Waiting for gospel...

In Douglas John Hall's most recent book, Waiting for Gospel, in his introduction he asks a damn good question.  It comes, as is often the case in his writing, after a long set-up - in this case about the lack of theological sophistication of North America.

How can serious Christians in North America today employ a term like rebirth without conjuring up a whole religious ideology, complete with stage directions, that is inimical to the truth they want to profess?  When an extraordinarily large percentage of the American public claims a born-again status for itself; and when what this means for most, apparently, is a rhetorically dramatic personal religious experience, perhaps clearly datable, perhaps entailing glossolalia, perhaps including spectacular physical healing and certainly separating off its recipients from all who cannot claim such ecstasies, yet manifesting in the reborn few or no discernible changes in lifestyle, political affiliation, or economic assumptions (nay, in all likelihood hardening in them the most questionable racial, creedal, political, sexual and other assumptions) - when, I ask, rebirth connotes such specific results as these, how, in this context, can it be used meaningfully to connote profound biblical teachings as repentance, justification by grace through faith, the simultaneity of sin and justification... the inclusivity of divine love... how can even the term gospel be employed by mainline Christians on this continent when for the majority of those using this term, the gospel is reducible to "fundamentals" or to sentimentalism, or to patethic little greeting-card ideas that are only slightly more sophisticated than gross superstition?

I had a clergy friend who once answered Hall's damn good question like this:  most people are so lonely and afraid that they will hang up their minds at the door in exchange for a hug. He was right then and it hasn't gotten any better in 25 years.  No wonder nobody goes to church anymore.  And so we are truly waiting for Gospel.