What is the Gospel?

I once received the ‘gospel’ photocopied on canary yellow, stuck under my windshield. There was a three bullet outline about how to “go to heaven”, along with a bold, italicized headline encouraging readers to “Get a better life using God.”

Three point outline -– Should it really be that simple?

“go to heaven” –- Is that all there is to it?

“using God” –- Do you take God in liquid or pill form?

Of course I criticize because I love. I passionately believe in the revolutionary liberating power of the Gospel of Christ. But there must be something more to it than what it sometimes becomes. These days of ours, in which there is a crying need for a robust Christianity to feed the needs of a spiritually starving people, demand a Gospel that will satisfy, not just another appetizer from Oprah and Dr. Phil.

So what does this meaty Gospel look like?

“and the Word became flesh and lived among us”

The Gospel, signified most fully in Christ, is that God desires to communicate his very self to all humanity. The offer has “divinizing” effects on human nature, as God graciously makes himself a constitutive part of human nature. This process deepens over time through sanctification, at last realized in beatific vision.

In the reverse, with the Incarnation, human nature is taken up for all time into the reality of God. God has made the human to participate in the divine.

“By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

We have been given an invitation to cut in on the ecstatic Triune dance of dynamic interrelated love for all eternity.

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’”

Good News.