Christians talk a lot about the gospel, but what actually is it?
An easy answer is that it’s “good news.” That’s what the Greek and Hebrew terms translated gospel mean, and we get the English word gospel from roots that mean “good news.”
But what is the good news that the gospel contains? What is it, specifically?
That’s where things get fuzzy. Christians don’t have a single, clear definition for what the gospel is. There are several different uses for the term.
This is a problem because St. Paul has stern things to say about people who don’t understand the gospel correctly. He writes,
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.
As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed (Gal. 1:6-9).
In Paul’s view, anyone who has a fundamentally different gospel is to be condemned and ejected from the Christian community. So making sure that you have a correct understanding of the gospel is very important. Yet this is where we run into trouble.
Sometimes people use the term very broadly. For example, GotQuestions states, “The gospel is, broadly speaking, the whole of Scripture.”
The gospel is a good thing, and Scripture is a good thing, so it sounds inspiring to link the two concepts and say that all of Scripture belongs to the gospel. It could even sound irreverent to propose that there are things in Scripture that are not part of the gospel.
But if you think about it, problems with the claim emerge. There are verses in the New Testament that say that Andrew was the brother of Simon Peter, but do we really want to say that the historical fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter—in some acceptable, first-century definition of the term “brother”—is part of the gospel?
What about Deuteronomy 3:11, which says that Og king of Bashan had a bed that was nine cubits long? Is the length of a pagan king’s bed really part of the gospel? Most Christians would not suppose so. It may be interesting that Og’s bed was nine cubits—or between thirteen and fourteen feet long—but this curious fact is scarcely something that warrants being considered an element in the gospel.
What’s going on in this definition is a pious identification of one sacred concept—the gospel—with another—Scripture. But this is not how Scripture itself uses the term gospel.
Even GotQuestions expresses reservations by saying that the gospel is the whole of Scripture “broadly speaking,” suggesting that this is an extended use of the term rather than how you’d define it properly.
Of course, language changes over time, and communities can use terms however they see fit. If some groups identify all of Scripture with the gospel, they can do that. But we need to be honest about the fact that this is not how Scripture uses the term.
Other Christians who have a very broad understanding of the gospel make it identical with the whole of Christian teaching. Any doctrine of the faith is part of “the gospel” on this usage.
For example, the Lutheran Book of Concord says that the term gospel is used two ways in Scripture and that
in the one case the word [gospel] is used in such a way that we understand by it the entire teaching of Christ, our Lord, which in his public ministry on earth and in the New Testament he ordered to be observed (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:4).
Here the term gospel would be identified either with all the teachings of the Christian faith or at least with those taught by Jesus himself.
But it’s pretty easy to see that this is not how the Bible is using the term. To give an example I often use, one truth of the Christian faith is the existence of angels. Jesus himself taught that angels exist. But the biblical authors wouldn’t say that the existence of angels is part of the gospel.
One reason is that the existence of angels is taught in the Old Testament, but the gospel is something new. It hasn’t been with us all through redemptive history. Whatever the good news of the gospel is, it’s something associated with the New Testament, not the Old.
Another problem with this approach is that if St. Paul is correct that anyone with an incorrect understanding of the gospel is to be regarded as accursed, and if the gospel is identified with the whole of Christian doctrine, then you won’t be able to have fellowship with anyone who disagrees with you on any point of doctrine.
The one point of doctrine on which you disagree with someone means he has a false gospel, and you need to regard him as accursed and kick him out.
Most Christians don’t hold this view. In the Protestant community, it is common to say that Christians can have different opinions on doctrines as long as they agree on “the essentials.”
The trouble comes when trying to identify what counts as an essential. People have different views on what is essential. For example, in many Protestant communities, the idea that we are saved strictly by God’s grace and not by our own efforts is common.
This claim is true, but in some circles it has led to an identification between the gospel and the concept of grace. You’ll recall that the Lutheran Book of Concord stated that the term gospel is used in two senses, one of which is identified with the whole of Christian doctrine. The other, more restricted sense is based on a Lutheran tendency to divide biblical teaching up into two categories that Luther referred to as law and gospel. The Book of Concord continues:
In addition, however, the word “gospel” is also used in another (that is, in a strict) sense. Here it does not include the proclamation of repentance but solely the preaching of God’s grace. . . .
Everything that preaches about our sin and the wrath of God, no matter how or when it happens, is the proclamation of the law. On the other hand, the gospel is a proclamation that shows and gives nothing but grace and forgiveness in Christ (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:6, 12).
On this view, law is anything that discusses our sin or God’s wrath, whereas gospel is anything that deals with grace and forgiveness in Christ.
It’s okay if Lutherans want to use the terms law and gospel this way in their own community and classify different verses in Scripture according to these two categories. But we need to be exegetically honest about the fact that this is not how Scripture itself employs these terms. They are definitions that come from a later age and are being used to classify Scripture, but Scripture does not conceptualize the terms in this way.
For example, the primary meaning of the term law in the New Testament is a reference not to human sin and divine wrath, but simply to the Law of Moses that God gave during the Exodus. Although that law does have things to say about sin and wrath, it also contains promises of grace and provisions for forgiveness.
Another problem with the idea of being united on essentials while allowing diversity on non-essentials is that people also tend to identify their own movement’s distinctive doctrines as essentials and thus as parts of the gospel.
For example, some Pentecostals use the phrase “full gospel” and hold that many Protestants are not preaching all the elements they need to for a full presentation of the gospel. One element they hold is part of the gospel is the idea that God continues to give miraculous gifts. GotQuestions.org explains:
A “Full Gospel Christian” believes that the Holy Spirit is still doing everything he was doing in the New Testament Gospels: He is still healing, giving the gift of tongues, performing miracles, etc.
So you don’t have the full gospel unless you include miraculous gifts in it. Most Protestants don’t teach this, and so for Full Gospel Christians, most Christians have a truncated version of the gospel.
On the other hand, Calvinists stress what they refer to as “the doctrines of grace.” These are teachings connected with grace and predestination that they refer to as the “five points of Calvinism” and summarize with the acronym TULIP (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints).
Many Calvinists think that the doctrines of grace are so important that you have to teach them to have a correct understanding of the gospel. I’ve known Calvinists who hold that, and if you point out that this would imply that non-Calvinists don’t actually have the gospel, they’ll sheepishly admit that this is the case: Non-Calvinists don’t really teach the gospel.
These two positions identify the gospel with the views of particular groups—certain Pentecostals and Calvinists—but most don’t identify the gospel so narrowly with their own movement.
Many seek to identify the gospel with something broader—something most or all Protestants could get on board with.
For example, there are slogans in Protestantism like sola fide (Latin, “by faith alone”). The claim is that we are justified by faith alone, and this was a big point of controversy during the Reformation.
To justify breaking away from the Catholic Church, Protestants accused it of teaching a false gospel. They said Paul preached the idea of justification by faith alone, and so sola fide expressed an essential element of the gospel.
If anyone taught that anything besides faith was involved in justification, it was argued that he was in some degree engaging in self-justification and adding “works” to the gospel, making it a false understanding. They then appealed to the passage from Galatians where Paul condemns anyone with a different understanding of the gospel.
There are a number of problems with this understanding, and we don’t have time to go through them all at the moment. However, it’s worth pointing out that “by faith alone” is not the language of Scripture. The phrase is used only once—in James 2:24—where it is rejected.
It’s also worth pointing out that Catholics don’t have a problem with the formula “faith alone,” provided you understand the faith in question correctly. Pope Benedict XVI stated,
Luther’s phrase “faith alone” is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. . . . So it is that, in the letter to the Galatians, in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification, that St. Paul speaks of “faith that works through love” (General Audience, Nov. 19, 2008, quoting Gal. 5:6).
In light of growing Catholic-Protestant rapprochement, some Protestants have backed off on the necessity of the “faith alone” formula and been more open to the idea that the gospel merely requires that it’s God’s grace that saves us. They might identify the gospel with another Reformation-era slogan, the idea that we’re saved sola gratia (“by grace alone”).
One of the most common ways of presenting the gospel is that it is the message of eternal salvation. It’s all about sin and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.
The idea is that you are a sinner, and you cannot save yourself. If left to your own devices, you will spend eternity in hell. That’s the bad news many preachers say one needs to understand to appreciate the good news or gospel.
The good news is that God has not left us to our own devices. He sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for us, and so he graciously offers to forgive our sins if we repent and believe in his Son. That way, we can be saved from sin and from hell and spend eternity with God in heaven.
It so happens that every one of the claims I’ve just described is true. But is this the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel, or does the New Testament understand it some other way?
We’ll explore that question next time.