The gospel is good news. Good news, as Martin Luther taught the church, comes in the form of a promise. It is not law, which binds us to our past; it is promise, which opens up our future. It declares, not as a mere possibility but as a glorious fact, that the future shall be such-and-such—that the future is not bound by our failures but comes instead as a free gift from one who loves us.
“Remember not the former things,” the Lord says, “nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing” (Isa. 43:18–19 RSV, here and throughout).
The gospel, then, is God’s good promise to us about our future. We can trust it because it is God himself who speaks. The gospel is God’s Word, and so it is one and the same as the Word that made the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1–4). It is, quite literally, omnipotent. As Lutheran pastor Harold Senkbeil likes to put it, God’s Word does what it says. It gets the job done just by being spoken (Isa. 55:10–11).
The church is the creature of this word, which is another way of saying that God uses the gospel to bring the church into existence. And in the words of another Lutheran, the late theologian Robert Jenson, “It is the whole mission of the church to speak the gospel.”
Speaking the gospel comes in many forms, from public worship to the sacraments to caring for the poor. Just as a hug and a kiss are a kind of nonverbal communication, so are bread and wine. In the famous line attributed to Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.”
Everything for the church, then, comes down to one thing: getting the gospel right. In particular, getting the promise of the gospel right. So what is the content of gospel promise?
I’m not going to hold you in suspense, because you already know what I’m going to say—and because, as I sometimes tell my theology students, in this conversation Sunday school answers are welcome. The promise of the gospel is Jesus. Jesus is the gospel and the gospel is Jesus. The good news, the gift of God, the hope of the world—it’s Jesus, Jesus, nothing but Jesus.
Given how simple this is, you’d think we Christians wouldn’t mess it up. If all we did was stick to Jesus in preaching the gospel, we could be confident of being on solid ground! Unfortunately, that’s not what we do. We are perennially tempted to convert the gospel from “Jesus alone” to “Jesus plus ____.”
You can fill in the blank after “plus” any way you like. I started with Luther, so it’s natural for Protestants to think of Reformation controversies: Jesus plus works, or Jesus plus indulgences, or Jesus plus the pope. What I have in mind, though, are some “Jesus plus” temptations that are a little bit closer to home.
The biggest one on offer today is the prosperity gospel. A favorite whipping boy of theologically educated Christians, the prosperity gospel promises your best life now. It proclaims that God is fed up with your unsatisfactory life here on earth, and by his power he is going to turn it around for you. He is going to give you that raise, buy you that car, get you out of that neighborhood, heal you of that illness. All you have to do is believe—that is, believe and pray, by naming it and claiming it in Jesus’ name. (And maybe by donating to the preacher’s ministry; call it seed money.)
It’s easy to mock the fixtures of the prosperity gospel: grifter preachers, basketball stadiums, celebrity fame, private jets, financial scandals. Does anyone really think Jesus came to earth and died on a cross so we can have nice teeth and wear expensive suits? Isn’t this all one big scam?
No doubt it is, sometimes. But as my colleague Richard Beck has pointed out, there’s a reason the prosperity gospel is so popular—not only here in the US but around the world, and not only with certain races or classes, as critics might like to suppose, but across every race and class. Given how difficult it is to define, as well as its substantial overlap with charismatic and Pentecostal traditions, it’s reasonable to conclude that the prosperity gospel is one of the largest and most successful class-crossing, multiethnic, multinational religious movements on the planet.
And the logic is powerful in its simplicity: The prosperity gospel says that God loves you, wants you to have a good life, and is willing to give it to you—if only you ask him. Because he’s Almighty God, he can. Because he’s a loving Father, he will.
Ask yourself: Are you participating in the prosperity gospel when you pray for a job interview, a successful surgery, or safe travels on the road? Well then, a prosperity advocate might argue, why not pray for everything the same way and see what God does about it? Does God want you to be miserable? Are Christians meant to be masochists?
Things get murky fast in sorting out what God does and doesn’t want for us in this life, what we should and shouldn’t pray for. I know of a venerable Catholic philosopher who once stood up at an academic conference to defend praying for a good parking spot. If God is God, she reasoned, why not?
To be clear, I’m not here to defend the prosperity gospel. At the end of the day, at least in its most naked form, it is a false gospel, for the simple reason that it promises “Jesus plus.” And we know that the only promise the gospel makes is Jesus.
Yet I began with the prosperity gospel because, for many Christians, it is self-evidently a bridge too far. There is a bright red line, and if you cross it for the sake of the prosperity gospel, you have thereby left the faith behind. You have, in the words of the apostle Paul, embraced “another gospel” (Gal. 1:7).
But here’s the rub. In my experience, there’s another version of the prosperity gospel on offer in our churches, and it is quite popular. It is far subtler than the ordinary kind. It appeals to the well-off rather than to the downtrodden, and it uses fancy theological trappings to sound like something other than what it is.
Here’s what it says: We need to stop focusing so much on the hereafter, on the sweet by-and-by. We’ve had too much talk of heaven—too many altar calls, too much fearmongering and culture warring, too much assuming that this world is going to hell in a handbasket. Too much, you might say, about postmortem life, not enough about premortem life. We need to bring our gaze down from heaven back to earth. We need to look around us. There’s a whole world in need and God wants us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
This message is appealing because it has ample theological and biblical warrant. Its proponents look to the Gospels and see Jesus proclaiming God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. They see Jesus pouring out the Spirit at Pentecost. They see Paul calling believers to live out the Lord’s will here and now in the community of the church. This is no delay of life until after death; it’s abundant life in the present tense (John 10:10). The good life the gospel promises is not far off. In Jesus’ words, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21, ASV).
Just as with the more ordinary prosperity gospel, there’s much to commend here. Christian faith is about the present, not just the future. The Spirit is our foretaste of the life of the world to come. Jesus does want justice to roll down like a river, not just in heaven but on earth. The church should practice works of mercy to the poor and oppressed. All this is true.
What’s amiss is not so much what is affirmed as what is denied. The preaching of this “gospel plus” produces a kind of forgetfulness of heaven, rooted in what can only be called an embarrassment about spiritual things. Often as not, one detects the influence of N. T. Wright, although just as often, it is not Wright per se but a misreading of his work. Either way, the gospel is subtly transformed into a message about this life, an upper-middle-class mutation of the prosperity gospel that promises to extend the kind of health, comforts, and affluence enjoyed by educated, prosperous believers to any and all who lack them.
This, in turn, becomes the mission of the church: to increase the quality of life here on earth. Heaven, if it exists at all, can wait. We’ve got work to do now.
Remove the sophisticated theology, however, and are we really so far from “your best life now”? As with some versions of the social gospel at the turn of the 20th century, the church appears to be a kind of nonprofit or social work operation—at best a spiritual charity. If we aren’t making the world a better place, in this model, then we’re failing at our mission.
But what, again, is the mission? The mission, according to Scripture, is the good news of the gospel, and the gospel is a promise, and the only promise the gospel makes is Jesus. Nothing else, no “plus.”
The gospel does not promise you health. It does not promise you wealth. It does not promise you anything in this lifeexcept the person and work of Jesus. You may or may not get married; you may or may not have children; you may or may not live long; you may or may not live well. You may suffer trials, you may endure squalor, you may know little more than pain, fear, and isolation. You may be homeless and friendless, utterly abandoned by this cold, dark, unforgiving world. God does not promise to spare you any of it. In fact, Jesus himself promises that some of us, just by being his followers, will suffer these things as a result (John 15:18–16:33).
Jesus does not go on to say that he will protect us from these woes. He says only that he will be with us in the midst of them. It is his presence in the darkness of this life that gives us confidence that he will bring us into the light of the next—eventually.
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For, as Paul wrote, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). This from a man who was beaten, rejected, imprisoned, stoned, whipped, shipwrecked, and ultimately beheaded for his faith (2 Cor. 11:16–33). His hope was in Jesus; it was not hope in this life or for this life. “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24–25).
For Paul, patience meant groaning: “Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling … so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” For now, “we walk by faith, not by sight,” because “while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.” It is a terrible thing to be away from the Lord. But groaning does not mean despair. Although “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” we know that the one who has prepared a heavenly home for us “is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 5:2–8).
Reading Paul, you almost get the impression that the gospel is about going to heaven when you die. Some of us have been taught not to say such world-denying, world-escaping things; our seminaries and theology textbooks were supposed to have educated us out of them.
It’s true that Christian hope looks forward to the resurrection of the body and new creation, not the popular picture of harp-playing ghosts in the clouds. Nevertheless, it remains the case that we have allowed a proper biblical corrective to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side—so far, in fact, that we’re left with little more than a this-worldly gospel of making life better by our own efforts.
Let’s return to the hope of the gospel. The gospel gives us Jesus, only Jesus, nothing but Jesus. He is God’s promise to us. He is God’s Word to us. Put your trust in him, and all these things shall be added unto you—if not in this life, then in the next.
