The Surprising God

This post is by Dr. Michael Morrison, Dean of Faculty at Grace Communion Seminary. What is the mission of the church? One answer is this:  make disciples who make disciples . While it is true that Jesus told his followers to go into all the world to make more disciples, baptizing them and teaching them (Matt. 28:18-20), this command can be misunderstood in a formulaic way, as is the case with the Jehovah’s Witnesses who hold to a one-dimensional, command-centered view of mission, which reflects their unitarian view of God. But the Bible tells of the God who is triune, who has a mission that is complex and multi-dimensional. This post explains. Without Purse or Script  by Liz Lemon Swindle (used with artist's permission) The mission of the Triune God is not a multi-level marketing plan designed to get people to agree to certain doctrines, and then spread them. Doctrines are important, and obedience is important, but God’s mission is more than that. God is one being, three pers...

This post is from Neil Earle, who teaches Christian History at Grace Communion Seminary. Thomas F. Torrance is widely recognized for his work in correlating cosmology with Christian theology. In  How to Read T.F. Torrance ,  Elmer Colyer quotes Torrance as saying that his aim was to “clear the ground for a rigorous Christian dogmatics within the contingent rational order with which the Creator has marvelously endowed the universe.” In fulfillment of this aim, Torrance set forth an impressive series of articles, books and lectures. These investigations into ‘scientific theology” undergirded his claim that the New Physics—those developments in the early 1900s spearheaded by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Kurt Gödel— “was not uncongenial” to theology ( Divine and Contingent Order, 70). In fact, argued Torrance, the new discoveries resonated well with aspects of Christian thought that date back to Patristic times.  This post outlines an an...