the favor of thinking that Paul, though he can chase a few tangents here and there, never left the gospel and that it extends from verse three through to verse twenty-eight.
Third, the gospel of 1 Corinthians 15 is not Paul’s gospel as if he were the first to articulate it. The gospel of 1 Corinthians 15, made clear in Paul’s own words in verses 1–3, is the one and only apostolic gospel that was passed on in oral form from the very beginning by all apostolic Christians. This is not Paul’s gospel; this is the apostolic gospel and therefore Paul’s gospel.
Fourth, the gospel is defined by events in Jesus’s life. In crisp formulae we find four rapidly narrated events in verses 3–5: he died, he was buried, he was raised, and he appeared. If we continue to verse 28, we need to add that he was exalted, and he will reign, and he will return, and he will hand over to the Father. Instead of four spiritual laws, we get four (or more) events in the life of Jesus. I cannot emphasize this contrast enough. The gospel of evangelicalism is an abstracted system of salvation and even transaction; the gospel of the apostles was a story about Jesus. I’m not saying this to be cute or provocative; I’m saying this because it’s what 1 Corinthians 15 says.
Fifth, the word “gospel” means to “announce” or to “declare,” and what is declared according to 1 Corinthians 15 is that Israel’s story has come to its fitting completion in the story of Jesus. “To gospel,” then, was to announce that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and the destined goal of the story of Israel. This is made clear in verses 3–5 in the words “according to the Scriptures” but it is found in the constant resonances of verses 3–28 to the Old Testament narrative. What drives this story is neither injustice nor the need for personal salvation but the need for a king for Israel. Jesus is that king.
Sixth, this story about Jesus saves. Or better, Jesus saves, but the Jesus who saves is the Jesus of this story of Israel. He’s the Savior of Israel. But the defining word for Jesus in the gospel is that he is Messiah and Lord. As Messiah and as Lord he is Savior. Once a young man wrote me an e-mail and asked this question: what does Jesus being Messiah have to do with the gospel? We’ve got a problem if we are asking that question. We’re so far from the original Peoria we don’t even know where it is! The reason the e-mailer asked that question was because he understood the gospel not as justice but as personal salvation from God’s wrath and his personal sin, and Jesus being a Jewish Messiah had so little to do with it, he was having trouble making sense of the only narrative that the Bible tells. But, still and without any reduction, this story saves. In verse 3, Paul says Jesus “died for our sins.” There is no explicit atonement theory here because for the apostles the effect of the gospel was salvation, however it happened.
Seventh, the gospel is a complete story of Jesus. It has been said, and it deserves to be said often, that for most Christians, and here I blanket the entire church—Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism—the only event in the life of Jesus of significance was his death. They have a Good Friday gospel. But the gospel of the apostles included his life as well as his death and his burial, and his resurrection and his exaltation. It’s a complete life that has to be told if we wish to announce the gospel.
Before I push on, a tangent for you to think about. I grew up reading the Bible through a salvation hermeneutic that went something like this: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation, sometimes abbreviated C-F-R-C. One year while teaching the whole Bible to a group of first year college students it dawned on me, that no one in the Bible revealed that he or she read the Bible like that until Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. Furthermore, if we are bound to restrict the gospel to verses 3–5 or 3–8, then we will have to admit that the C-F-R-C narrative is not the gospel but a salvation story. But, as I said earlier, it is wiser to extend the gospel to verse 28, and if we do that, there is at least the reality of the C-F-R-C in the apostolic gospel statement. But there the focus is not so much on the death of Christ but the resurrection of Christ.
Let me now summarize: we have seen that in the one and only place where the term is actually defined the gospel refers to the narration of the entire story of Jesus as the completion of the story of Israel and that this narrative story of Jesus saves us from our sins. To “gospel,” then, means to tell this story of Jesus as the saving story. I believe we’ve got the saving part down pat, and we’ve ignored the story almost entirely.
Leg Two: The Sermons in Acts
But it is the story that is precisely what two other major elements of the New Testament understanding of the gospel tell us as well. If the first leg in our stool is the apostolic definition of the gospel in 1 Corinthians, the second element is the apostolic gospel sermons in Acts. There are in fact seven of them, unless you count Stephen’s speech, in which case there are eight. I don’t, but that’s because it ends with finger pointing instead of a call to conversion.
Sit down some day and read Acts 2, 3, 4, 10–11, 13, 14, and 17. Then read them all over again carefully with this question: If these two apostles, Peter and Paul, are gospelling in these passages, what was their gospel? What was the gospel of their gospelling sermons? I hope you conclude what I concluded a few years back, and I hope you don’t do what I did. I was writing books on the gospel and atonement, one of which was popular, called Embracing Grace, and one for a more pastoral context, A Community Called Atonement. When I was working on those books, I was convinced that the gospel was the message of salvation, and in that work I happened quite often onto the sermons in Acts and kept saying to myself: but these apostolic sermons don’t do what I’m doing. I didn’t think the apostles were wrong, but they didn’t fit how I was describing a salvation and atonement theory. Because I didn’t think that I might be wrong, I ignored Acts. But for a lecture on the book of Acts I was to give at the University of Stellenbosch, I decided to work on the gospel in the book of Acts, and I have to confess it was one of the rare academic experiences where everything fell into place, not unlike the way Chesterton described his conversion. Formerly I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of the apostolic gospel sermons in Acts, but I thought I had salvation more or less figured out. But in working on that lecture for South Africa, it suddenly dawned on me that what I was calling “gospel” was not what Peter and Paul would have called gospel. Instead, the word “gospel” refers to something else.
What was that? Go ahead, read Acts 2, 3, 4, 10–11, 13, 14, and 173 and you will no doubt conclude what I concluded. The gospel of the apostles was not the “plan of salvation” or “how to get saved” or atonement theory or anything like what the “left” or the “right” said it was. Instead, those seven apostolic sermons had one and the same perception of the gospel: it is the announcement that the narrative of Israel’s story had come to completion in the story of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and Lord. In other words, the sermons in the book of Acts take the gospel of 1 Corinthians 15 and make it sing and sting in real, live preaching. Seven sermons are hard to digest at once and they are also hard to synthesize into a few words, so I’ll just make a couple observations. But before I do that let me quote from the heart of Peter’s gospel sermon to Cornelius, who lived in Caesarea Maritima, the newly fashioned city built by Herod the Great. We were in Caesarea recently and it struck me as a really good place to explain the gospel to gentiles, which is just what Peter did.
Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached—how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.
“We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by
