The gospel is something that every Christian should know, understand, and be able to articulate on the spot.
We are baptized in the story of the gospel, and the Lord’s Supper is a regular celebration of the gospel. We habitually read from books called “Gospels.” We are told that we should support evangelism — that is, the active promotion of the gospel. Our churches sponsor missionaries and parachurch ministries whose primary business is the advancement of the gospel. There is even a broad Protestant coalition called “Evangelicalism.” The evangel, the gospel, is so ubiquitous that its content and concerns should be self-evident to all people of Christian faith.
What Is There to Debate?
And yet the topic of the gospel, what one might think is undebatable, is debated. Yes, we all agree that the gospel has something to do with God and Jesus, salvation, and faith, but after that it can get contentious and confusing. Theologians and pastors disagree on what the gospel is in essence, what to emphasize in the gospel, what problem the gospel is trying to rectify or remedy, how we should respond to the gospel, and what the implications of the gospel are for the church, mission, individual piety, and everyday life.
No wonder there is an industry of books trying to clarify the substance of the gospel, its meaning, and entailments for contemporary audiences.
The complexity over defining the gospel is not merely a result of our unsanctified souls, a deficiency in religious education, or even a creeping worldliness in the church. Discussion over the gospel is generated by the very necessity of articulating it for diverse audiences.
The gospel is not a mathematical formula. It is more like the performance of a dramatic story about God and his Son, and all performances have to be scripted, interpreted, translated, and communicated to audiences.
Facilitating the Conversation
In this article, and the book (Five Views on the Gospel) on which it’s based, we are pursuing a multi-perspectival exploration of the gospel: its biblical foundations, its meaning, and its various entailments.
We have assembled a fantastic and diverse collection of authors, each of whom have a deep love for God, an abiding faith in Christ, a commitment to advance the gospel, and a history of Christian service. They are at the top of their respective fields when it comes to scholarship, and they hail from diverse traditions and contexts. Now, we are bringing them all together to explain and explore the gospel both individually and as part of an ongoing conversation.
Obviously, we have not been able to incorporate every single perspective, tradition, and theology into this discussion. But what we have included is, we think, a diverse sample of views that will speak to churches, mainly Protestant churches in the Anglophone world, and help them think evangelically about the gospel.
The views included in this discussion are:
- King Jesus: A view of the gospel rooted in Scripture’s storyline that places an emphasis on the identity of Jesus as Messiah and Lord.
- Reformation: A view of the gospel indebted to the legacy of the Reformation that places emphasis on God’s grace, justification by faith, and union with Christ.
- Wesleyan: A view of the gospel that accents the free offer of grace and the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.
- Pentecostal: A view of the gospel that focuses on Jesus and the Spirit as the power for faith, forgiveness, and freedom.
- Liberation: A view of the gospel that centers on the holistic redeeming and liberating work of the gospel and how it addresses the entire human condition.
A Summary of Five Gospel Perspectives
Following is a summary of the five different perspectives on the gospel explored in this discussion.
King Jesus Gospel
According to Scot McKnight, the New Testament gospel is indebted to the storyline of Scripture, a story that climaxes in the revelation of Jesus the Messiah, the king, who rescues his people and makes them his royal subjects. What is more, the gospel is something that Jesus preached, it was a gospel about a kingdom, and a kingdom is a people ruled by a king.
The context for understanding the gospel is the intrusion of evil into the world, the eschatological promises for redemption given in Scripture, and the empires of the ages that represent the sum of anti-God forces in our world. McKnight believes that the gospel calls for people to surrender to God in faith, embrace the lordship of Jesus, and live out the gospel story of healing and hope in our own everyday lives.
The biblical texts that McKnight regards as paramount for understanding the gospel are Isaiah 40:3, Mark 1:15, Acts 2:36, 38, 13:38–39, and 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. The impact that the gospel makes is for believers to submit to Christ by adopting a pattern of life typified by Christoformity with cruciformity.
Reformation Gospel
Expounding the Reformation Gospel position indicative of the Calvinistic and Westminster tradition, Michael Horton takes as central Jesus’s work as prophet, priest, and king, who imputes righteousness to believers, taking them from condemnation to righteousness. He closely coordinates the gospel with a forensic understanding of justification by faith.
Viewed this way, the context of the gospel is the biblical narrative of plight and solution, with the plight construed as curse and condemnation, and the solution construed as righteousness and eternal life.
The texts that Horton regards as the most salient for his case are Luke 18:9–16, Acts 15:8–11, and Romans 4:3–6, with manifold references to Romans and Galatians along the way. For Horton, the gospel demands faith, not a passive faith but a faith that yields holiness and obedience. To live a life worthy of the gospel means, under Horton’s Reformed perspective, to ensure that faith operates in, through, and for love.
Wesleyan Gospel
The Wesleyan Gospel as articulated by David A. deSilva is the one that has currency in Methodist circles and various holiness movements influenced by John and Charles Wesley. For deSilva, the gospel is the story of how God’s grace undoes the penalty and power of sin and concurrently draws us into a life of holiness.
The context for the gospel is the conviction that human beings have failed to worship God and need a change of heart to render to God the holy worship due to God as our Creator and Redeemer.
Several texts are central in that articulation for deSilva, including John 3:3, Romans 6:1–11, 13:11, and Hebrews 12:14. He sees the gospel calling people to faith, the experience of new birth, a sense of assurance, with the Spirit given as a power toward perfection. Believing the gospel should result in intentional discipleship, a reliance on the Holy Spirit, divesting oneself of sin, and investing in a Christian community.
Pentecostal Gospel
Julie Ma advocates for a Pentecostal Gospel shaped by her Asian heritage and ministry experience and resourced from the Pentecostal tradition. Ma contends that the gospel is principally concerned with the liberating work of the Holy Spirit.
The gospel meets our need to escape marginalization and to receive blessings. Human beings are alienated from God and need to return to the abundant, precious blessings that God designed us to enjoy. What stands in the way is not only our sin but the sinful institutions and structures around us.
Biblical texts that strike Ma as important include Luke 4:18–19, Acts 1:8, 2:1–12, and 1 Corinthians 12:7–9. The benefits that the gospel confers are empowerment for our own participation in the mission of God in our world. The result of our gospel-experience should be, argues Ma, a holistic spirituality where we seek to care for each other in body, mind, and spirit.
Liberation Gospel
Shively T. J. Smith presents a Liberation Gospel in the tradition of African-American experience and religious testimony. For Smith, the fact that Jesus died a slave’s death means that the gospel is concerned with liberation, both spiritual and social, to set people free from the forces of death and exploitation.
The context for the gospel is the human experience of depravation caused by our own sinning and deprivation caused by the sinful behavior of others. Manifold texts speak about the human experience of illness, poverty, ethnic and racial discrimination, gender bias, social-class stratification, dispossession, disinheritance, and marginalization. Thus, for Smith, biblical texts that she finds important are stories like the good Samaritan from Luke 10:25–37 and others that speak about and emphasize human dignity and accompaniment as a necessity for resolving human misery, exploitation, and struggle.
The gospel, then, should drive persons toward caring for others and dismantling systems that harm people and even creation itself. Smith believes that when the gospel is practiced, it results in the witness of inclusion, equality, and freedom. An essential benefit of the liberation gospel, in Smith’s mind, is championing our moral responsibility to each other.
The Goal Is Knowing God Better
The aim of this conversation is not to problematize the gospel, not to make the gospel opaque or obtuse by inundating readers with a myriad of perspectives or by burying them in scholarly details. Quite the opposite.
The objective of this conversation is to help readers appreciate the richness and depth of the gospel, to grasp the different ways the gospel can be proclaimed and applied, to notice diverse scriptural witness to the gospel, to exhort the churches to attain clarity and conviction about the gospel, and to consider the ministry of the gospel as a task that the entire church, both lay people and clergy, have responsibility to undertake.
The gospel requires knowing, teaching, preaching, guarding, going, giving, living, and loving in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Accordingly, the objective we are pursuing is that readers may come away from our book knowing God better (see Eph. 1:17) by wrestling with the manifold wisdom of God as it is given to us in the gospel, so that we might better delight in the gospel, live a life worthy of it, and carry it with us in our life, work, and service.
Adapted from Five Views on the Gospel, edited by Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston.
Presenting a variety of contemporary and tradition-based perspectives, each contributor in Five Views on the Gospel answers key questions about the nature of the gospel. The CounterPoints format provides a unique opportunity for each contributor to set forth their own understanding of the gospel, to interact with competing perspectives, and for the editors to sum up points of agreement and disagreement and a path forward in the debate.
Michael F. Bird (PhD, University of Queensland) is Deputy Principal, Director of Research, and Lecturer in New Testament at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. He is an Anglican priest and author of over thirty books, including Evangelical Theology, Romans (Story of God Bible Commentary), Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible, and with N. T. Wright, The New Testament in Its World and Jesus and the Powers.
Jason Maston (PhD, Durham University) is Associate Professor of theology and Associate Dean, School of Christian Thought, at Houston Christian University. He is the author of Divine and Human Agency in Second Temple Judaism and Paul and has coedited several works, including the Reading in Context volumes (Zondervan Academic) and Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination.
