Gospel and Christianity

Gospel and Christianity

Introduction

The gospel is a collection of the accounting of Jesus Christ (Jesus of Nazareth)'s life, as given by four different people: Mark, Mattew, John and Luke. Additionally, it is observed that Christians also use the term gospel to discuss any sort of religious news, information or extract. In this paper, however, we study the importance of the Gospels in the life of a Christian and if a non-Christian person was to look at the Gospels as a source of inspiration, what should he/she perceive of it.

Overview

We live in a post-secular age where the world is moving away from religion towards the concepts of modernity and secularity. Charles Taylor defines secularity in the West as the drift away from grounding our moral sources in a particular religious worldview to theism being only one of many possible alternatives for grounding the good life. One of the motivating factors that contributed to this drift was the flurry of violence associated with the offshoots of Protestantism after the Reformation. People grew weary of the authoritarian nature of state-sponsored religion in Western Europe that wedded the coercive power of the state with increasingly diverse religious perspectives on theology and morality. The Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic Christian traditions dominated the European landscape during the early stages of the Reformation period and vied for political and religious supremacy. Their competing moral and theological visions escalated into devastating violence in the Thirty Years War between the Catholics and Calvinists in France and the Puritan revolution in England. During this same period, a new “social imaginary” was emerging; a way of picturing social existence that included separating the coercive power of the state from the authority of the church: democracy. Many tributaries feed the stream of conversation concerning the role of religion in the public life of a liberal democracy. Any conversation about public morality raises concerns about knowledge, especially when presenting it to a non-Christian person.

How do we know what is right or wrong?

Is there a universal basis to ground morality or are we left to individual cultural expressions?

Is there any way to do social criticism across cultures or are we confined to radical relativism?

Is there such a thing as “religious knowledge,” and how might it bear on the conversation in the public square?

The waning influence of the Enlightenment and the advent of postmodernity have brought these concerns about knowledge, especially moral knowledge, to the fore.

Entering Christianity in a democratic country like America

Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and Cornel West offer a parallel minimal definition of the Christian tradition. Christian tradition focuses on the person and work of Jesus Christ as represented in the Christian Scriptures. According to the authors, the telos of the Christian tradition is to form a distinct community of people (Hauerwas) who follow in the way of Jesus and testify to his lordship over all of life (Yoder). The authorities of the Christian tradition are Jesus and the apostles, who form the narrative around which Christians center their ...