What is the authentic gospel? How do we answer the sceptics? Christianity is not a religion, but God’s good news for the world. This implies that it has both a divine origin and a human relevance: it comes from God and it speaks to our condition. So, before we ask, ‘What is the gospel?’, we need to ask, ‘What is a human being?’

Chapter 1: The human paradox looks at what the Bible teaches and what our experience endorses: the glory and shame of our humanness, both our dignity as creatures made in God’s image and our depravity as sinners under his judgement.
Chapter 2: Human freedom: what is traditionally called ‘salvation’, seen in terms of ‘authentic freedom’.
Chapters 3 and 4: The central themes of the death and resurrection of Jesus, securing our freedom. This section also looks at a number of objections and denials.
Chapter 5: The far-reaching implications, both for faith and for life.

Taken from the original book ‘The Contemporary Christian’ (published 1992) with light editing and questions at the end of each chapter added by Tim Chester.