The New Testament has a good deal to say about the importance of being gospel people.
Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, is a New Testament book all about the gospel and about being gospel people. In the first 11 chapters, Paul lays out the ‘gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures’ (1:1–2). It is good news ‘concerning his Son’ (1:3), the Last Adam (5:12–21), our only hope. And it is good news concerning ‘the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood’ (3:24–25). In Romans, we read that: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;’ (3:10–12).
Yet, those lost in sin (8:7) can ‘be saved by him from the wrath of God’ (5:9). Sinners can be ‘justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ (3:24). Through the gospel, they can be born again, united to Christ in his death and resurrection (6:3–4) to enjoy no condemnation (8:1) and a new life, walking ‘according to the Spirit’ (8:4). Such people – whether Jew or Gentile – who heartily believe in Jesus become the true people of God, the people who have attained the ‘righteousness that is by faith’ (9:30; cf. 10:9–13).
At the risk of oversimplifying, we could summarise the first 11 chapters of Romans like this:
• Chapters 1–4 concern the Son’s once-and-for-all redemption of lost sinners so that they might be justified by grace alone.
• Chapters 5–8 concern the Spirit’s work of regeneration, how he gives new birth to the dead and new life to sinners who will then walk in the Spirit.
• Chapters 9–11 concern the Father’s word of revelation, being a Scriptural defence of the statement that ‘it is not as though the word of God has failed’ (Rom. 9:6).
Then, from chapter 12, Paul appeals to the Roman Christians to live as transformed, gospel people. Especially, he calls them, amid their differences (12:3–8), to ‘love one another with brotherly affection’ (12:10; also 12:13–21; 13:8–14). Paul recognises that while they share a common gospel, they will differ over a number of other matters (e.g. what to eat and special days), and he asks them not to judge or grieve each other over such matters (chap.14). What is striking is the complete difference of tone from that in Galatians 1, where Paul sees the Galatians turning to ‘a different gospel’ (Gal.1:6). For Paul, to change the gospel is intolerable: ‘even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed’ (1:8). But in Romans 14, it is not the gospel that is the cause of disagreement. The gospel is not a matter over which we can cheerfully diverge. Yet the people of the gospel, while never turning from the gospel itself, should clearly exercise some latitude over many other issues over which Christians differ. In fact, they should actively ‘watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles’ (16:17). That is what it means to be people of the gospel rather than people of a party.
Similar notes can be heard in 1 Corinthians. There, Paul addresses the death and resurrection of Christ as matters ‘of first importance’ (15:3). Yet the first – and seemingly most basic – exhortation of the letter is this: ‘I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment’ (1:10). To a highly tribal church riven by the cries of ‘I follow Paul’ or ‘I follow Apollos’ or ‘I follow Cephas’ or ‘I follow Christ’ (1:12), Paul calls for unity in Christ alone and the word of the cross (1:13–31). While the gospel must never be compromised by our actions (chaps. 5–6) or our beliefs (chap. 15), Paul calls for a unity found in the gospel (11:17–14:40) that does not depend on complete agreement on all things (chap. 8). In that way, we prove that we are not of a sect but of the gospel.
The gospel, our anchor
For people of the gospel, the gospel serves as our mooring anchor. An anchor stops a ship from drifting while allowing it a certain amount of movement on the surface of the water. Just so, the gospel holds us to Scripture’s matters of first importance while allowing some slack for differences of opinion on other matters. As Paul called the Romans and Corinthians to unity in the gospel and liberty in what to eat, so the anchor keeps us from making shipwreck of our faith (1 Tim. 1:19) without making our every disagreement a cause for schism.
With the gospel as our anchor, evangelicals are able to see that not every issue is a gospel issue, and not every error (or departure from our view or practice) is a soul-killing heresy. Some doctrines are more essential and foundational than others (Heb. 5:12–14). Henry Venn argued that recognition of this was in fact a distinguishing mark of evangelical thought. Evangelicals, he wrote, are marked out ‘not so much in their systematic statement of doctrines, as in the relative importance which they assign to the particular parts of the Christian System, and in the vital operation of the Christian Doctrines upon the heart and conduct.’ This, added J.C. Ryle, is the only true way to be gospel people: ‘You may spoil the gospel by disproportion. You have only to attach an exaggerated importance to the secondary things of Christianity, and a diminished importance to the first things, and the mischief is done. Once alter the proportion of the parts of truth, and truth soon becomes downright error! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be Evangelical.’
To be evangelical thus means to be called to exercise Biblical wisdom. As J.I. Packer put it, it involves the need to discern between ‘the virtue of tolerating different views on secondary issues on the basis of clear agreement on essentials’ and ‘the vice of retreating from the light of Scripture into an intellectual murk where no outlines are clear, all cats are grey, and syncretism is the prescribed task.’
Walking with such discernment is no easy task, and describing how to do so well takes more than a few pages. Yet Albert Mohler uses a helpful metaphor for evangelical thinking here: that of theological triage. Triage is a sorting system commonly used in medical contexts to decide in an emergency which injuries must be treated first. It ensures that a gunshot wound is treated with more urgency than a scraped knee. Theological triage recognizes that some doctrines are first-level issues, essential to the gospel: the nature and identity of the triune God, the Father’s revelation, the Son’s redemption, and the Spirit’s regeneration. Other doctrines are not necessarily unimportant because they are non-essential. Some are second-level issues, like baptism and church government, which, while not essential to the gospel, still cause Christians to separate into various denominations. Some are third-level doctrines, like different views on the timing of the return of Christ: they are significant, but issues over which Christians may disagree and still remain in close fellowship, even within the same local congregation. Second- and third-level doctrines still matter, but they must not be given an exaggerated importance. And then there are some other (fourth-level) issues that are actually relatively unimportant, such as what we eat.
Since being gospel people means both unwavering faithfulness to the gospel and a refusal to elevate other issues to the level of the gospel, evangelicals have to walk a line between fighting over too much and discerning too little. Time and again, we have failed – and been shot at from both sides for our failures. But our failures do not invalidate the goodness of the task. Loyalty to the gospel demands that we work simultaneously against both tribalism and the muddying of theological waters.
