If the left understands the gospel as justice, the right considers it as justification. From John Piper, who asked if Jesus preached Paul’s gospel—and by that wondered if Jesus preached justification by faith alone, to Greg Gilbert’s new book What is the Gospel?, this group of pastors and theologians believe the gospel is justification by faith, and by this they mean justification as understood in the Reformation. Without a hint of reductionism, the essence of this gospel is double imputation and the necessity for the sinner to dig deeply into his or her own dark heart to see the glory of this truth in order truly to be saved or to have comprehended the gospel.2 Still, Gilbert’s book perfectly meshes with the standard understanding of the gospel that one hears in most forms of evangelism, from John Stott and Billy Graham, to Nicky Gumbel: God is creator, God is loving but holy, humans are made in God’s image but are sinners under God’s wrath, Jesus came to die so that wrath can be averted, and all one must do is to believe that message—faith alone—and so attain salvation to spend eternity with God. Gilbert’s approach is more nuanced, but he has four points: God (and love is minimized in his sketch), man as sinner, Christ, and faith. Yes, each of these elements is true and can be found in the Bible but Jesus, Peter, and Paul would not recognize that gospel as their gospel. In other words, I’m unconvinced either of these gospels will play in the Peoria of the New Testament. I am convinced they do play in modern Peorias because both are forms of colonizing the gospel to the agendas of our own culture. Those are strong claims and they will be supported in what follows.
Before I sketch how Jesus and the apostles understood the gospel, I want to make three brief points. The first is that many of us, and I include myself, came to Christ when someone preached that gospel as the gospel. So, whatever I have to say in what follows does not diminish that this gospel has worked, works, and will probably continue to work. Second, this word “works” deserves attention. The correlation of those who respond to that four- or five-step gospel and those who follow Christ as disciples is not high. David Kinnamon, who is now President of the Barna Research organization, showed me some numbers once wherein it was clear that about 90 percent of children who grow up in evangelical homes “make a decision for Christ” but only about 20 percent can be said to be “following Christ” when they are in their thirties. The research doesn’t show this, but does anyone doubt that the gospel those 90 percent heard was more or less the gospel we sketched above? The third point now will begin to scrape the chalkboard: the four-point approach in the standard evangelical gospel is our doctrine of salvation arranged into a compelling, convicting, guilt-producing, rhetorical bundle. What drives this gospel, though, has begun to change in the last decade or so, with a marked decline in the idea that God is the kind of judge who will send someone to suffer consciously in hell for all eternity if they don’t respond to the offer of the good news. What many of us grew up with then was a rhetorically effective bundling of the doctrine of salvation shaped to precipitate decisions that would relieve our deepest angst about God and our eternal state, and what drove that bundle was the threat of judgment and hell. Jesus, then, was sent to give us a chance to escape the wrath of God.
Again, I do not question any of the four points or anything I’ve said about salvation in the previous comments. I believe in God’s judgment, and I believe that Jesus saves us, and I believe that God loves us. But, and here’s the scraping part, this is not what Jesus, or Peter, or Paul meant when they used the word “gospel.” What, then, did they mean?
Leg One: 1 Corinthians 15
To answer this question, we have to ask how we are to answer this question. In good Protestant fashion we have to go to the Bible, and that means we are in search of a text that defines gospel, and happily we’ve got one: 1 Corinthians 15. But when we go to 1 Corinthians 15, something in the text immediately jumps up at us and says “Surprise, surprise!” Why? Because the one text that defines gospel in the entire New Testament tells us that the gospel is neither “justice” nor “justification.” Instead, it tells us that the gospel announces the resolution to a story. To be sure, that story saves, effecting both justification and justice, but what drives the gospel according to 1 Corinthians is neither the injustice of this world that needs to be set aright, nor our sins—Adamic and personal—that need to be forgiven. And neither does it suggest that the problem the gospel resolves is God’s wrath. What drives the justice gospel is social systems gone awry and what drives the justification gospel is personal rebellion leading to guilt, but what drives the apostolic gospel of 1 Corinthians 15 is something else.
I will make seven observations about the apostolic gospel, and I will then suggest that this fresh perspective on the gospel throws piercing light on church praxis and mission in our world today. Rerun: what played in the original Peoria of the New Testament will play as well in modern and postmodern Peorias. But it will require that we make some adjustments in our minds and praxis.
First, a historical claim: before there was a New Testament, before the apostles wrote letters, before the Gospels were written, there was the gospel. When it comes to the Christian faith, in the beginning was the gospel. The gospel created the church, and the Gospels. The gospel created the Epistles, and the gospel created the New Testament, and the canon.
Second, there is dispute about which verses of this text are the gospel. Some say only verses three to five refer to the gospel while others see it extending from verse three through to verse eight. But in light of what we will see of the gospel elsewhere in the New Testament, and all the way to the Nicene Creed, we might do ourselves the favor of thinking that Paul, though he can chase a few tangents here and there, never left the gospel and that it extends from verse three through to verse twenty-eight.
Third, the gospel of 1 Corinthians 15 is not Paul’s gospel as if he were the first to articulate it. The gospel of 1 Corinthians 15, made clear in Paul’s own words in verses 1–3, is the one and only apostolic gospel that was passed on in oral form from the very beginning by all apostolic Christians. This is not Paul’s gospel; this is the apostolic gospel and therefore Paul’s gospel.
Fourth, the gospel is defined by events in Jesus’s life. In crisp formulae we find four rapidly narrated events in verses 3–5: he died, he was buried, he was raised, and he appeared. If we continue to verse 28, we need to add that he was exalted, and he will reign, and he will return, and he will hand over to the Father. Instead of four spiritual laws, we get four (or more) events in the life of Jesus. I cannot emphasize this contrast enough. The gospel of evangelicalism is an abstracted system of salvation and even transaction; the gospel of the apostles was a story about Jesus. I’m not saying this to be cute or provocative; I’m saying this because it’s what 1 Corinthians 15 says.
Fifth, the word “gospel” means to “announce” or to “declare,” and what is declared according to 1 Corinthians 15 is that Israel’s story has come to its fitting completion in the story of Jesus. “To gospel,” then, was to announce that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and the destined goal of the story of Israel. This is made clear in verses