The Gospel Coalition

As this blog turns 5 this week, I’m pulling out some posts from the archive and giving them new life. Yesterday, we looked at several posts from Kingdom People’s first year. Today, we’re jumping into Year 2.

The most monumental blog post of Kingdom People’s second year was the podcast and lengthy transcript from my sit-down conversation with N.T. Wright - “Interview with N.T. Wright – Full Transcript” (November 19, 2007). I had been reading Wright since my years in Romania, primarily his work on Jesus. I had recently begun to read up on the controversy surrounding his views on justification and Paul. Wright agreed to an hour-long interview at Asbury Seminary, where he answered a number of questions related to his life and work as well as the current discussions of justification. A few months later, I sat down with Bishop Wright again in Nashville to discuss his book Surprised by Hope. In the second interview, I brought up specific criticisms from Mark Dever, Doug Wilson, and other pastors and theologians.

One of the longer blog posts I wrote in 2008 was called “Don’t Replace the Substitute!” I registered my concern with replacing reductionistic, past presentations of the gospel with newer presentations that were equally reductionistic:

When I evaluate a gospel presentation, I try to imagine what kind of disciple the presentation will produce. The gospel presentations of past generations have given us individualistic Christians without an understanding of the missio Dei and the nature of the church. They need to be fixed.

But I hope we don’t trade the inadequate presentations from the past with other inadequate presentations. I can see future generations who have grown up with this newer presentation asking questions like, “What does the gospel say about my guilt? How do I know I’m okay with God? How can I be sure I’ve been doing enough for the Kingdom?” And eventually, we will have self-focused, self-centered Christians who have turned introspective precisely because the gospel presentation they heard and believed did not say much to them about that.

During the spring of 2008, I began gathering a number of definitions of “the gospel” in an ongoing series titled “Gospel Definitions.” As far as I know, the result became the largest grouping of gospel definitions on the Internet today. Carefully working through these definitions was instrumental in helping me develop the ideas that would turn into the book Counterfeit Gospels.

Also of note during the blog’s second year – the 2008 presidential campaign. I did quite a few posts about the campaign, including this one, which analyzed what we learned from the campaign slogans of both candidates: “Yes We Can? What Our Campaign Slogans Tell Us About America” (September 16, 2008).

“Yes We Can” has become the mantra of the Obama campaign. ”Country First” has become the tagline for the McCain camp. No doubt these easy-to-remember slogans will help the strategies of both campaigns. But Christians should carefully consider both the commendable and the condemnable aspects of these sayings.