Grenz: The Community of Love

“The church is a sign likewise when it lives as a community in the world.  As those who have responded to the gospel call and acknowledge the lordship of Christ, we seek to model what it means to live under the guidelines of the divine reign.  Kingdom principles include peace, justice, and righteousness.  But above all, the divine reign is characterized by love.  Consequently, by being a true community of believers, we indicate what the reign of God is like; it is the community of love” (Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 503).

Macchia: God, Revelation, Resurrection

“The key event in God’s self-disclosure is the resurrection of Jesus, because there God reveals that he is Lord of salvation, the only Savior.  God defeats sin, death, and the powers fo darkness to reign supreme over all.  This God is Lord of life whose breath creates and renews life, even glorifies it beyond the bounds of mortal existence” (Frank D. Macchia, The Trinity, Practically Speaking, 30).

Cloud-Townsend: Holy Spirit and Growth

“The best way to think about the Holy Spirit and growth is to think about a moment-by-moment relationship of dependency on him.  We depend on him to guide us, lead us, talk to us, reveal truth to us, empower us to do what we can’t do, give us gifts to be able to give to others what they need, and many other things.  But all this happens in an ‘abiding’ sort of way.  We yield to him and follow.  We open up our hearts and beings to be ‘filled’ with him.  We ask him to invade all that we are and to work in us.  In a sense, we give ourselves to him as we live out the life of growth” (Cloud and Townsend, How People Grow, 99).

Torrance: Trinity, Love, and Communion

Here is a great series of lectures that Thomas F. Torrance gave in 1981 at Fuller Theological Seminary.  Below is a great quote regarding the Trinity:

“Is God ultimately a prisoner in his own lonely monotony? Or do we have, in God’s self-revelation, an overflow of his inner divine communion of love? The love of the Father to the Son, and the Son to the Father, involving the reciprocal knowledge of the Father and the Son, Son to the Father and over to us. Now, the whole Christian message is, the staggering Gospel, that in and through Christ and in his Spirit, we are given freely to share in the overflow of the inner communion of love in the being of God, and to partake of the inner reciprocal relations of knowing in God himself. And, in some sense…what it means to partake in the reciprocal relations in the divine being” (Lecture 4).