What is the Gospel?

The nature and scope of the Christian gospel is a hotly contested topic, both in our day, and in ages past. For those with a biblical approach to the subject, the gospel is typically understood as the means by which an individual person is reconciled to God — justification by grace alone, through faith in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Simply put, 2,000 years ago God came to Earth as the man Jesus, he died on a Roman cross to take the just penalty for our sin (evil thoughts and deeds), and he raised himself to life to show his victory over death. Everyone who simply trusts in Jesus can thereby have our sins forgiven, so that we are reconciled with God unto eternal life with him.

This is, of course, true as far as it goes. But when scripture is examined carefully, we see that the term “gospel” is actually much broader in its usage than the doctrines of personal salvation. It reflects the total impact of Jesus’ heavenly kingdom on the earth and its kingdoms, including the impact Heaven makes on society and human government. In this article, we’ll briefly look at the case for a broader definition of the gospel, as well as the “two-sense” framework that pietistic evangelicals and others use to maintain a reductionist view of the term.

Half the battle on this subject is understanding why in the world it’s controversial in the first place, among biblically-minded Christians. The evidence is simple enough to present, and the reasoning isn’t difficult to understand. Yet when normal, everyday Christians read the Bible, see commandments pertaining to social issues, then start engaging in gospel-centered politics, there is often a knee-jerk reaction against such social action that comes back at them from evangelical leaders with a high view of scripture. Some reasons for this including the following:

• Many theologically compromised evangelicals are deeply political and partisan in our day, so the whole field of politics is associated with a bad thing that corrupts evangelicalism. We accept the trend, rather than correct it.
• The social gospel movement of last century genuinely perverted the biblical gospel in its attempt to address social issues, so it is wrongly perceived that any application of the gospel to social issues is likewise perverted.
• Americans generally have an allergy to any interaction between Church and State on political issues, so American Christians imbibe this extrabiblical concern into our theology.
• The pietist movement of the seventeenth century successfully preached a reductionist view of the gospel which focused exclusively on the personal salvation of the individual, and this became the lens through which evangelicalism falsely came to view orthodoxy.

Thus we find ourselves in a situation today where various groups are genuinely threatening the purity of the gospel, and evangelicals react by insisting that only the orthodox view of the gospel may be preached. But by this they mean the pietistic view of personal salvation alone. This works well enough when dealing with people who preach an obviously false gospel, because for all of its flaws, pietism is still better than a lot of the other junk floating out there. But those who challenge evangelical reductionism itself fall under the same critique, because pietism is assumed to be true without biblical review. Evangelicals unwittingly define orthodoxy as pietism, then constrain Christian ministry to prioritize personal salvation as the exclusive mission of the Church. Biblical social action is then rejected as if it were the social gospel, despite deep and foundational differences in the actual content of what is preached.

There is a very easy solution to all of this that demands very little of evangelicals in terms of repentance of a reductionist gospel. Abolitionists and other biblical activists don’t actually need to redefine the gospel to compel Christian involvement in the political sphere. The Bible does that through a battery of commandments that are rooted in the Christian ethic of love toward God and neighbor, which is the fruit of the Spirit’s regenerating work.

So if, as the pietists have it, the gospel is constrained to only include those doctrines which are necessary for personal salvation, Christians are still called to conform our lives to the example and commandments of Christ. Whether those commands exist as part of the gospel message itself, or as broader biblical teaching that describes what Christians should be and do post-salvation, biblical activists can still make a compelling case that social engagement is not only legitimate, but even the duty of Christians living in a nation with unrepentant national sin, no problem.

If all we care about is compelling Christians to social action, then abolitionists don’t have to redefine the gospel to accomplish that. But social action isn’t all we care about. We are Christians first and foremost, and we are only abolitionists because we believe that Christianity responds to national sin in particular ways. Because we are Christians, that means that we need to care about things like the perversion of the gospel, whether such perversion exists in modern inventions like critical theory, or in our own historic traditions like pietism. The reduction of the Christian gospel to care only about personal salvation is biblically wrong, and it’s part of the reason why western civilization is falling to pieces around us; we abandoned a formerly Christianized society to the Secularists.

Most importantly, pietism threatens the consistency and sufficiency of the gospel itself when we try to answer the question of how God would have us deal with national sin. It is well-established in scripture that individuals are not the only ones who sin. Collective groups like clans and nations can also bear a collective guilt of sin that brings the entire group under the judgement of God, regardless of the guilt or innocence of particular individuals within the group (Jon 4:11, Lev 20:1-5, Deu 21:1-9). How should that sin be resolved on a pietistic gospel that saves individuals alone? You would have to say that something other than the gospel saves nations from their sin, which should make anyone who loves Christ and his word vomit in his mouth. There is one gospel, no other name under heaven by which man must be saved. Jesus’ blood was sufficient to answer the entire problem of sin, and the gospel that we preach needs to account for the full scope of Adam’s fall.

So even though pietism isn’t a direct threat to Christian social action, and we can certainly appeal to the easy answer when we don’t have time to pursue full reform of pietism in our various conversations, we still need to care about the problem of pietism, and pursue reform when God gives us the opportunity. We need to care enough about the purity of the gospel to insist on biblical consistency from our evangelical brethren, and press them on the various ways in which their commitment to personal salvation alone conflict with a biblical rendering of the gospel. When we do the hard work of pushing for legitimate, biblical reform in this area, it will make the Church’s entire approach to the problem of sin more consistent, robust, and effective, whether it expresses itself in everyday people on the streets, or in the halls of power.

The rally cry for theonomists and other non-pietistic evangelicals is the “gospel of the kingdom,” a phrase that appears in the gospel of Matthew, and which has parallel phrasing in Mark. It emphasizes that gospel proclamation for the early Church encapsulated the whole impact of the kingdom of heaven on earth through the incarnation of Christ. This includes not only the kingdom’s impact on personal judgement and salvation, but its impact on the kingdoms of earth (e.g. the destruction of Jerusalem for her rejection of King Jesus, Mat 23:37-39). And it includes other things as well; King Jesus provides a total answer to the problem of sin. Every aspect of creation that has been tainted by sin is either destroyed or redeemed by the gospel of the kingdom of heaven.

This is the “hard” answer because despite its solid biblical foundation, it comes up against the historic conflict between pietism and the social gospel. Social gospel adherents appropriated “gospel of the kingdom” language — a legitimate biblical insight they used to attract people — and applied it to an extremely unbiblical and anti-Christian social program, going so far as to redefine entire theological categories in terms of humanism, naturalism, and other aspects of Chaos religion. So when Christians with a more biblical worldview use the same language to push back against pietism, we are often classified into the same category as the social gospel, that of liberal protestantism.

In short, there’s a baby in the social gospel, and a whole lot of bathwater that we have to work past in our discussions on this topic. The hard answer is that we need to save the baby — the biblical insight of a greater scope for the gospel that includes social action — and throw out all of the filthy bathwater that the social gospel tried to wash her with. Maybe then we can save some actual babies, instead of just singing songs and averting our eyes in the midst of the greatest genocide ever committed by man.

Among other places in scripture, the gospel of the kingdom is expressed well in Matthew, through its early account of John’s and Jesus’ gospel proclamation to Israel.

1. John the Baptist begins his prophetic witness, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Mat 3:2)
2. After John is put in prison, Jesus takes up the same message. (Mat 4:17)
3. This call of repentance is summarized as the “gospel of the kingdom” (Mat 4:23)
4. Then this gospel of the kingdom is elaborated in Jesus’ sermon on the mount (Mat 5-7)

Taken in context, the very detailed sermon on the mount is rightly viewed as an elaboration of the kind of content that Jesus was teaching throughout Galilee, the “gospel of the kingdom.” It wasn’t a sermon primarily about Jesus’ death on the cross, though the necessity of the cross is made evident by the impossible moral standard that Jesus presented for entrance into the kingdom of heaven (Mat 5:17-20). Like other presentations of law, it showed sinners why repentance was necessary, and the nature of the kingdom we would enter into and obey in place of our former slavery to sin.

So for Matthew, the term “gospel” encapsulates the total impact of the kingdom of heaven as it arrives on earth. It is at hand, and we are to repent while we are able, that we may enter into it. But we are doing more in our repentance than obtaining fire insurance, salvation from Hell. We are transferring from a self-centered, sinful way of life into a kingdom that values and produces genuine character and compassion modeled after the nature of its king Jesus.

The gospel of Mark is even more explicit on the scope of the gospel, in that he describes his entire account of Jesus’ arrival on earth as “the gospel” (Mar 1:1). This includes all kinds of historical and doctrinal content, such as the baptism of Jesus, the temptation of Jesus, the particular disciples of Jesus, the healings of Jesus, the relationship between the law of Moses and the law of Christ, the unforgivable sin, the nature of salvation, detailed eschatology (end times theology), and a myriad of other things. For Mark, the whole fact of Jesus’ arrival on earth is summarized as “the gospel,” and many of the implications of that arrival are worked out in the pages of his gospel account.

Scripture offers plenty of other support for a broad, kingdom-wide understanding of the scope of the gospel, but I’ll cite just one more for the sake of time. In Revelation, we have an angel preaching a message of repentance that contains no reference to the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Yet this is considered legitimate gospel proclamation in John’s estimation of the matter.

Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.” (Rev 14:6-7)

The angel describes some aspects of the arrival of heaven to earth, namely a global judgement by God. But no mention of blood atonement is given at this crucial moment in many people’s lives. There isn’t even the word “repent,” just a command to give God the glory and honor that he is due, which would be a fruit of repentance. To be sure, Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection all must be true facts of history in order for such repentance to work, because without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins (Heb 9:22-28). But the content of the gospel message apparently doesn’t always need to include that particular information, contrary to what is often claimed by pietistic evangelicals. Here’s just one example from 9marks concerning the test of “true” gospel proclamation:

This is crucial, the difference indeed between Gospel and not-Gospel: To proclaim the inauguration of the kingdom and the new creation and all the rest without proclaiming how people can enter it—by repenting and being forgiven of their sins through faith in Christ and his atoning death—is to preach a non-Gospel.

— 9Marks: What is the Gospel?

Some of that might be true, at least when compared to the passage above. The angel proclaims the coming kingdom and offers a means to enter it. But it doesn’t say anything about faith in Christ or his atoning death, merely an opportunity to demonstrate repentant submission to God.

The point here isn’t to diminish the importance of a person’s knowledge about how salvation is accomplished, but simply to show that mankind is saved by the object of his faith (God/Christ), not the particular knowledge he has about how that salvation is accomplished. The knowledge is important, but not salvific. This was the case in the salvation of Abraham, the example of salvation by faith that Paul used to defeat the Judaizers. The particular saving knowledge / doctrine that was communicated to Abram had nothing to do with blood atonement; it was that Abram would have a son and heir, and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars (Gen 15:1-6, Rom 4:1-5). It was Abram’s faith in God, and the trustworthiness of his word, that accomplished Abram’s salvation, not the particular content of God’s word to which his heart responded. And this is true for many people in scripture, like Noah, or Enoch, or Joseph, etc.

Thus we see that God presents in scripture a very broad gospel of the kingdom of heaven, one which impacts the whole of the cosmos, not only the salvation of individual souls. Individuals enter into the kingdom through repentance that expresses faith in God/Christ, but different people will have different amounts of knowledge about how salvation is accomplished by the kingdom of heaven.

When physical children are born, we do not have knowledge about how conception and birth function; we simply experience the entrance into a new world. In the same way, when people are born again into the kingdom of heaven (Jhn 3:1-10), we don’t need to understand how the new birth is accomplished as a prerequisite to experiencing it, we simply need to have faith in God that produces justification. Knowledge of justification and other doctrines of personal salvation is important, just as knowledge of the doctrines of national salvation is important. But none of that information is required for a person to be saved. It is entirely possible and eminently biblical for people to be saved both personally and nationally without all of the knowledge about how that salvation is accomplished.

Pietist push-back against a broad gospel really warrants a whole series of articles, rather than a mere section of an article. But to summarize, the typical answer is to segregate the gospel so that some doctrines (the approved, pietistic doctrines of personal salvation) are considered the gospel in a “narrow sense,” and all other aspects of the gospel are relegated to a “broad sense.” The upshot is that narrow gospel doctrines become part of the body of “primary doctrines” that the Church regards as necessary for salvation or inclusion in the Church, whereas the broad gospel doctrines become classified as “secondary doctrines” where disagreement in unity is allowed.

It’s important to realize that there is no exegetical warrant for splitting the gospel into two pieces or senses in scripture. This move is done for theological reasons, to make New Testament writing fit into the primary/secondary mold that people use to classify doctrine. But there is no reason in scripture to believe that the original authors had in mind any distinction between the gospel in a broad sense and the gospel in a narrow sense.

Most arguments for a narrow sense of the gospel will cite passages that talk about the atonement or some other aspect of the pietistic gospel, and claim that therefore a narrow sense must be legitimate. Yet these are explained equally well under the simple recognition that any doctrine classified under a supposed “narrow sense” of the gospel would also be classified under the “broad sense” of the gospel, because the broad includes the narrow. The gospel of the kingdom includes the doctrines that tell us how a person enters into the kingdom, among its other concerns. Because one is part of the other, every reference to the gospel can therefore be seen as a reference to the broad sense of the gospel alone, without any need for a narrow sense to even exist.

Consider for example the following claim from 9marks:

Romans 1:16–17: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”

Paul defines the gospel in terms of “salvation” and the righteousness of God being revealed through faith. It becomes clear through the rest of the book that he’s talking here about forgiveness of sins (justification) being through faith, not works. His focus in Romans is not on the coming kingdom, but on how one becomes a part of it. And that he calls “gospel.”

— 9Marks: What is the Gospel?

Again, a focus on how one enters into the coming kingdom is also a focus on the coming kingdom, by definition. One includes the other. So one can claim this as evidence that justification is part of a narrow sense of the gospel. But all it actually provides is evidence that justification is part of “the gospel.” There is no narrow sense described here, no reason from this text that demands that we separate some doctrines within the gospel from others, and make them part of a core gospel, or narrow gospel. Rather, justification is part of the gospel, and we are superimposing the idea of a narrow gospel onto the text.

Against the narrow gospel claim, Paul does use the term “gospel” in Romans to describe things other than how one enters into the coming kingdom. Paul describes the gospel as including Jesus’ biological descent from David (1:1-4), as well as Jesus’ eschatological judgement of mankind (2:16). And he focuses on far more than the question of how one enters into personal salvation, discussion Israeology and the works flowing out of salvation, to name just a couple themes.

The data we have on Romans shows that Paul is talking about “the gospel” as a unified concept that encapsulates a spectrum of smaller doctrines, some which fit pietistic distinctives, and others that go beyond them. Paul in Romans is describing the gospel, not the narrow gospel. There is no exegetical reason to believe that such a narrow gospel even exists, only a theological reason that superimposes it onto the text of scripture, here and elsewhere. When pietists speak of a narrow gospel, the simple question to ask of the passage is, “Why can’t this just be part of the broader gospel of the kingdom?” There is one sense of “the gospel” presented in scripture, and it is our theology that needs to change to align with its broader contours.

The gospel is the good news of Jesus’ kingdom of heaven arriving to earth. It presented itself when King Jesus came to earth to live, die, and rise again as a man, and through his work on the cross it offers a total answer to the problem of sin that plagues the universe. This includes an offer of forgiveness and restoration to individuals who place their faith in God and his appointed king Jesus. And it includes a myriad of other implications with partial redemption offered in the present day, and total redemption promised for the age to come.

This means that just as it is appropriate to speak of gospel-centered evangelism, it is equally valid to speak of gospel-centered ecology, political reform, education, or psychology, etc. While a utopian society will never be achieved as long as sin ravages the heavens and the earth, Christianity nevertheless offers a sanctifying influence that produces gradual improvement as man brings his civilization increasingly under the lordship of Christ. Because every aspect of man’s nature and dominion are impacted by the fall of Adam and Eve, every aspect of man’s nature and dominion are redeemed by the gospel of Christ and his Church, both now and in the age to come.

To reduce the gospel to only those aspects which redeem individuals from Hell is to affirm a mere subset of what is reflected in the biblical record. Such a reductionist gospel is biblically deficient and destructive to human civilization, leaving sin-centered ideologies to ravage the earth in its place as false gospels that offer false answers to the manifold problems of sin and death.