Happy Gospel Day

Back in 2005, I found myself, like so many other Southern Baptists, both dismayed and frustrated by the overall decline in baptisms throughout the convention – a decline that continues till today! If baptisms are an indicator of evangelistic success, then Southern Baptists were failing on a massive scale. The question was, what should be done to rectify this denominational decline?

It is God himself, of course, through his Spirit who calls individuals unto repentance and faith by transformation. However, for our part, most importantly, the Spirit moves individuals predominately through our proclamation of the gospel. Therefore, before I examined issues of contemporary methodology and past denominational decisions, I thought it appropriate to go back to square one and study the meaning of the gospel.

One thing I noticed was that Christian leaders frequently mentioned the gospel but rarely explicitly explained what it was. What exactly is the gospel? The average Christian says something to the effect that the good news is that “God punished Jesus so that I wouldn’t have to go to hell.” Many of the required systematic theologies at seminaries did not provide a definition. The BFM2000 mentions the gospel seven times but never defines it. When leaders do attempt an exposition it’s usually communicated in vague generalities of what Christ accomplished but without specificity. It appeared to me that what our leaders said was of central importance to our faith was, in practice, either a secondary issue at best or something few could accurately articulate. I speculated that perhaps SBC evangelism was declining in today’s world because we weren’t accurately defining what the gospel was so that the Spirit could effectively move individuals to repentance and faith. So, what was the gospel? I decided to go back to the Scriptures.

My method was simple enough. In order to learn how the Bible itself defined the gospel, I studied every instance of euaggelion and euaggelizō in the New Testament, starting with Jesus himself. The conclusion was and is self-evident from Jesus, the Gospel writers, Paul, and the other apostles: the gospel is first and foremost the good news of the kingdom of God and Jesus Christ as its king. While personal  salvation is a part of the gospel, it, along with peace and healing, is a subset of the overall news that God rules and reigns through Jesus.

Again, the evidence for me was obvious, explicit, clear, and conclusive. Since then I’ve discovered other mainstream, conservative biblical scholars who have arrived at a similar conclusion, noting that our popular conception of the gospel as purely about personal salvation is reductionistic. I’ve written on the subject in numerous places and at numerous times. For example:

Getting the Gospel Right: Correcting the PopularMisconception about the Message of the Gospel

The Good News of Psalm 110: An Easter Sermon

Forgiveness of Sins Seventy Times Seven

Government, Violence, and the Gospel

Jesus and the “Harrowing of Hell”: An Interpretation of 1Peter 3:18-22

First Peter and Fighting Oppressive Injustice

Psalm 22: A Key to Interpreting the Crucifixion of Jesus

Nevertheless, it was on October 4^th, 2005 that I reached this conclusion that the gospel is the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and Jesus as its king. Other than the highly suspicious fact that the overwhelming majority of Christians (both leaders and laity) had been getting the gospel wrong for so long, my immediate thought was that perhaps our evangelism efforts were deficient because so was our understanding of the gospel. What I wasn’t expecting was how my new understanding would dramatically affect my conception of the Faith.

The Bible is an enormous collection of seemingly disparate theological works by numerous authors of varying genres, cultures, and eras assembled from written and oral traditions over a period of 2,000 years. Furthermore, various Christian traditions have attempted to express its contents in various ways over another two millennia. It has been the efforts of systematic and biblical theologians to make sense of the documents by bringing it into a coherent conceptual framework whose whole explains its part and its parts explain its whole.

When I began to conceptualize the gospel as the kingdom of God and Jesus as its king, many of the disparate elements of the bible began to come together into a cohesive whole: covenant, Torah, justification by faith, resurrection, new creation, powers and principalities, corporate solidarity, amillennialism, atonement, egalitarianism, enthronement, authority, submission, sermon on the mount ethics, prayer, suffering, government, natural law, Baptist distinctives, soul competency, idolatry, the supposed differences between Paul and the Gospels, the supposed differences between Paul and James, church methodology, and passages such as Genesis 1-3, 12, 15 and 17; 2 Samuel 7; Psalms 2, 22, 110; Isaiah 40-55; Daniel 7; Mark 1:1-3; John 20; Acts 7; Romans 8; 1 Corinthians 15; Ephesians 1; Philippians 2:6-11; 1 Peter 3:17-22; and Revelation 21-22 all began to come together in a great outworking of what God had been doing throughout history. When I looked at other mainstream, conservative scholars who had arrived at a similar conception of the gospel, I saw that they had arrived at similar conclusions about these disparate elements. It seemed that conceptualizing the gospel as the Kingdom of God and Jesus as its king inevitably led to a common cohesion.

But apart from this coherent conceptualization of biblical theology, I soon noticed other personal benefits. I now had more optimism, joy, patience, forgiveness, faith, and less worry and anxiety – all directly traced back to my conceptualization of the gospel to God’s Kingdom and his Son as King.

There’s a reason why the disciples rejoiced at the gospel. There’s a reason why they went out in Spirit-filled faith proclaiming it in power and optimism, willing to suffer all things. There’s a reason they were successful. There’s a reason why Paul was converted and shook to the core by the gospel. There’s a reason why the early Christians were able to rejoice at martyrdom and change an empire. There’s a reason why the closer a body of believers gets closer to the true gospel the more successful they are in furthering the Kingdom of God. You can plot the success in real, tangible ways. You can plot it in baptisms, church growth, and discipleship. Success in ministry advancing the Kingdom of God isn’t a random occurrence devoid of our theological conceptions and methodologies. Any person, minister, church, ministry, church, and denomination can see success and expand the Kingdom, increasing baptisms, the closer they approach the true gospel.

This is why I celebrate October 4^th as Happy Gospel Day.