“Because of the complex entanglements of theology, with a little imagination one might argue that almost any topic is a gospel issue. At one level or another, everything in any theology that is worth the name is tied to everything else, so it is possible to tie everything to the gospel. In that sense, well-nigh everything is a gospel issue. . . .”

One of the reasons many people resonate with Kevin DeYoung’s writing is that he has a mind that likes to define terms and make distinctions. When that happens, fog begins to clear away among people of goodwill.

So, on the question, “Is social justice a gospel issue?” he avoids the easy answers of Yes or No and rightly responds: “That depends on what we mean by ‘social justice’ and what we mean by ‘gospel issue.’

Kevin’s article reminded me of a 2014 Themelios editorial by D. A. Carson. I wonder if we might be having more clear and productive conversations these days if we had taken to heart Carson’s careful definitional distinctions.

Carson argues that when we say “X is a gospel issue” we are doing two things at once:

• We are making a truth claim.
• We are making a polemical assertion in order to establish its relative importance.

On the “truth claim,” he writes:

The statement is a truth claim in that it asserts that something either is true about X, namely, that it is “a gospel issue.”

The claim is either valid (if X really is a gospel issue) or invalid (if X is really not a gospel issue).

But, he points out, most people who say “X is a gospel issue” are doing more than making a truth claim:

If the truth claim is valid, the statement implicitly asserts that X is a more important topic than others that are not gospel issues: it is designed to establish the importance of X relative to other topics that are not understood to be gospel issues.

What is presupposed in the statement, of course, is that the gospel has a very high level of importance, perhaps supreme importance, such that if X is a gospel issue, it too is similarly elevated in importance.

It follows, then, that to abandon X, when X is a gospel issue, is somehow to diminish or threaten the gospel. . . .

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