False Gospels

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…” – Galatians 1:5

Paul begins his letter to the Galatians in rather stark manner. It seems that teachers in the church, motivated by a desire to win the favor of Jewish leaders (6:12-13), were telling people that they were not truly Christians until they joined the Jews in following Old Testament law, such as observing Jewish feast days (4:10) and being circumcised (5:2). This may seem irrelevant to us, but if one considers that what they were doing was combining the gospel with old ways of earning worth, for the purpose of pleasing others, in a way that fit in with the cultural majority—then it’s not all that unlike what we do today. 

Our culture touts not feast days and circumcision, but a kind of “expressive individualism” or “hyper-individualism,” based on a moral ecology which, as Brooks writes about in his book The Second Mountain, is built on a series of assumptions including the buffered self, the dream of total freedom, the centrality of accomplishment, the God within, and the privatization of meaning. Mash this together with the gospel, and you get a sort of hybrid gospel that says we can believe in Jesus but still do whatever we want to, that makes our faith a private affair, that judges our faith based on how much we can measurably accomplish with it. Many of us also have cultures from our families of origin, or individual personality types or histories, that tend to mingle in with the gospel whether we are aware of it or not.

The fact is, the gospel does not say that we are saved by Jesus and ____. Jesus and “successful” children; Jesus and our accomplishments; Jesus and a husband; Jesus and money; Jesus and career success; Jesus and our feelings. Any hybrid gospel is a false gospel. Any gospel that does not stand entirely on grace is a false gospel. And this truth is one we have to keep learning, because it requires un-learning so many other things, so many other ways of seeing and living.