No Other Name

A Response to the Third Discourseman

I

Perhaps some of our readers were perturbed by the Third Discourseman’s article on the essence of the gospel. We have been so trained to believe that penal substitutionary atonement and justification by faith alone are the central tenets of the gospel – particularly after the proliferation of Reformation-themed talks and books in the last few years – that the claim that these are ancillary (albeit deeply important) doctrines doubtless comes across as a radical one. But the Third Discourseman is right. The gospel is that Jesus is Lord: and it is good news indeed.

I would probably go further than him, both in emphasising the extent to which the gospel is not penal substitutionary atonement, and in speaking of the many pastoral and theological issues that flow out of a wrong understanding of the gospel. The book of Acts is telling in this regard. It is not just that Peter’s sermon at Pentecost majors on the theme of Jesus’s Lordship; it is, arguably, the central theme of the entire narrative. The cross does feature, but it seems to do so more as a testimony of mankind’s sin – ‘you killed the author of life’, Peter says to the men of Jerusalem (Acts 3:15) – than as an exposition of the reality and nature of the atonement. The only time the atonement does feature in Acts is in the context of Paul speaking to fellow believers, those who already confess faith in Christ as Lord; he tells the Ephesian elders of ‘the Church of God, which he bought with his blood’ (Acts 20:28). If we take the pattern of apostolic gospel proclamation as normative, or even prescriptive, the logic seems to be this: the good news that we, as the church, proclaim to the world is that Jesus Christ is Lord, God’s promised King, and that in him – by faith in his name – forgiveness of sins is proclaimed. It is only once someone puts their faith in Christ as Lord that the precise means by which that forgiveness is wrought – the means by which God can pardon the sinner, and the divine justice be satisfied, such that God can be both just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ (Rom. 3:26) – is explained and made clear.

This is so important, because both the logic of the gospel itself, and the nature and character of Christian faith and obedience, are at stake. When the gospel we hold out to unbelievers is simply that of Christ as the Passover lamb, the propitiation of their sins, the logic of repentance is lost. Christ is met only as a passive sacrifice: the message is that Christ died, so you don’t have to. At that point, the godliness and probity that are indelibly a part of the Christian life lose their logic. Yes, Christ calls us to righteous, holy living, even to the depths of self-denial. But why would we actually need to do this, if Christ is simply a sacrifice on our behalf? if the heart of the gospel is that God has so done it all, that we do not need to do anything? 

But anyone who has read the Gospels closely knows that the call of the kingdom is far more radical than that. In the apostolic gospel, Christ died, so that we can die too. Hence the apostle’s magnificent and mysterious claim that he has been crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20), or that we as believers have in fact died already (Col. 3:3). And this chimes with Jesus’s call, in all its radical beauty: to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow him. This only makes sense in its fullness when we understand that the apostolic gospel is that Jesus Christ is God’s king. He is Lord of all, and only in his name is salvation to be found. Faith in him, when we understand that this is who he is, as held out in the gospel, becomes so obviously wrapped up with repentance and obedience. For the one whom I trust for my forgiveness and salvation is the one who is Lord of all, who commands me to obey and follow him.

But when we present the gospel the opposite way round, we run into a host of pastoral issues. For the spectre of antinomianism lurks behind the presentation of a merely substitionary Christ. To avoid this, we hedge in the gospel offer with incentives for godliness. You must be so thankful, we say, for all that Christ has done for you, that you will live a godly life, your righteousness flowing out of sheer gratefulness. But I am not sure – and I would be grateful to any reader who points out that I am wrong here – that thankfulness is ever emphasised as a motive for godliness in the New Testament. For to make godliness the product of a thankful heart is to make it an appendage, perhaps even an afterthought, to the core truths of the gospel. Godliness, in this conception, becomes something we do in response to the gospel, rather than the marrow of the gospel itself.

Even worse, an appeal can be made to how much we owe God, in light of the forgiveness he has bestowed on us. In Trouble in Paradise, the rather erratic Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek considers what it means to live within debt-riddled patterns of economic and social life, which he sees as tied to some of the core teachings of Christianity. The problem of forgiveness, he claims, is that ‘the pardon does not really abolish the debt. Rather, it makes the debt infinite – we are forever indebted to the person who pardoned us.’^[1] In a sense, I couldn’t agree more. For that is all we are left with, if indeed the gospel is only about a pardon we receive. We recognise that we owe God everything, since he has so emphatically let us off the hook, and so the patterns of our lives begin to have to reflect the immensity of that debt. But the idea that the forgiveness God offers must somehow be paid back by my godly living denies the very reality of grace – that the gospel offer is made as a gift, and is something we can neither earn nor pay back. To put it in the language of Reformed theology, it is an attempt to twist the cross back into the covenant of works, rather than receive it in the covenant of grace. 

And yet this ‘debtor’s ethic’ is everywhere. Consider these lines from a song by Matt Redman:

Jesus, what can I give, what can I bring
To so faithful a Friend, to so loving a King?
Saviour, what can be said, what can be sung
As a praise of Your name for the things You have done?
Oh, my words could not tell, not even in part
Of the debt of love that is owed by this thankful heart.

There is warrant for this: after all, ‘he who has been forgiven much loves much’. But if salvation from sin and the power to live a righteous life are evacuated from the gospel to which we hold, then such a sense of thankfulness can all too easily become overemphasised. The same kind of problem is observable in an account of cross-shaped Christian living that John Stott gives in his book The Cross of Christ. He cites the example of Count Nikolaus von Zizendorf (1700–60), founder of the pietistic Moravian brethren community, whose conversion occurred upon the sight of Domenico Fetti’s baroque painting Ecce Homo (‘behold the man’, Pilate’s words upon presenting Christ to the baying crowd), which depicted a suffering Christ wearing his crown of thorns. Beneath the painting, as Zizendorf gazed on it at a gallery in Düsseldorf, was a moving inscription: ‘All this I did for thee; what doest thou for me?’ Zizendorf apparently resolved, there and then, to live a cross-shaped life. 

And perhaps he understood that such a life flowed out of, rather than being in response to, the cross; that it only truly made sense in light of the lordship of Christ. But the truest answer to such a challenge can never be a godly life. What can I do for Christ in light of what he has done for me? Nothing. No righteousness that I might work up in response to Christ’s sacrifice can ever come close to measuring up to the immensity of that sacrifice. To even attempt such a quid pro quo has potentially devastating consequences: to those who truly understand something of the price that Jesus paid, the depth of his suffering and the weight of the love that drove him through it, such a call is not an inspiration, but a crushing burden. For the cross by its very nature renders me empty-handed, and in its weighty shadow all my righteousness is as dirty rags. It can only be received as a gift, or it cannot be received at all.

II

You might notice this reduction of the gospel merely to forgiveness, or indeed justification, if you listen more carefully to how many preachers use the word ‘save’. It seems to me that, for many, ‘save’ has become a synonym for ‘justify’. And yet I see no exegetical justification for this. When in Ephesians the apostle tells us that ‘by grace [we] have been saved’, it is overwhelmingly evident from the context that the salvation of which he speaks is salvation from the death of sin, and being under God’s wrath and curse, to new life and righteousness in Christ. The salvation which is only by grace is not God merely declaring that we are righteous, though that is a beautiful thing in itself; it is God saving us from the tyranny of sin. The same is true when the angel tells Joseph that Jesus will ‘save his people from their sins’. So too in Titus chapter 3: we are not saved by works done by us in righteousness, the apostle tells us; and yet the salvation of which he speaks, which is wholly the product of God’s sovereign grace, is that of being brought from the tyranny and horrors of sin to a life that is sanctified and holy, a life that is pleasing to God.

Well did the theologians of old know these truths. It’s there in the classic hymn:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed, 
Be of sin is a double cure, 
Save me from its guilt and power.

Toplady recognised the truth of what I have been arguing here: that the salvation offered us in Christ is both from the guilt of sin (justification) and from the power of sin (sanctification, both definitive and progressive). Yet our emphasis on the beautiful truth of the free offer of justification has led us to downplay, perhaps even to marginalise, this other essential aspect of what salvation is. But to those who walk in sin, in enmity to God, in futile ways, there is hope in the gospel. Because Jesus Christ is Lord, because he is the King of Kings, he can save from the power of sin any and all who turn to put their trust in his name.

Both justification and sanctification are achieved at the cross. But the logic of gospel repentance, and of the centrality of obedience to the life of faith, is lost, when we believe Christ to be the lamb of God before we are inclined to believe that he is the lion of the tribe of Judah. We are called to proclaim Christ as Lord. In his name salvation is to be found; the mechanics of this, beautiful as they are, need not be our first port of call.

III

And yet: I have two critiques for my fellow Discourseman. Firstly, there is perhaps more implicit in the truth of Jesus’s lordship than he has articulated. Implicit in the apostolic proclamation of the gospel is the truth that Christ alone is our hope and salvation. That is what Peter and John so confidently proclaim before the council of Jerusalem elders: ‘And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:12) To claim that salvation is only in Christ is to render obsolete any attempts to achieve salvation by my own means. In other words, the apostolic emphasis on the person of Christ as Lord implies that salvation – both sanctification and justification – are by faith alone.

Secondly, the gospel that the Third Discourseman so helpfully laid out is not at all incompatible with what he calls ‘limited atonement’, and what I, and my fellow Reformed brothers and sisters, prefer to call ‘definite atonement’ – that is, the truth that Christ died specifically for his people. In fact, the pattern of apostolic preaching seems to emphasise this perspective on the atonement. For the Arminian, or indeed the hypothetical universalist (a far more common breed in contemporary Evangelicalism) kerygma cannot but involve the central claim that ‘Christ died for you’. And yet, in the apostolic gospel proclamation, whose archetype we find in the book of Acts, the message that is universally proclaimed is the lordship of Jesus Christ over all – which provides both the imperative for salvation and its gracious means. In other words, the apostles are not so much concerned to say to the unbeliever ‘Christ died for you’, as to say ‘Christ is your Lord’. The message of substitutionary atonement, meanwhile, appears in the Acts narrative, as I have said above, only in the context of discussion amongst believers, and with respect to the church. By contrast to the message so usually proclaimed in contemporary evangelism, this pattern of gospel proclamation is something that even the most stridently Calvinistic believers can support.

IV

I am not trying to rock any evangelistic boats. Nor am I trying to be contrarian for its own sake. Instead, I hope that what I have said above is not only faithful to the Scriptures – from which we must derive all sacred doctrine – but faithful to to the reformed confessional tradition, and indeed the faith of the Catholic Church. In a time of widespread apostasy, and thinly-concealed ethical decay, it is all the more imperative that we in western societies are clear on the message that we proclaim. The great sadness of our day is that many do not worship and obey Christ as the Lord; the even greater sadness of the final day will be that many who confess Christ as Lord will do so all too late. It is the duty of the church during this our earthly pilgrimage to proclaim that great and beautiful truth while that hour has not yet come.

The Fourth Discourseman

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^[1] Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise (London: Penguin, 2014), 48.