For The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt.
As part of my reflection on theology, I have composed a brief summary of a foundational Christian worldview. Based on my study, faith, and understanding, here is an attempt to answer some of the questions of theology (Who is God? Who are we and why are we here? What happened to the world, and what is God going to do about it?) in simple terms:
God is love and love expressed. He is eternal, unchanging, active, living, near and yet mysterious.
He is Creator: he loves to create and continues to do so. He is King: he reigns in just, responsible, protective sovereignty. He is Trinity, a communal being in and of himself, engaged in and desiring relationship. He is Saviour, capable of and desiring to restore, reclaim, and redeem all that is broken and lost. [1]
We are his creation, his image-bearers, sub-creators, and storytellers [2] who long for justice, who admire beauty, who thrive in relationship and whither in isolation, spiritual beings who search for meaning and purpose. [3] We think and feel and remember and dream as we experience the world that is, the world that was, and the world that will be.
Out of love, God gave us the gift of choice and free will, and we chose not to trust. We bought the lie that he did not have our best interest in mind, and we missed the opportunity for perfect communion with him. We settled for less than his perfect plan, and in doing so we invited separation, pain, death and brokenness into the world.
In his grace, God our Saviour immediately began staging a rescue operation. Through the sacrifice of resurrected Jesus, we have access to salvation, not only for eternity, but for us to connect with God and experience his kingdom here and now.
We can now respond to his pursuit of us and experience his kingdom, which is not just a future event but a current reality in the “overlapping, interlocking” spheres of heaven and earth. The arrival of God’s kingdom was ushered in by Jesus’ action “to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there.” [4]
We now have the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, and we now (in our bodies and as the body of the church) have become the Temple, an intersection of heaven and earth. [5]
God calls us to be part of his new creation and agents of his new creation [6], and he gives us aid to accomplish this, beginning with his living Spirit. His saving plan also includes his word, the Bible, a gift to “sustain and direct” us [7], and the Body of Christ as made manifest through the church, “the means of his action in and for the world.” [8]
We are living as people of light in a darkened, sleeping world.
We will experience death, but we will also have the assurance of “life after death” (to be with Christ) and ultimately “life after ‘life after death,’ ” bodily resurrection in God’s new heaven and new earth. [9] All that is broken and cut off and separated will be restored, renewed, reunited and recreated. We will once again live with God as he desired and intended.
In the meantime, we respond in worship. We are “penciling the sketches for the masterpiece that God will one day call us to help him paint” [10], and we are “practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God’s new world.” [11]
1. Dan Wilt, “The Nature of God” (Essentials Blue Online Course video).
2. Dan Wilt, “Essentials in Worship Theology: The Nature of the Human Being” (Essentials Blue Online Course e-book).
3. N.T. Wright, “Simply Christian” (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 51.
4. Wright, p. 102.
5. Wright, p. 132.
6. Wright, p. 236.
7. Wright, p. 190
8. Wright, p. 201
9. Wright, p. 222.
10. Wright, p. 218.
11. Wright, p. 206.
Learning is a full-time job. 