I thought I'd better post some thoughts regarding Mark Driscoll's Confessions of a Reformission Rev, though many readers will have already discussed it at some length. I reviewed his previous book, The Radical Reformission earlier this year.
Driscoll asks, (page 23), "Will you proclaim a gospel of forgiveness, fulfillment or freedom?" He notes that the "traditional" church proclaims a gospel of forgiveness, (which "worked well for people in Christendom") and the "contemporary" church proclaims a gospel of fulfillment. The "emerging" church, on the other hand, proclaims a gospel of freedom. Driscoll clearly aligns himself with this third version of the gospel.
Yet Driscoll's reason for rejecting the "gospel of forgiveness" is vague at best. He says that it "seems judgmental, mean-spirited, naive and narrow-minded to the ever-increasing number of people who do not understand the basic tenets of Christianity". In other words, it is liable to be misunderstood – but it always has been misunderstood by many people.
There is no doubt that freedom is a biblical category, and I believe it to be an integral part of the biblical gospel. It can also provide an effective focus for evangelism, though it has its own particular pitfalls. If we say that we focus on freedom because it is something that people long for (whereas they don't desire forgiveness), then we still have to carefully distinguish between freedom that's bad (like freedom from God) and freedom that's good (like freedom from sin). Tailoring the message to what we think people want to hear is always dangerous.
The thing is, freedom and forgiveness are not incompatible, and should not be played off against each other. Since the Bible is thematically rich, there are many different ways to explain the gospel. We don't always gave to use the analogy of the law-court and speak in terms of getting right with God. But there's nothing wrong with preaching in this way.
In fact, we can go much further. We could, in theory, take any biblical theme and use it as a means of telling the gospel. For example, we could argue that the thing that people desire and lack is not freedom, but relationship. We could then formulate the gospel in terms of love – sin means rejecting God's love. But God's love is also the solution to the problem.
Thus, there is nothing wrong with preaching the gospel in terms of freedom, but Driscoll (and the emerging church movement) misses the mark in saying that we should do so at the expense of preaching in terms of forgiveness.
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