A Review of The Very Good Gospel By Lisa Sharon Harper: Part I

The Book Review and Why This Title Matters

Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast, my name is John Harris. We're going to talk about a book today, it's a book review day, by Lisa Sharon Harper called The Very Good Gospel. This is a listener generated episode, meaning someone contacted me last year and said, John, would you please do this book.

This is not an extremely popular book in more quote unquote conservative evangelical circles, and I mostly focus on those circles, but this is an important book I think to do, and I'll give you some reasons for it as we proceed.

This is a book that I think exemplifies where things are going, and that's one reason. It is a book I think that clearly and consistently, more than a lot of other books, articulates the syncretization between Christianity and social justice, and so even if you don't read this book or aren't familiar with Lisa Sharon Harper, it is a book that is a good example of where social justice thinking leads.

I'm going to introduce you to Lisa Sharon Harper because I think actually she is kind of outside of that conservative evangelical circle, she does have I think more influence and she probably will have more influence as the years go by as conservative evangelicalism is less and less conservative.

She'll probably have some influence there as well, so we'll talk about all that. I wanted to let you know though about a sponsor for this podcast before we keep going, and that is Gold River Tea. You can go to goldriverco .com and you can get some really, really good tea.

In fact, I know there's some summer flavors that are going to be coming out soon as well, but some of you live in more cold climates, maybe you're in the mountain area and you're still drinking that warm tea.

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If you want to support an organization that is pro-Western civilization, pro-Christianity, anti-cancel culture, supports American workers working in this country, you're going to want to go to goldriverco .com.

When you go there, put in the promo code, conversations. Conversations will get you a discount on that tea and again, it's top-notch stuff. I enjoy it. I drink it and I'm thankful for their sponsorship.

I'm thankful there's a company that I can go to and feel good about purchasing their product. Goldriverco .com. Now, for some of you, you know, I think I announced actually in my last podcast, I've been away for a little while and I have a lot of stuff to talk about.

I know there's a lot of stuff going on right now and I want to acknowledge that. I know many have asked me to comment on various things, Southern Baptist related. I think the big thing today is Elon Musk and this Twitter rejecting Elon Musk's offer to buy them and perhaps I will be able to get to talking about some of those things as the weeks progress.

We'll see where things go but one of the unique things about conversations that matter and one of the things that I think is beneficial for people out there is book reviews and not just book reviews but speech reviews, blog reviews.

Sometimes we'll do a biographical studies. I did a pretty in-depth one on Tim Keller and what I can do is share with you all the information that I'm looking at. I can distill it. I can give it to you and there'll be a link in the info section.

If you're a patron, you'll be able to access the full PowerPoint for this but I can give you all the quotes. You'll see those on the screen. I'm going to give it to you clear as day. If you're watching, if you're listening, I'll just quote everything to you and the goal of that is I want you to be able to think for yourself to go to the source and I'm helping in that process.

I'm doing some of the hard labor in getting all the information to you but I'm going to give you source information, primary source stuff and then you can make the determination. Now I'm going to give you my commentary but if you're talking to a friend, let's say you're in a Bible study or a small group and they want to use The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper.

Well, you're about to listen to a podcast or two. I don't want to go past two but we may end up making this two podcasts. You're going to get some information about Lisa Sharon Harper. Well, what do you do with that?

Well, you can go to your friend and say, watch this. That usually doesn't go over as well in my opinion. From what I gather, and this is just my hunch I guess, it's better when you are able to articulate reasons for objecting to something yourself or supporting something.

If you can locate the source material, cite the source material, say this is what she says on this page and this is why I disagree or this is what she argues and this is why I don't think that's biblical, that is a much better way of approaching it because it really forces people to deal with the issue, deal with what the Bible teaches, deal with what Lisa Sharon Harper says and whether or not it's right or wrong or conforms to reason.

That's what you want to focus on more than anything else. That's what I'm doing with this podcast and with so many others is I'm giving you the information that will help you in navigating something like this.

And I have a number of other books that I do want to go over. In fact, the next one might be the Jesus and John Wayne book. I've been putting that off for a while. I've read excerpts from it. I haven't actually read the whole thing and so I may do that and we may do something like that for Jesus and John Wayne.

But for today we're going to do this book called The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper and here's what the front of the book looks like for those who are watching. It's called The Very Good Gospel, How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right.

That's right, how everything wrong can be made right. And I'm on Lisa Sharon Harper's website right now. She introduces herself as a speaker, writer, activist, and artist. And if you go to her about section on her website, lisasharonharper .com, I'm just going to give you the cliff notes here.

But she's written a number of books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican or Democrat, Left, Right, and Christ, Evangelical Faith in Politics, and Forgive Us, Confessions of a Compromised Faith.

And of course, The Very Good Gospel is her more popular work. It was recognized as the 2016 Book of the Year by Inglewood Review of Books. So some of these titles sound almost like they could be Tim Keller books, right?

There's no left or right. There's no Republican, Democrat. There's sort of this Christian position that transcends that. But guess what? This Christian position very much seems to be in favor of issues on the left.

Lisa Sharon Harper is a columnist at Sojourner's Magazine and Auburn Theological Seminary, senior fellow. She's appeared on, let me just give you a few of them, Fox News Online, NPR, Al Jazeera America, CNN Belief Blog, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine.

So now we're getting on into a really more emergent church in my mind, publications, but formerly evangelical publications, supposedly relevant, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial, and all the rest of the stuff, mostly left-leaning stuff.

In fact, I think in The Very Good Gospel, you're not going to find even a reference to abortion. It's all stuff on the left she's concerned about, which was a little surprising. I thought at least she'd try to put something like that in there, but nope.

She has a master's degree in human rights from Columbia in New York City and served at Sojourner's Chief Church Engagement Officer or as Sojourner's Chief Church Engagement Officer. And let's see, there's some of the relevant things here to know.

So in 2014, she was involved in pushing for justice in Ferguson, and in 2015, the healing process in Baltimore. She trained and catalyzed, and this is what it says, okay? Let me just read this to you.

She trained and catalyzed evangelicals in St. Louis and Baltimore to engage those issues. And I think that, well, Ferguson would be the Michael Brown, I believe, right? And so she's on the ground, and she's involved in community organization and all that kind of thing.

If you remember from Barack Obama's run for the White House, what was he? He was a community organizer. Who was he close to? Pastor Jeremiah Wright. This was something that was, at the time, controversial.

It's liberation theology. Well, what's liberation theology? And then we saw that clip of Jeremiah Wright over and over saying, basically, that God should curse America. And of course, not for the things that I think a lot of godly Christians today think, yeah, God's going to curse America for.

So that was back then. Well, today, this is being mainstream. This kind of liberation theology has infiltrated, quote unquote, conservative evangelical denominations and organizations, even though people are saying, oh, it's not happening.

Yes, it is. It totally is. And I've seen it firsthand. It is definitely happening. And so I think Lisa Sharon Harper is a little bit further down the road than many in evangelical institutions. But look, she's trained.

She's trained evangelicals to be activists. That's the whole point. I think what we've seen with Christian leaders, in particular pastors, is they've gone through a process in the last 100 years from, well, we're a pastor to now we have to be a therapist or a psychologist because people don't, in a secularized society, value pastors as much.

They're going to their psychologists. So now pastors need to make sure that they know psychology so they can compete and try to maintain their authority and respect. And then there was the pastor as the manager.

So the pastor runs the institution that everyone else in the Christian circle that goes to that church participates in. So whereas a century ago, even 50 years ago, even maybe 30 years ago, you would have voluntary associations you'd be part of.

You go to church on Sunday, Wednesday, perhaps. You would normally, you know, you might have your bowling group or your Boy Scout group or whatever. And now, more and more, it's like all those needs must be met in the church.

And so the pastor becomes the CEO of the company, of the social group that manages the Sunday school and the Awana and the youth group and the men's retreat and the women's weekend and just the list goes on for all the different organizations, ministries.

Social events. And so you have the pastor as a therapist, the pastor as the manager, and then the pastor or the Christian leader as the social justice activist or community organizer. That's all that is.

And so I've seen this to some extent, even at the seminary I went to. There's a change in how a pastor is supposed to be. And now a pastor has to engage these topics. They have to become political activists.

And it's just interesting to me to watch this transformation or to study it. In fact, I went over some of this. I don't have one with me, but in my book, Social Justice Goes to Church, I just trace out the history of neo-evangelicalism and how in neo-evangelicalism, the idea was we're going to gain influence by this cultural engagement, which will show to the whole world that we're relevant because we know psychology too.

And you can come to us. So the pastor became kind of this therapeutic figure and appealed more to women than to men. And so we've gone through this whole thing. And we're now, I think we're just starting.

We've been in there for a few years. The Union Theological, some of these really out there seminaries have been on this for longer, but the evangelical schools are still in a process of transitioning, I think, in many ways.

And they're still kind of holding on to, in some ways, a traditional pastor role at the very least, they try to hold on to the exegetical preaching, at least in name. Whether they do it or not, that's another story.

But at least they say they do. And they say they value that, right? But this whole new arena of activism is certainly becoming very popular. And I saw it when I was at Southeastern in the chapel, especially.

I saw that's where a lot of that stuff started to come in. And then it made its way into other areas of the seminary. So I think it's important to talk about something like this, because essentially, you have someone who's gone further down the road.

They're further down the social justice road. And for those who want to know what's up ahead, well, someone like Elisa Sharon Harper is going to be able to show you. Because what was said by the left, the hard left, five, ten years ago, is now said by the more moderate left.

And what was said by the moderate left, five, ten years ago, is said by the moderates. And what was said by the moderates is said by the conservatives. And you can see how this works. In fact, the last episode that I put out there was all about this whole Dave Rubin situation, and what conservatives have said about it, and how the winds have shifted so much.

And we're seeing that with all sorts of different issues. And so I think looking at a book like this can help us see what's going to happen. Where Sojourners was, the many even Southern Baptist leaders are today, right?

Sojourners was radical in the 70s, radical. And now it just would sound like a mainstream evangelical conference or something. So that's one of the reasons I want to focus on this, and I thought it was a good idea.

Another reason that I thought it was a good idea to focus on this is just because of how consistent I think Elisa Sharon Harper is. Like, this is where the woke stuff is going to take you. And I'm not saying she has her inconsistencies, but she's at least not pretending to believe.

Like, she's willing to give up some core doctrines in order to make the woke stuff work. And I've maintained for a while, like, one's going to eat the other. You can't have, you can't maintain this unstable element of syncretized Christianity and social justice.

So I think this will be beneficial. Now, this may take some time for us to go through it, but if I have to split it up into two or three episodes, then that's fine. We'll just do it. So let's start here.

The Goal of the Book: Shalom, Dominion, and the Very Good Gospel

The goal of the book. So you know what the Very Good Gospel is about. This is from the end of the book, and this is what Elisa Sharon Harper says. The Very Good Gospel answers the heart cry of our age.

Our ransacked world is crying out for the restoration of the governance of God and the shalom it brings. As the body of Christ lives out the Very Good Gospel in pews, in households, and in the public square, it is partnering with God to restore the very good to the world.

It is exercising God's kind of dominion within the church, and it calls our leaders to the same in society to exercise the kind of dominion that cultivates the image of God on earth while serving and protecting all of God's creation.

Let it be so. There is a way back to shalom. It is the way of God demonstrated through the person of Jesus and made possible through his death and resurrection. This is the good news. This is the Very Good Gospel.

So you can see here, this is the goal of the book, that what Elisa Sharon Harper wants to do is mobilize Christians to exercise dominion, and she's calling this dominion that changes society, that cultivates the image of God on earth, that does all of these things to create this beautiful new world.

She's calling that the Good Gospel. This is what the Gospel is. So you can see right away, the Gospel is what she wants to motivate people to do. It's something—there's a works element here. People need to do something, and when they do that thing, they usher in this beautiful, wonderful paradise of sorts, and that is the Good Gospel.

That's the good news. The good news is that we can go and do this. We can build this. And so the rest of the book is, how do we do this? What is it? Flesh out the description of what this utopian state we're striving for looks like.

It's providing more Bible verses, supporting the arguments that she brings to motivate people to do this kind of thing. And once we go through all that, you will look at a paragraph like this very differently, because what you'll see is that some of the words that she's using here, especially the word Gospel, it's not what you think of as an Orthodox believer when you think of the Gospel.

So let's start. In the description at the beginning of the book, Walter Brueggemann says that Harper proposes a thick reading of the Gospel, racism and gender violence. Violence arise from a thin rendering of the Gospel.

All right. So Harper says there's this thick Gospel, and then there's all these bad things, racism and gender violence that arise from a thin Gospel. The very good Gospel is a welcome read that invites a rethinking of faith and life that is all too often dumbed down to thin.

So you have a Gospel that is incomplete. It's partial. It's not quite there. That's the problem. And this is what we hear, by the way, from many evangelical leaders today, not just Lisa Sharon Harper.

I have a whole section in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, where I just start quoting evangelical leaders over and over and over, and I show, yep, this is what Russell Moore said. This is what J .D. Greer said.

I don't even know who all I quote in there. There's so many. This is what Dan Cathy said. And I just go through. Here's all these evangelical leaders. Here's what they say about the Gospel, and they talk about it as if most evangelicals, if they believe in salvation by grace through faith, just have part of the Gospel.

They don't have the full Gospel. And this is exactly Lisa Sharon Harper's point. Now, where does this take her? And of course, she's on the left. So that's what we're focusing on is social justice. Where does this take her?

And that's what I want to give to you. Where does this theology of this thick Gospel, this full-fledged Gospel that is so much more than salvation by grace through faith, where do you end up with this?

And by the way, I should probably note, I was approached at one of the places I was speaking about this and challenged, and I was appreciative of it from a brother who was just wanting, in a way, from perhaps a position on more of a conservative side, really wanted to see a Gospel that impacted the world.

And that if the Gospel is reduced, and I don't buy that this is a reduction, but if it's reduced, if it's only about salvation by grace through faith in Christ for souls, if that's what salvation is, then what about the millennial reign?

What about the final state? What about all these other good things? Isn't that part of good news? And oftentimes what you'll hear is people bring up the term Gospel of the Kingdom to describe that. Jim Wallace did that all the time.

The Gospel of the Kingdom is almost like this is a fuller view of the Gospel than Paul's Gospel or something. And so I started looking into that, and I may do an episode on it. This is not the time to do that episode, but I'm convinced the Gospel of the Kingdom and Paul's Gospel, they're the same thing.

Jesus' Gospel and Paul's Gospel are no different. Paul's communicating the same Gospel. And there is a sense in which you can describe the Gospel, the good news, as we look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, right?

The Gospel is the story of Christ. It's the good story that Jesus came. But the kernel of the good news, the kernel of truth in that story that is the thing that saves our souls is that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, took our sins upon himself, gave us his righteousness, satisfied the wrath of God, rose again from the dead, defeating death, and has guaranteed a place for those who put their trust in him.

And so it's by faith. It's, I believe that's the good news. And I think the main thing that I, when I've traced this out throughout the New Testament, the main thing I notice about the Gospel is it's always something God's doing.

It's always, this is what God is doing. And yes, I do believe we are going to do good works if we're saved. I believe that's going to impact society. I believe that beyond that, in the final state, in the eternal realm, there is a place for us as believers.

I think that that's a wonderful thing. That's good news. That's part of the good news. But the good news is what it's not is the idea that we must on this earth exert some kind of good works. We must obey the law to such an extent that we'll usher in some kind of a utopia here.

Right? That's not what the good news is about. And that's what you find Lisa Sharon Harper doing. That's what you find Jim Wallace doing. And that's what you're now finding a lot of evangelicals doing.

They're saying, well, that's part of the Gospel. And you get these weird situations that arise where like Eric Mason tries to say Christians should really learn how to apply the Gospel or something from the anti-apartheid commission in South Africa and the non-Christian groups that are doing it right.

And they're somehow participating in the redemption of society. And they're part of the Gospel. And you're not going to find that in the New Testament. That's just strange. You're getting to a point where what like non-Christians are now, they have part of the Gospel too, because maybe they're participating in something good.

And the thing is, if you flip this, if you go to the right side of the aisle and you just say like, we must have capitalism for the full Gospel or the free market. Without the free market, we don't have the full Gospel.

And we have so far to go. We just need to get there. Or without every American owning a firearm to protect themselves, we don't have the Gospel. That sounds ridiculous. Hopefully that sounds ridiculous to your ears.

Like, wait, what are you talking about? And of course, I can make a logical connection to all this, right? I could say, well, look, if you're going to be a follower of Christ, you're going to want to protect your family.

And in our day and age, that most of the time is going to mean you probably need to have a firearm. And therefore, that's part of the Gospel or something. Well, that's ridiculous. No, of course it's not.

That's just maybe Christian ethics or obedience or it's being responsible before the Lord. And perhaps the motivation that you have to follow Christ, which started at the point in which you received Christ and understood the Gospel, that's motivating you into these other areas to exert Christian ethics and be an influence, be salt and light.

That's a wonderful thing. But we don't call that the Gospel. The Gospel is what Christ did. The Gospel is something that is totally of God. And there is a specific way in which it's used. There is the narrow sense in which the Gospel is the power of God to salvation for those who believe.

And it's something we're not to be ashamed of. And like I said, in the broad sense, it's the story of Jesus. But it's because Jesus was sent on the mission that he was sent on to seek and save that which is lost.

And so I may do a whole episode on this at some point to help people understand this more. For me, this was made clear when I was doing my study for Social Justice Goes to Church because I kept seeing this language.

I kept seeing that the critique against conservative evangelicals was they just don't have the Gospel. And that's exactly what Lisa Sharon Harper is trying to say, that there's a whole group of Christians.

They just don't. They're lacking something. They don't have the Gospel because they're not involved in this kind of political activism. And if they were involved in this political activism, then they would have the Gospel.

So what is it? Like the Gospel plus circumcision? The Gospel plus these works? And then you're a true Christian? Or you're fully Christian? Or how does this work? And so if you think about it, it's one of the most potent attacks you can make on Christians because that's the most important thing they believe.

What's Christianity? Well, the Gospel is central to that. The good news is it's the story. It's the good story about what God has done. People who were totally alienated from God and now are brought near by the blood of Jesus Christ.

And if you can say that that central message actually includes some kind of activism for climate change initiatives or support for illegal migrants, you can get a whole bunch of Christians. You can actually manipulate them into the left, into doing what the left wants.

Because, of course, that's central to Christianity. And if they want to be true Christians, well, they're going to have to go and they're going to have to obey the Gospel. And if that's what the Gospel teaches, if it's soft peddling LGBT, or if it's marching with BLM, if it's any of these issues that you're going to hear Lisa Sharon Harper talk about, as I read her quotes, then you'll do it.

Even if you aren't normally an activist, even if you're not someone who would do those things normally, you'll do it because now it's part of your Christian duty. Now it's part of your faith. It's a fundamental command that you have.

And so that's really what's going on here. It's not enough for the left in Christianity to just say that what they're doing is part of consistent Christian ethics. They have to go that extra step and say, well, it's actually part of the central message of the Gospel.

It's not just a disagreement we have over Christian ethics. It's a disagreement we have over the core doctrine of Christianity, one of them, and certainly the major one that distinguishes Christians. And so that's a serious charge if you're telling people they don't have the Gospel.

I mean, normally, okay, if you don't have the Gospel, you're saying someone doesn't have the Gospel, or they don't have the whole Gospel, or they're missing an element of the Gospel. Where does that leave them?

Where are they going? Are they going to heaven? Are they going to be with God? Or did they miss out on redemption if that's the case? That's a serious question. And so this is where I think the manipulation comes in and why when you hear Lisa Sharon Harper say the Gospel, don't think salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

Don't think justification. Don't think salvation for souls. Don't think about just individuals or groups or people even. Think about the environment and what humans are doing to try to stop pollution, right?

Think about trying to support, like I said, illegal migrants or BLM or any of these left leaning causes, the Me Too movement, and trying to make sure that women aren't suffering from microaggressions.

This is now part of the Gospel. That's part of the good news. Apparently that's why Jesus came, right? That's what he accomplished on the cross. And I kid you not, we'll get into some quotes. That's what Jesus did in trying to, in rising from the dead and conquering death is he was trying to stop, he was sending a message to all those chauvinists out there that they better stop mistreating women and stuff.

And it's like, God's law is there. God's law absolutely applies, but that's not the Gospel. In fact, God's law would still apply whether there was a good news or not. And we would just all go to punishment, wouldn't we?

God's law would still be there. The law actually is what leads us to the knowledge of our sin. And that leads us to the need, knowing the need that we have for the Gospel. That's the function of the law.

And of course, there's three functions of the law. I write about it in Christianity and Social Justice that Martin Luther gave us, but that is not for today's episode. Today's episode is about Lisa Sharon Harper.

So Harper proposes a thick reading of the Gospel instead of a thin reading of the Gospel. So let's get into what this thick reading of the Gospel is. Here's the thin Gospel. Christians are taught to think of the good news of Jesus Christ in this way.

God loves us, but we're sinful. As a result, we're separated from God. Jesus died to pay the penalty for our sins. All we have to do is believe that his death was enough and we get to go to heaven. That's some good news.

Seriously, who wants to languish in hell forever? But on this particular day, and this is Lisa Sharon Harper, there's a quote from her. She says, as I walked away from the King Center, the MLK Center in Atlanta, one thing I thought haunted me.

The good news of my Gospel doesn't feel good enough. The good news of my Gospel doesn't feel good enough. There's something lacking in that Gospel. The idea that Jesus Christ loves us, God loves us, we're sinful, we're separated.

Jesus died to pay the penalty of our sins. If we put our faith in him, the way she's writing this is very simplistic, but if we put our faith in him, if we believe that his death was enough, then we get to go to heaven.

So we get to be in the right relationship with God. That is lacking. There's a problem with that, is what she's saying. That's not a Gospel that's enough. We need a different Gospel. We need a thicker Gospel.

We need a Gospel that engages the issues that Lisa Sharon Harper wants engaged. The thing is, if someone becomes saved, if they truly are a child of God, what does Jesus say? If you love me, you'll keep my commandments.

We have ethics. We have principles we're supposed to keep. One of the things I pointed out, which I'll expand on here, is that when the left in Christianity wants to manipulate Christians to pursue their leftward agenda, whether knowingly or unknowingly, what they do is instead of putting their issues in the realm of Christian ethics and just obedience to Christ, they have to smuggle it into the Gospel itself.

It would be very easy, I would think. Let's just say Lisa Sharon Harper is really wrong on her ethics, but she's sincere about it, right? That's the only important thing today. She's sincere. She's really wrong about that, but she thinks she's right, and that's the Gospel.

The Gospel is salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins to be in a right relationship with God. The debt has been paid of sin. The curse of sin is broken. That is the Gospel, and then she says, okay, once you believe this, though, you're going to want to follow God's law, and God's law supports my positions, right?

Now, she could make that argument, and I would disagree with her, and I would say, no, it doesn't. You're wrong. This is what the law teaches. You're actually against the law, but that's not what she does, and that's not what so many social justice warriors do, and it's so deceitful because in a way, it's not subject to the same kind of scrutiny.

If you're saying, here's what the Bible teaches on ethics, and here's why I think that you should support BLM, you could have a Bible study over it, but as soon as you say, well, the Gospel is to, the good news is that we're going to have a perfect world, and by our own efforts, we're going to get there, and that's part of this good news, and if you're not on board, then you just don't believe the Gospel.

That's actually manipulation. That's accusing someone of not being a true Christian, essentially. That's how it's heard. That's why it works. You're not opening your Bible and getting into a study about it.

You're just basically, you're throwing bombs unnecessarily, and then you're merging law with grace and a corrupted social justice law at that. She says, Shalom is the stuff of the kingdom. It's what the kingdom of God looks like in context.

It's what citizenship in the kingdom of God requires and what the kingdom promises to those who choose God and God's ways to peace. To live in God's kingdom in the way of Shalom requires that we discard our thin understanding of the Gospel.

I had to face a hard truth, and my limited evangelical understanding of the Gospel had nothing to say about 16 ,000 Cherokees and four other sovereign indigenous nations whose people were forcibly removed from their lands, and it had nothing to say to my own ancestors who were enslaved in South Carolina.

So what's she saying? Well, the Gospel, if it's just about salvation from sin in Christ, then it says nothing about these social injustices. So how can it be a good Gospel? How can that be the Gospel?

How can just salvation in Christ for the forgiveness of sins? How can that be the Gospel if it doesn't actually produce real world change and require people to stop abusing other people? Now, the answer to that is God's law requires that.

God's law requires that, and we're guilty of violating God's law, which is why we need the Gospel. Okay? And then once you're a Christian and you receive the Gospel and God's giving you a new heart, then you're going to want to follow God's law, and that will prevent you, by and large, I mean, we're still sinful, but it will have an effect on the redeemed sinner in such a way that they no longer desire sin.

And so that's the answer. That's what Christianity provides. And of course, there's people who call themselves Christians who have done wicked things. They are sinful. They are people still. But that doesn't negate the fact that Christians, by and large, throughout human history and running the comparison between Christians and other groups, have been much more likely to help people, to follow God's law, to value human worth.

That's why they set up hospitals. That's why a lot of even the charities that we give to today, like the Red Cross and others, are Salvation Army, started by Christians. Christians have been on the forefront of, I mean, Western culture in general, very shaped by Christianity, has done more for the world as a whole than, at least in modern times, than any other society, any other civilization.

And that's ultimately because of Christianity. In fact, there's a book I was just reading on the plane, and I'm seeing if I have it in here. I think, I don't think, I wasn't planning to talk about it, so I didn't.

But, well, it was about this topic. The title was, If God is so good, why are Christians so bad? And so I read that, and it was an interesting book. It had some, it was a good introduction to that very topic.

But what she's saying here is, the solution is, well, we just need a different gospel. Apparently, we've had a flawed gospel. And this is a question that I'd like to ask. For how long did the church have a bad gospel?

Okay. How long did the church have a bad understanding of the gospel, apparently? Was it 100 years? Was it 200 years? Was it 2 ,000 years? Was it just the early church had it, and now we're recovering it today?

You know, what? Because that's a problem. If you give the impression that this has been ongoing for most of Christian civilization, and certainly she makes the case that Western civilization is corrupted.