The God and the Gospel of Righteousness by David Pawson
Anchor Recordings, 2014 £4.99 63 pages ISBN 978 1 909 886 681
Reading this book by David Pawson, son of Prof Cecil Pawson who was Vice President of
Conference in 1951, is a salutary and sobering experience.
With plenty of Bible references and accounts of personal experiences, the author’s main concern is
the current, prevailing obsession with preaching the love of God.
David Pawson maintains, with compelling evidence from the scriptures, that neither Jesus nor the
apostles ever preached the love of God per se.
A survey and analysis of the book of Acts reveals that preaching in the early church, as recorded
there, was based on the righteousness of God rather than his love.
More than that, the preaching of John the Baptist and of Jesus himself was primarily about
repentance and the need to believe the Gospel. (Mark 1 15)
Going through the book of Acts in the New American Standard Bible (1995 edition), one can find
14 references to preaching by Peter, Paul, Philip and other preachers which quite specifically
mention ‘repentance’.No mention of preaching the love of God can be seen there, however.
As always with David Pawson, he is reliable, direct, helpful and instructive.