McKnight, Scot. The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good New Revisited. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011. | 
Whenever I approach anything Scot McKnight has written I do so very cautiously and with suspicion. I’m not sure why I do that besides knowing that he is Arminian in his soteriology and a bit reactionary. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by both his tone and his direction with the subject matter in The King Jesus Gospel.
McKnight is the author of the popular blog, “Jesus Creed,” author of numerous books, and is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University (Chicago, Illinois). For some context, North Park University is a school of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
In McKnight’s new book he is trying to answer what he believes is the most important question, “What is the gospel?” He believes the church is “in a fog” about the question and the church has confused the gospel with salvation. McKnight confesses that he has been spurred on in his study of this topic because of the callousness of growing up around Evangelism Explosion where the gospel is all about a decision. I can sympathize with McKnight a bit regarding EE having gone through it in seminary, although I didn’t grow up with it.
McKnight captures one of the issues very early I have had with the church and its understanding of the gospel. He said that;
Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.
One of the things that McKnight is trying to demonstrate, which I believes he accomplishes, is that the church needs to move its people from simply being “members” to people who are “discipled.” McKnight rightly identifies a middle place where most people get stuck and never get to the disciple stage, which he calls “the decided.” Those people come to a church, make a decision about the “gospel” and then are there. They never move from decision to disciple because their “gospel” was never a gospel at all.
One last point I’ll mention that resonated well with me is McKnight’s emphasis upon the necessity of the Old Testament in understanding the gospel. To rightly understand the gospel you not only have to have an understanding of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, but you also have to have some comprehension of the Story that those things take place in. This point dovetails nicely with the current Sunday School class I am teaching. I agree with McKnight when he says;
…the Bible’s story may seem like an old story to many…The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only make sense in that story. Now a very important claim: without that story there is no gospel. This leads to a second claim: if we ignore that story, the gospel gets distorted, and that is just what has happened in salvation cultures.
If I had any major point of criticism with this book it would be the pot-shots that McKnight takes at justification by faith. McKnight does not deny justification by faith but he frequently belittles it and puts it in the back seat to many other things. I am guessing that this is in reaction to a perception that justification by faith alone has been over-emphasized by many. Aside from this though I don’t think I have any major contentions with this book. I was served well by the book and I appreciate a voice going hard after easy-believism and decision making salvation.
FTC Rhetoric: I do not receive payment for my book reviews. I do sometimes receive free review and giveaway copies from authors, publishers, and publicists. My first responsibility is to my readers, therefore, I am committed to honest reviews.
Yesterday in church we had a guest preacher in while our Pastor was away on vacation. Curt Lamansky, the chairman of the Bible department at 
Ok, so Robertson being a fool isn’t anything new. He has had a lot of knucklehead moments over the years and is rarely repentant of them. I would hear of these much more frequently when living in Virginia Beach, where Robertson lives and where Regent University and the 700 Club is based. The seminary I went to is just about a mile or so down the road.
