Day 4: What is the Gospel?

We Christians are always talking about the Gospel. Well, some of us are, anyway. We say that preaching ought to be "Gospel-centered" or perhaps even "Gospel-driven." We tell ourselves that Christians ought to preach the Gospel to themselves daily, and some of us put a great deal of importance on "sharing the Gospel" with others.

And I agree with all that. The problem arises when we ask the simple question, "What gospel?"

In my experience among Evangelical Christians, the gospel is often reduced to a brief statement summarizing the doctrine of substitutionary atonement or the doctrine of justification. Christ died for our sins, in our place, assuaging the wrath of God, and winning for all who believe forgiveness and everlasting life. We ourselves can do nothing to save ourselves (good works won't cut it). No, it had to be Jesus, the Son of God.

Something like this message is what Billy Graham focused on, and perhaps it is as much his fault as anyone else's that people default to this understanding. And of course it is not without Biblical warrant.

But I believe there is much more to the gospel than that. Bible.org does a fair job of answering the question, "What is the Gospel?" At least they get around to some of the other Biblical passages that indicate a broader definition of "gospel" than just the doctrine of justification.

Now, of course, there is much to be said on this topic, and it's not my intention to attempt to say it all. In brief, I think we ought to use and understand the term "gospel" more broadly than we do. I think that by limiting the term (in practice) to the doctrine of justification we incur unnecessary consequences.

It is the nature of those consequences that has been intriguing me lately. In a future post, I want to talk more about a broader understanding of the Gospel, and why it's important. I also want to talk about those pesky consequences of a too justification-centric understanding of the "good news."