Pass it on
The word "gospel" once meant a military victory announcement; a report of something that happened in space and time, whether you believed it or not. Today it has been emptied into a synonym for "my personal truth." That shift was not an evolution. It was a retreat. And the retreat broke the staircase between fact and meaning.
What the Word Used to Mean
In the ancient world, when a battle was won, a messenger was dispatched to carry the news back to the waiting city. The Greek word for this announcement was euangelion; good news, gospel. It was not a suggestion. It was not an invitation to explore your feelings about the battle. It was a report: the king has won, the enemy is defeated, the city is safe. Your opinion about these facts did not change the facts. The messenger was not asking whether the news resonated with you. He was telling you what had happened.
This is the context in which the early Christians chose the word "gospel" for their central message. They were not starting a religion in the modern sense; a set of practices and beliefs you could adopt if they felt meaningful to you. They were making a claim about an event. A man named Jesus of Nazareth was executed under Pontius Pilate, buried in a known tomb, and raised from the dead on the third day. These were not metaphors. They were not spiritual truths that happened in the hearts of the disciples. They were events. They happened in history, at a particular time, in a particular place, witnessed by particular people. And if they happened, everything changed.
The Retreat from History
Something happened between then and now. The gospel stopped being treated as news and started being treated as advice. Instead of "this happened, therefore respond," it became "here is a way of living that you might find meaningful." The shift was subtle at first. By the time of theological liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had become explicit: the resurrection did not need to have happened in history. It could be true as a symbol, as a myth, as a story that expressed something profound about the human experience of hope and renewal.
This sounds generous. It sounds like making room for people who struggle with the supernatural. But it is actually a complete evacuation of the Christian claim. If the resurrection did not happen in history, Christianity is false; not in a nuanced, metaphorical way, but in the straightforward sense that its central claim about reality is incorrect. Paul said this himself in 1 Corinthians: if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins, and of all people Christians are most to be pitied. Not "your faith is a beautiful metaphor." Not "your faith is a meaningful story." Your faith is futile. It does nothing. It corresponds to nothing.
Christianity is either the most consequential fact in the universe or the most elaborate waste of time ever devised. There is no middle option where it is "true for you" but not true in the way gravity is true.
Why the Historical Claim Matters
The insistence on history is not intellectual stubbornness. It is structural necessity. If the resurrection happened, it means something about reality itself: death is not final, the Creator has acted within creation, and the claims Jesus made about Himself are vindicated. If the resurrection did not happen, none of those things are true, and Christianity is a well-intentioned mistake that has been misleading people for two thousand years. You cannot split the difference. The event and the meaning are welded together. Break the weld, and you have neither.
This is why the Case for Christ matters. It is not an exercise in making the faith more intellectually respectable to outsiders. It is an exercise in recovering what the faith actually is: a claim about something that happened. The gospel is not a song you sing to make yourself feel better. It is not a story you tell to give your life narrative coherence. It is a verdict; a ruling on the nature of reality that was delivered by a specific set of events in first-century Judea. Your feelings about the verdict do not change the verdict. The question is not whether the gospel resonates with you. The question is whether it is true. And if it is true, the only appropriate response is not appreciation. It is surrender.