At the heart of Christianity stands the figure of Jesus and the message he embodied the gospel. This book seeks to make what is at the heart of the Christian religion available in a new way in our time. Many of those who read this book will already have some notion of what the Christian faith is about. Professor Countryman therefore writes: "I fear that the reader will bring to the reading of this book all kinds of assumptions that don't belong here; and I have tried to be explicit in rejecting some of these so that I can reintroduce something truer." Within the church and outside of it, people today are in a period of refocusing and rediscovery, asking what is really central to the Christian faith. Some claim that today's church has lost its heart, if not its soul. Countryman sounds a clarion call back to the gospel, the "good news." For in the end, he writes, "we must be prepared to choose the good news over everything else." Here, then, is a fundamental work that has grown out of and been tested in the parish, and that has served as a basic text for seminary courses in "Foundations of Christian Spirituality." L. William Countryman is Professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, and author of The Language of Ordination: Ministry in an Ecumenical Context, also published by Trinity Press.
