Here’s a helpful reminder of the objectivity of the gospel from James Torrance. The good news of the gospel is not, in the first instance, what God does in and through us but what he has done outside of us and for us in the work of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth tells the story of an old lady who once went to the evangelist Kohlebrügge and asked him, ‘Tell me, sir, when you were converted?’ The evangelist, knowing well that she was interested in the details of his Christian experience, replied, ‘Madam, I was converted nineteen hundred years ago when Jesus Christ died on a cross for my sins and rose again.’ He was concerned to point away from himself and his own faith to Jesus Christ. The decisive point for him was not primarily anything in his own experience, important as that may be, but that Jesus ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, buried…the third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven.’ It was as though he said, ‘When Christ died long ago for me, I died, and when Christ rose again for me from the dead in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, I rose again. When Christ ascended for me into heaven, I ascended with him and now my life is hid with Christ in God.’ That is the true testimony of faith, the inner witness of the Spirit. In the words of the apostle, ‘We judge that if one died for all, then all died.’ Christ for us is prior to Christ in us.