If you’re not reading the Bible for fun you need to consider if maybe you’re doing it wrong.

Lecturing at the Dabney Center on Ephesians and Paul’s perspective therein, I had to deal especially with Ephesians 3.6: “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” My message, following Ridderbos was that the “mystery” was the Gospel. Contextually there is no escaping that basic point. However, obviously there has to be a different sense to the term “gospel.” in the verse lest it become nonsensically redundant. In Ephesians 3.1ff, Paul is speaking of Gospel as administration whereas many times (as in the end of v. 6) it can have a narrower meaning of story. Since the story is about the death and resurrection of Jesus which tells and explains to us the present Lordship of Christ, they are quite compatible.

But I discovered just before flying down to Louisiana that the story and the administration are more closely related than I had realized. In order to come up with a quick example of the story aspect of the Gospel, I put First Corinthians 15.1ff into my notes. I was quite startled:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me…

Did you catch that? The story of the Gospel included an administration in history, and the connection is not only on the Lordship of Christ. In witnessing to the Gospel message Paul moves seemlessly from the death and resurrection of Jesus to the witnessing of that resurrection. According to Paul the Gospel proclamation included the explanation of the Gospel proclamation: “…and that he appeared to Cephas…”

(I think the fact that Paul skips the women who were in fact the first to witness Jesus is confirmation that he is singling out the ministers of the Gospel, the Apostles and Presbyters. The point is not simply that someone somewhere saw Jesus but that this was the beginning of the Church.)

Needless to say this gave me a lot more to talk about in relating the story of the Gospel to the Gospel administration. It has been bouncing around in my head ever since. I have wondered if there was any additional confirmation to be found.

Yes there is.

Pastor Balthrop’s web log had this excellent insight, which I repeat in full:

The Insufficiency of “Jesus Is Lord” in Evangelism

I hear people decrying how small a voice the church has in the world today. Most of the people I live around want lots and lots of evangelism, so they come up with programs for teaching people to evangelize. Some even provide “certification” that one has completed the course and, ostensibly, is now ready to do it. Evidence demands a verdict: they still don’t do much of it. Why is this?

I think it’s because they have enough experience to know that the likelihood of success is very low. They come up then with verbal formulations of all kinds to explain why a canned, formulaic “gospel” presentation is so ineffective. Why doesn’t the message “Jesus is Lord” work?

I’ve come across a little verse that stopped me in my tracks when I read it. 2 Corinthians 4:5,

For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.

How many churches, how many preachers, how many everyday believers preach this? I mean, sure, we all know to preach “Jesus is Lord,” but how many preach, “Jesus is Lord and I am your servant”? I wonder if this is why the church’s voice is so small in the world. Perhaps our voice will be as large as our service to those the world would count as a bad investment.

We preach not ourselves but Christ and ourselves as servants for his sake. This fits well with First Corinthians 15.

Richard Baxter:

Whom must I judge a visible member of the church, with whom I am thus bound to hold communion?

1. If you are the pastor of the church who are made the judge, at his admission by baptism, or afterwards, you must so judge of every one who maketh a credible profession of true Christianity, that is, of his present consent to the sacramental covenant: and that profession is credible, which is, 1. Understood by him that maketh it. 2. Deliberate. 3. Voluntary. 4. Seemingly serious. 5. And is not disproved by valid evidence of the contrary. These are the true measures of church communion; for every man, next God, is the judge of his own heart; and God would have every man the chooser or refuser of his own mercies.
2. But if you are but a private member of the church, you are to judge that person a visible member of the church, whom the pastor hath taken in by baptism, and not cast out again by excommunication; except the contrary be notorious: and even then you are oft obliged for order sake to carry yourself towards him as a visible member, till he be regularly cast out.

I forgot one detai:

After the crack about buttons and hooks, Peter bar Jona answered rather stiffly as he sat up from the couch, “Well, I am speaking Latin more often.”

Thomas Reid, the father of Scottish Common Sense Realism, pointed out that the Empiricists had been misled by a trick of grammar. One can say, “I see a tree,” and “I feel a pain.” Thus, the idea is derived that we need some sort of intermediary between us and the “external world.” We perceive “percepts” rather than things.

I wonder if the sentence, “We teach doctrine,” is causing analogous theological damage.

In Gene Wolfe’s excellent tetrology, The Book of the Long Sun, Patera Silk receives a vision from the Outsider that his predecessor’s prayers for help have been answered. He is the help. But this means he must not expect help. The help is him.

This seems symmetrical with what we need to realize about reaching modern culture. God reached modern culture by calling us. If we need to reach modern culture that defeats the entire point.

John Nevin:

But to be thus living and vigorous, our theology must be more than traditional. It must keep pace with the onward course of human thought, subduing it always with renewed victory to its own power. Not by ignoring the power of error, or fulminating upon it blind ecclesiastical anathemas, can theology be saved from death; but only by meeting and overcoming it in the strength of the Lord. Now this requires, in our day, a legitimate regard in this form to the errors of Germany in particular. For it is preposterous to suppose that in the most speculative portion of the whole Christian world these errors stand in no connection with the general movement of the world’s mind, or that they do not need to be surmounted by a fresh advance on the part of truth as being only the dead repetition of previously vanquished falsehood.

Vern Poythress:

Typical readers of the Journal may be troubled by the book’s reliance on modern theologians. The book defends the Apostle Paul against charges of manipulation (pp. 140-144), and mentions Luther and Calvin favorably. But for answers to peculiarly modern and postmodern concerns, it goes to Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Vincent Brümmer, Pannenberg, Jüngel, Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and especially Moltmann. As a result one cannot tell where the book stands on issues that divide orthodoxy from mainstream modernist theology. But I believe that one should give the book the benefit of the doubt. Modernist theology in all its forms is built on the presupposition that we must make peace with modern thought forms and mainstream historical-critical research. With few exceptions, these cultural traditions are to be left intact, and theology can perhaps still carve out for itself a space alongside them by deepening and supplementing the whole. Insofar as modern thought and mainstream biblical research have built themselves on modernist foundations, Thiselton’s book calls for a thorough-going transformation, even crucifixion and resurrection, of both foundations and superstructure. So the book implicitly points toward a radical critique of modernist theology.

The book’s reliance on modernist theology may also be seen as an indirect comment on the limitations of orthodox scholarship. The orthodox have seldom engaged modern thought in depth except by way of denunciation. So whom should the book cite? Thiselton emphasizes affirmation and common grace where he can, and uses the language of neoorthodox writers in places where it formally matches orthodoxy.

I never finished the dream.

Suddenly the sea serpent was gone and the belly of the beast became a psychologist’s office. Jonah lay on the couch and someone who looked Freudian stood near him smoking a long cigar.

“Why do you think you imagine you’re trapped in a whale?”

“Fish, you mean.”

The doctor shrugged. Outside the window (the curtains were tied open) I noticed a farmer was using horses to plow the field. Since I was dreaming nothing surprised me.

“So why do you think you imagine your trapped in big fish?”

“I’m not imagining. I’m cut off. I need to reach out.”

The Freudian gestured out the window. “There’s Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford,” he said. “Look at them separating, going their separate ways because they are from two different cultures.”

“I know how they feel,” said the patient.

“You’re very bold,” laughed the cigar-smoking man. “Come back when you will only use hooks and no buttons. Tell me then that you are in a… sea creature.”

I left at that point hoping to get Ford’s autograph. I should have gone out the window. Leaving through the door, I found myself in the middle of downtown Ninevah. We had been here the entire time,of course.

Today we officially shifted shape. Jennifer is working and our school-aged children are in school. Quite a change for what has been a home-schooling single-income family! I could post pictures of them in school, of course, but instead here they are at Grant’s Farm during our last visit of the Summer holiday.

The other night I had a dream that I was in the belly of a big sea monster. There was a man there. I was worried that we didn’t have anything to talk about, but it turned out that he was a Christian. God had called him to be a missionary to Ninevah, a real post-modern enclave according to him. (“It has the second highest concentration of homosexuals in the US,” he said. I nodded sagely as I always do.)

So now he just had to figure out how to get there.

“Really strange” I said, “that God would call someone in the belly of a Pleisaur and tell him to get past all those obstacles and cover all that distance. I’m not God, but I would have thought it would make more sense to pick someone closer–someone with a direct land route, at least.”

Then I noticed that my new fried didn’t seem to be able to make eye contact with me.

There was more to the dream. One thing I woke up thinking was that when Christians talk about needing to reach today’s culture that there must be some sort of back story they’re not telling anyone.

Thinking about this, I am.