Naked Gospel

Andrew Farley's book, "The Naked Gospel", has joined a growing chorus of "evangelical" voices calling the Church to a more simple expression of God's truth. As he says in his tagling, "Jesus plus nothing."

This is, of course, bewitching tonic to a Church grown weary with sin and forgiveness cycles and "hard road sanctification." So Farley's book calls us to return to the foot of the cross and the door of the tomb to rediscover the real Jesus and His Gospel.

I have to ask how we can do that? How can we have such a reductionistic faith? What would such a gospel be built upon, any way? You might say, "Well, Dysmas, it would be built upon JESUS! Anyone can tell you that." Okay, fair enough. But how do we learn of this Jesus? Simple. Easy-peasy. Just pull out your Bible (according to Farley, you might want to stick only to those 27 books comprising what we Evangelicals call the New Testament -- the Old one is full of that bad old Law which leads to so much legalism that Farley warns us about).

But wait a minute. Where did we get those 27 books any way? Who wrote them and for what purpose? And did THOSE guys have a "Jesus plus nothing" approach?

Actually, therein lies the conundrum facing any modern "simplifier" who calls us back to the roots: the roots of our faith are not in those 27 books. Rather, they are in the 39 books (or adding a few if you want to be a pre-Reformation Christian) which comprise Jesus' Bible, which our Lord read, studied, memorized, and proclaimed. In fact, the ones who declared that the 27 new ones were even worth paying attention to were men who recognized that following Jesus in truth was both a lot simpler and a lot more complicated than a Jesus plus nothing perspective could allow.

The Bible was written to a community, for a community. The One who boldly proclaimed Himself as the Messiah promised in those 39 "old" books and whose life, death, burial, and resurrection -- not to mention His expected return -- are clearly portrayed in the 27 "new" books says that to follow Him, we must DO SOMETHING. As the wise sage Batman tells us, it is not who you are on the inside, but what you DO which defines you.