~ "The Gospel According to Context" - Brenden Lang D.Min.

Full Title: According to Context: The Gospel Message In Light of Semantics, the Scriptures, and the Setting of the New Testament.

I just finished reading the doctoral thesis of one of my best friends, Brenden Lang. For those of you who know me as the pastor at Madison Church of Christ in Brooklyn, Iowa. Brenden is the son of Mark and Patty Lang, a 2004 Graduate of BGM. His Doctoral thesis is a 114-page work on how we understand the Gospel. This work was submitted to Northern Seminary in Illinois in the spring of 2025 and was sent to me by Brenden on my birthday!

Brenden delivers an incisive and persuasive correction to the most common formulation of the gospel in modern Evangelicalism that rides the line between an academic work and popular-level writing. His work is divided into four chapters:

(The Gospel) According to Popular Evangelicalism

Here, and in the “ministry context” section which proceeds it, Brenden points to “the deficiencies of the popular Evangelical gospel.” by which he means the ‘soterian gospel’ as depicted by Scott McKnight as: “I’m a sinner, How can I be saved?, by Christ’s righteousness, I accept his righteousness, I have eternal life.” (p. 4&5)

The critique hints at the future work of the paper, which will show that ‘the Gospel” in context meant something quite different than the above, but focuses on the negative consequences/implications of the aforementioned popular Evangelical (soterian) gospel. This chapter essentially establishes the felt need for the work of the paper that follows, by showing how the evangelical understanding of the gospel has robbed it of its power in the present world.

“When we reduced the content of the gospel to a plan of salvation - to an announcement that our sins could be forgiven and that we could go to heaven when we die if we believed, repented, confessed, and were baptized - then we stripped the gospel of its power in the world here-and-now.” (p. 15)

“God saves us for this place. Inasmuch as he restores us, he also has plans to restore this place” (P. 20)

“The gospel, as it has been told for far too long and far too often, is LESS than Jesus or Paul ever intended; it is anemic and prone to abuse and manipulation. (p. 23, emphasis mine)

(The Gospel) According to Semantics

The previous chapter contained some key words to set up the rest of this work: “We have not given enough consideration to the fact that we might misunderstand [the gospel]” (p. 22). To remedy this problem, Dr. Lang takes us through three key contextual categories for the Gospel, which provide a corrective to our modern assumptions. First up is semantics, where he takes us on a tour of the word “Gospel” in the world of scripture.

Brenden argues that there is appreciable semantic overlap between the way that the word gospel (Gk. euangellion) is used in Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts, so he draws on both of them to establish that “The gospel for Jesus is not how to be saved, but rather a newsworthy event as a result of which people may be saved” (p. 44) and that “when Paul summarizes the gospel, he doesn’t map out the so-called Romans Road; he delivers a royal report. (p.45). Finally his semantic report concludes with “the New Testament gospel is good news in the view of some about King Jesus” after heavily emphasizing the royal dimension of this word semantically.

These conclusions are reached after a good many pages of canonical and non-canonical citations, which showcase the semantic range and focus of the word “gospel.” Pages 31-43 will probably be the most challenging to the non-academic reader, and my personal communications with Brended indicated that he was a little self-conscious of how academic this section is. However, they really are worth reading and will give the reader (at every level) a firm foundation from which to step away from the popular Evangelical (soterian) gospel to consider more Biblically faithful alternatives. Also, I put a bookmark in Teresa Morgan’s Roman Faith & Christian Faith to read this, so this section was a gentle walk in the park from my perspective.

(The Gospel) According to the Scriptures

In this section, Brenden highlights the phase “according to the Scriptures” which plays such a prominent role in Paul’s Gospel presentation in 1st Corinthians 15 and examines how “the Scriptures” relate to the death and resurrection of the Christ. He correctly points out that “When Paul states that the gospel is in accordance with the Scriptures, he has in mind all the Scriptures. He is not thinking of just one verse…Rather, he is thinking of the whole of it - Scripture in toto.” (p. 50).

Dr. Lang argues that rather than looking at the prophecy-fulfillment level for the fulfillment of the scriptures, we need to look at the whole “storied world that the Scriptures provide by means of all their genres, narrative, or otherwise.” (p. 53) and then goes on to show that the Scriptures, writ large, tell a kingdom story. This story is as big as your 2,000-page Bible, so it takes quite a bit of time to work through. The construction of this story is the most ambitious section of the paper, here are some quotes from it:

The deeper issue is that all of this (the popular Evangelical gospel) is based on a faulty premise, namely, that the story of the Bible is fundamentally a story of salvation. (p. 54, parenthesis mine)

I suggest a better way to understand the story of the Old Testament - indeed, the story of the whole Bible - is a kingdom story. (p. 55)

There was a pervasive view that God would re-establish the kingdom of Israel in fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures… The New Testament presumes that it is continuing a kingdom story. (p. 56 & 57)

If we are to understand the story [the Scriptures] tell and the gospel message that accords with this story, then we must understand God’s mission and the human commission that kick it off. This mission is to fill the earth with God’s kingdom culture for the well-being of all creation and the ultimate glory of God.” (p. 64)

The New Testament gospel is an announcement that accords with the Old Testament Scriptures. And the Old Testament Scriptures tell a kingdom story. (p. 79)

The gospel entails salvation, and yet it announces so much more: through Jesus - the true image, the true son of God, the true Israelite, the promised seed of David, the promised seed of Eve - God has taken charge of creation. (p. 80)

(The Gospel) According to Setting

Here, Dr. Lang looks at the “broader 1st-century Jewish socio-political situation in the region of Israel-Palestine as it was set within the larger Roman empire.” He draws back upon some of the semantic work done earlier and then places it into the story of Jesus, and that within the story of a Jewish people occupied and burdened by the Roman Empire in the 1st Century. Much of this section is dedicated to a thorough and insightful exegesis of Luke 20:19-26 when the scribes and chief priests sent spies to trap Jesus with a question about taxes. Brenden exposes the royal and cosmic war of words that is dwelling below the surface of the English text in this passage as a capstone to his argument that the gospel is royal/kingdom-shaped.

[Jesus] wasn’t preaching to a people fundamentially concerned with where they would go when they died (although they were interested in how to “inherit eternal life.” He was preaching to an audience concerned with when, how , and through whom God’s kingdom would arrive. (p. 86)

Conclusion

I loved this paper. Dr. Lang has incisively identified a wayward presumption within the evangelical faith and has concisely provided the defeater for it. His thesis can launch the Church more fully into the mission of God in the world by giving its people a more powerful and compelling understanding of the Gospel, which has the tremendous advantage of being original to the Biblical text. I would recommend this paper to anyone who has read the Bible and worships in a broadly Evangelical Church/context.

Dr. Lang’s work runs parallel to the King-Jesus gospel movement and tract of literature currently being advanced, by Scott McKnight, N.T. Wright, Michael Bird, Matthew Bates and others, and he cites from their works extensively. At times, I had to remind myself that I was reading Brenden and not Matthew Bates (who ended up being a surprise second reader to this thesis). I.e. “And so may all of us who have accepted Jesus as Savior give our allegiance to him as King.” (p.106)

Brenden is one of the closest friends I’ve had in my life, but we were never really on parallel tracks academically when we were spending all of our time together. Since we moved away from each other in 2015, we have somehow unwittingly stumbled together onto this same corpus of literature and scholars. Because I am terrible at personal correspondence and staying in touch with the people that mean the most to me, reading this paper was a delightful moment of discovery that my good friend is right there with me. There have been a few times in the last year that have made me feel alone in the way that I understand scripture and the Gospel; they were pretty tough times. Reading these words from my friend was a fun and timely blessing.