The Mission of God and my own hobby horses!

Dawn often ribs me gently (joining in a long line of others who rib me...) about how I have a Bible that only really has three or four books in it. While not quite on the level or in the style of the heretic Marcion, who dispensed deliberately with most of the Old Testament, it is true that I return disproportionately often to certain books. Generously, my Bible consists of Ezra and Malachi and the Old, and Mark, Ephesians, 2 Timothy and Titus in the New. The Ezra inclusion is the legacy of my friend Andy in Beeston, with whom I read it properly for the first time in the gloriously sunny spring of 2000 on the grassy banks outside Nottingham University's Portland Building. Titus makes it in because it's a short little letter, ideal for reading 1-2-1 with students when you want to complete a series and it's difficult to plan months of meetings. I must have read it with dozens of students, individually and in small groups.

Why this reminiscence?

My Biblical hermeneutic has been shaped over the years mostly by influences from UCCF and the Proclamation Trust, and Andy Gemmill, our former pastor at Beeston Free Church. It's therefore unsurprising that the main questions in my mind with Biblical texts, large or small, are these three:
1. Where does this book fit into the whole Bible?
2. What did the author want me take from it? (i.e. why is it in the Bible?)
3. How is it about Jesus?

(This is just a very quick thought off the top of my head by the way.)

So anyway, I've been wondering a couple of things about this comprehensive book of Wright's that I've almost finished, and poor old Ezra doesn't make it in to the scripture index. This isn't surprising, but I do feel sorry for the guy. When I get to the New Jerusalem I'm definitely going to search him out for a chat because his queue might be shorter. But what does his little, odd, obscure-ish book contribute to our thinking about mission? About the mission of God?

Well, at the very least it puts a very strong emphasis on God's priority for his people to be his people. End of story. The Hebrews exiled in Babylon are brought back to Jerusalem and reconstituted as his people in his land under his rule. That is God's purpose. I'll suggest that it's his mission. (Something that I think is seriously lacking in Wright's book: an emphasis on God's mission being to seek, save and keep his people, now and for eternity).

Put it this way: in the book of Ezra, I'm thinking that really all we see in terms of what God wants to see happening, is that his people live as his people. They do not seem to have a long list of concerns, a wide variety of tasks to accomplish. Just the one. Be the people of God.

And then my other hobby horse - Titus. Titus gets three mentions in the index - chapter 2:9-14 ish - but interestingly none of them pick up on the purpose part of those verses, which I think is both clear and crucial: that God sent Jesus to redeem a people to be his own. That's a purpose statement. It's a mission statement. The contribution of these verses to Wright's argument is to do with the living out good lives to adorn the gospel, which is of course vitally important. But there's a more fundamental purpose behind that adorning, which is so that the gospel goes out faithfully in order to actually do the redeeming work in the first place, in order that God's people be found, called, saved and so on. What that people do follows on from what God does first, and they are distinct movements.

I am convinced that a theology of mission that doesn't have a controlling, central place for the gospel word and the proclamation (teaching/speaking/gossiping/discussing etc - this isn't an apologetic for the primacy of the pulpit) but at least moves in the direction of evangelism and teaching being one amongst many activities that make up God's mission is problematic. And I just don't believe we see that in the New Testament at all.

Sin and mission

God's mission in the world has something to do with sin. Only the most ardent liberal could deny that. One of the questions therefore is 'what is sin?'. Another would be 'how exactly does God's mission tackle sin?' Our perception of sin is clearly going to affect our view of mission, and our understanding of God's solution to sin is going to shape our practice of mission from the roots up. 

Personally, I need to learn to think more deeply about basic things and not be satisfied with primary school level answers, but at the same time if something is simple, we need to not over-complicate it.

I'm wondering if that's the case with Chris Wright's treatment of sin, where in chapter 13 he explains his thoughts on structural or societal sin. I really do not want to fall into the over-atomistic trap of many and simply say we should be talking about getting individuals to pray the sinner's prayer, as if that is the be all and end all of mission. But what shall we make of this quote?

'So if our mission is bringing good news into every area of human life, then it calls for some research and analysis as to what exactly constitutes the bad news, horizontally in the structures of a given society and vertically in its history. Many factors will be uncovered in the process. But only as they are uncovered can the cleansing, healing and reconciling power of the gospel undo their dismal effects.' (p. 432)

The thing is, do we see anything like this approach anywhere in the Bible? Not that the careful thinking about the breadth and depth of sin isn't a good idea. I'm sure it is. But as an approach to mission - well, I need some more help to see that approach in the way the apostles took the full revelation of the good news around the Jewish and Roman Mediterranean lands. 

Do we know what the good news is? Yes I think so. Do we know what the bad news is? Again, yes. And the bringing of that good news to bear against the bad news is, I think, less complex than this chapter suggests. 

Creation care

I've been waiting for this subject to turn up at some point in the book.

Is creation care an essential part of mission?

I'll quote a couple of sentences, which come off the back of some simple points made about the value of creation, the love of God for creation, the continuity (qualified rightly I think) between this creation and the new, renewed one to come, the distinction between creator and his creation, and more. I'm with Chris Wright on those issues, to begin with, but then it becomes a little muddled, I think.

'I would like to make just a few more points articulating how and why it seems to me that a biblical theology of mission... must include the ecological sphere within its scope and see practical environmental action as a legitimate part of Christian mission.'

'In the past, Christians have instinctively been concerned about great and urgent issues in every generation, and rightly included them in their overall concept of mission calling and practice.'
(p 413)

'Being Christian does not release us from being human. Nor does a distinctively Christian mission negate our human mission, for God holds us accountable as much for our humanity as for our Christianity. As Christian human beings, therefore, we are doubly bound to see active care for creation as a fundamental part of what it means to love and obey God.' (p 414)

I want to suggest at this point that part of the nagging concern I've had with the book, as with the wider issue of mission in the circles we move in, is that there is possibly a very basic confusion of categories going on here, which ends up leading us down a wrong track.

To say that Christians - as all humans - are charged with being stewards of God's creation is one thing. And surely we all agree with that. As he says, we are not released from being human. We live in a creation that has value and should be valued.

But to place that at the centre of our mission - along with other tasks such as teaching humans from all of creation to obey what Jesus commands - seems problematic. The charge to all God's human creatures to be stewards holds, but I am sure that it sits in a different place to the command to God's chosen people to be his people with all the concomitant responsibilities that entails. It doesn't sit alongside that command, as if of equal significance. God commands many things, but they do not all sit alongside each other. I think there is an order - I don't think the word hierarchy is right so I won't say that - that we need to have clear when we think about mission, and right throughout the book I do not believe Chris Wright has made this clear, which ends us up in a muddle about what we are supposed to be doing, as the church and as individuals.

Apart from anything else, I'm struggling to think of a single instance in the New Testament where the apostles take us in this direction, explicitly or implicitly. If anyone reading this can help me out, please do so. It seems to me that some significant conclusions are being read back into the Old Testament framework that Wright has constructed, before those conclusions are really warranted.

I'll be more constructive when I write my own conclusions - for the time being however, what is the place of creation care in thinking about and doing mission?

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!

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.