them, Instead, He put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, He is speaking entirely in parables. It is hard to believe that whatever it is He is talking about can be summed up this simply." 

THE TROUBLE WITH THESE REDUCED IDEAS

Omar's point is well taken, And while the ideas presented in these pamphlets are certainly true, it struck me how simply we had begun to explain the ideas, not only how simply, but how non-relationally, how propositionally. I don't mean any of this to fault the pamphlets at all. Tracts such as the ones Omar and Greg encountered have been powerful tools in helping people understand the beauty of the message of Christ. Millions, perhaps, have come to know Jesus through these efficient presentations of the gospel. But I did begin to wonder if there were better ways of explaining it than these pamphlets. After all, the pamphlets have been around for only the last fifty years or so (along with our formulaic presentation of the gospel), and the church has shrunk, not grown, in Western countries in which these tools have been used. But the greater trouble with these reduced ideas is that modern evangelical culture is so accustomed to this summation that it is difficult for us to see the gospel as anything other than a list of true statements with which a person must agree. 

OUR REDUCTION HAS CAUSED US TO MISS SOMETHING

It makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the gospel is easy to understand, a simple mental exercise, not the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the gospel of Jesus. John would open his gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.'

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Great stuff from The Donald.

-Sean