by David P. Gushee
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“I believe that the teachings of Jesus offer the best ethical instruction, the best account of the will of God, that the world has ever known,” writes Christian ethicist David Gushee.
His 2024 book, The Moral Teachings of Jesus, guides readers through 40 individual and sometimes parallel lessons — not cherry-picked favorites but those that arise most clearly from Jesus’ instructions captured in the Gospels.
With excellent biblical scholarship and penetrating insight, Gushee delves into the lessons Jesus offered on living in radical and often counter-cultural ways of faithfulness.
At a time when following Jesus is often downplayed or absent from many expressions of the Christian faith, this book is well timed.
As Gushee notes, however, in the Introduction: “Surely any time is the right time, and any church is the right church, to seek the spiritual and moral renewal that comes from close study of the astonishing, bracing, demanding moral teachings of Jesus.”
This is a most helpful resource for individual reading, sermon preparation or group study.
“The category ‘moral teachings,’” writes Gushee, “denotes teachings intended to instruct Jesus’ listeners, especially his committed disciples, about God’s moral will for their character and behavior.”
Gushee does not simply read a verse, tag Jesus and climb upon some ideological soapbox. He sticks with Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels, even when the lessons are hard to hear and even harder to follow.
To articulate and advance the following of Jesus as the defining priority of the Christian faith requires a willingness to refocus on Jesus’ instructions to all would-be disciples. Gushee’s book is a helpful resource for that needed refocusing, reframing and reforming.
Doing so, in fact, can largely define what it means to be truly Christian when that label is so often misused.
“I believe Christians are those who commit to obey these teachings,” he writes. “Blessed are those who bless the world by heeding and doing what Jesus taught.”
Review by John D. Pierce, Director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative.