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.

Mission from the point of view of Old Testament Israel

One of the clearest things to me as you read the Old Testament is how central it is to God's plans that his people be a blessing to all the nations. Mission is too often spoken about in churches only from texts like Matthew 28 and Acts 1. But the whole Bible has this consistent them, and Wright surveys the Pentateuch, the Psalms and the Prophets to show this.

As a caveat, I'm increasingly wondering whether the nagging voice in the back of my head about what's missing sort of begins to become clear here: the continuity of the theme of God's people, i.e. the church, is a bit shaky in his framework. We'll see. But I just read this excellent line:

'The recipients of the Abrahamic blessing [Gen 12 etc] become the agents of it. The principle that those those who are blessed are to te the means of blessing others is not confined to Israel alone, as if Israel would forever be the exclusive transmitters of a blessing that could only be passively received by the rest from their hand. No the Abrahamic promises is a self-replicating gene. Those who received it are immediately transformed into those whose privilege and mission it is to pass it on to others.' (p 236)

What is it to be blessed in Abraham?

This is who we are

One of the reasons for reading up on this subject is that the work we're involved in - helping to build a student movement in Greece that trains believers and reaches unbelievers - is (hopefully!) of long term use here! One of the features of European evangelicalism that we've been able to learn a little about over the years, is the profound inward-looking nature of the small communities of Christians, either locally as in larger countries like France and Italy, or nationally in smaller Balkan countries where networks or relationships exist across the whole nation and down through the generations.

That's not to say that we're not too inward-looking in the UK (or anywhere else), but the extent to which that seems to be true here is quite hard to appreciate until you've been here a little while.

Everyone is cousins with everyone across the churches!

Anyway, the point is this:

This is what I've been reading today. Exodus 19 is a passage that defines who we are as God's people - and it leaves you in no doubt that our very identity and purpose is to represent God among the nations of the earth, to be the bearers of his word and his character and his will.

There is simply no room for us to think of ourselves as here for ourselves. The question is: how do we effectively work to bring about the change that we so urgently need to see, from inward looking to outward? From turned in on our own needs and concerned for our own continuation, to being turned outward to the need of those around us for knowing God and for the growth of his church?

At the end of the chapter that surveys the whole Bible with reference to passages that pick up on the universality of the Abrahamic blessing ('all peoples on earth...') and the particularity of Abraham as the means of that blessing ('...will be blessed through you' - Gen 12), Wright makes the clear and incontrovertible point that Israel's election as God's treasured possession is no different from ours: election is for mission.

We have been chosen so that others might be blessed. Whatever one thinks of election, we need to think this!

Where does the story of mission begin?

If we agree that God's intentions are to be known in all the earth, and if we agree that God has always had that one plan, where is that plan first revealed?

Almost everything in the Bible begins in the beginning...obviously...

[Little plug here for The Bible Project...]

But how far back in the beginning?

Chris Wright goes to Abraham, and while he has a huge role in the Biblical theology of mission, what happens to our picture if we start with Adam? And what about Noah? I just want to make one point from each character, and then I have to try and keep those points in mind as I read on because [spoiler alert] I have been increasingly convinced over the past few years that our ecclesiology plays an enormous role in how we think about global mission, and it is the place of the church that I think is one of the big gaps in much talk about mission.

I'll just keep it to headlines:
If you begin with Adam, then God's mission takes on the character of filling and ordering God's first creation - I write without having done detailed study just now, but just drawing on the big picture of what Adam is charged with. He is a sort of global gardener.

If you begin with Noah, then God's mission has more of a flavour of divinely-provided rescue from a divinely ordained judgement. Noah is the one in the only place of safety - the ark.

If you being with Abraham, then we're looking at the idea of blessing to all nations coming through the one man.

It doesn't take much knowledge or insight to see all these themes in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

I'm writing this for two reasons:
1. If Chris Wright leans as heavily as he does on Abraham, how does that affect the overall view of God's mission?

2. If anyone reading this has any wisdom on all this, I invite your feedback!

I'll come back to the implications of Abraham's place in Wright's book when I've come to the end of part three.

Mission of God - Part Two

In this post I'm going to briefly review the three chapters that make up Part Two - The God of Mission: 

The Living God Makes Himself Known in Israel
The Living God Makes Himself Known in Jesus Christ
The Living God Confronts Idolatry. 

I don't need to go into any detail on these three excellent chapters. I just want to think aloud about a few broad issues that I think are significant for the book, for Wright's project, and for thinking about mission full stop.

The first is to say that what is made very clear is that YHWH is unique, and his mission is unique. There is an exclusivity to the whole thing, for which we should not be apologetic. He writes on page 91, of Moses talking to Israel: 'So this unique knowledge of this unique God is now your unique stewardship.' 

This uniqueness is of course not diluted as you go through Scripture from Deuteronomy onwards - it remains just as unique ('one cannot have gradations of uniqueness', as Alan Partridge was once taught) and becomes, in some senses at least, clearer and more explicit with the incarnation.

This leads on to the second point, which is a question of continuity and discontinuity. If the mission of God, as Moses understood and taught the people in the desert, was that he, YHWH, the only God, be known, how has that mission changed since the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus?

Spoiler alert: unless I've got this quite wrong, the impression I've got is that the definition of mission that Wright's framework leaves the reader with by the end is significantly broader - or at least sounds broader - than simply making God known. I don't want to be reductionistic about that phrase - making God known - as if evangelism is all there is to mission, or to the Christian life, or the only real application of any Bible passage. Of course it isn't. But I do think that if it Moses was right, and if Wright is right about Moses, then the uniqueness of God in his being and in his mission inevitably has a controlling function on everything else. In other words, there is a central issue at stake, and all non-central issues have to find their correct place around that one central issue.

These chapters actually make that point very, very clearly. God is made known in through Israel, and of course ultimately in Jesus, and all other pretensions to divinity, or all other objects of worship, are idolatrous and will be judged and destroyed. That being so, his exclusivity does not change, and neither does his mission. 

The question therefore about how much continuity there is from the Old Testament to the New is a significant question. I can't jump ahead any more than this, but as I read these three chapters, I regularly jotted down in my notes a question mark about continuity. Chris Wright is most well known for his work on the ethical implications of the Old Testament for the people of God, and I've long wondered whether some of the issues around the way in which continuity and discontinuity is worked out is glossed over or in some cases given too much weight.

We'll see.

Let me give one example. On page 92 Wright says:
'It is not necessary to read a missionary mandate into this role [of Israel bearing witness to the nations] within the Old Testament itself, in the sense of the Israelites being physically sent out to travel to the nations to bear witness to this knowledge. But the concept is clearly there: this knowledge  is to be proclaimed to the nations, just as much as the good news of its liberation was to be proclaimed to Jerusalem. Or to be more precise, the good news of what God had done for Jerusalem would constitute part of the good news that would go also to the nations, when "all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God" (Is 52:10; cf. Jer. 31:10). How this would happen is never clearly articulated in the Old Testament, but that it would happen is unequivocal.'

I think it is arguable that the 'how' is not clearly articulated. However, an entire chapter is then devoted to the issue of idolatry, with part of the conclusion being the following:

'Since God's mission is to restore creation to its full original purpose of bringing all glory to God himself and thereby to enable all creation to enjoy the fullness of blessing that he desires for it, God battles against all forms of idolatry and calls us to join him in that conflict.'

I have questions about all this. Is this God's mission, or is his mission to be known? (I know, these aren't mutually exclusive issues, but still, it makes a difference, I think, how we express the central issue). Is there really so little explicit articulation of the how question in the Old Testament? And is the battle against idolatry that is such a big issue in the Old Testament handled in this way by the writers of the New? It took me slightly by surprise to find anti-idolatry taking such a central place in Wright's definition of mission.

As I said, we'll see.