Ch 7 The Color of the Gospel

“I tell you the truth, where this gospel is preached throughout the world,

In December, 2021, President Biden convened leaders from more than 100 countries in a virtual “Summit for Democracy” in order to bolster democracy globally. He stated that preserving democracy is “the defining challenge of our time.” Given the partisanship and polarized climate witnessed in the U.S. that has compromised democracy, the instability of the U.S. renders its credibility as the leader of the democratic world suspect for advancing the integrity of democracy.

Many Christians and churches in the U.S. affirm its American democracy as the nation of God, the freedom of which others should follow and emulate as the will of God. This nationalism has fostered tribalism that many have embraced, thus also making suspect their credibility for advancing the integrity of the gospel—which is evident pervading existing Christian witness. The reality is that the integrity of democracy and the integrity of the gospel are inseparable in common conventional Christian thinking, and their interrelation evolves with a biased perceptual-interpretive lens that conflates the gospel with American democracy to give the gospel a hue of partiality.

Such partiality is consequential for the integrity of the gospel claimed and proclaimed. This process is demonstrated in how the news media operates in most contexts today. Two issues of partiality are evident in mainline news media: (1) The prevailing focus is on the bad news of the day, with little if any attention given to any good news—of course, this could be merely reporting the existential reality of our times—and (2) listeners, viewers, or readers of the news typically turn to and rely on sources that are partial to their views, because the news media is structured with such bias in order to inform mainly on the basis of their partiality. Accordingly, the integrity of the news from these sources is always suspect and cannot be counted on for the full, whole picture of what is truly happening. And those who rely on such sources are misled and misguided when they use information lacking integrity for everyday life.

These two issues of partiality apply also to the gospel claimed and proclaimed. The first issue, however, is the reverse of news media reporting. Rather than the gospel’s focus being on the bad news—which is an integral part of the gospel—the prevailing attention is given to the good news, under the assumption that the gospel is only the Good News. Consequently, Christians both favor claiming this so-called Good News without knowing and understanding the depth of the bad news, the news from which the gospel only can be claimed as good news. Furthermore, they also lean to proclaiming the gospel with the partiality of good news because of their bias against drawing attention to the bad news and thereby turning people off. Therefore, the integrity of the gospel with good news partiality is always suspect and cannot be counted on for the full, whole news embodied the whole-ly Word. Any gospel with the hue of partiality is always misleading and misguiding. Is this the basis pervading Christian theology and practice that is witnessed in the diverse hues of the gospel composing the global church?

Christian diversity is a tapestry of many colors, tints and shades. The gospel is not colorblind, but it renders secondary all the hues from diversity’s prism. When they are given primacy, the human significance of these hues discolors the gospel—hues which are incompatible with the color of the whole gospel.

It is from diversity’s prism of the gospel that the good news has been reported ongoingly with the bias of different hues—hues with selective facts and nuances of its truth, thus reporting the gospel with variable good news composed even by alternative facts and virtual news. The diverse hues from this prism have augmented the gospel outside the boundaries of its theological trajectory and relational path (as in Mt 7:13-14). Paul was simply astonished to see this existential reality emerge to discolor the gospel (Gal 1:6-7, cf. Col 2:4).

This biased partiality to the good news was also anticipated by Simeon when the gospel was whole-ly embodied. Just Luke’s Gospel reported Simeon’s relational response to the gospel, because Luke was concerned about the gospel’s inclusiveness to counter any bias of partiality that would distort or taint the gospel. Simeon, who embraced the whole gospel as the Spirit revealed to him, clearly distinguished the gospel’s good and bad news, and he anticipated its impact on those in the tradition of God’s people:

“This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in God’s kingdom, and to be the significance that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Lk 2:25-35).

As forecasted, the relational path of Jesus’ gospel intruded on the tradition of God’s people, “and his own people did not accept him” (Jn 1:10). Even though their tradition included enough similarity to accept Jesus, the roots of their theology and practice were incompatible with Jesus’ vine roots. The incompatibility of prevailing religious tradition was ironic but not surprising, and should alert us to existing traditions today. The whole gospel Jesus embodied was right for the heart of human life, and he enacted integrally the bad and good news to make right the human condition. His gospel is incompatible with any complicity or reflection of injustice, and their tradition (and those today in likeness) lacked the relational significance of justice as defined by the relational terms of God’s authority and rule of law—regardless of their conformity in referential terms. Therefore, their Rule of Faith could not embrace the whole gospel enacted by Jesus, which exposed the injustice rooted in their tradition. In his gospel, accordingly, Jesus clarified any misconceptions and corrected any illusions with the undeniable paradox:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring common peace, but a sword….” (Mt 10:34-36)

The bad news of the gospel not only antecedes the good news but necessarily qualifies what the good news is that is essential for whole justice and uncommon peace—the whole-ly relational outcome of Jesus’ gospel (cf. Mt 12:18-21).

Back in June, 2015, Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, responded to the murders of nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; this bad news was perpetrated during their weekly Bible study by a white young adult proclaiming racial superiority. Labberton responded in part: “Until our lives [including at Fuller] reflect a gospel powerful enough to eradicate roots of racism and violence, the faith we proclaim will be a marginalized impertinence.”^{^[1]}

Indeed, the essential truth of the whole gospel must first be the essential relational reality of the church and its persons and relationships, including the academy and other Christian organizations. Yet, the issues of justice and reconciliation rooted in the bad news of the gospel must go beyond ethical-moral terms and reach deep into the heart of persons and relationships in their ontology and function. This gospel process necessitates unavoidably getting past the secondary—as important as it may be in existential life—into this primacy and requires the redemptive change of our theological anthropology that reduces persons and relationships in their ontology and function. If we want justice with whole righteousness, then the gospel of the uncommon wholeness of Christ and integrally its uncommon equality also require this essential reality in the church without divergence: the new, uncommon and whole relational order for the church to be distinguished as the new creation family not just of Christ but the Trinity, whereby its gospel will have the qualitative relational significance for all persons, peoples, tribes, nations and their relationships to be made whole in their innermost—that is, in the primacy of their inner out transformed without the veil of distinctions and the barriers to intimate equalized relationships together.

How persons do relationships in Christian diversity, however, is filtered through the prism that colors the gospel in a partiality to bias their own persons and relationships favorably and those of others less favorably. This common human dynamic discolors the gospel with a consonance or dissonance heard (or seen) accordingly—a gospel, in Labberton’s words, of “marginalized impertinence,” which diverse Christians and churches are accountable to change and responsible to make whole-ly relevant.

Diversity’s prism commonly discoloring the gospel uses contextualized soundtracks to claim and proclaim the gospel. While such a soundtrack may have consonance in that context, it readily has dissonance in other contexts whereby the gospel’s significance and primary relevance cannot be heard. Yet, without the gospel’s significance, what can be heard by others could have secondary relevance. Christmas is the prime example of a discolored gospel having consonance for others, who would otherwise consider the gospel dissonant and thus without relevance for their lives. As the most prominent Christmas soundtrack of the gospel, “Silent Night” has been widely translated and embraced in the global community, even by the diversity of those who are not Christians or are of another religion; but they still are touched by the consonance of its sound, not by the significance of the gospel embodied for them to receive in order to resonate in their hearts for the primary relevance of their life in wholeness. This is a prime example of how the medium displaces the primary significance of the message, and then becomes the message in itself. Silently and sadly, ‘hallelujah’ is a verb in relational response to jah (YHWH, God) that has typically lost its relational significance in worship to become the message as a noun, reverberating as an end in itself; this end-message has even reverberated in secular soundtracks, often reduced to merely ‘hallelu’.

As “Silent Night” illustrates, gospel soundtracks are translated in native languages to better reverberate in listeners. While this may help a gospel soundtrack to be consonant, it does not get down to the heart of the gospel to illuminate its essential significance and primary relevance. The primary issue for the whole gospel’s soundtrack revolves around the gospel’s language and genre embodied by the Word. Paul was unequivocal that the gospel’s language is composed “not with words of contextualized wisdom” but by the language embodied and enacted relationally by the Word (1 Cor 1:17, ESV). In other words, the gospel is a verb communicated only in the Word’s relational language. Based on the Word, this is the only language that makes the gospel soundtrack consonant for listeners to hear (or see) its essential significance and primary relevance (cf. Jn 8:43). Moreover, the gospel’s soundtrack genre is vital to illuminate the gospel as clearly distinguished from the diverse colors evolving from diversity’s prism. Paul further clarified that human contextualization has biased diversity’s lens “so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the whole glory of Christ, who is the image of whole-ly God” (2 Cor 4:4, NIV). Therefore, the genre of the only color giving clarity to the whole gospel is light, and any other color discolors the gospel to distort its significance and taint its relevance.

The genre of light takes the gospel further and deeper, for example, than merely major news to report (even as ‘breaking news’) or just theological doctrine to believe and practice. Yet, typically, the light of the gospel is misunderstood with a contextualized bias (as in Jn 1:5; 2 Cor 3:14) or is simply obscured with a commonized bias (as in Jn 1:10-11; 3:19). In the genre of light, the gospel illuminates the whole-ly identity and function of the Word’s vulnerable presence and relational involvement enacted in the active voice of the transitive verb distinguished only in relational language.

Notwithstanding the importance of the diversity of native languages, the gospel’s whole composition can only be determined by the primary parameters of the Word’s relational language. With the whole gospel being a verb, it cannot be claimed or proclaimed as a mere common noun, nor as merely an adjective modifying what God has given to the world. As a transitive verb, the gospel is the relational action enacted by the Word that communicates in relational language directly to those who, without distinctions and partiality, are the recipients of the Word’s whole-ly relational action. Thus, the gospel’s relational action is never a virtual transitive action in what would amount to a verb in the passive voice. The Word’s relational language is the soundtrack only of communication in the active voice of the whole-ly God, whose vulnerable presence and relational involvement in real time constitute the gospel’s integral significance and relevance.

With the gospel in the relational language composing its transitive verb, the active voice of the gospel’s soundtrack resonates for the diversity of all persons, peoples, tribes and nations, resonates in the consonance necessary to hear the integral bad and good news that illuminate seeing the Light embodying and enacting the whole gospel (Jn 1:9; 8:12). Therefore, the gospel in the essential significance of only this language and with the primary relevance of just this genre has the unbiased impartial basis for the diversity of all to claim and proclaim together as one family in the image and likeness of the Trinity in uncommon wholeness.

Given Mary’s vulnerable relational involvement and reciprocal response constituting her discipleship (as discussed previously), Jesus highlighted her identity and function as a central feature wherever the gospel is preached in global diversity (Mt 26:13). Why central when the gospel is openly expressed and not just implied when the gospel is noted? The answer emerges in relational language.

That is to say, nowhere in the NT do we find a person who enacts the whole gospel as a verb with more relational significance than Mary. How so? There are two key ways fundamental to the gospel. First, Mary embodied a person who would not be and thereby was not limited and constrained by her surrounding context, both cultural and religious. In spite of her diminished distinction as a woman, her person demonstrated the hard decisions necessary to make redemptive changes in her identity and function—that Jesus highlighted for Martha (Lk 10:42)—which distinguished the redemptive transformation at the heart of the gospel as a verb for all recipients to undergo. The first key about Mary is her relational action as the verb of the gospel in the active voice of her vulnerable relational involvement foremost with Jesus. This key relational way unfolds integrally in the second key. Her relational action as a verb was only in the active voice of a transitive verb. The only discipleship response to “Follow me” that has significance to Jesus is the response to his vulnerable presence and relational involvement in the primacy of reciprocal relationship together. The whole gospel as a transitive verb does not enact unilateral relationship but only reciprocal relationship for wholeness together. Mary, more vulnerably and intimately, embodied and enacted these key ways with her Lord and Teacher (in contrast, e.g. to Peter, Jn 13:6-7).

Therefore, in the Word’s unbiased perceptual-interpretive lens, Mary neutralized the diverse coloring of the gospel (contrary to what Martha and the other disciples practiced) to enact the relational language of the whole gospel, whereby the Light was not misunderstood or obscured. Accordingly, in their vulnerably intimate face-to-face reciprocal relational involvement together, the soundtrack of the gospel that Mary’s person deeply expressed resonated in the heart of Jesus’ person to signify the relational outcome of the gospel—the relational outcome ‘already’ when constituted by the relational dynamic of nothing less and no substitutes.

Should Mary, then, be featured at the heart of the whole gospel wherever and whenever? The answer depends on making hard decisions, likely with redemptive changes. The hard reality of Mary’s discipleship is that she ongoingly challenged conventional thinking (both Martha’s and the other disciples’), the diversity of which discolors the gospel to distort or taint it so that its soundtrack doesn’t have the consonance to resonate the gospel’s essential significance and primary relevance in the hearts of listeners. If conventional thinking is not changed redemptively, Mary’s person is reduced to just another figure in the NT narrative, who doesn’t warrant the attention that Jesus ascribed to her.

There is no knowledge about whether Mary and Paul ever met. But they were sister and brother in the new creation family of the gospel of peace. Their connection, however, goes deeper than the conventional gender distinction of brother and sister, because at their hearts from inner out their primary identity and function are persons, persons in relationship together both equalized and intimate as church family.

Paul’s person reflected Mary’s person rather than mirroring the distinctions of his old self (as in Phil 3:4-6). Any color of the gospel that Paul might have had from a contextualized bias was neutralized by his redemptive transformation from the relational action by the Light of the gospel, which confronted Paul face to face (Acts 9:3-5). Even his secondary complaints later were changed in the relational outcome of the gospel (e.g. 2 Cor 12:7-9). Therefore, just like Mary, Paul was not limited or constrained by contextualized biases and conventional thinking in Christian theology and practice; rather he definitively neutralized the diverse coloring of the gospel (Gal 3:26-29) and unequivocally exposed the gospel’s discoloring (Gal 1:6-7).

Indeed, Paul didn’t diminish the bad news of the gospel by skewing it with the good news; that would only discolor the integral gospel into a fragmentary hue. And, of course, just like Mary, Paul’s relational involvement enacting the gospel as a transitive verb in the active voice served its relational purpose and outcome for the Light to be seen (or heard) without misunderstanding or obscurity (2 Cor 4:6).

It should not be surprising if much of Christian diversity prefers a partial gospel colored by hues from diversity’s grassroots. Why? Because such discoloring does not make the good news contingent on the bad news of the gospel, which then would make it less dissonant for their contexts and thus easier to listen to—similar to the partiality of news media’s skewed reporting. But a partial gospel doesn’t give the whole picture to see the light of the gospel.

In the light, the whole gospel’s bad news exposes the contextualization and commonization of the human condition, which pervades Christians and churches for their condition. Then the gospel’s unavoidable bad news confronts the reduced theological anthropology defining their identity and determining their function, which evolves from a weak view of sin lacking reductionism that is also confronted in Christian diversity. Thus, the bad news gets down to the core roots of diverse Christian theology and practice that need redemptive change. This is demonstrated by Jesus enacting the gospel in the intrusive voice of his ongoing transitive verb action. When he cleaned out his family house to make it the shared dwelling in covenant reciprocal relationship together for all nations (Mk 11:15-17), the Light illuminated what’s integral to the uncommon peace that only he gives, which would compose his church family for all persons, peoples, tribes and nations without their comparative distinctions.

The good news is of little or no significance unless it is directly relevant for the existential condition in Christian diversity that requires the change to free it from the limits and constraints preventing all the persons and relationships in the global church from being transformed (not reformed) to wholeness. This wholeness together is nothing less than the integrally equalized and intimate relationships reconciled in the whole-ly image and likeness of the Trinity, just as Jesus prayed definitively for his family (Jn 17). If you do the math, do all the diverse parts of the global church body, past and present, add up together to compose the global church in the wholeness of the gospel’s new creation—no matter how vibrant the diversity or resounding the parts?

Paul’s verb action begs for relational unity in the church (Eph 4:1-5) in the active voice of relational language, which is not expressed as a reminder in referential terms to maintain in church doctrine and to advocate in referential language by church leadership—both of which are without relational significance. Paul expresses in the depth of relational terms what Jesus transformed into Paul: the wholeness of Christ composing the whole of who, what and how (the gravity of righteousness) the church is in its unity, oneness (henotes)—the oneness distinguished only by wholeness together and differentiated from anything less than whole relational terms. The primary identity and function of the church’s righteousness is Paul’s deep concern over any secondary identity and function of the church’s diversity (cf. Rom 14:17), the secondary practice of which must always be integrated into the primary of who, what and how the church and its persons and relationships are (cf. 14:18-20)—brought together and held together by the gravity of their righteousness.

Only the integral gospel integrates the defining bad news into the transforming good news by the relational action of the gospel as the transitive verb in the active voice of relational language, in order to constitute the new creation relational outcome of the gospel deeply in the experiential truth and relational reality of all persons, peoples, tribes and nations in Christian diversity—with their diversity re-purposed, their churches re-image-d, and re-order-ed to celebrate the whole gospel integral for the global church.

Just the integral gospel enacts the relational dynamic of nothing less and no substitutes.

Perhaps the following musical gospel will help the church’s celebration to resonate anew:

Ps 96:1-2; 98:1-2; 71:15; 40:3; Lk 22:30; 2 Cor 5:17; Lk 6:38; Eph 1:13; 4:23-24

[1] Quoted from “Out of Anguish, We Commit to Change,” posted 6/22/2015, http://fuller.edu/offices/President/From-the-President/2015-Posts.

[2] Music available online at http://www.4X12.org.