What's the Gospel in Seven Words?

The Century asked 23 authors to boil Christian proclamation down to just a few words. What is the essence of the essence of Christianity?

In the incarnation, life,
death and resurrection of Christ we see that God is so for us and with us that
we can no longer be defined according to death, a religion-based worthiness
system or even the categories of late-stage capitalism.

Among Gospel epitomes I
especially love the Jesus prayer, the Agnus Dei and "When he ascended on high,
he led captivity captive"--the good news as I first heard it from Paul
(Ephesians 4:8) and Christ's Jubilee proclamation (Luke 4:18).

To be
sure, the second-to-last word, which can be very powerful, can be given to
something else.

This always seemed like hard moral advice that very few of us were really able to follow. But in recent times its meaning seems clearer.

By grace we're created in
the image of God. When we corrupt our lives with sin, the grace of God in Jesus
Christ forgives us and makes us fully alive again.

Christ "has broken down the dividing wall. . . . that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it."

A common tendency among
believers is to think of Jesus Christ in the past tense. He's the guy we study
in the Bible that some taxidermist must have mounted on a wall.

The gospel is the good news that Christ's death and
resurrection--mediated through scripture, tradition, and the sacraments of the
church--offers new life for all who embrace it.

Birth is a messy, painful
affair, fraught with risk and danger. Yet Jesus was born.

God's all-encompassing love enters the world in the
person of Jesus Christ, through the power of the Spirit.

Jesus Christ revitalizes,
personalizes and universalizes God's covenants with the people of Israel.

We are The Church of
Infinite Chances, where every sinner is a saint and vice versa. "Sinners
welcome," reads the banner on my church.

I
used only six words; I rested on the seventh.

The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is working to infiltrate the whole creation with God's love.

Our "no" is a human rejection of God's claim on us as our creator, sustainer and lord, a rejection that produces alienation and isolation, even from ourselves.

According to both Irenaus
and Athanasios, God became like us so that we might become like God. Clement
observes that through obedience one "becomes a god while still walking in
the flesh."

The gospel begins
and ends with God. Jesus makes God's action good news. But the word
"Jesus" alone doesn't help me; such Jesus is a nice guy, but I need
Jesus Christ, God's anointed.

But not everyone will grow and change.

Christ effected our reconciliation with God and invested in us, so that we may become teeming vessels of witness and service to others.