Understanding Jesus as the Son of God Ought to Have a Bearing on Our Evangelism

In past generations—how far back depends on the location—our evangelism in the Western world was largely confined to the churchified and to those who had at least been exposed to basic Christian doctrine. To insist on the importance of believing on Jesus the Son of God, or to preach that God sent his Son into the world to save the world, raised few eyebrows: the “Son” language was so much a part of the heritage that very little was done to unpack it. Today, however, in much of the Western world, we are dealing with biblical illiterates. What does it mean to them when they hear that God has a Son, or that God sent his Son into the world to bear our sins in his own body on the tree? This is not a subtle-but-wicked plea to avoid complex doctrines. Far from it: rather, just as we have to start farther back in our evangelism to provide more of the Bible’s story line for the good news of Jesus to cohere—much as Paul provides much of the Bible’s story line when he preaches the gospel to biblically illiterate pagans (Acts 17:16–31)—so we have to unpack more of the doctrine of God, and thus of the Son, to a generation that knows nothing of the Trinity. There are many ways of doing this, of course, but one of them is to follow the biblical trajectories forward, unpacking the Son of God themes as we go, until we reach their climax in Jesus the Son of God—the true man, the true Israel, the true Davidic King, the one who comes as David’s Son and yet as the mighty God.

Adapted from Jesus the Son of God: A Christological Title Often Overlooked, Sometimes Misunderstood, and Currently Disputed by D.A. Carson