The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited

by Scot McKnight

Publisher:

Zondervan

, 2011

ISBN: 9780310497202

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Overview

Contemporary Christians have built a “salvation culture” but not a “gospel culture.” Evangelicals have reduced the gospel to the message of personal salvation. The King Jesus Gospel makes a plea for us to recover the old gospel as that which is still new and still fresh.

This book succinctly and without pretense demonstrates that the gospel is defined by the apostles in 1 Corinthians 15 as the completion of the story of Israel in the saving story of Jesus. McKnight shows us that the gospel was preached by Jesus, and that the sermons in the Book of Acts are the best example of gospeling in the New Testament.

Practical suggestions about evangelism
Ideas about building a gospel culture

Top Highlights

“Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.” (Page 18)

“I believe the word gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about ‘personal salvation,’ and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making ‘decisions.’ The result of this hijacking is that the word gospel no longer means in our world what it originally meant to either Jesus or the apostles.” (Page 26)

“One reason why so many Christians today don’t know the Old Testament is because their ‘gospel’ doesn’t even need it!” (Page 44)

“When the plan gets separated from the story, the plan almost always becomes abstract, propositional, logical, rational, and philosophical and, most importantly, de-storified and unbiblical. When we separate the Plan of Salvation from the story, we cut ourselves off the story that identifies us and tells our past and tells our future. We separate ourselves from Jesus and turn the Christian faith into a System of Salvation.” (Page 62)

“The Story of Jesus Christ is locked into one people, one history, and one Scripture: it makes sense only as it follows and completes the Story of Israel.” (Page 50)

The revolution Scot is proposing is massive . . . [and] we all urgently need to allow this deeply biblical vision of “the gospel” to challenge the less-than-completely-biblical visions we have cherished for too long, around which we have built a good deal of church life and practice. This book could be one of God’s ways of reminding the new generation of Christians that it has to grow up, to take responsibility for thinking things through afresh, to look back to the large world of the full first-century gospel in order then to look out on the equally large world of twenty-first century gospel opportunity.

—N. T. Wright, from the Foreword

Scot McKnight here presents, with great force and clarity, the one gospel of the Bible and of Jesus the King and Savior . . . Study the Gospels to see how Jesus did it, and then do it in the matter he did it. You don’t need a program, a budget, or any special qualifications to do this. Just understand it in the biblical form and do it. Scot McKnight gives you the key.

—Dallas Willard, from the Foreword

Scot McKnight (PhD, Nottingham) is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University, Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books, including One Life, Galatians and 1 Peter in the NIV Application Commentary series, and the award-winning The Jesus Creed.