“It is likely that our theological problem in the church is that our gospel is a story believed, shaped, and transmitted by the dispossessed; and we are now a church of possessions for whom the rhetoric of the dispossessed is offensive and their promise is irrelevant. And we are left to see if it is possible for us again to embrace solidarity with the dispossessed.”
From The Land, Second Edition (p. 206), by Walter Brueggemann
(Thanks, Parks family, for the great birthday gift!)
I am not bold enough to argue with any real theologians but I do have a suggestion and this is that the gospel has been emptied of its content by both the reformers, the liberals who followed them and the evangelicals of recent years.
I say this for the simple reason that the content of the proclamation of the early church/the apostles absolutely had to be Jesus. I do mean the ‘historical’ Jesus.
Deriving our definition of the gospel from the epistles is methodologically silly but that is precisely what we have been doing for the last several hundred years.