Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

There is nothing Jesus talked about more than the kingdom. It is by far his favorite topic. “Jesus went through all the towns and villages,” Matthew reported, “teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness” (9:35). And yet you’d never know it from the way many modern Christians talk about the gospel. “Jesus came to die,” they often say, referring to a view of Christianity that reduces the gospel to a transaction, whereby God needed a spotless sacrifice to atone for the world’s sins and thus sacrificed Jesus on the cross so believers could go to heaven. In this view, Jesus basically shows up to post our bail. His life and teachings make for an interesting backstory but prove largely irrelevant to the work of salvation. Dallas Willard called it “the gospel of sin management.”5 What happened on the cross has been the subject of wonder and debate for centuries, with Christians of good faith employing different metaphors and language to articulate its significance, but any view that reduces Jesus to a sort of deus ex machina, necessary only for a single moment of rescue, strips the incarnation of all its power and tells a far simpler story than the one the Bible actually gives us. Jesus didn’t just “come to die.” Jesus came to live—to teach, to heal, to tell stories, to protest, to turn over tables, to touch people who weren’t supposed to be touched and eat with people who weren’t supposed to be eaten with, to brea...