Justin Taylor points us to an interesting exchange between Anthony Bradley and Jared Wilson on the value of tweeting the gospel. The posts Justin links to are interesting, for several reasons. First, Bradley basically argues that tweeting the gospel has become ‘insider baseball’ for Christians on Twitter and in the process it is emptying it of its impact and keeping us from maturing. Wilson responds by pointing out the flawed logic of the post, and the bad exegesis of Hebrews 5:13-14 and 6:1-2 in arguing that the “twitter-gospel” is keeping Christians on milk and not whole food. Honestly, the exchange is good and it got me thinking. I would recommend that you read it.
As far as Twitter itself goes, here are the implications that I drew from this exchange:
- Twitter as a medium is still amorphous in its usage, and people hold many different views of its “purpose”.
- How much context matters, or even how much context can exist, on Twitter is unclear
- Twitter is being used for important conversations in new and influential ways, but the potential for reductionism is very apparent
But more importantly what does this conversation tell us about the view and use of the gospel by Christians today? A couple of things, namely that there seems to be confusion not only on what constitutes the gospel, but how we are to use it. I don’t know much about Bradley, but I think he has a valuable start to his argument: the gospel should be presented to those who do not believe in a way that is clear. From here though, Bradley starts to meander in a direction that I don’t agree with. Bradley argues that what is being tweeted is not the gospel, but some clever restatements designed to drive apparently self-promoting re-tweets. But I think he’s reading them wrong, take a look at the anonymous examples he quoted:
“Legalism says achievement leads to approval, the gospel says that approval leads to achievement.”
“The gospel obliterates, annihilates, and disembowels any notion of wage earning as a basis for our acceptance with God.”
“The Gospel makes us stop asking: What have I done for God? And makes us ask: What’s the Lord done through/in/despite me?”
Here’s the thing, these are not gospel restatements, they are gospel implications. I do not think that Bradley is picking up the difference between the statement of the gospel and what that means for our lives as Christians. Why do I say this? Here is how Bradley address them:
I fully understand that many of these tweets are intended to encourage the faithful to persevere, because for those of us who struggle with idolatry and sin (Romans 7) we need to hear the gospel daily. We get it. So tell us, then, what the gospel actually is instead of collaborating with weak attempts at imaginativeness to reformulate something people have actually died to communicate.
This statement is illogical given what we know. If the audience is believing Christians as he asserts then knowledge of the gospel is assumed. In essence his statement is this, ‘I know this apple is an apple, but because it’s not an orange it hurts the cause of oranges’.
He is confusing two different, yet equally important, ways the gospel is to be used and spoken of. He furthers this mistake by trying to use Hebrews 5:13-14 and 6:1-2 to advance his point:
While it gives the appearance of sophistication, much Twitter-gospel is gospel milk. It reminds me of a couple passages from Hebrews: “Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil” (5:13-14), and “Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment” (6:1-2).
But here is the thing, as Wilson says, the gospel is both the ‘milk’ and the base of the ‘solid food’. Moving to a more mature understanding and knowledge of the Scriptures does not mean that we leave the gospel behind, it means that we start to explore, process and live the implications, effects and change that it promises. What Bradley seems to indicate here is that the point of the gospel is evangelism, and the ‘solid food’ is something else. This is plainly incorrect. The gospel should permeate all we teach and all we do. To reduce it to some sort of one time use entry ticket does it a great injustice.
Tags: twitter
