The Gospel is not (just) Justification by Faith

Many Evangelical theologians will tell you that the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone was a (if not THE) hallmark theological victory of the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. Reformulation of this doctrine effectively retrieved salvific power and authority from the grip of the Roman See and released it back into the benevolent winds of the Holy Spirit to fall wherever and whenever He saw fit.

This is all well and good and we should be grateful for the recovery of what I take to be a central soteriological claim (i.e. that people are saved by grace through faith alone and not [merely] through association with the visible, organized church).

However, I think there is a disturbing myopia that can arise from an accidental overemphasis of this facet of the gospel.

Surely this is the mechanism of the gospel – the instrumentality by which the gospel is applied to broken human beings – but I think by itself it fails to capture the totality of the gospel. In other words, to reduce the gospel message down to justification by grace through faith alone fails to account for relevant revelation data that suggests a broader understanding of the gospel message.

When we come to Scripture, we find something much bigger afoot. As I’ve explored before (Here: Why do you read the Bible?) I think it’s telling that God has given us something of an on-going narrative in Scripture. Instead of just providing us with a nice and tidy list of Do’s and Dont’s, the record of God’s revelation comes to us in an unfolding story. It’s the dicey tale of God’s interaction with and establishment of the people of Israel. It’s the compelling presentation of a nascent Church’s developing in the crucible of a hostile mother religion. It’s the representation of God in real life; the real life of people – just like you and me.

Sure there’s plenty of scholarly debate about how every piece of the story fits together (or even if there is one overarching story – thanks Collin Cornell for mentioning this in a previous comment), but side-stepping that discussion for a moment I think it stands that (according to the Scriptures) God is up to something big – the plot line of his novel is complex and cosmically sized. It starts with creation and ends with creation.

But did you catch that? Cosmically sized.

If we read the story carefully, we find that our justification by faith in Christ is but a piece of all that God is up to. A large piece, yes; but only a piece nonetheless.

When we back out from the particulars of human salvation, we can see that God is working out redemption for all created things. The writer of Revelation reminds us that (in the final scene of this act) God, the Lord, the Alpha and Omega will make “all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Last time I checked, all things meant ALL things.

We see echoes of this when Paul writes that “…the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the Creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-20).  

This present truth kind of makes St. Francis look a little less crazy for preaching the gospel to the wildlife he happened upon. Right? Perhaps St. Francis actually had a more healthy understanding of God’s cosmic plans for redemption. I’m not suggesting we all go out and evangelize the Alaskan brown bears or the Floridian crocodile. But I am suggesting that it would do our souls well to remember the grandiose plan of God for his Creation. This is the God for whom saving Israel was “too light a thing” (Is. 49:6), so he declared his intentions to offer salvation to all the nations. This is the God for whom simple preservation of the old isn’t enough, behold, he will make all things new (Rev. 21:5).

With this understanding of the gospel, we can see that the gospel is not (just) justification by faith. The gospel is a seed-promise of cosmic restoration – not merely of humanity, but of all things Creator God has made.