Book Review: The Explicit Gospel

The Explicit Gospel by Matt Chandler with Jared Wilson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. 224 pp)

Matt Chandler is the lead pastor of The Village Church in Dallas, Texas. His sermons are among the top selling podcasts on iTunes, and he speaks at conferences worldwide. He lives in Texas with his wife Lauren, and their three children Audrey, Reid, and Norah.

Jared Wilson is the pastor of the Middletown Springs Community Church in Middletown Springs, Vermont. He is also the author of the books Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior and Gospel Wakefulness. He lives in Vermont with his wife Becky and his children Macy and Grace.

Well Churched?

According to the latest Pew Report, 78.4% of Americans consider themselves Christian. Moreover, some have no idea why they went to church growing up. Church attendance rates drop dramatically when people enter their twenties, most likely because church is seen as an obligatory service to a God people don’t know. 

I still remember the last sermon I heard at the church I attended growing up. It was about why George Washington was a good man. Not Jesus, but George Washington. Not until I heard the gospel explicitly preached did I find the truth: Jesus. In Matt Chandler’s and Jared Wilson’s book, The Explicit Gospel, the authors outline why preaching the gospel explicitly and emphatically is important.

“My daughter was three, and it hit me that my kids were going to grow up in the church. That night for the first time I asked the question, ‘How can you grow up going to church every week and not hear the gospel?’ I quickly decided that these people [in my church who hadn’t heard the gospel previously] had heard the gospel but didn’t have the spiritual ears to truly hear it, to receive it. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit wasn’t going to let it go that easily. The question began to haunt me” (12).

Chandler and Wilson then outline how Christians should preach and hear the gospel on both the ground level (micro level) and the air level (macro level). In the gospel on the ground, they trace the biblical narrative of God, man, Christ, and response, and in the gospel on the ground, they look at the meta-narrative of the Bible’s story of redemption. 

Enter Grace

Perhaps the most poignant thing said in the gospel-on-the-ground section is after the authors outline who humans are (sinners).

“So far we have seen that the Scriptures reveal God as sovereign and glorious and tell us that his sovereign plan is to make manifest the supremacy of his glory. We have also seen that the Bible tells us that we fall short of God’s glory in our sinfulness, which is made manifest in our predisposition and efforts to worship things and people that are not God. Because God’s passion is for his own glory, then, and because he is perfectly righteous, his response to our idolatry is wrath, eternal condemnation administered by him in consigning us to eternal conscious torment in hell...Enter grace” (53).

Chandler and Wilson sketch the gospel of Christ’s grace and salvation in one of the most considered, poignant, and convicting ways I’ve read. An old idea we perhaps don’t hear often enough, the topic holds significant weight for me. The chapter on Christ is by far the most explicitly stated (most likely why the book is named what it is) I’ve heard in a long time, and the authors call for response.

“The gospel is such power that it necessitates reaction. Jesus Christ has worked such an outrageous wonder that he demands response, whether hatred or passion. Anyone ambivalent about what Christ has actually done just isn’t clear on the facts. To present the gospel, then, is to place a hearer in an untenable position. The heart of the hearer of the gospel must move, either toward Christ or away from him” (63).

Something for the Contemporary Church Goer

For the section on the Gospel in the air, Chandler and WIlson focus on the main narrative of the bible: Creation, Fall, Reconciliation, and Consummation. They also warn the reader about the dangers of exclusively focusing on either the Gospel in the air or the Gospel on the ground.

The Explicit Gospel is a well-written, biblically faithful and thorough explanation on what the Gospel is and how the Gospel should inform and transform people. Granted, the book does rehash some well-tread arguments and ideas (Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation), and painting the gospel as something in need of explicit statement is an Evangelical position dating back to the 1920s. But, at the same time, I think it is worth bringing the argument back, as Chandler and Wilson have obviously found the need to do so in their churches. Chandler and Wilson effectively argue their point in a well-thought-out way and will most likely advance the conversation of the Gospel to those who merely heard bland statements about Christ growing up. 

Myself, I was moved by this helpful reminder, as I perhaps don’t always present the Gospel as effectively and intensely as I should when leading others in my church. The authors gave me something to wrestle with and chew on by effectively identifying problems and systematically tearing them down. This is worth a read.

Verdict: 5 out of 5
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Posted By: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: Pulphead

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011. 365pp)

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and editor of The Paris Review. He is the author of two books: Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son and Pulphead.

“Greatest Hits” 

I recently picked up a couple books containing essays by reputable journalists. The first being Distrust that Particular Flavor by William Gibson, and the second being Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. What I’ve found difficult about these books is that both are rather like listening to a compilation album, or better yet, a “greatest hits” album by an artist you love. On such an album, there are bound to be songs that you love and songs that you hate. Similarly, there are essays in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead that are pure genius, while others were best to skip over. I’m going to spend time on the pure genius, as I think those essays are reason enough to buy this book.

Creation Fest 

Photo by Altus

In my opinion, the best essay in this collection is the first essay, a commentary on Christian culture against a background of hilarity. In this essay, Mr. Sullivan was assigned to cover a festival in Missouri where Christian bands were playing. But, in a penchant for the more elaborate, instead of merely covering the bands, sitting on the side of the stage, and writing a brief report, he decided to recruit some young Christian folk to travel in a RV with him on the way in order to get more honest material. He posted on a chatroom looking for some travel companions:

“I had failed to grasp how ‘youth’ the [Christian rock] phenomenon is. Most of the people hanging out in these chat rooms were teens, and I don’t mean nineteen either, I mean fourteen. Some of them, I was about to learn, were mere tweens. I had just traipsed out onto the World Wide Web and asked a bunch of twelve-year-old Christians if they wanted to come for a ride in my van” (5).

Five pages into his book of essays, and Sullivan had me hooked. Not only is he talking about Creation Fest, a Christian festival I attended long ago, but he’s funny! He also grasped the Christian “rock” phenomenon quite accurately. Christian rock is somewhat of a separate genre from the rest of rock in general. Sullivan describes why.

“A question must be asked is whether a hard-core Christian who turns nineteen and finds he or she can write first-rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would never have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian-rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot…take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus-loving, recognizing that to avoid this is the surest way to connect with the world” (19).

Photo by Robb and Jessie Stankey

I’m a Christian, and I’m a musician, but ask me if I like current Christian bands and I’ll genuinely laugh you out of a room. This kind of statement certainly rings true.

Covering the Christian rock concert marathon that is Creation Festival, Sullivian, listening to the bands suddenly exclaims “Shit, it’s Petra” (those who know of Petra understand the fact that swearing is entirely warranted in this circumstance due to their unnaturally awful sound) and begins to talk about his Christian upbringing in a long exposé. In some of the most honest, beautiful prose discussing one’s personal faith in regards to Christianity, he says that his problem with Christianity is that,

“I love Jesus Christ…He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said…His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation…once you’ve known Him as a God, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won’t slacken. And one has doubts about one’s doubts” (33).

That’s raw. That’s honest. And, it’s something that I think more people need to think about. Christians have done a lot of stupid things in the name of Christ, to the point that a guy won’t consider himself a Christian because he loves Jesus, not the religion and mantra that’s behind it.

Michael Jackson is Awesome 

Photo by Andy Leddy

Among this book of brilliant essays was a piece about Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson has singlehandedly changed the world of pop (he is, after all, known as the King of Pop) and he gets a bit of a bad rap. He terribly disfigured his face through surgery, did some creepy things, and played in a world of perpetuated childhood. In the essay, Sullivan writes,

“His art will come to depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to heed his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow” (112).

The thing that we dislike Michael for so often was also the thing that brought him such beautiful music. It’s true; he may have been a serial child-molester, but then again maybe not. Maybe, Sullivan purports, he just loved children with a similar childlike innocence. Sullivan also muses, that we have perhaps done him an injustice, especially in regard to his looks,

“We have, in any case, a pathology of pathologization in this country, It’s a bourgeois disease, and we do right to call bullshit on it. We moan that Michael changed his face out of self-loathing. He may have loved what he became” (126).

Sullivan succeeds in tugging at the heartstrings of the reader, and forces him or her to come to grips with either former prejudices or doubts about the famous, and perhaps infamous, pop-star that is Michael Jackson.

Sullivan has several other essays that are worth reading as well, one on his time in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina; one on The Real World reality TV series and the reality TV phenomena in general; one on Axl Rose (remember him?); and one on Bunny Wailer (singer and guitarist with Bob Marley). These essays are just a few of the ones I enjoyed in the collection. I highly recommend that you check them out for yourself, as the clarity and honesty he brings to these essays brings out things you wouldn’t think about, or perhaps wouldn’t want to. He tells a story about this world that most of us don’t know, and it’s too honest, raw, and compelling to not read. You just have to find the essays that are the best, as in the end not all of them spoke to me. If all of the essays were as good as the ones I mentioned, I would rate this book much higher. But, Pulphead: Essays is certainly still worth picking up and reading as the good far outweighs the bad.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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