One gospel for a complex world?
Papers from the Ninth Oak Hill College Annual School of Theology

CONTENTS

Introduction - Chris Green

1 Can we speak of ‘the’ gospel in a post-modern world? Pluralism, polytheism and the gospel of the one, true God - Michael Ovey
2 ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘eternal life’ in the Synoptic Gospels and John - Paul Woodbridge
3 Theological implications of ‘eternal life’ in the Fourth Gospel - Paul Woodbridge
4 The king, his kingdom and the Gospel: Matthew, Mark and Luke–Acts - Chris Green
5 The gospel of Paul and the gospel of the kingdom - Simon Gathercole
6 Kerygma or kerygmata: is there only one gospel in the New Testament? - David Peterson
7 Worship, our mission: responding to the god who has rescued us – A sermon on Deuteronomy 6:4–5 - James Robson

The Oak Hill School of Theology is an annual event in our calendar which takes several years to plan and publish. The initial selection of the theme, and the choice of speakers for the day, is done two years ahead of time, and the contributors then begin to read, think, interact and pray around their given areas. Frequent conversations and shared reading give a cohesiveness and collaborative feel to the venture, and then each speaker in turn delivers an early version of the paper to the rest of the faculty. Again, interchange takes place, and the papers are reworked until the School itself. After that, the constraints of a fifty minute talk are lifted, and each writer is freed to expand the paper into a chapter for this book. ...

Dr Michael Ovey opens the book with a consideration of what it means for contemporary Britain to claim to be a pluralist culture. Michael teaches Doctrine at Oak Hill, and his clarity with the often complex subject he deals with in his chapter is extremely helpful. Moreover, before he was ordained, Michael was a barrister, and one who regularly drafted legislation that came before the Houses of Parliament. This gives his chapter two unique elements.

First, Michael is acutely aware of, and sensitive to, the political consequences of trends in society and public life, and of the echoing trends in theology. ...

Second, his training as a barrister explains the forensic skill with which he dissects (I am tempted to say, vivisects) an argument and lays open its founding presuppositions and inevitable consequences. Michael is persuaded that the current praise being heaped upon tolerance springs from a deep rebellion against God, and to demonstrate that he digs far down into Western culture’s foundations. ...

My chapter ... goes into waters that are less wellcharted and where the storms are only beginning. The book of Acts has been re-emerging in New Testament studies after a period of neglect, and is beginning to attract some attention, not all of it helpful. Why, for instance, does Luke hardly mention the Kingdom of God, or Jesus’ death? An argument similar to the one explaining the difference between the Synoptics and John has emerged, in which there are different, and fundamentally irreconcilable, gospels within the work of even one writer. I attempt to show that this is to misread Acts: the references to the Kingdom are few, but they occur at such signally important points in the narrative that their relative scarcity becomes a non-issue. ...

Dr Simon Gathercole continues ... with a wide-ranging survey of the gospel in the writings of Paul. Simon is the one contributor who is not on the Oak Hill Faculty; instead, he teaches New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, and he has published several widely acclaimed books and articles on Pauline theology. At issue in his chapter is the charge that Paul invented a completely new gospel, which is radically different from the message of Jesus. It is the claim, still widely heard, that Paul invented Christianity from the much simpler, and less doctrinal, message of Jesus. ...

Professor David Peterson’s chapter is an attempt to synthesize what has gone before, and to map out a new paradigm for unifying the New Testament. David is a respected scholar and author, and his mature reflections of a lifetime of academic study of the New Testament show the benefit of the long view. ...

If David Peterson is right, however, as he carefully works through the evidence from Paul, Acts, John and the Synoptics, there is inescapable evidence for the case for unity of message across the New Testament, and the position (J.D.G.) Dunn adopts needs to be avoided.

This issue is close to the academic heart of this book, but it would be wrong to think that any of the authors see this as merely an ‘academic’ (in the sense of ‘interesting but irrelevant’) issue. As the chapters repeatedly show, the matter to hand is: whether God has truly made himself known, or is a bundle of high-sounding contradictions; whether the New Testament shares God’s consistency, or his (its/their?) pluralities and rivalries; whether tolerance of irreconcilable truth-claims is a virtue or a lie; whether there is one gospel that is true for all people, everywhere, or if there is a range of presentable options among which one may choose; whether the assertion that the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes (Rom. 1:16) is true or not.

The passion in those questions explains the final chapter. None of the papers in the volume was presented at the School of Theology in the form they now appear, and David Peterson’s was not given at all on the day. But we decided that the final emphasis in the book must not lie with intellectual argument, no matter how persuasively made, but with a passionate preaching of God’s Word. Dr James Robson teaches Old Testament at Oak Hill, and he summarized in one sermon – which was not preached with a view to publication, but only to move his hearers – what it means to know, love and serve the one, true, living, speaking God, to whom be the glory. ...