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The Living Gospel
Luke Timothy Johnson is an outstanding biblical scholar but also a writer with a rare gift for writing profoundly yet simply for a wide general audience. In this new book, Johnson examines certain key themes in the New Testament as they apply directly to the Church today. The Gospel is the central content of the Christian revelation, the glad tidings of redemption. Just as Christ's own teaching is a Gospel, so Johnson's passionate concern in the pages of this new book is how this Gospel can be preached and lived out today. The book divides into three sections ― Theology, Scriptural Reflections, and Jesus. "One of my constant preoccupations," writes the author "is how to read the Scriptures for the life of the Church in a manner that is at once loving and critical, challenging yet charitable." This book of short accessible chapters, contains Johnson's thought in concentrated and fresh form.
- GenresChristianity
208 pages, Paperback
First published August 17, 2004
16 people want to read
About the author
Luke Timothy Johnson
87 books69 followersLuke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
Johnson's research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of early Christianity (particularly moral discourse), Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle of James.
Johnson's research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of early Christianity (particularly moral discourse), Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle of James.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 7, 2010
I probably never would have heard of this insightful theologian were it not for my penchant for Teaching Company lectures. After listening to Professor Johnson lecture on the Gospels and the Apostle Paul, I was sufficiently intrigued to want to read some of his books. So I picked up first the Real Jesus, a fabulous send up of the historical Jesus movement, and then The Creed, which not only gave me insight into the Nicene Creed line by line but also enhanced my appreciation for the tradition of reciting it collectively and regularly. Professor Johnson does not fit comfortably into either liberal or conservative theological categories. A former Catholic monk (now married with children), he seems to possess both a deep love for the church and a deep concern for its failings and limitations.
I picked up The Living Gospel quite randomly, not sure what to expect. It is divided into three parts, and the first part seemed to be a rather loose collection. Each chapter could probably stand alone, and there wasn’t much to thread it all together. Though this section is titled “Theology of the Bible,” most of the chapters seem to explore issues facing the Catholic church and appear to be directly addressed to the church: the church should do this, the church should do that, etc.. And yet the writing isn’t preachy in tone but rather thoughtful and loving. His chapter on the molestation scandals in the church cuts, I believe, to the very heart of the problem. His chapter about how the church should respond to homosexuality is perhaps the most thoughtful and balanced Christian treatment of the subject I have yet read. (And it will likely please neither the orthodox nor the progressive.) The second section is about Scripture, and the chapters here seem more tightly connected. My favorite chapter in this section was his call for the renewing of Catholic biblical scholarship, and here he again takes up a middle ground between the modern and traditional approaches. The third and final section explores “Jesus, the Heart of the Gospel” and basically covers ground covered in more detail in two of the author’s other books (The Real Jesus and Living Jesus).
The work was uneven, sometimes demanding my interest and at other times losing it. For the most part, it’s not overly erudite, but it’s certainly not easy reading either, and there were times I longed for clearer language. No one outside of academia would think to say something like “the dialectic of absence and presence” or “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” or “the epistemology of faith,” for instance. Despite Professor Johnson’s realization (and critique) that today’s biblical scholarship is divorced from the laity and too deeply ensconced in an ivory tower, he himself cannot escape his academic habits. Another such academic habit is his compulsion to avoid the male pronoun in reference to God, which sometimes results in torturously redundant constructions (rather as if I were to say “Skylar writes Skylar’s review with Skylar’s keyboard”). All and all, Living Gospel is an interesting and thoughtful collection of theological reflections, but not a book I would recommend before The Creed or The Real Jesus.
I picked up The Living Gospel quite randomly, not sure what to expect. It is divided into three parts, and the first part seemed to be a rather loose collection. Each chapter could probably stand alone, and there wasn’t much to thread it all together. Though this section is titled “Theology of the Bible,” most of the chapters seem to explore issues facing the Catholic church and appear to be directly addressed to the church: the church should do this, the church should do that, etc.. And yet the writing isn’t preachy in tone but rather thoughtful and loving. His chapter on the molestation scandals in the church cuts, I believe, to the very heart of the problem. His chapter about how the church should respond to homosexuality is perhaps the most thoughtful and balanced Christian treatment of the subject I have yet read. (And it will likely please neither the orthodox nor the progressive.) The second section is about Scripture, and the chapters here seem more tightly connected. My favorite chapter in this section was his call for the renewing of Catholic biblical scholarship, and here he again takes up a middle ground between the modern and traditional approaches. The third and final section explores “Jesus, the Heart of the Gospel” and basically covers ground covered in more detail in two of the author’s other books (The Real Jesus and Living Jesus).
The work was uneven, sometimes demanding my interest and at other times losing it. For the most part, it’s not overly erudite, but it’s certainly not easy reading either, and there were times I longed for clearer language. No one outside of academia would think to say something like “the dialectic of absence and presence” or “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” or “the epistemology of faith,” for instance. Despite Professor Johnson’s realization (and critique) that today’s biblical scholarship is divorced from the laity and too deeply ensconced in an ivory tower, he himself cannot escape his academic habits. Another such academic habit is his compulsion to avoid the male pronoun in reference to God, which sometimes results in torturously redundant constructions (rather as if I were to say “Skylar writes Skylar’s review with Skylar’s keyboard”). All and all, Living Gospel is an interesting and thoughtful collection of theological reflections, but not a book I would recommend before The Creed or The Real Jesus.
October 26, 2016
In this collection of short essays, Luke Timothy Johnson addresses several different theological topics with great wisdom and insight. Through them all, he seeks to establish the essential connection between the gospels and our own personal lives. Johnson is both an excellent scholar and a writer. There were many places where I had to stop, ponder, then re-read what he had written. The first few essays were especially challenging, if even indicting.
October 26, 2015
This is a great book. It is a collection of short essays by Theologian Luke Timothy Johnson that deal with some of the implications of Jesus' life for how we are to live our lives. Not only does he provide a thoughtful theological interaction with gospel accounts, he also challenges his readers that we are not to simply read the gospels - we are to live out of the truths they present.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews