The Gospel According to Who?

As far as ambitiously titled books go, Chris Seay’s The Gospel According to Jesus would surely rank near the top of many lists.  I wasn’t even sure who Seay was when I cracked open the book (turns out he is the pastor of a church called Ecclesia in Houston, TX), but the title grabbed my attention.  I was curious to hear more about the “Faith that Restores All Things,” suggested by the subtitle.  As a Mennonite, I suppose I am drawn to anything that smacks of a Jesus-centred approach to faith.  Consequently, despite my unfamiliarity with the author, I had high hopes for this book.

It turns out that you really can’t judge a book by its cover.  I found The Gospel According to Jesus to be a rambling, disjointed, and fairly frustrating read.  There are a number of specific critiques that could be made of this book (one thinks of Seay’s weird, silly, and, well, wrong assertion that what human beings were created to do was “lie around naked and eat fruit”), but perhaps the most telling indictment comes in chapter three.

One would think that a chapter entitled “What is the Gospel?” in a book called The Gospel According to Jesus might include a few references to, well, the gospels!  Yet the reader searches in vain for any discussion of the gospels themselves!  I double and triple-checked this chapter to make sure that I wasn’t making things up or being unnecessarily critical, but Seay has managed to write an entire chapter on the nature of the Gospel without referring to even one of the gospels.  We hear not a single word in this chapter from Jesus himself!  One almost doesn’t need to read on.

What we get instead is the gospel according to Romans, augmented by a few long, loosely connected quotes from figures as diverse as Lesslie Newbigin, William Tyndale, Pope Benedict XVI, D.A. Carson, Rick McKinley and Tim Keller.  Each of these authors has good and important things to say about the gospel, but it’s not always clear why Seay is quoting them or that he even understands what they are saying.  This sounds harsh, I realize, but it’s hard to know what to think when, to cite just one example, a quote from Pope Benedict’s discussion of how the word euangelion (which is translated “gospel”) would have been understood in its first century context (i.e., a proclamation about the realignment of social reality) is closely followed by this:

This good news ought to make you leap and dance.  One of the indicators of how well we grasp and live out the gospel is our “leaping and dancing.”  Does your church celebrate well?  Are you a festive crew, or might some describe you as gloomy?

Interesting, perhaps, but likely not what Benedict was getting at.  At times, chapter three reads as if Seay just grabbed a handful of his favourite quotes containing the word “gospel,” added a few passages from the book of Romans, supplied a bit of personal commentary, and called the result an explanation of the gospel.

Not surprisingly, the gospel “according to Jesus” looks similar to the gospel that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American evangelicalism is already reasonably familiar with.  If, as Seay asserts, “the reason we are not living in the light of life that real Christianity ignites is that we have ignored, distorted, and misunderstood the gospel according to Jesus,” the reader will undoubtedly puzzle at what is offered as the remedy.  For example, here is a kind of summary statement from the chapter on the nature of the gospel:

You were rescued!  You’ve destroyed your life with sin and you’re living in destruction by your own choice.  You deserve to die.  But God, the Creator, has reached into that destruction with love, saying, “I’m here to pull you out.”

Now there is certainly elements of this paragraph that are true and worthy of affirmation.  I would want to qualify some terms, and expand on a few others, but there’s nothing inherently false about it.  But there’s also nothing very new or revolutionary about this understanding of the gospel.  This is a well-traveled road.  Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that it is at least partially responsible for the very distortions and misunderstandings Seay is attempting to correct.

To be fair, Seay gestures in some good directions.  Chapters entitled “Imago Dei” and “Shalom, the Fruit of Justice” indicate that Seay is at least thinking in some very good and helpful directions, even if these are not located within a comprehensive enough framework or do not receive the depth or breadth of treatment the reader might hope for.  In addition, the idea that the gospel is for the healing of the whole world pops up frequently, if unpredictably, throughout.  In the Afterword, for example, Seay speaks eloquently about the recent oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico and how one’s convictions about the gospel might inform and motivate response.  Seay is to be affirmed whenever and wherever he pushes against understandings of “the gospel” that make it all about me and my sin.

But given the debacle of chapter three and the generally inconsistent and disjointed nature of themes treated by the book in general, this reader closed The Gospel According to Jesus wishing for much better—or at least clearer—“news” than this.

I received a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus through Booksneeze‘s book review program.