"Here is an impassioned and accessible plea for union with Christ as the center of Christian faith and life. Drawing on a wide swath of Scripture and Christian tradition, You Need a Better Gospel will be a boon to clergy and lay people who yearn for a deeper, livelier, and more transformative faith in the reality of the good news."
Susan Eastman, associate research professor of New Testament, Duke Divinity School
"Delaying gratification works well when you're on a diet or saving for retirement but not so well when it comes to defining the content of the gospel, which concerns not only an afterlife but eternal life now. To have eternal life is to participate in the family of God--in the Son, through the Spirit--with other adoptees. Snodgrass rightly asks evangelicals--'gospel people'--to recover the New Testament understanding of faith, which is considerably more rich, dramatic, and self-involving than merely signing on the doctrinal dotted line."
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
"In this important and readable book, Klyne Snodgrass unpacks what is, for many Christians, a significantly underappreciated scriptural theme: God's participation with us and our participation in the life of God. The robust gospel of transformative participation recovered and expounded in these pages is a needed corrective to the simplistic gospel on offer in too many quarters of the church. A must-read for pastors and lay people as well as professors and scholars."
Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical Studies and Theology, St. Mary's Seminary & University; author of Participating in Christ
"With pastoral concern, academic rigor, and godly wisdom, Klyne Snodgrass provides a helpful resource for a wide range of readers. The gospel--good news--continually gets debated and at times truncated, but Snodgrass shows that a robust gospel is not about a ticket to heaven but about humans fulfilling their ultimate purpose through participation in Christ."
Dennis R. Edwards, associate professor of New Testament, North Park Theological Seminary
"This book is a needed plea to the church to rediscover the real gospel as rooted in participation in and engagement with Christ. It leads to a better understanding of the call of our faith to be active and focused on things that matter. The gospel has been hijacked for many other things that have little or nothing to do with what God asks of all people. We are made in his image and designed for relationship and participation with him. This book sets all of that right, leading us not only to reflect who we are designed to be but to live actively in the very way God asks us to travel, aware that he is very much with us and in us as we go."
Darrell L. Bock, senior research professor of New Testament studies, Dallas Theological Seminary
"Many struggle to find the coherence in what seems like a big jumble of ideas in the Bible: grace, obedience, works, salvation, ethics, baptism, and so on. Klyne Snodgrass has put his finger on the missing piece that holds these all together--participation. Christianity's God-centered gospel is focused on personal transformation because the means to salvation and its goal are found in participation, union with Christ through the Spirit. This view changes everything, so I strongly commend this book."
Ben C. Blackwell, associate professor of early Christianity, Houston Theological Seminary
Klyne R. Snodgrass (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is professor emeritus of New Testament studies at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, where he taught for more than forty years. He is the author of several books, including the influential Christianity Today Book Award Winner Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus. Snodgrass formerly served as the editor of Ex Auditu: An International Journal of the Theological Interpretation of Scripture for twenty-five years.