Five Views on the Gospel

Last Thursday evening (22 May 2025) Zondervan Academic hosted a webinar about the new book, edited by Michael Bird and Jason Maston, called Five Views on the Gospel. Four of the five authors were able to participate. The five authors are Michael Horton, David deSilva, Julie C. Ma, and Shively T.J. Smith, along with me. In today’s post I want to summarize and expand on what I presented in my 10-minute slot. Each was given 5-10 minutes to present our view of the gospel. Horton (Reformation), deSilva (Wesleyan), Ma (Pentecostal), and Smith (Liberation).

When I wrote The King Jesus Gospel I did so out of decades of dissatisfaction with the pervasive reduction of the gospel to the Four Spiritual Laws, the bridge illustration, an obsession with the forgiveness of sins as the sole point of the gospel, and the endless variations on this pervasive reduction. This reduction is not just featured in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and revivalism. I’ve heard it from mainliners and Roman Catholics. A question many of us have asked is Why is this the gospel when no one in the New Testament identifies the gospel in those terms? (I discuss the origins of this “soterian” gospel in King Jesus Gospel.)

What became clear to me over those years of dissatisfaction was that the benefits of the gospel had become so central to the presentations of the gospel (the elevator speech theory) that the “tail was wagging the dog,” if I may be so crude. That is, when we make benefits of the gospel central the gospel becomes about me, and it becomes radically individualistic. Not only does it make the gospel purely individualistic, it turns Jesus into an agent, a role, an actor in the work of redemption. His personhood is muted; his effects are exaggerated. It is not unfair to say such an approach to the gospel is paradigmatically American. Framing the gospel by its benefits distorts the gospel. Easily slipping into a sales presentation, the gospel begins with what I need and then the next thing one senses is that the work of God was entirely designed for me. I have heard evangelical evangelists that God loves you so much that if you were the only person alive God would have sent Jesus just for you.

All along I was hearing people talk about the gospel, and what I observed was that many simply defined gospel by what they liked most about the Bible’s message, and two major alternatives I heard often were justification and justice. Both proposals became formative for me in learning to articulate both what the gospel is and what it is designed by God to accomplish in this world. A significant moment in my own thinking occurred when I heard (or read?) John Piper ask if Jesus preached justification by faith. I wanted to ask back that the more important question was whether or not Paul preached Jesus’s message. The only Gospel text that gets close is Luke 18:14, which I translate like this: “I say to you, This [tax agent] descended fully right to his house rather than that [Observant one/Pharisee] because everyone who raises his status will be impoverished, and the one who impoverishes himself will be raised in status.” The perfect middle/passive participle might be about justification but faith as a term is not used.

So, with that dissatisfaction banging around in my head for years, along with attempting to reshape the presentation, I began to ask about method: Where does one go in the New Testament to sort out what the gospel is? I landed on this: we need to begin and base our view of the gospel on passages that actually talk about what the gospel is. That is, to passages that define the gospel. Not to our favorite ideas but to gospel-specific passages. This was not very hard: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 15:3-8, or 15:1-28; then to 2 Timothy 2:8 (“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David–that is my gospel” in the NRSVue). Especially 1 Cor 15 led me next to the sermons in the Book of Acts, with the not-so-subtle observation that there was a very good chance that both Peter and Paul had a good idea what the gospel was (Acts 2:14-39; 3:12-26; 4:8-12; 10:34-43; 11:4-18; 13:16-41; 14:15-17; 17:22-31). (In these passages, by the way, justification is mentioned once in a subordinate clause.)

From 1 Cor 15 and 2 Tim 2 along with the gospel sermons in Acts, I proceeded to ask why the Gospels are called “the gospel.” This means I concluded method-wise that including the Gospels was important for defining the gospel.

Thus, I landed on the gospel as telling the story of Jesus as the “fulfillment” of the broad sweep and direction of Israel’s story. To “gospel,” which I learned in those days to use as a verb to avoid dulling the edge by talking about proclaiming, preaching, and announcing. Telling people about Jesus is gospeling.

Which led to hands being raised What about forgiveness and justification and redemption, et al? The answer I have given over and over is that they are the benefit of the gospel, not the subject of the gospel. The subject is Jesus. And connecting to Jesus brings those redemptive benefits, and Jesus’s redemptive benefits are holistic, and not just spiritual and not just restored relations with God. To gospel is to tell the story of Jesus in all its dimensions – and that means the elevator speech is nothing more than using the opportunity to say something about Jesus, who himself brings the redemption.

Thus, I believe the gospel as presented in the New Testament teaches us to distinguish:

gospel subject (Jesus),

benefits (holistic redemption, which means justification and justice),

and response (faith, trust, allegiance, which entail conversion from and conversion to, that is repentance and transformation).

Finally, a big thanks to Emily Bruff at Zondervan as well as to Mike Bird and Jason Maston for hosting the webinar. (We had almost 1000 people sign up for the event.) The renewed discussion of the gospel shows the importance of the topic and recent proposals.