Evangelical gospel

I was just talking to a co-worker about the previous blog post and how sad I get when people talk about the great news of going to heaven when they die—forever. It's good news that we're in God's presence after we die, sure. But if we look forward to the resurrection, and live anticipatorally today, the good news that Jesus preached makes sense: captives are set free, the poor are fed and the oppressed are liberated. All creation will be liberated from sin permanently at the resurrection.

When I hear "Christians" damning the creation to fire as if it is a bad thing, they haven't read enough. And I mean they ignored the next sentence. What people know as 2 Peter 3:10–12 says: "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat." It's an awesome and fearsome thing to read those sentences. But we evidently get lost in the awe, because we completely ignore the next sentence: "But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells." Can it be more clear? This righteousness that Peter is referring to is the good news: liberation and plenty for all. Hebrew righteousness has everything to do with equality and justice and almost nothing to do with the Roman idea of the gavel falling condemning a prisoner to a sentence.

Of late, I've taken to calling what Evangelicals preach the "evangelical gospel." I have felt that it defines things well enough, and distances the Scripture from that heresy sufficiently. But I just realized that if you translate the roots of "evangelical gospel," you get "good newsical good news." That's an injustice at the very least, since it gives too much credence to the "goodness" of that news. At other times I speak of "kakangelion," the opposite of "euangelion." Maybe I need to stick with that.