What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ? – Part I -Brad Jersak

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Part One: What is the gospel of Jesus Christ?

After sixty years, my life-long love affair with Jesus Christ and his Good News for the world still captivates me. The gospel I know today has emerged from my encounters with grace amid my missteps, and in my subsequent reflections on how often my stumbles have been met by mercy. Whatever growth I’ve gained is through glimpses of the expansive love of God for everyone and everything, (ii) through intimate communion with the person of Jesus, and (iii) in gratitude for the liberating mercy the Spirit has shown me.

Today, I have more questions. Lots of questions. Questions about the what and how and who of salvation revealed in Jesus. Some are challenges to dominant versions of the gospel

that don’t seem nearly as good as promised… or they represent persistent ditches into which Christian clerics and academics frequently cause others to slip.   

For example, much of my journey included an Evangelical teaching that salvation is imputed by unconditional grace to those who repent and receive it—a proclamation in heaven’s courts— where our participation in that salvation was held suspect, and our transformation was expected but sort of optional. I was told that a holy God doesn’t actually see us—our ‘worm theology’ couldn’t allow it. When God looks at us, he only sees Christ (“we are snow-covered dung”).

Weirdly, the extravagant claims of ‘unconditional grace’ were often accompanied by moralistic preaching, even for the “once saved, always saved” streams of Evangelicals. I’ve still not connected the dots there. Perhaps you can. Oh, and there was also that infernal ultimatum—you are saved by grace if you “pray the prayer,” but if you don’t, you’ll burn in hell forever. Unconditional?

Way back in 1988, I began a post-Evangelical pilgrimage that traversed three different movements, where I’m happy to say grace was seen as far more than transactional fire insurance. Grace is active in our real-life experience through the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, transforming, liberating presence. Salvation wasn’t a cheap abstraction—it was more than a remote verdict or ideal position in a Gnostic heavenly realm disconnected to my daily life. As one who needed authentic liberation, ‘saving grace’ became an existential reality for me. Salvation isn’t a doctrine requiring mental assent but a Savior I experience as a living, loving Presence.

I’ve learned over time that in Jesus Christ, I have been saved (no less than two millennia ago), am being saved (a life-long trajectory), and I will be saved (at our resurrection into eternal life)—and that the New Testament does indeed foresee this salvation extended to all people. I see it everywhere in the overt promises of Jesus, in Paul, in John and in Peter. And I began to read the NT judgement texts and Jesus’ warning parables as means to that glorious end, finally understanding them as the chastisements of a loving Father and therefore restorative in nature.

Learning that ultimate redemption is, at the very least, a legitimate gospel hope created space for me to breathe the gospel as good news for all people. After all, when Paul tells us to pray that all people will be saved and Peter tells us this is God’s will, then dogmatizing the necessity of hellfire as essential dogma is incongruent with the apostolic witness.

My problem is that despite that, I’m seeing a trend—a reversion among Christian teachers, pastors, priests and zealous converts—that reduces the gospel to a warped form of repentance. This mislabeled ‘repentance’ is focused on the same self-loathing and moralism I fled from in the revival preachers of my childhood. It sounds so familiar: “God offers salvation. It is now up to us to repent in preparation for the final judgment, which despite our faith, will be a judgment of works.” I often wonder how and why that message keeps getting imported into gospel sermons by zealous religious proof-texters.

Here is today’s bottom-line question: Did Jesus teach salvation by works with a threat of eternal damnation? Because that’s what I’ve been hearing and reading. Am I misunderstanding? Is that how Christianity understands the gospel? I don’t believe so. Rather, the ancient faith always taught that salvation is en Christo (“in Christ”)and revealed at the Cross as the self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love of God. That’s what I’ve come to believe. And if it’s heresy to proclaim that, sign me up. If that’s not the Christian message, I have been deceived by a more beautiful gospel (and so was Paul).

A corollary question: What is gospel repentance? Is it performative, shame-based self-flagellation for law-breaking behavior—a self-sacrificial appeasement to earn God’s grace? That sounds a lot more like the prophets of Baal than the Day of Pentecost. What is true repentance? The meaning of repentance is intrinsic to the Greek word—metanoia—a turning or opening of the eyes of our heart (or nous, our innermost being). Metanoia indicates more than self-deprecation and more than a rational change mind. Metanoia is our heart response to the overtures of Divine Love. Metanoia has always been initiated by God’s grace, the Lover’s love for the beloved—“we love because God first loved us.” Grace created our eyes, then heals and opens our eyes, then fills our eyes with the Light of Life and Love. Those who gaze on the Serpent on the Tree (John 3)—Grace Incarnate—see how they have been, are, and will be saved, delivered, and healed. Metanoia—gospel repentance—includes both the reorientation of our lives toward Perfect Love and the transformation that results from our re-Turn… ALL underwritten and re-Generated by the Savior of the world.

Repentance is not about earning our worthiness to receive salvation after sufficient self-scolding, ascetic brownie points, or a priestly spank—rather, repentance is receiving the Cup of Salvation with gratitude that Christ never withholds his healing mercies from us.

What I find missing in so many gospel presentations is the radical understanding of divine love and the unconditionality of grace, which I believe was taught by and embodied in Jesus. The first Christians offered a gospel of redemption—of vivifying grace with implications for ultimate redemption. Jesus and his apostles preached a gospel that is truly good and liberating news.

Watch for Part 2: The Gospel Jesus Preached.

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