“For I am not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the power of God for salvation…For in it the righteous of God is revealed.” (Romans 1:16-17)
It seems that the “gospel” is first and foremost an event, or news about an event. It is the telling of something that took place in time, in history that revealed the Love and Righteousness of God. As one of the early church fathers wisely quipped, “God became what we are that we might become what he is.” Too often this gets lost–God became man (Phil 2: 6-11), bore our condemnation, died, and was raised–and the resurrection becomes a general philosophy or idea. We who believe would of course never say that explicitly, but I fear it is implicitly expressed in our struggle with sin and applying the work of Christ on the cross to our specific sins in repentance.