What do we make of the word 'holistic'?

Holistic mission.

This might be one of the big underlying issues with this book - and with a significant stream of western missiology. 

[Let me insert a disclaimer: I am open to having this opinion corrected by the end of the book!]

I have come to the tentative conclusion during chapter 9 that Chris Wright has been working with an assumption that is so foundational that is has possibly ended up controlling his framework - how consciously, I can't say. But it's there, I'm sure of it - and as I've written a couple of times, the conclusions one comes up with in this area really matter!

Now, his stated intention is to 'develop an approach to biblical hermeneutics that sees the mission of God as a framework within which we can read the whole Bible' (p17). But the more I read the more it seems that he is developing the hermeneutic with the a priori assumption that mission must be 'holistic' - and I don't think he has sufficiently justified this. It means that the sweep of scripture is read through the lens of 'mission must be more about getting souls into heaven'.

And in one sense it is, but there is a sense in which it isn't! (I'll keep this powder dry for my overall conclusions).

If you're truly going to develop a whole-Bible view of mission, which we must, then we have to allow the whole Bible to inform that view. It seems to me that the notion that mission needs to be something more than merely evangelism is such a basic foundation in his view, that the books doesn't seem to allow the possibility of actually allowing scripture to define mission. I have reached the end of chapter 9 and it still hasn't emerged from a whole-Bible survey. Lots of helpful insight. Lots of good stuff. But an absolutely critical piece missing. What does God in the whole of scripture actually say mission is? I've hinted at a couple of things that I wonder might be missing in the earlier parts of the book. Perhaps they'll be filled in by the end. But I am increasingly sure that there is a flaw in the foundation of his hermeneutic, and it has to do with this notion of holistic mission. I hope that it is not there purely as a reaction against a reductionistic view of church, mission and evangelism inherited from his Northern Irish roots - something to which he explicitly refers a number of times. I know we're all products of our environment, but I find myself longing to be persuaded far more explicitly by the weight of scripture rather than a lop-sided background. 

This may be very unfair.

I would totally agree with Wright that if we say mission is only about telling people they can go to heaven when they die, of course that's deficient. I think the Bible presents us with a view of mission which IS far richer than that, but doesn't take the theologically lazy way out of saying mission is 'holistic'.

The question still remains to be answered: what exactly is mission?

Aha...

As people have asked me how the reading is going, I've been saying that I feel like I'm about to come across the part of Wright's argument that really shapes his missiology, and does so in a way that clarifies what I've been growing uncomfortable with. It remains to be seen how much the rest of the book augments or diminishes this unease, but as far as I've got so far, I think this is significant and not in a good way.

It's about the Exodus - what sort of a redemption it is, and what it means for us.

Some headlines:

1. There are several aspects to the redemption event in Exodus - but they are not all of equal significance, and Wright doesn't seem to allow for this, which has big implications for his whole missiology
2. The Exodus is as Wright says the first big redemption event but one must take into proper account how it is used and developed and referred to in the rest of the Bible, and I don't think Wright does.
3. The central event of the Exodus redemption is the Passover, is it not? This bloody, deathy, atonementy, first-born-son dominated event is barely mentioned in Wright's treatment. At least so far. I can't quite believe this oversight.
4. It is God who redeems, and his people do virtually nothing (other than grumble subsequently!). To immediately jump from what God does then to what we do now seems clumsy to say the least. It seems like this is what Wright is doing.

I don't want to be overly-polemical in this, but a sentence like this raises concerns in methodology and outcome:

'The inevitable outcome surely is that exodus-shaped redemption demands exodus-shaped mission. And that means that our commitment to mission must demonstrate the same broad totality of concern for human need that God demonstrated in what he did for Israel.' (p275)

I think the words 'inevitable' and 'surely' are unhelpful. There's more careful study to be done of the Exodus, and the place of the event in the rest of Scripture, but at the very least I want to ask: does Jesus, and do the apostles, concur with the inevitable and the surely that Wright affirms? I don't think so. There's little or no evidence of an Exodus-shaped missional life in Israel in the next 36 books of the OT and similarly in the NT. Can I be a little provocative and suggest that it is being read back in from contemporary trends in mission and evangelism?

I'll come back to this but it's a big issue in western evangelical missiology today. 

The big question in my mind is: what exactly are we called to be doing as God's people?

What's next?

I've had a proper break from this mini-project during our Easter holidays and now I'm on the home straight: I intend to finish reading the book this week and finish writing by the end of April so I can move on to the next part of the sabbatical. The plan is to read and review larger chunks over the next few days so that I can then write up the main thrust of the review (which won't be a review of the whole book - that's not really my purpose) and not get bogged down in detail.

This is a good moment to reveal some of my motivation to get into this book carefully.

There are a couple of catchphrases that have been used in (at least) western missionary circles for some years now. I don't know when they started being mainstream terminology, but they were certainly in widespread use by the 1990s. Mission is often described as 'holistic' or 'integral'. I take these terms to mean that mission is about reaching the whole person, or more, with a view to bringing life and progress to all areas of human experience, as opposed to just evangelism with its focus on getting people to eternal life.

I hope this is not an unfair caricature.

This means that mission would include all kinds of poverty relief, economic and social development, education and medical work, ethnic and racial reconciliation, systemic change and so on.

I hope no one would say these are not good things to be doing.

But here we get to the rub, I think. When we define mission we need to be careful because the results of that definition are not inconsequential. They matter. And I have had a hunch for a long time (20 years or more!) that the definition of mission that much of mainstream western evangelicalism is working with is a bit of a reaction against a caricature of mission from previous generations. 

Crudely put, the thinking goes like this:

- evangelical missionary efforts have been largely about getting people into heaven when they die
- God is interested in so much more than that - he is interested in the whole person
- therefore mission should be about reaching the whole person
- therefore mission itself is holistic and includes the spiritual, physical, social, psychological and environmental elements that we see in the full sweep of Biblical revelation.

A more careful thinker could probably analyse things better than this brief outline, but I hope this isn't way off.

And it's here that alarm bells start ringing, although I won't explain why fully just yet, because I think the solution needs to be in view and not just a critique of the problem.

In chapter 8, 'God's Model of Redemption', Wright shows how the Exodus event attaches the Hebrew word group for redemption to several activities in different categories (pp 268-9):

• political
• economic
• social
• spiritual

'In the exodus God responded to all the dimensions of Israel's need. God's momentous act of redemption did not merely rescue Israel from political, economic and social oppression and then leave them to their own devices to worship whom they pleased. Nor did God merely offer them spiritual comfort of hope for some brighter future in a home beyond the sky while leaving their historical condition unchanged. No, the exodus effected real change in the people's real historical situation and at the same time called them into a real new relationship with the living God. This was God's total response to Israel's total need.' (p271)

I don't disagree with any of this. But I am aware of the context into which this is written, and I want to suggest at my halfway point that how this is applied will be absolutely critical. There are two poles being outlined in that paragraph, identified by the two instances of the word 'merely'. I suggest that it would be a basic theological error to suggest that the right thing to do is merely find a balance between these two poles. That's not how biblical theology works. And the consequences of how we define and then practise mission are significant, so we need to get it right. 

Read on.