What is the “Original Gospel”?

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

To the dedicated Protestant Christian,

You enthrone the Bible to dethrone the Church, while quoting the Church to prove that such is legitimate, so that you can be judge of all and God must capitulate to your will. 

You are saved because you say so, not because you have anything to do with God or with others. Such a disconnected view of salvation doesn’t fit the reality of an eternity spent with all the saints and angels, held in the eternal love and life of the Trinity. No one can be saved on their own! 

The living Gospel, the Covenant of Life which is found in the Church, which Christ established to bring salvation into the world and is our hope of continued relationship with God in unending Communion, is torn from our fingers and replaced with rules of logic and perfect continuity with Scripture (when perfect continuity of Communion proves to be a mystery). 

The problem is that the Apostles didn't have Sola Scriptura, nor did they create a canon, and it flexed over time, building rings around the locus around the experience of the Incarnation. 

To believe in a story which you connect with personally, which is how God touches you and brings meaning and grace into your life, is the essence of the Gospel. 

This is what you reject because it cannot be proven, or what denomination of church claiming to be the absolute cannot be logically deduced. Funny, because Christ's historical reality and the very events witnessed by the Bible itself cannot be absolutely, logically deduced. 

It always remains a mystery. 

To try to reduce it to a principle, to eradicate mystery, to eradicate the work of God and substitute it for history (the Apostles only authoritative as "reporters"), is to kill it and divorce our lives from the story of God's love and creation... the only truth, however, if found in a story. 

That's what the Gospel is.