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?