“Too often we teach corresponding truths as if they were dichotomous and emphasize one to the exclusion of the other, creating a warped and twisted theology that is ultimately antithetical to what Scripture really teaches […]. Often, we teach respect for authority without teaching the limits on and the dangers of power, and how those imbalances can feed an abusive environment. […] When we emphasize having the right spirit or the right attitude when speaking out […] without equal emphasis on the importance of humble listening and repentance [from] the one […] confronted, we have an imbalanced theology. Often, we teach forgiveness without the corresponding reality of God’s justice. Or present forgiveness practically as being almost in opposition to justice. We teach unity as if unity is a goal in and of itself, without adequate emphasis […] that unity around the wrong thing is not unity at all.” – Rachael Denhollander

We recently wrapped up the first unit in our RED-ENG Sunday school series, “Investigating Evangelicalism.” In this unit, through N.T. Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, we sought to explore how a deeper understanding of Scripture’s language of the bodily resurrection, as well as its imagery of the new heavens and new earth should inform the church’s mission today. During our study, some of us found that many of our inherited images of Christ’s second coming and assumptions about our heavenly hope differed a great deal from central passages and facets of Scripture’s overarching story of humanity’s redemption and creation’s renewal.

Many of us were familiar with the side of the gospel story that promises a personal relationship with God, a relationship that leads to the individual salvation for our “souls”, and ultimately finds its payoff in the hope for eternal life after death. But if the church is just here to save “souls”, why should we care about the present world at all – God’s good creation? And what about the hungry, poor, sick, and abused, how is an escapist gospel good news to these individuals? If the motivating hope of our gospel is just for a kind of amorphous eternal afterlife, instead of the concrete hope in Christ’s death and resurrection, the living God who has entered our world, then it seems like our gospel is hardly something worth hoping for, much less something worth sharing. None of the abovementioned aspects of the gospel story are bad, but alone they are incomplete. And when we fail to tell the whole story, we fail to properly witness the good news of Jesus Christ.