I want to come at it from a different angle. And, as happens for me often right now, that angle is in Tim Keller-like direction.

In his article The Gospel in All it’s Forms, Keller says:

I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on “doing bad things” but on “making good things into ultimate things.”

OK, so what he is doing here is moving the focus in gospel presentations from ethics to identity. But it seems to me that this is exactly what Tom Wright has been doing in his ‘new perspective’ of justification. His reading of Paul is that the Law was a ‘good thing’ that had become ‘ultimate thing’; that the Judaism of Paul’s time had come close to treating the Law as an idol. More than this, and famously, he interprets the big issue that Paul is addressing as the separation between Jews and Gentiles. And that separation being based on observation of the Law. That is, that the issue was that the Jews were building their identity on the Law rather than faith in God. Which, of course, is precisely Keller’s working definition of sin.

In the spirit of Andrew Wilson’s post (‘we can have our cake, and eat it’), we should remind ourselves that this doesn’t require us to reject a gospel presentation that is concerned with ethical questions. This is a big gospel, with deep and wide implications.

Going back to Tim Keller:

…there must be one gospel, yet there are clearly different forms in which that one gospel can be expressed.

And perhaps we can go further. Perhaps, for us, to miss the identity aspect is to miss something important. In a culture where identity floats, it possible to get the beliefs right, get the praxis right and still miss something important.

In ‘Christendom’ you can afford to train people just in prayer, Bible study, evangelism — private world skills — because they are not facing radically non-Christian values in their public life — where they work, in their neighborhood, etc.

In a ‘missional’ church, the laity needs theological education to ‘think Christianly’ about everything and work with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know: a) what cultural practices are common grace and to be embraced, b) what practices are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, c) what practices can be adapted/revised.

In a ‘missional’ situation, lay people renewing and transforming the culture through distinctively Christian vocations must be lifted up as real ‘kingdom work’ and ministry along with the traditional ministry of the Word.

Here’s one particularly interesting paragraph

The gospel DNA of grace is crucial to Redeemer’s embrace of center-city culture. It gives people permission to try and fail, to mix freely with those of other faiths and morals, and to tolerate ambiguity. Someone who works in advertising or theater may have to serve for many years at projects he or she finds morally ambivalent. Even those who rise to positions of responsibility will find no clearly marked path. Without a grasp of grace, there will be no Christians working in such areas. Keller likes to describe Redeemer’s stance as “cultural presence,” which enhances flavor but doesn’t take over.

This crystalises something that has been floating in the back of my mind. One reason grace is so important (apart from the obvious) is because we live and work in a compromised world — a world in which we may come across situations in which there is no good answer, or we find ourselves in institutions with inherent moral ambiguity. Grace gives us space to act faithfully in a complex world.

(HT: Adrian Warnock)

In line with other things I’m trying to think through at the moment, I’m particularly interested his thoughts on discipling and supporting people in their working life: How do we help them see their work as important, not just a distraction from their church-life? And are we prepared to help people work through questions such as, as a Christian, should we be involved in financial short selling or method acting? Hang on through the Q&A; session, where some practical approaches to this are discussed.