"It is the work of God to restore cracked Eikons, in the context of the community of faith, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Spirit, and this restoration is to both union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world."
The gospel is the work of the (triune) God to form a community of faith in order to restore cracked Eikons through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Pentecostal Spirit to union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world.
First, the gospel is a narration of the saving events in the life of Jesus as they bring to fulfillment the Scriptures of Israel.
Second, the events in Jesus' life are his life, his death, his burial, his resurrection and his appearances.
Third, this narrative forms the basis for salvation, understood here to include the forgiveness of sins. These events accomplish that salvation and the gospel therefore involves the appeal to believe in God's redemption through these events
My proposal has been that 'the gospel' is not, for Paul, a message about 'how one gets saved', in an individual and a historical sense. It is a fourfold announcement about Jesus:
- In Jesus of Nazareth, specifically in his cross, the decisive victory has been won over all the powers of evil, including sin and death themselves.
- In Jesus' resurrection the New Age has dawned, inaugurating the long-awaited time when the prophecies would be fulfilled, when Israel's exile would be over, and the whole world would be addressed by the one creator God.
- The crucified and risen Jesus was, all along, Israel's Messiah, her representative king.
- Jesus was therefore also the Lord, the true king of the world, the one at whose name every knee would bow.
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