Gospel-Centeredness: Where It’s Been and Where It Should Go 

I remember first being exposed to the writings of the late Tim Keller back during my sophomore year, in the college ministry of John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist Church. At that time, Keller’s writings and sermons supplemented the ministry of John Piper wonderfully to help shape my understanding of God, the gospel, and the Christian life. From John Piper, I gained a “big-God theology,” coming to understand the centrality of the glory of God and the total sovereignty of God in the world and in salvation. From Tim Keller, I came to understand the centrality of the gospel. As Keller said, the gospel is not the A, B, Cs of the Christian life but rather the A to Z of the Christian life. This was revolutionary for me at the time. 

I always had assumed that the gospel message “gets you in the door” of Christianity, and after that, you sort of “graduate” to higher things. Keller helped me, and countless others, I suspect, to understand that you never graduate from the gospel. The gospel itself is how I, as a Christian, continue to grow. I never move beyond the gospel, for I need it every day, and every promise of God is purchased and secured by what Christ did in his death and resurrection. 

I am forever indebted to God for what he taught me through Tim Keller. His ministry played a key role in what some have called the “gospel-centered movement”, and insofar as that movement has helped Christians like me come to understand the centrality of the gospel, it has been a positive movement. However, in the 20 years since that time, I have come to see some unfortunate results from the form of “gospel-centeredness” that many of Keller’s followers embraced. I am far from the first person to point this out (see here and here, for instance), but in the hope that my experience and summation of the problem, as I see it, can help others, I offer the following critique.

Third-Way Gospel-Centeredness 

First of all, the very simple articulation of what it means to be “gospel-centered” that I offered above is one I still hold to and want to commend to others. We should see the whole Bible as connecting to the most important part of the plot, that being the death 

and resurrection of Christ. We should see that no growth, as a Christian, happens apart from the gospel and faith in the promises of God. The gospel is the center of the Bible and should be central to the Christian life. If this is what gospel-centered means, then every Christian should indeed be gospel-centered. However, the legacy of the gospel-centered movement has shown that for many, this is not all that gospel-centered has meant.

Let me start with my own personal experience. After my time at Bethlehem Baptist, I was a member of several other evangelical churches that were all self-described “gospel-centered” churches. In these churches, we frequently read and studied Tim Keller’s books in our small groups. Our pastors preached sermons that were similar in tone and approach to Keller, also, with the exposition helpfully showing how the text of Scripture related to the central message of the gospel and calling for the hearers to repent and believe in that message. So far so good, in my view. 

However, in these churches, looking back, there was always a very clear aim to avoid being politically partisan. To be “neither left nor right.” The gospel, my pastors explained, addresses both the political left and the political right, and so whatever a person’s political persuasion, they alike need the gospel and can meet there in the middle to find agreement in their need for a Savior. Again, so far so good. I don’t know that anyone, not even those critical of Keller’s ministry, would suggest that this is not true. “We all like sheep have gone astray,” conservatives, liberals, Marxists, neo-Nazis, you name it. In that basic sense, these gospel-centered leaders were right that the gospel really is a sort of “third way” between whatever other polarizing ideologies you can find. You name two unbelieving perspectives, and the gospel really is a superior “third way,” insofar as it’s the only way that actually saves. 

However much this perspective made sense to me years ago and even now, if articulated as I have done in recent years, it has become clear that the “third way” approach is ultimately rather unhelpful. If defined as I defined it above, then no actual Christian would disagree. Do all “sides” need the gospel? Yes. Absolutely. Amen. Say it and never stop saying it. However, the self-described gospel-centered churches, pastors, and laypeople I have been involved with typically took this “third-way,” gospel-centeredness approach in a different direction. To be “gospel-centered” or “third-way,” in practice, meant more about what you’re not supposed to say than what you are. For many gospel-centered leaders, to be “gospel-centered” meant, often implicitly, that you must limit yourself from addressing or taking a stance on controversial topics, especially political ones, and instead “focus on the gospel.”

Pastor Doug Wilson has most helpfully highlighted the issue here when he said, “the real issue is not whether the gospel is central, but rather what it is central to.” (1) For those in the gospel-centered movement, gospel-centeredness came to mean something restrictive rather than something expansive. Mostly, it meant we shouldn’t get involved in politics or show any preference to the political right or left.

The Legacy of Third-Way Gospel-Centeredness 

20 years ago, I experienced this sort of avoidance of politics and somehow didn’t see a huge issue with it. Sure, even then, I understood there were some big differences between the Republican and Democratic parties, for instance, and I couldn’t see how anyone could justify voting for a Democrat as a Christian, and yet the differences perhaps were not so great that they needed to come up in my conversations with my friends from church. Political issues weren’t addressed, were rarely talked about, and if anyone did embrace a worldview consistent with the Democratic Party, it was intentionally left alone by our pastors. And that, right there, was the problem. 

In more recent years (maybe the past 7-10 years), I can’t tell you how many friends and fellow former church members have either wandered away from the faith altogether into far-Left ideology, or while still bearing the name of Christian have nevertheless embraced the whole worldview and values of the secular Left. This has been a tragedy, and as I’ve reflected upon it, it is a tragedy owing fully to the “third-wayism” described above and the failure of pastors to speak into areas that Scripture actually does speak to. 

As stated above, if gospel-centered means acknowledging that of two unbelieving perspectives, a third perspective that calls for repentance and faith in Christ is the best solution, then of course, no Christian would disagree. However, the fallacy of third-wayism came in assuming that the gospel would always land squarely in the center, addressing both worldviews equally. The reason this is such a fallacious way of thinking, as it relates to politics, is that clearly one worldview can be more indebted to Christianity (and the gospel itself) for its existence than another worldview. 

The Middle Way and the Widening Gulf

Some worldviews are simply more based on truth than others. Some political viewpoints come more from a Christian worldview. Other political viewpoints come more from a secular, atheistic, or some other worldview. Since many of my beloved churches and pastors failed to address politics and the worldviews that inherently lay underneath them, they were also unwilling to address and confront the many unbelieving worldviews and thought systems of their parishioners. This has led directly to where we’re at today, where many who bear the name of Christ now, often without even knowing it, have fully embraced secular ideologies of Marxism, Critical Theory, and are supportive of practices such as abortion or gender ideology, or at least are apathetic about these practices in favor of supporting the values of Leftism. 

Is this what “gospel-centered means?” Does it mean that Christians and pastors can’t call out the horrors of gender mutilation, the atrocity of abortion, the errors of Critical Race Theory, Marxism, or any other politically divisive topic? Does being gospel-centered mean we must toe the middle line, not seeking to upset people too much on either side, and attempting to stay equally in the middle? What if most of the evils in our culture are currently coming from one side over another? 

It is often commented upon how divided our country currently is, even within the Church. Could it be that part of the reason for this current division is that pastors and Church leaders failed to speak out earlier, to confront and correct the ways of thinking that are not in line with God’s word, out of fear of turning people away or being labeled as being too “political”? Now the gulf has just widened, and many Christians, never having had their unbiblical worldviews and philosophies challenged by their pastors, have just waded deeper into the torrent of the cultural Zeitgeist, no longer merely (as if it were a mere thing!) apathetic about abortion, but now more sympathetic than ever to both abortion, the LGBTQ movement, socialism, and a number of other serious errors. 

Paul, in Colossians 2:8, said, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” Now here’s a question: if one is to avoid being taken captive by unbiblical ideologies, do you think it’s important to be told what they are? Surely Paul would have us identify these philosophies if we are not to be taken captive by them. Yet, it is just this identification that many gospel-centered Christians have been unwilling to engage in. 

Toward a Better Gospel-Centeredness 

Despite what I’ve written above, I, for one, do not yet want to give up on the term “gospel-centered.” As I explained above, insofar as the term gets at the centrality of the gospel for the Bible and for the Christian life, I still find it useful. Yet, I want to see the evangelical Church rid itself of thinking that to be gospel-centered means we must limit our prophetic or teaching voice. The gospel is central, yes, but it is central not only to an individual’s personal relationship with God, but to all of reality. The gospel is central, and must be recognized as central, to the Bible, to the Christian life, to the local church, to marriage, to parenting, to education, to politics, indeed, to every single aspect of our world. 

As Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” If we truly want to be gospel-centered, we will stop acting as if the gospel is irrelevant to how we approach politics, or any other issue. Christ is Lord, and there is no area of life that we can keep from him. When the Apostle Paul summed up his ministry in Ephesus in Acts 20 he stated two times how he did not “shrink” in his teaching: “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable” (Acts 20:30). “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).

We need more Christians and pastors who do not “shrink,” not for the sake of being intentionally partisan, but for the sake of the truth, for the sake of “what is profitable”, and for the sake of “the whole counsel of God”; indeed, for the sake of the gospel, which has necessary implications for every area of our lives. Let us rid ourselves of third-way gospel-centeredness and let the gospel be central to all of life, as it really is.

(1) Doug Wilson, Frequently Shouted Questions About Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2025), 57.