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Editorial:
Spring Fever Comment:
What is Reconciliation? From
the Director: Ireland is changing and so are we! The
Whole Gospel for the Whole World (and beyond...) Rwanda
Ten Years On Anglo-Irish
Relations The
Hard Gospel Interview
with Robin Eames: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh Interview
with Sean Brady: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh Church-based
Peacebuilding Evangelism
& Reconciliation - are they irreconcilable? Dogville
and the Drama of Redemption Blessed
are the Peacemakers? Review:
Bitter Fruit Review:
The Colour of Darkness Review:
The Lost Message of Jesus Review:
The Futures of Evangelicalism Review:
Evangelicals in Ireland: An Introduction |
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review: JUDGING FROM the critical aftermath, this is one of the more controversial books to come out in recent times. But, to be honest, all controversy aside, I found the book frustrating. Without doubt, it brings into the open many important challenges. The troubling conclusion of the conversations and experiences that the authors relate is that many have become disillusioned with the Church and its message. Tragically, the authors claim, this is because we have lost the message that Jesus preached. They feel that the church has too often proclaimed a narrow, exclusive, hell-obsessed, condemning gospel of an angry God, whereas the message of Jesus, centred on the fact that “God is love”, is inclusive, radical, relevant, challenging and attractive. It is good news! It means liberation not bondage; inclusion not rejection; concern for the oppressed, not dogmatic oppression. It has radical social implications of love for enemies and non-violent resistance against evil that Christians all too often fail to demonstrate. The book is written with the excitement of people who have discovered this lost message for themselves, who have been changed by it and have a passion to impart it both to those who have not heard it and those who fail to preach it. As such, many will rightly find provocative, refreshing and liberating truth in this appeal to re-focus on the holistic message of God’s love as well as the challenge to see Jesus not as a “safe, sanitized, twenty-first century saviour” but as “the most challenging and controversial figure of all human history” (p. 70). However, some may feel that the authors are merely finding their way into a radical understanding of the gospel that others have been promoting for quite some time. But – and this is the bit that frustrates me – what are evidently some important and challenging conclusions about the nature of the gospel are mixed with arguments that display naive biblical interpretation and rely too heavily on caricatures, generalisations from experience and pithy sayings that have only an air of profundity. For example, a key verse for the whole book is 1 John 4:8: ‘God is love’, which is undeniably a ‘mind-bending, brain-stretching, worldview-shaping soundbite’ (p45). It is surely vital to our very understanding of God that he chooses to define himself as love (p55). And yet, it is used in a sweepingly axiomatic fashion with little regard for context. We are told that ‘The Bible never defines God as anger, power or judgement – in fact it never defines him as anything other than love’ (p 63). But in the very same letter John tells us, ‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light…’ (1 John 1:5). This goes unmentioned, as does 1 John 4:10, which is crucial both to understanding God’s love and to thinking through the atonement – a subject taken up in the final chapter and at the heart of the ensuing debate. This last chapter – possibly not as central to the book as the later debates might suggest – typifies this flimsy approach. The authors caricature a view of the cross as ‘cosmic child abuse’ (p. 182). They oppose it with this undefined notion, robbed of its context, that ‘God is love’. And they throw in the simplistic premise of a modern sociologist for which they offer no evidence, aside from the assertion that it is ‘profound’. This just will not do as a contribution to such an important discussion. So I was frustrated that, for want of more robust and faithful reasoning, we’ve ended up with a book that has some passionately communicated and stimulating conclusions which are undermined by some ill thought through and highly incautious ones. In seeking the lost message of Jesus, there is potential here to lose the message of Jesus. But as the debate has raged, I’ve been even more frustrated that the Church typically produces either passionate communicators with a gracious understanding of God’s love for people, or fine biblical scholars with a deep understanding of God’s truth for people, but so often struggles to marry the two. BEN WALKER is Research Co-ordinator at the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland. THE LOST
MESSAGE OF JESUS: Steve Chalke & Alan Mann |
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