One of the primary tasks of the church is to proclaim the gospel to the surrounding culture. We have seen many attempts, both wise and ill-advised, both successful and unsuccessful, to do this in the past century in the United States.
N.T. Wright points out, in What Saint Paul Really Said, that the church has often been more successful at addressing the concerns and assumptions of first-century Jews in its proclamation than it has at addressing contemporary Americans:
I believe, as a matter of cultural analysis, that the Western world is moving rapidly towards various new forms of paganism….The church, ironically enough, has often majored on the mesage that Paul had not to the pagans, but to the world of Judaism. That remains important. But we do not have to tell our hearers to become Jews in order that they may then be confronted by Paul’s gospel. If we want to address our own generation with the message of Jesus Christ, we need to rediscover the way in which that Gospel really is good news for a pagan world. Paul is very zealous about that, if only we will listen to him. p. 94
Instead of focusing on Paul’s ways of addressing second-temple Jewish beliefs, we should be looking at Paul’s confrontation of paganism. Indeed, Wright says, the West is looking more and more like the pagan world of the first-century Roman empire. If our world is primarily pagan, not Jewish, our proclamation of the gospel must take this fact into account.
At the same time, we make the mistake of assuming that first-century Jews believed what most Americans believe about salvation and the gospel. For example, Wright points out that we often read into Judaism a kind of proto-Pelagianism, the doctrine that we achieve salvation by pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps:
I was taught, and assumed for many years, that Saul of Tarsus believed what many of my contemporaries believed: that the point of life was to go to heaven when you die, and that the way to go to heaven after death was to adhere strictly to an overarching moral code. …What mattered to him was understanding, believing, and operating a system of salvation that could be described as “moralism” or “legalism”: a timeless system into which one plugged oneself in order to receive the promised benefits, especially “salvation” and “eternal life”, understood as the post-mortem bliss of heaven.I now believe that this is both radically anachronistic (this view was not [yet] invented in Saul’s day) and culturally out of line (it is not the Jewish way of thinking).
…
[Saul] wanted God to redeem Israel, Moreover, he drew freely on texts from the Hebrew Bible which promised that Israel’s God would do exactly that. p. 32
So we have these two false assumptions to deal with in our proclamation of the Gospel in America:
- Americans believe basically the same thing Jews in the first century did (or, alternately, that Jews in the first century must have believed what secular Americans now believe)
- The primary theological misconception held by Americans is that legalism is the way to go to heaven when you die
Wright asserts that our Western, increasingly postmodern culture is becoming increasingly pagan, and thus must be confronted with the gospel in a way that takes this paganism into account. In the following posts in this series, I will outline what I perceive to be the common American understanding of the Gospel and related subjects, and offer some insights on how to address this reality with the Gospel. I look forward to receiving your feedback.
