The basics are the key

One is saved by seeing that Jesus told the truth about himself and his mission. The joy of that is something we can celebrate in common.


In this entry I rehash some points I have already made. The idea is to try to stir up some interest in a thought experiment. What would happen if all the churches of Christendom agreed that all public preaching and discussion would be limited to only the kerygmatic core of Christianity? Discussion of any further matters would take place only among believers, and then only if it could be done respectfully. For reasons detailed elsewhere in this blog, and touched upon in this post, I think that is an essential step toward Christian unity.

As matters now stand, the unsaved have a hard time understanding what the gospel is and isn't, because different churches preach it differently, with various amounts of extraneous detail. If we all spoke one message, leaving out the extraneous points on which we differ, it would at least be clearer to the world that we are all talking about the same thing.

This is the thought experiment: Could you and your church follow Paul's example at Corinth and "know nothing but Christ and him crucified"? Could you preach your message on that basis? If not, why?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments section, found at the end of this post. The comment system allows anonymous login if you like, or several sorts of credentials. Below are my own thoughts on the matter, but I'm actually more interested in yours, because I have been getting no traction in trying to promote this idea. It would be helpful if I knew what other people, from here and there in various parts of the church world, are thinking.

To begin to explain by own view, it does unbelievers no harm if we stick to the basics. I think it does them good. The power of the gospel is in the kerygma. It is not in the many secondary concerns such as the age of the earth, the nature of the millennium or the metaphysics of communion. We should be talking, to the unsaved, about what it is that can save them.

Many of the concerns we Christians find so consuming these days, the religious points that divide us, were unknown in the first century, for they had not yet been invented. We argue as if they are matters of great importance, but people were getting saved before anyone thought up such disputes, and believers were serving very effectively to spread the gospel. The early church turned their world upside down; we seem hardly able to impart more than a bit of boat-rocking motion in our day.

I think Christians everywhere will discover something about our common spiritual heritage if all of us talk, when before the public, about nothing but Christ and him crucified--the faith once for all delivered to the saints. I've argued for that approach elsewhere in these pages. I regard the kerygma-only approach to public preaching and discussion as essential to progress toward unity, for it shows a single front to the public and it also reminds us of where the source of our well-hidden sameness is to be found. It will take the pressure off all of us to be right on the points that divide us, by taking such debates out of the public square.

Underneath all our later accretions of doctrines and dogmas, ceremonial differences and other ecclesiastical barnacles, we are all Christians of the first century. We believe what they believed; else, we are not Christians at all. If we do believe the truth they received, we are Christians almost regardless of what else we have added atop that sure foundation. Christianity, and Christian unity, are much simpler than we are making them out to be. I wrote previously (at too much length, for nobody reads it) that a kerygma-only approach would weed out the false brethren (who are as real in our time as in Paul's), unconfuse the public about what the Christian message really is and advance our progress toward unity of the churches.

It's a start on unity because once we realize that the core of the preaching is the same for everyone we will have something to talk about, that does not involve centuries of divergent views. It will be clearer that there is the Christianity of the central issues and then there are noncentral issues. No one is saved by having the correct opinion about noncentral matters and no one is damned for a wrong opinion about them. One is saved by seeing that Jesus told the truth about himself and his mission. The joy of that is something we can celebrate in common. From that point on, it should be easier for us to tolerate one another, though we belong to different churches. Who knows? After that we may come to appreciate and even love one another. Far fetched as it sounds, we might even learn how to listen to another's views on secondary matters of faith and practice and honestly consider adopting some of them.

To reiterate for emphasis: Since the truth about who Jesus is and what he set out to accomplish is what saves the unsaved, that is the news that we should be telling to the unsaved world around us. It is what we should talk about, as of first importance, when talking to each other. The rest can wait.

Your comments, please.