Week 4 | The Gospel and The Church

The Gospel and the Church 

In Romans 1:16, Paul bold proclaims that he is 'not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first but also to the Greek'. For Paul, it is clear that the gospel is the message that brings about salvation. The proper response to hearing this message, Paul claims, is 'faith'. 

But what does that word mean?

The greek word that is translated into English as either 'faith' or 'belief' is 'pistis'. When many of us in the modern word think of faith or belief, we assume that it means agreeing with or accepting a certain proposition or idea; 'faith', for us, often means little more than believing that God exists and that we need to intellectually assent to a handful of doctrines. But this is not what the Greek word pistis means. New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta, in his book Paul and the Language of Faith (Eerdmans Press, 2020), argues that the term pistis is much more dynamic than merely believing that an idea is true. Pistis has a range of possible uses in ancient Greek, but one of the most common is the idea of 'faithfulness', showing loyalty or allegiance to another person. Pistis is active. Imagine it like this: if you are married, you believe that your spouse exists. But that alone does not mean that you are being faithful to your spouse; marital faithfulness requires exclusively loving and serving your partner, not just believing that they exists. This is what the word pistis means. It is also why Paul and other writers of the New Testament equate 'faith' with 'obedience'; they carry a similar meaning (cf. Romans 1:5, 1 Peter 1:2). To have faith in Jesus means that we are faithful and obedient to him, not that we simply believe that he exists. 

Matthew Bates, a New Testament scholar that has written extensively on both the gospel and faith, argues in his book Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic, 2017) that when referring to a proper response to the gospel, pistis should best be translated into English as 'allegiance', since we are offering our exclusive loyalty and faithfulness to Jesus, the one true king. The proper response to the gospel is to become faithful or allegant to Jesus, and this is how God chooses to save people. But placing our allegiant faith in Jesus the king is only the beginning of the story. 

In Ephesians 1:13-14, Paul succinctly outlines what happens when someone responds to the gospel: 'In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.' Those that put their faith in Jesus are given the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit becomes the marker that someone is truly faithful to Jesus, and is the sign that one is a part of Abraham's family, the world-wide people of God, called to be a light to those that do not know Him. In 1st century Judaism, obedience to the Jewish law defined the people of God. Non-Jews (called 'gentiles' or 'Greeks' in the New Testament) are excluded from the family of God. But Paul, a very conservative Jew, claims that, through faithfulness to the Gospel and the presence of the Holy Spirit, 'the gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body...in Christ Jesus through the gospel' (Ephesians 3:6). In Galatians 3, Paul reminds his audience 'that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the nations will be blessed in you.” So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer' (Gal. 3:7-9) and that they 'received the Spirit...by hearing [the gospel] with faith' (3:2). Faith, pistis, allegiance to Jesus through the gospel, which results in the gift of the Holy Spirit, is now what demarcates Abraham's family, the people of God. Paul calls this Jew-plus-gentile family of Abraham 'ekklesia', or 'church'. 

This means that we, as the Jesus-allegiant, Holy Spirit-enabled family of Abraham, must think about ourselves as the universal family of faith; the only identity that we have is in Christ, and we, the united family of Abraham, have been given the responsibility of spreading the Gospel to the nations. Our citizenship is in the Kingdom of God. Both Peter and Paul understand that Abraham's family was called to be both distinct from the nations that surround them and be a light to a world that had forgotten about God. Paul explains to those living in the Roman colony of Philippi that their 'citizenship is [preserved] in heaven' (Philippians 3:19), and Peter tells Christ-follows living in Asia minor to think of themselves as 'aliens and strangers' (1 Timothy 1:1, 2:11). The  church is to think of its identity in this way.

The final question that must be asked, if 'faith in the gospel' should be understood as 'allegiance to king Jesus', is what exactly that obedience looks like. Paul is very clear that the Holy Spirit, with our cooperation, enables us to 'put to death the deeds of the flesh' (Romans 8:13). But what does this look like? In New Testament scholar Michael Gorman's book Cruciformity (Eerdmans Press, 2001), he argues that the cross is both the source and the shape of our salvation. Not only does Jesus's death, resurrection, and ascension save us, Jesus's death on a cross is the goal of Christian faith and discipleship, and the primary way that we share the Gospel with the world. Gorman explains that the church needs to have narrative faith, by which he means that the outside world should look at the church and see people whos lives and behavior are shaped by the cross. As we discussed last week, in Philippians 2:5-11 Paul encourages his audience to have the same attitude of sacrifice that was in Christ Jesus. Christians are to selflessly serve one another and serve the world as a testament to the Gospel, which is the story of Jesus the crucified king. The apostle John summarizes it perfectly: 'In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another' (1 John 4:10-11). 

The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is the crucified King, who died for our sins according to scripture. Those that put their faith in this gospel and give their allegiance to Jesus are saved, given the gift of the Holy Spirit, and incorporated into the worldwide family of Abraham that Paul calls the church. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are live lives of sacrificial love for others, embodying the gospel story through the way that we practice our faith. This is what it means to proclaim the Gospel.