Gospel or Salvation?
Gospel or Salvation?
Many Christians calls themselves "evangelical," but actually they're soterians. They're not Gospel Christians, but soteriological Christians. These two aren't the same.
Dear friends and supporters:
Famed evangelical Anglican Bishop J. C. Ryle begins his 1874 book Knots Untied with these lines:
It may be laid down as a rule, with tolerable confidence, that the absence of accurate definitions is the very life of theological controversy. If men would only define with precision the theological terms that they use, many disputes would die. Scores of excited disputants would discover that they do not really differ, and that their disputes have arisen from their neglect of the great duty of explaining the meaning of words.
While Ryle might have exaggerated the role of definitional imprecision in theological controversy, there can be no doubt that misunderstanding over the meaning of terms contributes to serious theological confusion.
This failure can lead to an almost opposite but equally serious problem: papering over legitimate disputes by equating terms that are not identical.
A notable and relevant example of this latter quandary is the identification of the words salvation and gospel.
Meaning of “Salvation”
Salvation in the New Testament is overwhelmingly the Greek word transliterated soteria. It means rescue, or save, or even health. That shade of meaning “health” comes out even in the first four letters in English: salv[e]). The meaning of salvation appears perhaps most strikingly in the context for 1 Thessalonians 5:9:
For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ….
The statement is valuable in that it not only indicates the meaning of salvation, but also the means: the work of Jesus Christ. From the rest of the Bible we know that God through Jesus Christ saves us from his own righteous wrath by the latter’s atoning, substitutionary death on the cross.
This message is at the heart of the Bible, no less in the OT than the NT. The old covenant sacrifices typified Jesus Christ’s death and temporarily provided atonement until he came to offer himself as a final, definitive atonement. This is a big part of the message of Hebrews.
Without soteria (salvation), there is no Bible, no rescue, no hope — no gospel. Man is still dead in his sins (Eph. 2:1). The soteria effectuated by Jesus is the glory of the gospel. This is why Paul writes famously in Romans 1:16 that the gospel is the power of God to salvation.
Meaning of “Gospel”
But salvation is not the gospel. It’s easy to assume that it is, because even many Christians don’t really know the full meaning “gospel.” The gospel is not salvation from judgment. The gospel is what makes that salvation possible.
Gospel is the euangelion, which means the good news or glad tidings. It’s fascinating to consider how the ancient Greeks used the word euangelion. It was closely associated with the imperial cult. The emperor issued good news, his gospel. He himself embodied the good news. He was deemed in some sense divine. He healed. He performed other miracles. He was the world’s savior. He as a god protected the state. Great signs accompanied his birth and life. His words became sacred writings. He granted great power to humans under his care. No wonder his life and actions and words are celebrated as gospel. The emperor himself was good news.
The Bible’s use of gospel is similar, though purified. John Frame notes at least five overlapping meanings in the NT alone. But the gospel begins in the OT.
The first gospel preacher
The Bible’s first gospel message is found in Genesis 3:15, and God is the world’s first gospel preacher. He will use the seed of the woman (Jesus Christ), to crush the seed of the serpent, Satan and his minions. In fact, this is often called the protoevangelium, literally, the first gospel.
From the Edenic protoevangelium to the end of the NT, the good news is that God in Jesus Christ is both definitively and gradually crushing Satan, the world, the flesh, and the devil, and both restoring and enhancing the sinless, glorious created order.
Because man is God’s crowning creation, his own image-bearer, in fact, the recovery and restoration of man is the central dimension of the gospel. This is why so much of Paul’s epistles, for example, is devoted to individual soteriology, though it’s devoted to much more than this, despite the fact that so many readers don’t seem to recognize that fact.
But because the bad news (sin, anti-gospel) impacts all areas of creation, so the good news (gospel) must reshape all of creation.
Modern evangelicals (gospel people) have often reduced soteriology (soteria truth) to individual soteriology, and, even more mistakenly, have equated this with the gospel. So when they hear the word gospel, they hear “salvation from my sins and, positively, new life in Jesus Christ.” This is an irreducible part of the biblical gospel.
But it is far from all of it.
Evangelical or Soterian?
Scot McKnight grasps this distinction admirably:
Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation. Behind the word gospel is the Greek word euangelion and evangel, from which words we get evangelicalism and evangelism. Now to our second word. Behind salvation is the Greek word soteria. I want now to make a stinging accusation…. [W]e evangelicals as a whole are not really evangelical in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians. Here’s why I say we are more soterian than evangelical: we evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the word salvation. Hence, we are really “salvationists.” When we evangelicals see the word gospel, our instinct is to think (personal) salvation. We are wired this way. But these words don’t mean the same thing.
And as long as we assume we’re evangelicals when in fact we’re soterians, we’ll never get the full meaning of the gospel, or of the Christian Faith and our responsibility and expectation in the present world.
Consequences of Confusing Gospel with Salvation
What are the consequences of confusing the gospel with salvation, and reducing the former to the latter? Here are three:
Individual soteriology overcrowds
First, individual soteriology crowds out other vital aspects of the Faith. The gospel is the good news of cosmic redemption, but salvation (almost always defined as individual salvation) is about the rescue of sinners, not creation in toto, as the Bible requires (Rom. 8:21–22). This means that education and science and economics and music and technology and the environment and politics are, at worst, left to themselves, which means: left to the work of unbelievers; and, at best, they are assumed to be “neutral” areas of life on which both Christians and non-Christians can arrive at common-sense agreement. The fact that these areas of life that decisively impact our world are infested by sin and need redemption just as does the individual sinner doesn’t comport easily with the paradigm of a nearly exclusive individual salvation. The (individual) salvation paradigm in contrast with the (comprehensive) gospel paradigm abandons large swaths of the world to sinful development and domination.
We confront a radically secular education system and rebellious art and atheistic science largely because over the last century and a half Christians have reduced the gospel to salvation (soterism).
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that this reductionism is of recent historical vintage. It has poisoned all sectors of the church, starting very early.
Rome
In the West, the Roman church adopted a sacerdotal soteriology — salvation mediated by the church institution at the hands of priests in the sacraments. This shift away from the Bible wasn’t accompanied by any distinctively Christian concern for culture outside the church. All to the contrary. In the medieval era, the church embraced the nature-grace distinction. Grace, reduced largely to individual salvation, was monopolized by the church, while the world outside the church was governed by natural ( = philosophical) law apart from any distinctly biblical truth. In time, the culture was de-Christianized, and society was held together only because of the high regard for and cultural predominance of the church.
The church was sacramentalized, and the culture was secularized.
Reformation
The Protestant Reformation restored the Biblical truth of (individual) salvation by the exclusive mediation of Jesus Christ and by faith alone. However, it did not, for the most part, challenge the Western idea of the predominance of soterism. It merely redirected that soterism from the instrumentality of the church to the instrumentality of faith.
In addition, Martin Luther’s experience of relief from the weight of his sin and God’s impending judgment became man’s chief problem that the cross and resurrection solved. In the biblical picture, the cross and resurrection solve a cosmic problem — a sin-infested creation, of which man is the prime example (Col. 1:15–20) .
You get the soteric gospel when you accept the cosmic gospel. But the cosmic gospel wasn’t what most of conservative Protestantism had in mind, right up to the present day.
Creational worldview demoted
Second, when we equate the gospel with salvation, we demote the Bible’s creational worldview. Soterists have little reason to interpret salvation (or even the gospel) in terms of creation, but creation is precisely what the gospel is calculated to redeem. What was polluted in the Garden of Eden is purged by the cross and resurrection. The Second Adam reverses the sin and consequences of the first Adam. (See “Creation: The Evangelical Failure.”)
(continued below)
The gospel and salvation consist of many facets and can — and must — be approached from many perspectives. To limit it to one or two perspectives is to distort the multidimensional biblical picture. Much of the Bible-believing church of the last 100 years has woefully narrowed the gospel as it is presented in the Bible and consequently has failed in its task of cultural reclamation, an indispensable aspect of the biblical gospel. This short book is an attempt to expose those failures and chart a course back to the Bible’s concept of the gospel.
Get the ebook here.
(continued)
Christian dualism
But soterism is not the creational worldview. It tends toward a dualism, even Gnosticism, according to which matters of the body and this present life are secondary; and the human soul, defined (incorrectly, as in Platonism) as the interior, immortal, immaterial, “spiritual” part of man, is primary. Salvation is from individual sin and to sanctification in this life, and impending escape to and relief within the next.
Creation isn’t particularly important in God’s plan, other than as the theater in which to display his grace in saving sinners. The notion that the theater itself also must be redeemed isn’t really a concern. And this means that any incremental labor to bring Christian truth to bear within the created order is at best an ancillary project and at worst a distraction from the Christian’s main calling — personal evangelism and individual sanctification.
The Bible miniaturized
Third, when we reduce the gospel to salvation, we tend to bypass large parts, and neuter the application of, the Bible. A central theme of the Bible is individual salvation, and we could have no Christian faith without it. But the Bible is about much more than this, and certainly much more than about salvation, as usually understood. The Bible simply isn’t a soterist book.
The Bible is God’s word, and it’s not God’s word only in soteric matters pertaining to church and prayer and evangelism. My father once reminded me, “Jesus taught more about Hell than about heaven, and more about money than he did about Hell.”
A big Bible
The fact is that the Bible has a remarkable lot to say about gospel matters wider than soterism, including instructions (his law) about such matters, so many in fact that one would almost seem to have to labor intentionally to miss them. God’s law covers cultural topics as diverse as food, cooking, clothing, personal cleanliness, politics, education, farming, building, music, money, economics, warfare, health, marriage, crime, penology, abortion, homosexuality, substance abuse and much, much more.
The problem isn’t that the Bible is silent on cultural topics. The problem is that many Christians “read around” these topics or simply ignore them or find them insignificant. In contrast, H. Henry Meeter writes:
This book [the Bible], therefore, besides teaching us the way of salvation, provides us with the principles which must govern the whole of our life, including our thinking as well as our moral conduct. Not only science and art, but our home-life, our business, our social and political problems must be viewed and solved in the light of Scriptural truth and fall under its direction.
But this holistic view of biblical application isn’t available to soterists. When the Bible is overwhelmingly about (individual) salvation and not the (cosmic) gospel, the Bible gets fatally miniaturized.
Conclusion — Recovering Gospel Christianity
Since the reduction of “gospel” to “salvation” has intensified over the last 150 years in the West, the church has become increasingly emaciated and ineffectual. It’s easy to blame the effects of the great twin evils of 18th century Enlightenment and its 19th century reaction in Romanticism, as well burgeoning ideologies over the last century — Darwinism, Marxism, existentialism, statism, modernism, and postmodernism. And they have indeed struck heavy blows to the Faith.
But coterminous with these enemies has been the shrinkage of the gospel to salvation, a deeply rooted historical development whose danger becomes more evident as the culture grows more depraved.
P. T. Forsyth once observed that the effects of heresy are always more dangerous in retrospect than in prospect. And while the equation of gospel with salvation isn’t a heresy as historically defined, its consequences have been no less disastrous to the world than many actual heresies.
Recovering gospel Christianity, not only soteriological Christianity, is a pressing need of the hour.
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Personal
I’m preparing for our mid-February trip to Texas. On Valentine’s Day I’ll be preaching during morning worship at City Church, Corpus Christi. The following weekend, Sharon and I will be in the Rio Grande Valley, where I’ll be speaking five times, including adult Sunday school and worship:
I pray that I’ll be able to see many of you in Corpus or McAllen.
Next week I hope to address “Sexual Marxism.”
Thank you so much for your friendship, prayer, and support.
Yours for the King,
Founder & President
Center for Cultural Leadership
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