The Core of the Gospel 1

The story of Jesus is "good news."  It is the "gospel" that God has enthroned Jesus as king of the universe.  A gospel in the time of the New Testament was extraordinary news, like the birth of a successor to the throne or a key military victory. In the preaching of Jesus, the image of "preaching the gospel" may have pointed directly at Isaiah 52:7 and the good news that God was restoring his people after a time of captivity. [1]

The sermons of Acts are all encapsulations of the good news as well, and almost all of them climax with the fact that God has raised Jesus from the dead and enthroned him as king of everything. [2]  They are all very similar, which probably shows that they are as much the handiwork of Luke as word-for-word transcripts of exactly what was said on each occasion. [3] But they nevertheless give us a clear picture of the earliest preaching of the church. [4]

The sermons of Acts almost all have a roughly similar outline. [5]  First, God had foretold his plan in the prophets of Scripture. He was now making it happen through Jesus of Nazareth. The people of Jerusalem had put him to death, but God had raised him from the dead. The resurrection is the climax of all the sermons in Acts but Stephen's. God installed him as king of everything and has now sent out his Spirit. In response, everyone should repent, be baptized, and they will receive the Holy Spirit...

[1] See Ken Schenck, Jesus: The Mission (Indianapolis: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2013), 22-23.

[2] See 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 for another narrative encapsulation of the gospel.

[3] We know from the Greek historian Thucydides that it was perfectly acceptable for a historian to compose speeches that fit the occasion about which they were writing (cf. History of the Pelopponesian War, 2.97.4). The sermon of Acts 2 gives us a hint of Luke's handiwork in that Peter seems to quote Psalm 16 from the Greek version, while Peter would have spoken Aramaic on the Day of Pentecost. Compare Acts 2:26 with Psalm 16:9.

[4] A classic here is C. H. Dodd's, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology (London: Nisbet, 1952).  You can read it for free online here.  I studied under Dunn who studied under Moule who studied under Dodd.  This basic gospel preaching is sometimes called the "kerygma."

[5] Arguably Stephen's sermon in Acts 7 would have ended up similarly, but he gets stoned before he finishes.

The Kingdom: Commenced and Coming

Bob Whitesel was telling me at lunch how revolutionary George Ladd's theology of the kingdom was at Fuller when he was there in seminary.  It's an odd story to me, because to me I have always found both Albert Schweitzer's rendition of Jesus (the kingdom is entirely yet to come) and C. H. Dodd's rendition (the kingdom is entirely here already) as so strangely extreme in the light of the gospels.  Ladd's idea of "inaugurated eschatology"--the kingdom has begun in the person of Jesus but is not fully here and will not be fully here until Christ's return--has always seemed commonsensically the best description both of the gospels and of Christian theology.

But Bob has helped me see that these ideas, which for me in seminary were simply different ideological positions, were originally ensconced in what was going on at the time of these scholars.  Ladd, for example, gave theological justification to a burgeoning charismatic movement for whom it was important to see the spiritual gifts of the kingdom as present reality.  John Wimber, for example, was about to start the Vineyard movement at the time.

No doubt the same could be said for Schweitzer and Dodd, especially Dodd.  It's a reminder that historical Jesus research often has as much or more to do with those doing it as with the historical Jesus.  I'm not at all saying such investigations are illegitimate.  I'm just confirming what so many have said before: when we see Jesus as our model for today, we often see Jesus as a mirror of ourselves.