Unlikeable Gospel

A most obstinate misconception associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the gospel is welcome in this world. The conviction -- endemic among churchfolk -- persists that, if problems of misapprehension and misrepresentation are overcome and the gospel can be heard in its own integrity, the gospel will be found attractive by people, become popular, and even be a success of some sort.

This idea is both curious and ironical because it is bluntly contradicted in scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history from the event of Pentecost unto the present moment. There is no necessity to cite King Herod or Judas Iscariot or any notorious enemies of the gospel in this connection; after all, while Christ was with them, no one in his family or a single one of the disciples accepted him, believed his vocation or loved his gospel.

After Pentecost, where the Acts of the Apostles evince an understanding and the confession of the gospel, resistance and strife concerning the gospel are equally in evidence among the pioneer Christians, while the consternation and hostility of the world for the gospel was very agitated and quickly aggressive. Furthermore, the letters of the New Testament betell congregations nurtured in the faith amidst relentless temptations of apostasy and confusion and conformity.

Subsequent events in the life of the church, especially since the inception of Christendom in the Constantinian arrangement, and with the institutional sophistication of the churches, only modify this situation by complicating it.

There is, simply, no reason to presuppose that anyone will find the gospel, as such, likable.

The categories of popularity or progress or effectiveness or success are impertinent to the gospel. The matter is signified forcefully in the introit to Romans 13 by the text "Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them" (Romans 12:14).

This is no adage prompted by sentimentality. It is a statement of the extraordinary relationship between Christians and the ruling principalities, a statement about the implication of the Lordship of Jesus Christ for the rulers of this age. To bless the powers that be, in the midst of persecution, exposes and confounds their blasphemous status both more cogently and more fearlessly than a curse.

In the Book of Revelation, the issue is expressed more severely and more straightforwardly than perhaps anywhere in the Bible: "Also [the beast] was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them" (Revelation 13:7). On the face of it, this is not an appealing or may in itself be an explanation of why it has been so often ignored or even suppressed by commentators or why it has seldom been mentioned, much less commended, by preachers.

I have read it, it seems, a thousand times, and I admit that I am tempted to wish it were not there or to locate some pretext to dismiss it or gainsay it. I find no way to rationalize the verse away. Unlike some other passages in Revelation, it does not afford evasion or oversight because it is esoteric or enigmatic. It is a most unambiguous and matter-of-fact statement. It says what it says: during the present age, the Word of God allows predacious ruling authority to wage war on the Christians and to defeat them. For the time being, in the era of the fall, until the consummation of this history in the judgment of the Word of God, the beast knows success and indulges victory; the saints suffer aggression and defeat. Surely the text mocks every effort, undertaken in the name of the Christian witness in this world, which is informed by calculations about effectiveness, progress, approval, acclaim, or any of the varieties of success. And that not only in circumstances where the church openly imitates or emulates the way of the beast, but also where the calculation prior to action or program is more guileful or pretentious and claims foreknowledge of how the matter will be judged by the Word of God.

The churches and, within them, both social activists and private pietists, are virtually incorrigible -- despite the admonition of Revelation 13:7 -- in practicing some such deliberation before risking any putative witness. Where that be the situation, the professed saints succumb to the power of death by their profound doubt in the efficacy of the resurrection and by their direct dispute of the activity of judgment in the Word of God. So they -- attempting vainly to forestall or obviate defeat -- are defeated anyway, ignominiously.

Revelation 13:7 contains no melancholy message. It authorizes hope for the saints -- and, through their vocation of advocacy, hope for the whole of creation -- which is grounded in realistic expectations concerning this present age. It enables the church, as the first beneficiary of the resurrection, to confront the full and awesome militancy of the power of death incarnate in the ruling principalities and nourishes patience for the judgment of the Word of God while trusting nothing else at all.

This seemingly troublesome text about the defeat of the saints by the beast is, preeminently, a reference to the accessibility of the grace of the Word of God for living now. To mention the defeat of the saints means to know the abundance of grace. And that prompts no rejection of or withdrawal from the world as it is, but, on the contrary, the most fearless and resilient involvement in this world.

Since the rubrics of success or power or similar gains are impertinent to the gospel, the witness of the saints looks foolish where it is most exemplary. This foolishness of the saints, this witness in the midst of defeat, is wrought in the relationship of justification and judgment, in which one who knows justification to be a gift of the Word of God is spared no aggression of the power of death but concedes no tribute to the power of death while awaiting the vindication of the Word of God in the coming of Jesus Christ in judgment.

William Stringfellow was an attorney, lay theologian, social critic, and author of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. When this article appeared, he was a contributing editor to Sojourners.