Is the gospel larger than sola fide?

Many Evangelicals have cited Galatians and other parts of scripture against Roman Catholicism and other groups they think hold a false gospel. A common response has been to cite passages in the Bible that refer to the gospel without defining it the way those Evangelicals are defining it (Mark 1:1, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, etc.).

It's true that the gospel consists of more than what those Evangelicals cite from Galatians and elsewhere. But though the gospel consists of more than the means by which we receive justification, that means is part of the gospel and a foundational aspect of it (Galatians 3:2).

People often use the language of a whole to refer to a part. So, a person or group who's partly right about the gospel and partly wrong about it can be referred to as holding a false gospel. Paul wasn't saying that the Judaizers were wrong about every part of the gospel. Rather, they were wrong about part of it, and the part they were wrong about is essential. We can apply the same kind of evaluation to other groups as well, including modern ones.

People often use abbreviated language. We sometimes assume our audience knows more than what a term conveys by itself. For a variety of reasons, such as a desire for brevity, people often summarize something without spelling out all of the details. A passage like 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 can summarize the gospel with an intention of highlighting some aspects of it while leaving other aspects out or present in only an implicit way. So, the gospel will often be summarized as something like "the gospel of the kingdom" (Matthew 4:23) or "the gospel of the glory of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:4) without mentioning sola fide, but also without mentioning other details, like the atoning death of Christ and his resurrection, which are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15. Just as the essential nature of Jesus' atoning death and resurrection referred to in 1 Corinthians 15 isn't negated by its not being mentioned in Matthew 4 and 2 Corinthians 4, the essential nature of the means by which we receive justification isn't negated by its not being mentioned in a passage like 1 Corinthians 15. There's other evidence to take into account, like what we have in Galatians.

I'm not aware of any reason to think the Judaizers denied anything like Jesus' Messiahship, the atoning nature of his death, or his resurrection, yet Paul said that the Judaizers taught a false gospel. And he did that on the basis of the means by which they thought people receive justification, the same issue Evangelicals are raising against groups like Roman Catholicism.

An Evangelical can focus on a particular aspect of the gospel, as Paul does in Galatians, because that part of the gospel is relevant to the individual or group he's addressing. That doesn't mean the Evangelical is saying that the gospel consists only of what he's focusing on in that context.

To whatever extent somebody, an Evangelical or whoever else, is too focused on an aspect of the gospel, overlooks some other portion of the gospel, misunderstands something, or whatever, we can correct him accordingly. But there's also a danger of erring in ways other than what Evangelicals are being criticized for, such as being focused too little on something Evangelicals are rightly giving more attention to. You can err in more than one direction. The danger of overestimation is accompanied by the danger of underestimation. Regardless of whether any given Evangelical individual or group is overestimating something like the principle Paul lays out in Galatians 3:2, it is an apostolic principle and is part of what we have to take into account when thinking about the gospel.