What Makes the Gospel So Scandalous?
Encountering more than an abstract concept
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
(Five-minute read)
For quite a number of years I’ve wondered why it is that people have historically felt so threatened by what Christians call “the gospel.” It has always been strange to me that a message that announces such good news—that we are loved, that we are valued, that we don’t have to hustle to earn God’s favor—would be apparently rejected by so many people. What’s not to celebrate about such a heart-warming message? How is it scandalous that there is a God who loves us and there is nothing we can do to merit His love?
I mean, honestly: who doesn’t like free stuff? Who puts up a fuss about getting something for nothing?
Over the last few years, however, as my own journey has shifted a bit, and my understanding of the gospel has led me to new places, it has clicked for me: what makes the gospel so scandalous, at least it seems to me, is the very practical ways it liberates us from the old rules and regulations. It’s one thing to say that God loves us without condition, which isn’t all that controversial, I don’t think; it’s another thing to say that since God loves us without condition, we don’t have to do X anymore (and perhaps we never did).
Think about it: if you’re at all familiar with the New Testament, the reason that Jesus and Paul and all the apostles got into trouble is not simply because they announced such radical and unmerited grace as an abstract concept; it’s because they took that abstract concept and applied it to everyday life in a way that confronted long-practiced customs and rules.
Thus, Jesus, embodying the grace of God, hung out with “sinners and prostitutes,” despite rules which said He wasn’t supposed to do that. Similarly, in spite of custom which said He couldn’t do so, He healed people on the Sabbath, which raised the ire of the religious leaders, leading them to plot His crucifixion.
So also Paul didn’t simply announce that a person was justified by grace; he declared that a person was justified by grace and therefore Gentiles didn’t have to get circumcised. He further proposed that, contrary to previous custom, God’s grace was so radical that Jews could sit at the same table as uncircumcised Gentiles. Again, this was not simply Paul announcing an abstract “gospel.” This was Paul announcing a gospel that left previous custom and tradition null and void—and it was this latter reality that so scandalized those who encountered it.
This is, I would propose, what we see throughout the history of Christianity as well. What made Martin Luther’s gospel so radical was not simply his recovery of the idea of “justification by faith.” It was his recovery of justification by faith, which meant one didn’t have to confess his or her sins to a priest anymore for absolution. It was his recovery of justification by faith, which meant one didn’t have to pay indulgences to the church anymore. It was the practical outworking of the idea of justification by faith that so scandalized and threatened the Catholic Church, igniting their wrath.
I’ve seen this in my own life and ministry as well. I remember that when I first came to my present church one of my members warned me that if I wanted to preach the gospel, I would probably, much to his chagrin, offend some of the people in the congregation—so I better be cautious (he was in favor of me preaching the gospel, I should hasten to explain). But that’s exactly what I did—week after week after week, I infused my sermons with the gospel.
And do you know what happened? Nothing. Not a thing. No one walked out. No one got upset. No one left the church because I dared to mention that God loved them unconditionally and that salvation was a free gift. Such an idea, shared in abstract terms, is not really threatening at the end of the day.
Six years ago, though, I started to grasp the practical ecclesiological and missional implications of the gospel, and started preaching about them. Guess what happened? Some people started getting upset.
When I started to proclaim that the gospel liberates us from thinking a person has to dress a certain way to show up to a worship service—or that the gospel liberates us from insisting that specific instruments couldn’t be used in worship, or that the gospel liberates us from thinking that attending a worship service makes us good Christians, or that the gospel liberates us from believing that we can’t hang out with people who don’t think, act, or believe like we do—when I started to proclaim those practical outworkings of the gospel, that was what some found too hard to bear (though I will freely admit that, likely, part of what people objected to was my delivery of such news and not always just the news itself).
But what is it about this practical aspect of the gospel that so scandalizes us?
I think it confronts our desire for control. If there’s one thing we humans desperately struggle with, it’s when we don’t feel like we’re in control. This is why these simple, easy acts give us a deep sense of security. If we can just dress the right way, eat the right things, “go to church” on the right day, we feel safe.
We feel an even greater sense of control, and a greater sense of security, when we can convince others to eat, dress, and drink the same way we do. The more people who do it the way we do, the more in control we feel and the more secure we feel in our own skin and in our sense of standing with God and our fellow human beings.
So when someone comes along and questions the behaviors we think give us our security, that really undermines our security.
Of course, this is not to say, at all, lest someone misunderstand me, that the gospel means that anything goes. The gospel doesn’t topple all rules and morality. The gospel is not scandalous because it frees us from those old restrictions regarding life and limb. We aren’t suddenly free to kill people or sleep with their spouses because of the liberating gospel. Similarly, I would also propose that the gospel doesn’t liberate us from keeping the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week—Saturday—though it does liberate us from all the man-made traditions which insist everyone has to keep it in just such a way (as Jesus had to repeatedly go up against).
And that’s the larger point, to return to where I started: the reason the gospel is so scandalous is because it liberates us from relating to God as a taskmaster who is primarily interested in our obedience rather than our hearts. It’s scandalous because it frees us from taking our cues from other human beings who, in an attempt to exert control, set down rules and regulations that have their origin in anything other than the heart of God.
So here’s a question for you: has the gospel truly scandalized you?
Because, this is my proposal: if the gospel hasn’t led you to reevaluate and question some of the rules, practices, and traditions that you’ve highly esteemed up to this point, I wonder if you’ve truly encountered or understood the gospel.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.