What Is the ‘Good News’?

Last week, I riffed on Shakespeare with a piece on ‘What’s in a Word?’ This week, the follow-up question is what’s in a phrase—a very well-known phrase, in fact: ‘the gospel’, or the ‘good news’.

Given its centrality for Christian faith, one would think the answer would be pretty obvious—self-evident and shared by all. And yet, the Christian world being what it is, there are lots of ‘factions’ (I don’t mean that pejoratively), each having its own preferred, if not also required, ideas about what, exactly, ‘the gospel’ means.

I suggest that what primarily drives the different answers is the nature of the human problem to which we think the gospel is the solution, and that, in turn, drives the Bible verse(s) that we choose as its biblical foundation. The reason there’s a need to choose verses is that (i) the New Testament speaks of multiple facets of the benefits of Christ’s work, and (ii) it offers no hierarchy or ‘ranking’ of those facets—no single foundational idea.  

A major problem in evangelicalism, unlike in Catholicism, is the absence of any central authority to pronounce on these things. There is no pope. In fact, every organisation, every independent church—and sometimes, every individual—is their own pope! Evangelicalism lacks a universally recognised mechanism for determining doctrine.

This is reflected in the many thousands of different Statements of Faith (belief summaries) that abound within evangelicalism. It stands to reason they can’t all be right. Let’s hope that on that final day, God is relaxed about the parts that churches and organisations have got wrong...

Why does every evangelical church and organisation need to have its very own Statement of Faith? Good question. One could be forgiven for thinking it’s a way of saying “Our right beliefs are more right than your less-right beliefs.” Or perhaps it’s closer to “Our important beliefs are more important than your less-important beliefs.”

Defenders of confessional statements would, of course, argue that every church and organisation has doctrinal boundaries somewhere. The question is not whether boundaries should exist, but how tightly they should be drawn and what (presumably vital) matters they should encompass.

To those who would say I’m nit-picking—that evangelicals all believe the same things, really; that the variations don’t matter, so long as a SoF is still recognisably ‘evangelical’ (whatever that means)—the obvious response is, why have any variations in the first place? It shows that the reality is, one person’s ‘evangelical’ is not another person’s ‘evangelical’.

But let’s come back specifically to the gospel.

It would seem that we could hardly do better than to start with the apparently aptly-named ‘The Gospel Coalition’ (‘TGC’ to its friends). Keep in mind, however, that TGC is Calvinist, hence very conservative evangelical, and reflects US evangelicalism (which is a slightly different brand from parts of the non-US world).  

Its confessional statement starts simply enough: “We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ.” It continues, “this good news [centres] on the cross and resurrection.” “The message is: ‘Christ died for our sins . . . [and] was raised’.” So far, so good, you may say—no problem with that. However…

This section on ‘The Gospel’ is embedded within a lengthy doctrinal framework with definitive positions on many other required components, such as affirming Reformed theology and tradition, statements concerning the precise nature of the Bible, penal substitution as a required belief, as well as a literal Adam and Eve, and complementarianism (the insistence that church leadership and teaching roles are exclusively male). This illustrates an interesting distinction between ‘the gospel’, defined very simply, and the comprehensive belief requirements for someone wanting to participate in its ‘gospel coalition’.

Keep in mind the distinction between a statement of faith and a confession of faith. Many evangelicals—even prominent leaders, in my experience—are surprisingly unaware of the difference. A helpful, non-technical explanation of that was provided in a 2011 letter to pastors from the then-National Director of Vineyard USA, Berten Waggoner:

“When I was a part of the group that put together our present Statement of Faith, I asked John Wimber why we didn’t call it the Vineyard Confession of Faith. He responded without hesitation, “Because we are not a confessional movement.” He then went on to explain what he meant. He said that a confessional tradition, in his understanding, was shaped by the idea that members must agree with the entire confession to be in good standing with that tradition. The “Confession of Faith” was an outside boundary that one must adhere to if he/she wants to be a part of that community. He further explained that our Statement of Faith was not designed to serve in that way. It was not designed to keep people out of the Vineyard. Rather, it served to identify us as a movement within the general, basic framework of orthodox and Evangelical Christianity.”

Hence, Bert explained, “individual Vineyard pastors and churches are free to do pretty much what they want and remain in fellowship as long as they are headed in the same direction and have the same centre.” That direction and centre, he said, is Christ and his Kingdom: “We have endeavoured to stay focused on the centre and move in that direction … we are not a movement that draws stiff boundaries in theology or practice.”

The Vineyard understanding during the Wimber and Waggoner era—I can’t speak for today, whether Vineyard has moved away from that, or its leaders are even aware of the history—consciously differed from more explicitly Reformed movements, which typically insist on confessional statements.  

It’s not uncommon, of course, for church leaders who are ignorant of the difference to treat ‘statements’ as ‘confessions’ in practice.

The Assemblies of God denomination (AoG) has what it calls a ‘Statement of Fundamental Truths’ in which it says, “the truth set forth is held to be essential to a full-gospel ministry.” Once again, as with TGC folks, although the gospel itself may be short and sweet, there’s a whole package of beliefs (indeed, ‘essential truths’ in this case) that it’s necessary to subscribe to, to participate in their ‘full-gospel’ ministry—as opposed to what would otherwise be an ‘incomplete-gospel’ ministry, presumably.      

What we see in these examples of TGC and AoG—which are by no means unique; they reflect an evangelical norm—is the expansion of the gospel concerning Jesus to include certain doctrinal beliefs they consider implied by the gospel. In other words, those additional beliefs are seen as so closely connected to the gospel that to disagree with them is fundamentally to disagree with the gospel.

This elevation of the Bible to such an exalted status—and just to be clear, no one is questioning its inspiration, uniqueness, or status as the Word of God—is the back door for additional belief requirements getting smuggled into the gospel itself.

The logic appears to run like this. The gospel is founded on the Bible. Therefore, doctrines that are ‘clearly taught’ in the Bible are essential to the gospel. To question those clearly taught doctrines is therefore to question the gospel itself.

This logic enables secondary and tertiary issues that are not the gospel to be treated as pari passu with the gospel. The entire package becomes ‘the gospel’.

The sense one gets from such churches and organisations is that to ‘give way’ on any (so-called) ‘clear biblical teaching’ destabilises biblical authority. Very soon, it’s feared, the slippery slope would set in, and the gospel itself would be next to be undermined. Thus, these additional evangelical doctrines, though not themselves the gospel, become a supposedly necessary protective wall around the gospel.    

Accordingly, any number of ‘correct’ beliefs—about, say, the nature of the Bible, the atonement, sexuality, women in ministry, a literal Genesis creation and many other matters—become ‘gospel issues’.  

Interestingly, the first item in the belief statements of both AoG and the Southern Baptist Convention is ‘The Scriptures’. (It’s second on the list in TGC.) This is in marked contrast to the historic early creeds that have always defined Christian orthodoxy, in which the nature and function of the Bible as the Word of God receives no mention (and nor, for that matter, does the precise nature of the gospel and the atonement). Required beliefs on all of these, however, and much more, are now insisted upon in conservative evangelicalism.

And yet, if the early church could define Christian orthodoxy without prescribing those things, why can't we?

The Nicene Creed’s good news provides simply:

“For us and for our salvation Christ came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”  

Pulling all this together: what, then, is ‘the gospel’?

Fundamentally, it is the ‘good news’ (the literal meaning of ‘the gospel’) about Jesus Christ.

What good news about Jesus Christ?

All of the good news about Jesus Christ!

The New Testament is full of it.

TGC is not wrong to say that this good news centres on the cross and resurrection. But it is wrong (i) to smuggle additional doctrinal requirements into that good news and (ii) to limit the good news in that way. Jesus was and is good news in innumerable ways—everything he said, and did, and was, and is.

This is why the New Testament offers us so many facets to Jesus’ atoning work, like the many facets of a gemstone.

Even Jesus’ encounters with people are part of the ‘good news’, because they tell us more about the God we see perfectly imaged in him in practice: what divine good news looks like. Jesus’ encounters ‘teach’ just as much as his didactic teaching (‘downloading information’) and his deliberately enigmatic parables, because Jesus is the same in nature and character yesterday, today, and forever. He will be—towards us and for us—the same as he was to those he encountered in his earthly life.

How Jesus engaged with others, then, is how he will engage with us, now.

We do not approach Jesus and the gospel through doctrines we find in the Bible; we approach doctrines through the Jesus and the gospel we find in the Bible.

If our doctrines are not Jesus-shaped and good news-shaped, and if the fruit of our doctrines is not being experienced by people as good news, then there’s probably something flawed in them.