Edward Rommen holds an MDiv and a DMiss from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as well as a PhD in Theology from Ludwig Maximillian University, Munich, Germany. After fifteen years of church planting and teaching in Europe, he returned to the United States to teach missions and theology and then returned again to pastoral ministry as an Orthodox priest. He is currently an adjunct professor at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.
The Gospel is more than information about the death and resurrection of our Lord. It is an invitation to enter, by way of personal faith, into a relationship with the person referenced by our propositions. Our task as believers is to mediate saving communion with a personal being upon whose will our very existence is contingent. It is precisely this personal aspect of our message, the Gospel-as-Person, that is in conflict with the late-modern notions of the Self and social discourse. Get Real: On Evangelism in the Late Modern World describes how the late-modern phenomena of existential anxiety, social alienation, and epistemic uncertainty have resulted in what some have called "the loss of Self." It also identifies ways in which that loss obstructs both the presentation of and the reception of the Gospel-as-Person. Finally, it shows how the Gospel-as-Person facilitates the recovery of the Self and social discourse, and how that message can be effectively presented in the late-modern context.