Christian Minimalists

Evangelicals have become experts in finding a thousand new ways to ask the same question, “What is the least one has to do to become a Christian.“ That’s our defining question. We’ve become masters at theological and soteriological minimalism. We are the ones who have boiled the entire glorious Gospel down to a single phrase, a simple emotive transaction, or some silly slogan. It is time for a new generation of Christians, committed to apostolic faith, to declare this minimalistic, reductionistic Christianity a failed project! It is wrong to try to get as many people as possible, to acknowledge as superficially as allowable, a Gospel which is theologically unsustainable. We need to be reminded of the words of Søren Kierkegaard, in his Attack Upon Christendom, where he declared, “Christianity is the profoundest wound that can be inflicted upon us, calculated on the most dreadful scale to collide with everything.”1 We, on the other hand, have made entrance into the Christian faith painless and almost seamless. In the process, we have managed to produce as many nominal Christians as Christendom ever did. If the liberal project taught us that denying Apostolic Christianity renders the Gospel inert and non-reproducible (note rapid decline of mainline churches), evangelical, minimalistic Christianity has taught us that the Gospel cannot be reduced to a bite sized piece for mass consumption.

The Gospel is about the in-breaking kingdom and the New Creation that claims the whole sphere. Christians can’t simply choose to play in one small corner of the chessboard – you have to play the whole board, or you will lose. The Gospel must be embodied in a redeemed community and touch the whole of life. That is why the Wesley brothers set up class meetings, fed the poor, wrote books on physics, gave preachers a series of canonical sermons, catechized the young, preached at the brick yards, promoted prison reform, rode 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, superintended orphanages, were avid abolitionists, and wrote theologically laden hymns for the church, etc. You see, they were capturing every sphere with the Gospel. The New Creation does not simply break into one little square on the chess-board – it crashes into the whole of life! If Wesley teaches us anything, it is that salvation is not something which is merely announced to us, it is something which God works in us – the forceful intrusion of his holiness into our history.

Brothers and sisters, it is time for us to capture a fresh vision of the great meta-narrative of the Christian Gospel for our times! The bumper sticker “God is my co-pilot” will not get us there. We have, in effect, been criss-crossing the world telling people to make God a player, even a major player in our drama. But the Gospel is about being swept up into His great drama. It is about our dying to self, taking up the cross, and being swept up into the great theo-drama of the universe! Christ has come as the Second Adam to inaugurate the restoration of the whole of creation by redeeming a people who are saved in their full humanity and called together into a new redeemed community known as the church, the outpost of the New Creation in Adam’s world. Discipleship, worship of the Triune God, covenant faithfulness, suffering for the sake of the Gospel, abiding loyalty to Christ’s holy church, theological depth, and a renewed mission to serve the poor and disenfranchised – these must become the great impulses of our lives.

Timothy Tennant, Bumper Sticker Christianity