By Dr. Johan Tredoux
It was an ordinary Friday night; 1974, Klerksdorp, a small town about 60 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa. My middle-school friend’s dad had invited our family for dinner at a fancy hotel downtown. We were excited about the “a la Carte” service at the 3-star hotel. The ambiance promised an old Titanic British flare. My friend’s dad was the manager, so I knew, even as a 14yo, that we were in for a royal treat. This night promised to be very special for our family, who were scraping by on a meager Nazarene pastor’s salary. That is until my dad tried to find parking right in front of the Klerksdorp Hotel.
As my dad reversed parked into his spot, we heard screams and a sudden commotion: two grown men who had smashed their beer bottles against the street light poles were angrily coming at each other. This would get bad quickly. We watched helplessly through the car window as a bloody mess was about to unfold.
Life was never boring with a dad who was as impulsive as he was passionate about his evangelism. This was no more evident than at that crucial moment. In a quick, irrational move, my dad decided to jump out of the car and stop the fight. I can still hear my mom’s scream: “Gideon, what are you doing?” But her voice fell on deaf ears. I recall the hair on my arms rising as I watched my dad jump between the two grown men to stop the fight. It was a move that took the men by surprise and led to their decision to angrily approach my dad instead.
Suddenly, everything fell silent in the car. We waited and watched in horror. No one could have foreseen what happened next: My dad screaming at the top of his voice: “In the name of Jesus, stand right where you are!!” The shock of my dad’s preacher voice—barrel-chested-authority—stopped both men in their tracks. If ever there was a divine intervention, this was it! Either these men were overwhelmed with holy fear, or they were just plain shocked by the unorthodox bravery of this well-dressed, clean-shaved man. With a startled look, they both dropped their bottles. One walked away as my dad put his hand on the shoulder of the other and led him around the corner.
Forty minutes later, my father joined us at the dining table, and we heard the rest of the story: the man, who had moments earlier approached my dad with a broken bottle, had been, in turn, guided into a moment of introspection and prayer in the back alley of a 3-star hotel, where he accepted Jesus as his personal Savior! I will never forget the look my mom gave my dad: relief mixed with embarrassment and humiliation. Incredibly, my dad had chosen to surrender proper protocol and British etiquette to get this man “saved.” While I was grateful that my father had averted danger, that moment—mother’s anxiety, my fear, the confused look of my friend’s parents around a table of solid silver cutlery, and the smell of special braised steak—is something I will never forget.
This “delightfully spoiled evening dinner” story showed up many times in my dad’s sermons. This story, and many others, were shared with gusto as examples of the evangelistic urgency that rested on all of us, as Christ followers, to get people saved. As I write about my growing-up years as a preacher’s kid, especially as it relates to evangelistic experiences, I’m left with many questions. Just to be sure, as many pastors’ kids could testify, I got “saved” at least 20 times growing up. At least every year when the evangelist showed up and scared the living daylights out of me with choices of either going to heaven or hell. Two of the most memorable responses were after watching the movie: “The Thief in the Night” and going forward while singing “Just as I am” at a Billy Graham crusade in Johannesburg.
As was the case with my dad’s dramatic encounter at the hotel, where he called this man to an on-the-spot decision for or against Christ, I couldn’t but help but think that Paul’s conversion experience on the Damascus Road served as a template for my dad’s evangelistic approach. Now, as I am writing, it all feels so far away. I keep thinking about the disciples who walked with Jesus for three years and still didn’t get it.
The Gospel version I was raised on was probably what this poor fellow got from my dad in the alley next to the hotel. I imagine my dad sharing the story of Jesus as a courtroom drama, where sin is law-breaking and needs to be punished, and God as the Judge whose justice must be satisfied. Since our sin is against an eternal God, the punishment must also be eternal, so Jesus must step in to be punished or sacrificed in our place. Of course, once the eternal substitute has been punished, the Judge is then free to pardon the repentant sinner since that debt has been paid in full. The choice was to accept what Christ had done by faith, with the assurance of heaven when you die or, if you do not consent, hell. Poor fellow, my dad could be very persuasive.
What leaves me puzzled is the seeming obsession in the evangelical world to make ourselves the subject of the Gospel. We do so by placing all the weight of the Gospel on the conversion experience itself. It seems that we have forgotten that the weight of the Gospel should be on the “Faith of Christ” and not on our “Faith in Christ.” It is amazing to me that we have lost sight of this basic element of Christianity. It was one of my theological mentors, Dr. Noble, who brought my attention back to this more orthodox position. It is the more ancient, more accurate, more biblical account of the Gospel; one established by the apostles and the early church fathers in the first three centuries after Christ. One can call it the healing Gospel or the therapeutic version.
In this version, sin is not merely a law-breaking behavior but, rather, a fatal disease that makes us mortal and subject to death. In this healing Gospel, we find ourselves in a hospital, not a courtroom. God comes not as a punishing judge but as the Great doctor who came to heal our brokenness and rescue us from death. Placing the weight of the healing Gospel on the Faith of Christ is to say that we are saved by participation in Christ as members of his body. In other words, we are redeemed, not by virtue of our faith but because we participate in Jesus Christ’s healing assumption of our broken humanity.
Noble warns that by placing all our emphasis on a “faith in Christ,” we make the initial decision moment the key point of salvation. In so doing, we relegate Christ to a subordinate position as merely a means to the end of our salvation. It is then essential that Christ remains the subject of the Gospel and not us. According to Noble, there is a distorted kind of evangelistic preaching that tells us little of Christ but focuses rather on heaven and hell and the need for conversion. The great biblical story is narrowed and restricted to refer merely to the moment of the individual’s conversion. The result is a conversion-centered Christianity instead of a Christ-centered Christianity.
Much of my upbringing aligned me with the “Fall” Redemption” pathway with an obsession with original sin. I realized that much of this emphasis has placed me in a courtroom with God as a Judge. Metaphorically, Gen 3, with its emphasis on the fall, was presented to me as my most original story. Being guilty and feelings of unworthiness shaped my early childhood perception of myself, especially when the first things said about me as a baby were that I was “born” a problem to God.” The overall flow of this Gospel was this: when you turn from God, God turns from you. If you turn back to God, God will turn back to you. This places salvation in our hands. Our response becomes everything. This scenario leaves us with the nagging question: Is God only facing me when I decide to face him?
Much freedom came to me as I anchored myself in Gen. 1 as my most original story. This enabled me to celebrate the beautiful truth that God likes me and calls me good. Instead of thinking that I need to get back in His embrace, I have this deep sense that I have always been in the hands of God. (Irenaeus) He has never let go of me. The very essence of who I am is anchored in God’s grace. And I believe I am to live “from” this” position as my base camp. This more orthodox healing/therapeutic gospel has helped me to understand that God is not “watching me” as a judge but “watching out for me” as in the story of the prodigal son. The overall flow of this healing Gospel was this: when we turn from God, God doesn’t turn from us. God is always turned toward us.
From a NT perspective, this means that I view my life through the eyes of the resurrection. It is the recapitulation of the first creation in the new creation. The movement is from light to darkness, from the positive to the negative. Not the other way around. I link Genesis 1 with the resurrection. I am embraced through the “Faith OF Christ,” in his self-offering love demonstrated through his life, death, and resurrection. This too, is my most original story.
Now, to circle back to the actions of my dad at the Hotel where we were invited for a scrumptious dinner… If it was me, I would have chosen to avert the crisis by staying with my wife and children rather than confront the angry men with power. Thankfully, my father wasn’t hurt, but maybe the broken beer bottles and alley conversion can serve as a metaphor for the broken ways in which we presented a courtroom gospel, instead of a healing gospel.
Bradley Jersak summarizes this essay well. He wrote in A More Christlike God:
Christ did not come to change the Father, or to appease the wrath of an angry judge, but to reveal the Father. God is like Jesus, exactly like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. We did not know that, but now we do. Paul said God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. It’s not the Father that needed to be reconciled to the world. It’s the world that needed to be reconciled to the Father. Jesus, perfectly revealing the heart of the Father, confronts the sin of the world this way: I forgive you. Even when we turn away from God, he is always there, confronting us with his love. God is always toward us. Always for us. He comes, not as a condemning judge, but as a great physician. Jesus was saving us from Satan, sin and death; not saving us from God.[1]
[1] Jersak, Bradley. A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel (p. 294). CWR Press. Kindle Edition.