Mission, evangelism and social action – part 3

God is a Gospel-Alone God.  He is known only in the Gospel.  His very being is a Gospel Being.  There’s no use even conceiving of a God other than the Father revealed in the Son by the Spirit.  If you’re not convinced, read these posts which were digressions to bolster the point:
       The Trinitarian OT
       Oneness [...]

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God is not a narcisist

Ok – just one more digression before we get back to missions.  This flows on from our discussions about the trinity…
 I’m a bit slow in my travels around the blogosphere so I apologise that this is about a week out of date.  But, Ben Witherington (recently-ish) managed to get 83 comments on a post called “Is [...]

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Oneness and Threeness

I remember a friend asking me what I thought God was doing before the creation of the world.  I answered “They were enjoying one another.”  He looked very quizzical and then said, “….Oh! You mean the Trinity!” I remember thinking “Well yes, what god were you thinking of?”
Yet many will think of God in ways that are divorced from [...]

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The Trinitarian Old Testament

This, together with my next post on One-ness and Three-ness, is a detour from my series on mission, evangelism and social action. 
The point I’m seeking to secure in this detour is that God is known only in the Gospel.  He is a Gospel-Alone God and thus His church has a Gospel-Alone mission.  There is not a God to [...]

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The Mystery

Ok, I’m going to continue with my Mission, Evangelism and Social Action posts in a little bit.  But first I need to respond to some excellent questioning by Bobby and KC.
I propose three posts on the issues of “The Mystery”, “The Trinitarian OT” and “One-ness and Three-ness”.  All of these are seeking to uphold the fact that [...]

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Mission, evangelism and social action – part 2

I tried to argue in the last post that neither soteriology nor ecclesiology nor eschatology should define our priorities in mission.  Rather, it’s our doctrine of God that must be our first point of call.  It is the God whose being is in the Father’s sending (missio) of the Son who is the proper foundation [...]

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Mission, evangelism and social action – part 1

Here are some thoughts on the inter-relation of mission, evangelism and social action. I have written a longer essay on this on my website here.  Here are some abridged thoughts… In part one I will flag up the doctrine of God issues which ought to be the very foundation of our missiology.  But first, a word of [...]

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God is not revealed in His Twin

This should be very obvious, but we easily forget it.  Even in the verses that most directly uphold the full and complete revelation of the Father in the Son, the differentiation of Father and Son are also prominently in view:
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9)
“The Son is the radiance of [...]

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Sermon recommendation

On the Cruciform God thing - here’s a brilliant sermon by Darrell Johnson on these same issues.  His text is Phil 2:5-11 and his title: “So that’s what it means to be God!”
The real realization is not “Oh, Jesus is the god I’d always believed in!” – how’s that for fitting the Saviour onto a Procrustean [...]

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The Cruciform God

[I've edited this post from it's original form which was a little specialized and 'try-hard'!] 
For a long time I’ve held a certain verse from John at arm’s length:
“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life.” (John 10:17)
I’ve always held it at arm’s length because… well what would it mean to take [...]

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