The Good News Is More than Calling Out Sin

In Pope Francis’s recent interview with 60 Minutes, reporter Norah O’Donnell asked him, “When you look at the world, what gives you hope?”

He replied,

Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead, and people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

This set off a controversy in some Evangelical circles. James White took to Twitter to declare,

I have said for decades the real issue with Rome is the gospel. Francis says “people are fundamentally good.” “There are some sinners.” “The heart itself is good.”

This is humanism. It is not Romans, it is not Galatians, it is not Jeremiah or Isaiah or Proverbs or Psalms or Genesis or Revelation. It is humanism. This man has no concept of the gospel itself. This may be some of the clearest evidence I have ever seen of the utterly apostate nature of the Roman hierarchy.

And before you jump on me: the majority of so-called Protestants are just as much in error as Francis.

White ought to know better than to fly off the handle and arrive at sweeping conclusions based on a 47-second clip from a 45-minute interview without examining the context to see what else the pope said.

In fact, minutes before the segment that set White off, the pontiff had said, “You have to be open to everything—you have to—everyone, everyone, everyone. That so-and-so is a sinner? Me, too! I am a sinner.”

So he was not denying the reality—or the universality—of human sin. He was acknowledging that everyone is a sinner, and some—the rogues he referred to—are really bad, but there is also good in the human heart, and that’s encouraging.

A much more moderate reaction came from Gavin Ortlund, though even he expressed some discomfort with what the pope said:

The thing with him is he’s so unclear sometimes and clumsy in his language. But kind of leave that aside, and it’s an occasion to reflect upon a broader need, and that is the importance of being clear about sin. The gospel is such good news. We want to bring the happy news of the gospel to our friends. To do that, we have to start with the bad news, and that’s that we’re alienated from God. We are sinners. We are broken. We all know that deep down, but it’s so important to start there. Then we get to the good news, which is that Jesus has solved all of that at the Cross. But you have to start with the bad news to get there!

I want to acknowledge that there is an element of truth here. The Catholic Church is fully aware that the reality of sin is the flipside of the good news, and preaching about sin is necessary to understand the gospel.

In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states, “The doctrine of original sin is, so to speak, the ‘reverse side’ of the good news that Jesus is the savior of all men, that all need salvation, and that salvation is offered to all through Christ” (389).

So we’re agreed on this fundamental truth. However, in some Protestant circles, the “bad news first, then good news” idea has become fixed in the popular mindset of how to present the gospel. It’s a preaching tradition that has become so central that some can’t imagine presenting the gospel without using it.

This is particularly true in Protestant traditions that are focused on getting people to the point of a crisis conversion, with an altar call or saying the Sinner’s Prayer, where a terrified sinner suddenly turns his life over to God in a moment that fearful preaching has produced—as with Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The situation is worse in Protestant traditions—such as Calvinism—that have a rigid way of speaking about human sinfulness.

Humans are sinners, but that doesn’t stop Scripture from speaking of them positively. For example, Luke says that Zechariah and Elizabeth “were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord” (Luke 2:6). So Scripture itself speaks of humans in positive ways, without ignoring their sin.

And, if you think about it, the “preach sin first” approach is often not the right way to initially present the gospel to people. Yes, the message of human sinfulness needs to be part of it, but people are often drawn to Christianity by a variety of things, and it’s often a bad strategy—the instant they express any kind of interest—to start insisting on what a horrible sinner they are.

That certainly wasn’t St. Paul’s universal approach. If you read the account in Acts 17 of his address to the Areopagus in Athens, he begins by complimenting the Athenians for their religiosity (v. 22), he says he saw they had an altar “to an unknown god” (v. 23), and then he starts telling them about God (vv. 24-26), how God is “not far from each one of us” (v. 27), and how their own poets have said that we are God’s children (v. 28). He says we therefore shouldn’t think of God as an idol (v. 29), and that God has mercifully overlooked the times of ignorance (v. 30a), but now he wants people everywhere to repent (v. 30b), because a day is coming when he will judge the world through Jesus (v. 31).

Paul thus starts with mystery (who is this unknown God?), moves to how God cares about the Athenians and wants to have a relationship with them, assures them of mercy for sins committed in ignorance, and only lastly gets around to the need to repent.

This is a very different strategy from “First you must convince people of what horrible sinners they are, and only then share the good news with them to relieve the anxiety you have induced.”

Our Protestant friends should thus think a little beyond their preaching traditions—as Paul did.

They also should be sensitive to the context. In the 60 Minutes interview, Norah O’Donnell had not just asked Pope Francis, “What is your understanding of the gospel?” She asked him, “When you look at the world, what gives you hope?”

It would have been bizarre and inappropriate for the pope to launch into a tirade about human sinfulness and then conclude with an altar call. That would have been breaking the interview format by refusing to respond to the question he had been asked.

Should he—at some point—mention human sin? Absolutely! And he did! Should he mention our need for Jesus and God’s mercy? No doubt about it.

But working those themes into a larger body of discourse—the approach that Paul took at the Areopagus—is one thing, and having a one-track mind where you’re just repeating “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is another.

We’re thus agreed that sin is the inverse of the good news and that it needs to be discussed. But we need to think beyond common Protestant preaching tropes . . . and we need to be sensitive to the context of a statement and not impose an imaginary context on top of it.