A Wonderful Plan for Your Life?

What this page is asking

The author of this site set down a thesis to be tested: “For fifteen centuries the Church proclaimed what God has done in Christ. Much modern preaching proclaims what Christ can do for you.”

He put the core claim like this. For roughly its first fifteen hundred years, the Church’s public message announced what God had done, named the human problem as sin, death and the devil, called hearers to repent, believe, be baptized and be joined to the Church’s teaching, the breaking of bread and the prayers, and pointed them toward the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Much preaching of the past hundred and fifty years still uses this vocabulary, but the centre often moves. The hearer’s needs set the agenda. The problem becomes emptiness, a lack of purpose, or a life that is not working. The promise becomes peace, fulfilment, “a wonderful plan for your life,” or blessing now. The response becomes a single private decision. Judgment and the resurrection of the body move to the background or disappear.

He put the question in a form that can be checked: is the message of much of the modern church the same message the apostles, the Fathers and the medieval church proclaimed, adapted for a new audience? Or has its centre shifted from what God has done in Christ to what Christ can do for the hearer? What has been kept, what has been added, and what has quietly dropped out?

He also set the scope. This page is not about how a person becomes a Christian; earlier dossiers covered baptism and the new birth (01, 21, 27). Nor does it repeat The Gospel of Me (Dossier 50), which covered the move from “What has God done?” to “What will God do for me?”, the language of a “personal relationship,” testimony in place of the gospel, the consumer church and “purpose” language; or the dossiers on prosperity teaching (38, 61). This page does one thing those did not. It compares the content of the proclaimed message itself, across the eras, in the words its preachers used: what is announced, who it is about, what problem it names, and what it promises.

Two ways of telling the message, labelled so they can be told apart

The page compares two shapes the public message can take. They are given letters so that it can refer to them briefly.

Almost no real sermon or tract is purely one or the other, and the page does not pretend otherwise. The grid in Part VIII scores real summaries item by item precisely so that the mixture shows. The question is where the centre lies.

What both sides agree on

So the disagreement is not about whether the message may be adapted, whether God loves the hearer, or whether there are benefits. It is about the centre: whether the sentence is about God’s act, with the hearer as the one it is for, or about the hearer’s life, with Christ as the one who improves it.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that the modern gospel tract is closer to the apostles than the medieval sermon was, and see what survives. Second, narrow it: paste in one sermon or tract you know and ask for the table in Part XI, row by row. Third, widen it: ask the same question of a single century, such as the fourth or the sixteenth, and see whether its preaching passes the test this page sets.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, and the
section. Verify every quotation against a reliable published source;
where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it, or say that it is
given at second hand. Do not invent quotes. Do not take verses out
of context. Check every claim marked "(verify)" and say what you
found.

  TITLE. Propose a title that will resonate with readers.

  THESIS TO TEST. For fifteen centuries the Church proclaimed what
  God has done in Christ. Much modern preaching proclaims what
  Christ can do for you.

  CORE CLAIM. For roughly its first 1500 years, the Church's public
  message had a recognizable shape. It announced what God had done.
  The Son became man, was crucified for our sins, rose bodily from
  the dead, and will come again to judge the living and the dead.
  It named the human problem as sin, death, and the devil. It
  called hearers to repent, believe, be baptized, and be joined to
  the Church's teaching, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. It
  pointed them toward the resurrection of the body and the life of
  the world to come. Much preaching of the past 150 years still
  uses this vocabulary, but the center often moves. The hearer's
  needs set the agenda. The problem becomes emptiness, a lack of
  purpose, or a life that is not working. The promise becomes
  peace, fulfillment, "a wonderful plan for your life," or blessing
  now. The response becomes a single private decision. Judgment and
  the resurrection of the body move to the background or disappear.

  QUESTION TO TEST. Is the message of much of the modern church the
  same message the apostles, the Fathers, and the medieval church
  proclaimed, adapted for a new audience? Or has its center shifted
  from what God has done in Christ to what Christ can do for the
  hearer? What has been kept, what has been added, and what has
  quietly dropped out?

  ALREADY COVERED. An earlier article, "The Gospel of Me", covers
  the shift from "What has God done?" to "What will God do for
  me?", "personal relationship with Jesus" language, testimony
  replacing the objective gospel, consumer church selection, and
  "purpose" language. Earlier articles cover prosperity teaching,
  baptism and conversion. This article is not about how someone
  becomes a Christian; it is about the message itself: what is
  announced, who it is about, what problem it names, and what it
  promises. Link to the earlier articles rather than repeating them.

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. The strongest case for continuity, first: Paul in the
      synagogue (Acts 13:16-41) and at Athens (Acts 17:22-31);
      1 Corinthians 9:22; Galatians 2:20; D. L. Moody's "Ruin by the
      Fall, Redemption by the Blood, Regeneration by the Holy Ghost"
      (verify); Billy Graham preaching sin, the cross and judgment;
      The Purpose Driven Life opening "It's not about you"; the late
      medieval trade in indulgences. Is adapting the form of the
      message the same as changing its content?
   2. Acts 2 compared with a modern altar call or sinner's prayer,
      line by line: what is announced, what problem the hearer is
      told he has, what he is asked to do, what he is promised.
      Where did the altar call come from? It is often traced to
      Charles Finney's "anxious bench" in the 1830s (verify). Does
      the modern pattern start before the 150-year window?
   3. What the apostles called "of first importance": 1 Corinthians
      15:3-4; 2:2; Mark 1:15; Acts 17:31; Acts 24:25. How often do
      judgment and the resurrection appear in apostolic preaching,
      and in modern gospel presentations?
   4. The message as the early Church taught it: Irenaeus, Against
      Heresies 1.10.1 and the Demonstration of the Apostolic
      Preaching; the Nicene Creed; Athanasius, On the Incarnation;
      Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures (c. 350); Augustine,
      On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed (c. 400), on narrating
      the whole story from "In the beginning God created the heaven
      and the earth" to the present times of the Church (verify the
      reference). Who is the subject of the sentences?
   5. One message across East and West and through the Middle Ages:
      Chrysostom's Paschal Homily; Anselm, Why God Became Man;
      Gregory the Great; the preaching friars. Different messages,
      or different emphases within one? Be honest about medieval
      failures: indulgences, fear of purgatory, reliance on merit.
      Do not romanticize the first 1500 years.
   6. Modern gospel summaries in their own words, presented fairly:
      Moody's three R's; the Four Spiritual Laws; Steps to Peace
      with God; "ask Jesus into your heart" and Revelation 3:20 in
      context (3:14-22); the Foursquare Gospel; seeker-sensitive
      churches; Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (Christian Smith, Soul
      Searching, 2005). For each: what is the human problem, who is
      the main actor, and what is promised?
   7. The problem and the promise: Hebrews 2:14-15; the
      "God-shaped hole" (check what Pascal actually wrote);
      prosperity teaching briefly, linked; Acts 14:22; 2 Timothy
      3:12. Does a message that promises a better life now prepare
      hearers for suffering?
   8. Where the message leads: Acts 2:41-42; early catechesis (the
      Apostolic Tradition on up to three years, verify); the
      decision as climax and "find a good church" as an optional
      next step.
   9. A test readers can run themselves: count the sentences in
      which God is the subject and those in which the hearer is,
      in a recent sermon or tract and in Acts 2, the Nicene Creed
      and Cyril. Build a side-by-side table: who acts, the problem,
      the promise, the response, the end in view. What has been
      kept, added and dropped? Where can the historic message
      still be heard today?

OBJECTIONS. Present the case for continuity first, at full
strength, in its own Part. Answer other objections inside the
argument, where each arises. Where the evidence corrects or
qualifies the brief, say so in a marked box.

NAMING. Historic writers quoted from dated, published works.
Modern gospel summaries quoted verbatim from their publishers' own
editions. Organisations named only for documented facts or in their
own words. No living individual named as an example of anything.
Every modern sermon or invitation composed by the page labelled as
composed.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. Adaptations sorted into form and
content. Acts 2 tapped phrase by phrase, and compared line by line
with a composed altar call. The history of the invitation dated.
The apostolic sermons tallied. The Creed's verbs and their subject.
Cyril's course of lectures, and a slider of how long preparation
took. East and West sorted by message and emphasis. A grid of
modern and historic summaries. One composed life over five years.
Where each model ends. A sentence-subject counter that works on
any pasted text, a table the reader builds, and kept/added/dropped.
An objection drill the reader answers first. Claims sorted by
whether the argument proves them, a test for any sermon or tract,
and the reader's own verdict.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating
the question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating
the key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining
every technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section. Also produce a
plain-English quick version of about fifteen minutes with three
short exercises, and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. The brief quoted several passages from modern versions; the page gives them from the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer, as it does everywhere on this site. Ten things qualified the brief. They are listed here, and marked again where they arise.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in the texts listed in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

The case for continuity

The author asked that the strongest case for continuity be put first, and fairly. It is a strong case, and it deserves to be heard before anything else is said. Here it is, in six steps, as its defenders would make it.

1. The apostles adapted their message to every audience

Luke records two sermons by Paul that could hardly be more different. In the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia he speaks to Jews and God-fearers, and begins with Israel’s history: “The God of this people of Israel chose our fathers” (Acts 13:17). He moves through the Exodus, the judges, Saul and David, and quotes the Psalms and Isaiah. In Athens he speaks to philosophers, and begins with what he has seen in their streets: “I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” (17:23). He quotes not Moses but a Greek poet: “For we are also his offspring” (17:28). He does not mention the Old Testament at all.

Paul states the principle himself: “unto the Jews I became as a Jew … to them that are without law, as without law … I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:20–22). If the apostle shaped his message to his hearers, the modern evangelist who begins with loneliness or purpose is doing what Paul did at Athens: starting where the hearer is.

2. God’s love for the individual is biblical

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Paul did not think the gospel was only about the cosmos. It was about him. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15). A gospel presentation that begins “God loves you” is saying something Paul said of himself.

3. The great modern evangelists preached the old content

D. L. Moody (1837–1899), the most famous evangelist of the later nineteenth century, is remembered for a three-part summary of his preaching: “Ruin by the Fall, Redemption by the Blood, Regeneration by the Holy Ghost.” Sin, the cross and the new birth by God’s Spirit: there is nothing therapeutic in it.

Billy Graham (1918–2018) preached to more people than anyone in history, and the content of his preaching was sin, the cross, the resurrection and the need to repent before God’s judgment. His book Peace with God (1953) is built on sin, the cross, repentance and faith, and the return of Christ. Whatever one thinks of the crusade invitation, the message that came before it was not a self-help talk.

4. Even the best-known “purpose” book begins against the self

The most widely sold Christian book of its decade, The Purpose Driven Life (2002), opens its first chapter with four words: “It’s not about you.” Whatever criticisms have been made of the purpose-driven model, its central text does not tell the reader that God exists for him. It tells him the opposite.

5. Felt needs are in the Gospels

Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry and spoke to a Samaritan woman about her thirst before he spoke to her about her husbands (John 4). He promised rest to “all ye that labour and are heavy laden” (Matthew 11:28) and said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Starting with a felt need is not a modern invention.

6. The first fifteen centuries were not pure

The late medieval church did not always proclaim grace clearly. Preachers sold indulgences with the promise that a payment would release a soul from purgatory; Luther’s twenty-seventh thesis quotes the claim, “as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory,” and calls it preaching “only human doctrines.” Fear of purgatory and reliance on merit shaped what many ordinary people heard. If the thesis means that every pulpit before 1500 proclaimed the pure gospel, it is false.

The way to test that is to look at what Paul kept at Athens. He started with an altar and a poet. He ended with this: “God … now commandeth all men every where to repent: because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:30–31). The Athenians mocked him for it (17:32). He did not adapt the ending to avoid the mockery. The starting point moved; the destination did not.

Try it: form, or content?

Ten adaptations of the message, from the New Testament to the present. Some are all in the starting point; some change what is announced. Which is which?

0 of 10 sorted

Pentecost, line by line

The first sermon preached after the resurrection is recorded in Acts 2. It is short, and it is worth reading slowly, because it is the template every later message has to be measured against. Peter quotes Joel to explain what the crowd has seen, and then turns to Jesus.

Try it: who is doing what?

Tap each phrase of the sermon’s centre to see who is the subject of the sentence, and what the hearers are told about themselves.

Look at the pattern. God approved Jesus, did miracles by him, delivered him up by his determinate counsel, raised him, exalted him, and made him Lord and Christ. The hearers appear in two roles only: they are the ones who crucified him, and they are the ones to whom the promise is made. The sermon is not silent about the hearers’ condition. It names it bluntly: “ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” The problem is not that they are unfulfilled. It is that they have killed the one God sent.

Then comes the response. “Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (2:37). Peter answers: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children” (2:38–39). And then: “Save yourselves from this untoward generation” (2:40). “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (2:41–42).

A modern altar call, for comparison

Now set beside it an invitation of a kind that will be familiar to many readers. It is composed by this page from common elements; it quotes no one, and it is not meant as a caricature. Many invitations are better than this, and some are worse.

Try it: kept, changed, or missing?

Ten features of Peter’s sermon. For each, is it kept in the composed altar call, changed, or missing altogether?

0 of 10 sorted

Where the altar call came from

The brief asked where the altar call came from. It is often traced to Charles Finney (1792–1875) and his “anxious bench” in the 1830s. That is right as far as it goes, and it is worth seeing what Finney himself said.

By this I mean the appointment of some particular seat in the place of meeting, where the anxious may come and be addressed particularly, and be made subjects of prayer, and sometimes conversed with individually.

Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Lecture XIV, “Measures to Promote Revivals,” on “the anxious seat.”

Finney defended the measure because it brought a hearer to a point of decision in public, there and then, before others, where hesitation would be exposed. His critics at Princeton and elsewhere objected that it confused the hearer’s act with God’s. The broader argument, about revival as a technique, is told in Dossier 50 and is not repeated here.

What changed with the anxious seat was not that preachers began calling for a response. Peter called for one. What changed was the place of the response. In Acts 2 the response is baptism, the same day, into a community that then devotes itself to teaching, fellowship, bread and prayers. In the Didache, baptism follows “having first said all these things,” that is, after the moral instruction of the “two ways.” In the anxious-seat pattern, the response is a movement of the body and the will at the end of a meeting, and it becomes the moment by which the hearer, and the preacher, mark that something has happened.

Try it: when did this first appear?

Six moments in the history of how the Church asked for a response. Date each one.

“First of all”

Paul tells the Corinthians what he “delivered unto you first of all.” It is four clauses long, and every one is about Christ: he died, for our sins, according to the Scriptures; he was buried; he rose again the third day; he was seen (15:5–8). The hearer appears only in the word “our.”

Paul says the same thing in other words to the same church: “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). And Mark sums up the preaching of Jesus himself in one sentence: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The news is about time and God’s kingdom: something has happened, and the hearer must turn.

The brief asked how often judgment and the resurrection appear in apostolic preaching. Acts records eight speeches to outsiders that set out the message. They can be counted.

Try it: tally the sermons in Acts

Tap each sermon to see what it contains. The totals build at the foot of each column. Press a column heading to see which sermons have it.

Two things stand out. The resurrection is in every sermon: it is the one thing the apostles never left out, and at Athens it is the climax. The coming judgment, or “the day of the Lord,” is in six of the eight. Before Felix, Paul “reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come,” and “Felix trembled” (24:25). To Cornelius, Peter said that Christ is “ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead” (10:42). The judgment is not a threat added on to frighten. It is the other half of the resurrection: the one God raised is the one God has appointed to judge.

It is only fair to notice what the tally also shows. The cross is not mentioned at Athens; a benefit now is not wholly absent, since Peter promises “times of refreshing … from the presence of the Lord” (3:19), though the context is the restoration of all things at Christ’s return (3:20–21). The apostles did not use one formula. But there is no sermon in Acts that begins with the hearer’s life, and none that promises it will go better.

The rule of faith and the Creed

By the late second century, Christians had a short summary of the apostles’ message that they could recite and appeal to. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing c. 180, gives it as what the whole Church believes.

The Church, though dispersed through our the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one,” and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race … and that He should execute just judgment towards all …

Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.10.1 (c. 180); trans. A. Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885). The square brackets are the translators’. Irenaeus also wrote a short Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, which sets out the same message as a story running from creation through the prophets to Christ.

Read the passage for its grammar. The subject of every clause is God: the Father who made, the Son who became incarnate, the Spirit who proclaimed. The verbs run from creation to the end: made, became incarnate, suffered, rose, ascended, will be manifested, will gather, will raise, will judge. The human race appears once, as the flesh that will be raised. The phrase “for our salvation” is the only place where the benefit is named, and it is a reason for God’s act, not a description of the hearer’s life.

The Nicene Creed, in the form agreed at Constantinople in 381 and confessed ever since by the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed churches, keeps the same shape. Its second article is the message in miniature. (Dossier 24 tells the story of why it was written.)

Try it: whose verbs are these?

Tap each clause of the Creed’s second article and its close. Notice who is doing what, and where the person reciting it appears.

The person reciting the Creed has exactly three verbs of his own: I believe, I acknowledge, I look for. Each of them faces outward, toward something God has done or will do. The benefit is there, in “for us men, and for our salvation,” “crucified also for us,” “for the remission of sins.” But it is always attached to God’s act, as its purpose. The hearer is the one it is for, never the one it is about.

Athanasius, writing On the Incarnation in the early fourth century, explains why the story has to be told this way. The problem it solves is not a lack in human life but death itself, which came in with sin, and which only the Word made flesh could undo: he took a body “that, whereas men had turned toward corruption, He might turn them again toward incorruption, and quicken them from death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like straw from the fire” (On the Incarnation 8.4; trans. A. Robertson, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4, 1892). And the end of it all: “For He was made man that we might be made God” (54.3). The benefit could hardly be greater. It is still God’s act.

How the Church taught it

The best evidence for what the early Church thought the message was is what it taught the people preparing to receive it. Two fourth-century texts survive that show this in detail: the lectures Cyril of Jerusalem gave to candidates for baptism, and a short handbook Augustine wrote for a deacon who found the job hard.

Cyril’s course

Cyril gave his lectures in Jerusalem, near the site of the crucifixion, c. 350, during the weeks before Easter. They were taken down as he spoke. Their order is the order of the message.

Notice two things about the course. First, the whole Creed is taught, clause by clause, including the second coming and the resurrection of the flesh: these are not optional extras for advanced students, but part of what a candidate must know before he is baptized. Second, Cyril holds doctrine and life together from the start: “The method of godliness consists of these two things, pious doctrines, and virtuous practice: and neither are the doctrines acceptable to God apart from good works, nor does God accept the works which are not perfected with pious doctrines” (Catechetical Lectures 4.2; trans. E. H. Gifford, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7, 1894).

Augustine’s method

About fifty years later, a deacon of Carthage named Deogratias wrote to Augustine to say that he found instructing beginners tedious and did not know how to do it. Augustine’s reply, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed (c. 400), is the first manual of its kind. His first instruction is to tell the whole story.

The narration is full when each person is catechised in the first instance from what is written in the text, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, on to the present times of the Church.

Augustine, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed 3 (c. 400); trans. S. D. F. Salmond, NPNF, First Series, vol. 3 (1887).

Augustine joins the two halves in one method. The content is the history of what God has done, “from … In the beginning … to the present times of the Church.” Its purpose is that the hearer should love God, who has loved him first. Later in the work he tells the catechist to speak of the resurrection of the body and the judgment to come, and to warn the beginner against being led astray by the bad Christians he will meet inside the Church. The story goes all the way to the end.

How long did preparation take?

The brief noted that the Apostolic Tradition speaks of up to three years of instruction. That is right, with two qualifications, and the second matters for this page.

So the length of preparation changed enormously, and cannot itself be the test. Slide through the cases below and watch two things: how much teaching came before the response, and how firmly the response joined the hearer to the Church.

The teaching before the response swings from almost none to three years and back to almost none. What is constant across the first six cases is the second meter: the response is baptism, and baptism joins the hearer to a body that teaches, breaks bread and prays. The modern decision is the first case in which both meters can stand near zero at once.

East, West and the Middle Ages

The thesis speaks of one recognisable message for fifteen hundred years. The obvious objection is that East and West preached differently, and that the medieval West in particular preached something the Reformers said was a different gospel. Both objections deserve a hearing.

The East: Christ’s victory over death

Every Easter night, in Orthodox churches across the world, the same sermon is read aloud. It is attributed to John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), and its climax is this:

Let no one fear death, for the Saviour’s death has set us free. He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it. By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive. … O Death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and thou art overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns.

The Paschal (Catechetical) Homily, traditionally attributed to John Chrysostom; read at the Paschal service of the Orthodox Church. English translations vary; this is the form widely used in English-speaking Orthodox parishes.

Its subject is Christ, its problem is death and hell, and its promise is that death has been overthrown. The hearer is invited to rejoice, “both rich and poor,” “ye who have fasted and ye who have not.” Nothing in it is about the hearer’s plans.

The West: satisfaction for sin

In 1098 Anselm of Canterbury finished Why God Became Man, the most influential account of the atonement in the Western Middle Ages. His problem is sin as an infinite debt of honour owed to God, which man owes and cannot pay, and which God can pay and does not owe.

If, then, as we have stated, it be needful that the heavenly kingdom be made up of men, and this cannot be effected unless the aforesaid satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it.

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo II.6 (1098); trans. S. N. Deane (1903).

East and West tell the same act from two sides: the East as a battle in which Christ defeats death and the devil, the West as a debt that Christ pays. Hebrews holds both in one sentence: through death he destroyed “him that had the power of death, that is, the devil,” and he came “to make reconciliation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:14, 17). These are different emphases within one message. In both, God is the actor and the cross and resurrection are the act.

The medieval pulpit

Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) opened his Homilies on the Gospels with Luke 21 and the signs of the end, preached to a Rome wasted by plague and war. When Francis of Assisi wrote the rule for his friars in 1223, he told them what to preach: “announcing to them vices and virtues, punishment and glory, with brevity of speech; because the Lord made a brief word upon earth” (Rule of 1223, chapter 9; trans. Paschal Robinson, 1906). And the walls of countless parish churches preached the same thing to people who could not read: over the chancel arch of many English churches was painted a “Doom,” a picture of Christ in judgment, with the dead rising from their graves.

That is the medieval message at its best: sin and virtue, judgment and glory, the resurrection of the dead. The thesis is right that the shape held.

The medieval failure

It is also true that by the fifteenth century much of what ordinary people heard was a distortion of that shape. Fear of purgatory, the multiplication of paid Masses for the dead, and the sale of indulgences made it easy to hear the message as a transaction in which the believer’s payments shortened his punishment. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses (1517) attack exactly this: “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory” (Thesis 27). And Luther’s answer was not a new message but a recovered one: “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God” (Thesis 62; Luther’s Works, vol. 31).

Try it: one message, or a different one?

Eight contrasts from the first fifteen centuries. Is each a difference of emphasis within one message, or a different message?

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Modern summaries in their own words

The brief asked for each modern summary to be presented fairly, in its own words, and tested by three questions: what is the human problem, who is the main actor, and what is promised? Here they are.

The Four Spiritual Laws

Written by Bill Bright (1921–2003), founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), in the 1950s, and published as a booklet in 1965, the Four Spiritual Laws may be the most widely distributed gospel tract ever printed. Its four headings, in the current edition, read:

Fairness first. The booklet names sin plainly and says it separates us from God. Under Law 3 it says that Christ died in our place and rose from the dead, citing 1 Corinthians 15:3–6. It calls Christ “Lord” as well as Saviour. This is not a gospel without the cross. But look at the frame. The first sentence is about “your life,” and the phrase “God’s love and plan” recurs in every law: sin is a problem because it stops us experiencing the plan, and Christ is the provision through which we can. The judgment, the resurrection of the body and baptism do not appear. The Church appears afterwards, among suggestions for growth.

Steps to Peace with God

Developed during Billy Graham’s London crusade of 1954 as an outline for counsellors speaking with inquirers, and still published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Steps to Peace with God has four steps. In the Association’s own current wording, they begin:

The suggested prayer includes: “Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life.” Again, fairness first: sin, repentance, the cross and the resurrection are all here, in the hearer’s own mouth. What is missing is the same: the judgment, the resurrection of the body, baptism. The Church appears once, in the advice on growing as a Christian: to worship “in a church where Christ is preached.” And the headline, as in the Laws, is a benefit: “peace and life — abundant and eternal.”

The Foursquare Gospel

Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), founder of Angelus Temple in Los Angeles and of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, summarised her message as Jesus Christ the Savior, the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, the Healer, and the Soon-Coming King. The denomination still uses the four.

The seeker-sensitive church

From the 1970s, a number of large American churches, of which Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago (1975) and Saddleback Church in southern California (1980) are the best known, designed their main weekend services around people who did not go to church. Their founders surveyed their communities to learn why people stayed away, and shaped services, music, buildings and preaching to answer those reasons. The aim was evangelistic and sincere: to remove every barrier except the gospel itself. The effect, its critics have argued, was that the hearer’s felt needs set the agenda of the service, and that topics such as marriage, stress, money and purpose became the usual entry points into the message. This page notes the model and does not assess any church.

What American teenagers absorbed

In 2005 the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton published Soul Searching, the report of a national study of the religious lives of American teenagers. They found that, across denominations, what most teenagers actually believed could be summed up in five points, which they called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 162–63.

This is not a church’s teaching. No church wrote it, and the authors are describing what young people took away, not what anyone set out to teach. That is exactly why it belongs here. It is the message as received at the far end of a long process, and every element of Position B is in it with nothing of Position N left: no sin, no cross, no resurrection, no judgment, no Church.

Try it: eleven summaries in one grid

Here are eleven summaries of the message, from Peter to the sociologists, scored on eight features. A full dot means named, a half dot means implied or partly present, and a blank means absent. Tap any row for the evidence. Tap a column heading to see which summaries have it.

Read the columns, not the rows. Sin and the cross are kept almost everywhere until the last two rows: that is the continuity the case in Part I pointed to, and it is real. Christ’s resurrection is kept in the tracts. Four columns change sharply: the judgment, the resurrection of the body, baptism and the Church, which are present in nearly every historic summary and absent from nearly every modern one. And one column fills up: the benefit in this life, which no historic summary leads with and every modern one does.

The problem and the promise

Every message names a problem and offers a remedy. In the historic message the problem is named in Hebrews: Christ took flesh “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). Sin, death and the devil: three enemies, all outside the hearer’s power, all defeated by God’s act. The promise is forgiveness, the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.

In much modern preaching the problem is named differently: emptiness, a lack of purpose, a life that has not worked out, sometimes sickness or financial need. The most famous description of it is the “God-shaped hole,” usually credited to Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). The brief asked what Pascal actually wrote.

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragment 148 (Lafuma numbering; 425 in Brunschvicg), written c. 1656–62, published 1670; trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin, 1966).

That difference is the whole of this Part. If emptiness is a symptom, the remedy is to deal with the cause, and the hearer may well remain unfulfilled for a time while the cause is being dealt with. If emptiness is the problem, the remedy is fulfilment, and the message is tested by whether the hearer feels fulfilled. The prosperity gospel is the furthest form of the second, where the problem is poverty or sickness and the promise is wealth or health; it has had its own dossiers (38, 61) and is not repeated here.

Does the promise survive suffering?

The brief asked whether a message that promises a better life now prepares its hearers for suffering. The apostles were blunt about what to expect. “We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12). And Paul makes the resurrection the reason the suffering is bearable: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Follow one composed life through five years, and watch what each message has to say at each point.

The point is not that Position B is cruel. Its promises are made kindly and often come true for a while. The point is structural. A promise about this life is falsified by this life going badly. A promise about what God has done, and what he will do at the resurrection, cannot be falsified by anything that happens before the resurrection. Paul saw this exactly: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Into the Church, or to a decision?

Every message ends somewhere. Peter’s ended in a community. “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). Luke’s word “added” needs an object, and he supplies it a few verses later: “the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (2:47). Being saved and being added are told as one event.

The four things the new converts “continued stedfastly” in are not activities they chose afterwards. They are the shape of the life the message announced: the apostles’ teaching (the content of the news), the fellowship (the people it creates), the breaking of bread (in which, Paul says, “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come,” 1 Corinthians 11:26) and the prayers. In the apostolic model, the Church is part of the message. Its common life is how the news goes on being told.

The early Church kept this shape even when preparation lengthened to years: the catechumen’s whole instruction was aimed at the night of baptism, after which he would for the first time stay for the Eucharist (Part VI). In many modern presentations, by contrast, the decision is the climax. The tract ends with the prayer; what follows is headed “next steps” or “suggestions for growth,” and finding a church is one suggestion among several. Dossier 50 looked at what happens next, when the convert chooses a church as a customer chooses a shop; the question here is only where the message itself ends.

Try it: which model is this?

Eight statements. Does each belong to the apostolic model, the decision model, or both?

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Run the test yourself

The brief asked for a test readers can run themselves. Here it is, in three steps. You need nothing but a text: a sermon you heard, a tract, a song, a church’s “what we believe” page.

Step 1: who is the subject?

Take each sentence and ask a single grammatical question: who is doing the main verb? Mark it as God (Father, Son or Spirit), the hearer (you, I, we, your life), or someone else. Try it on the texts below, then paste in one of your own. Dossier 50 ran a related test on pronouns; this one counts only the subjects of the sentences.

Two cautions keep the count honest. First, a sentence in which the hearer is the subject is not wrong: “Repent, and be baptized” has the hearer as subject, and it is the climax of Acts 2. The question is the proportion, and what the hearer’s sentences are about. Second, “God” can be the subject of a sentence whose real subject is still the hearer: “God wants to give you the life you’ve always dreamed of.” Count it as God’s, then ask what God is said to be doing.

Step 2: build the table

Now read your text as a whole and fill in five rows. Your answers appear beside Acts 2 and the Nicene Creed, and the last row works out what has been kept, added and dropped.

Step 3: kept, added, dropped

Last, the question the brief ended with, asked of the modern message as a whole rather than of one text. Ten elements. For each, has it in general been kept, added, or dropped or moved to the background?

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Where the historic message can still be heard

The brief asked where the old shape can still be heard today. The answer is simpler than it might seem: wherever the historic liturgy is used, the message is proclaimed every week whether or not the sermon proclaims it. The Creed is said, with its “for us men, and for our salvation” and its “he shall come again with glory to judge.” The Scriptures are read in a set order that runs through the whole story. The church year walks the congregation from Advent, with its double coming, through Christmas, Good Friday and Easter to Ascension and Pentecost. And at the table, the congregation does what Paul said it does: “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). In many Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran rites the people answer with a modern acclamation that is the kerygma in ten words: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

That is one of the strongest arguments for an inherited order of worship (Dossier 20). A sermon can drift. A liturgy that makes the congregation say the Creed and proclaim the Lord’s death every Sunday makes the drift visible, because the people are saying one thing while the preacher says another.

What the comparison proves

That epigraph is here as a warning to the page, not to anyone else. Paul’s word is about a different gospel, and it would be easy to wave it at every tract that leaves out the judgment. This page does not. It is important to be exact about what the comparison shows.

Try it: does the argument prove this?

Eight claims. Does the argument of this page establish each one, or not?

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How the same hearer could be met

The youth leader in the drill had a real concern. Here is one way to start where his students are and still tell them the news.

The felt need is the door. The news is the house. Every element of Peter’s sermon is in that paragraph, and none of it requires the hearer already to know the words.

A test for any sermon or tract

Eight questions to ask of any gospel presentation you hear or read. Think of one, and answer each. The page records nothing.

Your verdict

Two questions. Nothing is recorded.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Seventeen items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Acts 2. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Underline every verb whose subject is God. Then read 2:37–47 and note where the hearers end up.
2. 2. Acts 17:16–34 and 24:24–25. Read these first. Ten minutes. Note where Paul starts at Athens, and where he finishes.
3. 3. 1 Corinthians 15. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Note what Paul delivered “first of all,” and what he says follows if Christ is not raised.
4. 4. The other sermons in Acts: 3:12–26; 4:8–12; 10:34–43; 13:16–41; 26:2–23. Tally them yourself against Part IV.
5. 5. Hebrews 2:9–18; Revelation 3:14–22; Acts 14:21–22; 2 Timothy 3:10–12; 2 Corinthians 4:16–18. The problem, the door, and what to expect.
6. 6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.10, and the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (trans. J. Armitage Robinson, 1920). Free at New Advent and CCEL.
7. 7. The Nicene Creed, in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) or any modern liturgy. Say it aloud and count the verbs that belong to you.
8. 8. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, chapters 1–10 and 54. About an hour. Free at New Advent and CCEL.
9. 9. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures: the Procatechesis and Lectures 4, 13, 15 and 18. Free at New Advent.
10. 10. Augustine, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, chapters 3–7. Free at New Advent.
11. 11. The Didache, chapters 1–7, and the Apostolic Tradition, chapters 15–21 (trans. B. S. Easton, 1934).
12. 12. The Paschal Homily; Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.11–II.6; Francis of Assisi, Rule of 1223, chapter 9; Luther, Ninety-five Theses (1517), especially 27 and 62.
13. 13. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Lecture XIV. And for the debate it provoked, Albert B. Dod’s review in the Princeton Review.
14. 14. The modern summaries in their own words: the Four Spiritual Laws (Cru); Steps to Peace with God (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association); the Foursquare Church’s own statement of the four-fold gospel; A. B. Simpson, The Four-Fold Gospel. All are on their publishers’ websites.
15. 15. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragments 131–149 (Lafuma), around the “infinite abyss”; Stanley N. Gundry, “The Three Rs of Moody’s Theology,” Christian History 25 (1990); Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching (2005), chapter 4.
16. 16. Earlier dossiers: 50 (the self as subject), 01, 21 and 27 (baptism and conversion), 38 and 61 (prosperity), 24 (the Creed), 20 (liturgy), 23 (assurance and the decision).
17. 17. One sermon. Do this one. Take the last sermon or gospel presentation you heard. Write down, in one sentence each, what it announced, what problem it named, what it promised, what it asked, and where it ended. Then say the Nicene Creed and do the same.

Modern gospel summaries on this page are quoted verbatim from their publishers’ own current editions or websites. Organisations are named only for documented public facts or in their own published words. Every modern sermon, altar call, invitation and remark attributed to a preacher, youth leader or anyone else is composed for illustration and quoted from no one. No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything. This page judges no one’s motives, sincerity or faith.