8 Truths from Paul's Actual Gospel

How did things get so confused? It's the Gospel, right? It's basic, foundational, well-known. Or is it? How did we muddle our image of the Benevolent One, turning God into the Ultimate Punisher? How did we come to a place such that Christ-followers feel it necessary to defend a niggling, perfectionist, unyielding, hypercritical deity all the while pretending this unrelenting severity is compatible with love?

The problem is nearly universal. Over the past 400 years a misshapen set of beliefs has come to be called "the Gospel." To understand what I am arguing against, let me give a brief summary of the Justification Gospel (which is also referred to as "justification theory" and goes by popular names like "The Four Spiritual Laws").

The justification Gospel says that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Problem is, God is very serious about sin. He's a perfectionist. Even the slightest deviation from moral truth is all but unforgivable. The good news is all human beings can deduce this for themselves. God is apparent from the cosmos. Moral law is apparent from the conscience. And whenever Jesus is preached, people who have correctly surmised their doom can find a way out of damnation. Jesus was sinless but he died at the hands of sinners. That is because God's plan was for his Son to be a cleansing sacrifice. His death has the mana to absolve people of sin-guilt.

The final step in justification is simple: accept God's easier terms in a simpler contract. You no longer have to go by the "moral perfection" contract. You can sign up for the "faith in Jesus" contract. Just believe "in" Jesus. (Never mind that the minimum required content of faith is unclear). If you fulfill the faith contract ("I believe in Jesus") then God will absolve you of sin.

A simple summary of the justification Gospel is this: you are separated from God and only the sacrifice of Jesus can save you. To be saved, believe in and thereby receive Jesus as your savior. You are now forgiven.

To many people reading this, that sounds like Christianity. It is not.

Paul's Way . . .

Please don't think I am claiming to have invented a new Gospel. Nor am I suggesting that a billion or more Christians are hopelessly lost and need to read my essays in order to attain to a happy afterlife.

No, the Gospel has not been completely lost and God has not stopped pouring his love into the hearts of people. And actually, most of the time, more accurate beliefs about God's nature and methods are upheld simultaneously with harmful errors.

But Paul never pictured God dangling sinners like spiders by a gossamer strand over a superheated fire. According to Paul we're in the hands of a loving God, not the angry God Jonathan Edwards warned about. Paul's actual Gospel is unconditional and transformative, not contractual and forensic. It is the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple and also that of Peter.

If Paul's Gospel sounds wonderful to you, perhaps you'd like to know more about it. Here are 8 truths about Paul's real Gospel that might help us to see what's so sublime about it:

The actual Gospel is participatory: we participate in the death and resurrection and ascension of Christ because he participated in our humanity and the Spirit incorporated us into Christ's reality.

The actual Gospel is unconditional: God sends his love to sinners, awakening them by divine gift and granting them faith.

The actual Gospel is benevolent: God loves sinners so much he experienced humiliation and death to help us while we were his enemies.

The actual Gospel is revelatory: God reveals Christ. We do not discover Christ by means of reason or education. We do not deduce what can be known about God and work from that to becoming somehow able to believe in a set of doctrines about Christ.

The actual Gospel is apocalyptic: the new reality in Christ has already begun and operates in parallel with the old reality in such a way as to overtake it in the future and transform it.

The actual Gospel is Christocentric: it is based on his sinless life, his miracles, his teachings, his humiliation, death, resurrection, ascension, and his lordship over all things to come.

The actual Gospel is philo-Semitic: God blessed a human family (Abraham's) with potent gifts, including the Torah and prophets, and Christ came to fulfill the promise of the Torah.

The actual Gospel is transformational: God does not leave us resourceless in our moral quandary, but puts us on a trajectory to become new creations.

Now, with these eight truths we have begun to fathom the depths of God's love revealed in the faith of Jesus and imparted to us by the Spirit as a gift we did not earn (not even by faith). And there is good reason to learn and contemplate often the truths of the Gospel. Why would I say that? Here is Paul's answer: