when is news good

Christians claim to have Good News. We are commanded to share it. We are troubled because few people respond positively to the news we share. We believe the news to be Good, but our hearers do not agree. Instead, they think it is Bad News or Fake News or Boring News. It is imperative that we understand why this is.

We can gain insight by looking at a piece of news that would be received as Very Good by almost everybody: the news that their lottery numbers have been picked and that they have won a hundred million dollars.

I see within this particular bit of news three components which, if they are all present in any news whatsoever, will more often than not mean that those to whom the news is proclaimed will receive it with over-the-top reactions of excitement and joy. Any news that has all three components unambiguously present will be judged Good, Great, Wonderful; conversely, the absence of any single component will be enough to chill the response, and when two or more components are missing, the news will likely not even be deemed noteworthy.

The first component is that the news brings promise of concrete, easily imaginable, positive changes in the hearer’s life. In the case of the lottery winner’s news, they learn that they’ll be able to quit the job they don’t like. They’ll be able to buy a bigger house in a fancier neighborhood. They’ll be able to eliminate their debts. There are likely a hundred clear, articulable dreams that they’ve had which they thought would always remain dreams, but now can become real.

The second is that the changes are happening very soon. The money doesn’t transfer to their bank account the second the last number drops. They’ll probably need to go into the lottery office and fill out some paperwork first. Maybe it’ll take some time for the transfer to process. But they won’t need to wait years or decades: they fully expect that within a few weeks at the latest, the millions will be in their possession, ready to be spent however they will.

The third and final component to good news is that it is credible. The Lottery is not a scam. Everyone knows that it’s big and that it’s rich: they’re not merely pretending they have money that they don’t actually have. Also, the new winner has never heard of the state running off with the cash instead of paying up. They have full faith that they will receive the promised reward for winning the game.

The message delivered to the lottery winner meets all three criteria. It passes the test. It is, yes, definitely good news.

Let us see now how the Christian Gospel performs.

Are the three components of good news all present in our message?

I’ll analyze a five-part proclamation, the “standard” Christian Good News which, with tiny variations depending on the part of the Body speaking, has been preached all over the world for centuries and which continues to be preached today.

This news is that:

1. There is One God, who created everything, and this God loves us.
2. We have seriously damaged our own lives and our relationship with God by committing acts of disobedience against him, called “sins”. These sins deserve severe punishment.
3. God, not wanting to punish us, but instead wanting to reconcile us to himself, sent his only son into the world to be born as a man and to be offered as the sacrifice necessary for our sins to be forgiven.
4. Through this man, Jesus, the Son of God, some have been chosen to be adopted as sons and daughters into the household of God. These, if they accept the offer of adoption, repent of their sins and don’t rebel, will after their deaths live perfectly forever with God.
5. Upon death, their souls will leave their bodies and will begin this experience of eternal life in Heaven, but one day Jesus will come back to Earth and resurrect the bodies of every human, and those who have been chosen and have lived in a worthy manner will continue their blissful lives with God in a resurrected physical body, while those who have not lived in a worthy manner will suffer eternally in a place called Hell.

Let’s earnestly attempt to take the perspective of a twenty-first century person who has never heard anything about this news before. Let’s make our hearer someone who is unusually trusting and willing to listen to people he’s never met. And let us simply imagine how he receives the news, without reacting in frustration that he is mishearing us or that he needs to study more before making a judgment or that he is obviously not one of the Elect. In the mind of our congenial hearer, does the Christian Gospel check the three boxes?

Does this news herald the arrival of concrete, easily imaginable, positive changes in his life?

“I suppose it’s better that this God loves me than that he should hate me. But I can’t see him, can’t hear him, and if he did create the universe, then he doesn’t appear to be interacting much with it nowadays. I prefer the love of people who are, you know, physically present. Or at least easy to converse with.”

He doesn’t seem to anticipate that this first portion of the Gospel will change his life at all. Let us see if things improve.

“You say that I am, like everyone else, a sinner who needs to repent. But I don’t know; I think I’m a pretty good person. These things you call sins, I acknowledge that yes, some of them are bad for me and cause me problems, but some of them I really enjoy and they make my life easier and I don’t see how they cause any harm.”

This part of the proclamation does mean changes for him, and the changes are negative. Giving up all of his sins would be unpleasant and difficult.

The next part further darkens the clouds gathering on his horizon.

“Wait, God sent his own son to die so that our sins could be forgiven? Couldn’t he just have forgiven them without having his son tortured and executed? Was that a loving way to treat his son? Maybe I don’t want God’s love after all. And you say there are over a billion Christians on Earth who believe this? Well, now I think a billion people are kind of dumb and crazy.”

Faith in humanity successfully shaken.

The journey through our message has been rocky so far, but now we come to our own big-money prize: eternal life with God. Yet this is another change about which our 21st century hearer is less than enthused.

“So because Jesus died, I can potentially live forever. Okay. What will I do in Heaven? Passively be happy all day? The ‘beatific vision’? So does everyone just stare at God forever? Is it like the videotape in Infinite Jest, but you can’t die? I don’t know what this means, and it’s not clear to me that you know what it means either, and it’s definitely not clear to me that this is something that I want.”

“In fact, the more I think about it, the less this future makes sense. What is a ‘soul’? Okay, it’s not a physical thing that takes up physical space. But you said it’s going to Heaven: is that a physical place? It must be, because you said Jesus went there with his physical body, right? So it must be somewhere. Can’t you guys send a satellite to take a picture so we can see what it’s actually like? No? Is it too far away? I don’t understand.”

Finally, we drop our Gospel’s killing blow.

“You say that everyone will be judged, and that people who haven’t accepted this news will be tortured forever. But if they never heard the news, they get a pass, right? Maybe?! Some of my family members died without hearing the news! How strong is God? If we all join up together, is there any chance we can defeat him so he’s not able to populate his eternal fire dungeon? No? So I guess you win, then; I’m forced to accept your Gospel.”

We have won a convert, but the news has not met the first criterion for Goodness. It does not promise any evidently positive changes in the listener’s life. In fact, the hearer has judged that because the Gospel is true, his life will now be worse off. He stands conquered and despondent before the elated missionary.

Having examined our message for the first criterion of good news, let us quickly deal with the second criterion.

Are the promised changes happening very soon?

No; it fails according to the second criterion as well. Our hearer, assuming he is fated to a normal lifespan, will need to spend a few decades in self-denial and perhaps even suffer some persecution before he gets to taste Heaven’s fruits, which do not attract him. The news is shaping up to be quite bad indeed. But there is still hope that in the third criterion, things may turn around.

Is the news credible?

As the missionary is giving our sad convert information about Sunday service times, a woman from the neighborhood mercifully interrupts:

“Neighbor, I felt as you feel now when I heard this news. But take heart: it is fake. Look.

Missionary, your God does not show himself to people. So be it. But I have read your book, and in it God, though he hides himself, does many impossible things to prove to people that he exists and that he is powerful. He loves you and you are good friends with him; tell him, then, to do an impossible thing right now. Maybe tell him to make a mustard tree grow up instantly from this sidewalk. It should be easy for him, no?”

“Well, it doesn’t really work like that,” the missionary responds, “but if you come to church on Sunday, you will see a truly marvelous miracle: God, working through his ministerial priest, will transform bread and wine into human flesh and blood!”

“I have seen this ‘miracle’, and it is less than marvelous: the bread and wine look, smell, and taste completely unchanged. If he can’t show us a more impressive miracle at this very moment, then surely the one billion Christians on Earth have captured many undoctored videos of your God showing his might in an undeniable manner. If you want me and my neighbor to believe that he is real, then please show us just one of these videos.”

As the missionary protests, a smile begins to spread over our hearer’s face.

“See, neighbor? If his God used to have any power, he has it no longer. Nobody will be damned. You yourself have already recognized that his message makes no sense, that he can’t explain why God sent his innocent son to die, that he can’t explain what a soul is or what Heaven is. Moreover, I have been to their churches and have seen that they have not been freed from sin: most of them continue in the same sins as before and they bemoan among themselves that they need to continually confess the same sins over and over. And the day of Jesus’ return, the day of judgment? Two thousand years they have been waiting and it still has not come. I tell you: the news is fake. Go in peace, and continue to sin.”

So our hearer goes off rejoicing, having heard some actually Good News. As for the Christian’s news, it misses the third criterion: it is not credible.

Our Good News is Bad News

Our proclamation has gone oh-for-three. It has none of the criteria which distinguish a piece of news as Good. Our news is, therefore, to Average Joe Hearer, worthless.

This is not to say that everyone would receive the news the same way. Would this proclamation have been well received by the first-century Jew, who already had an unquestioning faith in the One God and a strong consciousness of sin and of atonement through bloody sacrifice? The odds are better. Likewise, the woman who has suffered for years in addiction and the prisoner with decades remaining on his sentence: these both have profound knowledge of sin and its consequences, these both long for a freedom which they fear will never come. Their hearts may be fertile for this message. And we ourselves: most of us were drilled into a variation of the message from a very early age, but we are nevertheless examples of hearers who have accepted it and who continue to rejoice.

But for normal 21st Century Man? It is not enough. Even the most freshly diploma’d, brain-fried-by-TikTok Bachelor of Marketing and Advertising Arts or whatever can tell you that the message is not a winner.

To my words, a crowd of believers gives a hearty “Amen!” and says, “Yes, this is what we have been saying! You can’t expect people to open their hearts to the Lord if you come to them talking about sin and judgment and Hell! What is most important is that God is Love: we must minimize the sin talk and focus on the love and mercy which the Lord has for every person!”

To this crowd, I tell you, in the Spirit of God, that your heads are in the sand. Gospel Love is still just love from invisible people; Gospel Mercy is meaningless without sin consciousness. No one cares. I beg my brothers and sisters in the Lord to acknowledge this and to open their eyes.

Meanwhile another voice, singular and strong, in whom anger has perhaps been building for a few minutes now, raises its own objection.

“Why should we care whether the hearers accept the message? The Lord told us to preach it, so that’s what we should do. I would rather die than water down His message to make it more palatable to the World.”

This is a noble position, and it is spoken truly. I too would rather die than distort our Lord’s message. But I believe that a time is coming in which every knee will bend and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, and I see us getting further away from that goal rather than closer to it. We know how people responded to the Lord Jesus’ preaching, and we know how they respond to ours. While we both face people who think themselves clever and come out to ridicule our message, Jesus saw far more joy and excitement from the uninitiated than we see today. We should be disturbed by the variance. We should reexamine the Lord’s proclamation and our own to ensure that there are no discrepancies between the two. Having just analyzed the Gospel of his followers in a certain way, we are already in the mode, so we might as well subject the Gospel Proclamation of the Lord Jesus to the same test and see whether it satisfies the three criteria for good news.

Jesus’ is a one-part proclamation:

The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.

Does this news herald the arrival of concrete, easily imaginable, positive changes in his life?

“‘The Kingdom of God is at hand.’? So your God is coming here to rule over everything? I’m skeptical of monarchies, because they devolve into corrupt dictatorships, but I also hate our current politicians, so I guess I will hear you out. What will your God change when he is king?”

“It’s good that he will help blind people see. I don’t know about setting captives free; I think a lot of captives deserve to be captives. But I am neither blind nor a captive. How will my life be changed?”

“‘The poor will have good news preached to them’? ‘Blessed are the poor, for to them belongs the Kingdom of God’? I can’t fully envision what you mean, but I do feel as though the world as it is set up now is primarily for rich people, so this makes me happy to think that if your God is in charge, he will give the world over to normal poor people like me. Won’t the rich and powerful resist this change, though?”

“‘To bind their kings in chains and their nobles in fetters of iron, this honor is for all his faithful’? ‘It is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God’? Wow, you seem like you mean business! Being the normal person that I am, I cannot stress enough how much I despise politicians and the uber-rich. I would absolutely love to see them humbled!”

“In the Kingdom, you say that ’nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ This makes sense: if you can unite all of the nations under one throne, then there shouldn’t be any more war or need for armies. This is maybe the best part of your news so far. I’ve never been in a war zone before, but I see pictures of them and feel awful for the people whose homes are destroyed and whose children are bombed. I hope none of my descendents will ever experience such a thing. I’m also angry at the trillions of dollars and the billions of hours of manpower that are wasted on war and on preparation for war.”

“You too are insisting that I repent of my sins? Shucks, that’s a shame. But I am not happy about the direction I see things going in my life and in the lives of my loved ones; I am worried for the future if the current brand of politician continues to make decisions. But you look completely different from them. If you (Jesus, was it?) become king, then a poor man will be in power. I might actually be willing to repent, if it means you’ll burn down this current system. But will you, like, eternally torture people who don’t do what you say?”

“‘If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world.’ Yeah, after hearing this news, I feel better about the future, despite not hearing a lot of hard plans for how it’s going to work.”

“But ‘at hand’, what does that mean time-wise? Judging from what the other preacher said, I’m guessing it means I won’t be seeing the Kingdom of God before I die.”

Will the promises of this news be fulfilled very soon?

“Oh, you actually mean it when you say ‘at hand’. Like, if I go to sleep tonight I might miss it, it’s that close. Like, obviously, most definitely, 100% coming this generation. That’s the answer I was hoping for. Well, you seem like a really great guy, and I hope your vision comes true, but I’ve already been duped by news like this recently, so I can’t say I trust that you or your God will be able to pull it off. Sorry. Nice meeting you, though.”

Is this news credible?

As our hearer begins to walk away, he sees his neighbor, whom he has known for years and who is paraplegic, rolling on the other side of the street in his wheelchair. After a few seconds, Jesus calls his neighbor by name; he tells him to stand up and walk. Our hearer stops and turns to see his neighbor walking on perfectly healthy legs which seconds ago had been completely atrophied.

Our proclamation must be the Lord’s

Jesus’ Gospel, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God At Hand, On Earth, Now, satisfies all three criteria for Good News. To the modern hearer, it would probably hit harder with more explicit detail about what God’s reign will bring, detail which we can provide based on however the poor are suffering in a given area. But even without such detail, people have a propensity to get very excited about the potential for Actual Change in the political realm. To envision More Of The Same in politics produces enough bile that the word Change alone, even spoken by obvious charlatans, is often received with joy.

I tell you: this is it. The Kingdom of God At Hand is what we are to proclaim. All of our evangelization must be focused on the sharing of this, the message of Jesus.

I tell you also that the degenerated proclamation, focused on our immaterial souls being allowed to go to a distant Heaven because of the sacrifice of the Cross, this proclamation must be taken out back and given a merciful end. It is different from what the Lord proclaimed and, as we have already established, it is simply not good news to most people. It is, in fact, an Anti-Gospel. This Anti-Gospel’s painful contortions of reason and language, the smirking, inane explanations that Actually, Jesus’ Kingdom Is Not a Political Kingdom, these must be retired, and if they insist on sticking around, they must be ridiculed by the members of the Body who are able in the Spirit to read the signs of the times.

The Credibility Problem

The Lord Jesus and Our Father gained credibility by doing, regularly and in front of independent witnesses, obviously miraculous things. The Lord promised that we of His Body would perform those same works as well as works even greater than those. It will be as he said.

When it comes to credibility, the crux of the matter (and this specifically is another thing that I will beg every Christian to accept and to always remember) is power. We present to our listeners a claim: that God is establishing a kingdom which will have no end, spatial or temporal. Why should they believe that our God will have the power to do what he has said he will do? His Body numbers around a billion people right now: this is a vast multitude, but two of the nations of this world are even more numerous. Plus, a great many of our number are fully estranged from the Body and will themselves need to be convinced again. Will anyone believe that this King, who marches with his tentative one billion, will be able to overcome the world’s kings who rule six billion?

Miracles would certainly help to convince, though today the bar would be raised: they would need to be miracles that positively could not have been accomplished (or falsified) using the modern world’s impressive gadgetry.

More important, I think, than miracles will be the extent to which the Body will 1) unify and 2) focus intensely on the work of making the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth real. When even a few tens of millions of the Body of Christ’s members decide that now is finally the time to stop waiting for a second Body to come down from the clouds, and when these devote all of their efforts to seeking the Kingdom with unflagging faith, with eyes fully open and unclouded by sentimentality, with minds fixed on the strategy and tactics that will bring victory, and with hearts lifted up toward the Father and burning with the Spirit’s love: when a few tens of millions of believers make a united entrance into the field this way, will anyone doubt that they will make strides in cutting down and reaping the world’s governments for the Lord? The atheists already tremble and fume about Christian theocracy, despite a divided Body whose members are distracted with trying to get their personal souls to Heaven and who still feel some tingles of excitement when worldling politicians whisper sweet nothings to them.

Members of the Body, not one in vibes only, but working rationally, judiciously, and systematically within a single structure whose sole task is to realize the political Kingdom of God, will show that they can take power by actually taking power. We will show that our King is different when we elevate (or rather, humiliate) new political leaders who look nothing like worldly leaders and look everything like Jesus. We will show that God’s Reign will be good when we actually establish governments that legislate and judge with the wisdom and love and integrity of Christ.

As these things start to actually happen, the positive changes promised by our news will become easy for all to see. The world will see that changes are happening now. And our proclamation, the Son’s proclamation for all people, will become credible.

I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.

Today, for the Gospel, what we must become is a juggernaut for the political Kingdom, purified of all worldliness and crushing all worldly authority under our ever-advancing wheels. Those called to lead this effort must die completely to themselves, die completely to sin, must be utterly emptied out and recast as pure vessels who are filled to the brim with the life of Christ Jesus and who become indistinguishable from Him, through whose mouths the Lord will command his subjects, through whose hands the Lord will conquer His world. Anyone serious about spreading the Gospel must help build and support this new political organization of dead and resurrected men and women, this organization through which the Almighty God will manifest His power.

As the victories pile up, as the excitement builds and the Body grows and the great chorus of our hammers drum a Sanctus rhythm on the walls of the old world, the time will come, very soon, when, our news having been heard by all, even the skeptic will once more break silence, crying, “Blessed be the God of Israel. He has visited his people and set them free.”

To evangelize is to make the kingdom of God present in our world.

Evangelii Gaudium 180