Jesus the Word according to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto for Contemporary Evangelicalism, Especially Its Elites, in North America

Using the historical situation of the Gospel of John as an analogy, a situation that forced the Johannine community to form its own faithful Christian identity in the midst of the non-Christian world around it, Robert Gundry encourages the current North American evangelical church to go and do likewise. In a provocative book, Gundry challenges the evangelical movement to return to its early roots in the Christian fundamentals, a return that may require it to find a more appropriate way to be in the world but not of it. Since Jesus the Word according to John the Sectarian has three primary parts, I shall interact with each part individually and conclude with some general comments. In chapter 1 Gundry attempts to show that a Christology of the Word dominates the whole of Johns Gospel more than has been recognized before and that this domination makes the Gospel a totalizing narrative (3). By approaching the text synchronically, taking John as it presently stands, Gundry allows the Word-Christology explicitly expressed in the prologue to stand as a formative influence throughout the rest of the Gospel. In this way Gundry works through the entire narrative of the Fourth Gospel, showing how the narrative reveals a specific Word-Christology throughout. Gundry looks specifically at the amount of Word language used in the Fourth Gospel Then Gundry works progressively through the narrative revealing the Word-Christology motif in several passages. [Full Review]