There is so much that is good here about not letting gospel be reduced to a personal salvation plan but hearing it as Jesus fulfilling the entire story of Israel that I was tempted to give this 5 stars. I reason I didn't is that most of it has been said before (My wife called it N.T. Light) and that his foil seems a bit of a strawman. That evangelicals reduce the gospel to individualistic salvation I don't doubt and have seen, so I think its an important point; however most thoughtful engaged evangelicals that actually read their bible and books wouldn't fall into the category McKnight puts him in. This book stands in a long line of books criticizing the evangelical tendency to make the gospel entirely about taking care of sin without making Jesus Lord. I am grateful for the point and think McKnight makes it rather well but its ground I've seen covered before (as McKnight would admit).

What I did appreciate is that McKnight articulates how a fuller gospel presentation which does justice to how Jesus fulfills Israels story effects our evangelistic proclamation. I think NT Wright's Challenge of Jesus does a similar thing in terms of 'how we live' in light of the gospel; this might do a better job of thinking things through in terms of Evangelism. ( )

There is a bit of a disagreement among Christians, or at least leading Christian thinkers, regarding the gospel. Is it Jesus’ gospel (kingdom) or Paul’s gospel (justification by faith)? Scot McKnight wrote the cover story for the December 2010 issue of Christianity Today titled “Jesus vs. Paul”, in which he lays out a new proposal. So which is it? Jesus’ gospel or Paul’s gospel? Yes.

In McKnight’s newest book, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (2011, Zondervan), he more fully answers the gospel question by trying to rise above the tired arguments that seem to be never-ending. And he does it well.

There is no argument that the church is suffering a bit of a crisis. We are seeing people make a decision to accept Christ, but overall, churches are not growing. I have read a number of interesting theories, but I think I like Scot’s hypothesis the best. He thinks we are focusing on the wrong thing, and we need to return to a robust teaching and preaching of the gospel. The gospel? We are evangelicals; we live and breathe the gospel! Or do we?

McKnight observes we have reduced the gospel to the plan of salvation. We are not truly evangelicals; we are soterians, or salvationists. When evangelicals talk about the gospel, we typically think immediately of the plan of salvation. I have talked to a number of my friends about this and they agree; the gospel is equivalent with the plan of salvation. McKnight appears to argue the plan of salvation is part of the gospel and comes out of the gospel. Salvation is a result of the gospel.

McKnight believes that if we want to be more effective at building the kingdom and changing live, we need to quit just teaching the plan of salvation and start teaching the gospel. The whole gospel. We need to return to the gospel the apostles preached and taught. “Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.” (page 18, emphasis his)

When defining the gospel, he appeals not to the Gospels but to Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul defines the gospel. In the first part of the chapter, he give the short version; it is the story of Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, was buried, raised to life, and appeared publicly. On a side note, one of the key things we often leave out of the story—or at least minimize—is the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is key and is the hope of our resurrection.

Later in the same chapter, Paul does something else that evangelicals rarely do. He roots the story of Jesus in the story of Israel. McKnight argues that for the plan of salvation to really make sense it must come out of the story of Jesus and for the story of Jesus to really make sense it must be seen as the completion of the story of Israel. While I had never previously never really thought about it from that perspective, I don’t disagree.

McKnight has received some criticism for focusing on the corporate nature of the kingdom and minimizing the role of personal salvation. As I read the book, I did not see that at all. In fact, just the opposite is true. His understanding of the gospel and where the plan of salvation fits into it is much more robust than that. He begins at the beginning and gives the plan of salvation roots. This is how he orders it: Story of Israel/Story of the Bible --> Story of Jesus --> Plan of Salvation --> Method of Persuasion.

If The King Jesus Gospel lacks in any area, it is that it causes the reader to ask questions it does not answer. It does provide some answers, but it does so without a lot of specifics. An important point is made that the evangelical church has a salvation culture but needs a gospel culture. How do we accomplish that? How do we build a gospel culture? Maybe it is better not to answer the questions too specifically. Maybe it is better to figure it out ourselves. To help with this, McKnight offers a list of six comparisons between the gospeling, or evangelizing, in the book of Acts and our gospeling today. He compares:

1. 
   What gospeling seeks to accomplish
   


2. 
   What frames gospeling
   


3. 
   Gospeling, wrath, and judgment
   


4. 
   The problem gospeling resolves
   


5. 
   Gospel and empire
   


6. 
   Talk about Jesus
   

Since McKnight defines the gospel as the story of Jesus, he is basically advocating a story approach to gospeling as opposed to a soterian approach. To do this we must create a gospel culture. He closes the book by telling us that a gospel culture emerges from a soterian culture in these ways:

• 
  We have to become People of the Story.
  


• 
  we need to immerse ourselves even more into the Story of Jesus.
  


• 
  We need to see how the apostles’ writings take the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus into the next generation and into a different culture, and how this generation led all the way to our generation.
  


• 
  We need to counter the stories that bracket our story and that reframe our story.
  


• 
  We need to embrace this story so that we are saved and can be transformed by the gospel story.
  

One of the most powerful aspects of The King Jesus Gospel is just how rooted in scripture it is. McKnight makes no claims without drawing them back to the Bible. He sums this up by providing an appendix with the gospel sermons in the book of Acts. This does an excellent job of demonstrating what first generation Christian preaching looked like and what ours can be.

While I do not endorse every aspect of any book, The King Jesus Gospel offers great insight into current evangelical church culture and a framework for changing that culture. There is much for church leaders and Christian thinkers to gain and learn from in this work. Whether or not you agree with McKnight, this book is definitely worth reading and thinking through.

Thoughts? ( )

With so many variations of the Gospel making their rounds (and I'm not just talking false gospels), it's no wonder we have lost sight of what the Gospel actually is. In today's society it seems we have transformed the message of the Gospel into solely a message (and method) of salvation. In other words, we have gone from a "gospel culture" to a "salvation culture" essentially becoming soterians rather than Gospel evangelists.

McKnight does an excellent job in drawing primarily from Scripture but also from tradition (early church fathers and early creeds) in describing and outlining the Gospel in it's most basic and simplistic form. In summary, the Gospel is this: "Jesus of Nazareth, the one who lived and died and who was raised and ascended and enthroned, is both Messiah of Israel and Lord of the whole world". He truly is King. This is the King Jesus Gospel in which Jesus reigns over the Jews and over all the earth. This is the same Gospel that Jesus himself taught, along with all of the apostles including Peter and Paul. And for the first few centuries, this is what the early church also believed and taught. It was with Augustine and later the Reformers that soteriology was introduced in with the Gospel message. Theological terms such as: propitiation, justification, and substitutionary atonement were intermixed in with Reformed-era creeds and confessions and have stuck ever since. While these terms and processes are certainly a vital part of the transforming power of the Gospel, they are not the Gospel in of themselves.

Overall, this is the best book that I've read outlining what the Gospel truly is. However, while it seemed McKnight was able to easily capture Paul's definition of the Gospel primarily drawing from 1 Corinthians 15, it seemed he was all over the place in attempting to capture Jesus' definition of the Gospel. But, I give credit where credit is due... namely that McKnight ultimately does define the King Jesus Gospel. But, I still remain "on the fence" if whether or not the kingdom of God also plays a part and role in this King Jesus Gospel.

I highly recommend this book to all Christians, and especially for those of us who are involved in evangelism and missions where getting the Gospel message right is absolutely vital. ( )

Sometime back I had this issue, the bible says that Jesus “preached the gospel” and that the disciples “preached the gospel,” but it never spelled out exactly what they were saying. And for sometime the modern church in America has over laid that word “gospel” with soteriology. In other words, we say that the “gospel” is about the saving grace of the cross. But while the gospel (euangelion) contains the work of the cross, that is not all that it is. You can not define the gospel simply by explaining the cross. For the simple explanation that … the cross had not happened when Jesus and his disciples were preaching.

Jesus did not preach, “believe that I will die on the cross and resurrect for your sins.” That could not have been “the gospel” that he preached. And yet, if you ask a Christian today what the gospel is, you will hear some rendition of the atonement of the cross.

Now, I have no problem with saying that the cross is good news or that salvation is now apart of the modern telling of the gospel. But before we get to modernity, I think we should understand WHY the story of Jesus is good news.

Today, people can explain salvation and the cross without ever once mentioning the Old Testament. We ask the new to the faith to “confess Christ as Lord,” without ever telling them what that means or why it’s important.

Scot McKnight in his new book The King Jesus Gospel writes, “one reason why so many Christians today don’t know the Old Testament is because their gospel doesn’t even need it.” but “the gospel of the New Testament cannot be reduced to the plan of salvation.”

Scot McKnight is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. He is the author of The Jesus Creed which won the Christianity Today book award for 2004 in the area of Christian living. McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed, has been a popular site for Evangelicals to discuss various theologies.

His new book seeks to unlock the BIG QUESTION: what is the gospel? Scot believes that Christianity is stuck in a salvation culture, but that we need to transition and find our true home in a “gospel culture.”

McKnight is a smart writer who writes a great book. This book is for anyone seeking to re-learn the biblical concept of gospel and for anyone who wants to communicate a full gospel story to the world. Highly recommended.

When I first heard about this book, I was excited. I liked the title: The King Jesus Gospel. I knew that he would talk about how the Gospel relates to the Kingdom of God. I wondered if he would mention Lordship salvation. I hoped that he would talk about the grand narrative of scripture. McKnight does this and more. This book is a reaction to the shallow evangelistic methods and anemic “gospeling” of the day.

Scot McKnight writes this book as a corrective for much that has gone wrong in modern evangelism. “I believe we are focused on the wrong things”,writes McKnight. Anyone who grew up in a church that used scripted evangelistic programs and/or programmed visitation can relate to the experiences and disappointments that McKnight recounts. As I read the introduction, I found myself transported back in time to my own experiences. Throughout the book I saw McKnight put into words the thoughts that have been in my mind for some time. So what is the problem and how do we fix it?

McKnight suggests that we have a salvation culture not a gospel culture: “The evangelical culture focuses on the experience of personal salvation as the decisive factor for creating that culture.” We are concerned with people being saved from hell but we are not dedicated to them living in the light of the gospel for the rest of their lives. This is why true discipleship is lacking in the church. Our focus is on saving them from something but not necessarily to something. We fail to address the kingdom living issues. I found myself in complete agreement with the author on this assessment.

After our attention has been brought to bear on this diminution , we are taken to the reality of the full gospel. The source is of course the scripture. We are given examples in the writings of Paul, the gospel according to the four evangelists and the teaching of Jesus Himself. I rejoice that the author goes to scripture for the answer to the question, “What is the Gospel?” McKnight then goes on to instruct us on how to usher in this gospel culture. I do not want to spoil your reading of the book so I hope this whets your appetite.

I do not always agree with McKnight. Indeed, I did not always agree with what he said in this book. But I found McKnight to be correct in reacting against the current culture, compelling in his arguments, kind to those he disagrees with and passionate about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. I hope that this book gains a wide reading. I hope that this topic is much discussed. And I hope that his critics will exhibit the same gracious spirit that he does in his writing.

This book was provided to me free of charge from Zondervan for the purpose of review. ( )