Scot McKnight's soteriology

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@Christy

For them “the gospel” is what you need to believe/do to be saved.

I certainly don’t believe in anything like that. I tend to call that a gospel of salvation by works of the mind. And this last sentence of mine certainly points a typical use I make of the word “gospel” for various soteriological formulations, and that has more to do with the evangelical traditions and language I have been influenced by rather than any honest evaluation of what the word “gospel” means when used by Jesus and Paul. But for me it is enough to distinguish between a formulation of our understanding of salvation and a formula for salvation itself. For example, I would say that I believe in a gospel of salvation by the grace of God, where God asks us to seek a righteousness based on faith, which is only made real by such works as seeking justice, correcting oppression, and helping those in need, but this formula is only an understanding of salvation and there is no implication that this tells us how to be saved let alone that believing in such a formula provides any advantage for doing so.

@Christy

For McKnight “the gospel” is the Story of God acting in human history.

That is clearly an abstraction McKnight has derived from the uses by Jesus and Paul rather than the use they actually made of the word. I would suggest that this is a word that we might used in more than one way as long as we explain the usage when it is asked of us. This of course goes back to our previous discussion of narrative theology, in which I expressed a variety of mixed feeling – approval of some trends and criticism of other aspects.

@Christy

Wax seems to be offering a knee-jerk defense of systematic theology, probably because he is a Neo-Cal and they LOVE their systematic theology. The whole article smacks of the necessary posturing and boundary marking that is typical of TGC when they think anything threatens their team. Piper hated Wright’s book Justification and wrote a whole book in response to it, and TGC will always fall in line with Piper. I imagine McKnight is more sympathetic to Wright’s interpretation of Romans, so therefore he must be publicly disagreed with and the Piper fan-boys must be duly warned. It’s probably part of the contract if you are going to blog for TGC.

Perhaps it is a weakness of my theological education that I didn’t study such recent developments in evangelical theology, but rather something considerably broader with depth in unexpected areas such as Eastern Orthodoxy (background of my church history professor), Judaism (OT professor), and Catholicism (philosophy professor).

@Christy

McKnight thinks systematic theology has become over-rated and unfortunately trumped the Story, which is what God actually gave us in the Bible. If he had wanted his special revelation to be a system, he certainly could have done that. But instead our special revelation is the story of Israel and the Church and the Person of Jesus Christ. So that’s what we need to engage with.

And I agree with him about that, but setting the distinction “systematic” aside as something to explore later, it is usually only to provide a caveat that my own interest in theology is a matter of hobby, personal obsession and idle interest rather than of anything of ultimate importance. I certainly observe that Eastern Orthodoxy doesn’t share this obsession with theology and that the real roots of the evangelicalism with George Finny was to refocus Christianity away from dogma to the power of Jesus in changing lives.