The Surprising God

Did God forsake Jesus at the cross? Tom McCall gives a thoroughly Trinitarian answer in his book  Forsaken ( click here for my review). The question is also addressed by several Trinitarian theologians in interviews on GCI's You’re Included   video program. Following are quotes from those interviews, beginning with Ray Anderson: "The Trinity says that God is both above and he is below, God is involved. The one who dies on the cross has to be as fully God as the Father in heaven. Jesus says, 'God, my Father, why have you forsaken me?' This has to be, not only the language of Psalm 22, the human lament of forsakenness that Jesus takes on his own lips, but it has to be that God himself has, in a sense, assumed a humanity estranged from God, so that atonement begins in Bethlehem. "T.F. Torrance said you have to go back to the fact that the one who was born from the womb of Mary was born to assume the human estrangement, to assume the sentence of deat...

I realize that the word "evangelism" makes many who read this blog uncomfortable. Some even think evangelism is contrary to incarnational Trinitarian theology. Let me ease your mind, by quoting from the book,  Gospel, Church, and Ministry , in which T.F. Torrance is quoted as writing this: The church today in its faint-heartedness and skepticism seems to have lost its nerve…adapting the gospel to modern man instead of bringing modern man face to face with the gospel…. The Church cannot discharge the task that Christ has laid upon it without offering unadulterated witness and engaging in pure evangelism, cost what it may in scorn and ridicule or oppression. If at the point the Church seeks to save its life it will lose it, but here if it is ready to lose it for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s it will find it. (p. 160, emphasis added)  Strong words these, and in this post I want to address the topic of engaging in what T.F. calls "pure evangelism." My goal is not...