Next week Tuesday, October 31, is the three year anniversary of the launch of my first book, the (un)offensive gospel of Jesus. It’s what I like to call raw art—it’s 252 pages of raw musings and reflections on the Church’s responsibility to show Jesus and tell His hopefully Story well. I thought it was a decent first writing effort and also contributes to the ongoing conversation in the Church about her mission in showing and telling Jesus. Since three years is a good age, I thought I would celebrate for the next several days by shamelessly reintroducing it 🙂
There will be a few posts over the next week reintroducing the ideas and themes in the book with a surprise at the end. Today I thought I would post the foreword to the book. I was fortunate enough to have Scot McKnight to write the foreword, which is pretty generous. I think it is a good introduction to what I had hoped to do with the book. I hope the forward alone encourages you to continue to show Jesus and tell his hopeful Story well.
PS—The book retails for $14.95 on amazon
I’ve heard it time and time again: “Before you can preach the good news you have to preach the bad news.” Well, yes, I say to myself: the gospel is good news to rescue humans from their sin, their despair, their problems, our problems, our despair, and our systemic injustices. The good news is that God does this for us in Jesus Christ and in the power of God’s Spirit. So, yes, there are problems out of which we need rescue.
My problem with the “bad news first” gospel preaching is that it isn’t the gospel we find Jesus preaching. Jesus, in other words, was no grace grinder, someone who first had to make folks feel miserable before He’d offer them the balm of His good news. There are many grace grinders among us today. For them, grace is the experience of recognizing our wretchedness so powerfully that we clamor for God’s grace. Grace grinders, in other words, create a gospel, a theology and a kind of worship service where we must first dig deep into our sin, the deeper the better, so that we can sense how bad we are…and only then, having plumbed the depths of our sinfulness, can we hear the good news of grace. Grace grinders grind us under with the message of grace.
Can you imagine a young man offering a young woman a diamond ring and then saying something like this? “You don’t really deserve this. In fact, you’re mighty lucky I’ve chosen you. Be thankful, take my hand, and live with me in love.” Love does not work like this. Neither does grace.
Jeremy Bouma is a deep thinker; he’s courageous enough to challenge some popular evangelicals and emergents today. Yet, this is not a screed: Jeremy loves the Church and has a passion for the ostracized, like the homosexual community, and he tells us in this book that grace grinding is not the way of Jesus and it is not the gospel Jesus preached. Jesus was not offensive; He was incredibly and beautifully attractive. He fashioned a vision of the Kingdom that brought to expression the deepest yearnings of every human being alive on planet earth, He offered Himself to be loved and to love as the love that sets the heart free, and He pointed to a way, the way of the cross, where He took upon Himself our problems and offered us a way out and a way forward.
This really is good news. And it is good news for more than just me. It is good news for us—together. God made us to love God and to love others, and Jesus was the Very Presence of God’s love and He embodied what it meant to love others. That is the good news and it overwhelms the bad news. Jeremy Bouma, in this salty book, may take your breath away at times but he’s on a reflective, serious, and stubborn journey to find a way toward the gospel that is good news. Many of us are on that journey with him. There is a way to “gospel” without being a jerk; Jeremy shows us a way.
Dr. Scot McKnight
Professor of Religious Studies, North Park University
Author, The Jesus Creed and The King Jesus Gospel
Nice! I may have to get me one of these books… 🙂