By Darrell L. Bock and Mikel Del Rosario
[Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor in New Testament Studies and Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Mikel Del Rosario is a doctoral student in New Testament Studies, Project Manager for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary, and Adjunct Professor of Christian Apologetics and World Religion at William Jessup University, Rocklin, California.]
On an episode of the Table Podcast called “Engaging with Millennials,” Q founder and author of The Next Christians Gabe Lyons observes, “When you look at all the conversions from the Second Great Awakening until now, [you find that] we had huge conversion growth . . . up until the early ’80s. That’s when the percentage started to drop off [and the] cultural influence [of the church] declined.” He suggests a problem with one way that the gospel has been expressed over the last thirty years: “We’ve left off what I would call the bookends of this full story.” While virtually every evangelical church recognizes the importance of sharing the gospel, recent messaging has tended to focus on only half of the gospel story. A variety of experts interviewed on the Table Podcast have touched on this idea, not only in conversations about ministering to millennials, but also on episodes about truth and beauty, sexuality and identity, as well as the story of Creation.
This briefing highlights ideas from conversations with Lyons, with Saint Jude Oak Cliff resident theologian Nika Spaulding, with Centre for Public Christianity founder John Dickson, and with Moody Bible Institute professor-at-large in biblical studies Christopher Yuan. First, while the “partial gospel” begins in a negative place, the “whole gospel” begins in a positive place. Second, the whole gospel is designed to take us to redemption and lead us to reconciliation.
The Partial Gospel Begins In A Negative Place
Some Christians become discouraged when sharing their faith because they perceive that more and more people seem to be immediately closed to the gospel message. However, many inadvertently begin spiritual conversations by essentially telling the person, “First, you are sinner and you need to be fixed.” This has been called the “Fall-Redemption Story” or the “Two-Chapter Gospel.” Here the gospel story starts in Genesis 3 rather than in Genesis 1. This approach begins with the idea that “you’re a sinner and need to be forgiven by a holy God, who can rescue you from your sin.” While this not an unbiblical message, there are problems with beginning in this negative place.
First, it can lead some people to see God as primarily a cosmic judge who keeps track of human faults in order to bring punishment, but God as judge is only part of the biblical concept of him. While the “Fall-Redemption” model or “Two-Chapter Gospel” is a part of the biblical narrative, it is an abbreviated version of the whole gospel. Beginning spiritual conversations with the Fall in Genesis 3 begins at the wrong point, in the middle of the Gospel story. Skipping over Genesis 1 hinders people from seeing a fuller picture of God and humanity. This is something millennials in the church, like Nika Spaulding, are bringing to the attention of pastors and other Christian leaders.
On an episode called “A New Vision for Sharing Faith,” Spaulding suggests that gospel conversations should not begin with a discussion of brokenness and sin. Rather, they should begin with the biblical truth that all humans are created in God’s image. He designed the gospel to take us back to the initial purpose of life and our original design.
Spaulding: One of the things that I’ve noticed from evangelistic efforts [that are] trying to reach Millennials and Gen Zers [is that] the “part one” is, “you’re broken.” And I’m like, “Ooh. That’s not actually our story.”
Our story began with a triune God, and then creation, and then the beauty that is humanity made in God’s image, and we belong to something bigger than ourselves. This idea of using story as part of evangelism is gaining a lot of traction in our church, where people want to know what they belong to.
Beginning gospel presentations in a negative place cuts out the beginning of the gospel story. Preaching the whole gospel means including the beauty of creation, beginning in a positive place.
The Whole Gospel Begins In A Positive Place
This fuller presentation has been called the “Creation-Fall-Redemption story,” in which people are not presented merely as sinful creatures, but as precious human persons made in God’s image. We are made to manage the earth well together and reflect God to his honor while doing it (Gen 1:26–30). Further, God is not presented primarily as a cosmic judge, but one who gives all individuals their dignity and intrinsic worth. On an episode called “Truth, Beauty, and the Gospel,” John Dickson explains how Genesis 1 highlights the goodness and beauty of God’s creation:
Dickson: [In] Genesis 1, everything is good. . . . The [Hebrew] word there is טוֹב, or in the Greek translation, καλός which tends to have an aesthetic quality. It’s good in the pleasant sense. [You could translate it as] “God saw that it was beautiful.” It’s repeated seven times, and the seventh time in Genesis 1, it says, “Very good.”
We’re made in the image of God [and] our minds, which are given to us by the creator, are able to see in creation in a variety of ways, whether it’s art, music, beautiful ideas, beautiful arguments, beautiful relationships, we’re able to see and experience the harmony between the objective orderliness of creation and the rational order of our minds. You only have to go to the last chapters of the Bible to see that beauty is everywhere in Genesis [and also in] Revelation 21 and 22, isn’t it? The description of jewels and streets, and the dimensions of the city, and all of this so clearly saying it’s good again.
Bock: That’s right, we got it back.
Dickson: Not that it was completely gone [but] everyone longs for justice to come in the world. The biblical idea is that God is coming not as the angry schoolmaster, with a big stick to punish children. He’s coming as the justice commissioner to sort out the mess of the world, and sure, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that, but I think anyone can step back and go, “You know what? I want God to come and sort the mess out.”
There’s going to be harmony in a world where there’s breakdown, there’s going to be justice where there’s injustice. There’s going to be peace where there is violence. And so, there’s a match between the truth of God’s Word and the beauty that we all long for.
Recognizing this allows us to see the Fall and even individual sinful acts from a more biblical perspective in relation to our unbelieving friends and neighbors. For example, it includes focusing on the good and the Imago Dei in all people.
On an episode of the Table about biblical sexual ethics and the gospel, Christopher Yuan and Darrell Bock discuss seeing people not primarily as characterized by a given behavior but primarily as people made in the image of God. Doing this more intentionally can help us better relate to people as we share the whole gospel, rather than beginning our conversations from a negative place.
Yuan: Everyone, whether [he or she] has come to Christ or not, whether they are living in unrepentant sin or not, whether they identify as gay or not, everyone is created in the image of God. Having this concept of identity is so important because I don’t know of any other sin issue that we have conflated with personhood. For example, if I call someone an adulterer, I don’t view that as who they are, but what they do or what they are continuing to do. However, the world has conflated sexuality with who we are. Sexuality isn’t who we are.
Bock: You love a person because they are made in the image of God. That brings them worth, regardless of what they’ve done, because there is an inherent connection [between] what the person was created to be and what they have the potential to be, that is different from who they currently are. If you can step in with the gospel and show the way in which God loves the person and has taken the steps to deal with what has left them [morally] short at the same time, you have the opportunity to turn them from being a debtor into being someone who has received something that takes them out of that place of debt.
[We] recognize that this person, despite their failures and their falling short, has the potential under the grace of God to be something that they have not been. We can either think about who they are currently and get stuck there, or we can think about the possibility of what God can do with this person. I think that will change the way you think about relating to someone.
Yuan: What really frustrates me is [when] Christians say, “Look at [how] those [in the] the gay community [or] the lesbian community make their sexuality who they are.” Yet, when we see a gay person, we [often] see them [as] their sinful behavior alone and nothing else. We forget that this individual, who has yet to know Christ, is still an image-bearer of God. We need to stop viewing same-sex behavior as the only lens through which we see those in the gay community.
I’m not at all saying that we need to ignore or treat trivially this sinful behavior. I just don’t think that we need to elevate it as the first thing [we think about when we see a gay person] because this is something that I often hear when I speak at churches. They will ask, “I have this gay friend or gay coworker. How do I tell them?” And I’m like, “Tell them what?” [They respond], “That [homosexual sex] is sin.” Why does this have to be the first thing that you want to tell them?
First, just get to know the person. The second thing is not that we would tell them that they’re living in sin. The second thing is talk to them about God, the existence of God, and Jesus Christ his son.
Beginning with God creating humanity and its implications for the imago Dei affirms the dignity of the person and highlights the idea that the most important thing about their identity as a human being is that they are made in God’s image.
The Whole Gospel Is Designed To Take Us To Restoration
The whole gospel message clarifies the reasons for redemption: Restoring humanity to what we were always meant to be. This fuller expression of the gospel is sometimes called the “Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration” narrative or the “Four Chapter Gospel.” It begins in Genesis 1 and ends in Revelation 22. Richard Averbeck, professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, points back to God’s original command to steward the creation as something that the gospel message restores. He discusses this with Bock:
Averbeck: [Genesis 1] sets the foundations for what the gospel achieves on the other end in terms of reconciliation—what the gospel takes us back to. The gospel takes us back to being good stewards of the creation together in a way that’s harmonious.
Bock: And the foundational basis [for] the appeal for taking the gospel to everybody is because of that accountability. When we look at the apostles in Acts presenting the gospel to someone who doesn’t know anything about the Bible, they start with the idea of “You’ve been created by a creator God to whom you’re accountable.”
The beauty of the gospel is that Jesus brings about restoration of all things. Everything about creation that Genesis 1 and 2 describes as “good” was marred by sin in Genesis 3. God’s provision of redemption through the cross makes permanent restoration and renewal possible. Lyons encapsulates well the “Four Chapter Gospel,” the story of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. He and Bock discuss this and the implications:
Lyons: The first part [of the story] in Genesis 1 and 2 [is] the creation part of the story. There was a good design to this world that every human being is made in the image of God, meant to bear witness to who they’ve been designed after. But that sin, so the fall part, the second part of the story distorts all that. It makes us disordered. We go after things that God never intended us to go after. Then, only through Christ can we be redeemed through the cross and his resurrection and our belief and acceptance of that gift of grace. But there’s this fourth, final part of the story—partnering with God to renew all things, to be a part of reconciling as 2 Corinthians 5:18 describes. We’ve all been given the ministry of reconciliation.
The [first] challenge for the church is to get our teaching right. If we’re teaching people about just a vertical relationship with Christ—and we’re kind of hanging on as we see the world start to slip, we go, “Man, I can’t wait to get to heaven one day. Things are gonna be great”—[then] we’ve missed the point of how God wanted us to live with our neighbors here on earth. That is, to be a part of his redemptive purposes which God will use to draw people towards himself in a way that our words and our beliefs and talking about those will never do.
Bock: The great commandment doesn’t read, “Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and make your reservation in heaven.” The two parts are love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself, and the whole picture and ethic of the New Testament is clear. It’s also in the Ten Commandments. If you orient yourself properly to God, that impacts the way you’re relating to others, and it’s designed to give you a quality of life that’s not just eternal in duration but eternal in quality in its roots. [This] takes you back to being made in the image of God. So the full story is [this]: You’ve got creation. You’ve got the fall. You’ve got redemption and then you’ve got ultimate restoration and reconciliation.
Those are the four parts. In the “half stories” you just talk about the fall and the redemption, but you don’t bookend it with creation and the way God designed us, why he designed us that way, what he hopes our place on earth is and will be, and the fact that he has a place he’s trying to take us.
Lyons: When you tell a half story, it just doesn’t make sense to people and it can be the equivalent of handing a wonderful book to a friend of yours, but the first hundred pages are ripped out of the book and your friend has to start at page 101 and try to figure out who these characters are, what’s going on, and then just as they’re getting into the book, the last hundred pages are ripped out, and they don’t know where this story’s going. Yet we tell the story of the gospel in these “half story terms” of “you’re a sinner, you need to get saved and then you’ll go to heaven and, by the way, your job is [to] tell other people that story.” We are saying something that’s pretty incoherent, and people are going, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re answering questions that maybe in the ’60s and ’70s people were asking such as, ‘If I died tonight, where would I go?’” There was a nuclear holocaust on the horizon. People were really asking the question. I haven’t had a lot of people ask that question recently.
Bock: Yeah, their other question is, “Why am I here?” not “What’s going to happen to me eventually?”
The Whole Gospel Is Designed To Lead Us To Reconciliation
The creation mandate of Genesis 1:26–28 shows that humanity was made as male and female to cooperate together in the management of our planet. The whole gospel is about Jesus taking us on a journey where we are relationally equipped to live the way God intended us to live from the beginning. He wants us to manage our relationships together well, and he provided a way for us to be restored through the cross. The whole gospel shows us the effort to reclaim what was lost, to take us back to the proper management of the creation in such a way that we reflect God’s character. We are, therefore, to be the light of the world that Jesus talked about in Matthew 5:14 and engage in the ministry of reconciliation that Paul mentioned in 2 Corinthians 5:11–21. That reconciliation is not just a work of vertical reconciliation, it is a work that God performs at a horizontal level. When we share the whole gospel, we lovingly invite all men and women into a new world, the family of God.
One of the most powerful ways to evidence the gospel is to live out the reconciliation lifestyle to which God has called us. We do this by loving people well and by obeying the great commandment to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. God gives us the capability to love even our enemies, while loving our neighbor as ourselves. In a DTS Chapel message called “Where Eternal Life Takes Us,” Bock relates this to the way we share the gospel: “Our concern for others undergirds the claim in our words for the gospel. God cares about you. When I share the gospel, that's what I'm sharing with people. God cares about you. How in the world is that other person going to know it unless I show my care for them? I better teach truth, but I better love well.”
This is why it is important to pair gospel proclamation with gospel demonstration in our everyday lives. While some may resist the former while welcoming the latter, the earliest Christians found acts of compassion to be effective in establishing the church in ancient cities. Serving alongside people builds relationships. Many times, this creates an opportunity for us to begin spiritual conversations while talking about what motivates our service.
Over the last thirty years, the church’s messaging has tended to focus on only half of the gospel story. While we must showcase the work of Christ, the core of the gospel described in 1 Corinthians 15:1–8, we must not neglect the “bookends” of the story. The “Four Chapter Gospel,” or Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration narrative, allows us to begin gospel presentations in a positive place. It can help us present God not primarily as a judge but the one who gives all people infinite value and worth. The whole gospel is designed to take us to redemption and restoration. This, in turn, leads us to live out the gospel in a ministry of reconciliation. Let’s give people the whole story, the whole gospel.
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