The God of the Gospel

Mike Bird contends, rightly I would say, that the heart of Christian theology is the gospel, which means when we talk about God we need to see God through the lens of the gospel. He attempts this in Evangelical Theology, and he subtitles this section of this textbook-ish book with “The triune God in being and action.”

His contention is that the gospel draws us into the mysterious reality of God’s triune being, answers best the question what God is like, and it puts the story of Jesus within the larger story of creation, redemption, and new creation — and all this there is an ultimate aim to the story and an underlying unity. This all depends on how one understands “gospel,” and right away I would argue the story creation, redemption, new creation (C-F-R-C) puts us back into a soterian model of gospel more than an apostolic model of gospel. Hence, the near absence of God at work in the Story of Israel — in other words, the God of history — in this section.

Bird’s focus in his section on the God of the gospel is a theological discussion of Trinity, which he handles with admirable deftness, a bit of wit, and a good share of quoting across the spectrum, not to say useful categories for instruction in Trinitarian theology. He makes a case that Trinity matters and can’t be dismissed as tangential or obscure. I have for years contended the only way to show me it matters is to show me it matters when not discussing Trinity. In other words, when it comes to topics like ecclesiology or eschatology or soteriology.

Good defense of how the Bible both anticipates and reveals Trinitarian thinking. (One wonders what he would now do in light of NT Wright’s stuff on monotheism revised.) Bird sketches patristic thinking and then has a section on “intra-trinitarian relations” in perichoresis theology, though this needs much more attention than he gives it. He dabbles in the evangelical debate about subordinationism, without taking sides too clearly, though he does plead that we avoid adopting the Trinity on our side.

On practical value of Trinity: prayer and worship, ministry, missions, community…

This leads to “What is God like?” and it is at this point that I feel like we have a traditional model of systematic theology with gospel as the portal. We get the incommunicable and communicable attributes … he dips into God and gender, seeing God as transcending gendered ontology.

God as creator is done well: exclusive, regal, providential, and covenantal monotheism all are part of creational monotheism. Gospel gets more pervasive influence here.

God reveals himself in nature, with a splendid chart on arguments for God, special revelation, with a splendid chart on revelation … and I will try to reproduce it here as three ways to see the Bible:

Record of revelation: God spoke at the event, the events of Exodus/Sinai.

Content of revelation: God spoke in the Bible, the Book of Exodus is revelation.

Means of revelation: God speaks through the Bible, Illumination gained by reading exodus story.

… Christological revelation: Jesus is the revelation of God. But he does not reduce revelation to Scripture, and he points to gospel preaching, to baptism and eucharist, catechisms, creeds, etc. He is open to Barth’s christocentrism and in this section I think the gospel orientation he gives to his theology is on full display.

In his final section he talks of the plan of God, and here he modifies covenant theology into creation and new creation, with an Adamic administration and a Messianic Administration. In this section he has a full redemptive history display of the Bible’s Story, not quite christologically constrained enough for me, but it’s the basic themes of redemption in storied form. He calls this the covenant of grace. He rejects the kind of covenant theology found in such ideas as the “covenant of works.”