Christianity IS the Gospel

"In its conceptual representation of this theocentric arrangement for salvation, Christianity explains the necessity of grace in the following way. Human beings universally could have perceived clearly that God wants love to rule the world. Instead they have all rebelled against having a definitive communion of love with God. As a race and as individuals they could and should have perceived that the proper present and ultimate meaning of their life is to participate with God in a communion that opens solicitously to any other human being and embraces everyone who responds. Instead, human beings universally have willfully exchanged their God-given birthright - their finite freedom and their capacity to love - for bondage to the sin of self-will. This is the domino-effect fall that every human individual repeats, and it is enormously more serious than a person's merely falling short of the mark of moral aspiration. In choosing to live from the self for self, the radical reality of a person falls away from companionship with God. From this "original sin" or "fall" in each person's life originate all other sins, including personal moral defects and misdemeanors. One must understand this notion of every human person's original sin if one wants to understand Christianity's reasoning for the necessity of grace, because, according to Christianity, it is this sin that permanently estranges people from God. "Original sin" designates a person's fundamental commitment to be a self and to cherish and choose what pleases this self. It is a commitment that forms so subtly, on the basis of a decision that develops so early and deceptively, that a person cannot remember having ever experienced it as an actual option. Christian theology will not exculpate us even though we cannot remember choosing our selfish orientation. It will not permit us to say, "We were born this way and could not have been otherwise." The condition of being a self is one that each person brings about. Because it is a condition of being selfish, the human person is selfish whether it remains immobile or engages in activity. When one does express one's self, the expression is self-assertion and self-service. When a person's being is selfish, that personal being is selfish in itself, in its actions, and in its relations. It shuts out God and other humans from its being, and is indifferent to them except to use them for its self. Such a person whose being is selfish does not even want to be otherwise. The selfward orientation of human persons impairs their judgment, conscripts their will, and confuses their emotions so that they are unable to discern and despise their truly corrupted condition, or to initiate and effect a break away from it or even to imagine the possibility and satisfaction of selfish motivation. Since the selfish sinner is unwilling, and unable to become willing, to participate in a fellowship or communion of love with God and other human beings, why has God not abandoned humans completely? Christianity answers that since God is ultimate and humans are finally accountable to God, and since the reality of God is a love that wills to commune with humans right now as well as forever afterward, God is not indifferent to humanity's unwillingness to love and to be loved rather than to be a self. Because the reality of God in Christ is the love that aims for communion, that love cares whether humans accept or reject it. It would cease to be righteous selfless love if it relented in its will to create communion with those who have rejected it. Because it does continue to care infinitely for those who are unwilling to commune with it, God's love requires that humanity's estrangement be overcome and that a radical atonement be established between loving God and selfish humanity. How can God's love and humanity's selfishness be brought together in a communing fellowship? Christianity asserts that this is a question for God to answer, because humanity is in no disposition to renounce and sacrifice anything of its own. Therefore, the motivation, the will, and the resources to anote holy (loving) God and unholy (selfish) humanity are all on God's side. This situation, according to Christianity, constitutes the crisis point at which grace, the inexplicable extension of God's love, becomes necessary. It supplies the missing link between God's love and humanity's selfishness that is necessary for the salvation of humankind from the sinful, fallen condition. At the same time, Christian teaching maintains that the mere presence of God's love does not suffice to induce selfishness to yield itself to communion with God's love. The power of God's love has to be conducted in such a manner that it creates communion with selfish people while they are still being selfish. Christians are instructed to see God's love demonstrated in precisely that creative manner in Jesus Christ, and they refer to it as "the grace of God given in Jesus Christ." What they see in Jesus Christ and call grace is God's making a sacrifice that humans ought to have made but refused to make. Christianity announces that right here in human history - where humans ought to have sacrificed their selfishness to God - the love of God acted vicariously for humanity in Jesus Christ and sacrificed selfless love to selfish humanity. This grace, this vicarious action of God's love, has supplied the missing link, in Christianity's scheme of salvation, a link that has joined holy (loving) God and sinful (selfish) humans in a radical atonement: 'In Christ God was reconciling the world to God's reality, no longer holding humanity's transgressions against them . . . . Christ was innocent of sin, but for our sake God made him one with our sinfulness so that in him we might be made one with God's goodness' (2 Corinthians 5:19, 21). 'Christ died for us godless people . . . . Christ died for us while we were still sinners and in that act God demonstrates God's own love for us . . . We were enemies when God reconciled us through the death of his Son, but now that we are reconciled we shall be saved all the more by the life of his son (Romans 5:6, 8, 10). In this vicarious atonement with selfish humanity, God's love is believed to have compromised neither its own righteousness nor the righteousness it requires of human beings. Indeed, for Christianity, vicarious suffering and death demonstrate that God's love is righteous: It remains loving consistently and extends itself to others at literally any cost to itself - exactly the opposite of what selfishness does. It demonstrates also that the righteousness which God wants from every human being is also vicarious love. 'The love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that since one man has died for all humans, then every human being ought to be dead, but he died for all so that living humans should no longer live selfishly, but for him who died and was raised to life for them' (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). Christians perceive that by yielding to human selfishness the love of God took a risk that has been realized: that humans would scorn, injure, and try to exterminate it, that yielding thus would involve great waste of love. There is, however, a far more decisive consideration for the dignity and integrity of God's love than this realized risk. By sacrificing itself, this love of God created a communion and a community within which selfish humans have an assured possibility of a regeneration that will enable them to become righteous lovers of others and of God. This provision for human regeneration through the communion of a loving God and selfish humanity, in the community of the church, is a realistic, not facile, treatment of sin. The grace that, according to Christianity, accomplishes this regeneration is an expensive, not cheap, grace. By its vicarious sacrifice in Jesus Christ the grace of God's love shows itself to be qualitatively other than human reality. Rather this otherness does not constitute an elusiveness of inaccessibility. The elusiveness of grace is the inexplicability of its given presence in Jesus Christ and his church." A World Theology - The Central Spiritual Reality of Humankind by N. Ross and Edmund F. Perry

The Gospel Hermeneutic

The Gospel is the hermeneutical key to all of Scripture. Our knowledge of God should revolve and possess its basis upon the Gospel. T.F. Torrance says it this way:

“This does not mean that all our knowledge of God can be reduced to Christology, but that, as there is only one Mediator between God and man, who is himself both God and Man, and only one revelation of God in which he himself is its actual content, all authentic knowledge of God is derived and understood in accordance with the incarnate reality of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and is formulated in doctrinal coherence with Christology. That is to say, doctrinal statements about God are possible and true only when Christologically grounded” (The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 17).