The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About the Good News? by Peter J. Gomes

From the Publisher

Jesus came preaching, but the church wound up preaching Jesus. Why does the church insist upon making Jesus the object of its attention rather than heeding his message? Esteemed Harvard minister Peter J. Gomes believes that excessive focus on the Bible and doctrines about Jesus have led the Christian church astray. "What did Jesus preach?" asks Gomes. To recover the transformative power of the gospel—"the good news"—Gomes says we must go beyond the Bible and rediscover how to live out Jesus' original revolutionary message of hope:

"Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope. Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don't turn out all right and aren't all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us."

This gospel is offensive and always overturns the status quo, Gomes tells us. It's not good news for those who wish not to be disturbed, and today our churches resound with shrill speeches of fear and exclusivity or tepid retellings of a health-and-wealth gospel. With his unique blend of eloquence and insight, Gomes invites us to hear anew the radical nature of Jesus' message of hope and change. Using examples from ancient times as well as from modern pop culture, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus shows us why the good news is every bit as relevant today as when it was first preached.

Publishers Weekly

As minister of Harvard University's Memorial Church, Gomes was a popular preacher well before The Good Bookbecame a bestseller in 1996. Several subsequent books were, or read like, first-rate sermon collections, but this is an incisive original aimed at cautious defenders of conventional wisdom. Asserting that "we are meant to go beyond the Bible in order to discover the gospel," Gomes points away from the past toward "a future in which promise and fulfillment meet." Meanwhile, "we must manage to live in the world as it is"-a world steeped in hostility, suffering and injustice. If we take the gospel seriously, "then like Jesus we will risk all, and might even lose all." Still, we hang on to a muscular hope that is "not mere nostalgia for what never was, but an earnest expectation of what is to be." A born storyteller, Gomes knows how to spin an aphorism: "The opposite of fear is not courage but compassion." And indeed his tone is compassionate even when he chides those who fear conflict and change, but especially when he extols God's provision "for the healing and care of all his creation, and not simply our little part of it." (Nov.)

Anthony J. Elia - Library Journal

Once again, we are graced with a delightfully reflective volume by renowned preacher Gomes (Christian morals, Harvard; The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart), who here deftly and elegantly weaves a spiritually rich narrative examining the nuances of Jesus-centered thinking and biblical understanding in the contemporary American landscape. In 11 chapters divided into three parts-"The Trouble with Scripture," "The Gospel and the Conventional Wisdom," and "Where Do We Go from Here?"-he creates a finely crafted statement about Jesus's role in a modern world rife with social, political, and economic problems. Personal vignettes, early American history, and current events accent the text. Gomes's relaxed yet intellectual style promotes the progressive message upon which he strikes in his later chapters (e.g., in "A Gospel of Hope"). Aimed at promoting a genuine sense of hope, stability, and civil progress in the post-9/11 world, this work is a good alternative for those seeking shelter from recently published antireligious works by such authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Gomes is America's preacher; highly recommended for all libraries.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060000740
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060000745
• Format: Paperback, 272pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: September 2008
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 19,122

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

We Start with the Bible

In the new paradigm, what-is-preached shifts from the Bible or a passage of the Bible to Gospel and elements of the world of Gospel. —Edward Farley,
Practicing Gospel

Some years ago I was on a night flight from Boston to London on a Saturday and was to preach in a London church on Sunday morning; in those days I was not intimidated by jet lag and looked forward to my engagement within a few hours of landing at Heathrow Airport. Then, midway over the Atlantic Ocean we encountered significant turbulence and were warned to keep our seatbelts fastened. Less concerned about the storm than about my sermon, I took out my notes and my Bible, and as I read, the lady beside me, who had been mercifully quiet throughout the flight, observed me. As the turbulence increased she noticed that I was reading the Bible, and finally she asked, nervously, "Do you know something that I should know?"

In the preaching profession that is known as an "illustration in search of a sermon"—although it was one I declined to preach at that moment. As with so many people, my seatmate had assumed that the answer to the present dilemma, whatever it was, would be found in the Bible; and while she might not know where or how to look for it, she assumed that, as a clergyman, I did. To many people the Bible remains a book of magical properties: taking an oath or swearing on a stack of Bibles is meant to assure the truth, for example, and a Bible in the drawer of a hotel bedside table implies not only thepresence of the Gideons but a formula for relief in moments of temptation or desolation.

We assume that the Bible has something to tell us that we need to hear. It is read out faithfully in every church in the world; preachers protest that they preach from the Bible and only the Bible, and Bible schools, Bible colleges, and Bible institutes have never been more popular. To turn on cable television is to discover a wide variety of Bible preachers and teachers, from well-known televangelists to any media-savvy preacher who can afford a satellite disk or a website. The camera angles always show large auditoriums filled with enthusiastic listeners, their Bibles open to follow the exposition of the text, and many of the programs have their own patented Bible courses of study which, for an appropriate contribution, are available for purchase.

No one in the Bible business simply says, "Read the text and it will be made plain to you." Although many will argue for the "plain sense" of scripture, that sense is made clear only through the guidance of one who presumably knows more about it than we do; and there is the assumption that once we read and understand it, the Bible will have something useful to say to us. This confidence in the text's ability to speak to our condition reminds me of the practice of settling disputes and troubles by opening the Bible at random and putting one's finger on a verse, which is taken to be the answer to the problem. Had I applied that principle to the question of my seatmate on my flight to London, what would she or I have made of the situation if my finger had landed, for example, on John 6:12, which reads in part: "Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost"?¹

We start with the Bible because, like Everest, it is there, and it looms large. There is no point in pretending otherwise, but while we may begin there, are we meant to end up there as well? If it is a means, to what is it a means? I suggest that the Bible, in all its complex splendor, is but the means to a greater end, which is the good news, the glad tidings, the gospel. Jesus came preaching—we are told this in all the Gospels—but nowhere in the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New Testament, or even Christianity. It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know "our" Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.

A Matter of Interpretation

There is the doubtlessly apocryphal story of the accountant in a large firm who handled a deceptively simple question put by his boss, "What is two times two?" by replying, "What would you like it to be, sir?" and thereby landed a plum job. To many people the notion of interpretation, particularly where the Bible is concerned, seems much akin to that of our wily accountant, for interpretation is somehow seen as an alien and intervening force between the reader and the truth of the text.

For many years I have taught a course in Harvard College, "The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation," and at the conclusion of the introductory lecture I invite questions from the hundreds of opening-day "shopping" students who might under the right circumstances decide to take the course. Invariably someone asks, "Is this a course about what the Bible says, or is it a course about what people say the Bible says?" It is a hostile question, and I don't make the situation any easier when I say that the very act of reading is an act of interpretation, and that in a course of this sort it is impossible not to read what people are both finding in the text and bringing to it. One does not have to be a postdoctoral student in literary criticism to know that a sixteenth-century German Lutheran and a twenty-first-century Latin American Catholic are likely to read and interpret scripture differently. My course is a survey of how readings of the same constant text have varied over the centuries, from the formation of the canon to our present time, dependent on context and subtext. A community in exile will read differently from a community in apparent full possession of all it surveys, with those who have nothing welcoming the promised overturning of the standing order, and those who have much of this world's goods not longing for the end of the age.

Read a Sample Chapter

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

We Start with the Bible

In the new paradigm, what-is-preached shifts from the Bible or a passage of the Bible to Gospel and elements of the world of Gospel. —Edward Farley,
Practicing Gospel

Some years ago I was on a night flight from Boston to London on a Saturday and was to preach in a London church on Sunday morning; in those days I was not intimidated by jet lag and looked forward to my engagement within a few hours of landing at Heathrow Airport. Then, midway over the Atlantic Ocean we encountered significant turbulence and were warned to keep our seatbelts fastened. Less concerned about the storm than about my sermon, I took out my notes and my Bible, and as I read, the lady beside me, who had been mercifully quiet throughout the flight, observed me. As the turbulence increased she noticed that I was reading the Bible, and finally she asked, nervously, "Do you know something that I should know?"

In the preaching profession that is known as an "illustration in search of a sermon"—although it was one I declined to preach at that moment. As with so many people, my seatmate had assumed that the answer tothe present dilemma, whatever it was, would be found in the Bible; and while she might not know where or how to look for it, she assumed that, as a clergyman, I did. To many people the Bible remains a book of magical properties: taking an oath or swearing on a stack of Bibles is meant to assure the truth, for example, and a Bible in the drawer of a hotel bedside table implies not only the presence of the Gideons but a formula for relief in moments of temptation or desolation.

We assume that the Bible has something to tell us that we need to hear. It is read out faithfully in every church in the world; preachers protest that they preach from the Bible and only the Bible, and Bible schools, Bible colleges, and Bible institutes have never been more popular. To turn on cable television is to discover a wide variety of Bible preachers and teachers, from well-known televangelists to any media-savvy preacher who can afford a satellite disk or a website. The camera angles always show large auditoriums filled with enthusiastic listeners, their Bibles open to follow the exposition of the text, and many of the programs have their own patented Bible courses of study which, for an appropriate contribution, are available for purchase.

No one in the Bible business simply says, "Read the text and it will be made plain to you." Although many will argue for the "plain sense" of scripture, that sense is made clear only through the guidance of one who presumably knows more about it than we do; and there is the assumption that once we read and understand it, the Bible will have something useful to say to us. This confidence in the text's ability to speak to our condition reminds me of the practice of settling disputes and troubles by opening the Bible at random and putting one's finger on a verse, which is taken to be the answer to the problem. Had I applied that principle to the question of my seatmate on my flight to London, what would she or I have made of the situation if my finger had landed, for example, on John 6:12, which reads in part: "Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost"?¹

We start with the Bible because, like Everest, it is there, and it looms large. There is no point in pretending otherwise, but while we may begin there, are we meant to end up there as well? If it is a means, to what is it a means? I suggest that the Bible, in all its complex splendor, is but the means to a greater end, which is the good news, the glad tidings, the gospel. Jesus came preaching—we are told this in all the Gospels—but nowhere in the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New Testament, or even Christianity. It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know "our" Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.

A Matter of Interpretation

There is the doubtlessly apocryphal story of the accountant in a large firm who handled a deceptively simple question put by his boss, "What is two times two?" by replying, "What would you like it to be, sir?" and thereby landed a plum job. To many people the notion of interpretation, particularly where the Bible is concerned, seems much akin to that of our wily accountant, for interpretation is somehow seen as an alien and intervening force between the reader and the truth of the text.

For many years I have taught a course in Harvard College, "The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation," and at the conclusion of the introductory lecture I invite questions from the hundreds of opening-day "shopping" students who might under the right circumstances decide to take the course. Invariably someone asks, "Is this a course about what the Bible says, or is it a course about what people say the Bible says?" It is a hostile question, and I don't make the situation any easier when I say that the very act of reading is an act of interpretation, and that in a course of this sort it is impossible not to read what people are both finding in the text and bringing to it. One does not have to be a postdoctoral student in literary criticism to know that a sixteenth-century German Lutheran and a twenty-first-century Latin American Catholic are likely to read and interpret scripture differently. My course is a survey of how readings of the same constant text have varied over the centuries, from the formation of the canon to our present time, dependent on context and subtext. A community in exile will read differently from a community in apparent full possession of all it surveys, with those who have nothing welcoming the promised overturning of the standing order, and those who have much of this world's goods not longing for the end of the age.

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