Outline of a Missional Biblical Theology





“The Glory of God is Humanity Fully Alive, and Life is Beholding God”                     (Irenaeus, 2nd century)

God, the Great King and Father, loves his creatures and creation and has a wondrous goal for them.  God intends to live with his creatures in loving community on this creation in its full flourishing!

God created women and men in his own image.  As God’s children we are created to be his royal representatives and caretakers for the well-being of creation.

Inexplicably, we have heinously turned our backs on our Father and Creator and forfeited this primal dignity and vocation.

Fortunately, God never acquiesced in our rebellion and set himself to both reclaim us from the bondage into which we have fallen and restore us to our creational dignity and vocation.

God called Israel through Abraham and Sarah to use this people to spread divine blessings to all nations and peoples.

 Israel failed to be the people God could so use, save for one faithful Israelite, Jesus of Nazareth.

In and as Jesus Christ, God has come to do this himself by living, and dying as the creature he always intended us to be, freeing us from the powers of sin, death, and the devil.

By raising Jesus from the dead God vindicated Jesus as both truly divine and truly human.  We can be sure that in him God has poured out his own life for love of us; and that in him humanity has poured out its life for love of God.

By faith in Christ, we are enabled to receive God’s gifts of forgiveness (reclamation) and new life (restoration) and live as the community of royal representatives and creation’s caretakers God created us to be.

This community lives in hope for God’s new creation which we have tasted in Christ and long for the full feast that awaits us.

This community loves, living now the way of God’s new creation amid our not-yet-fully-new creation, is how we live out this faith and this hope.

God will use these acts of faith and hope-motivated love, purified through judgment, as “building material” for the new Jerusalem, God’s children who live and reign (Rev.22:5) with him forever on this new creation.




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