It’s taken a while to respond, but here we go. Your posting is very nicely formatted; and sorry, I didn’t mean to be strident. Perhaps we should go back to Chajc’s statements:

For me the whole trajectory of the narrative from Genesis forward is the Gospel story. We have no identity without it. We have no real mission other than proclaiming it. Proclaiming it may take many forms depending on the context, but to find a mission or identity outside of the Gospel story is in my mind pushing the envelope to far in an attempt to be relevant.

He makes the same point in the comment below:

No matter the context or the audience the ‘good news’ is always in my mind the same call, a call to return to God. A call to be in right relationship with Him. A call to have Him as you God, as we are His people.

My argument is basically that the trajectory of the biblical narrative takes us through the Gospel story, so I would say that it lands us beyond it rather than outside it. That is the unavoidable consequence of a linear understanding of history.

From a narrative point of view, it is misleading to think that the Gospel story or the ‘gospel’ is the end-point or highest point of biblical revelation. Jesus’ gospel is an announcement to Israel about its immediate future. He is not simply saying to individuals who happen to be Jewish, ‘Repent and believe in me as your personal saviour.’ He is calling a faithful part of Israel to reconstitute itself around him in order that the people of God might escape the devastating ‘judgment’ of the Roman war and emerge transformed from the crisis, redefined by the new covenant in the Spirit. It is not generic humanity but ‘his people’ that he came to save from the consequences of their sins (Matt. 1:21).

This is what he has in mind when he announces the coming kingdom. So I’m afraid I still wish to maintain that the good news in the New Testament is first of all ‘historical, corporate and political’. It is historical in that it is addressed to Israel at a particular moment in its history; it is corporate in that it is an announcement regarding the fate of the nation; and it is political in that it has to do fundamentally with who rules over God’s people. By referring to that construction as an ‘emerging paradigm’ I do not mean that I have invented it solely for the sake of the enterprise of the current phenomenon which we call the ‘emerging church’. Rather I would argue that the current situation has allowed us to see more clearly the inherent historical, corporate and political shape of the gospel in the New Testament. This can be summed up in Jesus, certainly; but right now I think we need to un-sum it and grasp the narrative-historical dimensions of the New Testament texts. The Word became flesh but by that ‘incarnation’ the Word entered the particular narrative of God’s people - for example, as part of the story that John the Baptist told about the condemnation and salvation of Israel (Jn. 1:6-8; cf. Matt. 3:1-10 and parallels).

As for your transmission metaphor: I would argue that the ‘framing narrative’, if you like, is not the invention of the transmission but the rest of the vehicle. There is no point insisting on the efficacy and necessity of the transmission if the fuel tank is empty, the engine is broken, the differential has seized up, and someone has made off with the wheels. It’s no good taking the transmission out of the car and expecting it to transport us somewhere.

This is not a matter of an ‘over-academized methodology’: it is simply the story that the Bible tells. What I hear you advocating, indeed, is an over-simplified methodology which may have some immediate practical value but which fails adequately to represent the truth of scripture. It may be the case that the church suffers from an excess of religiosity and ritualism and that the invitation to a more authentic personal faith is urgently needed. But I do not think that the call to a renewal of personal faith is enough. Your objection to religiosity merely captures one aspect of the contemporary crisis - and one which probably now makes much more sense in the US than in Europe. But I would argue both on exegetical and missional grounds that this is constitutes a much too narrow basis for defining the gospel, which I think needs to be firmly located in an overarching biblical narrative about a people called to embody in its corporate life, in defiance of other narratives, actually and prophetically and in anticipation of God’s future, the renewal of creation.

I submit that focusing intently on the context - some if not most of which is surely hypothetical since it goes back 2000+ years - is a great ditch to fall into.

Here again I strongly disagree: take the ‘good news’ out of the context and you risk seriously distorting it. These are not separable things: the gospel that Jesus and Paul announce first to Israel and then to the world is intended to address a particular historical circumstance. That announcement certainly has universal implications, but it is a mistake to skim off the stuff that appeals to our modern privatized religious sensibilities and discard the rest. Chajc’s list of ‘good news’ texts extracted from across the canon of scripture admittedly says something about the consistent character or purposes of God, but it is highly selective and, in my view, obscures the fundamental shape of biblical truth.