An Individual Gospel - E Stanley Jones

"An Individual Gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body; and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul.  One is a ghost and the other a corpse" E. Stanley Jones

 

All truth is God's Truth Publisher: IVP - Arthur F Holmes

It [the Gospel of John] presents the Logos as co-oeternal and coequal with God, and as the personal creator who transcends the world he makes from nothing. In the beginning was the Word  (John 1.1) echoes the opening words of Genesis: In the beginning God created and God said, "In Hebrew thought a word is not a detached comment, but a creative act, a decree that effects what it declares (cp. Ps 33:8-9; Isa 55.10-11) John's Logos also recalls the personified wisdom who governs the nations, rewards the just, and existed from the beginning of creation (Prove 8.35). John therefore declares that the Logos is personal, and one with God: He is creator of all and he gives life and light to men. By incarnating himself, he revealed both grace and truth(john 1:1-14)

The Logos is revealed both in the Incarnation and in the written words of the Scripture and, if less specifically, in the intelligible order of his creation. Hence non-Christians as well as Christians perceive the truth, if fragmentarily. All truth, no matter where it be found or by whom it be discovered, is still God's truth.

The scriptures and the church fathers clearly placed the focus on truth, they perceived its universality, and they recognized the ultimate unity of all truth in God. They believed, passionately so, that all truth is God's truth no matter where it be found. Yet today the Christian faith is too often seen as a private affair of the heart without reference to the larger scope of human knowledge and cultural affairs. Such a faith is too small to match the understanding which the early church had of the message of Scripture. God is creator and Lord of All; Jesus Christ reaffirms this by becoming incarnate to redeem human life. For the Christian, then, all of life matters and all of thought. All our learning must somehow fit together. Of course, A now we know in part and we see these things through a glass darkly.[1 Corinthians 13:12] But the Christian gospel of hope pertains among other things to our knowing and understanding the truth.

Reactions against a compromising identification appear in relation to political and social involvement as well as theological beliefs. Tertullian, for instance, spoke out in the early church against Christian participation in governmental and military affairs and against many of the social practices of the day, and some have argued that the church forfeited its early purity when it joined with the Roman Empire. When the Middle Ages wedded church and state and thereby identified the church with the social and political status quo, reforming and separatist movements arows: Fracisican, Waldensian, and others. In post-Refomation times, the Anabaptists refused to participate in many governmental tasks because the social and moral compromises they saw it would involve. In nineteenth-century Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard protested vigorously against a state church wherein one became a Christian willy-nilly by being born a Dane. And in the past few years, some of the Jesus people have repudiated the church's identification with what they see as an effete middle-class establishment and have developed a counter-culutre life-style instead.

All of these reactions are essentially counter-cultural, and each in its time contributed needed perspective to the life of the church. To identify the church with any historical status quo is a tragic betrayal of the church=s calling. To accept uncritically the structures of the present betrays a weakened doctrine of sin and loses that holy discontent which is always hungry for righteousness.

To identify Christianity with a historical culture loses sight of transcendent moral law. That the moral practices and social institutions of the day have been to easily hallowed by the church is evident in regard to war, slavery, work, sex, marriage, the status of women, and especially in America, a capitalist economy and democratic institutions.

Jacques Elul is a former French underground leader and mayor of Bordeaux, a Law professor, and a prolific writer on sociological and theological topics. He rejects both the identification of Christianity with current cultural movements and the practice of withdrawing from the world and its problems. In The Presence of the Kingdom, he maintains instead that the Christian is called to Challenge the suicidal direction of the world by spiritual means. We cannot hope to change society, for there are no universal moral rules as a basis for a political agreement between the Christian and a secular world. We must therefore learn to put up with the tension between sacred and secular, and develop a Christian lifestyle in response to the demand of God=s kingdom upon us. Thereby we shall bear witness to the hope we have in God.

Since the Christians cannot expect to change society for the better, Ellul refuses to sanctify secular methods or theories of politics or law or violence by making up a Christian justification of violence. He may have to us political or violent means as he does legal means because he lives in the world; but they are forced on him by the necessities of history, not chosen because they are either right of Christian.

The idea of a Christian culture or a normative Christian social ethic or a Christian political theory(as distinct from a Christian critique of society) is alien to Ellul. Ellul's doctrine of sin thus obscures both the doctrine of creation and the biblical conception of unchanging, universal and unified truth rooted in the God in whom we hope.

Whatever men do that is right and good they do by the goodness of God, for every good gift comes from above. Whatever men know they know by the grace of God, for all truth is God's truth wherever it be found.

Pilates' question is still with us[what is truth]. It was a rhetorical question, occasioned by Jesus claim to bear witness to the truth. Perhaps it expressed his cynicism about the perennial religious and political disagreements of Jesus accusers, rather than voicing a serious inquiry, But his words were spoken out of the divided philosophical background of a Roman culture. On the one hand, stoics and Platonists dogmatically maintained that truth is unchanging and universal, the same for everyone, that it is rooted in the unchanging rational structure of what is ultimately real, and that while it transcends changing human opinions it is nonetheless accessible to a disciplined logical mind. On the other hand, skeptics argued that all judgments are relative, all arguments are indecisive, and all so-called knowledge is mere, opinion, and truth if indeed there be any that is unchanging and unknown remains utterly unknown.

Emil Brunner sees revelation as a personal confrontation, an I-thou experience of God conceived on the model of Martin Buber's distinction between interpersonal experience with others as human subjects(I- Thou) and the more detached relationships(I-It) in which we treat things and propositions and even people as objects. When I talk about a person or my relationship to him, I make him an object instead of a subject; I depersonalize him and reduce the I-thou experience to the I-it level. For Bruner, revelation is a direct personal encounter with GodI(I-Thou). Propositions about God (I-It) reduce God to an object of thought and thereby falsify the truth of the encounter. The Bible is about (I-it) God's personal revelation (I-thou), and not itself a divine revelation to men. Accordingly, it remains a fallible human witness to God's revelation and can provide no royal road to learning, however insightful its witness may be

Author: Arthur F Holmes

Date: 1977

Source: All truth is God's Truth

Publisher: IVP

City: Leicester, UK