My thanks to Jared Wilson over at The Gospel-Driven Church for reminding me of Tim Keller’s piece “The Gospel in All its Forms,” which is an excellent discussion (as one would expect of Rev. Keller) of the ways in which the gospel message is one, yet multifaceted, speaking in different ways to different people and different groups of people with the singular message of the good news of Jesus Christ. I was particularly interested, this time around, in the Rev. Keller’s consideration (which Jared emphasizes) of the eschatological element of the gospel:
If I had to put this outline in a single statement, I might do it like this: Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.One of these elements was at the heart of the older gospel messages, namely, salvation is by grace not works. It was the last element that was usually missing, namely that grace restores nature, as the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck put it. When the third, “eschatological” element is left out, Christians get the impression that nothing much about this world matters. Theoretically, grasping the full outline should make Christians interested in both evangelistic conversions as well as service to our neighbor and working for peace and justice in the world. . . .Instead of going into, say, one of the epistles and speaking of the gospel in terms of God, sin, Christ, and faith, I point out the story-arc of the Bible and speak of the gospel in terms of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. We once had the world we all wanted—a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict. But by turning from God we lost that world. Our sin unleashed forces of evil and destruction so that now “things fall apart” and everything is characterized by physical, social, and personal disintegration. Jesus Christ, however, came into the world, died as a victim of injustice and as our substitute, bearing the penalty of our evil and sin on himself. This will enable him to some day judge the world and destroy all death and evil without destroying us.
I was particularly interested in this, as I said, because I’d just read, a couple days ago, a piece in Perspectives addressing this point of view. The Rev. Jeffrey Sajdak, pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in Pella, Iowa, was responding to a fellow Pella pastor, Second Reformed’s Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell, who had taken a shot at neo-Calvinists (he called it “a friendly nudge to see if anyone is awake”) in an earlier issue. In the course of that article, the Rev. Mathonnet-VanderWell gave us a parable, what we might call the Parable of the Theater. The Rev. Sajdak responded to that parable this way, titling his article “The Fourth Act”:
His concluding story about the great theatre deftly highlights these challenges; yet the story he tells is incomplete. The drama needs another act. . . .There’s another act, an act that is dear to the hearts of many neo-Calvinists, the act of Consummation. I have personally been enriched by and preached some of the insightful commentary of Richard Mouw on Isaiah and Revelation and the New Jerusalem. The vision of this world being transformed, renewed, and restored is a grand and exciting vision. The highest aspirations of culture, stripped of their sinful taints and malicious purposes, enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem and the New Earth.
The Rev. Mathonnet-VanderWell, in his own response, granted the point but argued that we should be careful not to jump there too quickly (for reasons which I find dubious, and which seem to me to say more about his philosophical and theological preferences than anything else). Personally, however, I think the Rev. Sajdak is right, as is the Rev. Keller: most of us, especially in Reformed circles, are far more prone to forget about that fourth act than we are to overemphasize it and misuse it. (What’s more, when it is misused, the best defense against that misuse is a right emphasis on the coming consummation of Jesus’ work, the restoration of the proper created order.) That’s a problem, because it’s the fourth act, the completion of God’s plan to redeem the world (not just individual people), that gives us the proper perspective on the first three; without it, our understanding of Jesus and his work will inevitably be skewed.