Is the church called to update the gospel for each new generation, or to recover it when culture has drifted? In this short essay I examine the New Perspective on Paul—an influential bid to keep Christianity “relevant”—and argue that relevance without scriptural fidelity quickly becomes mere revision. Let’s start where Paul himself starts: with charity, but also with an immovable cross.
1. We Begin on Common Ground
I owe my New-Perspective friends this: their alarms against loveless traditionalism and cultural isolation are biblical. Paul did flex on food, circumcision, and calendar days (1 Cor 9:19-23) so that “by all means I might save some.” They remind us that the gospel creates a new multi-ethnic family, not a guild of spiritual Lone Rangers (Gal 3:28). These instincts are right, needed, and too often missing in Reformed pews.
2. The Question Beneath the Question
Yet charity must still ask: When does contextualization stop being mission and start being re-write? If the church edits its core message to match the mood of the moment, what is left to offer the moment? A gospel that keeps morphing can no longer metamorphose anyone; it is only a religious selfie of the age.
3. Scripture’s Immovable Benchmarks
Isaiah 40:8 still taunts every generation: “The grass withers… but the word of our God will stand forever.” Jesus, not first-century Judaism or twenty-first-century activism, is “the truth” (John 14:6). Paul’s “flexibility” was always ad-extra—methods, not message. The apostle who shaved his head for Jews and ate veggies for Gentiles would still anathematize any “different gospel” (Gal 1:8). Methods move; the cross doesn’t.
4. Reformation Precedent: Back to the Sources, Not to the Spirit of the Age
Luther, Calvin, and company were not medieval hipsters updating Christianity for Renaissance tastes. They were conservative radicals—conservative because they swore sola Scriptura, radical because Scripture uprooted a corrupted church. Their watchword was ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei: “the church reformed, always being reformed according to the Word of God,” not according to the Zeitgeist.
5. The Pitfall We Must Name
Whenever the church re-tailors justification to fit communal identity (NPP) or re-imagines sexuality to fit modern autonomy, it repeats the Galatian seduction: “another gospel.” Culture is not neutral; it is a generation catechism that disciples us daily (Rom 12:2). If we adjust the faith to match that catechism, we hand over the keys to the very world we are sent to win.
6. Toward a Faithful, Therefore Truly Relevant, Reformation
Relevance is not the fruit of revision but of resonance with what God has already spoken. A Word-saturated church will:
- Welcome the outsider without redefining the inside (Eph 2:12-13).
- Confront both self-righteous religion and self-authenticating secularism with the same verdict: “all have sinned” (Rom 3:23).
- Speak “the truth in love” (Eph 4:15)—love refusing to compromise the truth, truth refusing to withhold love.
The world does not need a church that echoes its questions; it needs a church that answers them with a crucified and risen Lord who never changes.
7. An Invitation, Not a Condemnation
To my NPP-inclined brothers and sisters: let’s keep the passion for community, the hatred of hypocrisy, and the missionary creativity. But let’s tether them to the apostolic gospel that God justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5) through the alien righteousness of Christ alone. That message—though it sounds foolish to both first-century Jews and twenty-first-century skeptics—is the only power that saves.
Reformation happens when the church stops asking, “How can we update Christianity?” and starts asking, “Where have we drifted from it?” Then, and only then, will we be truly relevant—because we will be real.
