Living the King Jesus Gospel

Discipleship and Ministry Then and Now (A Tribute to Scot McKnight)

Nijay K. Gupta, Tara Beth Leach, Matthew W. Bates, Drew J. Strait, Nijay K. Gupta, Tara Beth Leach, Matthew W. Bates, Drew J. Strait

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725254817, 9781725254824
• eBook ISBN: 9781725254831
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Living the King Jesus Gospel brings together biblical scholars, theologians, church historians, and ministry practitionersto discuss the Good News of Jesus Christ, discipleship, and the Christian life throughout the centuries and in the world today. Drawing from across the New Testament, the Church Fathers, the Reformers, the Anglican and Orthodox Traditions, and various modern contexts, the contributors bring diverse perspectives to key questions about the gospel. What ties them all together is the person of King Jesus and the hope for a church that embodies and reflects a life-giving and flourishing kingdom.

Part 1: New Testament

1

Is There Any “Gospel” in the Gospels?1

Michael F. Bird

Introduction

Evangelicals are so named because of their commitment to the “evangel,” that is, the gospel. The joyous proclamation that God has wrought salvation in Jesus Christ and this salvation is received by repentance and faith. The evangelical faith is about churches, associations, and para-church bodies gathering to proclaim the gospel and striving to live out a life worthy of the gospel.2 The gospel suffuses the entire New Testament even as there are different narrations of the story of Jesus, epitomes of apostolic preaching, summaries of the gospel, and theological argumentation concerned with the defense of the gospel itself.3

There are also diversities associated with various Christian traditions who tend to emphasize certain aspects or implications of the gospel in their own ecclesial cultures. The Latin-western tradition tends to focus on the human problem as guilt and justification as the solution. Meanwhile, the Greek Orthodox tradition tends to operate in terms of death and corruption solved by Jesus’s resurrection and participation in his divine life. Methodist theologians major on the gospel’s message of forgiveness and renewal unto holiness. Pentecostalism would begin with humanity’s spiritual alienation from God and narrate the gospel as Jesus the Spirit-bearer and Spirit-giver who makes us alive to God. Liberation theologians start with human experience of oppression and describe Jesus as the agent of divine justice to the oppressed.4

The Reformed tradition, broadly conceived, is a sub-species of the Latin tradition, arguably distinguished by an attempt to recover apostolic hermeneutics, its innovations on justification, a focus on substitutionary atonement, with due emphasis on union with Christ and the work of the Spirit in salvation. However, I think it is fair to say that many contemporary expressions of Reformed evangelicalism are merely engaged in a selective riffing off the Synod of Dort in their constructions of Reformed-ness. Moreover, they lack the catholic sensibilities, canonical consciousness, and pneumatic commitments that characterized the early reformational theologians. The result is that this pop-Reformed theological culture is, at its worst,5 a kind of crass Paulinism as viewed through the lens of the Synod of Dort. It is Calvinist in a sense, but perhaps more Calvin Klein in its ability to fuse fad, brand prestige, celebrity pastors, and low-church elitism.

I submit for many seminarians these days, whether Reformed or not, that their gospel is very Paul-shaped, almost solus Paulus! They can grasp the gospel as something evident in Galatians and Rom 1–8, but struggle to be able to identify any gospel in the rest of the New Testament. This is partly due to a myopic focus on the “gospel of justification,” but also due to a syllogistic view of salvation whereby they learn that (1) God is holy, (2) Humanity is sinful, (3) Humanity needs a God-man to take away the penalty of our sin that affronts this holy God. If the gospel is set out that way, one can jump from Gen 3 to Rom 3, with the result that the story of Israel and Jesus are not required in any account of the gospel. Lest I be accused of overstatement, I routinely ask students how to preach the gospel from the Old Testament Psalms like the apostles did and I inquire of them in what sense the Gospels convey the gospel. The answers I receive convey a mixture of biblical illiteracy and hermeneutical obliviousness. As such, I am thankful for the work of Scot McKnight who, in his celebrated volume The King Jesus Gospel, addresses this very problem, i.e., how to connect the gospel to the stories of creation, Israel, and the prophetic career of Jesus the Messiah.6

In this essay I will attempt to offer an exemplar in explaining how the gospel can actually be found in the canonical Gospels with a view to widening the horizons of readers who might find themselves wearing a theological restraining straitjacket whereby they can only grasp the gospel when it is translated into (selective!) Pauline categories. I will achieve that by examining specific units from each Evangelist to demonstrate that the gospel is tangibly and authentically present in our very Gospels.

Matthew 26–28

The story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection is the climax in all four Gospels and this is powerfully narrated in Matt 26–28. Matthew tells the story of Jesus’s anointing at Bethany, the Last Supper, Judas’s betrayal, Jesus’s arrest and trial, then his crucifixion, death, and burial, followed by his resurrection. Matthew is, I believe, riffing off Mark, but he does it to indicate that Jesus is the triumphant suffer...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: New Testament
• Part 2: Christian History and Tradition
• Part 3: Christian Life, Discipleship, and Community Today