Theopedia

Gospel

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel.”

— Mark 1:15 (ESV)

Definition

The gospel is the announcement that God has acted in Jesus Christ to save sinners: that Christ died for sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, “in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). The English word translates the Greek euangelion, “good news,” the sense also carried by the Hebrew behind Isaiah’s “good tidings” (Isaiah 52:7). It reports something God has already done, not instructions for the hearer to carry out. The New Testament also uses the word for the four written accounts of that same event: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession identifies the gospel as the way the covenant of grace itself has come to sinners across redemptive history:

“This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.”1

Beyond that, the confession devotes an entire chapter to the gospel, word for word identical to the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration of 1658, an addition beyond the original Westminster Confession, which has no equivalent chapter:

“The covenant of works being broken by sin, and made unprofitable unto life, God was pleased to give forth the promise of Christ, the seed of the woman, as the means of calling the elect, and begetting in them faith and repentance; in this promise the gospel, as to the substance of it, was revealed, and therein effectual for the conversion and salvation of sinners.”2

The chapter goes on to insist that the gospel is made known “only by the Word of God,” not by “the works of creation or providence” or “the light of nature,”3 and that even where it is preached, an “effectual insuperable work of the Holy Spirit upon the whole soul” is still required before a sinner can be born again.4 The gospel, on this reading, is the outward means by which Christ and saving grace are revealed, but not itself the cause of the new birth it announces.

Biblical Basis

Jesus opens his public ministry by announcing the message itself: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15), fulfilling the description of one anointed “to preach good tidings” (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18). Paul later hands on a summary he says he did not invent: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).

Scripture applies several descriptive titles to the gospel, each naming a different facet of the one message. John Gill catalogs them: it is “the gospel of salvation” because it reports Christ as the author of salvation (Ephesians 1:13); “the gospel of the grace of God” because the blessings it conveys, election, redemption, pardon, justification, adoption, and eternal life, are of grace and not of works (Acts 20:24; Ephesians 2:8); “the gospel of peace” because it relates the covenant of peace and Christ’s making peace by his own blood (Ephesians 6:15; Colossians 1:20); and “the gospel of the kingdom” because it announces both the kingdom of grace now and the kingdom of glory to come (Matthew 4:23).5

The gospel’s origin is repeatedly set against human invention. Paul insists he “did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:11-12), and calls it “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes… for in it the righteousness of God is revealed” (Romans 1:16-17). Mark Seifrid reads that last clause as an announcement of God’s own vindication as Creator and Judge, not merely as a description of the salvation given to individuals: “It is in the Gospel, which announces the crucified and risen Christ, that the ‘righteousness of God’ is revealed… Just as our sin brought Christ’s condemnation and death, his resurrection announces our justification.”6

Historical Development

The Reformation’s recovery of the law-gospel distinction

Herman Bavinck traces how medieval theology blurred Paul’s distinction between law and gospel by treating Christ as a further lawgiver alongside Moses, so that the gospel came to function as a new law to be kept rather than a gift to be received: “Rome equated the old and new covenants with law and gospel respectively, not just Moses but also Christ was a legislator… thereby erasing the Pauline antithesis of law and gospel.”7 The Reformers held two things together against this: the underlying unity of the covenant of grace across both testaments, and a sharp distinction between law and gospel as “two essentially different revelations of divine will,” a distinction Bavinck credits with restoring “the peculiar character of the Christian religion as a religion of grace.”8

The Marrow Controversy

The same distinction resurfaced as a live dispute among Scottish Presbyterians between 1718 and 1723. A 1718 reprint of Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1645) provoked what became known as the Marrow Controversy: the book’s opponents, called “neonomians,” held that repentance, or some prior evidence of grace, ought to be required before the gospel could rightly be offered to a sinner. The “Marrow Men,” among them Thomas Boston, defended the book’s insistence that the gospel is to be offered freely to all without any such precondition, warning that requiring one turns the gospel itself back into a law.9

Opposing Views

The New Perspective on Paul

E. P. Sanders described second-Temple Judaism as already a religion of grace, a pattern he called “covenantal nomism,” in which membership in the covenant rested on God’s gracious election rather than merit, while obedience maintained rather than earned that membership.10 Building on Sanders, “new perspective” interpreters of Paul, among them James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright, describe the content of Paul’s gospel as chiefly a social and corporate announcement: that God has opened covenant membership to Gentiles as Gentiles, apart from the “works of the law” they read as Jewish ethnic boundary markers such as circumcision and food laws, rather than as, in the first place, a message addressed to the individual sinner’s guilt before God and need of justification.11

Objections and Responses

Is the gospel’s content chiefly a social and corporate reality, the inclusion of the Gentiles, rather than the justification of the individual sinner? Mark Seifrid grants that the New Perspective rightly notices a social dimension to Paul’s gospel but argues that dimension cannot stand on its own: “The ‘new perspective’ on Paul legitimately emphasises the social dimension of Paul’s gospel, the announcement that God has included the Gentiles. Taken by itself, however, such inclusivism is nothing more than the embrace of an ideal… Paul’s Gospel transcends such ideals in that it announces the advent of a new being in the resurrection of the crucified Christ in whom the world has been judged.”12 On his reading, Paul’s own argument in Romans grounds “the righteousness of God” revealed “in the gospel” in God’s vindication of his own justice through Christ’s death and resurrection, not in covenant membership as such (Romans 1:17; 3:25-26; 4:25).13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 20, “Of the Gospel, and of the Extent of the Grace Thereof,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Second London Baptist Confession, 20.2. ↩

  4. Second London Baptist Confession, 20.4. ↩

  5. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book IV, chap. 7, “Of the Gospel.” ↩

  6. Mark A. Seifrid, “The ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and Its Problems,” Themelios 25, no. 2 (2000): 16. ↩

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22. ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation,” n. 32. ↩

  10. Seifrid, “New Perspective on Paul,” 4. ↩

  11. Seifrid, “New Perspective on Paul,” 7-8. ↩

  12. Seifrid, “New Perspective on Paul,” 14. ↩

  13. Seifrid, “New Perspective on Paul,” 16-18. ↩