Unpacking Palmer’s Motto

From the very beginning, the founders of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary were committed to the spiritual and social implications of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This commitment was memorialized in the motto, “The Whole Gospel for the Whole World.” 

The Whole Gospel points to the all-encompassing “bigness” of the Good News that God has loved all people throughout history, offering forgiveness and new life to all through Jesus. 

This motto, which for the past 40 years has included the addition “Through Whole Persons,” has guided both the Seminary and University for all of its 100 years in service to God, the Church, and the world. 

The Seminary’s motto serves as a continual reminder that we exist to point all people to the Lord Jesus – God’s love in human form, our source of life, forgiveness, wholeness, and newness in this world and beyond the grave, and our hope in a world that is in need of it. As a result of this reality, we are transformed people who take our place in the ever-expanding outflow of God’s love in and through Jesus, for the created world and the peoples of the world. 

We are those people today, and pray we always will be.