McKnight reviews former pastor Jeff Mikels' book Evangelical Idolatry. He commends it as a candid account of pastors' failure to disciple congregations against Christian nationalism and conservative cultural idols. He agrees with Mikels' broader, Jesus-centered view of the gospel, in which Paul and Jesus preach the same good news, and he criticizes an evangelicalism that reduces Jesus to a role in a Reformation reading of Romans.
Reviewed
Its text teaches none of the positions Doxa lists.
Pastors should disciple their churches into a theopolitical discipleship that conforms to Jesus' kingdom vision, which is the gospel, and failing to do so is a failure of complicity.
Many American congregations now hold a majority of Christian nationalists or semi-Christian nationalists, and pastors are overwhelmed by the task of preaching a kingdom vision of the gospel to people who have taken on political idolatry.
- Endorses a source· Jeff Mikels, Evangelical Idolatry: How Pastors Like Me Have Failed the People of God
Jeff Mikels' book Evangelical Idolatry is valuable and worth commending, as it describes a real condition in parts of evangelicalism and will help struggling pastors.
- Adopts· Jeff Mikels
Some bedrock principles of evangelicalism are tied to conservative cultural idols, and others have long pointed this out, though silos keep the message from being heard.
- Adopts· Jeff Mikels
The gospel is more than doctrine alone: it combines right thinking, personal holiness, and social action, and brings the good news of the kingdom into present-day living.
The gospel should be framed in a Jesus-centered way, and some of Mikels' earlier framings of it were more Jesus-centered than his final definition.
- Adopts· Jeff Mikels
Paul's gospel was about Jesus and was the same good news Jesus proclaimed, contextualized for new audiences.
Many Christians today give Jesus little place beyond being the agent of redemption in a systematic theology built on a Reformation reading of Romans.
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