From Keller's lecture: The Supremacy of Christ & the Gospel in a PoMo World" (~27min):
"I haven't seen a Gospel presentation—a relatively short but comprehensive Gospel presentation—recently that I think actually really, really addresses postmodern people. The older Gospel presentations of Evangelism Explosion and the Four Spiritual Laws were great on systematic theology—God, Sin, Christ, Faith—and they got across the idea of grace vs. works but there was no story arc—Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. It wasn't there. They had systematic theology, but it didn't have biblical theology (what we call it). It read across the grain of Scripture and did a good job of summarizing, "This is God." "This is what the Bible says about sin." "This is what the Bible says about Christ." "This is what the Bible says about faith." But the basic narrative arc of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration, was not part of those Gospel presentations. And as a result (critics rightly say), the older Gospel presentations that so many of us grew up on were very individualistic, they helped you get your relationship right with God, but they were in a sense almost consumeristic, and the idea of the kingdom of God was never part of those Gospel presentations. So the Lordship of Christ over all my life—the Lordship of Christ over all of life—its not part of the Gospel presentations; it doesn't follow on from them.
"Now, if you go to the emerging church, if you go to the post liberal church, all the emphasis when they talk about the Gospel, all the emphasis is on the kingdom. All of it. It's all on Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. And all the emphasis therefore is on the fact that we had a world that we wanted (you see its all done corporately instead of individualistic), we had a world that we wanted and we've lost the world that we've wanted and now Jesus Christ has created a people and He's brought the kingdom and now you need to be a part of His kingdom program which is going to heal the world of injustice. And what you have there is an emphasis on the corporate, an emphasis on the kingdom, but you do almost always in these newer presentations of the Gospel lose the emphasis on grace vs. works, and on substitutionary atonement, and on the way in which Christ absorbed the wrath of God. And you don't see—when you hear these conversations, when I hear these Gospel conversations—I don't want to walk out of these presentations saying, "My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee"….
"It's going to take all our theological thinking now (not Bill Bright, not Billy Graham) but all our best theological thinking to develop user friendly Gospel presentations that merge both systematic theology and biblical theology in such ways that people can grasp [it] rather quickly and rather easily…."
