You Need a Better Gospel
Reclaiming the Good News of Participation with Christ
by Klyne R. Snodgrass
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Pub Date 18 Jan 2022 | Archive Date 18 Mar 2022
Baker Academic & Brazos Press | Baker Academic
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Description
This brief, accessibly written, and timely book shows that the biblical message is about attachment to Christ, participation in his death and resurrection, and engagement in his purposes. Snodgrass demonstrates that understanding and appropriating the gospel of participation conforms with what the church's great thinkers have emphasized throughout history and enables the church to recover its true identity.
This book brings the notion of participation in the gospel to a wider church audience. While other studies on this topic focus mostly on Paul's writings, You Need a Better Gospel shows that participation is the emphasis of the entire Bible, including the Old Testament. The real gospel, which offers participation in life with God, is astounding in its beauty and its power for life.
Advance Praise
“Here is an impassioned and accessible plea for union with Christ as the center of Christian faith and life. Drawing on a wide swath of Scripture and Christian tradition, You Need a Better Gospel will be a boon to clergy and lay people who yearn for a deeper, livelier, and more transformative faith in the reality of the good news.”—Susan Eastman, associate research professor of New Testament, Duke Divinity School
“Delaying gratification works well when you’re on a diet or saving for retirement but not so well when it comes to defining the content of the gospel, which concerns not only an afterlife but eternal life now. To have eternal life is to participate in the family of God—in the Son, through the Spirit—with other adoptees. Snodgrass rightly asks evangelicals—‘gospel people’—to recover the New Testament understanding of faith, which is considerably more rich, dramatic, and self-involving than merely signing on the doctrinal dotted line.”—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
“In this important and readable book, Klyne Snodgrass unpacks what is, for many Christians, a significantly underappreciated scriptural theme: God’s participation with us and our participation in the life of God. The robust gospel of transformative participation recovered and expounded in these pages is a needed corrective to the simplistic gospel on offer in too many quarters of the church. A must-read for pastors and lay people as well as professors and scholars.”—Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical Studies and Theology, St. Mary’s Seminary & University; author of Participating in Christ
“With pastoral concern, academic rigor, and godly wisdom, Klyne Snodgrass provides a helpful resource for a wide range of readers. The gospel—good news—continually gets debated and at times truncated, but Snodgrass shows that a robust gospel is not about a ticket to heaven but about humans fulfilling their ultimate purpose through participation in Christ.”—Dennis R. Edwards, associate professor of New Testament, North Park Theological Seminary
“This book is a needed plea to the church to rediscover the real gospel as rooted in participation in and engagement with Christ. It leads to a better understanding of the call of our faith to be active and focused on things that matter. The gospel has been hijacked for many other things that have little or nothing to do with what God asks of all people. We are made in his image and designed for relationship and participation with him. This book sets all of that right, leading us not only to reflect who we are designed to be but to live actively in the very way God asks us to travel, aware that he is very much with us and in us as we go.”—Darrell L. Bock, senior research professor of New Testament studies, Dallas Theological Seminary
“Many struggle to find the coherence in what seems like a big jumble of ideas in the Bible: grace, obedience, works, salvation, ethics, baptism, and so on. Klyne Snodgrass has put his finger on the missing piece that holds these all together—participation. Christianity’s God-centered gospel is focused on personal transformation because the means to salvation and its goal are found in participation, union with Christ through the Spirit. This view changes everything, so I strongly commend this book.”—Ben C. Blackwell, associate professor of early Christianity, Houston Theological Seminary
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781540965042 |
| PRICE | US$24.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 208 |
Featured Reviews
Alistair C, Reviewer
Overall a helpful book. At points I found myself shouting "YES!" from the sidelines, and other points I had some questions, but overall, a good book.
It was a bit repetitive at points. I see what the author was trying to do by focusing on 'participation' language and he did highlight how 'union' language doesn't quite have the same emphasis, but at points it felt a bit hobby-horse-ish.
I like that the author calls out the church on having a simplistic view of faith that might be restricted simply to a set of doctrinal points, rather than a life that is full of Christ. Some really helpful challenges.
Ethan L, Reviewer
One of the results of the “Christendom” experience over the past 2,000 years has been the intellectualization of the faith. Many sought to communicate Christianity in terms of an argument or philosophical system, and ever since there has been a strong temptation to make Christianity all about ideas and disputing about doctrines.
What was originally synthesized and philosophized in Christianity then went through the Enlightenment, and the result has sometimes been a perspective of Christianity as information acquisition and distribution. In theory there is an expectation of behavioral change, but what really proves important to many people is to have the right information and disseminate the right information. All kinds of lapses in behavior can somehow be justified and rationalized; but the moment anything about that information gets challenged, disputed, or questioned, then look out.
Think about how “the Gospel” gets characterized: almost entirely in terms of ideas, knowledge acquisition and distribution, and disputation thereof.
While the Gospel has always involved ideas, doctrines, and information acquisition and distribution, the Gospel has always involved far more than this. And Klyne Snodgrass does well at showing an important dimension of the Gospel often lost in this flattening process in You Need a Better Gospel: Reclaiming the Good News of Participation With Christ.
In short, Snodgrass is highlighting the pervasive theme of “participation” throughout the Old Testament, in the Gospels, and in Paul’s letters and other letters. The Gospel was never meant to be just about information. The Gospel represents the story of what God has accomplished so that Christians can jointly participate in His work in/with Him and with one another.
If one has not been attuned to the theme of participation in Scripture, then this book will provide an excellent opportunity to have one’s eyes opened to how frequently and pervasively the authors of Scripture speak to and expect the participation of the believer in the life and work of God. The Gospel is a clarion call to do something: to follow in the ways of Jesus and well embody Him.
The author should be commended as a Protestant and coming to these conclusions, since the “faith only” over-emphasis inherent in Protestantism has led to the functional idolization of belief and faith and comparative disregard and contempt for participation and work. He is always welcome to check out the Restoration side of the pool.
The author and I agree on concerns about the language of theosis/deification; the author mentions perichoresis and Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-23. I continue to emphasize, and encourage emphasis, on the story of Scripture as God’s revelation of the perichoretic relational unity within God and God’s desire for perichoretic relational unity with people and among people. Participation works quite well as a significant emphasis within this theme: when we belong to God and His people, we participate in the life and work of God and His people. If we are not participating in the work and life of God and His people, we functionally manifest a lack of involvement with God and His family, and the Scriptures attest to a prospect of terror in judgment if we meet the Lord in that condition.
This is an encouraging work for correcting unwise dogmatic and doctrinal emphasis, and a good attempt at getting back to a much more relational based understanding of what God is all about in Christ through the Spirit.
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