R.C. Sproul

but there is a recurring theme of certain elements of his activity that when we put them all together, we call it the kerygma.

Now, there's another reason why this term kerygma is important to our understanding of the early church, because the early church had another word that was important to their strategy and to their program, which was called didache.

In fact, there's a book from very early Christian history that's titled simply, The Didache.

And the didache comes from the same Greek word from which we get the English word didactic.

That which is didactic is that which teaches or instructs.

And so in the New Testament, a teacher was called a didoskelos, one who is involved with the didactic enterprise, one that is involved with didache or teaching.

And so there's a clear distinction in the early church between the kerygma and the didache for this reason.

Much of the preaching in the early church, though it began with a proclamation to Jewish people assembled in Jerusalem and in the Jewish regions thereabouts, very soon the preaching of the gospel expanded to Gentile nations.

And the Gentiles did not have a background knowledge of all of the content that we find in the Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament.

And so the preachers of the early church, when they confronted the Gentiles, did not have time to start with Adam and go through Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Jeremiah and all of those things.

They would simply give a boiled-down version of the significance of the person and work of Jesus.

And so their strategy was to preach the kerygma or to preach the gospel and call for a response to Christ.

And when people responded to that and then entered into fellowship with the early Christian church, then immediately they were engaged in a serious program of instruction.

The instruction came after the kerygma.

People responded to the evangelism of the preaching and were brought then into the church, and then they got filled in with the whole history of redemption, going back to Adam and Moses and David and all of that sort of thing, which became part of the didache.

We also find in the epistles themselves a heavy emphasis on the didactic.

on the explanation of the meaning and significance and application of what Jesus has done for us in his person and in his work.

But again, the basic proclamation, the basic evangelism of the early church was a simple, basic outline

of the life and work of Jesus that would announce, for example, that Jesus was a man born of a woman from the seed of David, who was the incarnation of God, who was born of a virgin, and who then gave his life in an atoning sacrifice on the cross,

was raised again from the dead so that the birth, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus became essential elements of the gospel or the kerygma.