What is the Gospel?
While we usually associate John Calvin with the doctrine of predestination, it is less commonly realized that he redefined how evangelicals have understood the gospel for the last 500 years. Calvin, who was a lawyer by profession, "upgraded" the apostles' call to simply believe in the author of salvation with the additional requirement to confess the legal basis of salvation. He termed his hybridization of gospel and law "saving knowledge" and it far overshot the simplicity of the New Testament gospel.

Winning a Generation Without the Law explains why Calvin's declaration of a 'minimum' doctrinal confession necessary to be saved was such an extremely slippery slope, causing theologian Adolph Harnack to lament, "The Reformation was...incapable of making any sound distinction between 'doctrine' and Gospel; in this respect falling far behind Paul" (What is Christianity?).

The book explores the 21st-century fallout of evangelicalism's 'legal' gospel that requires those "without law" (1 Corinthians 9:21) to first come "under the law" before believing in Jesus. It then explains why we need to recover ten basic principles the apostles followed in exporting the gospel out of the cradle of Mosaic law into a Western culture without law. Fraser specifically focuses on what they didn't include in their "Greek" gospel and drills down to the one problem the gospel solves (hint: it's not guilt!) that actually makes Jesus Christ 'good news' for the postmodern mind.

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