The Urgency of Getting the Message of the Gospel Clear Part I

“The name of God is blasphemed among the people groups because of you.”  (Romans 2:24)

“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from 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; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus...”  (Romans 3:21f.)

Writing as a Lutheran Christian pastor, I do not claim Martin Luther (1483-1546) to be an inventor, but rather a reformer.  The Gospel was already announced 14 centuries before in the New Testament by the very beginning verse of Mark’s account of the public ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  And it was at the same time laid bare and clear by the Apostle Paul in his “Letter to the Romans.”  What Martin Luther did was recover the already-existent message of the New Testament message that had over the centuries become obscured by the Roman Catholic Church of his time.  Lest we think however that we can rest comfortable by throwing stones at the institutional church that Luther challenged, it is vital to realize that the church in every age requires ongoing reformation (even churches of the Reformation!).  And not only that, it is people as a whole—both sacred and secular—who required the discipline of returning repeatedly to the roots of our thinking.  The scientific method assumes that all human beings (not just “the religious” but scientists too) are prone to bias-driven error so that the repetition of testing against accepted standards is demanded in the name of truth-seeking.  By the way, this means that Luther’s testimony about the Gospel is a testable claim that demands that it be tested, as he and the other reformers testified in both the “Augsburg Confession” and the “Apology” that are found in The [Lutheran] Book of Concord.

I am convinced that Luther did get it right with respect to the Gospel.  That which he announced to be the Gospel, namely that we are “justified” (that is, declared “righteous” on account of Jesus’ finished work on the cross and resurrection) through faith in Him alone, he discovered in the rhetorical heart of the Apostle Paul’s “Letter to the Romans.”  That particular letter (“epistle”) stands out as by far the most systematic, direct, and exhaustive treatment of the meaning of the “Gospel” in the entire Bible!  Please do not interpret this statement as a criticism of the rest of the New Testament (henceforth “N.T.”).  By and large the N. T. Letters were deliberately occasional pieces written specifically to address actual problems within the early church, including problems moral, strategic and theological.  Every other N.T. letter assumes the correct understanding of the Gospel as it fulfills its specific goal of applying that message directly to the problem at hand.  Even Paul’s “The Letter to the Galatians,” which indirectly defines the Gospel (2:16) had as its primary burden the retrieval of lapsing Christians in a way that “Romans” did not.