What are your thoughts on how history, science and politics have affected our understanding of the gospel?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1999.

I have had the opportunity to read and study again your interesting comments on the course of history, science and politics, and how developments in these fields have affected people's understanding of the Christian gospel.

I think myself that it has been an unfortunate thing that, in the fourth century, the Christian church made an alliance with the political power of the time. The immediate result was a confusion of the gospel. Our Lord himself forbade his disciples to use the sword to protect him or to advance his kingdom, and forbade the apostles to do likewise (see John 18:10–11, 33–40; 2 Cor 10:4). But when the church joined up with the state and accepted the Emperor Constantine as head of the church, then it became an accepted, unquestioned principle that the church could call upon the state to enforce Christianity by the power of the sword. The inevitable result was a contradiction of the gospel, and a confusion in the minds of the general public as to what the gospel of Christ really is.

It was certainly a good thing at the time of the Renaissance, that scholars began with enthusiasm to seek out the original writings of the Greek philosophers, and not to be content with the interpretation of those writers that had come down through the centuries in the philosophical schools. At the same time, Christian scholars likewise began to get back to the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, and not to be content with all the interpretations that had been put upon the Scriptures in the course of the centuries. Their intention was to test the traditions that had grown up by returning to the actual word of God itself. I think that we, in our age, do well to copy their example.

I myself have been greatly helped by reading the Gospel of John, and to notice that it is generally taken up with an account of our Lord's journeys to Jerusalem on the occasion of the great national religious festivals. These festivals had their origin, of course, in the regulations laid down by God in the Pentateuch; but over the centuries the people had become content with the symbols used at these festivals, and were no longer much concerned with the spiritual realities to which those symbols pointed. Many of Israel's religious rituals, such as, for example, the bringing of lambs and other animals as sacrifices for sin, were God-ordained symbols, pointing to the eventual coming of the Lamb of God. His sacrifice on the cross was the reality to which those symbols pointed; and when he offered himself to God as our sacrifice for sins, the old symbolic sacrifices were rendered obsolete. It was a tragedy, then, that Israel rejected him, but continued with the mere symbols until God allowed their temple and all its rituals to be destroyed by the Romans around AD 70.

This history, it seems to me, has a message for us Christians today. Over the centuries all kinds of symbolism have been added, and all kinds of traditions built up, but it is all too possible that people content themselves with the symbols, but lack any personal experience of the reality to which these symbols point.

I suggest, therefore, before we can expect the Christian gospel to have any serious effect upon our modern situations, culturally and politically, we should get back to the New Testament records and statements as to what the Christian gospel actually is. We must then be careful to expound it in all its original glory, uncompromised by the non-scriptural traditions and superstitions that hide from the people at large what the essential message of Christianity is.

Yours very sincerely,