18/02/2025
What Is the Gospel?
The goal of this book is to “get the gospel right.” The word ‘gospel’ means ‘good news,’ so it is crucial to make sure that the message really is 'good news' for those who respond to it. It is the good news that the Lord Jesus and His Apostles proclaimed to a lost world of sinners-Jew and Gentile. The essence of the gospel is the person and work of the Lord Jesus and how the benefits of His life, death, and resurrection are realized in the lives of individuals. Most evangelical Christians agree about the person and work of Christ: that He was God incarnate in human flesh to provide eternal life to a spiritually dead humanity through His death and resurrection. However, many who accept this statement might not agree with each other as to how a sinner can be saved. Indeed, there has been a serious polarization among Evangelicals in regard to salvation truth.
It is the thesis of this book that the gospel is that any sinner can be saved by grace only through explicit repentant faith in the finished work of Christ alone. This means that the gospel is a valid offer for every last human being, available by God's unmerited favor, apart from human performance either before or after conversion. Christ is the only way of salvation, that is, no one can be saved apart from explicit trust in the merits of His saving death and resurrection. Although the new birth and right standing with God are given instantaneously upon the exercise of saving faith, there is a process by which unbelievers come to trust in Christ for salvation. Also, it is the privilege of every true believer to have assurance of ultimate salvation.
It is clear that many mainline Protestants would no longer agree with Evangelicals about even the deity and passion of Christ. This book will only briefly deal with those issues. Traditional Catholics and Eastern Orthodox might agree with Evangelicals about His deity and passion, but they would not accept our teaching about how people can be saved. This was the crucial issue of the Protestant Reformation. However, within a century after the Reformation a sharp division developed among Protestants. Martin Luther and John Calvin had followed Augustine in a deterministic approach to salvation, with doctrines of unconditional election (absolute predestination) and irresistible grace. It is widely recognized that Calvin's successor in Geneva, Theodor Beza, developed a more extreme form of Calvin's doctrine by adding the notion of limited atonement-that Christ died only for the elect.
A century after the Reformation a reaction against this extreme Genevan Calvinism developed around Amsterdam pastor and theologian, Jacob Arminius (1560-1609). After Arminius' untimely death, some of his followers, called Remonstrants, pressed his denial of Calvinism in five points. At the Synod of Dort (1618-19) the Arminians were banished from the Netherlands Reformed churches by the extreme Calvinists, who set out their doctrine in five opposing points, the famous acronym, TULIP. Most Protestants, except Lutherans and the Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage, can trace their lineage back to either the Calvinism or Arminianism.
It is the burden of this book to show that both Calvinists and Arminians have got it half right and half wrong, with the truth being in the middle. Diligent inductive study of the whole Bible, without traditional or philosophical preconceptions, confirms the above definition of the gospel message. A middle or mediate view is also confirmed by the views of the early church fathers* and a score of evangelical movements which reacted to the determinism of the Reformers. It is also harmonious with the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus to His church. British scholar, I. Howard Marshall expressed this goal so aptly: “The full Arminian position is as much open to error as is extreme Calvinism. My aim is to reach beyond the Calvinist-Arminian controversy to a position which is biblical, and which therefore accepts whatever is true in both Calvinism and Arminianism.”
What Are the Various Views?
Moderate Calvinism.
The essence of Calvin's theology, which he got from Augustine a millennium earlier, is in the doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace. According to this view, God predestined some individuals to be elected to salvation based upon His own hidden reasons. God then sovereignly gives the new birth and faith only to those elect individuals. Christ died for all mankind, without exception or discrimination, but only the elect will respond to the gospel and be saved. This view is commonly referred to as four-point Calvinism.
Extreme or Hyper Calvinism.
Calvin's successors extended the implications of Calvin's views to become the five-points of the Synod of Dort and the Westminster Confession. The acronym TULIP stands for these points.
T is for Total Depravity, which means that mankind is so depraved that sinners can do nothing to please God, including repentance or faith. Spiritual death means total inability to respond to God, so God must give faith to the sinner.
U is for Unconditional Election or predestination.
L is for Limited Atonement, that Christ died only for the elect and not for the “non-elect.” (Some prefer the term, “particular redemption.”)
I is for Irresistible Grace, which means that the elect are sovereignly given regeneration to enable them to believe.
P is for Perseverance of the saints, which means that the truly elect prove their election by perseverance in faith and obedience to the end. Section III deals with issues raised by extreme Calvinism.
Classic Arminianism.
Some Christians would go back to the moderate views of Arminius himself. They reject eternal security, although Arminius only had doubts about this doctrine. They reject the other points of Calvinism. Four chapters of this book deal with eternal security.
Remonstrant Arminianism.
The Remonstrant successors to Arminius not only rejected all five points of Calvinism, but many also denied that Christ's death was as a substitute for sinners. This denial was an attempt to explain how Christ could die for all sinners without all mankind being saved.
Wesleyan Arminianism.
Over a century after Arminius, John Wesley (1703-91) restored an “Evangelical Arminianism.” He rejected the extreme views of the Remonstrants by holding to a stronger view of human depravity and God's sovereignty, which was important to his very fruitful evangelism. However, he began to teach that believers can attain sinless perfection, which became the basis for the subsequent ‘holiness movement.’
Mediate theology. The Synod of Orange (AD 529) affirmed Augustine's emphasis upon grace, but rejected his doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace, which could be called a semi-Augustinian view. Over a dozen movements after the Reformation rejected the determinism of the Reformers and sought to find a middle position. Hundreds of theologians, Bible commentators, and church leaders in recent centuries have held to election being conditioned on repentant faith alone, while also affirming the eternal security of the true believer. Research for this book has confirmed this mediate position as the biblical one.
Biblical Doctrine Is Foundational
Since God uses true Christians in all of the above movements, why should we be concerned about which one is right? Many Christians have the notion that doctrine divides and is unimportant in the life of the individual or of the church. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
In his first letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul emphasized repeatedly the importance of sound doctrine and teaching. He showed great concern for the truth of the message which Timothy was to preach and teach and spoke frequently of the imperative of holding to “the faith” as an objective body of essential truth. He encouraged Timothy to stay on in Ephesus to deal with false teachings in the churches there (1 Tim. 1:3-11). In emphasizing God's desire that all men might be saved, he makes their coming “to the knowledge of the truth” synonymous with this (2:3-4). Therefore it is essential that local church leaders be “able to teach” (3:2) and must hold “to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience” (3:9), since the church of the living God is “the pillar and support of the truth” (3:15).
Paul warns that “in the latter times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (4:1), and that to “be a good servant of Christ Jesus” Timothy will not only have to be “nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine” but also have to point out this apostasy to the brethren (4:6). Paul exhorts him to “prescribe and teach” that “the living God... is the Savior of all men, especially of believers” (4:10-11), and twice re- minds him that by giving attention to his teaching he will insure salvation for his hearers (4:13, 16). In the concluding section, Paul shows a great concern that Timothy teach “doctrine conforming to godliness” and warns those whose lifestyle is moving them away from “the faith”(5:8, 17; 6:2-3, 10, 17). Paul's letter to Titus emphasizes these same concerns (1:1, 9-14; 2:1, 7, 10).
Based on the preceding, it is no overstatement to say that biblical doctrine is foundational to the life, witness, and ministry of individual Christians, and to the life of the church. Yet today, we see little concern for doctrine in most evangelical churches, and music is fast becoming doctrinally vapid. This situation is so serious that it must be called a crisis.
—Pages 1-4, Getting the Gospel Right, A Balanced View of Salvation Truth by G. Gordon Olson, Foreword by Tim LaHaye
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