Recovering Evangelicals #12 Loose Threads: Evangelicalism and the Gospel
Many times, Boyd and I have been asked “What’s with the name of your podcast?” Here’s our answer.
In the first of a three part series, we take a look at how Evangelicalism has morphed and deviated away from its historical roots: the Gospel message itself.
Boyd starts us off looking at our respective experiences with contemporary Evangelicalism, then takes us back to when that period in the movement really came to the forefront of the consciousness of modern church culture: the days of Billy Graham to the present.
We then step back to the 1800s, when the term “Evangelical” first started being used by the church. Which prompts an awkward question: “was the Church not Evangelical before the 1800s?”
Luke then takes us back a couple millennia further, to a time that predates Christianity itself, and an entirely different culture that first introduced the term “Evangelical” to the world.
No, not the Hebrew culture.
The Romans themselves had a “Euangelion” … a “Gospel” … a Good News message of a savior for the world and for all mankind: a son of god who would bring in a fantastically new world order … a whole new kind of liberty, freedom, stability, and prosperity … such that no one before or after would ever be able to out-do his achievement. His name was Caesar Augustus.
This was their message long before Jesus gathered his disciples around him and co-opted the same word.
Some Christians might get uncomfortable with this, but it’s nonetheless a part of our history. An honest seeker will embrace that … and then unpack it. Perhaps we can show that Caesar Augustus’s acclamation was premature, and that Jesus himself took it to a whole new level? His new world order is not only still standing, but still growing: it brings to mind a mustard seed, or yeast in a lump of dough. Caesar’s, on the other hand, collapsed in on itself within a few centuries and continues only as echoes in our language, law, medicine, science … and Hollywood movies.
It is a fact of history that Christ’s euangelion has indeed been growing to fantastic proportions (Matt 13:31, 33), and has indeed been producing all kinds of “treasures, new and old” (Matt 13:47, 52): not just spiritual benefits (forgiveness; salvation; healing), but also societal ones (hospitals; schools; humanitarian efforts; movements to abolish slavery; peace-and-reconciliation commissions after a genocide; the laws which govern many countries). It has been casting nets to catch “fish” (Matt 13:47), and has been preparing a banquet (Matt 22:2).
“Thy kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven.”
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