2.2. The Gospel as the Hermeneutic of the Scripture
The New Testament canon, in witnessing to Jesus Christ, established a renewal tradition, the tradition of the Gospel, which stands as a distinct yet integral part of the Scripture as sacred writing. This Gospel is what should permeate the interpretation of the Scripture, including our cultures and our contemporary situations.
What is the Gospel? Honoring our Reformed tradition, we heed what John Calvin, one of the prominent Reformers who upheld the centrality of the Scripture, writes: “The sum of the Gospel is...made to consist in repentance and forgiveness of sins.”1 Speaking of faith in Christ and what it produces in the lives of believers, Calvin appeals to the proclamation of the gospels: the call for repentance (Matthew 3:2; 4:17; Mark 1:15) and the redemptive act of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (cf. Matthew 1:21; Mark 10:45; Luke 24:46-47; John 3:16).2 In this proclamation lies a profound mystery of the Gospel, that the good news was not only proclaimed by words, but in the totality of the incarnated Word. Christ was there not only as the messenger but also the message itself.3 It is not only that God sent Christ, but God is in Christ to declare that the time of God's option for us has come (cf. Luke 4:18-19). The Creator of all ushers in the redemption of the whole creation, the disarming of personal and collective sin, and the defeat of Death (cf. Romans 8:19-21; I Corinthians 15:55-57). This is Euangelion, Good News, for all peoples and the earth.
The consequence of such action on the part of God is not an abstraction on the part of humanity, because in Christ, the God-realm and humanity come together. This is the new reality that the disciples of Christ grasped in the first place: the kingdom of God is at hand. In the words of Newbigin:
The kingdom, or kingship, of God was no longer a distant hope or a faceless concept. It had now a name and a face - the name and face of the man from Nazareth. In the New Testament we are dealing not just with the proclamation of the kingdom but also the presence of the kingdom.4
Hence, the Gospel as the hermeneutic of the Scripture prescribes that the Scripture needs to be interpreted from the good news of God, Euangelion. John Howard Yoder captures the significance of something that is “evangelical” (euangelion-like) in this way:
In the functional sense [it] means first of all that it communicates news. It says something particular that would not be known and could not be believed were it not said. Second, it must mean functionally that this “news” is attested as good; it comes across to those whom it addresses as helping, as saving, as shalom. It must be public, not esoteric, but the way for it to be public is not an a priori logical move that subtracts the particular. It is an a posteriori political practice that tells the world something it did not know and could not believe before. It tells the world what is the world's own calling and destiny, not by announcing either a utopian or a realistic goal to be imposed on the whole society, but by pioneering a paradigmatic demonstration of both the power and the practices that define the shape of restored humanity. The confessing people of God is the new world on its way.5
At the heart of this statement is that the Gospel is intrinsically good news for all peoples, for humanity, and that it contains a unique ideological attitude that represents a particular worldview.6 This means that the Gospel cannot be limited to its 'spiritual' aspect, which would easily make the message of Christ at home with the absence of dikaiosune (righteousness and justice). The Gospel prescribes a way of life in all aspects, as the Messiah proclaims, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17b). Its manifestations become a living proclamation “of the new world on its way.”
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1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry Baveridge (Peabody, Massachussets: Hendrikson Publishers, Inc., 2008), 386 (III.3).
2 See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , 386ff. (III.3); Cf. 324ff. (II.16; 17).
3 See also Brian Stone's discussion on the topic of Christ as the message and messenger of the Gospel in his book Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007), 107-110.
4 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1995), 40; Stone points to this statement by Newbigin as where the story of Jesus and the story of the kingdom of God become one story, that is the presence of the kingdom in Christ (Evangelism after Christendom, 108).
5 John Howard Yoder and Michael G. Cartwright, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 1998), 373 as quoted in Stone, Evangelism after Christendom, 231.
6 Sumanta Banerjee, in his review of Secularism and Its Critics by Rejeev Bhargava, brings attention to Ashis Nandy and his distinction of “religion-as-faith,” explained as a “religious way of life that is traditionally pluralistic and tolerant,” and “religion-as-ideology,” which in Banerjee's words is “where religious loyalties get identified with non-religious, usually political or social-economic interest, of particular religious communities, and tend to to disrupt the tolerance and pluralism of the 'religion-as-faith' lifestyle” (Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No. 28 [Jul. 11-17, 1998], pp. 1826-1828 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406985 [accessed April 6, 2013]). This sharp categorization, however, is overlooking the fact that in order for “religion-as-faith” to be a “way of life,” it has to take forms in “religion-as-ideology,” so defined. They are two sides of the same coin. Otherwise, by analogy, every sermon will miss its real life application part. The question here is what kind of ideology people with religious conviction should adhere to in the spirit of tolerance and multiculturalism, and in a Christian context, how the the good news of Christ informs our moral and ethical decisions in politics, social-economics, etc.
6 Sumanta Banerjee, in his review of Secularism and Its Critics by Rejeev Bhargava, brings attention to Ashis Nandy and his distinction of “religion-as-faith,” explained as a “religious way of life that is traditionally pluralistic and tolerant,” and “religion-as-ideology,” which in Banerjee's words is “where religious loyalties get identified with non-religious, usually political or social-economic interest, of particular religious communities, and tend to to disrupt the tolerance and pluralism of the 'religion-as-faith' lifestyle” (Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No. 28 [Jul. 11-17, 1998], pp. 1826-1828 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406985 [accessed April 6, 2013]). This sharp categorization, however, is overlooking the fact that in order for “religion-as-faith” to be a “way of life,” it has to take forms in “religion-as-ideology,” so defined. They are two sides of the same coin. Otherwise, by analogy, every sermon will miss its real life application part. The question here is what kind of ideology people with religious conviction should adhere to in the spirit of tolerance and multiculturalism, and in a Christian context, how the the good news of Christ informs our moral and ethical decisions in politics, social-economics, etc.
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