Liberals, Evangelicals, and the Offense of "Ecclesiospel"

OK, bear with me here and suffer this exegete a little indulgence.

The question I want to put forth is whether, biblically, we can say that in a certain sense the gospel = the church. Mark says of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry that he began to "preach the gospel of God, saying, 'The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.'" Then immediately following this passage we see the calling of Jesus’ disciples, whom he eventually named apostles.

Now it has been fashionable in liberal circles to insist that while Jesus promised a kingdom, what we ended up getting was a church, and that the project of the NT writers was to try to do a bit of damage control by shoehorning the idea of the church back into the words of Christ in order to show that Jesus really meant “church” when he said “kingdom” (even though he really didn’t).

But when we come to realize that placing the calling of the Twelve immediately following the announcement of the kingdom was no accident, and that it is by the apostles’ serving at the Lord’s Table that they will rule Jesus’ kingdom as those sitting upon thrones and judging the twelve tribes of the new Israel, then we will have to abandon forever the idea that the church and the kingdom are two antithetical things. In fact, we will be forced to admit (with the Westminster Confession) that the visible church is the kingdom of God as it is manifested in this present age.

But how does the gospel fit into all this?

First, note that "gospel" bookends "kingdom" in Jesus’ initial proclamation (Jesus proclaims the gospel saying that the kingdom has arrived, and that people should believe the gospel). Moreover, consider how closely Paul’s message resembles that of Jesus. In Ephesians 3 the apostle goes on and on about his calling to proclaim what he calls “the mystery,” and finally in v. 6 he tells us what the mystery is: the mystery is that God is calling into existence a new body whose members consist of Gentiles as well as Jews, and whose Head is Christ. In other words, the mystery is the church, which is the body of Christ. But then at the end of the epistle Paul asks for prayer that he may be given divine boldness to preach what he calls “the mystery of the gospel” (6:19).

When we connect the biblical dots we discover—much to the chagrin of mainline liberalism—that not only are the kingdom and the church not at odds, they are in fact intimately related. And further, when we connect the biblical dots we also find—much to the chagrin of mainstream evangelicalism—that not only are the gospel and the church not at odds, but they are in fact virtually one and the same thing.