The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.
Interpretation
The Gospel presents its truth in a way that confronts each generation with differing challenges and conflicts.
D. A. Carson's quote suggests that the essence of the Gospel is not straightforward but rather multi-faceted and often contentious. It indicates that each generation faces unique challenges posed by the Gospel's teachings, implying that these teachings require careful contemplation and response that varies over time.
In practice
In a debate about morality, one might introduce this quote to illustrate how beliefs evolve.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
No salvation without regeneration - no spiritual life without a new birth - no heaven without a new heart.
Faith is part of who I am, yes. I was raised Christian Scientist. The most important thing I saw every single week on the wall at Sunday school was the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.
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