Review: Embracing Grace Final Part

I will provide brief snippets from a few chapters, hoping that your appetite will be whetted to get your own copy of Scot McKnight's Embracing Grace: A Gospel for All of Us.

Chapter 3- The Story of the Eikon
Scot introduces a technical, yet fascinating term perichoresis. It is a theological term describing the interrelationships within the Trinity. Scot writes, "The doctrine of the perichoresis teaches that God exists as an interpenetrating and mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity. In other words, God's reality is the love between Father, Son, and Spirit. This what God was doing, is doing now, and will do for eternity. This is what God is. Eikons are an expression of that reality and designed for that reality only."

"Individualism wrecks the gospel."

Chapter 4- Cracked Eikons
"[The human condition] will include stories of both Mister Rogers and child abusers, both Mother Teresa and heartless exploiters, both of Billy Graham and disgraced televangelists, both ordinary good folk and ordinary bad folk."

All the glory of being Eikons faded the day Adam and Eve disobeyed God--did not love him and trust his word. All the dimensions of Eikonic glory were broken---broken relationship to God, broken internally (shame, fear), broken relationally, and broken from the good earth God had made for them.

The cracks in the Eikons are relational. The gospel addresses these cracked relationships.

Chapters 5-6. Summary: Eikons are created for community, the community lost in the rebellion, and God is about restoring that community-reality through the gospel.

The remaining chapters of Embracing Grace unfold the forceful missional, strong embracing nature of the gospel of the kingdom of God; a kingdom of embracing grace. The preeminent human Eikon came to the planet in the Person of Jesus Christ. Jesus made known, at great risk to himself, the dancing grace and love of Father, Son, and Spirit and invited cracked Eikons to join in the eternal dance of God.

Grace is powerfully inclusive and overcomes the shameful exclusions that so much defined human relationships in Jesus' time and that sadly continue in a world where things are "not the way it's supposed to be."

I can't urge you enough to get Scot's book, Embracing Grace: A Gospel for All of Us, and savor it page by page.