In evangelicalism in general, and reformed evangelicalism in particular, the Christian faith deals primarily with two things: the past and the future. One of the most transformative developments over the years in how I think about my own Christian faith has been learning to see the Christian hope in the present.
If you ask a theologically educated evangelical about the gospel, you’re going to get something that resembles the following:
In the beginning, God created everything good. But Adam and Eve chose to sin and rebel against God. Since we are all descended from Adam and Eve, we are born with a fallen, sinful nature and are all sinners. God cannot simply overlook sin and still be holy and just; it must be dealt with. So, we’re justly under the condemnation of an eternal God, and there’s nothing we can do to justify ourselves before Him. But God loves us and wants to provide a way for us to be reconciled, and so He enters into the world as a man, who we know as Jesus.
Jesus is God, but he is also man. Because he is both God and man, he is able to live a perfectly righteous life as a human, free of sin. Jesus dies on the cross, thereby undergoing the penalty for sin (“the wages of sin is death”) and rises from the dead, thus defeating death. If you believe in Jesus, God will impute your sins to Christ and will impute Christ’s righteousness to you. Therefore, the justice of God is satisfied by Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and you get to be counted as righteous. And because you are now counted righteous, you will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven on the last day.
Furthermore, “believing in Jesus” generally means affirming certain historical propositions about him and the theological propositions that are built on top of them. This is why so much of evangelical apologetics centers on defending the historical reliability of the Bible in general and the gospel accounts in particular. In this framework, the gospel is understood as a particular theory of how justification works and faith is a matter of believing it and having a hope for the future based on events that occurred in the past.
Now, before moving on, I want to emphasize that I do not disagree with any of the preceding. I do, however, think it is truncated and incomplete in a way that tends to reduce the Christian faith to an abstraction. What follows is not an effort in theological deconstruction, but rather an attempt to broaden theological reflection in a way that advances a more robust vision for how the Christian faith has meaning for our lives today.
Christians have always recognized the necessity of God entering into His creation by taking on humanity—we can only know God in and through the revelation of Himself in Christ. A God who exists outside and independently of the material universe can’t be interacted or engaged with by creatures whose entire existence is within the material universe and bound by it. We may in theory recognize the necessity of the existence of such a God if we can demonstrate that the material universe is insufficient to account for its own existence, but recognizing the necessity of the existence of God is quite a different thing than being able to interact with or say anything meaningful about Him. In other words, a religion without an incarnation is indistinguishable from agnosticism.
The problem is that when our vision of the incarnation is left as a historical event, it doesn’t actually solve this knowability problem. The reason for this is because we can’t know or interact with Christ as the historical Jesus, or participate in his life as a historical event. I cannot fly to Israel today and interact with Jesus as a historical figure. I cannot go to the Mount of Olives today and find the historical Jesus giving the Olivet Discourse. I cannot go to Golgotha today and find Jesus hanging on the cross. I cannot find Jesus in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. An incarnation that happened in the past just means that God was knowable in the past. In order for God to be knowable in the present, the incarnation must in some sense be a present reality.
And just as we cannot participate in historical events as historical events, we also cannot participate in future events as future events. I am 31 years old, but I cannot live my future 40th year today, if such a future exists at all. And if my 40th year does exist, it will no longer be future when I am living it. If the blessings promised in the gospel are centered on future realities, then I cannot participate in or experience those blessings today.
This is what I mean when I said that the framework I described earlier tends to reduce the Christian faith to an abstraction. If our faith consists mainly in promises about the future based on propositions about the past, then we can only engage with it by reading accounts of the past or prophecies about the future and then affirming them to the best of our understanding of them. In other words, we can only really engage with the tenets of our faith through our thoughts, not through any interaction with the physical, material world in which we actually live.
This causes considerable difficulty in speaking about how our faith applies to our life, or how to “live out our faith.” It is difficult to live out your faith if your conception of faith turns your life into a waiting period. This is especially true for those who want to maintain a strong distinction between faith and works in order to avoid giving any appearance that we “earn” salvation. We may believe that we ought to do good works, or that they are a natural byproduct of being saved, but they don’t serve any real purpose in and of themselves. Good works are really just something you do while you wait for either your death or the return of Christ (whichever comes first) for no real reason other than you’re supposed to do them.
It also causes difficulty in speaking about how to “grow closer to God.” It is difficult to grow closer to God if you can only interact with Him as a set of propositions. Many within evangelicalism have a sense of this difficulty and will say things like “it’s not enough to know about God in your head, you have to know Him in your heart.” But that doesn’t solve the problem, because what they mean by “knowing God in their heart” almost invariably just means thinking about Him in a way that engages the passions and emotions. Which isn’t wrong, but it’s still completely abstract.
The answer to this, I think, consists primarily in three parts. The first is understanding the gospel not so much as a theory of how salvation works, but rather as a proclamation of the arrival of the kingdom of God on the earth. The second is thinking of the kingdom of God not just as something we look forward to in the future, but also something we look up at in the present. The third is understanding that our participation in the kingdom of God is a present reality through our participation in the life of the church, especially through the sacraments.
In evangelical circles, there is heavy emphasis placed on the need for individual Christians to participate in spreading the gospel. If you sit in evangelism seminars, you’re often going to be presented with various strategies for turning everyday conversations into opportunities to share the gospel with people, namely substitutionary atonement and justification through faith.
But when we read the gospel accounts, we don’t find lengthy discourses about how salvation works, how the death and resurrection of Jesus make us right before God, or how works and faith relate to each other in justification. Rather, the gospel is identified for us right at the beginning of the gospel of Mark: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” Or even more concisely in Matthew’s account of the beginning of Jesus’s preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
I would argue this shows that the gospel is best understood as the proclamation of the arrival of the kingdom, which is based on the identification of Jesus as the promised king. In other words, the king has come and the kingdom is here. That is the essence of the good news. That is the gospel. Questions about how one enters it, the relationship between faith and works in doing so, our theology of the atonement, the logical relationship between God’s sovereignty and the human will in conversion, etc. are all secondary to and derived from identifying Jesus as the promised Christ, who is the king.
The second point is that the kingdom is a present reality. We often hear Jesus’ words repeated: “my kingdom is not of this world.” And this is of course true. But it is on the earth. It is something we can participate in and interact with today. Jesus did not take the kingdom off the earth back up to heaven with him when he ascended after his resurrection. When Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that begins as a tiny seed and then grows into a mighty tree, the idea is not that he plants it and then it remains a tiny seed for thousands of years before instantaneously becoming a giant tree when he comes back. Growth is a process that takes place within time and space. While it is certainly true that the kingdom of God does not reach its fullness until Christ returns and the dead are raised, it is nevertheless a present reality. The world is being redeemed even now, and we have a role to play in it.
This leads to the third point, which is that the Christian life is lived within in and through the life of the church, because the church is the body of Christ and the kingdom of God on earth. The sacraments are the means by which we are joined to and abide in this body. Baptism, received in faith, is our entrance into Christ. It is the means by which we are united with him. As Paul puts it in Galatians 3:27, we are “baptized into Christ.” Communion, received in faith, is our participation in Christ. It is the means by which we abide in him and are nourished by him. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 10:16, the cup we bless is a “participation in his blood” and the bread we break is a “participation in the body of Christ.”
In the sacraments, we find the meeting point between spiritual realities and our physical, material existence. The altar is where we interact with the Christ we read of in the scriptures. This is why God is knowable today and is the sense in which the incarnation is not merely a historical event but an ongoing reality. The answer to “what does it mean to draw near to God?” is most fundamentally, “approach the communion table and receive it in faith.”
The life of the Christian then is not merely one of contemplation and reflection on historical events and future promises, but also one of present action. It is one of embodying Christ himself, specifically in the way he demonstrates his love for the world by pouring himself out on its behalf. The Christian life is marked by giving of ourselves in service to others, beginning with the household of God and then extending out to the world from there. The answer to “how can I live my Christian life today?” is simply, “give of yourself in service to others.”
The good works we do today then are not merely the byproduct of having been justified. We don’t do them simply because Christ commands us to, as if his commands are arbitrary or just a matter of giving us something to do while we wait for a future salvation. Nor are they things we do to earn or merit our salvation. Rather, they are means by which Christ is formed in us and embodied by us. They are means by which we learn to live the life we are promised in Christ.
We do not have to wait for our physical death or for the second coming of Christ in order to see our faith given expression in the world. He is living and active in his work of redemption even now. Christianity is a hope for not only after your death, but a hope for your life as well. Christianity is not only for the past and the future; it is for today.
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