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    Jesus Reveals the Father: Interviews With Gary W. Deddo
    Jesus Reveals the Father: Interviews With Gary W. Deddo
    Jesus Reveals the Father: Interviews With Gary W. Deddo
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    Jesus Reveals the Father: Interviews With Gary W. Deddo

    By Gary Deddo

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    About this ebook

    Who is God - what is God like? Jesus reveals to us what the Father is like, and that transforms our understanding of what God is doing, and how we respond to him. In these seven half-hour interviews, Dr. Gary Deddo discusses God, the gospel, salvation, repentance, sanctification, and many other topics along the way. The transcripts have been edited for clarity and readability.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrace Communion International
    Release dateMar 11, 2013
    ISBN9781301466795
    Jesus Reveals the Father: Interviews With Gary W. Deddo

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      Book preview

      Jesus Reveals the Father - Gary Deddo

      Jesus Reveals the Father:

      Interviews With Gary W. Deddo

      Copyright 2014 Grace Communion International

      Cover image: Grace Communion International

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Who Is God?

      God’s Plan to Share His Love

      Those Who Never Heard the Gospel

      Karl Barth and His Theology

      Is It Hard to Be Saved?

      What Is Repentance?

      Participation in Christ

      What Is Jesus Doing in Our Sanctification?

      About the Publisher

      Grace Communion Seminary

      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

      Introduction

      This is a transcript of interviews conducted as part of the You’re Included series, sponsored by Grace Communion International. We have more than 130 interviews available. You may watch them or download video or audio at https://learn.gcs.edu/course/view.php?id=58. Donations in support of this ministry may be made at https://www.gci.org/online-giving/.

      Grace Communion International is in broad agreement with the theology of the people we interview, but GCI does not endorse every detail of every interview. The opinions expressed are those of the interviewees. We thank them for their time and their willingness to participate.

      Please understand that when people speak, thoughts are not always put into well-formed sentences, and sometimes thoughts are not completed. In the following transcripts, we have removed occasional words that did not seem to contribute any meaning to the sentence. In some cases we could not figure out what word was intended. We apologize for any transcription errors, and if you notice any, we welcome your assistance.

      Our guest in these interviews is Gary W. Deddo, who was, at the time of the interviews, a senior editor at InterVarsity Press. He was president of Grace Communion Seminary for 6 ½ years and is now Professor of Theology at GCS.

      Dr. Deddo earned his PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland, under Professor James Torrance. He helped begin the T.F. Torrance Theological Fellowship. He is author of numerous articles and books, including Karl Barth’s Theology of Relations and George McDonald: A Devotional Guide to His Writing.

      The interviewer for the first six interviews was J. Michael Feazell, who was then vice president of Grace Communion International. The interviewer for the last two interviews was Michael Morrison, Professor of New Testament at Grace Communion Seminary.

      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

      back to table of contents

      Who Is God?

      JMF: I’ve heard you talk about the essential theological question. What is it?

      GD: When people hear the word theology, it usually has a negative connotation. People start out, I don’t want to have anything to do with theology. It’s nothing but controversy, abstraction, and only for only ‘egghead’ types of people.

      JMF: And those are the people who like it.

      GD: Could be. Theology has a bad name, and it probably deserves it. No one should be interested in bad theology. An awful lot of what people have heard over the years and how it’s conducted, it does give them that impression. So I don’t blame people for having a negative attitude or stand-offish attitude about theology. A simple way to say it: often, the primary questions where people who want to talk about theology, have to do with what God is, or how things operate in God’s universe, or in salvation. Sometimes theological questions have to do with why things are the way they are? or why they go the way they do. They surround the what, why, how, where, when questions.

      JMF: The stand-offish – it’s there, I’m over here – kind of questions.

      GD: Right, it’s an object for a study, for analysis, for debate… an endless debate. This exhausts people, and they don’t understand the terms of the debate – they don’t see any relevance to it. This is not only informal theology, but formal theology. Often, those are the questions people are trying to answer. But in my view, and I’d say it with James Torrance, he used to emphasize this with us over and over again, is that the primary theological question is not any of those. The primary theological question is who – Who is God?

      JMF: That’s a relational question.

      GD: It’s very relational. It means who is God in himself, and also who is God in relationship to me, and who am I in relationship to God? It has to do with the whole of reality, and therefore it is personal. Who? – it has to do with identity. Who is this One that we’re talking about? And what does it have to do with who I am? It’s much more concrete, it’s much more personal, it has to do with interaction.

      But it’s not just a question that some theologian dreamed up and said, Let’s start with the ‘who’ question. Jesus himself pressed this into the minds of his disciples. It’s the very center of the gospel of Mark. Jesus says to them: Who do men say that I am? After perhaps half of his ministry with them, the question he wants to press on their minds and hearts is: Who? The who question – Jesus himself puts it at the center.

      The first question is, Who do they, those who have been listening to me, say that I am?

      They consider that. Well, some say, ‘Elijah,’ and some say, ‘the Prophet,’ some say, ‘John the Baptist’ – this and that.

      Jesus allows them to give that answer, to warm up their thinking and their reflection. But then he presses them even more deeply, when he says this: "Now that we’ve covered that, now who do you say that I am? Now it’s very personal, very direct, even intimate. You’ve been with me a year and a half, two years – night and day. Who do you say that I am?"

      We could say that Jesus is being a theologian. He is directing our thoughts, he is directing our reflection, he is sorting out what the most important and crucial and even central issue is, where our starting point proceeds from. Who do you say? That gets Peter rolling, as you know.

      JMF: He gives a great answer.

      GD: You are the Christ – the Messiah. But oddly enough, Jesus is not all that impressed with that answer. There is something wrong about it, because Jesus then has to indicate – this is going to involve rejection by certain people and suffering and death, and then resurrection.

      This really disturbs Peter. Peter had the right label for Jesus. Jesus does not deny that he is God’s Messiah – the Christ. But he can’t really affirm it. Peter has the right label, Messiah, but he’s filled it with content that doesn’t fit. It isn’t accurate. It isn’t true, and in the end it doesn’t glorify who Christ is, because Peter thinks this has to exclude suffering and rejection and death and crucifixion. Where Jesus recognizes, this is going to be essential to who I am and what I’m here to do.

      Jesus is leading Peter here, and the rest of the disciples as they are listening, in theological reflection. In a sense, he’s saying, you got the right label, but you don’t have the right meaning. He sees that Peter is being tempted by the devil to misunderstand this label, so that, if Peter hangs on to that definition of Messiah, which excludes suffering and rejection and death, he’s going to exclude Jesus himself.

      JMF: It’s like the Bible trivia question, To whom did Jesus say, ‘get thee behind me, Satan’? And everyone goes, Well, Satan, obviously. No.

      GD: It’s Peter, under serious temptation. Jesus is leading Peter in theological reflection, because what he has to do is fill that proper label, Messiah, with the proper meaning that corresponds to who Jesus is.

      This is all in response to who am I? A label is not enough – and if theology can be of help to any of us, what its job is, what its purpose is, is to take appropriate names and labels – Jesus is the Son of God, God is infinite, or omnipresent – Jesus is the Savior or Lord – all these things are names, labels. But we’re not done just because we have a name and a label. Theological reflection is to try to help us have a proper content, to give a most faithful meaning to those name and labels.

      JMF: That has something to do with experience, then. If you’re going to have content to a who question, there has to be some kind of experience of that who.

      GD: You’re right, and in this case, what God in Christ is doing is meeting us face to face. Just like we’re meeting face to face. I have to come here from Chicago and show up. We hadn’t met face to face. We had various e-mail interactions and phone conversations and things like this, so we could say, yes, in some ways we’re getting to know each other. Not in falsehood, I mean we weren’t lying or deceiving each other, but I think after our time together, we’re going to know each other in a very different way face to face. This is what God has done in Christ – showed up in person, face to face, so that the who is actually with them.

      The Scripture says Jesus is Immanuel – God with us. They’ve had names and labels and various discussions – they have the Old Testament – leading up to this time. But when God arrives in person with a name and a face, now they have an opportunity to re-fill all those names and labels and all those, as it were, phone calls and e-mails and discussions they’ve had up till now. They have an opportunity to re-fill all those with the deeper truth, because they’ve had a face-to-face revelation. As the Gospel of John tells us, Jesus is God’s self-exegesis, his self-interpretation.

      As Jesus deals with Peter, he’s going to try to help him

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