This book is a sequel to R. C. Sproul's Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), which examined and critiqued the 1994 document entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.
Getting the Gospel Right has three parts. The first two chapters document the recent dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics. Chapter 1 expresses Sproul's deep concern for how "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" (ECT) tended to cut the ties that had bound evangelicals together before they set out on a quest for unity with Roman Catholics. The depth of his concern about this unity emerges in chapter 2. Here he shows that the evangel-the Gospel that is the bond unifying evangelicals-is at stake in this dialogue. After succinctly reviewing the etymology of the word "evangelical" and the history of the reformers' recovery of the Gospel, Sproul identifies the crisis that the continuing dialogue brings. Sola fide is at stake. Sproul believes this dialogue jeopardizes the evangelical principle of justification by grace through faith alone.
Parts II and III unpack Sproul's burden. Part II is an expose and critique of a second document written by the same group of evangelicals and Catholics, the 1997 document entitled The "Gift of Salvation" (GOS). Part III comments on an evangelical response to GOS, namely, The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration. Dispute over GOS prompted members of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (publisher of Modern Reformation) to voice concern. By way of response, some supporters and some rejecters of GOS began to dialogue, which led to the drafting of The Gospel of Jesus Christ in 1999.
Those unfamiliar with this ongoing dialogue may pick up this book expecting to find something quite different from what it offers. It is not an exposition of the Gospel structured around biblical exposition. Rather, it is a book that not only gives its readers a comprehensive grasp of the contemporary evangelical and Catholic dialogue but that also takes its readers on a guided tour through the major theological disputes that prompted the Reformation and the confessional resolutions that flowed from it.
The two documents stemming from the dialogues of ECT have largely bypassed evangelical laypeople. Consequently, Sproul's book can inform those readers who have given little attention to the issue. Together, Faith Alone and Getting the Gospel Right narrow the knowledge gap for those who have not kept pace with the ECT dialogue and the important issues it addresses. However, many may find Getting the Gospel Right to be ponderous, perhaps pedantic, in the sense of its involving extraordinary attention to detail. The exacting and precise discussion may tax some readers' patience. But perseverance will reveal why many evangelical leaders have been troubled by the recent evangelical-Catholic rapprochement. Sproul is not resentful of the idea of rapprochement itself. He is concerned, first, about the nature of the unity of faith that ECT and GOS achieved between evangelicals and Catholics. It leaves several "weighty theological matters" unresolved, including: (1) baptismal regeneration; (2) the Eucharist; (3) sacramental grace; (4) the language of justification; and (5) merit, reward, purgatory, and indulgences. Second, and more significantly, the GOS does not include the language of imputation.
The GOS seeks to respond to the criticism of ECT, particularly from evangelicals, that ECT lacked any clear affirmation of justification by faith alone (sola fide). In the book's second part, Sproul quotes the entire GOS document and comments on each paragraph. With keen and penetrating surgical precision, he shows that GOS still is deficient on this central doctrine. It particularly troubles him that The GOS's affirmations and denials still leave room for Catholics to retain their church dogma concerning justification and yet endorse GOS. For example, he believes it does not expressly deny the possibility that humans can accrue merits before God, both works of satisfaction (condign merit) and works "fitting" for God to reward (congruous merit). At stake, of course, is not only the sufficiency of Christ's satisfaction but also the forensic nature of justification and the ground or basis upon which God declares a sinner righteous. The core of Sproul's concern with GOS is the conspicuous absence of an affirmation of the imputation of Christ's righteousness as the sole basis of our justification before God.
With an incisiveness reminiscent of Martin Luther's, Sproul argues that the reformers' principal objection to Rome's doctrine of justification concerned the ground of justification. Rome insisted that justification is based upon the infused righteousness of Christ, whereas the reformers contended that justification is grounded in Christ's imputed righteousness. Thus, as Sproul reads GOS, the document's failure to address whether the righteousness of Christ is infused or imputed means that it falls short at the same point as ECT, for apart from imputation justification is not sola fide. Yet Sproul's exposition of The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration in Part III reveals that his concern over sola fide goes beyond just affirming the forensic nature of justification and imputed righteousness.
In that part, Sproul insists that a proper articulation of the biblical Gospel extends beyond affirming that Jesus Christ's righteousness satisfies both God's justice and law, as the reformers held. Like the seventeenth-century Reformed theologians who discussed the subject of imputation in greater detail, Sproul also contends that the evangel binding evangelicals together necessarily affirms both Christ's passive and active obedience. Christ's passive obedience involved God imputing our sins to him and then Jesus passively enduring the punishment for them. This, Sproul argues, was necessary to satisfy God's justice and the curse. However, in order for God to bless us by declaring us righteous, Christ had to merit the blessing, which he did by rendering perfect obedience to the law. So, Sproul argues, by his passive suffering Christ became our curse and by his active life of obedience under and to the law he became our righteousness. This precise definition of sola fide, of forensic justification, and of the imputation of Christ's righteousness in terms of his active and passive obedience, is Sproul's central burden in Getting the Gospel Right.
If we truly believe that we are to be "reformed and always reforming," then we must recognize that each generation of believers will need to reaffirm the great truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus, we should receive theological challenges to the Gospel as God's providential gift to the church to prompt us to be watchful and thoughtful in how we articulate the faith "once for all entrusted to the saints." We must simultaneously conserve the truth of the Gospel (be "reformed") and rigorously assess whether we have properly understood and expressed the Gospel of Jesus Christ (be "always reforming"). R. C. Sproul's book is to be commended and welcomed because it contributes toward this sacred task of calling evangelicals to conserve the Reformed confessional statements and challenging contemporary expressions of the Gospel.
In Getting the Gospel Right, Sproul only addresses the dialogue that has been taking place between evangelicals and Catholics. Understandably, therefore, his book only hints at a number of in-house discussions among evangelical scholars that may be equally significant.
Prompted in part by ECT but mostly by two decades of seminars and published papers and books on Paul's view of the Mosaic Law, evangelical exegetes and theologians continue to discuss Sproul's principal concerns. These discussions show that not all evangelicals concur with Sproul's clear position on Roman Catholic doctrine and also that some evangelicals, while concurring with neither ECT or GOS, wonder whether historic Protestantism, as faithfully articulated in Getting the Gospel Right, requires further revision in the light of continuing examination of some crucial biblical expressions and concepts. A few examples must suffice.
Paul's expression, "the righteousness of God," used several times in Romans, continues to beg for the kind of inquiry Martin Luther gave it long ago. Does it mean "a righteousness from God" (Rom. 1:17, niv) or "God's righteousness" (as it does unambiguously in Romans 3:5, niv)? How we read this phrase has implications for how we will articulate Paul's understanding of the Gospel. Another contested expression of Paul's is "the faith of Jesus Christ" (Rom. 3:22, kjv), found repeatedly in Romans and Galatians. Again, exegetes who cherish and conserve the principal features of the Reformation disagree about its meaning. Many insist that it means "faith in Jesus Christ," but others believe that it speaks of "Jesus Christ's faithfulness" as the ground of our justification (comparable to Paul's mention of Jesus Christ's obedience in Rom. 5:19). Also on the table of exegetical discussion is whether justification is to be considered just one biblical metaphor among many-one depicting a forensic aspect of God's salvation even as other biblical metaphors picture other aspects of salvation. Does the multiform richness of biblical imagery portraying God's salvation become obscured if systematic theology focuses on the forensic metaphor as paramount? And what about the already and not yet dimensions of salvation? Evangelicals properly believe that justification is already ours by faith (Rom. 5:1). Yet several Scriptures seem to orient justification to the future (e.g., Matt 12:36-37; Gal. 5:5). How should we integrate these texts with those that depict justification as already ours by faith? Finally, some biblical theologians wonder whether the seventeenth-century formulation of the imputation of Christ's righteousness in terms of his active and passive obedience is expressly to be found in Scripture or is only to be inferred from it.
Biblical scholars who desire to conserve the reformers' insights are thus striving to advance our understanding of the Gospel by continuing to examine the Scriptures. To this end, many of them have offered fresh proposals concerning these issues. Thus, it would be wrong to conclude that Getting the Gospel Right is the final word for our generation's task of "always reforming." And surely Sproul does not intend to terminate evangelical inquiry into the nature of the Gospel or the quest to clearly and thoughtfully articulate his principal concerns: the nature of sola fide, of justification, and of imputation. Getting the Gospel Right is provocative but not definitive. It outlines the issues and concerns for evangelical discussion well without closing that discussion. Rather, it establishes that faithfulness to the evangel must preserve sola fide, forensic justification, and the imputation of Christ's righteousness as central features of the Gospel even as we continue our ongoing task of "reforming" what we confess in the light of the Scriptures.
