How Zondervan Acquired The Gospel According to Jesus

How I Got Drawn into the Lordship Debate—part 7
by Phil Johnson

hen I came to Grace Church in early 1983, the "Word of Grace" tape ministry and the "Grace to You" radio ministry were two separate departments under the oversight of a council of Grace Church elders. They were physically located about a half mile apart, with different staffs and different structures. Even though their tasks and constituencies overlapped, the radio ministry was the newer ministry and was still perceived by some in the more staid tape ministry as something of an experiment.

There was also a mild rivalry between the two ministries. The radio ministry was a fun and exciting place to work, with a loose structure and lots of creative freedom. The tape ministry was the opposite.

I spent the first four years of my career here helping reorganize and unite the two organizations. Within a few years, Grace to You spun off from Grace Church to become an independent non-profit organization, and we relocated to a larger facility where the tape and radio ministries finally blended seamlessly into one.

That was a seismic change. It took about 4-5 years to complete and see all the aftershocks subside. Meanwhile, I used whatever "spare time" I had to do editorial work on The Gospel According to Jesus. (I still treated that as a working title. I always assumed Moody Press would retitle the book in the publication process.)

From the beginning, that book was a high priority for me, but I was editing it in my spare time, and on the side I also edited The Legacy of Jesus, a wonderful book by John MacArthur on the upper-room discourse. (I still love that book, but it was something less than a blockbuster.)

The Gospel According to Jesus ultimately turned into a four-year project and threatened to drag out even more. By mid-1987, I was only slightly past the halfway mark in the editorial process.

Then quite unexpectedly in 1987, a controversy erupted at Moody Press over another book they had published.

James Montgomery Boice's excellent little book Christ's Call to Discipleship was a short but very potent look at what "discipleship" involves. In a footnote in the early pages of that book, Boice disagreed with something from Charles Ryrie's Balancing the Christian Life. Boice's book was not about the lordship issue per se, but the issue Boice disagreed with Ryrie about pertained directly to the lordship salvation controversy.

The book had already been in print for a few years, but then Moody Monthly printed an excerpt, and the excerpt they chose included the section where Boice contradicted Ryrie.

Someone fairly well known (I was told at the time that it was Dave Breese) wrote the president of Moody Bible Institute a letter complaining about Boice's criticism of Ryrie. At the time, Moody Press was Ryrie's main publisher; the Ryrie Study Bible was in its heyday; and Ryrie was considered the inviolable standard of orthodoxy by many at Moody.

So an order came down from the administration of Moody Bible Institute that Moody Press was not to publish any more criticisms of Charles Ryrie.

Jerry Jenkins called me and asked me if there was any way that John MacArthur's book on lordship could be re-edited so that it would be in harmony with Dr. Ryrie's published statements on the matter of Christ's lordship and the gospel. And if not, he asked, could we simply omit any reference to Ryrie?

I reminded him that MacArthur's position was the very one Ryrie had anathematized in Balancing the Christian Life, and I assured him it would be impossible to reconcile MacArthur's position with Ryrie's published material. The whole point of the book was to answer Ryrie's charge that proclaiming the lordship of Christ is "a different gospel."

So after discussing the issue at length with John MacArthur, Moody Press graciously relinquished the contract on the book. They have continued to publish the MacArthur New Testament Commentary series, and we have maintained a warm relationship and vigorous partnership with Moody Press, even though they passed on the opportunity to publish that particular book.

I tried to put a good face on the whole episode by consoling myself with the fact that the pressure was off me to meet Moody's deadlines. It appeared I would be able to breathe for the next few months.

But the very next day the phone at my house rang. It was an editor at Zondervan. I don't know how he got my home telephone number, but he said they had already heard about the book and knew Moody was dropping it. He said Zondervan would be eager to publish it, and he was planning to make a proposal to John MacArthur that afternoon. Before he did, he had some questions about the manuscript: how far along was it, and could we have it finished and ready to submit within about 9 weeks? They would be interested in releasing the book at the Christian Booksellers' Association national convention the following year, so they would need the manuscript ASAP. They liked the topic, the timing, and even the working title.

That's how The Gospel According to Jesus came to be a Zondervan book.

I put everything else on hold and devoted the next two months to completing the book. John MacArthur likewise set things aside in order to work through the manuscripts, and amazingly, we were able to submit the finished manuscript in time to meet Zondervan's severely shortened deadline.

I spent the next six months trying to get back into my routine at Grace to You. But from that day until now, I have never had what you could reasonably call a "routine."

The prepublication process with Zondervan turned out to be a grueling back-and-forth exchange of questions, additional documentation, and minor manuscript revisions. I remember taking the final version of the manuscript on a flight to Manila in the spring of 1988. I spent some 12 hours on the trans-Pacific flight proofreading and then sent the revisions back to Grand Rapids via DHL as soon as I landed in the Philippines. I had a headache that took a week to get over, but my work on the book was finally done.

The Gospel According to Jesus was released in (of all places) Dallas, at that year's CBA convention in July.

Within weeks after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus, we began to be swamped with feedback about the book—some negative, but the vast majority enthusiastically positive. The Gospel According to Jesus still sells briskly almost twenty years later. I think it might be the best-selling non-fiction work devoted to a point of theological controversy since Harold Lindsell's The Battle for the Bible.

The issues in the lordship controversy are vital, and the widespread controversy it has generated reflects that. For three or four years after The Gospel According to Jesus was published, I began to think that this one issue might dominate the rest of my life. I answered most of the mail generated by the book. I have a whole file cabinet full of correspondence related to the book and the controversy it generated.

But when MacArthur published a second book on the lordship issue (Faith Works, subsequently retitled The Gospel According to the Apostles), most of the controversy suddenly died away almost as quickly as it had begun.

For the past dozen years or so, our ministry has received surprisingly few questions about this issue. I have participated in theological discussion forums on the Internet since 1995, and I have never yet encountered anyone who was prepared to make a serious defense of the no-lordship position.

In fact, until about two years ago, I can't recall that anyone even wanted to debate about the issue at all. The Grace Evangelical Society has continued to hold conferences and publish newsletters for their own constituency, but the no-lordship position has been totally discredited in most circles.

Now the topic of "lordship salvation" seems to be oozing back into the discussion, though (in my assessment) not yet in a serious and sober way. In my next installment in this series, I want to discuss why the lordship controversy fell so quickly from the evangelical radar and what seems to be bringing it back.

More yet to come.

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