Lesson 8: The Gospel

This one is late because I was caught off guard. I thought it would be easy to dash something off quickly, then I sent last week’s short essay to a list of people with a paragraph that included “Remember all four (gospels) were written before the Copernican revolution. Let me look next week at ways we define the Gospel after that great change. For instance, possible ways we might define heaven now.”

I immediately received all sorts of comments about my use of the word “heaven.” They chided me for talking about the gospel as something that happens after we die and describing that as going to someplace called heaven. Although this was done with humor, fully understanding that is not at all what I meant, my friends used the situation to express dissatisfaction with the Church focusing its message on some other time or place. For instance, they would cite some poetic saying the Church uses when someone dies as meaning nothing at all. Although no one said it, I sensed people not only questioned the reality of hell but also heaven.

That led me first to realize I could not casually talk as if we have handled the Copernican Revolution. The New Testament used the scientific concepts of the first century that pictured the universe as concentric spheres with humans occupying the earth at the center and God and his angels in heaven at the outermost ring. I don’t think anyone in our modern scientific age really thinks there is such a place anymore. Yet, we still talk about the Gospel as a promise that we will get to heaven after we die if we are good or have faith in Jesus.

But perhaps even more importantly, I realized when we do use first-century concepts, we also completely miss what Paul and the four evangelists meant by the Gospel. The good news they proclaimed was that Jesus of Nazareth acting with divine power started the Kingdom of God 2000 years ago. They were talking more about God sharing a special kind of community with us rather than a place.

Sometimes the message was compressed into “God raised Jesus from the dead after the political and religious establishment executed him.” The Idea was that the crucifixion did not remove God’s presence among his people. Jesus’ kind of community is still possible. If we make the resurrection into something that only makes it possible to be with God after we die, we miss the point. Worldly authorities do not execute people for talking about something that happens in another world after death.

I’m not sure why I used “heaven” instead of the “Kingdom of God.” I guess I was thinking about the need to translate first-century concepts into 21st-century ones after Copernicus. Maybe I thought I could do something like Dante who used his Church’s concepts of the inferno, purgatory, and paradise to comment on his contemporary society. I really can’t remember what was going on in my head. However, when I received my friends’ critiques, it seemed to be a bad idea as the word comes with too many implications.

However, now I think it might have been a fortunate mistake. It certainly brought out the difficulty of putting the Gospel into contemporary language. It also revealed the problems some of my friends have with the way the Church is doing it.

In the coming weeks, I’ll try to examine the Gospel as a message about the community God calls his people to establish in our world.

Tags: Christ-centered Community, Gospel Community, The Gospel, The Gospel after Copernicus, The Gospel is Not What Happens after We Die, What is Heaven