Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age (eBook)

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We’ve a Story to Tell

We Preach Christ Crucified

The Antithesis of the Gospel

The apostle Paul set forth his gospel to the Corinthians:

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and folly [mória] to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:23–24)

In so doing, Paul put his gospel in antithesis to two first-century forms of intellectual self-assertion:

Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom. (1 Cor. 1:22)

Two attitudes reveal this self-assertion: by the questions that they asked about the gospel and by their reactions to the gospel. By these, the questions and the reactions, you shall know them.

The Unreasonable Skepticism of Jews Requiring Signs

There was the attitude first of the Jews. The Jews required a sign, says Paul. What does that mean? That the Jews were hard-headed realists, unwilling to advance a step beyond evidence? No, it means nothing of the kind. It means that the Jews were showing themselves unreasonable skeptics. The sign, which the Jews required in those days, was a type of evidence that we may describe as miracles and magic to order.

The second temptation which had been put to our Lord Jesus Christ in the wilderness had taken the form of an invitation to provide miracles and magic to order. Remember how the devil tempted the Lord basically saying, “Throw yourself down from a pinnacle of the temple and get up unhurt at the bottom, and you’ll wow them” (cf. Matt. 4:5–6)? That was the essence of the temptation. And Jesus had refused it. He was not gathering support, not gathering followers, on that basis. And so we read that when “the Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him, he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, ‘Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.’ And he left them” (Mark 8:11–13).

These requests are really skepticism masquerading as interest. At bottom, it’s an attitude of unwillingness to believe. What is being demanded? Miracles and magic to order is something that it is arrogant and arbitrary to demand in a situation where abundant signs had already been given. That’s what we have to grasp. In the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ—as those who watched it saw it and as it was reported by the apostle Paul to the Corinthians and others—abundant signs had been given already.

Do you remember how, in the opening verses of Matthew 11, we are told of the messengers who came from John the Baptist, languishing in prison, to ask the Lord Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3)? And this was John’s question.

Some of the things that Jesus had been doing, and even more perhaps things that Jesus had not been doing, had surprised John. John’s idea, based on the way that God had prompted him to herald the coming Messiah, was that as soon as Jesus’s ministry began, catastrophic things would begin to happen: acts of judgment, acts of traumatic import for the life of the nation.

Jesus had not been ministering in that way. Hence the question, Are you he who should come? The one “whose fan is in his hand” to “purge his floor” (Matt. 3:12 KJV), or are we to look for someone else?

And do you remember how Jesus replied to John’s question? The message that he sent back through John’s disciples was this: “Go and tell John what you hear and see—the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (Matt. 11:4–5). Go and tell John that those things are happening and say to him, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me,” or caused to stumble (11:6). It’s a word from this same root from which skandalon comes. Blessed is he who should not be caused to stumble at me. Blessed is he who discerns the meaning of the signs that are being given in my ministry and is prepared to trust me concerning those matters where I happen to fulfill these expectations.

But the signs that had been given were the decisive ones. For what Jesus meant for John to pick up was this: that here was being fulfilled what Isaiah long ago had prophesied. We know the words well. They’re in the thirty-fifth chapter of the prophecy, and Handel set them to memorable music in the Messiah. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,” Isaiah had predicted, “and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing” (Isa. 35:5–6 KJV). That’s how it shall be in the day when God visits his people to bless them.

Yes, the signs had been given. And a further sign was to be given. Jesus refers to that in the opening verses of Matthew 16, where again we find him asked for a sign. “The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, . . . ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah’” (Matt. 16:1–2, 4). And elsewhere he’d interpreted that reference “as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). And after that, not. After that, alive again.

The sign of resurrection was to be given to confirm the witness born by those miraculous healings and works of mercy that Jesus did during his three-year ministry in Galilee. The signs had been given. That’s the point to grasp.

But the Jews who heard the stories still sought a sign. They wouldn’t accept the signs that had been given, because they’d not been given to order. The Jews, you might say, demanded to call the shots, to specify what signs should be given and where. They wanted to make God, as it were, dance to their tune. This is frivolous skepticism. It’s an expression of dispositional unbelief. Can’t believe, in this situation, means won’t believe.

The Jews unreasonably required signs. Many signs had been given, which already they were ignoring. Jesus put his finger on dispositional unbelief, resolute skepticism, when at the end of his story of the rich man and Lazarus, he said this, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). I don’t think that needs any explanatory comment from me.

The Invasive Intellectualism of Greeks Seeking Wisdom

The Greeks, Paul continued, seek after wisdom. What does that mean? Is the quest for wisdom a sign of great and superior intelligence? Doubtless the Greeks themselves would have insisted that it was, for they regarded themselves as folk of great and superior intelligence. But we have to say no. This request for wisdom is not that. It is a mark rather of invasive intellectualism, which is something rather different.

What was the wisdom that they asked Paul to provide? What they were seeking was a type of communication to which they were accustomed and in which they were interested. And probably there are two things in mind here as Paul speaks.

Some sought philosophical speculations on the world and life and things, speculations based on flights of audacious reason. Others were doubly seeking the kind of gnosis, inside knowledge, that was offered by the mystery cults. That too was often called wisdom in the first century AD. What it consisted of was the provision of occult secrets giving supernatural power, putting the adherent of the mystery cult in the know regarding all kinds of what were supposed to be spiritual mysteries, making him feel therefore that he was one of the spiritual elite.

And these were the two types of wisdom that they were asking Paul to provide. What are we to say of the Jews and the Greeks? As Paul describes them, they correspond to well-known and familiar types. Here are attitudes that are very far from dead.

You have met the man who says, “I want scientific facts. I want scientific proof before I’ll believe.” And he reserves the right to designate what he will regard as scientific proof, and what he will not regard as scientific proof. That man is the spiritual successor of the Jews.

Similarly you have met the man who says, “I am a man of reason. I am guided by reason. I steer by truths of reason. Whatever you have to say to me, you must present to me as a truth of reason, or I shan’t take it seriously and you can’t expect me to.” And that man is the spiritual descendant of the Greeks.

We Preach Christ Crucified

Neither the Jew-type nor the Greek-type is willing to take things from God by revelation. This was the controversy that the gospel raised and that Paul in his testimony had to pursue constantly in the world to which he went. For Paul went...