What is the gospel? Part One
The story of Jesus in the New Testament
Frankly, I find it frustrating when theologians debate the definition of the gospel. The gospel is like the four wheels on our car. We don’t need to think about the wheels, because everywhere we go it is the gospel that takes us there. Yet, differences of opinion about the gospel conflict and converge and confuse. Before we get a flat tire, let’s try to inflate our thinking with just the right pressure.
Five Different Gospel Interpretations
In Bible Gateway, Michael F. Bird at Ridley College in Melbourne and Jason Maston at Houston Christian University compare and contrast five different understandings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I like theologians who categorize, slot, and offer us alternatives. Here is their taxonomy.
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. 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.
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. 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 gospel demands faith, not a passive faith but a faith that yields holiness and obedience.
Wesleyan: A view of the gospel that accents the free offer of grace and the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. T he 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.
Pentecostal: A view of the gospel that focuses on Jesus and the Spirit as the power for faith, forgiveness, and freedom. 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.
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. 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. The gospel, then, should drive persons toward caring for others and dismantling systems that harm people and even creation itself.
Now, to be charitable, I find the Bird/Maston taxonomy somewhat illuminating. If I must place myself, I affirm the Reformation version of the gospel. But not the Reformed version Byrd and Maston describe. They inadvertently reduce the Reformation to only one sub-tradition, namely the Calvinistic or Reformed tradition.
When I think of the Reformation, I think of Martin Luther. Luther’s emphasis on the gospel as the message of divine grace does not make even honorable mention on this list of options. Sigh.
The Lutheran branch of the Protestant Reformation gave us sola scriptura (Scripture Alone) as well as sola gratia (Grace Alone). With these two emphases in mind, let’s ask again: what is the gospel?
What is the gospel?
Again: what is the gospel? Here is the answer I tender for your consideration: the gospel is the story of Jesus told with its significance. The significance of Jesus’ story comes in three forms: new creation, justification, and proclamation.
Note that we begin with Scripture. We begin with the story of Jesus as told in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and in brief elsewhere. The story of Jesus demands interpretation. That’s what the theologian does. St. Paul is an interpreter of the story of Jesus. New creation, justification, and proclamation are three theological concepts that St. Paul derives from the story of Jesus.
In what follows, I will (1) show how the gospel as the story of Jesus appears in Scripture. Then I will interpret the story of Jesus in three theological concepts: (2) new creation; (3) justification; and (4) proclamation. Each of these will occupy one in a series of Substack blog posts.
The one gospel versus the four Gospels
Might we find the gospel in a Gospel? The term, ‘gospel’, lower case, refers to the central message of the New Testament in abbreviated form. The term, ‘Gospel’, upper case, refers to one or more of the first four books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
The Gospel of Mark opens by announcing the gospel of Jesus Christ: “The beginning of the good news [gospel] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Because the word gospel (Greek: τò εὐαγγέλιον) means “good news,” we take it that Mark is referring to the story or the report or the good news regarding the events surrounding the biography of this man, Jesus. The structure of Mark’s Gospel is that of a narrative, a story, a history, an announcement of something that happened. My thesis is that the gospel involves the act of telling the story of Jesus with its significance. The story of Jesus, told with its significance, constitutes the material norm for Christian systematic theology.
The story of Jesus and its significance come to us as a single piece. To say that the story of Jesus is good news already involves a certain level of confession, of commitment to the meaningfulness or significance of this story. In fact, the story in its most compact form of symbolization never appears in the Bible apart from this interpretive perspective. With the Bible as our source, we have no access to Jesus apart from this interpretation. The news of Jesus and its goodness are found together, inseparable. Just how and why it is good news are reflected in the most primitive confessional or kerygmatic formulas.
Can we find the gospel in the Book of Acts?
The sermons of Peter and Paul in Acts provide excellent examples of the gospel in miniature. Because of their function as the first evangelization in the ministry of the early church, we can expect that although brief they will include the essential and unmistakable heart of the primitive Christian message.
Four quite consistent elements appear whenever the story of Jesus is told: (1) the fulfillment of prior Hebrew expectations; (2) the unwarranted death of the righteous one; (3) the resurrection from the dead; and (4) the forgiveness of sins. Whether addressing the people from Solomon’s portico or responding to the threat of prison for preaching in the name of Jesus, the apostles typically recited briefly the history of Israel understood as pointing forward toward fulfillment. This was followed by reporting the execution of Jesus on the cross and his vindication by God through the Easter resurrection. It was further explained that all this happened to affect the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of Israel (Acts 3:12-26; 5:24-32; 10:34-43; 13:16-41). This preaching seems to have come as bad news as judgment to those who rejected it, because it appeared “to bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28). But to those among the “great numbers of both men and women” (Acts 5:14) who became believers it was good news because it brought healing into their lives.
These sermon summaries were intended to extend the horizon of the gospel beyond the Jewish tradition to appeal to Gentiles. New Testament historian David Balch stresses that these speeches in Luke-Acts function to widen the scope of God’s grace to include non-Jews, to bring the covenant to all peoples (Balch, 2015, p. 244). Thus, we would expect to find in these sermonic messages the heart of the gospel, the essence of the gospel.
It is likely that the speeches of Peter and Paul reported in the book of Acts are not word for word records of what the apostles actually said. They are probably the compositions of the author of Acts. Yet it is quite likely that they accurately reflect the original. I say this for three reasons. First, because of the “we” passages scholars are generally agreed that the author of Acts must have been a traveling companion for at least some of the adventures reported. Having actually heard the original addresses, the writer could certainly remember the general content of what was said.
Second, the writer declares himself or herself or themselves to be a historian who is attempting to present “an orderly account” of what happened so that the reader can “know the truth” (Luke 1:3,4). There is an avowed attempt to be accurate and to present the truth.
This leads directly to the third and most important reason: it appears that the objective of the original speeches and the objective of the book of Acts are nearly the same. Both are trying to present the gospel. Both constitute a form of evangelization. Even if we do not know word for word what Peter and Paul said on the reported occasions, the author of the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts is trying to do the same thing as Peter and Paul, namely, to tell the story of Jesus with its significance.
Can we find the gospel in the New Testament epistles?
The book of Acts is not the only New Testament source for such brief presentations of Jesus and his significance. For example, 1 Peter 3:18-22 offers a complementary form of gospel presentation. It appears to be an early creedal summary that most probably predates the letter itself. Some scholars contend that behind this text is an early Christian hymn similar to the ones quoted in 1 Timothy 3:16 or even Philippians 2:6-11 and Colossians 1:15-20. In a mode of expression anticipating the Roman Symbol and the Apostles’ Creed, the 1 Peter text follows Christ’s resurrection with his exaltation to the right hand of God and its efficacy for the believer in baptism.
The heart of the statement is the report of the righteous one who died for the unrighteous. This results in the forgiveness of sins—Xριστòϛ ἅπαζ περὶ ἀµαρτιϖν ἒπαθεν (or ἀπέθανεν), δίκαιοϛ ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων—in order that he might bring us to God. The substitution of the righteous Christ for the unrighteous sinner, perhaps connoting a sacrificial offering (Lev. 14:19 in LXX), establishes for us a new rapport with God. We might consider 1 Peter 3:18 the gospel in a single sentence, the story and its significance in a single statement.
[I don’t take sides here regarding the claim that penal substitution should be the one and only model of atonement.]
Another story of Jesus told with its significance? Paul’s kerygmatic formulation in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 includes many of the elements we identified in Acts: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, . . . was buried, . . . was raised on the third day, . . . appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” Hence, by “story of Jesus with its interpretive significance” I do not necessarily mean the full-blown narratives of the Synoptic Gospels. These came later. What I mean is the reference to certain indispensable historical occurrences in the career of Jesus that establishes that God has worked definitively to accomplish salvation.
The significance of the story of Jesus is that it announces our salvation. We may spell out this significance in terms of three New Testament themes: the gospel as new creation, justification, and proclamation. To these three theological interpretations we turn in the next Substack blog posts.
Substack ST 2031 What is the gospel? Part One
Patheos ST 2004 What is the gospel?
Patheos ST 2005 What is Justification by Faith?
Patheos ST 2026 Faith alone belongs to the gospel. And Luther was right!
Substack ST 2031 What is the gospel? Part One
Substack ST 2032 What is the gospel? Part Two
Substack ST 2033 What is the gospel? Part Three
Substack ST 2034 What is the gospel? Part Four
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Meet Tehttp://publictheology.kr/main/bbs/content.php?co_id=s2_1d Peters. Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor, teaching theology and ethics. He is author of Short Prayers and The Cosmic Self. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3rd edition, God—The World’s Future (Fortress 2015). His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.
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