Here’s the Third offering from Ben Myers (who was so kind to leave a comment – to say hello!). The word “Gospel” seems to be in the air as far as this blog is concerned. I’m still in reorientation mode … I seem to always function in this kind of rhythm of change – orientation-disorientation-reorientation 🙂 That’s just life. Anyway, before I return back to my more blogging self … enjoy the gems from other wiser (and smarter) people than me.
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Summary: The verbal expression of faith must be shaped and guided by the story of Jesus.
Theology is the attempt to articulate faith verbally. But while theology provides the vocabulary of faith, it is the gospel which provides the grammar of faith. Just as every language has an underlying grammatical structure, so too faith has its own grammar: it has an underlying structure of meaning, a set of fundamental “rules” which determine the way faith can be expressed.
And the grammar of faith is the gospel: it is the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This means, then, that faith is fundamentally structured by narrative, by story. If we want to bring our faith to verbal expression, we cannot simply use concepts and ideas and symbols – first and foremost, we must tell a story. We must allow all our speaking to be shaped and structured by the story of Jesus.
The gospel is not, however, simply an ordinary historical narrative. It is not simply a recollection of certain events that took place in the first century CE. Rather, the gospel is a very special kind of story. For the point of this story is not simply the narration of historical events, but the narration of God. When we narrate the gospel, we are telling the story of God himself – we are narrating who God is, what he has done, and what he will do. In order to speak the gospel, then, we must tell the story of Jesus as the story of God.
This means, further, that the story of Jesus has universal significance. If the story of one particular first-century man is also the story of God, then this must be the true story, the story of reality as a whole, the story that tells us the way things really are. And thus the gospel is a story about ourselves – it is a story which has truth and meaning for every human person. We could thus describe the gospel as a “meta-narrative,” as the one great story which puts all our own personal stories into their proper context. My own personal narrative, or the narrative of my own family or community, finds its true meaning only within the context of this story about God. God is reality, God is truth; he is the context of meaning which makes all other things meaningful.
In order to speak the gospel, then, we must do two things: we must tell the story of Jesus as the story of God, and we must tell it as the story of ourselves. Only when we have done both these things together have we truly narrated the gospel. And in just this way, the gospel functions as the grammar of faith, as the underlying structure which determines how we speak about God and about ourselves.
So as we seek to articulate our faith verbally, we must allow all our speaking to be guided by the grammar of the gospel. At the deepest level, everything we say about God and about ourselves must be shaped by the story of one particular Jewish man in the first century CE – a man who lived, died, and was raised to life.
Further reading
* Barth, Karl. “The Proclamation of God’s Free Grace,” in God Here and Now (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 34-54.
* Bloesch, Donald G. A Theology of Word and Spirit (Downers Grove: IVP, 1992), pp. 107-138.
* Jensen, Peter. The Revelation of God (Leicester: IVP, 2002), pp. 31-63.
* Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3-60.
* Newlands, George. God in Christian Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), pp. 209-221.
* Pannenberg, Wolfhart. “What Is Truth?” in Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. 2 (London: SCM, 1971), pp. 1-27.
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