Grace Mission University

Student Name: Soneat Pen (855 86430052) pensoneath@gmail.com

Course Name: Gospels
Name of Instructor: W. Gil Shin, PhD

Book reading report

This book reading report is based on the book How God Became King which contains
four parts. The book of How God Became King was written by N.T. Wright.
N.T. Wright’s How God Became King attempts to show that Christians tend to read the
Gospels (Matthew-through-John) improperly. He notes a myriad of tendencies that are common
in evangelical circles, one of them being, the reading of the gospels through Pauline lenses.
The heart of this book cries out for Christians to respect the gospels as the gospels and return to
what the original intentions of the evangelists were. In the first part Wright presents an overlooked
dilemma: that Christians don’t know what to do with the life of Jesus. We cough up plenty of
sermons on the birth/incarnation and especially on the death (and resurrection) of Christ. But we
are puzzled with what to do with his life. In the next chapter Wright critiques, the opposite extreme;
those who only look to the life of Christ to the neglect of everything else the gospel writers include.
Though noting positive moments and aspects of this movement, Wright fits those of “the social
gospel” into this extreme.

Wright’s book proves highly intelligent yet surprisingly readable. This is a breath of fresh air since
many historians, theologians, and scholars produce works that are the equivalent of dictionaries.
Though the book tends to be repetitive, I think it needs to be since Wright is driving a vital point
throughout the whole book: that we are misreading the gospels.
One of the ways I was struck was how this book made me realize how I tend to think of Eden and
then go automatically to the cross, underscoring (or unwittingly ignoring) the narrative of Israel.
Wright argues that we are doing an injustice to Scripture; that we ought not neglect Israel’s story
but see Israel (starting from Abraham’s calling) as God doing the Eden thing again (though we
tend to skip the huge “Israel” part and, as reflected in many sermons and jump from, Eden to the
cross).
Though Wright critiques traditions left and right, he is not at all anti-tradition. he writes, “Put
tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come
to new life.”
His book is inevitably controversial since his claim is a serious one; that we have indeed read the
gospels wrong as Christians. What we need is not just a bit of fine-tuning, an adjustment here and
there. We need a fundamental rethink about what the gospels are trying to say…”

In conclusion…
This book reaffirms my beliefs that he is in fact an open-minded conservative. (Or a
conservative liberal