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):
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.
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