On Gospel-Centred Mantras

Why Repeating the Gospel Made Us Forget the Gospel

There are ways of perpetually speaking about “the Gospel” which ironically lead to people forgetting the substance of the Gospel when it really counts.

In our zealous efforts to repeat the terms of the Gospel at every turn, we can sometimes fail to apply the Gospel to the very areas of life where its force might be felt most powerfully. Strangely enough, this selective forgetfulness of the Gospel often manifests when we forget the very “forgetfulness” of the Gospel itself towards our sin.

"There is an art of forgetting, and every Christian should become skilled in it...If we cannot trust God to have dealt effectively with our past we may as well throw in the sponge now and have it over with. Fifty years of grieving over our sins cannot blot out their guilt. But if God has indeed pardoned and cleansed us, then we should count it done and waste no more time in sterile lamentations."

—A. W. Tozer (1964)

Sixty years on, most Christians might see themselves as free from those “sterile lamentations” of which Tozer spoke. This is because we spend so much time speaking about “the Gospel”. But there are ways of perpetually speaking about “the Gospel” which ironically lead to people forgetting the substance of the Gospel when it really counts.

To be clear, the Gospel—that is, the Good News of Jesus Christ coming into the world to live, die, rise, and ascend to glory, redeeming us by grace from the power of sin and death—is the most glorious news that exists on planet earth. There’s a reason we ought to emphasise it, and why it is the very basis for what it means to be an “evangelical”. However, the good recovery of the Gospel’s “centrality” in the life of the believer also bred unanticipated problems which disable the power of the whole of Scripture to challenge the ways the Gospel might be misapplied.

If you only ever repeat the Gospel and minimise everything else in the Bible under its umbrella, it can become quite easy to misapply the Gospel—e.g. the perpetual emphasis on God’s “outrageous grace”—and make oneself impregnable to critique. When the Gospel is seen in everything, everything may be seen in the Gospel. In such a scenario, to disagree with a subtle misapplication of the Gospel can be seen as disagreement with the Gospel itself.

Gospel-Centred Leftism

The root of the problem is that the mere phrase—“the Gospel”—has often been spoken like a magic spell by which all sermons may be concluded, all problems solved, and all arguments answered.

This is why all Gospel Coalition articles began to conclude in precisely the same way. Regardless of whatever the title of the article was, the answer was always some combination of “don’t worry, Jesus is enough, and you can’t do anything without him”. True enough, but not always necessarily the “answer” to the particular problem, nor even always the appropriate way to respond to it in all circumstances. This is also why we had a generation's worth of books titled Gospel-Somethinged Something, as if simply putting the word “Gospel-” before something immediately legitimised it as the right kind of something.

As many began to realise, however, it eventually became not the right kind of something but the Left kind of something! Focussing on “the Gospel” in this way is largely why many Christians came to despise “the culture wars” and/or socio-political engagement in general. They came to see such things as a distraction from “the Gospel”, which—remember—must always remain “central” to anything and everything we say and do.

But as such Christians were busily denouncing “the culture war” as irrelevant, the culture wars not only continued to happen around them but continued to happen to them. Hence, in recent years, many “Gospel-not-politics” Christians arrived at the curious conclusion that there are almost “unforgivable” sins if the hitherto cultural victors (the Left) have said so.