Monday, November 14, 2005

What is the gospel?


So, I have not posted in awhile. (I have a term paper that is sucking the life out of me – hopefully I can post on it soon.) I had that one post about how churches drive me crazy, but I deleted for two reasons. First, my apologizes to the united way, the facts of my comments may have been erroneous. Second, my negative voice in the end I felt was unhelpful. My post was about the institutionalization of the gospel.

We touched on the topic today in my cultural hermeneutics (how to interpret culture) class. Apparently Robert Gundry said something similar a few years ago, and called evangelicals to rethink a fundamentalist stance (see Jesus the Word, and John the Sectarian). In essence to reclaim our place as a sect protesting a decaying world, not the empire than evangelicalism has become. He has a point, but not quite what I had in mind.

Is it possible to “protest” a culture but still love it? By protest I mean proclaim the message of hope, of repentance and forgiveness. I think what is comes down to, is that we need to proclaim the gospel, but none of us seem to be able to articulate the gospel. So let me put it out there, how do you define the gospel?