Disciplemaking
A Layman's Historical Guide to the Inerrancy Debate
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 12:23
A Layman's Historical Guide to the Inerrancy Debate
Means of our Christian Growth
Monday, 15 March 2010 08:59
The Gospel of Jesus Christ
Thursday, 04 March 2010 12:25
The Gospel Of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:1 – 19)
By D. A. Carson
The Spurgeon Fellowship Journal - Spring 2008
Many have commented on the fact that the church in the western world is going through a time of remarkable fragmentation. This fragmentation extends to our understanding of the gospel. For some Christians, "the gospel" is a narrow set of teachings about Jesus and his death and resurrection which, rightly believed, tip people into the kingdom. After that, real discipleship and personal transformation begin, but none of that is integrally related to “the gospel.” This is a far cry from the dominant New Testament emphasis that understands “the gospel” to be the embracing category that holds much of the Bible together, and takes Christians from lostness and alienation from God all the way through conversion and discipleship to the consummation, to resurrection bodies, and to the new heaven and the new earth.
Other voices identify the gospel with the first and second commandments—the commandments to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. These commandments are so central that Jesus himself insists that all the prophets and the law hang on them (Matthew 22:34- 40)—but most emphatically they are not the gospel.
A third option today is to treat the ethical teaching of Jesus found in the Gospels as the gospel—yet it is the ethical teaching of Jesus abstracted from the passion and resurrection narrative found in each Gospel. This approach depends on two disastrous mistakes. First, it overlooks the fact that in the first century, there was no “Gospel of Matthew,” “Gospel of Mark,” and so forth. Our four Gospels were called, respectively, “The Gospel According to Matthew,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” and so forth. In other words, there was only one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This one gospel, this message of news that was simultaneously threatening and promising, concerned the coming of Jesus the Messiah, the long-awaited King, and included something about his origins, the ministry of his forerunner, his brief ministry of teaching and miraculous transformation, climaxing in his death and resurrection. These elements are not independent pearls on a string that constitutes the life and times of Jesus the Messiah. Rather, they are elements tightly tied together. Accounts of Jesus’ teaching cannot be rightly understood unless we discern how they flow toward and point toward Jesus’ death and resurrection. All of this together is the one gospel of Jesus Christ, to which the canonical Gospels bear witness. To study the teaching of Jesus without simultaneously reflecting on his passion and resurrection is far worse than assessing the life and times of George Washington without reflecting on the American Revolution, or than evaluating Hitler’s Mein Kampf without thinking about what he did and how he died. Second, we shall soon see that to focus on Jesus’ teaching while making the cross peripheral reduces the glorious good news to mere religion, the joy of forgiveness to mere ethical conformity, the highest motives for obedience to mere duty. The price is catastrophic.
The Steps of Integrative Theology's Method
Friday, 22 January 2010 17:49
I am facinated how the method one uses for developing their theology controls much of the genuiness of the belief system that results from it. So many Christians react to theologies that they don't know about or and emotionally dislike without any Biblical basis. Integrative theology is a great attempt to develop a theologiacal method that is not entirely deductive or Inductive. It places itself as abductive since is a
verificational method of researching one basic issue, which doesn't begin with an allegedly blank mind (as inductive methods do), or with a confessional statement presupposed to be true (as in deductive methods), but with several historical and contemporary answers as hyupothesis to be tested (Inductive Theology, Gordon R. Lewish & Bruce A Demarest, p11).
The steps according the Lewis and Demarest are are Summarized by 6 key phrases:
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The Problem
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Histoical Hypotheses
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Biblical Teaching
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Systematic formulation
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Apologetic Interaction
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Relevance for life and Ministry.
I intend to explore this method of doing thelogy myself and in teaching in the church. My desire is the it would produce great light with out the heat that can occur when people react to biblical teaching with doing any verification of their own theological presuppositions themselves.
Thick Gospel vs. Thin Gospel
Friday, 08 June 2007 04:52
Thick Gospel Vs. Thin Gospel
Growing A God-Centered Evangelism
When one things about evangelism and reaching people with the Gospel one must look to the Centrality of sovereign, saving grace because the quickening grace of God in salvation completely exalts God. Grace is God-honoring and humanity-humbling. We must see the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a "Thick Gospel" and not a "Thin Gospel. "
You may be asking, What in the world is a "Thick Gospel"? We all know that God initiates grace and that this grace frees us from the rejection of others in Evangelism. We know that evangelism is impossible without grace, for grace is what frees nonbelievers from their enslavement to sin. The problem with our understanding of the Gospel is that we stop our understanding of its relevance at the point a person profession Christ. For many Christians the Gospel is only for unbelievers because believers need to go beyond the Gospel in the the deeper-life.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The source of all grace is the Cross of our Savior Jesus Christ. The fact that "grace" continues its effect beyond our initial liberation from unbelief and continues to energize Christians should show that the Gospel of the Cross needs to be preached to Christian and non-Christian alike. What Christians need to understand is that after their salvation, the gracious power of the Holy Spirit upholds them through their Christian Journey. Saved under God-Centered and grace oriented evangelism, they have a wonderful framework for a Christian life of God-centered, grace oriented sanctification. And the basis for this grace in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. All grace was purchased for us at the Cross and that is why the Cross is the center of preaching is the early church and should be the basis of every Sermon we preach to people today.
