Scot McKnight believes that the question, What is the gospel? , is a crucial question for the church. He also believes the church to be confused about the 'real' answer to the question, the biblical answer. I've not long finished a stimulating book by McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel : The Original Good News Revisited (2011). Provocatively he argues that Evangelicals (those supposedly concerned about the evangel, the gospel, good news) today are not really evangelical at all! They are more accurately called soterians ! (He's coined this word to denote those who are primarily concerned with salvation at the expense of the gospel.) He believes that evangelicals--and included in this description would be many charismatic and Pentecostal churches as well--have built 'salvation cultures' (p. 29) rather than 'gospel cultures'. The two he affirms are not the same thing even though the former is part of the latter. Once might say that the gospel is the...
we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen --Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles