Quotes about Gospel

I feel about John ['s gospel] like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her. (Following Jesus, p. 27.)

The gospel by which individuals come to personal faith, and so to that radical transformation of life spoken of so often in the new Testament, is the personalizing of the larger challenge just mentioned: the call to every child, woman, and man to submit in faith to the lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus and so to become, through baptism and membership in the body of Christ, a living, breathing anticipation of the final new creation itself

The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart.

The Gospel is not meant to make people odd or less than fully human; it is mean to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness.

Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by their continuing pride, injustice, and greed.

Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about 'what God is saying here' without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus' back.

the gospel, in the New Testament, is the good news that God (the world's creator) is at last becoming king and that Jesus, whom this God raised from the dead, is the world's true lord.

Once you lose the kingdom theme, which is central to the gospels, everything else becomes reinterpreted in ways that radically distort, that substitute a subtly different "gospel" message for the one Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are eager to convey.

Any gospel which does not embrace both 'evangelism' and 'social action' is a counterfeit, offering either an escapist's dream, which leaves power structures of the world untouched, or a mere social reform which leaves the soaring spiritual dimension of reality out of consideration, and thereby dooms itself to compromise and failure.