Scandal and Folly: Newly Published Packer Lectures on Telling the Gospel Story in a Pluralistic Age

Note: From Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age: The 1978 Lectures (Crossway 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.

These lectures by J.I. Packer have never before appeared in print.

The apostle Paul set forth his gospel to the Corinthians:

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and folly [mória] to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (I Corinthians 1:23 – 24)

In so doing, Paul put his gospel in antithesis to two first-century forms of intellectual self-assertion:

Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom (I Corinthians 1:22).

Two attitudes reveal this self-assertion: by the questions that they asked about the gospel and by their reactions to the gospel. By these, the questions and the reactions, you shall know them.…

We Preach Christ Crucified

Neither the Jew-type nor the Greek-type is willing to take things from God by revelation. This was the controversy that the gospel raised and that Paul in his testimony had to pursue constantly in the world to which he went. For Paul went proclaiming what I Corinthians 1:18 calls the “word of the cross.” “We preach Christ crucified,” he said (1:23).

Now, this certainly was a startling thing for any man to say. The Christ – that’s a title, an office title as Presbyterians would say – is God’s anointed world ruler, the one whom Paul in the first ten verses of this chapter had referred to no less than six times as “the Lord Jesus Christ”:

Jesus, the personal name;
Christ, the office title; and
Lord, the standard title in the ancient world given to folk who ought to be worshiped.

And Christ, says Paul, we preach as crucified. That is, we proclaim that he was executed as an outlaw. Because it was only the outlaws who were crucified in the ancient world. Capital punishment was given for grave offenses and civil rebellion.

You can see how paradoxical and startling that sounds. You can see too how humbling a message it is, as Paul explains it. For if you asked Paul what it meant that Christ the anointed world ruler whom God had designated was crucified, his reply was that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (I Corinthians 15:3). There was no way in which man could be brought to God, save that the Christ should die for man’s sins.

Every man has sins that need to be forgiven, and no man by his own endeavors can put those sins away. But when Paul preached his message of Christ crucified, his word of life and hope for the world immediately gave offense to the Jews. First, it cheapened their own private messianic hopes. Second, it suggested that God was weak in allowing the Messiah to go to the cross. Paul speaks ironically of “the weakness of God” (I Corinthians 1:25), obviously echoing the things the Jewish critics said about his message. It does make God appear weak, and it does focus on the putting away of sin, which to the ordinary Jew (trusting as he was in the sacrifices offered in the temple) seemed simply an irrelevant message.

Similarly, when Paul preached of Christ crucified to the Greeks, it seemed nonsense, and they said so. Paul is obviously echoing ironically what the Greeks said when he speaks of “the foolishness of God” (I Corinthians 1:25). This is a very silly story, said his Greek critics. And to them too the message of the putting away of sin by the death of the Messiah seemed irrelevant to their own felt needs. So they rejected the message, and Paul says, “This is the reaction of ‘those perishing’” (cf. 1:18). When he uses that word, his language is clinical rather than emotional. He’s using the word because it expresses the thought that he wants to convey, that which is perishing (according to the dictionary meaning of the Greek word epilume that’s being used here) is that which is becoming incapable of its intended function. And that is the thought here: that men who were made for fellowship with God are showing themselves incapable of it and confirming themselves in that very incapacity by their resolute rejection of the word of the cross.

But Paul contrasts the negative reaction of those who are perishing with the positive reaction of those whom he describes as “called” (1:24), “who are being saved” (1:18). To them he says, “The message is the good word of Christ, ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’” (cf. 1:24). The power of God for part of the message is the proclaiming of his resurrection and his reign, and his power in the regeneration of sinners, and his power in the world is to see it at his return. And the message of Christ crucified is a proclamation of the wisdom of God, for, as Paul goes on to say in verse 30, Christ of God is made to us believers

wisdom, meaning the way to God, and
righteousness, a just justification that only divine wisdom could have devised and
sanctification, which in this verse certainly means a covenant relationship or a means of covenant relationship with God. (It means that, before it means anything else.)
And so redemption, for salvation from sin.

Christ is made to us all those things in the sense that we have them all in him. This is the wisdom of God par excellence, says Paul, for this is God in Christ providing us with all that we need for that life for which we were made and for which sin has unfitted us.

So Paul in this passage, as often elsewhere in his writings, draws out the antithesis between faith and unbelief, between the reaction to the gospel of those who are alive and to whom therefore it comes as a savor of life for life, and those who are spiritually dead, to whom therefore the gospel comes as a savor of death unto death.

The Antithesis of the Gospel Today

The point I am laboring to make sets the perspective that we shall be exploring throughout this book, namely, that the antithesis continues. It continues as the gospel confronts the modern world. And it continues, alas, as the gospel confronts a great deal that goes on in the modern church. For the spiritual descendants of the Jews and the Greeks of Paul’s day have got into the modern church, at least in principle and in their thought-forms. The movement that used to be called liberalism or modernism and is now frequently called radicalism in Christian theology manifests the same pride of mind.

I stress here that I’m speaking of the intellectual method of the movement rather than the motives of any particular individuals caught up in it. I’m speaking not of individuals but of ways of thinking. The movement, I say, manifests the same pride of mind, the same arbitrary skepticism, the same invasive intellectualism as you saw in the Jews and the Greeks of Paul’s day. Still we have the arbitrary skeptics who believe that they’re in a position to tell us that such realities as incarnation and resurrection cannot be. And we shall be making reference as we go along to that unhappy book, The Myth of God Incarnate, published by a number of English university theologians in 1977, which is just one of the latest expressions of this position. But its title, as you see, tells all at this point.

Intellectuals Seek Wisdom

Evasive intellectualism refuses to take seriously the fact that God has revealed himself in history and insists on turning Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the gospel into an idea, a myth, a symbol, a memory, an image, an influence, which refuses to allow that his status is that of a divine, personal Savior.

Those who do their thinking within the line set by this movement are obliged in consequence to change the Christian message so that it’s no longer an invitation from a living Savior in the terms of Matthew 11:28-29: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.” No longer can they think of becoming a Christian in the terms in which Paul spells it out in I Thessalonians 1:9 – 10, where he says that the Thessalonian converts “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.”

No, their gospel is rather a matter of, “Come unto an influence within the church,” than it is a matter of, “Come to a living Savior and a mighty Lord.” They reconceive the Christian mission. Inevitably and inescapably they must do this, as it’s not so much the task of introducing folk the world over to Jesus Christ the Lord, as it’s a matter of going out to the other religions to enrich them. That was the nineteenth-century way of envisaging the Christian mission. You take insight from the world of Christian thinking to make Buddhism into better Buddhism, Hinduism into better Hinduism and so on.

Liberals Seek Needs

The counterpart of that, in this late twentieth century, is the reconceiving of mission in terms of humanization, going out in order to identify with the secular ambitions and desires and concerns of the nations and to help them forward in their desires for political liberty, economic stability and so on. (You will know that there’s a great deal of thinking of this kind in the World Council of Churches.) And all this is opposed to the preaching of the living, reigning Christ crucified and alive forevermore.

And the message is no longer presented in the terms in which Paul presented it to the Philippian jailer: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). Jesus, according to this “gospel,” is an example and an influential memory in the church, but precisely not a living Savior and friend here and now in the present tense. And in the church, we have to fight the conflict constantly with liberalism, just as we have to fight the good fight against unbelief in the world.

Well, this is the situation into which these lectures of mine are being offered. What we are going to do together, God enabling us, is to rethink and to restate the essential gospel, the scriptural gospel, in the light of some of these modern trends, in the light of some of these latter-day modern movements. We are going to look at alternatives to scriptural positions; we are going to consider what can be said in favor of them and what has to be said against them. I hope we may through God’s grace keep the gospel from being overlaid with misbelief in our own minds and equip ourselves to proclaim the gospel all the more clearly to others.

The Story of the Gospel

The rest of this chapter will be dedicated to the first of the series of questions that we’ll be exploring. What sort of a message, what sort of good news, what sort of a communication is the gospel anyway? What sort of instruction is the word of the cross, the proclaiming of Christ crucified?

J. I. Packer