Mission and Trinity
I am getting close on finishing the comp paper. Finally! Mission is the motor that has driven me so far, it was my hidden mountain - my own exploration worth a life time. However, arriving there I realize there is something else - a even larger mystery, the hidden treasure -the Trinity. God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God, and there is one God. (Grudem) .
Ever since Willingen 1952 mission rediscovered its Trintarian focus: mission is not ours, it is not something that I can do for God, rather is God's and God's alone. People are being called by the triune God in the love-relationship with Him, while we Christians are joining our God in His mission. John Piper describes this as : "within the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and holy Spirit), God has been uppermost in His own affections for all eternity. Therefore, God has been supremely happy in the fellowship of the trinity." (Desiring God, p.33).
I am thrilled by dipping into Trinity: relation, perichoresis and love. However, above all, “To know this God, who both condescends to share all that we are and makes us share in all that He is in Jesus Christ, is to be lifted up in His Spirit to share in God’s own self-knowing and self-loving until we are enabled to apprehend Him in some real measure in Himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. It is to be lifted out of ourselves, as it were, into God, until we know Him and love Him and enjoy Him in His eternal Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such a way that the Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of our thinking of Him and constitutes the basic grammar of our worship and knowledge of the One God”(Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 155).
Lord, help me to understand what I can understand from Trinity... it will probably remain a mystery... but... help me....
I am getting close on finishing the comp paper. Finally! Mission is the motor that has driven me so far, it was my hidden mountain - my own exploration worth a life time. However, arriving there I realize there is something else - a even larger mystery, the hidden treasure -the Trinity. God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God, and there is one God. (Grudem) .
Ever since Willingen 1952 mission rediscovered its Trintarian focus: mission is not ours, it is not something that I can do for God, rather is God's and God's alone. People are being called by the triune God in the love-relationship with Him, while we Christians are joining our God in His mission. John Piper describes this as : "within the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and holy Spirit), God has been uppermost in His own affections for all eternity. Therefore, God has been supremely happy in the fellowship of the trinity." (Desiring God, p.33).
I am thrilled by dipping into Trinity: relation, perichoresis and love. However, above all, “To know this God, who both condescends to share all that we are and makes us share in all that He is in Jesus Christ, is to be lifted up in His Spirit to share in God’s own self-knowing and self-loving until we are enabled to apprehend Him in some real measure in Himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. It is to be lifted out of ourselves, as it were, into God, until we know Him and love Him and enjoy Him in His eternal Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such a way that the Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of our thinking of Him and constitutes the basic grammar of our worship and knowledge of the One God”(Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 155).
Lord, help me to understand what I can understand from Trinity... it will probably remain a mystery... but... help me....
