Evagelism and the Kingdom

I was delighted to read David Alan Black’s review of Mortimer Arias’ book, Announcing the Reign of God in his blog The Jesus Paradigm (named after his forth coming book).  It is remarkable for a solid evangelical to do such a close and sympathetic reading of an anti-evangelical text.  It seems that this type of dialogue between liberals and conservatives rarely happens anymore.  With more dialogue like this we could spend less time arguing about peripheral items and more time following Jesus.

The conservative church tends to lean towards Gnosticism with emphasis on the spiritual nature of Jesus and the gospel, while liberals tend to lean toward Arianism with emphasis on the physical nature of Jesus and the gospel.  Christian Orthodoxy says that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine.  We need to listen to each other to recover a true Christian definition of evangelism and the Kingdom of God.  We need to embrace the paradox.   We need to learn to love the world and hate the world, to save souls and people, and to take care of the earth and long for heaven.  We don’t need to meet in the middle; we need to bring the extremes together like God did in the person of Jesus.

Here is a quote from Black that shows me that there is hope for growth in faithfulness on all sides.

I believe that one of the most difficult challenges for evangelicals today is to test our understanding of the Great Commission against this teaching of Jesus. Our missionary activity falls short if we limit ourselves to calling for personal faith in Christ without pointing to the requirements of the kingdom. Yes, we can always escape to a convenient “altar call” and “pledge card” mentality and call it evangelization, but this is not the total message of the Scriptures and the vision of the all-embracing kingdom of God. I suspect the devil loves it when we preach a Gospel without discipleship, as is inevitable once we become preoccupied with “getting people saved.” Following Christ means following Him in costly discipleship or it means nothing at all.