In order to be restored to God's household, the Jews thought that gentiles

"...needed to do what the Jews had always needed to do: get circumcised and follow the Mosaic law. This was not a call to legalism, but it was a call to be faithful to the old covenants as if those covenants had not been affected by Jesus’ Advent. Paul responded by showing that Jesus had in fact fulfilled the promise to Abraham so that the old order was transformed. Jesus is the true heir to the Abrahamic covenant and because of His fulfillment and transformation of the old covenants, people can now acquire a saving, covenantal relationship with God through the Messiah apart from those old covenants."

This is the subject of Galations, according to Derrick Olliff, in When the Fullness of Time had Come: Paul’s Gospel to the Galatians. He says that Protestant reading of the book, as an argument against legalistic, merit-earning good works, is misguided in interpreting Paul at this point, even while being correct in its outcome.

If Olliff is right (and I think he is), I suspect we need to revise the way we talk about 'the gospel'. When Paul argues that the Galations are turning to another gospel, he does not mean an individualised system of earned merit. What he means is the return of God's king to His people. To be sure, it is not I who return, by earned merit or otherwise. Thus the Protestant position is correct. It is God who has made Himself king over a whole people: ultimately, He has restored the entire creation to His kingship.

The implications of this mean, as I have suggested before, that 'the gospel' may be practically denied, refused or subverted in many more ways than the rather simplistic Arminian idea that "I choose God". When we say that the cattle on a thousand hills are God's, we are only giving old covenant voice to the expansiveness of the gospel's impact: everything is to be reshaped according to the new headship of Christ, and this everything is not of a lower order than individual faith-analysis.

So, I want to suggest, firstly, that notions of merit and what we call 'works righteousness' are not the real enemy underlying every vital question of man's relation to God. How can they be, when the testaments do not construct that relationship primarily in terms of the individual? Secondly, the dangers of focusing on the inward mechanics of 'justification' are very real. We will end with a narrowly restricted 'gospel' that concerns itself with the knowledge of the inward heart-movement from damnation to salvation. It is evidenced by works of faith, but is expressed, taught and enforced in descriptive formulas ("salvation by grace alone through faith"). So everything comes down to arguments about words: especially since we assume that it is thoughts (given by the Spirit), rather than acts (can be done by anyone), which truly distinguish the saved from the damned.

The recipe for ugly, argumentative churches, whose best recommendation is that they look after their own (but are of no use to anyone else), is pretty clear. I believe it is a form of judgment that their view of 'the gospel' commands them to argumentative ugliness. Hearing, they will not hear. Yet the vapid, shallow, orgiastic me-and-my-Jesus nonsense of much contemporary evangelicalism is no reliable alternative.

The gospel is a reliable alternative. And this is why pieces like Olliff's are so valuable. We need, very badly - even perhaps more than at the reformation - a movement that recovers within the wider church what it might mean to be the people over whom God has enthroned Himself as King. This is an enormously wide-ranging concern: as wide as all creation. For instance, as in the post below, we need to recover a sense and theology of restored place. We need to bring Christ's kingship to bear on the environment. Kids, tidy your rooms. And on everything else. This will be an effort far, far beyond my lifetime. But when we do that, the attractiveness of the gospel will be overwhelming to all who see and hear it. Then will the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, be a light to the nations:

"For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope--the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good."