Episode Details

There are two words that sit right at the center of everything Christians talk about. Two words you’ve heard a thousand times.

Gospel. And faith.

Every pastor assumes that everybody knows what these words mean.

But what I want to suggest to you today is that most of us don’t really know what either of them means.

And I don’t mean we’re fuzzy on the details. I mean we’ve gotten the definitions of these words completely wrong.

I want to be clear. This is not some fringe idea. The scholars behind this reassessment, people like Drs. Matthew Bates, Scot McKnight, Nijay K. Gupta, N.T. Wright, are not radicals. They are working from the original Greek texts, from the historical context of the first century, and from church history. And they keep arriving at the same conclusions.

This presentation will be in two parts. Part One: what the gospel actually is.

And Part Two: what faith, that is the Greek word pistis, actually means in context.

PART ONE: THE GOSPEL

First, let’s talk about what the Gospel Is Not

If you ask most Christians today to define the gospel, you’re likely going to get one of two answers.

The first answer sounds something like this: we are all sinners. We’ve broken God’s law. And because God is holy and just, that sin has to be dealt with. The good news, the gospel, is that Jesus dealt with it for us. He died in our place.

And now, if you believe that, if you put your faith in what he did, you are forgiven, you are right with God, and you have eternal life.

Those are real things that Scripture more or less teaches.

But the argument we’re going to make is that that’s not the gospel. Or at least, it’s not a complete definition of the gospel. And treating it as the whole thing produces real problems.

The second common answer to what the gospel is is similar: that the gospel is specifically what happened at the cross, that Jesus died for our sins.

Different traditions offer various theories about how his death paid for our sins, but they would say that understanding and believing that our sins were dealt with at the cross is the gospel.

The fact that Jesus died for our sins is absolutely part of the gospel.

We’re going to see that Paul explicitly includes it in his gospel presentations. But saying the gospel is essentially the story of how the cross dealt with our sin problem, taking that one piece and calling it the whole thing, that’s where we start to go wrong.

Both reductions, justification by faith as the gospel, and atonement theory as the gospel, share the same underlying flaw: they make the rest of the ministry of Jesus theologically unnecessary.

If justification by faith is the gospel, the four books we literally call the Gospels don’t contain the gospel.

Everything Jesus said and did becomes background material. You could construct the entire gospel without ever opening Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

So if those things aren’t the gospel, what is?

Start with the word itself. Euangelion, the Greek word we translate as gospel, means good news. Specifically though, it’s the kind of news that gets publicly proclaimed.

And in the ancient Greco-Roman world, it had an even more specific meaning. It was the kind of announcement you made when a king won a battle.

When a royal heir took the throne. When the political order of the realm fundamentally changed.

It was a public proclamation so that the people of that realm would know that everything is different now, that they had a new king.

However, in the Christian context I like to think of the gospel this way: you’re trying to convince someone that Jesus is their rightful king, and to do that, you often need to explain the story of Jesus’s royal career, his pre-existence with God in heaven, how he became a man, his fulfillment of these ancient prophecies about the coming king, his de