In a recent piece on Christianity Today, Matthew Bates demurred recent attention to his book, Gospel Allegiance, by the TGC and T4G crowd (see also his Salvation by Allegiance Alone). His complaint was that they were portraying his book as teaching that the gospel message is solely that Jesus is king, and that this message is divorced from salvation by faith.
Bates believes that TGC and T4G have recently developed a new idea that justification by faith is central to the gospel. In response, he surveys the use of the term ‘gospel’ in the New Testament, arguing that justification by faith is not even part of the gospel message.
This piece has stirred a good amount of talk about whether justification is, in fact, part of the gospel. What I find striking is Bates’s claim that justification by faith being part of the gospel is a new idea. In fact, C. H. Dodd in the early 1920s wrote a small book called The Gospel in the New Testament. When he approached Paul, he laid out the gospel according to Paul. The major problem in Paul is sin and the human condition, and the major solution is what God has done in Christ. Dodd continues to explain how justification is a central aspect of Paul’s gospel:
When Paul speaks of faith, then, he is thinking of a confidence in God evoked by Christ, and securely based on what God has actually done through Christ for the redemption or emancipation of men. Through such faith, he says, a man is “justified.” That is, in fact, his answer to the old dilemma; no man can be saved unless he is in communion with God; yet, if God is righteous, how can a sinful man ever begin to have communion with Him? On the level on which Paul’s thought had habitually moved, the only answer, given in legal or forensic terms, is that, in view of all the guilt that lies on a man’s soul, God graciously acquits him, attributing to him a righteousness which is not yet his, but will be his through the divine grace. Thus God is not only just, but the Justifier of men, and His righteousness is shown to be of a larger kind than the justice of mere reciprocity (Rom 3:21–26, 4:3–5, 5:18–19; Gal 2:15–16).
There are of course many threads of thought in Paul’s letters, especially if one begins probing the ‘sub-structure’ of his theology. But I think it is telling that Dodd, in summarizing Paul’s gospel message in so concise a manner for laymen, chose to highlight the major problem in Paul’s thought as man’s guilty status before God, and the major solution as God justifying men through faith in Christ.
I have not read Bates’s book, and actually am eager to do so. That Jesus is king is obviously one of the biggest themes of the Gospels, and the idea of allegiance is, I think, helpful to some extent–but I would like to read Bates’s account of that to see where he takes the idea. So, I am not interested in arguing with Bates’s thesis in his book.
But what I do think is odd is that, at least in his Christianity Today piece, he focused so narrowly on the use of the term “gospel” in the NT to define it. Certainly there is a difference between a word and a concept, and I think it is far too restrictive to define the gospel only by the use of the euanggel- word group. In fact, that word itself seems to take on quite a transformed meaning in Paul, compared to its use elsewhere. He speaks of “my gospel” in Galatians. And I think that perhaps his calling to ministry among the Gentiles has something to do with the fact that he has his own gospel message. Perhaps Jesus as “Messiah” wasn’t something that was entirely attractive to his Gentile converts.
And so, perhaps there is not one ‘gospel’ in the NT. Perhaps there is an overall concept of the good news about Jesus Christ, and that good news is expressed in many ways, by many authors, in many circumstances, for many reasons. And that, I think, is good news, because the good news is even greater than we might think.
See Dodd’s The Gospel in the New Testament in paperback and Kindle, newly edited, formatted, and typeset in Fontes Classics.
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