What is the gospel?

Often we Christians speak of "the gospel" without being particularly clear about what it is. 

Sometimes we say the gospel is this: Christ died for our sins, bearing the wrath that we deserved.

Other times we might hear the emphasis placed on the fact of our inability: Jesus accomplished for us what we could not accomplish for ourselves.

Both of these renderings of the gospel are meant to lead us to salvation. In other words, someone shares this good news with another, who in turn receives it, believes it, and is saved. Hallelujahs all around.

But what if the recipient of this news is not particularly interested in salvation anyway? In other words, these takes on the good news are only good news for someone who had been, let us say, presuming upon God's love and thus their own salvation, presuming they were deserving of heaven.

Bot not everyone is making that presumption. Perhaps in a post-Reformation Europe this approach made sense. Everyone you met was either Catholic or some sort of Protestant. The Protestant critique of  Roman Catholicism was just that it led people to trust in something other than the cross of Christ for their salvation.

But most people I know are unchurched or post-church, and as such they're not really inclined to choose sides in Christianity's ongoing theological disputes. Most of them are not trying to save themselves, or not relying on mistaken notions about their personal salvation. It's just not a question that concerns them much. They don't believe in God and therefore have no fear of his wrath, and while many may think Jesus seems like a pretty good guy, the notion that he is God seems ludicrous to them, and they don't look to him or anyone else for salvation. They are fundamentally moralistic people, have a code of conduct that greatly overlaps with much of Judeo-Christian morality (though certainly not all), and strongly suspect that there is no survival of conscience or personhood after death. Dust to dust, that's all.

So what we have as gospelizers is a message that seems irrelevant to a lot of people; a message that does not, as the saying goes, meet them where they are.

I'd like to suggest that the good news presented in various NT texts is something larger than that message we've inherited from the Reformation. We've reduced the gospel to a kind of verbal talisman, and salvation to an individual's reception or rejection of that talisman. 

I've been thinking along these lines for sometime, ever since I began to ask myself, what does the New Testament say about the good news? 

See my previous post for more on this subject.