What is the gospel?

What Saint Paul Really Said, N.T. Wright

Question: How does Paul’s ‘4 part gospel’ according to N.T. Wright deconstruct and/or reveal as misguided the evangelistic efforts of today’s church?

In Chapter 3, Wright begins to unpack Paul’s usage of the term gospel (evangelion) in his letters within the context of Paul’s conversion and ministry.  According to Wright, Romans 1:1-5 is one of the flagship passages where Paul lays out “his understanding of God, the gospel, Jesus, and his own vocation.”[1]

It runs as follows:  "Paul, a servant of Messiah Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures—the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David’s seed according to the flesh, and marked out as God’s Son in power, according to the spirit of holiness, through the resurrection of the dead, Jesus the Messiah our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations for the sake of his name..."[2]

The four parts of the gospel that Wright pulls out of this passage are the crucified Jesus, the risen Jesus, King Jesus, and ‘Jesus is Lord.’  Jesus’ role as a servant—suffering and dying on the cross—is the foundation and center of Paul’s gospel, as it signifies victory over powers of sin and darkness.  As Wright goes on to explain later, the cross is also proof of Jesus’ fulfillment of the Jewish side of God’s covenant as the only truly faithful Israelite.

The risen Jesus is a profoundly Jewish fulfillment of God’s covenant, as he resurrects the one faithful Israelite (not at the end of history but in the middle), thus proving that He is faithful and that what Jesus accomplished on the cross was legitimate.  It also inaugurates a new age of which Christ is the first product, where Jesus’ victory over sin and evil begins to permeate the world and signs of God’s reign start to multiply.

Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, and the Anointed One are all synonyms for King Jesus.  The title is significant for a number of reasons, but what is perhaps most relevant because it is most often ignored is that Paul’s gospel is an announcement of a new world order initiated by the establishment of Jesus as King.  Jesus Christ or King Jesus is not just a name—rather it is a proclamation that God’s promise to the Jews for salvation is becoming available through the Messiah who also assumes the royal position as ruler of Israel through the line of David.

Finally, ‘Jesus is Lord’ takes the message of King Jesus and proclaims it to the whole world.  God’s covenant is no longer applicable only to Jews but also to Gentiles, women, slaves, and anyone else who will come to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, thus becoming part of the family of God through adoption (Romans 10:12, Philippians 3:20-21).  This is also significant because it displaces anyone else—like a Roman Emperor—who would claim lordship of the whole world.

With these four parts and their major implications laid out, the question remains; what can Wright’s exposition of evangelion bring to the table in a contemporary evangelical discussion on ‘spreading the gospel?’

First, it becomes clear that any understanding of the gospel as the mechanism by which people ‘get saved’ is misguided.  It might be helpful to explain to someone who is interested in spirituality and truth that salvation consists of belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection along with confession of sin, but this is not the gospel.  The gospel is the message of what has happened and what is happening, and along with that message the reality and ramifications of its existence in our daily lives.  In other words, the gospel means telling people about Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and reign.  Sharing must be followed by demonstrating it to them and summoning them to a similar calling.  The gospel does not consist of programs.  Perhaps that is the biggest mistake in our understanding of what we must do with the gospel.  Many leaders and ministers in today’s church understand the gospel as a mechanical process in a person’s soul, rather than a tangible and visible experience of God’s kingdom coming, through the truth of Jesus.  The church needs to start framing evangelism differently.

More specifically, the first practical message of the gospel is one of suffering.  As Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me.”  He followed up that speech by suffering and dying according to the will of His Father.  Contemporary church evangelism, instead of being a message of participating in the suffering and death of Jesus, has for years been a message of life improvement, self-help and even prosperity.  It is critical—for the sake of staying faithful to the life, ministry and death of Jesus and for the sake of a worldwide church who can grasp the meaning of sacrificial worship—for Christians to communicate the true cost of discipleship.  Furthermore, the gospel is a message from within the framework of Judaism.  It is not an appropriation of pagan religious ideas, but a logical and timely fulfillment of the one true God’s relationship with the Jewish people.  If we are to understand how the gospel relates to us as Gentiles, we must understand how God has related to His people throughout history.  We must look back and see how God’s promises to Israel have been proclaimed and worked out for the past four or five thousand years.  Taking Paul and Jesus out of their Jewish context are what have led to many misguided and even destructive movements in the church.  The church needs to start contextualizing the gospel better.

Along with the contextualization of the gospel, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection demands that we see the gospel as a message to a community, not a message to individuals.  If God raising Jesus from the dead points to the world-transforming faithfulness of God to His covenant, then it also points to the importance of community to the message of the gospel.  The Jews did not understand salvation as being a matter of individual faith, nor did St. Paul, and therefore the individualistic message of salvation that has often been preached by the American church is probably more cultural than it is accurate.

Since the gospel means a new kingdom with new values, it means through-and-through transformation.  The gospel is not just a set of philosophical commitments or emotional convictions—it is also power.  If Jesus died and was resurrected, then all of creation must go through a death and resurrection as it begins to participate in the family of God.  The power to make this happen—which comes from God—means very practical differences.  We must take Jesus’ ministry and his apostles’ ministry as models for our own outworking of the gospel.  More than social justice or Bible teaching, this also means signs and wonders of the Kingdom of God that have a certain magnetic ability to draw a response from people.  The church (especially in the US) needs to start praying and fasting, as the disciples did, for more power.

[1] Wright, What St Paul Really Said, 45.

[2] Ibid.