Quotes by Scot McKnight • Kernbeisser

Attention: This post was written in English, and then translated to German and Dutch. This is because I read the book in English.

The following quotes from the book “The King Jesus Gospel” by Scot McKnight struck me by their clear understanding. Quotes never replace a book. Quotes, however, can get you interested in reading more.

Quotes from the book

The question is this: What is the gospel?
Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church.
While this sketch of the Bible’s Story may seem like an old story to many and while each line (if not word) above deserves a chapter, this is the Bible’s Story, and it is more or less the Bible’s only story. However, this story is not the same as the gospel. The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only makes 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.
I am convinced that because we think the gospel is the Plan of Salvation, and because we preach the Plan of Salvation as the gospel, we are not actually preaching the gospel.
Teach salvation, namely, to pull humans from trusting in themselves and to encourage them to learn to trust in Christ alone in order to find justification before God. This is a very Reformation kind of gospel preaching.
The Plan of Salvation and the Method of Persuasion have been given so much weight they are crushing and have crushed the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus. This has massive implications for the gospel itself.
One reason why so many Christians today don’t know the Old Testament is because their “gospel” doesn’t even need it!
So, in 1 Corinthians 15:28, when we are finally connected to God in this eternal union with God through his Son, humans will be doing exactly what God intended for his creation. God will be God, and we will be God’s people – and the whole story will be about God.
You may be asking now, as I have myself numerous times, what happened? How did we develop a salvation culture out of a gospel culture? How did “evangelicals” become “soterians”? Or, when did the “gospel” become the Plan of Salvation?
The singular contribution of the Reformation, in all three directions – Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist – was that the gravity of the gospel was shifted toward justification by faith, and justification by faith laid bare the importance of faith – even if the modern emphasis on “personal” faith was not yet an emphasis.
When I read today’s thin and superficial reductions of the gospel to simple points, I know that that could never have happened apart from the Reformation. I also know that it didn’t happen during the Reformation itself but as a result of the Reformation’s reframing of the apostolic gospel-become-creed.
The Reformation did not deny the gospel story and it did not deny the creeds. Instead, it put everything into a new order and into a new place. Time and developments have somehow eroded the much more balanced combination of gospel culture and salvation culture in the Reformation to where today a salvation culture has eclipsed the gospel culture.
The soterian gospel we know today was not a Reformation gospel, but the gospel that arose in the era of the revivalists.
This is but a sketch, but it’s enough to ring the bell: the Gospels are gospel because they see the Story of Israel completing itself in the Story of Jesus. I would encourage readers of the Gospels to read a passage or a chapter and then to pause and ponder long enough to permit their knowledge of Israel’s Story – the Old Testament Scriptures – to help them find connections between what the evangelists are saying and what the Old Testament told us. It’s everywhere, and without this story-to-story way of reading the Gospels, one simply doesn’t grasp what the evangelists were doing.
At any rate, we neede to recover more of that early, emboldened Christian resurrection gospel.
When we reduce the gospel to only personal salvation, as soterians are tempted to do, we tear the fabric out of the Story of the Bible and we cease even needing the Bible. I don’t know of any other way to put it.

Limitations on the quotes

The quotes cited here are mainly from the first half of the book. Clear and insightful observations, which also fit well in the context of this site. The second half of the book explains how Scot McKnight understands the gospel to be. That is probably best explained with the following quote from the chapter “Gospeling Today”:

“There is one and only one gospel, and it was passed on from Jesus to the apostles to their churches. It is this gospel, and this gospel alone, that glues the New Testament into a unity. If we want to be New Testament Christians, this gospel must once again become our gospel.”

This idea is a widespread interpretation of and assumption about the New Testament, which I do not share. There is not just one gospel. He introduces this idea of a single gospel by introducing the term “apostolic gospel”. Because most churches and traditions hijack the entire New Testament as “being Christian”, that is not a new idea, but a different name, allowing for reframing what it means. In a sense, this is interesting and allows for an introduction of good elements to that understanding. Yet, it does not reflect the text in its development but is an interpretation injected into the Bible.

If reading the text of the New Testament closely, a development appears. While I understand there are similarities one can trace throughout Scripture, there are distinctions made within the text. Distinctions, by which there are not just variations to the same story, but real differences in tasks and messages as carried and proclaimed by different people to different audiences. To my best understanding, it is not just all the same, and I do not want to enforce that assumption, as it hides and suppresses vital elements of each gospel’s teaching, be it from Jesus, the Twelve, or Paul.

Quoting from the second half of the book would probably not do justice to the author and my own interpretation. I choose not to touch it, even if I find many thoughts quite helpful in concept. Please read the book if you are eager to learn more. It is a good read, even if you do not agree with everything.