Mission from the point of view of Old Testament Israel

One of the clearest things to me as you read the Old Testament is how central it is to God's plans that his people be a blessing to all the nations. Mission is too often spoken about in churches only from texts like Matthew 28 and Acts 1. But the whole Bible has this consistent them, and Wright surveys the Pentateuch, the Psalms and the Prophets to show this.

As a caveat, I'm increasingly wondering whether the nagging voice in the back of my head about what's missing sort of begins to become clear here: the continuity of the theme of God's people, i.e. the church, is a bit shaky in his framework. We'll see. But I just read this excellent line:

'The recipients of the Abrahamic blessing [Gen 12 etc] become the agents of it. The principle that those those who are blessed are to te the means of blessing others is not confined to Israel alone, as if Israel would forever be the exclusive transmitters of a blessing that could only be passively received by the rest from their hand. No the Abrahamic promises is a self-replicating gene. Those who received it are immediately transformed into those whose privilege and mission it is to pass it on to others.' (p 236)

What is it to be blessed in Abraham?

This is who we are

One of the reasons for reading up on this subject is that the work we're involved in - helping to build a student movement in Greece that trains believers and reaches unbelievers - is (hopefully!) of long term use here! One of the features of European evangelicalism that we've been able to learn a little about over the years, is the profound inward-looking nature of the small communities of Christians, either locally as in larger countries like France and Italy, or nationally in smaller Balkan countries where networks or relationships exist across the whole nation and down through the generations.

That's not to say that we're not too inward-looking in the UK (or anywhere else), but the extent to which that seems to be true here is quite hard to appreciate until you've been here a little while.

Everyone is cousins with everyone across the churches!

Anyway, the point is this:

This is what I've been reading today. Exodus 19 is a passage that defines who we are as God's people - and it leaves you in no doubt that our very identity and purpose is to represent God among the nations of the earth, to be the bearers of his word and his character and his will.

There is simply no room for us to think of ourselves as here for ourselves. The question is: how do we effectively work to bring about the change that we so urgently need to see, from inward looking to outward? From turned in on our own needs and concerned for our own continuation, to being turned outward to the need of those around us for knowing God and for the growth of his church?

At the end of the chapter that surveys the whole Bible with reference to passages that pick up on the universality of the Abrahamic blessing ('all peoples on earth...') and the particularity of Abraham as the means of that blessing ('...will be blessed through you' - Gen 12), Wright makes the clear and incontrovertible point that Israel's election as God's treasured possession is no different from ours: election is for mission.

We have been chosen so that others might be blessed. Whatever one thinks of election, we need to think this!

Where does the story of mission begin?

If we agree that God's intentions are to be known in all the earth, and if we agree that God has always had that one plan, where is that plan first revealed?

Almost everything in the Bible begins in the beginning...obviously...

[Little plug here for The Bible Project...]

But how far back in the beginning?

Chris Wright goes to Abraham, and while he has a huge role in the Biblical theology of mission, what happens to our picture if we start with Adam? And what about Noah? I just want to make one point from each character, and then I have to try and keep those points in mind as I read on because [spoiler alert] I have been increasingly convinced over the past few years that our ecclesiology plays an enormous role in how we think about global mission, and it is the place of the church that I think is one of the big gaps in much talk about mission.

I'll just keep it to headlines:
If you begin with Adam, then God's mission takes on the character of filling and ordering God's first creation - I write without having done detailed study just now, but just drawing on the big picture of what Adam is charged with. He is a sort of global gardener.

If you begin with Noah, then God's mission has more of a flavour of divinely-provided rescue from a divinely ordained judgement. Noah is the one in the only place of safety - the ark.

If you being with Abraham, then we're looking at the idea of blessing to all nations coming through the one man.

It doesn't take much knowledge or insight to see all these themes in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

I'm writing this for two reasons:
1. If Chris Wright leans as heavily as he does on Abraham, how does that affect the overall view of God's mission?

2. If anyone reading this has any wisdom on all this, I invite your feedback!

I'll come back to the implications of Abraham's place in Wright's book when I've come to the end of part three.

Mission of God - Part Two

In this post I'm going to briefly review the three chapters that make up Part Two - The God of Mission: 

The Living God Makes Himself Known in Israel
The Living God Makes Himself Known in Jesus Christ
The Living God Confronts Idolatry. 

I don't need to go into any detail on these three excellent chapters. I just want to think aloud about a few broad issues that I think are significant for the book, for Wright's project, and for thinking about mission full stop.

The first is to say that what is made very clear is that YHWH is unique, and his mission is unique. There is an exclusivity to the whole thing, for which we should not be apologetic. He writes on page 91, of Moses talking to Israel: 'So this unique knowledge of this unique God is now your unique stewardship.' 

This uniqueness is of course not diluted as you go through Scripture from Deuteronomy onwards - it remains just as unique ('one cannot have gradations of uniqueness', as Alan Partridge was once taught) and becomes, in some senses at least, clearer and more explicit with the incarnation.

This leads on to the second point, which is a question of continuity and discontinuity. If the mission of God, as Moses understood and taught the people in the desert, was that he, YHWH, the only God, be known, how has that mission changed since the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus?

Spoiler alert: unless I've got this quite wrong, the impression I've got is that the definition of mission that Wright's framework leaves the reader with by the end is significantly broader - or at least sounds broader - than simply making God known. I don't want to be reductionistic about that phrase - making God known - as if evangelism is all there is to mission, or to the Christian life, or the only real application of any Bible passage. Of course it isn't. But I do think that if it Moses was right, and if Wright is right about Moses, then the uniqueness of God in his being and in his mission inevitably has a controlling function on everything else. In other words, there is a central issue at stake, and all non-central issues have to find their correct place around that one central issue.

These chapters actually make that point very, very clearly. God is made known in through Israel, and of course ultimately in Jesus, and all other pretensions to divinity, or all other objects of worship, are idolatrous and will be judged and destroyed. That being so, his exclusivity does not change, and neither does his mission. 

The question therefore about how much continuity there is from the Old Testament to the New is a significant question. I can't jump ahead any more than this, but as I read these three chapters, I regularly jotted down in my notes a question mark about continuity. Chris Wright is most well known for his work on the ethical implications of the Old Testament for the people of God, and I've long wondered whether some of the issues around the way in which continuity and discontinuity is worked out is glossed over or in some cases given too much weight.

We'll see.

Let me give one example. On page 92 Wright says:
'It is not necessary to read a missionary mandate into this role [of Israel bearing witness to the nations] within the Old Testament itself, in the sense of the Israelites being physically sent out to travel to the nations to bear witness to this knowledge. But the concept is clearly there: this knowledge  is to be proclaimed to the nations, just as much as the good news of its liberation was to be proclaimed to Jerusalem. Or to be more precise, the good news of what God had done for Jerusalem would constitute part of the good news that would go also to the nations, when "all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God" (Is 52:10; cf. Jer. 31:10). How this would happen is never clearly articulated in the Old Testament, but that it would happen is unequivocal.'

I think it is arguable that the 'how' is not clearly articulated. However, an entire chapter is then devoted to the issue of idolatry, with part of the conclusion being the following:

'Since God's mission is to restore creation to its full original purpose of bringing all glory to God himself and thereby to enable all creation to enjoy the fullness of blessing that he desires for it, God battles against all forms of idolatry and calls us to join him in that conflict.'

I have questions about all this. Is this God's mission, or is his mission to be known? (I know, these aren't mutually exclusive issues, but still, it makes a difference, I think, how we express the central issue). Is there really so little explicit articulation of the how question in the Old Testament? And is the battle against idolatry that is such a big issue in the Old Testament handled in this way by the writers of the New? It took me slightly by surprise to find anti-idolatry taking such a central place in Wright's definition of mission.

As I said, we'll see.

Mission of God - Part One

I'm about a quarter of the way through the book and I'm enjoying it. It's really well written. I've heard Chris Wright speak a couple of times so I can hear his voice in the print - friendly, engaging, fair, serious, but with a twinkle! This is just a few thoughts on part one of the book, 'The Bible and Mission'.

Wright's stated aim for the book is on page 17:
'My major concern has to been to develop an approach to Biblical hermeneutics that sees the mission of God (and the participation in it of God's people) as a framework within which we can read the whole Bible.'

This might not sound very exciting but it's very useful! Any framework that helps one to read the whole Bible well, or even (trigger warning!) correctly, can't be a bad thing! Further, as people involved in full-time, cross-cultural mission (whatever one assumes that to mean) the central purpose of the book is right up our street.

Why read this book now?

Well, over the past few years I've had enough contact with various streams of thought about and approaches to mission (however defined) that make me wonder what people really mean by mission. There seem to be lots and lots of different activities that people sacrifice lots of time and money and emotion for, all described as mission, but really lots of them are at best tenuously linked to (what I assume to be - and maybe I'm wrong) the mission of God.

If Chris Wright can help me think better about this whole enterprise, I'll be glad.

But there's something else as well. I think - and this is what I'm waiting to discover as I read on - that some elements of the framework this book is constructing are themselves linked to the proliferation of 'mission' activities, for better or for worse.

I'm not sure it's possible for me to write this without sounding a bit...judgemental? Narrow? But I can't ignore what I've come across in speech and print that seems to me to be veering off the Bible's consistent teaching about God's plans for his world as revealed in his Word. If we agree that Scripture is authoritative, and that we are constrained to live and think and act and do and plan in line with it, then it's no small thing to be clear on what God wants of his people in his world. None of us want to be wasting time and money and prayer and resources on something that isn't important. Also, if there are important things being neglected because we've been too narrow and blinkered, that needs correcting.

So, I'm going to read, try and be clear on what the framework is, and then be clear on what the implications of that framework are. It will certainly have a bearing on what we do here in Athens, but I suspect on what churches do full stop.

The Mission of God

For part of my sabbatical I'm reading (with a view to reviewing) this excellent book:

The reason for this is that while excellent (so far at least - I'm about a quarter through) I've been wondering in recent years whether some of the issues we observe in mission work broadly, and student ministry specifically, is quite directly influenced by some of the conclusions that Chris Wright points to, implicitly if not explicitly. We'll see. It's at least for my own thinking and learning, but I'm gently hoping it might prove useful in our wider organisation.

I've decided to post the occasional bit of the review here rather than only putting it all down in one larger article. This is partly for my benefit but some people might be curious.