Denying the gospel

Every week, I confess the Nicene Creed, and I actually believe it.

I also confess that sinners are saved by trusting in Jesus, God’s Son, who saves out of sheer grace.

Yet I, with many of my friends who confess the same things, are accused of denying the gospel. What’s the sense of that?

We can only make sense of this charge if we recognize that for a certain kind of Reformed theology, the gospel is not gospel unless it comes second. For all the talk of the “primacy of the gospel,” this version of Reformed theology actually believes in the secondary character of the gospel. For the gospel to be good news, it must be added to something more foundational, and it has to be set off in contrast to that more foundational something. Usually, this foundational something is law, or perhaps the contrast is one of nature and grace, or demand and promise.

Whatever the formulation, it is assumed that the gospel cannot be gospel unless it stands in a binary opposition to that foundation. To deny the opposition is to deny the gospel itself, because the gospel is defined by that opposition. The Yes of the gospel only makes sense on the basis of a preexisting No. To deny that there was a preexisting No is to blur the pure gratuity of the Yes.

This sounds plausible enough on the surface of things. After all, the gospel is good news to fallen Adam and his seed, and is a response to the situation of the fall. It is historically secondary. Before God promised a redeemer, He had issued a command. Law comes first.

While this is true from a certain perspective, it ignores the prior words of God in Genesis. God spoke the world into existence by the Word of His power: Was that a Word of demand or promise, law or gospel? It seems clear that it was both. God’s first words of command were simultaneously life-giving good news: “Let there be light” was a command, yet it was a command that brought light into existence. Before God prohibited Adam from eating the tree of knowledge, the Eternal Word had already spoken Adam into existence. Before God’s No He had already spoken a preexisting Yes, and the Yes set the context for the No. The sheer fact that there is something rather than nothing is testimony to God’s prior Yes.

Every No from that time on is set within the context of God’s Yes: God says Yes to Noah, and then commands him not to eat blood. God says Yes to Israel in bringing them out of Egypt, and then issues the Ten Words. Every command that God issues presupposes His preexisting Yes, because unless God was committed to preserving a people He would not warn them off the way of death.

For a certain brand of Reformed theology, such talk amounts to denying the gospel because it denies what is thought to be the sub-stratum on which the gratuity of the gospel depends.

The Federal Vision controversy is, from this angle, more about creation than about soteriology or sacramental theology. Far be it from me to accuse those who oppose the Federal Vision of “denying creation,” but they are, in my view, failing to work through a fully creationist theology. Dare I say, they have failed to think through a fully evangelical theology of creation.