Part 3: The Church’s Ideal Response to Gospel Substitutes
In the Christian circles of our day, the term “gospel” has become common nomenclature. We pastors often speak of preaching that is gospel-centered. Evangelical churches desire to be oriented around the gospel. A whole host of leadership conferences over the past two decades—and even more books—have enforced this idea that we must be focused on the gospel in our Christian living.
Suffice it to say, shouldn’t we desire this? Absolutely! But have we perhaps grown so accustomed to this adjectival, “gospel-something” vernacular that we have misused the meaning of the word gospel? After all, the term gospel (ευανγελιον) originates from a Greek word referring to a message pronounced that is both true in nature and is good for its hearers in effect. It tells of a real event with real ramifications.
The gospel message of Jesus, revealed to us in Holy Scripture, is both historical and doctrinal.
As J. Gresham Machen stated in Christianity and Liberalism (1923), “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for our sins’—that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.”(1)
Throughout Scripture, we see the following proclamations of the gospel:
Galatians 2:20 - “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Romans 3:21–24 - “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”
Romans 4:24 - “It [God’s righteousness] will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification."
But Scripture also contains a countless number of amplifications of the gospel.
Indeed, these amplifications are too many for us to number, as the whole of Scripture is divinely written in such a way so as to holistically showcase and exposit for us the gospel. Every page of God’s Holy Word is written in this way: “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations” (Luke 24:46–47).
Such a message of divinely-instated and divinely-accomplished salvation from sin and its curse—death and eternal destruction—is the hallmark of the Christian Faith. Without the message of eternal life in Christ, secured and guaranteed by his sinless life, atoning death, and resurrection, there is no hope.
As such, the Church has no lesser unifying message than Christ and him crucified.
Yet in every generation, the visible Church has been met with detractors of the gospel and promoters of false gospels.(2) This has and will always be the case. It even began taking shape during the ministries of Jesus’ Apostles (cf. Galatians 1:6–9). We should not be surprised, then, by this recurring event. Jesus himself warned us that this would occur from the outset of the gospel’s proclamation, as a result of the Enemy’s implantation of the sons of the evil one among Christ’s field (cf. Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43).
The Church must therefore be on guard so as to not believe the lies of the enemy. These lies can be called “Gospel Substitutes.”
So what are “gospel substitutes?” In what form do they come? And what are some examples of gospel substitutes?
First, gospel substitutes are essentially messages that promise salvation from sin and justification before God by any means other than Christ. They come primarily in two forms: theoreticism and pragmatism. But they are more than just ideas and works. They are systems of ideas and/or works that promote self-sufficiency over God’s sufficiency to save from sin and its effects to the uttermost. These lies are not harmless theories or practices. They have real, lasting impact upon society as a whole. And they are systematically propagated by their professors within a generation through the abuse of good institutions such as education and legislation.
Of course, the propagation of ideas pervades all of life. This is why we must “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Gospel substitutes—when taught and believed—have consequences upon both society and her individual members. So the Church has and will be affected by the perversion of her integrity at the culture’s disavowment of truth. And collaterally speaking, the culture has and will be affected by the Church’s embrace and/or rejection of truth.
In the words of Machen,
“What is today [a] matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”(3)
Today, our American culture—not to mention the Western World—has been forced to deal with a preponderance of gospel substitutes. These include, but are not limited to the following:
Competing gender ideologies
The emergence of Critical Race Theory
Harmful political policies regarding the sanctity of human life
Authoritarian overreach into the lives of private citizens, organizations, and institutions in matters of health, daily routines, business, worship, and the like
One need only consider briefly the freedoms we took for granted before March, 2020 to understand that political theories of salvation and atonement pervade our culture, let alone the visible Church. As a pastor, a citizen, and a student of history, I, like you, am all too aware of these gospel substitutes. We see them every day in news articles and in conversations with our neighbors whom we love. In light of this, we must consider the following question:
What is an appropriate response to our culture’s madness?
In short, we must proclaim the unadulterated gospel to a dying world. But before we apply this to our present cultural crises, I believe we must first look to the past and understand how the Church has propagated gospel truth successfully… and even not so successfully.
In the coming blog posts, we will discuss the specifics of past cultural grievances and how the Church responded. In the meantime, I will simply propose the following:
We, as Christians, must not be those who conform to the culture. On the other hand, we must not be those who cancel the culture. Rather, we must be those who consecrate the culture by means of holistic gospel proclamation within our own spheres of influence.
When anti-Christian theories of atonement and salvation pervade a culture, the work of far-reaching, generation-transcending evangelism becomes more basic. We preach Christ—the whole Christ. When a society is destroyed by its own vices, like Narcissus foolishly mesmerized by his own appearance, the primary work of the Church becomes that of sowing and planting the seed once more. When she sows and plants in good faith, her fervent prayer will inevitably become that the Lord of the harvest, Christ Jesus, by the appropriation of his Spirit, would water it and ready it and beautify it for the Final Day.
For Christ and his kingdom of grace,
- Rich
Footnotes:
J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 23.
Theologians refer to the “visible Church” as being comprised of those who are true believers in Christ along with those claiming to be such.
J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture” in D. G. Hart, Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004), 404.
