The Gospel at the Center

The Case for a Gospel-Driven Theology

I’m starting to ponder, maybe, one day, soonish perhaps, doing a third edition of Evangelical Theology.

Out of all my books, that is perhaps the one I’m the proudest of! I did some earlier posts talking about the first and second editions.

Several reviewers contended that pursuing a “gospel-centred” or “gospel-driven” theology is a very faddish way of doing theology which will be hardly different in the end to the usual ways that Protestant theologies are written. But I beg to differ.

I think my Evangelical Theology is different in structure, scope, and method to most other theologies available written by evangelical theologians.

My rationale for volume is scriptural and historical.

First, if the gospel is, as Paul says, “of first importance” (1 Cor 15:3), then it deserves first place in the theological system.

Paul seems to have pioneered such an approach himself. While Paul’s letter to the Romans is most definitely not a systematic theology, it is his most comprehensive letter, and it begins with a statement of the gospel in Rom 1:3–4. I surmise that Paul set up a template for us to follow in doing theology, a theology that originates with the gospel itself.^[1]

Second, looking at church history, in the second century, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons,  recognized the priority of the gospel when he declared the gospel “handed down to us in the scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.”[2] Moving ahead into the Reformation, John Calvin was similar when he declared  that “The Spirit, promised to us, has not the task of inventing new and unheard-of-revelations, or of forging a new kind of doctrine, to lead us away from the received doctrine of the gospel, but of sealing our minds with the very doctrine which is commended by the gospel.”[3] In the words of the English Puritan John Owen, “All true theology is, in a sense, gospel theology, for, in whatever stage it existed, its object and prime mover was God the Son.”[4]

Any system of theology needs to build up from this gospel foundation. A good example of this approach is the Anglican Church of North America, which wrote its own catechism spearheaded by J. I. Packer. The very first section of the catechism expounds the gospel, and the very second question is:

Q: What is the Gospel?

A: The Gospel is the good news that God loves the world and offers salvation  from sin through his Son, Jesus Christ. (Psalm 103:1-12; Isaiah 54:4-5; John 3:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4).[5]

But the gospel is more than a beginning, it should be a recurring motif, an integrating theme in systematic theology. The gospel permeates all doctrines, it defines the church’s mission, tells us who God is towards us in Jesus Christ. The gospel is the most significant story in the life of the church, so theology should accordingly be a theology of that story, the gospel.[6] As John Webster wrote, “An evangelical theology is one which is evoked, governed and judged by the gospel.”[7]

I submit that a gospel-driven theology should be a working out of the gospel in the various loci of Christian theology (i.e., the specific topics in theology like the nature of God, the person and work of Christ, the church, last things, etc.) and then be applied to the sphere of daily Christian life and the offices of Christian leaders. I would go so far as to say that the gospel is the glue between belief, experience, mission, and practice.

Consider the following:

• Theology proper aspires to describe the God revealed in “the gospel of God” (Mk 1:14; Rom 1:1; 15:16; 2 Cor 11:7; 1 Thess 2:8–9).

• Christology is expounding the manifold dimensions of the life and work of Jesus as narrated in the four Gospels and taught in the one apostolic gospel of Jesus Christ (e.g., Rom 1:3, 9; 15:19; 1 Cor 9:12; 2 Cor 2:12; 9:13; 10:14; Gal 1:7; Phil 1:27; 1 Thess 3:2).

• Pneumatology focuses on the gift of the Holy Spirit and experience of new birth as the promise of the gospel (Acts 2:38; Rom 5:5).

• Soteriology aims to unpack the polyphonic richness of the “gospel of salvation” (Rom 1:16; Eph 1:13).

• Apologetics is the “defense of the gospel” (Phil 1:16).

• Ecclesiology is about our “fellowship in the gospel” (Phil 1:6) and striving for the “faith of the gospel” (Phil 1:17).

• Christian ethics mean living a life “worthy of the gospel” (Phil 1:27) and exercising obedience that accompanies “confession of the gospel” (2 Cor 9:13).

• Applied theology is about living a life “worthy of the gospel” (Phil 1:27). Derek Tidball correctly shows the implications of this for ministry: “Pastoral work is simply bringing to full flower the bud of the gospel” and “The gospel determines everything about the pastor—his motives, authority, methods, and character are all governed by the good news of Jesus Christ.”^[8]

All of this buttresses my claim that the gospel comprises the beginning, center, boundary, and unifying theme for all theology.

A theology that strives to be evangelical should be one that lunges, leaps, works, worships, prays, and preaches from the gospel itself. Such a theology commences with the gospel because the gospel establishes the hermeneutical horizons for its discourse about God and constitutes the chief purpose of the church’s existence. Beginning with the gospel, making it central, also yields a theology that allows God’s promises given in the gospel to bear fruit in the church.[9] As John Webster stated: “Dogmatics is the schematic and analytic presentation of the matter of the gospel,”[10] and to tease that out more fully, he wrote:

The best evangelical theological work emerges from the delight in the Christian gospel, for the gospel announces a reality which is in itself luminous, persuasive, and infinitely satisfying. That reality is Jesus Christ as he gives himself to be an object for creaturely knowledge, love, and praise. To think evangelically about this one is to think in his presence, under the instruction of his Word and Spirit, and in the fellowship of the saints. And it is to do so with cheerful confidence that his own witness to himself is unimaginably more potent than any theological attempts to run to his defense.[11]

Very similar is former Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, who wisely commented:

Responsible theologians ought to order their teaching by the gospel, and also to ensure that whatever else their theologies may contain, the reader can see what the essence of the gospel is. The failure to make the subject of the gospel explicit in some theologies means that the reader may not know in the end what the heart of the Christian message is. It is by an exposition of the gospel that the theologian earns the right to proceed, since the gospel is the most significant revelation of all.[12]

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[1] James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 25–26; Sheila E. McGinn, ed., Celebrating Romans: Template for Pauline Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).

[2] Against Heresies III.1.1; cf. I.10.1.

[3] Calvin, Institutes, I.9.1.

[4] John Owen, Biblical Theology: The History of Theology from Adam to Christ (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1994), 593. 

[5] James I. Packer, et al, To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 23.

[6] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Voice and the Actor: A Dramatic Proposal about the Ministry and Minstrelsy of Theology,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method (ed. John G. Stackhouse; Regent: Regent College Publishing, 2000), 61.

[7] John Webster, Word and Church (London: T&T Clark, 2001), 191.

[8] Derek Tidball, Skillful Shepherds: Explorations in Pastoral Theology (Leicester, UK: Apollos, 1997), 100, 120.

[9] Jeremy R. Treat, “Gospel and Doctrine in the Life of the Church,” SBET 32 (2014): 180.

[10] John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 130.

[11] John Webster, “Jesus Christ,” in The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (eds. T. Larsen and D. Treier; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.

[12] Peter Jensen, The Revelation of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 33.