What is the Gospel?

What is the Gospel?

That is such a simple question, and, yet, it has received so many different answers.

The Evangelical American preaches the Gospel as the Good News that the blood of Jesus, shed on the Cross on that old rugged hill, cleanses us from the guilt of sin, allowing us to go to Heaven when we die.

The Eastern Orthodox believer tells us that Gospel is all about Deification--God became man that man might become god.

The Magisterium in Rome declares that the Gospel concerns prevenient grace offered in the Sacraments, which frees us from the guilt and power of sin.

The Pentecostalist says, and rather boisterously, that the Gospel is all about the Holy Spirit mystically working in our lives.

Others, like Anglican N.T. Wright, insist that the Gospel is the proclamation that the King has come and established His Kingdom.

We could continue ad nauseam listing various denominations, traditions, and theologians and their unique perspectives, but, since I'm sure I have already oversimplified and/or misrepresented those I have already described, I will hope my point has been made--we talk about the Gospel, but we don't always know what we (or other people) mean when we use that term.  

As a general rule, each Christian Tradition has tended to emphasize one aspect of Gospel over, or even at the expense of, the others.  We have an unfortunate habit of truncating the Gospel, honing in on one concept that speaks directly and powerfully to us.  We normally do this in a reactive way, swinging the pendulum back and forth through generations and even individual lives.  In our desire to be succinct, to have something which we can easily grasp and communicate, we emphasize the mystical or the legal, Justification or Sanctification, the Father or the Son or the Spirit, and so on.  This is unfortunate.  If we really seek to be Gospel-centered people and churches, we must embrace and proclaim the fullness of the Gospel.

In other words, the answer to our question is all of the above.

The Gospel is the Good News that God has saved us from the power and the guilt of sin.  The Gospel promise is that we are legally and literally made righteous.  The Gospel proclaims that we are forgiven and empowered, deified and reconciled.  The Gospel offers hope for the here-and-now and the yet-to-come. 

The Gospel is the Good News that the Father has sent the Son as King and Suffering Servant, as Lion and Lamb, to reign over a people purchased by His own blood, whom the Godhead indwells through the Holy Spirit.  

 

God's Word offers illustrations, metaphors, and motifs for the Gospel, each one failing individually to capture the fullness of the Kerygma.  It is only when we collate them, equally emphasizing each idea, that we arrive at the Good News proclaimed by angels and apostles.  Like jewelers examining a diamond forged in the depths of eternity, we must study it from each angle, from each perspective, to see its true, multi-faceted beauty.  Still, I am sure, we will never exhaust it.

So, what is the Gospel?

That is the most important question anyone could ever ask.  As we seek to answer it, and to communicate our answer to a world in need of it, we must ever strive towards the fullness thereof.

Fortunately, the Gospel carries grace even for those who grasp it ever so slightly.