THE GOSPEL

I believe the word gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about personal salvation, and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making decisions. The result of this hijacking is that the word gospel no longer means in our world what it originally meant to either Jesus or the gospels.

— Scot McKnight

One of the perennial tasks of the church is to reexamine the gospel we preach and believe, alert to ways it has been reshaped by the idols of our culture. Martin Luther did this in his day in response to the Roman Catholic understanding of the gospel. Yet a mere hundred years after Luther led the Reformation, the gospel was contorted and the German church was an orthodox carcass. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, picking up Luther's torch four hundred years later, spoke about this corruption: "What emerged victorious from the Reformation history was not Luther's recognition of pure, costly grace, but the alert religious instinct of human beings for the place where grace could be had the cheapest. Only a small, hardly noticeable distortion of the emphasis was needed, and the most dangerous and ruinous deed was done."

Even small corruptions of the gospel make a mark. And they do not often begin with big sweeping changes. Among Luther's followers three generations after him, the corruption was only a change in emphasis, a slight redefinition of grace. However, this soon became the dominant emphasis of the gospel message, and it bred passivity in believers because it replaced the emphasis on living out professed faith. Luther's followers didn't explicitly advocate cheap grace. They simply neglected to talk about discipleship.

What Is the Gospel?

The word "gospel" simply means good news. The word occurs over ninety times in the New Testament and is a translation of the Greek noun euangelion. Both the noun and the verb form, euangelizo, are derived from the noun angelos, which is often translated "messenger." "An angelos was one who brought a message of victory or political news that brought joy." We should note there is nothing inherently religious in the word gospel itself.

Though the word translated "gospel" can be found alone at times, it is most often accompanied by a modifier. Among the most common are "the gospel of God" (Mark 1:14), "the gospel of Jesus Christ" (Mark 1:1), "the gospel of his Son" (Rom. 1:9), "the gospel of the kingdom" (Matt. 4:23), "the gospel of the grace of God" (Acts 20:24), "the gospel of the glory of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:4), "the gospel of peace" (Eph. 6:15), and "an eternal gospel" (Rev. 14:6). These modifiers give us a sense of the content of the good news, that it is of God, of Jesus Christ, of the kingdom, and that it relates to grace, peace, and glory in some way.

Yet the power of context is even more helpful than these simple adjectives. Reading about the gospel in the context of a broader description by the apostle Paul helps us grasp the meaning and content of the gospel in a person's life: "For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ.