Kimbrah G. (brinflower) reviewed on 7/13/2010

Helpful Score: 1

In The Jesus You Cant Ignore: What You Must Learn From the Bold Confrontations of Christ, John MacArthur attempted to argue that Jesus was not strictly a meek, perpetually friendly, sentimental messiah reaching out to other religious leaders and engaging in scholarly dialogue with them instead of challenging them (pg.45). That there were times when Jesus used harsh, chastising, embarrassing language with no place for dialogue. MacArthur discussed several Gospel cases (e.g. cleansing the temple in ch. 3, the woe proclamations in ch. 8) for the end that being nice was not always the example Jesus left for us.

The title of this book review was in now way misleading. John MacArthur, while a very easy to read author, created a book I would like to ignore. Overall, there is very little (if any) meat, the case he tried to make was neither effective nor revolutionary (an outspoken, in your face, non-docile Jesus toward the powers that be/oppressors/Pharisees/etc. has been presented successfully in works prior to this), there seems to be more filler in this book than necessary (would have been a lot shorter of a text had the author not included so much content and description). This was a difficult book to read because the reader is not invited to engage with the text, and it comes off as seemingly pieced together from various sermons.(Review also published at http://schleitheim.com/2010/07/13/ignore-the-jesus-you-cant-ignore-a-book-review/)

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