Repent and Believe in the Gospel

“The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.” (Mark 1:15)

The Lord Jesus began his public ministry with a clarion call to conversion, and he linked repentance together with saving faith in the Gospel because there is no way to have one without the other. Our English word gospel comes from the Anglo-Saxon term godspell which meant good story, a way of rendering the Greek word euangelion used in the New Testament to signify the story of man’s creation, fall, and redemption by God’s eternal plan of salvation. That story of salvation is good news for the human race because it reveals that though we must all die, we are also destined to live forever and share in the divine glory of God the Son if we place our trust in the Incarnate Word and live according to his teaching. Live according to his Gospel.

But we cannot live according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ unless we are willing to allow him to change us by grace through faith from children of wrath into the children of God by adoption. And we must be changed by grace through faith because we are fallen; there is a fatal flaw in our nature simply because we are human and heirs to the primordial rebellion of sin. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” (Romans 3:23-25)

That is why the Lord Jesus linked conversion and faith together. To be a disciple or student of the Lord Jesus, we must begin with repentance and belief in the Gospel, and that is what the Apostles and their successors proclaimed everywhere they could travel in the decades after the Resurrection. But while rejection of the Gospel and persecution of the Church were encountered in many places during the first centuries of Christianity, something else was also happening too close to the ground to be seen clearly by most observers.

Great numbers of people heard the Word of God and were changed by their encounter with Christ. In the darksome world of pagan antiquity, the light of the Gospel drew people of every class and station to saving faith in the Lord Jesus, and millions of individually changed lives eventually yielded a changed society. After three centuries of fierce opposition and often bloody oppression, Christianity emerged in the middle of the fourth century as the dominant religion of the Greco-Roman world, and missionaries travelled far and wide to preach the Gospel and celebrate the sacraments of the New Covenant. In due course, it was possible to speak of an entire Christian civilization or Christendom, meaning a society organized as fully as possible by the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that very triumph yielded an unhealthy development.

As the Gospel conquered the pagan world of Greeks and Romans and more and more people came to believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, the Church gradually stopped talking about the Gospel and began talking instead about the Faith, the faith which is the result of believing in the Gospel. This, I suppose, was because the rise of Christian civilization meant that within the boundaries of Christendom, the truth of the Gospel could almost be taken for granted. Almost.

But then came the schisms of the 16th century, followed by the Wars of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the various political, scientific, and cultural revolutions that shaped the world we know today. As the acids of modernity began to wear away at the authority of the Church and the credibility of her teaching, then the great falling away from Christ became an existential threat to Christianity and the Catholic tendency to talk about the Faith rather than the Gospel was reversed. For example, the documents of the First Vatican Council (1869-70) contain the word evangelium (Latin for Gospel) only one time, and that is in reference to one of the first four books of the New Testament. On the other hand, the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) speak of evangelium 157 times and use the words evangelize 18 times and evangelization 31 times while Vatican I used those two terms not even once.

Reforming the Church in every age requires beginning where the Lord Jesus began: Repent and believe in the Gospel. And so there can be no authentic Catholic reformation without knowing and believing the Gospel. Which is where we’ll start next.