Scott Mcknight's Jesus Creed

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Scott McKnight’s Jesus Creed has been very influential in helping me to understand my calling to ministry. McKnight expounds upon Jesus’ response to the question of the greatest commandment found in Mark 12. He opens the text by discussing the Shema as the first creed or prayer that Jewish children learned and how Jesus’ amendment to the Shema by adding the command from Leviticus 19 to love thy neighbor, changes the connotation of the sacred creed. The “Jesus creed,” McKnight asserts, is this radical meshing of love for God and love for people. A Jewish person living in Jesus’ time would have recognized both as important, but love for God would always have taken priority, being expressed in how well the commandments were kept. Jesus took that thinking and subversively turned it on its head by claiming that love for God and love for people were so closely related that they in fact were inseparable. Throughout the remainder of his book, McKnight shows his readers how Jesus lived out the love for God and love for people that he proclaims as the greatest commandments in Mark 12. Within that framework, McKnight also shows his readers how they too can live into …show more content…

In looking back at the Pentateuch I saw how the commandments in exodus 20 fit into an overarching framework of ‘love God, love people.’ The first 7 commands of exodus 20 are about loving God and what that would look like for the faithful Israelite. The last 7 commands are about loving people. I had never before seen the commandments of Exodus 20 in this way, but as I continued to think about Jesus’ statement in Mark 12 and the commandments in light of that statement, it became clearer to me that it was right there in black and white and I had simply missed it. As I continued to study scripture, I began to see other instances where love of God and love of people were brought to the

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