Mark,

First of all and above all, thank you for your talk at Together for the Gospel, and for starting a conversation about these things. I’ve read enough of this new literature—especially from some of the guys we might call emergent—to know that it is a real and dangerous issue. The Christian gospel is in serious danger of being melted down into a call merely to do good works here and now in the social and political realms. What you’re pointing out is that that “gospel” simply isn’t going to cut it, that a “gospel” that majors on good deeds and social work to the detriment of the atoning, saving work of Christ is no “gospel” at all. As I’ve put it elsewhere, it winds up making Christianity just another boring moralism that’s no different from any other religion in the world.

I do have some thoughts about your talk, specifically about this first “cry” you’ve just posted. The first (others may follow in later posts) is about the definition of the word “gospel.”

I suppose the main thing is that I’m a little uncomfortable limiting the scope of the word “gospel” to the message of Jesus’ substitutionary death to reconcile his people to God along with the call to us to have faith in him and repent. Of course, I agree entirely that this is the heart of the gospel, from which everything else flows. But I don’t want to say that everything that flows from that—whether that’s the resurrection of my body or the renewal of the world—are mere implications of the gospel.

Here’s the point: Doesn’t the New Testament sometimes use the word “gospel” to refer to the whole message of good news that God is proclaiming to the world? (Think of Jesus proclaiming “the gospel of the kingdom,” for example. Isn’t he using the word there in this broader sense? See also Romans 2:16, Galatians 3:8, Colossians 1:5, 2 Timothy 1:10, and Revelation 14:6, for possible other examples.) And doesn’t that good news, that gospel, include not just the promise of forgiveness of sins through Christ, but also the promise of reconciliation between human and human, of the resurrection of the body, of the renewal of the world, of the consummation of the kingdom, and of all the other benefits the Bible describes—all of them through and because of Christ? All of those promises, I would think, are part of the good news of Christianity—the gospel.

Now let me make just a few clarifying statements—

First, I think you’re right to define and emphasize justification by faith alone in Christ alone as the heart of the Christian gospel. That is without doubt or equivocation the fountainhead of everything else, and you don’t get to the rest of the “good news” unless you start there. In other words, to tell someone that it’s not really important to focus on the atonement, but rather that you can be a Christian just by being a “follower of Jesus” and by “living like Jesus” is not Christianity. To be a Christian is to believe in Jesus, repenting of sins and trusting for salvation in his atoning, reconciling, justifying, substitutionary death on the cross.

Second, and relatedly, I think it is a mistake when people say that non-Christians can in any sense do “kingdom work” or “gospel work.” Whatever that non-Christian friend is doing when he’s caring for the poor or cleaning up a park, it is not kingdom work. (So, Jonathan, I wonder if the Rwandan survivors you describe below are Christians? If not, then we can and should recognize that their forgiveness of their tormentors is wonderful—even, as you say, amazing—and that it’s a result of God’s common grace to them. But—and I know you’re not suggesting otherwise—we should also be very clear that what is going on there is not kingdom work or kingdom reconciliation unless it flows from the cross. And their forgiveness of their tormentors certainly doesn’t put them in the kingdom. The only way into the kingdom is through the blood of the King.)

Third, and relatedly, I agree with you that it’s a mistake and confusing and downright bad to say that a church or a Christian can “preach the gospel” by doing good works. I believe the Bible sometimes uses the word “gospel” in a broad sense to include everything God has promised to do in the world through Christ, but when Scripture talks about “preaching the gospel,” that is the proclamation, in words, of Jesus’ saving work on the cross, and the call, in words, to all men everywhere to repent and believe. “The Gospel” is a message, not an action. But it’s a big message that encompasses everything God has promised to do through Christ.

So I suppose my main point is that I just don’t want to limit the word "gospel" to include only "the announcement that God has provided a way for sinful human beings to be reconciled to God and his wrath removed," as Jonathan puts it below. Again, yes, that individual salvation, that divine-human reconciliation, is the fountainhead from which all the rest flows, but surely we don’t want to say that the resurrection of the body, the renewal of the world, etc are somehow not part of the "good news" of Christianity.