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“If you want to read the gospel, hear the gospel, or preach the gospel…read, listen to, and preach the Gospels,” he concludes. When speaking of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, he poses the question, “Why did the early Christians call these books ‘the Gospel?” McKnight really gets on a roll in Chapter 6. But, at least for me, McKnight explains this “story-of-Jesus gospel” in a way that is more accessible and applicable to everyday life. If this sounds a lot like what NT Wright’s been arguing for years, it’s because it is. The gospel summons people to respond-to repent, to place faith in Jesus, and be baptized. The gospel centers on the lordship of Jesus. The story of Jesus-his life, death, resurrection, exaltation, and return-is the completion of Israel’s story.Ģ. McKnight summarizes his position like this:ġ. While I still believe there is an element of relativity to the gospel because the gospel is about Jesus and everyone encounters Jesus a little differently, McKnight reminded me of just how important it is to acknowledge the fact that the writers of the New Testament had something specific in mind when they used the word “gospel.”Īnd according to The King Jesus Gospel, what they had in mind was “the story of Jesus of Nazareth as told as the climax of the long story of Israel, which in turn is the story of how the one true God is rescuing the world.” I’m wary of anyone who claims to have found a succinct summary of something as complex as the good news of Jesus. I confess I started this book with a bit of skepticism. But these two words don’t mean the same thing…My prayer for this book is that it will revive a generation of evangelicals to become true evangelicals instead of just soterians.” A salvation culture and a gospel culture are not the same, he says. Hence, we are really ‘salvationists.’ We are wired this way. Says McKnight, “We evangelicals (as a whole) are not really ‘evangelical’ in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians…We (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the world salvation. In fact, McKnight argues that modern evangelicals seem to have confused the words evangel (Greek for gospel) and soteria (Greek for salvation). The cross is the only part of his story that really matters. The Gospel as We’ve Known It…ĭallas Willard puts it this way: “For most American Christians, the gospel is about getting my sins forgiven so I can go to heaven when I die.” It’s "the gospel of sin management.”Īccording to McKnight, “the word gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about personal salvation.” It’s been reduced to “justification by faith.” Under such a scheme, the Gospels in the Bible are little more than back story leading up to the cross, and Jesus is little more than a mechanism by which our salvation is attained. In fact, I was still trying to process what I’d learned upon reading The King Jesus Gospelthat day- that somehow I’d managed to be a Christian for twenty-five years without understanding what the writers of the New Testament meant when they referred to the gospel.
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The skill and immediacy with which the poor guy changed the subject revealed to me that he’d probably sat next to a well-meaning evangelist in the past, the kind to whom “gospel” means salvation from hell and “evangelizing” means convincing your seatmate to make a decision for Christ before the plane lands.Īs McKnight notes in the book, “Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.” It’s a book about the gospel,” I said, “about how modern Christians have misunderstood it to be all about personal salvation, when it’s more about the story of Jesus.” I was thankful for the quiet time because I got to spend the four-hour flight completely engrossed in a book that revolutionized my perspective on my Christian faith- The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight.Īs we were taxiing around John Wayne Airport, the guy (who at the beginning of the flight told me he spent the summer working for Coca-Cola setting up air-conditioned tents at concerts and amusement parks), asked me what I was reading. The guy next to me on my flight from Chicago to Santa Ana last week was the perfect seatmate-chatty during takeoff and landing, asleep for the rest of the flight.
I just don’t think it is what Paul means.” “I am perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say ‘the gospel.’