"Whoever runs ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. He who abides in what Christ taught has both the Father and the Son" (2 John 9).
Progressives “run ahead.” They go beyond what Jesus and the Apostles taught. "Jesus plus one more thing” is the heart of every heresy.
Christians are not avant garde—edgy and experimental. They are conservative: They go back to the traditions handed down by Jesus and his apostles, an emphasis John made repeatedly: "That which was from the beginning... (1 John 1:1; 2:7, 13, 14, 24; 3:8, 11; 2 John 5, 6). John’s appeal to the past is his way of stating that new insights do not eclipse the gospel "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Christian faith is rooted in historical events: the Incarnation, the cross, the atonement and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There's no "new” news to report. It's finished.
Paul writes, playing with two different Greek words for “another”: "I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to another (ἕτερον—completely different) gospel, which is not another (ἄλλο—of the same kind)…" (Galatians 1:6, 7a).
Any other gospel than the gospel of Christ is not the gospel at all.
David Roper
5.27.21
