Mission and Ethics

Chris Wright has long been known as a writer and speaker on Old Testament ethics. I've just finished a chapter which he summarises as follows:

'In short, as God's covenant people, Christians are meant to be

• a people who are light to the world by their good lives (1 Peter)
• a people who are learning obedience and teaching it to the nations (Matthew)
• a people who love one another in order to show who they belong to (John)

It would be hard to find a more concise articulation of the integration of Christian ethics and Christian mission.' The Mission of God, page 392

Amen. The way we live as the people of God must be good and be seen to be good.

But here I think we see a significant issue with the theology of this book, and with the wider issue of mission, holistic mission, what is evangelism, what is the gospel, what is the heart of God's mission... I don't think he has satisfactorily argued the case here. And what is really missing is the issue of how God's people are built. How does the people of God come into being? Because the ethical outworking is clear - as summarised in those three bullets above. But ethics is the outworking of the identity of the people of God, and that identity is formed by something else - something that precedes ethics. And I believe that clarity on what that precedence is, is foundational to what God's - and our - mission is.

Read on!