What is the gospel?
Great series of posts by Greg Gilbert, senior pastoral assistant to Mark Dever at Capital Hill Baptist. I met Greg at the 9Marks Weekender and was greatly encouraged by some thoughts he shared as I related my time at New Life.
What is the Gospel?—There Are Really Two Conversations Going on Here, Not Just One
What we need to understand is that neither of these two questions is wrong, and neither is more biblical than the other. The Bible asks and answers both of them. Sometimes it says that “the gospel” is that message which a person must believe in order to be forgiven of sin—and that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, is the message that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was raised on the third day. Other times the Bible uses the word “gospel” to refer to the whole complex of promises that God intends to keep through Christ, such as in Matthew 4, Mark 1, Luke 4, and Acts 13.
Once we acknowledge all that, and once we realize that we aren’t all answering the same question when we say “The gospel is . . .”, I think we’ll be able to avoid some of the tension in the conversation. Not only so, but it seems to me that we’ll then be able to understand more clearly why the Bible uses “gospel” in both a broad and a narrow sense, and how those two senses fit together.
And that in turn will help us understand why (and this is important) the New Testament puts pastoral and evangelistic priority on the narrow sense—and why it expects us to do the same.
What is the Gospel?—The NT Uses the Word “Gospel” In Two Ways
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.
What Is The Gospel?—Tying It All Together
I think we can get at an answer to all those questions by realizing that the Gospel of the Cross (that is, the narrow sense of “gospel”) is not just any part of the Gospel of the Kingdom (that is, the broad sense of “gospel”).* Rather, the gospel of the cross is the gateway, the fountainhead, even the seed, so to speak, of the gospel of the kingdom. Read the whole NT, and you quickly realize that its univocal message is that a person cannot get to those broad blessings of the Kingdom except by being forgiven of sin through the death of Christ. That is the fountain from which all the rest springs.
That, I think, is why it’s perfectly appropriate for the biblical authors to call that fountainhead “The Gospel” even as they also call the whole package—including forgiveness, justification, resurrection, new creation and all the rest—”The Gospel.” Because the broad blessings of the gospel are attained only by means of the narrow (atonement, forgiveness, faith and repentance), and because those blessings are attained infallibly by means of the narrow, it’s entirely appropriate for the New Testament writers to call that gateway/seed/fountainhead promise “The Gospel.”
It’s also perfectly appropriate for the NT to call that fountainhead “The Gospel” and at the same time not call any other particular blessing of the broader package “The Gospel.” So we don’t call human reconciliation “The Gospel.” Nor do we even call the new heavens and new earth “The Gospel.” But we do call forgiveness through atonement “The Gospel” because it is the fountainhead of and gateway to all the rest.