My two previous posts on the assassination of Tiller generated a significant number of questions, and I wanted to put one general response in a nutshell here.
The gospel is central, always central. Our task is to preach Christ and Him crucified. We are not to downgrade the Church into a Moral Uplift Society, or some kind of a political reform association. The center of our duty is to worship God in Spirit and in truth. The water for the healing of the nations flows over the threshhold of the Temple, but the ministry of the Temple is always the same.
But I don’t know how to preach the gospel without proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all things. When He told us to preach the gospel, He said that we were to do it because He had been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Not some authority, not most authority, not spiritual authority, not seventeenth dimension authority, and most certainly not authority in this kingdom but not in that one. All authority. Let Jesus define what preaching the gospel means. It means that we are to disciple the nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey Jesus in everything. How is it compromising the purity of the gospel by seeking to obey the Great Commission from left to right?
When people tell me to stick to “preaching the gospel,” here would be my question. “Sure thing,” I will say. “May I seek to do it the same way John Knox did?” Was he a compromiser or no? Did he dilute the gospel with political activism, or did he preach the kind of gospel that, when unleashed, filled prideful kings and queens with dread?
A story is told of Spurgeon’s practice of saying in sermons that if anyone had come under conviction of sin, he would be at his office on Monday morning at a specified time. He did not believe in giving an altar call, a practice that was just then getting established in the evangelical churches. His successor introduced the altar call in the church, and when an old-timer asked him about it, he replied that he believed in striking while the iron was hot. The old-timer said that when Spurgeon preached, the iron stayed hot until Monday morning.
And when John Knox preached, certain things are not reported to us. Mary of Scots did not retort that it “is a good thing that man doesn’t have a political action committee.” He didn’t need one.
What many ostensible theological purists are actually defending is not a pure gospel, but rather an anemic one. But enough with a gospel in a box. Any gospel that fits in a box needs to be hauled off. Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of all the nations of men; He is not the inspirational spark in our mystery cult.