Disappointment: A book review

 After reading N.T. Wright's lengthy volume, The New Testament and the People of God, and his shorter How God Became King, I have taken on a different view of the "gospel." Not anything different from I Corinthians 15's opening verses, but something more historically based, deeper, and beyond the typical evangelical application to personal meaning. Wright is brilliant (how much can a person write?) but sometimes opaque in the sense that he explores the concepts in such depth and such breadth that one revels in it at the time but comes out with one's head spinning. 

The major points: the gospel is about the glory of God and the restoration of the earth and God's order in the universe, not mainly about an individual's experience. Related to this question is the one of how the gospel Jesus preached/preaches before the cross might be "different" from the one Paul and/or apostles preached and wrote. With that question in mind, I bought John MacArthur's The Gospel According to Paul, hoping for an in-depth study of that subject. 

That's where the disappointment comes in. He addresses that, sort of, in the introduction, mainly to say that the other  apostles would have rejected Paul if he was teaching anything different from what Jesus taught, and they didn't, so stop talking about two different gospels. Well, fair enough. It's an argument, and an acceptable one, but rather shallow. The rest of the book is something a young but non-seminary-trained pastor could use for preaching. Not bad, in any way, but pure John MacArthur. Critical of everyone other than evangelicals rather than compassionate, devoid of illustrations from life, but sound and unerring in doctrine.  

Well, maybe. He has become curmudgeonly as he aged, and he is wrong in one section of the first chapter in discussing the resurrection. He says Peter was able to preach at Pentecost because of the resurrection. No, the message of Acts 2 is that Peter preached because of the Holy Spirit's coming. As I've often said, we are afraid of the Holy Spirit, and thus don't draw on that power and thus live "less than." Time for a book on that point, I guess! In fear of charismatic excesses, we subordinate the Holy Spirit to a helper to the other two rather than a person of the Godhead. 

I've been annoyed with MacArthur ever since his "go home" comment about Beth Moore, not because Beth Moore is without basis for critique but because he was so dismissive and superior and male. Beth touched something for a lot of women, an area in their lives that male preaching was not reaching.