More Merton
I think Merton is right on with these thoughts…as a note, I have edited out a few segments (indicated by ellipses) to save my fingers from death by typing.
The greatest temptation that assails Christians is that in effect, for most of us, the Gospel has ceased to be news. And if it is not news it is not Gospel: for the Gospel is the proclamation of something absolutely new, everlastingly new, not a message that was once new but is now two thousand years old. And yet for many of us the Gospel is precisely the announcement of something that is not new: the truths of the Gospel are old, deep-rooted, firmly established, unchanging and in some sense a refuge against all that is disturbing because it is new. . . . The message of the Gospel when it was first preached was profoundly disturbing to those who wanted to cling to well-established religious patters, the ancient and accepted ways, the ways that were not dangerous and which contained no surprises…
What makes the Gospel news? The faith, which is created in us by God and with which we hear it as news. This acceptance of faith, this new birth in the Spirit, opens up a new dimension in which time and eternity meet, in which all things are made new: eternity, time, our own self, the world around us…
Those who preach the Gospel as if it were not and could not be news, as if it never could be news again, are saying in their own way, and much more terribly than Nietzsche, that “God is dead.” They are declaring it officially, they are proclaiming it not just as the paradox of an eccentric, but as the doctrine of their church…
The Gospel is the news that, if I will, I can respond now in perfect freedom to the redemptive love of God for man in Christ, that I can now rise above the forces of necessity and evil in order to say “yes” to the mysterious action of Spirit that is transforming the world even in the midst of the violence and confusion and destruction that seem to proclaim His absence and His “death.”
According to the OED, the word ‘gospel’ descends from the old English phrase ‘god spel,’ which was adopted as the regular translation of the Latin ‘evangelium,’ which means ‘good message.’ Why is the Gospel message sometimes thought of as bad news? And if it isn’t thought of as bad news, why do some people ignore it altogether?
