The Surprising God

As I travel the USA in service to Grace Communion International, many express enthusiasm about our incarnational Trinitarian theology. With these expressions often comes requests for a summary of this theology that could be used in a brief evangelistic gospel invitations to non-believers. Toward that end, I've written what follows. 1. Who is Jesus? This is life's great question for it addresses one that we all ask: Who am I? Jesus is the Son of the Father, the one filled with the Spirit beyond measure, fully God and fully (now glorified) human. Through him we all have been given "participation in the life of God" (2Pet 1.3). You may not know it, but it is true. Just think of all the ways that God's life has been expressed in your life already. 2. This life of God is love... joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, and self-control. It is a shared life of intimacy, freedom, delight, adventure and unbounded creativity. 3. God created you for O...

From Invitation to Theology by Michael Jinkins, page 132: "In 2 Corinthians 8:9 we read 'For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.' This is the good news of kenosis." Above, on the same page, Jinkins wrote this: "Paul says in quoting this hymn [Phil 2:5-11], what Calvin also says centuries later, that the whole life of Christ was a sort of perpetual cross, a perpetual suffering, a perpetual humiliation from beginning to end. Or to use the biblical phrase, 'heauton ekenosen,' (from which we get the theological term kenosis) that is, Christ 'emptied himself' (Phil 2:7). This teaching is at the heart of the entire New Testament witness to Jesus Christ." And now, skipping down and up onto page 133: "It is not too much to say that the fullness of God consists in God's self-emptying, God's power to give up God...

A key concept in understanding our emerging Trinitarian theological vision is the vicarious (representative) role that Jesus fills in the reconciliation of God and humankind. In The Mediation of Christ Tom Torrance writes of Jesus' incarnation as the means "in which God has drawn so near to man and drawn man so near to himself...that they are perfectly at one" (p. 29a). Jesus is "Emmanuel, 'God with Us"...the mediator between God and man...both God and man in one incarnate Person, in whom and through whom and in the form of whom divine reconciliation is finally accomplished" (p. 29b). In Jesus, who is fully God and fully human, we find "a bond of union and communion between man and God...which can never be undone" (p. 30b). As vicarious (representative) human, Jesus stands in the place of all humanity. This is a key concept of which Torrance writes: "The incarnation is to be understood as the coming of God to take upon himself our fall...