The Jesus Creed by Scot McKnight (who writes an excellent blog by the same name) is a seminal work for this very prolific author. As I have mentioned earlier, the big point on the Jesus Creed is that Jesus took the Shema (Hear!) of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and added Leviticus 19:18 to create Mark 12:29-31 - this is the Jesus Creed: love God and love others. McKnight then takes this creed and, by using the people and events in the Gospels, shows examples of transformation, kingdom values, spiritual formation, and joining Christ.
Strengths and weaknesses
The Jesus Creed is full of stories – McKnight tries to connect with the reader lots of real life examples. Also, McKnight has done his research by including relevant voices that supplement his points. This book is very easy to read; there is a clarity in the writing that is refreshing.
The book doesn’t give as much support for his notion of the Jesus Creed being the transformational key to the church as I would have liked to see. Not that I disagree with the power and depth of loving God and others, but some exposition in other texts would have been helpful to flush out the creed’s influence as a creed. McKnight contends for the daily recitation of this Jesus Creed, but yet only gives Jewish tradition as support. His insights into the lives of the individuals in the Gospels are vivid, but some of the thoughts are simply conjecture to some degree. (Just because you can name the Hebrew label doesn’t necessarily mean that such and such happened in that story. There tends to be some blurring of what the passage actually says and reading between the lines.)
There is some automatic hesitancy from me when I read McKnight. In terms of the Kingdom of God, he seems to be more “already” than “not yet” compared to where I land. He also is not afraid to attack some groups that seem to be close to the mark (but not in his exact camp), while being extraordinarily kind to other groups that tend to be all over the place (to put it kindly). While we disagree on other issues as well, he is a well-respected scholar whom I read quite often for insight. The Jesus Creed has quite a few gems within it; I have several pages dog-eared and many passages underlined. He is very lucid and (while he might balk at such a label) represents a good evangelical understanding of Christ in this book.
(BTW – If you’ve heard the lecture, you have a good overview of the book.)
