The Decided vs. The Discipled

I am reading Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011). In the book, McKnight attempts to show that the gospel of Jesus has been watered down in the church by the plan of salvation: Jesus merely comes to die for our sins and bring us to heaven. The plan of salvation gets people to make a decision. However, it usually fails to present the whole gospel. “Our focus on getting young people to make decisions—that is, ‘accepting Jesus into our hearts’—appears to distort spiritual formation” (p. 20). In other words, as McKnight comments,

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples…Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and—yes, the word is appropriate—aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at disciples slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles (p. 18).

I wholeheartedly agree with his observation and critique.

The “the gospel” we have been sharing is not the full gospel of Jesus according to the Bible. To use N. T. Wright’s words, “I am perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say ‘the gospel.’ I just don’t think it is what Paul means. In other words, I am not denying that the usual meanings are things that people ought to say, to preach about, to believe. I simply wouldn’t use the word ‘gospel’ to denote those things.” (Quoted by McKnight, p. 58).

I agree with McKnight that we should define the gospel by first referring to 1 Corinthians 15.

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain (vv. 1-2).

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (vv. 3-5).

The earliest gospel is concerned about the four things/events in the life of Jesus Christ: Christ died, Christ was buried, Christ was raised, and Christ appeared. And the story of Jesus is not separated from the story of Israel, for the phrase according to the Scriptures indicates that the story of Jesus is the resolution of the problem of Israel’s story and the fulfillment of the story of Israel. To share the gospel is to share the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of the story of Israel.

The word gospel was used in the world of Jews at the time of the apostles to announce something, to declare something as good news—the word euangelion always means good news. “To gospel” is to herald, to proclaim, and to declare something about something. To put this together, the gospel is to announce good news about key events in the life of Jesus Christ. To gospel for Paul was to tell, announce, declare, and shout aloud the Story of Jesus Christ as the saving news of God (pp. 49-50).

One of the problems of the plan of salvation—Jesus dies on the cross, saves us from our sins, and leads us into heaven—is that it diminishes the story of Jesus as the apex of God’s saving story from creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. “Equating the Plan of Salvation with either the Story of Israel or the Story of Jesus distorts the gospel and at times even ruins the Story. It is customary in America to refer to the ‘gospel plan of salvation,’ by which we mean how an individual gets saved, what God has done for us, and how we are to respond if we want to get saved” (pp. 37-38). The plan of salvation is not the whole gospel story. It is only part of the saving story.

In regard with the woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of costly ointment before the passion of Jesus as a prophetical act for his burial, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). Scot McKnight writes:

Why? Because Jesus assumes the preaching of the gospel will mean telling stories about the life of Jesus, including this very story of the woman who had just poured oil on him. I have had Christian students tell me that they know the gospel well but have never heard this story, and whatever you think of their reading habits, what this “never-heard-of-it” says is that gospel and four Gospels are not connected tightly enough. We do know that in the earliest churches the leaders publicly read from the gospel weekly, something we need to revive once again in our churches. It was this constant immersion in the Gospel[s] that created the potential for a gospel culture (p. 91).

Mark 14:9 makes sense in my head the first time in the context of understanding the Gospel as the story of Jesus instead of the plan of salvation.