The Four Spiritual Laws. . .

In his critique of the Four Spiritual Laws that Campus Crusade uses in their overused and abused track, Scott McKnight makes the following quote:

Third, it is the diagram, which is the image that was used in the 2d spiritual law as well, that concerns me. Here there is "Man" and "God," and it is the Cross of Jesus that enables the human being to get back to God. Once again, we are dealing here with a truncated gospel: the diagram depicts a gospel in which the problem is separation and the resolution is reconciliation. The gospel is always defined by the problem it depicts, and the Bible describes this problem in a number of ways, including but not limited to separation. In other words, if you define the problem as separation, once separation is resolved in reconcliation, the gospel has run its course. Once a person crosses the Cross to get back to God the gospel's work is done. (Few admit this; but the image seers it into the mind of those who are being evangelized and it leads to Christians who see the Christian life as the "second phase" and not the "gospel" phase; it leads to seeing fellowship/ecclesiology as something in addition to the gospel and not integral to the gospel; it does to the same to holiness, etc..)

Is reconciliation of individuals all there is to it? What then of the Church? What then of the World? Whenever the gospel is understood as an individual person finding his or her way back to God, the gospel is reduced to Individualism -- and anyone who reads the Bible knows that page after page is about the people of God (Israel and then the Church) and that the "plan" of God is to build a people for the good of others and the world.

This is one of my critiques of many of the "gospels" that I hear going around. They are completely individualized and narrowly focused. There is little, or no regard for the Church or the concept of God's Kingdom. Many time it is completely divorced from any concept of historical context. So, the Gospel get's relegated to the improvement of individual "mental health", with very little thought for what God is doing with this world, or where it is going.

Additionally, the focus is usually on reconciliation as the cure for our separation with God. Again, we wind up with a Gospel of "mental health", rather than Jesus' solution which was the "Kingdom of God as Jesus envisions it and as Jesus embodies it and as Jesus teaches it."