Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We
Follow, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 2010
Because I'm a high school teacher and a pretend New Testament scholar, certain things pique my interest. One of them is the intersection between an analytical
reading of the New Testament and the lives of young people. Most
devotional material for young people is fairly poorly written. If the
authors of this material were trying to produce what they have
written, then they were trying to misread the New Testament while
being boring and unhelpful.
Now, when a book that meets those
concerns is released and it is written by Scot McKnight, I get fairly
excited. One Life is a very helpful book, it has some flaws, but I
will get to those later in the review. All in all, the author's goals
are admirable and they are met. He aimed to write a book that
explained what it means to be a Christian around this definition,
“someone who follows Jesus” rather than, “someone who has
accepted Jesus and the Christian life focuses on personal practices
of piety. (pp 15)”
The Content
The
book follows a fairly simple format. Each chapter ends with a
recapitulation of its content, there is a one page interlude, then
the next chapter begins: wash, rinse, repeat. For the first 106 pages
the Christian life receives an extended definition at the end of each
chapter. The topics under which it is examined in Jesus' teaching are
helpful: kingdom, imagination, love, justice, peace, wisdom, and
church. All of these are under the heading of you one
life.
One life functions
as a technical term for the entirety of your life, abilities,
talents, relationships, and time. At this point the nature of
Christian faith is touched upon in the chapter on commitment. The
next section of the book applies the nature of the one life lived for
Jesus to issues of sexuality. After that, other aspects of Christian
thought are related to the Christian life, namely, the resurrection
and crucifixion of Jesus and what those mean for Christians today.
The book concludes with a five part summary of how to grow as a
Christian (this is my summary of the summary):
- Pray with frequency.
- Listen to God by learning the scripture, all of it, and relate it back to Jesus and his teachings. Then listen to promptings you experience that are related to the teaching of scripture.
- Ask God's Spirit to empower you and begin participating in a local church that commits itself to Jesus and his ways.
- Recite Mark 12:29-31 and Matthew 6:9-13 out loud daily to recall the priorities of living in God's kingdom.
- Tell others the good news about Jesus.
The Good
The book is
excellent because it is easy to understand and it seeks to explain
the Bible in two notes that create a wonderful harmony: Jesus and his
setting and the modern readers who wish to obey Jesus and their
setting. To write about Jesus without recourse to obedience to him is
to miss the whole reason that the gospels were written at all, but to
write about Jesus without sensitivity to what he and his biographers
meant is tantamount to disrespect and scholarly irresponsibility.
McKnight sides with neither Scylla or Charybdis and gives an adequate
account of what Jesus demands of his followers in the gospels.
Of special note
is that his treatment of the parables is very creative. He uses the
metaphor of imagination and refers to the parables as dream builders.
They inform us of how things could be now and will be when God's
kingdom work is complete. It is a very considerate reading of the
parables.
McKnight
also gives the reader insight into the kind of wisdom Jesus wanted
his followers to learn (pp 87-95). He must have seen the lack of
focus on good sense in many college ministries and churches, but this
chapter is gold. He focuses on how to apply Jesus' teachings to our
skills, talents, and capacities to find our vocation and to seek it
daily with a God-ward orientation. You will find no 'head in the
clouds' spirituality here, but an earthy, hard-work, discipleship in
the process of the daily grind. I love it. This chapter also includes
this advice: “I'm going to ask you not only to find a mentor and
listen to a mentor, but do everything you can to do what the mentor
advises you to do. (pp 88)”
Other gem quotes
from the book include:
- I wasn't into Jesus because I was a legalist. p 15
- Here's how to determine God's will for your life: Go where ever your gifts will be exploited the most. p 23
- We have to go back to Jesus and the gospels and we have to ask how Jesus understood this word kingdom. p 24
The Bad
The book does
have some bad parts. McKnight has seemingly created a new literary
convention and what he does is prefix the word 'life' with various
words, followed by a period. For instance: sex.life, commitment.life,
one.life, kingdom.life, God.is.love.life, etc. I do not mind the
convention, but I have a high tolerance for things of that nature, my
guess is that the average reader will be annoyed by it, even if it is
helpful for creating technical meaning out of an otherwise ordinary
word “life.”
Also, the word
perichoresis is used (pp 150)
to talk about the Trinity. This is good and well, it is even defined
well, “mutual indwelling.” This may be nit-picky, but a I do not
like the relationship that is made between this word and dance,
because they do not mean the same thing. Though McKnight does not say
that the word means dance, he makes the connection by calling the
Trinity the Dance of Eternity. That's not really a problem, just a
pet-peeve.
Finally, his use of pop-culture references is sometimes jarring. I
won't give examples because for many these references are likely to
be helpful, but I predict that others will find them funny because
they feel out of context.
Conclusion
This book has no significant flaws and is a helpful guide to
understanding how the four gospels relate to the Christian life. I
highly recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the Bible and
the nature of discipleship with Jesus Christ. *
