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TM 10 Perspectivas Bíblicas de la missio Dei – Lecturas Complementarias Adicionales

Carlos Van Engen, TM 10 PERSPECTIVAS BIBLICASDE LA MISSIO DEI Y EL PAPEL DEL PUEBLO DE DIOS

Lecturas Complementarias Adicionales

“Chapter 1: Prolegomena” by Johannes Verkuyl.....................................................................................1“Conversion, Culture and Cognitive Categories” by Paul G. Hiebert...................................................13“The Why and How of a True Biblical Foundation for Mission” by David Bosch...............................19“Relation of Bible and Mission in Mission Theology” by Charles E. Van Engen................................27“What Is Theology of Mission” by Charles E. Van Engen....................................................................34“Methodology in Exegesis” by George E. Ladd....................................................................................41“The Old Testament Roots of Mission” by Richard de Ridder..............................................................44“The Living God Is a Missionary God” by John R. W. Stott.................................................................51“The New Covenant” by Charles E. Van Engen....................................................................................57“Importance of Narrative Theology for Biblical Theology of Mission” by Charles Van Engen...........60“Paradigms of Mission in the Four Gospels” by Johannes Nissen........................................................63“An Exegetical Study of Matthew 28:16-20” by Karl Barth.................................................................73“The Great Commission” by John R. W. Stott.......................................................................................81“Beyond Anti-Colonialism to Globalism” by Paul G. Hiebert..............................................................91“The Enduring Validity of Cross-Cultural Mission” by Lesslie Newbigin.........................................103“Some Missiological Perspectives from 1 Peter 2:4-10” by P. J. Robinson........................................107“Many Faces of Paternalism in Mission” by Charles E. Van Engen...................................................115“The Flaw of the Excluded Middle” by Paul G. Hiebert.....................................................................119“The Contextualization and Translation of Christianity in Acts 9, 22, 26” by Shawn Redford..........126“Form and Meaning in the Contextualization of the Gospel” by Paul G. Hiebert...............................137“The Lausanne Covenant” by the International Congress on World Evangelization..........................147“Missions and the Renewal of the Church” by Paul G. Hiebert..........................................................152“Ten Major Trends Facing the World Church” by Howard A. Snyder................................................160“Can the West Be Converted?” by Lesslie Newbigin..........................................................................167“A Parable of Fishless Fishermen” by John M. Drescher....................................................................175Part of the Article ”Missiology as a Discipline and What It Includes” by James Scherer...................178“The Old Testament Basis for the Christian Mission” by G. Ernest Wright.......................................180Selections from The World of Mission by Bengt Sundkler..................................................................187“Financing World Mission Today” by Charles E. Van Engen.............................................................209“Our Challenge for Today” by John R. W. Stott..................................................................................212“Matthew 28:18-20 Interpreted from the Point of View of the Apostolate” by R. Recker..................217“The Work of the Holy Spirit” by D. T. Niles.....................................................................................226“Eschatology and Missions in the New Testament” by Oscar Cullman..............................................234“The Contours of the Reformed Understanding of Christian Mission” by Jerald D. Gort..................241“Book Review of The Open Secret” by Craig Bartholomew...............................................................247“Three-Arenas of Missiology – a Bibliographic Footnote,” Charles Van Engen………………………………..249“The Gospel Story: Mission Of, In, and On the Way,” by Charles Van Engen…………………..…251“The New Covenant: Mission Theology in Context,” vy Charles Van Engen…………………...….258“A Culinary Disaster Launches the Gentile Mission: Acts 10: 1-18,” by:

Charles Van Engen……………………………………………….…........……………274“Five Perspectives of Contextually Appropriate Mission Theology,” by:

Charles Van Engen…….........................................................................................……281“ Knowing God in Context: Critical Contextualization, Critical Hermeneutics, Critical

Theologizing,” by: Charles Van Engen……………………………………………….295“Chapter Four: Theologically Appropriate Communication by Dan Shaw and

Charles Van Engen”...…...........................................................................................…330“Dimensiones del crecimiento integral de la Iglesia,” por Orlando Costas........................................361“Crecimiento integral y palabra de Dios,” por Orlando Costas..........................................................369

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“Chapter 1: Prolegomena” by Johannes Verkuyl

(From Contemporary Missiology: An Introduction, by Johannes Verkuyl, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978, pp. 1-17. Used by permission.)

THE TERM “MISSIOLOGY”

The selection of a name for a discipline is not unimportant. It would be wrong to overestimate its importance, but the choice of a name does stand in close connection to what one sees as the most distinctive feature of his field of study.

Through the years a great variety of names for the science of missions has been proposed, and many of these names are in actual use. Gustav Warneck, a pioneer in the science of missions, suggested the term Missionslehre, theory of missions, which is still used to describe the course of missiological study at the Free University. Warneck also entitled his three-part book Missionslehre.

In his book The Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology Abraham Kuyper suggested several names which never caught on. In part 3 of his book. Kuyper proposed the term prosthetics, which is borrowed from Acts 2:41, 5:14 and 11:24 and is derived from the Greek verb prostithestatai “to add to the community.” Kuyper had other terms auxanics, “to multiply and spread out,” and halieutics, “to fish for men.” This last term had already been suggested by J.I. Doedes in his Encyclopedia of Christian Theology in 1876. Doedes himself preferred the term prosithetics and described missiology as the search for the most productive methods by which to Christianize those areas still unchristian.

This term puts undue limits on our field of study. A discussion of methods is an important part of missiology, but missiology does not end here. Kuyper’s term was never used, although it is true that Donald McGavran, one of the most widely known contemporary American missiologists, calls his school the Church Growth School. In fact he limits missiology to researching the growth of churches -auxanics, one might say.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the name coined by Robert Speer was used: “missionary principles and practice.”

In the Netherlands the phrase most often used is “theology of the apostolate.” A.A. van Ruler, J.C. Hoekendijk, E. Jansen Schoonhoven, and J.M. van der linde use it. Although Hoekendijk’s famous dissertation, Kerk en volk in de Duitse Zendingswetenschap, still employs the phrase

“science of missions,” his later publications also use the phrase “theology of the apostolate.” Both H.N. Ridderbos and G. Brillenburg Wurth in the book De Apostolische kerk and H. Bergema in his inaugural address made several objections to the use of this phrase. Their chief objection is that when one uses such terms as “apostolic” and “apostolate,” he is emphasizing the content of the apostolic martyria, didachè, kerygma and the authentic authority but not the specific activity of apostellein. To a degree I share their objections. In addition, when one employs this term, he completely erases the differences which exist between the disciplines of missiology and evangelism. To be sure, these disciplines impinge upon each other and in the future must increasingly “cross-fertilize” each other; they are not, however, identical. J.Dürr offers similar

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objections to this term in his article “Kirche Mission, und Reich Gottes.”1

In his book Hope in Action H.J. Margull opts for the phrase “theology of evangelism.” In England the phrase “theology of mission (or “missions”) is being used increasingly. The French speak of science missionaire (“missionary science”).

Personally, I prefer the internationally accepted term “missiology,” which, though it does not differ essentially in meaning from the phrase “theology of the apostolate,” does nevertheless make clear to everyone that the focus of interest is not primarily the content of the message but rather is the missionary action of God and the men and women he mandates. Furthermore, I prefer this term because I believe that wherever possible we ought to encourage uniformity in the use of language and terminology. In his handbook on missiology, the Roman Catholic missiologist Ohm quotes one of his colleagues: “Eine einheitliche Terminologie liegt im wohlverstandenen Interesse aller Konfessionen.”2

Once in a while philological objections are made against the term “missiology.” Raoul Allier comments in his article “missions and the Soul of a People” that by joining two words, one of them from Greek and the other from Latin, one ends up with a linguistic monstrosity.3 It is comforting, however, to note that such “monsters” occur rather frequently. Think, for example, of the term “sociology” and all the other “-ologies.”

The term “missiology” is of rather old vintage. Quite naturally, since the beginning of church history many derivations appeared from the Latin translation of the Greek verb apostellein: mittere, missio, missiones, etc. The derivation missio only surfaces in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit and Carmelite orders of monks sent out hundreds of missionaries. The publications of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide dating from this century also use this term. Ignatius of Loyola and Jacob Loynez consistently employ the term missio.

For the sake of clarity and to broaden the uniform use of language, I opt for the term “missiology.”

MEANING OF THE TERM

Having chosen this term, I now wish to make a few comments about its content, breadth, and depth. It is not sufficient simply to use words like missio, “missions,” and ‘theory of missions”. We must

develop the theological content of these terms so that we begin to use them with an awareness of their meaning and scope. Of course, my comments are only provisional at this point. A fuller description can come only after I have developed the biblical foundation within systematic missiology.

The world missionary conference held in Willingen, West Germany in 1952 revived a very ancient term which stemmed from the time of the Trinitarian discussions: missio Dei. When we look back upon the history and the theology of missions, there is no denying that a great deal of anthropocentric and ecclesiocentric language was used. There was talk about our mission, our missionary area, the missionary center, the missionary operation, etc. At Willingen a Copernican revolution happened, at least as regards terminology. at least there was already talk of “God’s mission, not ours.” One of the core sentences taken from the final report of the 1952 Willingen conference is: “The missionary movement of which we are a part has its source in the triune God Himself.” Karl Hartenstein went even further in his report Mission zwischen Gestern und Morgen (“Missions between Yesterday and Tomorrow”).4 And George Vicedom wrote his famous book Missio Dei (“The Mission of God”) after the Willingen conference.5 Vicedom’s theme is: “He, God, is the acting Subject in mission.” God the Father sent the Son and the Son is both the Sent One and the Sender. Together with the Father the Son sends the Holy Spirit, who in turn sends the church, congregations, apostles, and servants, laying them under obligation in discharging his work. Another emphasis of the Willingen conference and the later Mexico City conference was the relationship between the missio Dei and the missio ecclesiae. “There is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission.”

Men like John Taylor and Johannes Aagaard point out that to be faithful to the Bible one should not refer to the missio Dei but to missiones Dei. The one mission of the triune God takes shape in the innumerable particular missiones: missions to villages and cities, to seafarers and city dwellers, to students and farmers, etc. In addition, the word missiones underscores that God involves not only special groups and individuals in his tasks, but that the missio Dei also leads to diakonia, that is, to participation in development, to sharing in the whole

1 Johannes Durr, “Kirche, Mission und Reich Gottes,” Evangelische Missions Magazin 97 (September, 1953): 133-145.2 T. Ohm, Machet zu Jüngern.3 Raoul Allier, “Missions and the Soul of a People” The International Review of Missions 18 (1929): 282-284.4 Karl Hartenstein, et al., Mission zwischen Gestern und Morgen . Vom Gestaltwandel der Weltmission der Christenheil Im Licht der Kongerenz

des Internationalen Missionsrats in Willingen. (Stuttgart Evangelischer Missionsverlag, 1952).5 George F. Vicedom, The Mission of God an Introduction to the Science of Mission (St. Louis Concordia Publishing House, 1965).

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plurality of services which we are called to perform in his name as we carry out the missio Dei.

The renowned periodical of the World Council of Churches and its Commission on World Mission and Evangelism was earlier entitled International Review of Missions. Its present title is International Review of Missions. The change in title resulted from the influence of the phrase missio Dei. But the term missiones quite properly calls attention to the relationship between missio and missiones, to the one missio Dei and the plurality missiones connected to it.

Later still, the concept missio hominum surfaced, which emphasized that in addition to viewing the strictly ecclesiastical tasks and work in the light Jesus the Pioneer and Perfecter of Mission Dei (cf. Heb. 12:2), we ought to see all work done in service to society as inspired, led, directed by him. Presently missiologists are engaged in a heated discussion of the statement: “God acts in history.” How are the events within salvation history and world history related? Obviously they do not coincide precisely. Sins, demons, and the demonic powers are also active in history. History is not merely a record of the unhindered progress of salvation history; there is also the element of the unholy and wicked, against which God acts as both Judge and Liberator. Though this is not yet the place to discuss this issue more deeply, I do wish to indicate at this early point that the discussion about Mission Die has focused too little on the question of how God’s acts in history can be discerned and how the missio ecclesiarum is related to this process of discerning his acts.

Are the “signs of the times” which stand so central in the present discussion nothing more than a pious or sanctimonious explanation of the facts of history? How can we avoid a form of ideologizing the facts, as so often results from such interpretations of contemporary history?

What are the criteria for analyzing the judging the historical processes? Is the primary concern an interpretation of history, or must we give our attention to history because it is the place where we, with our eyes on the Messiah and his kingdom, must discharge our missionary mandate? Jesus Christ is the criterion for God’s saving deeds in history. He is the true vine planted in history. In him we see God’s intentions for human life in this world. In and through him we come to see what kind of fruits God is concerned with from the harvest field of history.

“God acts in history.” Of course, but where? Allow me to make only this preliminary comment: wherever love for God and one’s neighbor is blooming, there God is engaged, and the signs of the messianic kingdom become visible. Thus the

missiones ecclesiarum are connected with the missio Dei only when, in union with Christ the true vine and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they display the fruits of love for God and neighbor in countless ways.

The phrase missio hominum (“missions by men”) coined by Gensichen is of course open to misunderstanding. Putting the expressions missio ecclesiarum and missio hominum next to each other could suggest that the missions of the churches are not human missions and that “Church work” is something completely set off from the work of men and women in society. But the intent of the expression is clear. Its purpose is to show that even the nonecclesiastical activity of people in society, as long as it counters any type of evil and is purposefully performed in ways that help and heal, is connected either knowingly or unknowingly with the missio Dei in the world.

Kosuke Koyama depicts the distresses in a rural area of one part of Asia. His book, Waterbuffalo Theology, describes the evils of leprosy, malaria, ignorance, powerlessness, poverty, etc.6 He goes on to tell how a variety of organizations are combating these evils. Then he asks, “Who sent those men and woman?” The answer follows: “They too are capable of serving the missio Dei. God has sent them. In a certain respect they too are “God’s missionaries.”

Such is the meaning of the disputed phrase missio hominum. Everything directed toward welfare, liberation, and the unshackling the fetters of injustice—in short, everything “salvation-oriented”—has to do with the missio Dei and is within the perspective of the messianic kingdom.

Definition of Missiology

Missiology is the study of the salvation activities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout the world geared toward bringing the kingdom of God into existence.

Seen in this perspective missiology is the study of the worldwide church’s divine mandate to be ready to serve this God who is aiming his saving acts toward this world. In dependence on the Holy Spirit and by word and deed the church is to communicate the total gospel and the total divine law too all mankind.

Missiology’s task is in every age to investigate scientifically and critically the presuppositions, motives, structures, methods, patterns of cooperation, and leadership which the churches bring to their mandate. In addition missiology must examine every other type of human activity which combats the various evils to see if it fits the criteria and goals of

6 Kosuke Koyama, Waterbuffalo Theology (London: SCM Press, 1974)

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God’s kingdom which has both already come and is yet coming.

Some Clarifying Notes on This Definition

Presently there is a lot of talk about science functioning as a critic of society. This is proper and applies to missiology too. In a “time of testing” like the present, missiology ought to test the practice of world mission, world service, and development projects and programs against the standards of the Bible; she ought to inspect thoroughly those who administrate such programs and to serve them with advice.

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda (a Reformed Church is continually reforming”); this also holds true for the missiones ecclesiarum. The same principle applies to society: societas semper reformanda. In his essay “Bringing Our Missionary Methods Under the Word of God,”7 Lesslie Newbigin writes: “The Church must in every generation by ready to bring its tradition afresh under the light of the Word of God.” But not only must we examine our methods. The structures of the congregations; the relations between Western churches and those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the nature of the missiones ecclesiae today: and the plans for future projects must also be put under the examining light of God’s Word.

In this definition I have tried to underscore that missiology is a thoroughly theological discipline. The Middle Ages said a discipline qualified as theological when it Deum docet (“teaches God”), a Deo docetur (“is taught by God”), and as Deum ducet (“will lead one to God”). This definition, which places the concept of Mission Dei so centrally and grows out of the trinitarian teaching, directs our attention to the God who, in Hoekendijk’s words, begins, governs, protects, and completes his mission while enroute to the final revelation of his kingdom.

Today students of this discipline are increasingly being referred to as missiologists. Usually these people have logged some time in the area of practical experience and thus can prevent their scholarly work from turning into arid theorizing. A majority of missiologists concurrently serve as advisors to missionary service, and developmental agencies. We missiologists are called to do our work on the threshold of the third millennium after Christ’s birth, amid the giant changes and shifts in the world situation.

I make one final point: missiology may never become a substitute for action and participation. God

calls for participants and volunteers in his mission. In part, missiology’s goal is to become a “service station” along the way. If study does not lead to participation, whether at home or abroad, missiology has lost her humble calling.

THE PLACE OF MISSIOLOGY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGY

There was a day when missiology was accorded no place in the encyclopedia of theology. She was not even given standing room. All this happened when theology was done in ecclesiocentric or ethnocentric fashion; rather than the kingdom being in the spotlight, the individual, the nation, or the church received all the attention. By the nineteenth century, however-in K. S. Latourette’s words, “The Great Century”-missions had expanded so broadly that the need for the theological study of mission became apparent, and a spot had to be cleared for missiology in the theological encyclopedia. Of course, one must not exaggerate the difficulty missiology had in getting that spot. Father André Seumois allots 500 pages in his Introduction à la Missiologie to this issue, and it is hard to escape the feeling that the importance of this matter is slightly overdrawn.8

We shall now review suggestions and statements made by various authors on the role of missiology in order to better formulate our own position on this issue.

Schleiermacher on the Place of Missiology

Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher was the first theologian in the great century of missions who thought about the position of the science of missions within the wider discipline of theology. During his youth he met the Herrnhutters, and this meeting had left a permanent impression on him.

In the second edition of his Kürze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, Schleiermacher makes room for a couple of sentences on what he calls the “Theorie des Missionswesens.”9 These are included in the section on “Praktische Theologie.” Treating the issue of catechesis. Schleiermacher adds that when it is done among the “religious strangers who live in the vicinity or region of a church,” a theory about “how to deal with the converts” becomes necessary. In paragraph 298 Schleiermacher comments “Possibly a theory of missions which for all intents and purposes still does not exist could be added at this point.”

7 Lesslie Newbigin, “Bringing Our Missionary Methods Under the Word of God.” Occasional Bulletin 13 (November, 1962): 1-9.8 André Seumois, Introduction da la Missiologie (Schoneck and Beckenried, Switzerland: Administration de la Nouvelle Revue de Science

Missionaire, 1952).9 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kürze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen (Hildesheim: Oims, 1850).

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Schleiermacher makes a distinction between “continuous missions” (in regions where colonial or geographic relationships exist) and “sporadic missions” (like those of the Moravian Brothers, for example). Yet Schleiermacher did not actually perceive a separate category for missions. His missionary thinking is thoroughly limited by both culture and history.

Schleiermacher’s theological weakness is mirrored in his missiology. By identifying truth with man’s religious consciousness, by reducing the gospel to contemporary thought forms, and by failing to appreciate the theological categories which cannot be so reduced, Schleiermacher ended up with a contorted view of missions.

Strikingly, yet typically, Schleiermacher treats the subject of missions more broadly in his section on ethics than in his section on practical theology. Writing from the perspective of ethics, he views missions as a cultural responsibility in specific situations where Western culture penetrates non-Western cultural areas. The call to mission, however, is not universal. On page 190 of his Reden über die Religion he makes the surprising claim that missions are not to be seen as the call to proclaim and to show salvation to all mankind, but rather the missionary “must always carry his fatherland with its laws and customs along with him and look upon the higher and better things of life wherever he goes.”

In Schleiermacher we meet head-on one of the prominent representatives of a romantic cultural-Protestant notion of missions. This is more fully explained in Otto Küber’s book Mission und Theologie: Eine Untersuchung über den Missionsgedanken in der systematischen Theologie seit Schleiermacher.10

This is not the place to go more deeply into this issue, for our immediate concern is the issue of the place of missiology in the encyclopedia of theology.

Missiology in the Thought of Abraham Kuyper and J. H. Bavinck

Walking along in the footprints of Schleiermacher, Abraham Kuyper puts missiology among the practical disciplines or, as he calls them, the diaconological group. Kuyper divides the group into the didactic, presbyterial, diaconal, and laic disciplines. Calling it “prosthetics,” Kuyper includes missiology among the didactic disciplines. Kuyper describes the goal of prosthetics as “The study of divinely ordained and most useful methods of

Christianizing those areas and people who are outside of Christ.”11

J. H. Bavinck also puts missiology among the practical disciplines. In his book An Introduction to the Science of Missions, Bavinck argues for missiology to be treated and viewed as independent, though not isolated, from other theological disciplines. This independent entity Bavinck wants to put in the disconological group. In so doing he makes objection to Kuyper, who put it in the didactic group He correctly notes that missions involves not only teaching, but also service (He could have also added the dimension of fellowship.)

Missiology as Part of Church History

In his 1887 discourse Das Studium der Mission auf der Universität, Gustav Warneck, author of the first “Missionslehre” in Europe, stated his view of the place of missiology. He argued for incorporating the history of missions within the wider study of church history, the biblical foundation for missions within the biblical disciplines, and the study of missions proper within the framework of practical theology. He thus divided missiology into three separate studies and insisted that church history be one of the three. John Foster of England, C. Mirbt of Germany and K. S. Latourette of the United States argued for including all of missiology within church history. In Sweden this is also the usual practice. In the Netherlands, too, some theological schools incorporate missiology within church history and even set it within the study of twentieth-century church history.

Missiology as Part of Dogmatics

H. Diem argues for putting missiology within the study of systematic theology, or more specifically, in the study of the doctrines of the Trinity and eschatology.12 The missio Dei described in Matthew 28 points toward an eschatological event which happens not outside of history but within the history of missions and drives history on toward its goal and conclusion. Missiology’s task is to render an account of the proclamation events which go forward to the end. The message of the triune God, first described and explained in a Greek-Roman atmosphere of religious polytheism and metaphysical monotheism, must now be unfolded by young churches in their own unique theologies against the backdrop of the religious ideas current in their world.

To my knowledge this plea for inserting missiology into systematic theology never received

10 Otto Kübler, Mission und Thelogie Ein Untersuchung uber den missionsgedanken in der systematischen Theologie sent Schleiermacher (Leipzig: T. C. Hinrichs’ sche Buchhandiung, 1929).

11 Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopoedie der hellige Godgeleerdheld. 3 vols. (Amsterdam: J. A. Wormser, 1894). p.520.12 H. Diem, “Der Ort der Mission in der systematischen Theologie,” Evangelische Missions Muguzin III (1967): 29-42.

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support. In fact, as is obvious from the above, it is difficult to put missiology exclusively into any of the general categories. Missiology is involved with all the theological disciplines.

For this reason, more earnest and frequent appeal is recently being heard for making the missionary sciences a separate group complementary to the other disciplines. In a commemorative book honoring Walter Freytag entitled Basileia. the Norwegian missiologist O. G. Myklebust wrote the essay “Integration or Independence.”13 He expressly called for independence because whenever missiology is integrated into one or more of the other disciplines, it does not receive its due.

Manfred Linz calls missiology a “complementary science” (komplementar-Wissenschaft). He develops this idea more extensively in an essay in Einführung in das Studium ker Evengelischen Theologie14

The science of mission shall have to become concrete when cultural and geographic boundaries are crossed. For theology, theologians, and the church she points out the distant stranger living among our neighbors and the neighbor living among distant strangers. She takes careful note that salvation (heil) is designed for all human beings and that the service of reconciliation may not be restricted to the familiar horizon of our own land and environs. Mission is indivisible and the world is indivisible.

To this truth missiology must forever be pointing; in so doing she plays a crucial, complementary role. The burden of missiology is to answer the question facing the church: does her life conform to her calling to be the “salt of the earth” and “the light of the world?”

Without hesitation I join the ranks of those who describe missiology as complementary science.

As for the study of evangelism, I believe it clearly and exclusively belongs to the practical disciplines. Disciplines related to evangelism—that is, the other practical studies, exegesis, hermeneutics, church history, apologetics, and systematic theology—are so taught as to take into account only the issues facing Western society. No account is taken of the issues people face in the developing countries. Therefore by holding forth the missionary dimension, missiology must round out the other branches of theology and thus render real service in

communicating God’s law and gospel throughout the world.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MISSIOLOGY AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

Theological Disciplines

No extensive explanation is necessary; the relationship is quite obvious. I shall limit myself to a few comments. The relationship between missiology and evangelism is so direct that is some universities one professor teaches both and combines them under the title “Theology of the Apostolate.” Evangelism (evangelistiek) has to do with the scientific study of communicating Christian faith in Western society, while missiology centers on communicating it in the regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But these disciplines frequently “cross fertilize,” especially during treatment of topics as urbanization, industrialization, secularization, and methods of gospel communication. It goes without saying that there is also a connection between missiology and the other branches of practical theology.

Biblical studies, especially exegesis and hermeneutics, are crucial not only to a good understanding of the miss ecclesiae but also to a correct view of methods of communication. It is important to note that the majority of exegetical studies on the foundation of missions have been written by missiologist themselves. At this point missiology is acting as a complement to the existing disciplines of Old and New Testament exegesis.

Hermeneutics, too, is very important for missiology. The Gospels are in fact life-size photos of how the gospel was presented in a variety of milieus. The New Testament book of Acts presents many models of gospel communication among groups of people such as Jews, sophisticated heathen, devotees of archaic religions, etc. The importance of these hermeneutical models for missiology cannot be easily overestimated.

The branches of systematic theology, that is, dogmatics, history of dogma, and apologetics, are valuable for missiology, even as missiology can complement systematic theology;. For example in teaching the history of dogma the controversy with Islam often goes largely unnoticed. Or again, Western apologetics pays almost no attention to developing an apology for the world of Asia and Africa, etc.

13 Olav G. Myklebust, “Integration or Independence.” In Basileia: Walter Freytag zum 60. Geburistag. ed. J. Hermelink and H. J. Margull (Stuttgart: Evangelische Missionsverlag, 1959).

14 Manfred Linz, “Missionswissenschaft und Oekumenik.” in Einführung in das Studium der Evangelischen Theologie. ed. R. Bohren (Munich Kaiser Verlag. 1964).

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Ethics as studied in the West is now dealing with issues from which developing countries can learn and which they can profitably use in the very near future in their own situations. And from her side missiology begs for help from ethics in the ethical issues facing the young churches. At their very core all the issues facing the developing nations are ethical issues.

In the area of church history, missiology has much to learn form the history of Western missions. Likewise, there are a variety of reasons why it is preferable to treat the history and historiography of the young churches within the framework of missiology.

Missiology of course stands in close connection to ecumenics. Both set their sights on the whole church and the relationship between churches as well as on the whole world to whom the gospel is proclaimed. Practical reasons obviously require that Western ecumenical relationships be studied within the framework of recent Western church history and that growth of Asian, African, and Latin American ecumenical ties be treated by the missiology department. In this manner each department can round out the other.

Finally, missiology and the science of religion are so closely connected that one hardly needs to defend keeping them together. Without a phenomenology of and history of the current religions, proper dialogue with and missionary approach to these religions are impossible. But missiology must study not only the encounter with other faiths, but also the encounter with the ideologies. This is a special way in which it can complement other branches of theology. Regrettably, theological faculties usually devote scant attention to the ideologies.

Nontheological Disciplines

There is no sense in parading all the nontheological disciplines before us to view the connection of each one with missiology. I shall indicate only those which have a practical as well as a theoretical tangent to missiology.

The findings of cultural anthropology are crucially important for understanding the context of the young churches. The methods and results of non-Western sociology are highly important for missiology. Therefore every doctoral student in missiology is strongly advised to minor in cultural anthropology or non-Western sociology. Sociology of religion and ecclesiastical sociology are likewise of crucial value.

In the realm of economics, missiology takes great interest in the economics of developing nations. Doctoral students in missiology frequently minor in this area, too. Since the young churches are going through a phase of developing their political and social awareness, the two disciplines are also very important. Missiologists and students of the history of the developing nations have a complementary role to play in these areas as well. More and more we are coming to see the close connection between world mission, world service, cooperative ventures in national development, and efforts for justice. By focusing on this connection, still another rather neglected truth comes into view: political-scientists and polemologists must learn to look beyond the Bosporos and Dardanelles.

So much for our comments. Writings in the field of missiology clearly show that its relationship to other disciplines is not merely theoretical but living and vital.

THE POSITION OF MISSIOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

A place in the theological encyclopedia does not necessarily mean that a specific discipline thereby automatically has a spot reserved for it within the theological curricula of faculties, theological colleges, and seminaries. In this section we shall inquire how and when missiology actually achieved its place in the theological curriculum. Not that our present concern is not to delve into the history and content missiology. A later chapter will provide such a tour d’horizon. For the present we aim only to discuss as briefly as possible the role of missiology within theological education. For more information on this topic one can consult the very comprehensive study done by the Norwegian scholar, O. G. Myklebust, The Study of Missions in Theological Education.15

Early Studies of Missiology

During the latter part of the thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth centuries, Raimon Lull continually urged the Roman Catholic church to establish schools for studying those languages spoken by the peoples to whom the gospel had yet to be proclaimed. His chief interest was Arabic, and in 1276 he personally founded a seminary on Majorca for the study of the “idiomata diversa” of the missionaries. At his urging the Council of Vienne (1311) established chairs for the study of these languages in Rome, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca. Their lifespan was not long.

15 Olav G. Myklebust, The Study of Missions in Theological Education: An Historical Inquiry Into the Place of World Evangelization in Western Professional Ministerial Training with Particular Reference to Alexander Duff’s Chair of Evangelistic Theology. 2 vols. (Oslo: Egede Instituttet: hovedkommisjon Foriaget Land og Kirke, 1955-57).

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In 1622 the East India Trading Company requested the theological faculty of Leiden University to sketch a plan for a proposed seminary for pastors who were planning to serve in India and who could thus concurrently work for the “conversion of the heathen.” Anton Walasus drew up the requested plan. It showed striking similarities to the design of Roman Catholic seminaries. The demanding proposal called for no less than twenty separate courses, including theology and philosophy interspersed with activities such as prayer, fasting, visitation of the poor, and the practice of piety. All these requirements had to be met before one was sent out. Candidates lived in Walaeus’ house. The maximum number of students at any one time was six, and only twelve preachers were trained during the ten-year life of this school.

The East India Company abolished the seminary in 1633 for reasons which are unclear. On the one hand, the results did not seem worth the heavy costs to the company. On the other, the preachers were so well trained that they did not easily fit into the company’s plans for them to become its willing and ready instruments. Several pleas to reopen the school were never granted by the company.

A third attempt was A.H. Francke’s Collegium Orientale Theologicum in Halle founded in 1702. This, along with Leibnitz’s Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, was a training center for theological candidates to “propagate the faith through knowledge” (“propagatio fidei per scientias”). The impact on missiology and the training of missionaries was very slight, according to Gerhard Rosenkranz.

In 1627 the Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide was founded in Rome. It had a profound impact upon many students who went there for study.

At the Danish-Halle mission, Ziegenbalg, by providing for important work opportunities before sending missionaries out, stimulated not only the practice of but also theoretical reflection upon missionary activity.

THE MODERN ERA: THE OFFICIAL STUDY OF MISSIOLOGY IN UNIVERSITIES, FACULTIES, AND SEMINARIES.

Germany and Scotland

In 1864, Dr. Karl Graul (1814-1864), director of the Leipzig Mission made the initial try at introducing to Europe the scientific study of missions. In that year he delivered a speech which qualified him as a private teacher at Eriangen; in it he made a plea for including missiology in the “universitas litterarum.” Among other things, he said: “This discipline must gradually come to the

point where she holds her head up high; she has a right to ask for a place in the house of the most royal of all sciences, namely theology.” This was the first knock on the theological faculties’ door.

Graul’s Elijah-mantle fell on Dr. C.H. Plath (1829-1901), inspector of the Berlin and Goss Mission. He lectured in missiology at the famous Humboldt University of Berlin. He taught privately at first (1867) and later became honorary professor, that is, one who is not an official member of the faculty.

The year Plath began as a private teacher in Berlin (1867), Alexander Duff (1806-1876) assumed his task as missiologist at the New College in Edinburgh by delivering his inaugural address entitled “Evangelistic Theology.” Previously Duff had rung up a number of successes by establishing some Christian colleges in India, which today are still providing useful service.

However, his appearance as professor of missiology was not as successful. Duff’s biographer, William Paton, whose sobriety matched his enthusiasm in describing Duff, related in his book, Alexander Duff, Pioneer of missionary education (1923), that in the first winter semester he lectured on “God’s Decrees before the Creation” and at the conclusion of the second semester he ended up in the New Testament.16 After his departure the chair of missiology was eliminated.

Gustav Warneck was born on March 6, 1834 in Naumberg and died on December 26,1919 in Halle. The first person to receive an official appointment to the chair of missionary science, he was made professor extraordinary at the University of Halle and taught Missionslehre from 1896 to 1908. He entitled his inaugural lecture “Mission’s Right to Citizenship in the Organism of Theological Science” (1897). He was a real pioneer for missiology and was the driving force behind organizing European missionary conferences.

In 1874 Warneck founded the Allgemeine Missions Zeitschrift, which from the very beginning strove not only to include material about existing mission agencies but also to treat the subject of missiology itself. Through this scientific missionary periodical came the push for similar periodicals in Germany, America, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

Toward the end of his life Warneck put all of his insights into a three-part book, Evangelische Missionslehre, which is subtitled “an attempt at a theory of missions.”17 His insights appeared in a series entitled Zimmer’s Handbibliothek der

16 William Paton, Alexander Duff, Pioneer of Missionary Education (London: SCM Press, 1923).

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praktischen Theologie. In a later review we shall come back to this first draft of a theory of missions.

In 1968 the German Society of Missionary Science (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Missionswissenschaft) held its golden anniversary celebration at which Gerhard Rosenkranz honored Warneck as the pioneer in the field of missiology. Regardless of all the criticism which may properly be leveled at Warneck’s ideas, including those from Professor Hoekendijk of the Netherlands, no one can discount the pioneer importance of Warneck for the academic study of missions. When the Marburg University decided in 1950 to make missiology a required course for every theological student, this was the crowning success of Warneck’s early work. Missiology gradually came to be offered at virtually every German theological school.

Several other names are worthy of mention in this connection. Julius Richter (1892-1940) taught missiology in Berlin and gained attention by thirty publications dealing with missionary institutions. Carl Mirbt of Gottingen (1860-1929) did much to raise missiology to “the full position of a science.” to borrow Gerhard Rosenkranz’s phrase. His chief interests were missionary statistics and the relations between missions and the governmental authorities in the colonial era of missions. H.W. Schomerus of Halle (1879-1945) specialized in what we today would call the theology of religions.

Dr. Walter Freytag (1899-1959) was the first missiologist at the University of Hamburg. He founded that Missions Academy which is based there. He combined a life of busy service as General Secretary of the German Evangelical Missionary Council with that of professor at Hamburg, and after the Second World War became the most prominent representative of German missionary science. His deep humility coupled with his fine sensitivity to the concerns of the young churches and his service of reconciliation assisted Freytag in bringing not only Hamburg but all of German missiology out of the morass of Volkstum into which so many Germans had fallen. Freytag made missiology capable of serving the ecumenical cause. His place in Hamburg is now occupied by H.J. Margull, author of Hope in Action. 18

In the German universities the chairs of missiology were often held either by students of the theology of the religions (Horst Bürkle in Munich, Gerhard Rosenkranz in Tübingen, and E. Damman in Marburg, to name several examples) or by actual missiologists such as Hans Werner Gensichen of Heidelberg, Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen, and the

late George Vilcedom of Neuendettelsau, author of The Mission of God: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission.

The Netherlands

The Roman Catholic University of Nijmegen became the first Dutch university to establish a chair of missiology when it appointed Professor Alphons Mulders as Lector in 1930 and as full professor in 1936.

The Free Reformed University of Amsterdam was the first Protestant school to found a chair of missionary science. J. H. Bavinck became the first Dutch Protestant professor of missions and for several years did his teaching at both the theological school of Kampen and the Free University. Bavinck assumed his position toward the close of 1939 by delivering an inaugural lecture entitled “Proclaiming Christ to the Nations.” His book An Introduction to the Science of Missions sums up Bavinck’s missiological thinking.19

On June 23, 1969 an official cooperative venture between the missiology and ecumenics departments of the various Dutch universities began at Utrecht. This Inter-university Institute of Missiology and Ecumenics was the brainchild of J.C. Hoekendijk His many years as secretary of the Netherlands Missionary Council impressed him with the fact that there was urgent need for a thorough examination of the many questions posed by missions and world service. He found that traditional agencies lacked sufficient time for this study.

Hoekendijk also came to realize that missiology and ecumenics can no longer be studied separately since they are so closely intertwined. Both of these disciplines are directed toward the whole church and the whole world. The church addresses its gospel proclamation to the word, and the mutual relationships the various churches sustain with each other must be geared to this work the decision was made to start a single institute but to maintain two separate departments within it—one for missiology and the other for ecumenics. The institute’s headquarters and ecumenical section are in Utrecht, but the missiology department is at Leiden.

Space does not permit a review of the status of missiology at other European universities. For further reference see the study of Myklebust mentioned above. We cannot bring this section to a close, however, without making a few comments on missiology as it is carried on in the United States.

The United States

17 Gustav Warneck, Evangelische Missionslehre Ein Missionstheoretischer Veelsuch (Gotha: P.A. Oerthes, 1897-1903).18 Hans Jochen Margull, Hope in Action (Philadelphia Muhlenberg Press, 1962).19 Johan H. Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions (Nutley, N.J: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing House, 1960).

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Like Europe, the United States took a long time in putting the study of missions into the curriculum. Toward the close of the nineteenth century the student missionary elan was simply overwhelming. The so-called missionary awakening at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts in 1886 gave the impetus for forming the Student Volunteer Movement. The Mount Hermon gathering lasted twenty-six days and was led by Dwight L. Moody. Among the two hundred fifty students present there were such slogans as “All should go and go to all” and “The evangelization of the world in this generation.” At the close the number of student who had dedicated themselves to missionary service had swelled form twenty-one to one hundred. This group gave birth to the Student Volunteer Movement headed by Dr. John R. Mott. The movement’s influence widened to a degree hitherto unknown and spilled over into England, Ireland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

The Student Volunteer Movement stood in increasing need of worthwhile missiological study material. Atlases, statistics, and books on linguistics, history, and the history of religions appeared. Books such as Robert Speer’s Missionary Principles and Practice (among others that he wrote), Wells William’s Middle Kingdom, and Arthur Smith’s Chinese Society also answered this need.

Pressure was gradually increasing for introducing missiology as a subject into the curricula of seminaries and divinity schools. After a couple of faltering tries, Union Theological Seminary of New York first gave the science of missions its permanent place in the curriculum. Daniel J. Fleming appointed in 1918, was the first full-time professor. Soon other renowned seminaries like Yale and McCormick also began using part-time personnel to teach this subject.

The Missionary Research Library, with its present headquarters at 3041 Broadway in New York City in the tower of Union Theological Seminary, stimulated the desire for introducing missiology as a university course. Ever since John Mott led a drive for establishing this library, it has become a major resource for missionary studies.

In 1911, Hartford Seminary Foundation established its Kennedy School of Missions, which opened new possibilities for missionary training and emphasized concentrated study of various geographic areas of missionary activity. For example, there were China studies, Africa studies, and Muslim-are studies. Though the seminary no longer offers missionary studies, it is still producing its famous periodical, Muslim World.

The drive to increase the number of professorships in missiology came chiefly after the year 1920. The Student Volunteer Movement was gradually disappearing, and this expanded the need

for those interested in missions. “It was widely believed that by placing a professor of mission in a seminary the waning tide of missionary interest and zeal might be stemmed.” Missions professors were engaged to deliver sermons and speeches to the congregations to recruit missionary personnel.

By about 1940 there were few seminaries which lacked a department of missions, and by 1966 there were at least 100 seminaries offering courses in missions and 132 lecturers teaching them (usually in combination with other courses.)

At university divinity schools several professors raised the level of higher education in missiology. Kenneth Scott Latourette of Yale was author of the famous series History of the Expansion of Christianity. R. Pierce Beaver, once a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a member of the United Church of Christ, ranks as a leading statistician, historian, and library expert. In 1952 Beaver organized the Association of Professors of Missions in North America, which now has about 100 members. In a report given at Selly Oak in 1967 Dr. Beaver noted the dismaying fact that the number of university chairs of missions is declining in the United States. The trend seems to be toward maintaining missiology only in denominational seminaries. He said: “Every university and seminary needs a professor of missions to be a living symbol of the church’s worldwide mission and to be the agent who summons students and faculty to engagement in it.” If missiology should ever disappear from the American seminary, it would mark a great loss and would result in the strong growth of provincialism and parochialism among both faculty and students. I am happy to note that there are still outstanding professors of missions at a few universities which offer doctoral programs, such as Yale (Charles Forman), Duke (Creighton Lacy), and Southern Methodist (William Richey Hogg).

Complementing but not replacing the study of missiology at the university level are the short, intensive courses of study offered at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in Ventnor, New Jersey. The center also makes a contribution to missiology in its publication, the Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research.

The trend in United States’ universities and seminaries is to absorb missiology into the course in ecumenics or history of religions This is lamentable. As I see it, Beaver is correct when he says that chairs of missiology need a double base. First, they require theologians who see that the task of theology is worldwide, and therefore are willing to concede a spot—a spacious spot—to missiology in the curriculum. Second they require missionary and diaconal agencies who, in formulating mission policy

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and facing administrative questions, look to the missiologist for their input. Beaver prefers to separate the disciplines of missiology and science of religion rather than to combine them as often happened in the past.

An interesting missiological initiative is headed by Dr. Donald McGavran. He formed his Institute for the Study of Church Growth as a service for evangelicals. Now located at Fuller Theological Seminary as a graduate school of World Mission, it has come to serve a much broader group. Another important research institute is the Missions Advanced Research and Center (MARC) in Monrovia, California, a division of World Vision International.

This center, headed by Edward R. Dayton, uses the most advanced information systems and computer technology for developing an information center on world Christianity. It also publishes the Mission Handbook of North American Protestant ministries overseas.

A major development was the founding in1971 of the American Society of Missiology, which now has over 500 members and publishes a quarterly journal, Missiology.

The U.S. Center for World Mission, established in 1976 at Pasadena, California by Ralph D. Winter, coordinates studies and strategies for reaching unreached peoples with the gospel.

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TM 10 Perspectivas Bíblicas de la missio Dei – Lecturas Complementarias Adicionales 13

“Conversion, Culture and Cognitive Categories” by Paul G. Hiebert

Originally published in Gospel in Context 1(4):24-29, 1978. Used by permission of author.

Can an illiterate peasant become a Christian after hearing the Gospel only once? And, if so, what do we mean by conversion?

Imagine, for a moment, Papayya, an Indian peasant, returning to his village after a hard day’s work in the fields. His wife is still preparing the evening meal, so to pass time, he wanders over to the village square. There he notices a stranger surrounded by a few curiosity seekers. Tired and hungry, he sits down to hear what the man is saying. For an hour he listens to a message of a new God and something which he hears moves him deeply. Later he asks the stranger about the New Way, and then, almost as if by impulse, he bows his head and prays to this God who is said to have appeared to humans in the form of Jesus. He doesn’t quite understand it all. As a Hindu he worships Vishnu who incarnated himself as a human or animal in order to rescue humankind at different times in history. He also knows many of the other 33 million gods village proverbs say exist. But the stranger said there is only one God, and this God has appeared among humans only once. Moreover, this Jesus is said to be the Son of God, but the Christian did not say anything about God’s wife. It is all confusing to him.

The man turns to go home, and a new set of questions floods his mind. Can he still go to the temple in order to pray? Should he tell his family about his new faith? And how can he learn more about Jesus—he cannot read the few papers the stranger gave him, and there are no other Christians within a day’s walk. Who knows when the stranger will come again?

Conversion and cultural differencesCan Papayya become a Christian after hearing

the Gospel only once? To this we can only say yes. To say that a person must be educated, have an extensive knowledge of the Bible, or live a near perfect life would mean that the Good News is only for an elite few in the world.

But what essential change has taken place when Papayya responds to the Gospel message? Certainly he has acquired some new information. He has heard of Christ and his redemptive work on the cross. He may also have heard a story or two about Christ’s life on earth. But his knowledge is minimal. Papayya

could not pass even the simplest tests of Bible knowledge or theology.

To complicate matters further, the knowledge Papayya has, he understands in radically different ways from Christians in the West or other parts of the world. For example, the English speaker talks of God, but Papayya speaks of devudu because he is a Telugu speaker. But devudu does not have precisely the same meaning as God. Just as the English word “God” does not correspond exactly to the Greek word theos found in the New Testament.

Ordinary English speakers divide living beings into several different categories. One of these is supernatural beings, a category into which they put God, angels, Satan, and demons. Another is human beings and includes men, women, and children. A third is animals, and a forth is plants. In addition to these there is a category of inanimate objects such as sand and rocks, as well as a few kinds of life that are not so easily classified and over which there is some disagreement, such as virus and germs (see Figure 1). In this system of classification, God is categorically different from human beings, and human beings from animals and plants.20 The incarnation means that God crossed the categorical differences between himself and humans and became human.

Telugu speakers do not differentiate between different kinds of life. All forms of life are thought to be manifestations of a single life: gods, demons, humans, animals, plants, and even what appear to be inanimate objects all have the same kind of life (see Figure 1). To be sure, the gods have more of this life than humans and humans more than animals or plants. But there is no real difference between gods and humans and humans and animals. After death, good humans may be reborn as gods, and wicked gods as animals. Moreover, gods come down constantly to earth as incarnations to help humankind, just as a rich man might stoop to help his servant.

20 This is true despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of biological evolution. This theory blurs the distinctions between humans, animals, and plants. But in everyday life the distinction is strong. We can kill and eat animals and plants, but to kill humans or to enslave them is considered a crime. Animals need not wear clothes, but humans must.

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The problem we face, then, is that when we translate the Word of God into Telugu, not only is there a change in sounds from God to devudu, but also a change in basic meanings. There is a fundamental difference in the ways in which the two words are viewed, as in the ways these words are related to other words belonging to the same cognitive domain.

If devudu does not carry biblical connotations of the word “God,” then certainly we must find another word for translating it. There are many others that suggest themselves: ishvarudu, bhagavanthudu, parameshvara, and so on. But upon examination we find that all of these carry the same essential meaning as devudu. There is, in fact, no word in Telugu that carries the same connotations as either the English word “God” or the Greek word theos (nor do these two have exactly the same meaning). Nor is “God” the only word with which we have a problem in translation. Similar differences exist between all the other major words of any two languages.

high godslesser godsdemons and spiritsdemi-godssaints and incarnationspriestsrulersmerchantscraftsman castesworker castesservice castesoutcasteshigh animalslow animalsplantsinanimate world

PureMatter

PureSpirit

Mixed Relationsareessentiallyvertical

INDIAN CONCEPT OF LIFEBrahman, the only reality,

Unknowable to the passing worldRealityIllusion

AMERICAN CONCEPT OF LIFE

God,eternal,supernatural,infinite

Man:Natural, but with an eternal soul.A BRelations betweenmen are essentially horizontal.

Animals:temporal

Plants

Inanimate World:lifeless

Relations betweenCreator God and man areCreation vertical.

Figure 1. A comparison of American and Indian Views of Life


PureMatter

PureSpirit





PureMatter

PureSpirit




AMERICAN CONCEPT OF LIFE



Animals:temporal

Plants





Animals:temporal

Plants


Animals:temporal

Plants



Figure 1. A comparison of American and Indian Views of Life

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Now we must ask not only what knowledge must Papayya have to become a Christian, but also whether this knowledge must be perceived in a particular way—from a particular worldview. Must Papayya learn the English or Greek meaning for “god” before he becomes a Christian?

Since it is so hard to measure a person’s beliefs and concepts, would it not be better to test his conversion by means of changes in his life? Can we not define a Christian as a person who goes to church on Sunday, and who does not drink liquor or smoke? Here, too, the change at conversion may not be dramatic. There is no church for Papayya to attend. The circuit preacher may call only a half dozen times a year. Papayya cannot read the Scriptures. His theology is found in the few Christian songs he has learned to sing. To be sure, he no longer worships at the Hindu temple, but otherwise his life is much the same. He carries on his caste occupation and lives as most other villagers do. Is he then not a Christian?

Conversion and category differencesWhat then does it mean to be a Christian?

Before we can answer this question we must look more closely at our own thought patterns—at what we mean by the word “Christian.” This word, like many other words, refers to a set of people or things that we think are alike in some manner or other. It refers to a category that exists in our minds. To be sure, God, looking at the hearts of people, knows who are his. It is he who one day will divide between the saved and the lost. But here on earth, we as humans pass judgment, we decide for ourselves who is a Christian, and, therefore, what it means to be a Christian. What criteria do we commonly use?

Before we answer this question, we must ask an even more fundamental question: what kind of category are we going to use? Modern studies of human thought (see bibliography) show us that our mind forms categories in a least three different ways, and each of the three kinds of categories had its own structural characteristics. For our discussion here we will look at two of these types: (1) bounded sets and (2) centered sets.21

1. Bounded sets:Many of our words refer to bounded sets:

“apples,” “oranges,” “pencils,” and “pens,” for instance. In fact, the English language, probably borrowing from the Greek, uses bounded sets for

21 In addition to these two, there is a third and possibly a fourth type of category, namely fuzzy sets of one or two types. To be precise these should be referred to as fuzzy subsets.

most of its nouns—the basic building blocks of the language.

What is a bounded set? How does our mind form it? In creating a bounded set our mind puts together things that share some common characteristics. “Apples,” for example, are objects that are “the firm fleshy somewhat round fruit of a Rosaceous tree. They are usually red, yellow, or green and are eaten raw or cooked.”22

Bounded sets have certain structural characteristics—that is, they force us to look at things in a certain way (see Figure 2). Let us use the category “apples” to illustrate some of these.

a. The category is created by listing the essential characteristics that an object must have to be within the set. For example, an apple is (1) a kind of “fruit” that is (2) firm, (3) fleshy, (4) somewhat round, and so on. Any fruit that meets these requirements (assuming we have an adequate definition) is an “apple.”

b. The category is defined by a clear boundary. A fruit is either an apple or it is not. It cannot be 70% apple and 30% pear. Most effort in defining the category is spent on defining and maintaining the boundary. In other words, not only must we say what an “apple” is, we must also clearly differentiate it from “oranges,” “pears,” and other similar objects that are not “apples.”

c. Objects within a bounded set are uniform in their essential characteristics. All apples are 100% apple. One is not more apple than another. Either a fruit is an apple or it is not. There may be different sizes, shapes, and varieties, but they are all the same in that they are all apples. There is no variation implicit within the structuring of the category.

d. Bounded sets are static sets. If a fruit is an apple, it remains an apple whether it is green, ripe, or rotten. The only change occurs when an apple ceases to be an apple (e.g. by being eaten), or when something like an orange is turned into an apple (something we cannot do). The big question, therefore, is whether an object is inside or outside the category. Once it is within, there can be no change in its categorical status.

2. “Christian” as a bounded set:What happens to our concept of “Christian” if

we define it in terms of a bounded set? If we use the above characteristics of a bounded set we come up with the following:

a. We would define “Christian” in terms of a set of essential or definitive characteristics. Because we cannot see into the hearts of people, we generally choose characteristics that we can see or hear, namely

22 A composite definition based on the Oxford and the Thorndyke dictionaries.

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tests of orthodoxy (right beliefs) or orthopraxy (right practice) or both.

For example, some define a Christian as a person who believes (gives verbal acknowledgement to ) a specific set of doctrines such as the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, and so on. Some make such lists quite long and add on specific doctrines of eschatology or soteriology Others, convinced that true “belief” is more than a mental argument with a set of statements, look for the evidence of belief in changed lives and behavior. A Christian, then, is one who does not smoke or drink alcohol, and so on.

b. We would make a clear distinction between a “Christian” and a “non-Christian.” There is no place in between. Moreover, maintaining this boundary is critical to the maintenance of the category. Therefore it is essential that we determine who is a Christian and who is not, and to keep the two sharply differentiated. We want to make sure to include those who are truly Christian and to exclude as heretics those who claim to be but are not. To have an unclear boundary is to undermine the very concept of “Christian” itself.

c. We would view all “Christians” as essentially the same. There are old experienced Christians and young converts, but all are Christian.

d. We would stress evangelism as the major task—getting people into the category. Moreover, we would see conversion as a single dramatic event—crossing the boundary between being a “non-Christian” and being a “Christian.” To do so a person must acquire the defining characteristics which we have outlined above. Crossing the boundary is a decision event. Once a person is a Christian he is 100% Christian. There is essentially (not required by the structure of the category) nothing more for him to acquire. He might grow spiritually, but this is not an essential part of what it means to be a Christian.

Let us return, for a moment, to Papayya. If we think of “Christian” as a bounded set, we must decide what are the definitive characteristics that set a Christian apart from a non-Christian. We may do so in terms of belief in certain essential doctrines. But here we face a dilemma. If we reduce these to so simple a set that we say Papayya has truly become a

Christian (that he has acquired all of the beliefs necessary to become a Christian) are we not in danger of settling for cheap grace? Furthermore, how do we handle the fact that Papayya views the doctrines we do require in different thought forms? Must these be corrected before we are convinced that he is a real Christian?

On the other hand, if we raise the basic requirements for being a Christian too high, we make it impossible for Papayya to become a Christian that night, or that year—for it would take more than a year of careful teaching before he could begin to understand our theological framework.

We face a similar problem in using changes in behavior to define a Christian. There will be changes in Papayya, to be sure, but many of them will not take place immediately. We may see little in the way of a dramatic change by tomorrow. Is he then not a Christian?

3. Centered sets:Could it be that our problem with

deciding whether Papayya is or is not a Christian has to do with the way we form our mental category “Christian”? But there are other ways to form categories. A second way is to form centered sets. A

centered set has the following characteristics:a. It is created by defining a center, and the

relationship of things to that center (see Figure 2). Some things may be far from the center, but they are moving towards the center, therefore, they are part of the centered set. On the other hand, some objects may be near the center but are moving away from it, so they are not a part of the set. The set is made up of all objects moving towards the center.

b. While the centered set does not place the primary focus on the boundary, there is a clear division between things moving in and those moving out. An object either belongs to a set or it does not. The set focuses upon the center and the boundary emerges when the center and the movement of the objects have been defined. There is no great need to maintain the boundary in order to maintain the set. The boundary is so long as the center is clear.

c. Centered sets reflect variation within a category. While there is a clear distinction between things moving in and those moving out,23 the objects within the set are not categorically uniform. Some may be near the center and others far from it, even

23 Between 4 and not 4. This is the law of the excluded middle. While it is part of bounded and centered sets, the law does not hold for fuzzy sets.

Figure 2. Bounded and Centered Sets

CENTERED

BOUNDED

Figure 2. Bounded and Centered Sets

CENTERED

BOUNDED

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though all are moving towards the center. Each object must be considered individually. It is not reduced to a single common uniformity within the category.

d. Centered sets are dynamic sets. Two types of movements are essential parts of their structure. First, it is possible to change direction—to turn from moving away to moving towards the center. From being outside to being inside the set. Second, because all objects are seen in constant motion, they are moving, fast or slowly, towards or away from the center. Something is always happening to an object. It is never static.

Illustrations of centered sets are harder to come by in English, for English sees the world largely in terms of bounded sets. One example is a magnetic field in which particles are in motion. Electrons are those particles which are drawn towards the positive magnetic pole, and protons are those attracted by the negative pole.

4. “Christian” as a centered set:How would the concept “Christian” look if we

were to define it as a centered set?a. A Christian would be defined in terms of a

center—in terms of who is God. The critical question is, to whom does the person offer his worship and allegiance? This would be judged, in part, by the direction a person faces and moves. A Christian has Christ as his God. Christ is his center if he moves towards Christ—if he seeks to know and follow after Christ.

From the nature of the centered set, it should be clear that it is possible that there are those near the center who know a great deal about Christ, theology, and the church, but who are moving away from the center. These are the Pharisees. On the other hand, there are those who are at a distance—who know little about Christ—but they may be Christians for they have made Christ their Lord. He is the center around which their life revolves.

b. There is a clear division between being a Christian and not being a Christian. The boundary is there. But there is less stress on maintaining the boundary in order to preserve the existence and purity of the category, the body of believers. There is less need to play boundary games and to institutionally exclude those who are not truly Christian. Rather, the focus is on the center and of pointing people to that center.

There is a recognition of variation among Christians. Some are closer to Christ in their knowledge and maturity, others have only a little knowledge and need to grow. But all are Christian, and all are called to move even closer to Christ.

By recognizing variance, the centered set avoids the dilemma of offering cheap grace to make it possible for the ignorant and the gross sinners to become Christians without lengthy periods of training and testing. Growth after conversion is an intrinsic part of what it means to be a Christian. A Christian is not a finished product the moment he is converted.

Two important dynamics are recognized. First there is conversion, which in a centered set means that the person has turned around. He has left another center or god and has made Christ his center. This is a definite event—a change in the God in whom he places his faith.24

But, by definition, growth is an equally essential part of being a Christian. Having turned around, one must continue to move towards the center. There is no static state. Conversion is not the end, it is the beginning. We need evangelism to bring people to Christ, but we must also think about the rest of their lives. We must think in terms of bringing them to Christian maturity in terms of their knowledge of Christ and their growth in Christlikeness. We must also think of the body of believers in terms of their growth over the centuries.

Stress on growth also means that every decision a Christian makes, not only his decision to become a Christian, must take Christ into account. Every decision throughout life moves him towards Christ or slows him down.25

If we were to define “Christian” as a centered set, the critical question regarding Papayya is not what he knows (although he obviously needs some knowledge) but has he made Christ his God—does he seek to follow Christ and to know him more fully?

ConclusionsWhat do we mean when we say that Papayya, an

illiterate peasant, has become a Christian? In answering this, it is clear that we must first clarify what we mean by the word—whether we are thinking in terms of bounded or centered sets. If we do not make this clear, we will only talk past each other, and our disagreements will often arise out of

24 The turning may take several steps, but there is a definite turning around which is distinct from growth. Note, too, that the stress is on a change in knowledge or action. Knowledge must be acquired, but that in itself is not enough. It is a decision, a change in faith, that is a critical factor.

25 In centered set terms, one might say that each decision moves a person towards or away from Christ, but that a person remains a Christian so long as he is faced towards Christ. Whether he can or cannot turn back to face away, and therefore lose his position as a Christian is a theological issue and is not determined by the structure of the category itself.

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subconscious presuppositions rather than out of theological differences.

A centered set approach to defining “Christian” corresponds more closely to what we see happening in mission and church growth. It also seems to correspond more closely with the Hebraic view of reality. But a centered set approach does raise some problems, at least for westerners who think primarily in terms of bounded sets. These problems often relate to the question, how do you organize an institution such as the church as a centered set? Is it not essential to maintain the boundaries by setting high standards for membership? On the other hand, the bounded set fits best with our western view of the world and our democratic ways of organizing associations such as the church.

Ultimately the question of whether we should see the term “Christian” as a bounded or as a centered set must be decided on theological, not pragmatic principles. But this demands that we think through all of the basic theological terms and decide which of these should be viewed as bounded sets, and which as centered sets.

Note: It is interesting to note that the independent church movements in India, such as Bhakt Singh, organize themselves in terms of centered sets. They have only loosely defined, or no church membership, and give leadership to a few elders at the center.

Bibliography

Black, Max, 1963. “Reasoning with loose Concepts,” Dialogue, 2, 1-12.

Cohen, P. J., & Hersh, R., 1967. “Non-Cantorian Set Theory,” Scientific American, 217: 15, 104-106.

Cohen, P. J., 1966. Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis.

Hashisaki, J., & Stoll, R. R., 1975. “Set Theory,” The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th Edition. Macropedia 16: 569-575.

Hatcher, W. S., 1968. Foundations of Mathematics.

Zadeh, L. A., 1965. “Fuzzy Sets,” Information and Control, 8, 338-353.

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“The Why and How of a True Biblical Foundation for Mission” by David Bosch

(Taken from Zending Op Weg Naar De Toekomst, J. Verkuyl, ed., Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1978, pp. 33-45. Used by permission.

Also reprinted as “Hermeneutical Principles in the Biblical Foundation for Mission,” Evangelical Review of Theology 17(4):437-451, Oct. 1993. )

It has become customary in writing on the “theology of mission”, to begin with a chapter on the “biblical foundation of mission”. The argument seems to be that we already know what “mission” is and that, once we have established the biblical validity of mission, we may proceed to the exposition of mission theory and methodology.

Verkuyl, in his Inleiding in de nieuwere zendingswetenschap, follows a different approach. The section on the “biblical foundation” comes up for discussion only after several introductory chapters which deal with the history of the study of mission. To me this seems to be a commendable approach. We cannot simply assume that our readers already know what “mission” is, neither that they would agree with our definitions. I would, in fact, have preferred to go beyond Verkuyl: the section on the “biblical foundations of mission” should be preceded not only by a survey of the study of the subject of missiology but also by an overview of the ways in which the Church, down through the centuries, has understood her missionary responsibility. This is, naturally, something different from the development of missiology as theological discipline. We usually assume far too easily that we can employ the Bible as a kind of objective arbitrator in the case of theological differences, not realizing that every one of us approaches the Bible with his own set of preconceived ideas about what is says. It is only after having engaged in the exercise of looking closely at the different ways in which the Church, during various stages of her history, has interpreted a specific issue, that we begin to understand the relativity of our own approach.

For our present subject all this means that it is of little avail to embark upon a discussion of the biblical foundations of mission unless we have first clarified some of the hermeneutical principles involved. Verkuyl is very much aware of this. He therefore, quite correctly, opens his treatment of the biblical foundations of the missionary mandate with a paragraph on hermeneutics.26

In earlier Roman Catholic missiology the hermeneutic problem in dealing with the biblical foundations of mission was of only secondary

26 J. Verkuyl, Inleiding in de Nieuwere Zendingswetenschap, Kampen: Kok, 1975, 122-124.

importance. In the second edition of his Inleiding tot de Missiewetenschap,27 Dr. Alph Mulder devotes only ten pages to what he calls “Bijbelse Missietheologie: and of these ten pages only a fraction deals with the problem of the actual foundation of mission. Much more time, energy and space is devoted to “traditional” and “dogmatic” theology of mission.

Protestants, on the other hand, have always prided themselves in the fact that they do what they do on the basis of what Scripture teaches. Still, in the case of the earliest Protestant missionaries, the Pietists and the Moravians, very little of a real biblical foundation for their missionary enterprises was in evidence. Wm. Carey was, in fact, one of the very first to have attempted to spell out such a foundation for the Church’s missionary mandate. A. H. Oussoren, who has studied Carey’s missionary principles carefully, says of him that he listened to the authority of Holy Scripture, that his missionary work was “founded on the firm, objective ground of the Word of God” whereas the Pieties were much more subjective in laying stress on the misery of the “poor heathens”.28

Carey’s hermeneutics has to be subjected to scrutiny, however. He based his entire case on the argument that the Great Commission (Matth. 28:18-20) was as valid in his day (1972) as it had been in the days of the apostle. This in itself may be hermeneutically acceptable (we will return to the Great Commission) but is assumes just a little too much. For one thing, it assumes that the validity of the missionary mandate can be founded on isolated texts, for another, that everybody would agree with Carey’s definition of what mission is.

Let us begin with the first assumption. Carey—like thousands of other missionary enthusiast since—has built his case almost exclusively on the commission of the risen Lord. Christ has commanded us to go into all the world, therefore it is incumbent upon us to go. When critical scholarship since the 19th century began to east doubts on the authenticity of Matth. 28:18-20 as a saying of Jesus, this caused a real crisis in missionary circles. It had

27 Bussum: Paul Brand N.V., 1950.28 Cf. A. H. Oussoren, William Carey, especially his Missionary

Principles, Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1945, 251.

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to be “proved” at all costs, that this was an authentic saying because the validity of the missionary enterprise was at stake.

The reader should not interpret me as saying that the Great Commission is not from Jesus; I am merely arguing that discussions on such issues may be jeopardised by factors issuing from a wrong hermeneutic. In Carey’s view mission was only justified on the basis of an explicit command of Jesus. Our approach, however, would rather be to show that a world wide mission is valid whether or not this was commanded explicitly by Jesus.

In other circles there developed a hermeneutical approach not entirely unrelated to that of Carey. The Bible was used as a mine from which “missionary texts” could be extracted. Most of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was undoubtedly “particularistic” and therefore hardly usable as a foundation for a world-wide mission. If, however, we searched carefully and persistently among the rocks and rubble we would find small nuggets of real gold-stories of pagans such a Ruth and Naaman, who accepted the faith of Israel, “universalistic” expressions in the Psalms and in Deutero-Isaiah, encounters between Jesus and non-Jews, such as the Roman centurion, etc. Sometimes there are no such clearly visible nuggets of gold, then the ore would have to be melted carefully and the invisible gold meticulously extracted for it via the elaborate processes of exegesis.

I am not saying that these procedures are illegitimate. They undoubtedly have their value. But their contribution towards establishing the validity should not be deduced from isolated texts and detached incidents but only from the thrust of the central message of both Old and New Testaments.29 What is decisive for the Church today is not the formal agreement between what she is doing and what some isolated biblical texts seem to be saying but rather her relationship with the essence of the message of scripture.

This brings us to the second assumption of Carey and of many others who followed after him: that we already know what “mission” is and now only have to discover it in Scripture. For most Western Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, from the Middle Ages down to our own times, mission meant the actual geographic movement from a Christian locality to a pagan locality for the purpose of winning converts and expanding the Western Church into that area. Because this movement largely coincided with the West’s colonising of the non-Western world, it was inevitably mixed with overtones of Western superiority, imperialism, power

29 See also Verkuyl. op. cit., 123.

and know-how and with the idea of the “haves” going out to the “have-nots”. It is not my intention to join in the popular contemporary chorus of disparaging the traditional Western missionary. By and large he was a breed fundamentally different from his colonising countryman. Nevertheless, the historical situation in which he lived could not but influence his theological understanding. So mission was understood in the typical, activistic Western categories of the crossing of (remote) geographical boundaries.

Mission was, moreover, defined almost exclusively as the verbal proclamation of an other-worldly message and a preparation for the hereafter. Consequences of mission, such as social and political changes, were, in essence, regarded as by-products. Other activities of the missionary societies, such as education and medical care, were only ancillaries to the verbal proclamation of the Gospel.

When theologians with preconceived ideas about mission, such as those we have just described, look at the Bible, it is obvious that they would judge that at least the Old Testament reveals a “thoroughly passive character” as far as mission is concerned.30 The same verdict has often been made about the Jesus of the gospels: the idea of a mission to the pagan world lay entirely outside his horizon. Adolf von Harnack was one of the first scholars to have come to this conclusion, and since then many others have followed suit. I believe, however, that the definition of mission which underlies this interpretation is open to question.

During recent decades there has been a remarkable shift in the Church’s understanding of mission. At least as far as the Protestant churches are concerned mission started its life as a foundling child. For a very long period it was, at best, tolerated on the fringes of the household of the Church, almost as though the Church was embarrassed by its existence. Since the 1930’s, however, mission has gained enormously in respectability. The foundling is now accepted as a legitimate child. The Tambaram Conference of 1938 made the first overture in this direction; the New Delhi Assembly of the World Council of Churches (1961) finally legalised the relationship.

All this gradually led to an escalation in the usage of the term “mission”. From being a mere footnote to the study of the Church, the study of the mission of the Church has developed into a theological discipline in its won right. The escalation of the usage of the term “mission”, however, also has a inflationary effect. “Mission” came to mean- as

30 Cf. F. Hahn Das Verständnis der Mission im Neuen Testament, NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1963, 14.

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Donald McGavran once put it- “any good activity at home or abroad which anyone declares of be the will of God”,31 and Stephen Neil rightly commented that, if everything was mission, then nothing was mission.

In spite of this inflationary spiral, however, some crucial elements-long neglected- in the biblical understanding of mission were rediscovered. The essential element remained: mission was the Church-crossing-frontiers, but the frontiers that had to be crossed were redefined. Mission, as we understand it now, is not necessarily a geographical movement from those who practise Christianity to those who do not practise it, neither does it have to be restricted to the verbal proclamation of the Gospel. Mission is, in fact, the totality of the task God has sent his Church to do in the world. In this statement everyone of the four words in italics are of crucial importance. The frontiers the Church will be crossing in executing this task may sometimes, indeed, be geographical; they may however be - and usually are- also ideological, cultural, religious, social, economic and ethnic.

What is at stake here is, naturally, more than just the crossing of frontiers as such. Mission is only mission if it aims at leading people to repentance and faith in Christ’s finished work of redemption, if it seeks to incorporate those it reached into the new Messianic community, and if it makes Christ’s finished work of redemption relevant to the frontiers that are being crossed. Much of the devaluation of the concept mission in our day is due to the way in which this indispensable concomitant to the crossing of frontiers has bee disregarded in contemporary theology.

Let us now take a closer look, first at the Old Testament and then at the New, to establish what the Scriptures say about a foundation of mission thus newly defined. As this has to be a very brief treatment we understandably have to be very selective. We concentrate on those elements that are usually neglected in discussions on the biblical foundation of mission.

As far as the Old Testament is concerned, it is vital to recognise that a missionary mandate cannot be derived from a few isolated universalistic passages. That this is a futile starting-point can be deduced from a close look at Deutero-Isaiah, who is usually regarded as one of the most “universalistic” prophets in the Old Testament, even to the extent of incorporating the pagan king Cyrus into God’s plan of salvation. yet in this same Deutero-Isaiah there is a recurring and devastating judgment on the idolatry of non-Israelites.

31 In D. McGavran (ed.), The Conciliar-Evangelical Debate: The Crucial Documents 1964-1976. South Pasadena: Wm. Carey Library, 1977, 241.

We would rather base the missionary significance of the Old Testament not on some universalistic text, but primarily on the fact that Yahweh reveals himself here as the One who champions the cause of the weak, the afflicted and the oppressed.32 This is why the “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex. 20:2), formed the cornerstone of Israel’s confession of faith. This distinguished Yahweh from all other gods. Because of their inability to do as he did they stand condemned (Ps. 82). He is the “father of the fatherless, the widow’s champion... God gives the friendless a home and brings out the prisoner safe and sound” (Ps. 68:5,6). So the people of Israel are being challenged: “Search into days gone by, long before your time...; search from one end of heaven to the other, and ask if any deed as mighty as this has been seen or heard... Or did ever a god attempt to come and take a nation for himself away from another nation, with a challenge, and with signs, portents, and wars, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm,... as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt in the sight of all?” (Deut. 4 :32, 34-35). Whereas the gods of the predominantly hierophanic religions laid emphasis on order, harmony, integration and the maintenance of the status quo, the violation of which would precipitate the wrath of the gods, Yahweh revealed himself as the God of change, the God who comes to the rescue of the poor and needy.

It was characteristic of Yahweh that he expected his elect to reveal the same compassion which he himself possessed. The purpose of election was service and where this service was withheld, election lost its meaning. Israel’s besetting sin was precisely that she interpreted election as favouritism. However, election was not primarily privilege but rather responsibility. Israel who was a stranger in Egypt had to show compassion to the stranger in her midst. The “alien” who lived with Israel had to be accepted without reserve. (cf. Num. 9:14, 15:14-16; Joshua 20:9).

Israel’s guilt in this connection is superbly illustrated in the book of Jonah, a discussion of which, quite correctly, takes pride of place in Verkuyl’s survey of the Old Testament foundation of mission.33 This short book has often, wrongly, been regarded as dealing with mission in the modern, Western understanding of the term: Here was a prophet who crosses remote geographical boundaries

32 C.f. also Ferdinand Deist, “The Exodus Motif in the Old Testament and the Theology of Liberation”,Missionalia, No. 2, Vol. 5 (Aug. 1977), 58-69, and C. J. Labuschagne, ,,De godsdienst van Israel en de andere godsdiensten”,Wereld en Zending, No. 1, Vol.4 (1975), 4-16.

33 Op. cit., 131-138.

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to proclaim God’s message to a pagan people! In reality, however, the story of Jonah does not aim at the conversion of pagans. It is much more concerned with the conversion of the elect people of God; more specifically, a conversion to a compassion comparable to that of Yahweh. What is being castigated is Jonah’s- and Israel’s- appropriation of God’s favour and compassion exclusively for themselves. The irony of the story is that Jonah knows that God is “gracious and compassionate, long-suffering ...and always willing to repent of the disaster” (Jonah 4:2), but that it never dawned upon him that all this could be made applicable to peoples other than Israel. The missionary significance of this midrash does not therefore lie in the physical journeying of a prophet of Yahweh to a pagan country but in the fact that Yahweh is compassionate and that this compassion knows no boundaries. As Verkuyl puts it: Jonah reproaches Yahweh for being the same to those outside the covenant as inside,34 and he adds that it is “remarkable and disturbing” that the book concludes with an open question in this regard.35

In addition to the Old Testament emphasis on Yahweh’s compassion for the downtrodden, and closely related to it, is the fact that the religion of Israel was a historical religion. This, too, has tremendous significance for the foundation of mission. The old Testament has often been an embarrassment to the missionary Church because of its apparently exclusive concentration on Israel. This embarrassment is, however, due to an inability to understand the Old Testament revelation as historical. History, in order to be history, has to be specific. The concentration on Israel, far from being an “unmissionary” element in the Old Testament, is precisely the opposite. Without this element of specificity, Yahweh’s salvation would have been a-historical. A careful reading of the Old Testament thus reveals the enormous missionary significance of Yahweh’s dealing with Israel. This already becomes apparent in the call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3)). This event refers back to the Babel episode in Gen. 11. Man’s attempt at obtaining salvation has failed miserably; now God begins with a new thing. What Babel has lost, is promised and guaranteed in the history of Abraham’s election. Gen. 12 follows Gen. 11: The entire history of Israel is nothing but the continuation of God’s dealings with the nations. Yahweh alone can make history by breaking out of the circle of the eternal return and by journeying into the future with this people, with Abraham out of Ur, with Israel out of Egypt, moving to the nations. Only

34 Ibid., 136.35 Ibid., 137.

a historical religion can be truly missionary. If on the other hand, we discover in the Bible nothing but “eternal, immutable truths”, the missionary dimension will be quickly dissipated.

There is a third element which is of vital importance for the Old Testament foundation of mission: it is, I believe, not accidental that what Verkuyl calls the “universalistic motif” in the Old Testament, reached its zenith specifically in the period of captivity.36 This is especially true of the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah. Quite contrary to what Israel might have thought, it is not in national triumph, but in national disaster that the possibility of being God’s witness would come to fruition. This is, above all, true of the ebedh Yahweh: being God’s witness to the world does not mean an aggressive campaign with much verbiage but a silent suffering on behalf of others. So Isa. 53 reveals both the highest and the deepest dimensions of mission in the Old Testament. In Ex. 19:5 Israel was called a “kingdom of priests”. She was allocated a priestly function in the world. The priest, by definition, does not rule; he serves. Isa. 53 shows that such service can, at times, consist in innocent suffering for the sake of others. The priest himself becomes, as it were, the sacrifice which he brings to the altar.

This happens at a time in history when Israel was, politically speaking, entirely insignificant. She appeared to have failed miserably in playing a role in the world. She has become the scum of the earth, “whom every nation abhors, the slave of tyrants” (Isa. 49:7). Yet, precisely at this moment of deepest humiliation (and self-humbling!), kings and princes will draw nearer to Israel “because of the Holy one of Israel who has chosen you” (Isa. 49:7).

This leads us naturally, to the last of the four elements in the Old Testament dimension of mission I would like to highlight: that Israel is not the subject of mission, but Yahweh himself. The “proclamation” is not the spoken word, but the events concerning the ebedh. He is brought into the court of law in order to witness in the law-suit between Yahweh and the nations. He is, however, a most extraordinary and, in fact, apparently useless witness, for he can neither talk nor see (Isa. 42: 8-20; 48:8-13)! the whole point seems to be that the message of this dumb and blind witness does not consist in verbal proclamation but merely by his existence and his experiences he is a witness for Yahweh. His mission consists in his being there for others.

This has sometimes been referred to as the “centripetal” dimension of mission in the Old Testament whereas, in the New testament, mission would be conceived of as “centrifugal”: If the Old

36 Ibid., 126.

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Testament people of God are obedient, the pagans will flock to Jerusalem, attracted by the light that shines forth from the holy city. In the New Testament, on the other hand, the emphasis is on going out from Jerusalem into all the world (cf. Acts 1:8).

Undoubtedly there is an element of truth in this distinction. The problem comes, however, when we - as Westerners tend to do - define mission in exclusively centrifugal categories (a definition of mission we have already challenged), and when we argue that the “centripetal” is absent from the New Testament This is by no means the case, as D. van Swigchem has shown in his Het missionair karakter van de christelijke gemeente volgens de Brieven van Paulus en Petrus.37

The four elements of an Old Testament missionary foundation we have selected - out of many - are very close inter-related. The God who has compassion on all is also pre-eminently the God of history, who uses the specific history of Israel s the arena for his dealings with the nations. He is also, as the compassionate One and the God of history, the One who turns human categories upside down: he uses the weak and the downtrodden as his instruments to draw the world to him. Ultimately, therefore, it is not Israel who is the missionary agent but God himself.

* * *

When we now turn to the New Testament we make the remarkable discovery that all four elements essential to an Old Testament understanding of mission can be found here as well. Far too often discussions about the Church’s missionary mandate were made dependent upon the question about the attitude of the historical Jesus to the Gentile mission. While this question is undoubtedly of theological significance for our understanding of the ministry of Jesus, it is of no more than secondary importance in our present investigation about the biblical foundation of mission. There would have been a post-Easter Gentile mission even if Jesus had never been in contact with non-Jews and never said anything about them. That he did meet non-Jews and did say some surprising things about them should not be interpreted as a motive for the Church to engage in a Gentile mission but as a consequence of the essentially missionary dimension of God’s revelation in him.

As in the Old Testament, one of key words for understanding the New Tetament’s essentially missionary character, is the word compassion. Jesus’ conduct in no way confirmed Jewish piety as

37 Kampen: Kok, 1955.

expounded by the Pharisees. Unlike them he did not gather disciples so that they might learn the torah from him. On the contrary, He questioned traditional Jewish values at crucial points and he did this especially by turning to the outcasts of society. To them he proclaimed the possibility of a new life on the basis of the love of God.

It is remarkable to note how the people to whom Jesus turned are referred to in the gospels. They are called the poor, the blind, the lame, the leper, the hungry, sinners, those who weep, the sick, the little ones, the widows, the captives, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the least, the last, those who are weary and heavily burdened, the lost sheep. It is also significant that, whereas all these designations suggest boundless compassion, the Pharisees referred to the same categories of people derogatorily as “the rabble who know nothing of the law”.

Jesus’ love and service acknowledges no bounds. He mixes with tax collectors, disreputable women and other shady characters. He even enters into the homes of pagans. He tells the story of the lost son, in which he undercuts all human righteousness by works and all pride of achievement, but he also tells the parable of the good Samaritan in which he denounces al Jewish national self-righteousness and pride of descent. In his sermon in Nazareth he explicitly says:

“He sent me to preach the Good News to the poor,

tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more,

tell blind people that they can see and set the down-trodden free, and go tell

everyonethe news that the Kingdom of God has

come.”(Luke 4 :18-20)

In the ensuing dispute he challenges the Nazareth synagogue with the stories of God’s universal compassion in the Old Testament.

In all this he categorically calls his disciples to the same kind of boundless compassion. After the parable of the Good Samaritan he asks the lawyer: “Who of these three, do you think, was neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” And the lawyer had to admit grudgingly: “It was the man who had compassion on him”. ( Luke 10:36).

Jesus sharpens and radicalises the ethical demands of the torah and concentrates all these demands in the command to love, more specifically: in the command to love the enemy (cf. Matth. 5:44). This kind of love excludes every vestige of vengeance in the disciple’s heart. I therefore believe that Joachim Jeremias quite correctly attributes the cause of the dispute, which followed upon Jesus’

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Nazareth sermon, to the fact that he dared to omit the reference in Isa. 1:2 to the “day of the vengeance of our God”.38 In the preaching of the period it was especially on these words that the emphasis was laid. In fact, any truly Jewish preacher would read this passage with the primary purpose of using it as a basis for an exposition of the coming vengeance of the Lord on Israel’s enemies. And now Jesus deliberately stops short of the announcement about vengeance! How unimaginable! To only read the portion about grace, not the portion about vengeance! This was unforgiveable, especially as it implied that the same attitude would be expected of his followers.

Jeremias points out that the same occurs elsewhere as well. In Jesus’ reply to John the Baptist (Matth. 11:5-6; Luke 7:22-23) he quotes freely three passages in Isaiah (29:18-19; 35:5-6; 61:1-2). What is significant is that in each of these passages there is an explicit reference of the wrath of God while Jesus omits these references. Martin Hengel is therefore correct when he asserts that the proclamation of Jesus hardly had less “missionary” character than that of his disciples after Easter. He also, with approval, quotes Erich Grässer who says: “The Church saw in Jesus the archetype of the missionary”.39

Another important aspect in the New Testament missionary dimension lies in its historical character. As is the case with the Old Testament, missionary enthusiasts have been embarrassed about the absence of absolutely clear references to a Gentile mission in the stories about Jesus of Nazareth. This embarrassment reveals an inability to appreciate the historical character of God’s revelation. Once again: history is specific, not general. Here it is specific in the extreme: God’s revelation was incarnated and concentrated in the history of this Man. Yet this in no way suggested that the rest of humanity was left untouched. On the contrary: God was touching humanity through this Man, he “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2Cor. 5:19).

History is moreover, by definition, an unfolding. It contains the idea of of fateful and decisive moments which inaugurate new, hitherto unknown events. And the gospel stories are straining towards the unfolding of these new events. Verkuyl puts it well: all Jesus’s encounters with non-Jews vibrate with the holy impatience of him, who, while temporarily limiting himself to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, is yearning for the day when salvation will in its fulness go out to the nations.40

38 Joachim Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956, 35-39.

39 Martin Hengel, ,,Die Ursprünge der christlichen Mission”, New Testament Studies, No. 1, Vol. 18 (1971), 35, 36.

40 Op. cit., 143.

And so it was. The first advances towards a Gentile mission proceeded from the “Hellenistic” groups within Jewish Christianity. To them this was the natural consequence of their understanding of the ministry of Jesus within the situation of contact with Gentiles in which they lived. They did not need a missionary command to engage in mission. In fact, what has become known as the Great Commission (Matth. 28:18-20) is no missionary command in the strict sense of the word. Verse 19 has usually been translated as though the real activity of the disciples was to be the “going” into all the world. The Church has therefore understood Matth. 28:18-20 almost exclusively in geographical categories. In reality, however, , as an aorist participle, is an auxiliary simply reinforcing the action of the main verb. It does not command the disciples to go into all the world. It is simply taking it for granted that they will do this, and so they are told that, while going into the world, their principal responsibility will be that of “making disciples”. The principal verb of the sentence is therefore and its meaning is explicated by the two participles that follow: baptising and teaching.41

There is, in fact, a remarkable analogy between Matth. 28:18-20 and Phil. 2:6-11. The latter passage also refers to the exaltation and universal rule of Christ after his humiliation and then adds, not as a command but as a logical consequence of his accession to the throne, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow...”The historical for the Gentile mission has come and it needs no explicit command.

Also the third dimension of the Old Testament understanding of mission is to be found in the New. In the Old Testament, so we said, the idea of mission reached its zenith in the period of the Babylonian captivity, more specifically in the suffering of the ebedh Yahweh in Isa. 53. In the New Testament the zenith is reached in the suffering of the Son of man, more explicitly on Calvary, where he gave his life as a ransom for many. What appeared to be disaster was, in fact, God’s way of victory.

Once again: this has vital consequences for the Church-in-mission. To follow the Rabbi of Nazareth did not mean studying the torah under his guidance, but identifying with his suffering. Nowhere does this come out as clearly as in Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians.42 Paul rejects here the conduct of the

41 Cf. also Peter O’Brien, “The Great Commossion of Matthew 28: 18-20. A Missionary Mandate or Not?” The Reformed Theological Review, No. 3. Vol. 35 (Sept.-Dec. 1976), 66-78.

42 See Horst Baum SVD, Mut zum Schwachsein—in Christi Kraft; Theologische Grundelemente einer missionarischen Spiritualität anhand von 2 Kor., St. Augustin: Steyler Verlag, 1977.

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“hawkers’ (2:17) who define mission in the categories of demonstrable success and triumphalism. In contrast to them Paul is a ‘captive’ (2:14) who prides himself in his weakness (12:9). As a matter of fact, weakness (, affliction (), and suffering () are key concepts in this epistle in which Paul has to defend his apostleship against the “superlative apostles” (11:5; 12:11) of Corinth who recommend themselves. Unlike them, he has this treasure in an “earthen vessel” (4 :7) of which his many sufferings (6:4-10; 1:23-28) give ample evidence. Moreover, suffering and affliction are normal experiences in the life of the apostle, but for those who can only think in terms of success they are . We should go even beyond that and quote those words of Paul, which are such a stumbling block to Protestant ears: “It is now my happiness to suffer for you. This is my way of helping to complete, in my poor human flesh, the full tale of Christ’s affliction still to be endured, for the sake of his body which is the Church” (Col. 1:24). To the Corinthians he says essentially the same thing: “So death is at work in us, and life in you” (2Cor. 4:12). True mission only manifests itself in a Church which agonises with the victims of this world. The difference between the Pauline mission and that of this opponents in Corinth in the Cross.

The last element in the New Testament view of mission we want to direct attention to, is that here, too, mission is understood as a matter of being rather than doing. The Church does not become missionary only when she crosses geographical boundaries. As a matter of fact, she may cross such boundaries without becoming missionary in the true sense of the world. She may be crossing geographical frontiers without crossing the many other frontiers that count so much more.

We have already referred van Swigchem’s book on the missionary character of the Christian Church in the letters of Paul and Peter. Especially in I Peter the conduct of the Christians forms the basis of all mission. This and this alone will convince the pagans (2:12) and put their ingorance and stupidity to silence (2:15). Apparently these Christians do not themselves publicise their faith. The pagans, however, ask them for an explanation. Of what? Of the hope they have within them (3:15)! This was so much inevidence that the pagans became both inquisitive and jealous. To put it in Pauline language: this was the way God uses to “reveal and spread abroad the fragrance of the knowledge of himself” (2Cor. 2:14). Wherever the apostle lives as “Christ-fragrance”, something happens to the surrounding people.

* * *

We have come to the end of our brief discussion of the why and how of a biblical foundation for mission. Our conclusion is that both Old and New Testament are permeated with the idea of mission. There is only one scriptural symbol that corresponds to the question of the dynamic and functional relation of the Church to the world. That symbol is mission. Verkuyl quotes Hendrik Kraemer who once said: “A Church which is not engaged in mission is a galvanised corpse”.43 We have to elucidate this statement by adding: not everything we call mission is indeed mission. Paul dismisses the claims of the “Hawkers” in Corinth that they are engaged in mission. They are not, in spite of all their expansion programmes. They are what Hans Hoekendijk once called “a club for religious folklore”. It is the perennial temptation of the Church to become just that. She may slip so easily into this situation, without even becoming aware of it. The only remedy for this mortal danger lies in challenging herself unceasingly with the true biblical foundation of mission.

43 Verkuyl, op. cit., 155.

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“Relation of Bible and Mission in Mission Theology” by Charles E. Van Engen

One of the most basic aspects of mission theology has to do with the relation of the Bible to mission theory and practice. Initially, one would think this would be obvious. Such is not the case. In each generation there is a need to reflect again on the way the Church uses or abuses Scripture with reference to its understanding of mission.

The Need to Approach the Bible as a WholeAccording to David Bosch,

We usually assume far too easily that we can employ the Bible as a kind of objective arbitrator in the case of theological differences, not realizing that (all) of us approach the Bible with (our) own set of preconceived ideas about what it says...This means that it is of little avail to embark upon a discussion of the biblical foundations of mission unless we have first clarified some of the hermeneutical principles involved (David Bosch 1978, 33).

Senior and Stuhlmueller end their magnificent work on The Biblical Foundations of Mission, stating that they did not mean to, “Imply that the biblical style of mission is absolutely normative for mission today. There is no definite biblical recipe for proclaiming the Word of God...Nevertheless there is a value in reflecting on the biblical patterns of evangelization” (1983, 332).Biblical scholars and mission practitioners have contribute to the confusion by ignoring each other for too long. Lesslie Newbigin (1986, and 1989) demonstrated that Western culture’s preoccupation with the origin of the created order and human civilization brought with it a degree of blindness to questions of purpose, design, and intention. To a large extent biblical scholars have followed this same path in their examination of the biblical text. With notable exceptions, their analysis of Scripture has seldom asked the missiological questions regarding God’s intentions and purpose.

On the other hand, the activist practitioners of mission have too easily superimposed their particular agendas on Scripture, or ignored the Bible altogether. Thus Arthur Glasser calls for a deeper missiological reflection on the biblical message.

All Scripture makes its contribution in one way or another to our understanding of mission...In our day evangelicals are finding

that the biblical base for mission is far broader and more complex than any previous generation of missiologists appears to have envisioned...In our day there is a growing impatience with all individualistic and pragmatic approaches to the missionary task that arise out of a proof-text use of Scripture, despite their popularity among the

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present generation of activistic evangelicals (1990, 26-27).44

Johannes Verkuyl advocates a similar change in hermeneutical approach. “In the past,” he says, “the usual method was to pull a series of proof-texts out of the Old and New Testaments and then to consider the task accomplished. But more recently biblical scholars have taught us the importance of reading these texts in context and paying due regard to the various nuances...One must consider the very structure of the whole biblical message (1978, 90).”45

The basic contours of a broader hermeneutic were explored thirty years ago in Part I of The Theology of the Christian Mission, edited by Gerald Anderson (1961, 17-94). Here G. Ernest Wright, Johannes Blauw, Oscar Cullmann, Karl Barth, Donald Miller, and F.N. Davey surveyed a wide range of biblical material, deriving from the Bible what the Church’s mission ought to be.46 Interestingly, at about the same time47, the role of Scripture in the missiological reflection of the Second Vatican Council (for example, in Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes Dinitus) closely followed this model as well (A.P Flanner, 1975, 350-440, 813-862). Subsequent papal encyclicals like Evangelii Nuntiandi and Redemptoris Missio have appealed to Scripture; though, this appeal has at times appeared like elaborate proof-texting to buttress pre-determined ecclesiastical agendas.

So, over the last several decades a significant global consensus has emerged with regard to the Bible and mission. As David Bosch explains it,

Our conclusion is that both Old and New Testaments are permeated with the idea of mission...(But) not everything we call mission is indeed mission...It is the perennial temptation of the Church to become (a club of religious folklore)...The only remedy for this mortal danger lies in challenging herself unceasingly with the true biblical foundation of mission (1978, 18-19)

Ways to Approach the Bible as a WholeAlthough we may agree that it is important for missiologists to deal with the whole of Scripture as a diverse unity, we are in need of a hermeneutical

method that enables us to do that. We cannot have mission without the Bible, nor can we understand the Bible apart from God’s mission. The Missio Dei is God’s mission. Yet the Missio Dei happens in specific places and times in our contexts. Its content, validity, and meaning are derived from Scripture, yet its action, significance, and transforming power happen in our midst. Even when we affirm that we will take the whole of Scripture seriously, we still need a basis on which to link the Bible in its numerous contexts, with the here-and-now of the context of our missionary endeavor today. In what follows, I will review four ways that others have suggested the connection be made, and then add a fifth for the reader’s consideration.

From AboveOne of the most common linkages found in theology of mission involves a “theology from above”. In Roman Catholic and main-line Protestant denominational mission alike, this has involved using church tradition as the link between the Bible and mission. The church interprets the Scriptures and through its teaching authority or its denominational mission structures it derives missional action from what it sees in Scripture. The extension of the institutional church and its agendas becomes the heart of mission. But there is a second method that falls in the “from above” category. This involves seeing the Bible as a source of commands for mission. William Carey was a champion of this method, basing most of his link with the Bible on the “Great Commission” of Matt. 28:18-20. This imperative type of biblical support is common in “evangelical” Protestant missiology, and especially in Church Growth Theory, as popularized by Donald McGavran’s unending appeal to Matt. 28:18-20.The basic problem with both these approaches is that the Scriptures themselves are not allowed to interact with the present contexts of our mission. They are mediated, reduced, and filtered either by the agendas of the institutional church, or by the guilt-based appeal of the one who expounds on the commands. Curiously, this approach causes Protestants that would avidly defend a Gospel of grace to fall into a pit of legalism when it comes to mission. When we

44 See also David Bosch (1980, 42-49) and J. Verkuyl (1978, 89-100) and J. Scherer (1987, 243).45 Verkuyl points to two works as exemplifying this approach: Johannes Blauw (1961), and A de Groot (1964). We could add the works of

Harry Boer (1961) Berkhof and Potter (1964), George Vicedom (1965), Bengt Sundkler (1965) Richard de Ridder (1971) John Stott (1976) J. Verkuyl (1978), David Bosch (1980, 42-49), Senior and Stuhlmueller (1983), Harvie Conn (1984), Dean Gilliland (1983), Rene Padilla (1980, 1985), Arthur Glasser (1990), and Ray Anderson (1991).

46 Their approach to the Bible represents a step forward from older attempts to give a “Bible basis” for mission, like those of Robert Glover (1946) and H.H. Rowley (1955).

47 This perspective was also dominant at the recent meeting of the International Association of Mission Studies in Hawaii in August, 1992 — due, in part, to the strong influence exerted at that gathering by conciliar missiologists from the older Protestant mainline churches of Europe and North America.

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place church tradition or missional command between the Bible and our mission context, we reduce the impact that Scripture can have in transforming the way we understand, exercise, and evaluate our missional action.

From BelowAfter World War II many Protestant churches and missions, especially those associated with the World Council of Churches, became concerned with “relevance.” Although commendable in many ways, a hermeneutic of relevance pushed much mission reflection to an almost purely “from below” perspective. This hermeneutic has dominated the World Council of Churches, exemplified most recently in the 1989 San Antonio meeting of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, with its heavy emphasis on “acts of faithfulness.” The starting point is not the Bible, but rather particular contextual agendas.48 Once these agendas have been determined, exemplary cases are sought in the Bible to illustrate and validate the pre-determined activity.

But “evangelicals” should not judge the “ecumenical” stance too harshly. When evangelicals need to find justification for doing mission activities involving development, health, church planting, education, or urban ministries, they invariably scramble around the pages of the Bible to find illustrative cases (sometimes oddly-chosen minute texts read in a literal and biblicist fashion) to legitimize their already-determined agendas.Although the positive side of this approach is its contextual commitment, the down-side is its loss of the normativity of Scripture. The Bible is not allowed to critique the assumptions, motivations, or rightness of the action itself — it is used only as a justification for what has already been pre-determined. This mission is not God’s. It belongs to the practitioners. The text is used primarily as a justification of the activity.

The Hermeneutical Circle of Liberation Theology

The idea of “the hermeneutical circle” has been around since the early 1800’s, and is often associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher, along with others like Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, and Georg Gadamer.49 But Latin American Liberation theologians

transformed the concept into an intentional, creative, and revolutionary methodology.Perhaps the best liberationist articulation of the hermeneutical circle to link Bible and mission may be found in Juan Luis Segundo (1976).50 Segundo outlined four decisive steps in the process of the hermeneutical circle. First, we experience reality, which leads us to ideological suspicion. Secondly, there is the application of our ideological suspicion to our understanding of reality in general, and to Scripture and theology in particular. Third, we experience a new way of perceiving reality that leads us to the exegetical suspicion that the prevailing interpretation of the Bible has not taken important pieces of data into account. This calls for re-reading the biblical text. Fourth, we develop a new hermeneutic, that is, we find a new way of interpreting Scripture with the new perceptions of our reality at our disposal. This leads us to look again at our reality, which begins the process all over again.Through their intentional and positive formulation of the hermeneutical circle, and by adding particular contextual data to the equation, Latin American Liberation theologians offer missiology a very creative way of linking Bible and mission. (Cf. Guillermo Cook, 1985.) But Latin American Liberation Theology tends to reduce this new hermeneutical method to narrow socio-economic and political agendas, due in part to the heavy borrowing of European and Marxist socio-political theory. (Cf. Rebecca Chopp, 1986.) This in turn shrinks the basis on which the Bible is being read. The method would look different if the analysis of the reality were itself governed by Biblical perspectives.

Critical Hermeneutics Through Mission Paradigms

We all mourn David Bosch’s untimely and unfortunate death. Prior to his going, David Bosch was able to finish what will be considered his magnus opus: Transforming Mission. One of the most helpful parts of Bosch’s monumental work is the hermeneutical methodology he illustrates.Bosch begins by affirming, “We cannot, with integrity, reflect on what mission might mean today unless we turn to the Jesus of the New Testament, since our mission is ‘moored to Jesus’ person and ministry’“ (Bosch 1991, 22: quoting from Hahn 1984, 269. But Bosch goes on,

48 This perspective was also dominant at the recent meeting of the International Association of Mission Studies in Hawaii in August, 1992 — due, in part, to the strong influence exerted at that gathering by conciliar missiologists from the older Protestant mainline churches of Europe and North America.

49 See, for example, Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (1989); Richard Muller (1991, 186-214); and Mark Branson and Rene Padilla (1986).50 See also Gustavo Gutierrez (1974), Guillermo Cook (1985), Clodovis Boff (1987), Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff (1987), Rene Padilla

(1985), Mark L. Branson and Rene Padilla (1986), Samuel Escobar (1987), Jose Miguez Bonino (1975), and Roger Haight (1985).

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To affirm this is not to say that all we have to do is to establish what mission meant for Jesus and the early church and then define our missionary practice in the same terms, as though the whole problem can be solved by way of a direct application of Scripture...(Due to both historical and socio-cultural gaps between then and now), a historico-critical study may help us to comprehend what mission was for Paul and Mark and John but it will not immediately tell us what we must think about mission in our own concrete situation (1991, 23).

Bosch, then, offers a new approach to the problem by drawing from the theory of paradigm-construction that Hans Küng and David Tracy (1989) adapted from the philosophy of science.51 Bosch’s suggestion is to recognize that there are several self-definitions being offered both in the biblical text as well as in our modern contexts. Thus, “the approach called for requires an interaction between the self-definition of early Christian authors and actors and the self-definition of today’s believers who wish to be inspired and guided by those early witnesses” (1991, 23). This in turn would move us to re-read the biblical text, incorporating the newer sociological analysis of the Bible in its various contexts, then going beyond them to a series of self-definitions of mission for today’s contexts. Bosch calls this “critical hermeneutics.”

The critical hermeneutic approach goes beyond the (historically-interesting) quest of making explicit the early Christian definition, however. It desires to encourage dialogue between those self-definitions and all subsequent ones, including those of ourselves and our contemporaries...The challenge to the study of mission may be described...as relating the always-relevant Jesus event of twenty centuries ago to the future of God’s promised reign by means of meaningful initiatives for the here and now...

The point is that there are no simplistic or obvious moves from the New Testament to our contemporary missionary practice. The Bible does not function in such a direct way. There may be, rather, a range of alternative moves which remain in deep tension with each other but may nevertheless all be valid. (1991, 23-24).52

Following this method, Bosch examines what he calls the “missionary paradigms” of Matthew, Luke, and Paul. Bosch does not try to reconcile the distinct paradigms of mission he finds in the New Testament. Although he demonstrates the internal coherence and consistency of each paradigm within itself, he shows no compulsion to develop coherence or consistency between paradigms. In fact, he seems to feel that the breadth of their differences is precisely what may offer new linkages between the New Testament paradigms and the other five paradigms of mission that Bosch traces throughout the mission history of the church.53

In the end, Bosch tantalizes us by suggesting a host of “elements of an emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm,” but he does not help us construct it. Thus we need to find a way to build on Bosch’s work and go a step further.

The Bible as a Tapestry of God’s Action in the World

One way to build on Bosch’s hermeneutical method is to approach Scripture from the perspective of a number of themes and sub-themes (or motifs) of God’s action in the world. As seen in the diagram below, this approach would view the Bible as a tapestry, with the woof (horizontal) threads of various themes and motifs interwoven in the warp (vertical) of each context’s historical situation. This yields a perspective simultaneously involving a view “from above” and “from below.”

The themes may be approached “from above” because they are the action of God in history. They are “from below” because they occur in the midst of human history in the stories of men and women in context. Maybe this is what Johannes Verkuyl had in mind when he suggested the Universal Motif, Rescue and Liberation, the Missionary Motif, and the Motif of Antagonism as the place to begin formulating a biblical foundation for mission. (Verkuyl, 1978, 91-96).

By viewing the Scriptures as an interwoven tapestry, we can affirm the Bible as a unified whole and also deal intentionally with the diversity of the history and cultures of the Bible. (Cf. Glasser, 1990, 9; and Van Engen, 1978, 160-166) This is not an allegorical approach, nor is it purely literalist or literary. We are not advocating a simple one-to-one correspondence of biblical response to perceived felt-needs, nor is it strictly a matter of discovering “dynamic equivalence.” (Cf. Charles Kraft, 1981.) Rather, we are seeking an intimate interrelationship

51 See, for example, Ian Barbour 1974, Thomas Kuhn 1962 and 1977, Imre Lakatos 1978, Stephen Toulmin 1977, and Nancy Murphy 1990.52 Bosch’s thought in terms of theology of mission seems to echo what Paul Hiebert has offered from an anthropological perspective in what he

calls, “critical contextualization.” See, e.g., Paul Hiebert 1978, 1987, and 1989.53 For a friendly critique of Bosch’s approach, see J.G. du Plessis 1990.

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of text and new contexts through the vehicle of particular themes or motifs that bridge the text’s initial context with today’s contexts of mission. This, then, provides a creative interaction of word and deed throughout the history of God’s missionary activity. Such a critical hermeneutic helps us get away from finding a few proof-texts or isolated nuggets in the Bible to buttress our missional agendas. It goes beyond the search for a few “keywords” of the Gospel that might lend themselves for missiological reflection. And it is broader and deeper than a set of commands that may be external to the People of God and to their context, both old and new.

Mos

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Clan

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The Bible as a Tapestry of Missional Themes and Motifs in Context

(Illustration by Shawn Redford)

This approach calls us to take seriously the uniqueness of each biblical context in terms of its history, sociology, anthropology, and grammatical peculiarities. We must be able, therefore, to use all that we have learned so far from source, form, redaction, history, rhetoric, and canon criticism. (Cf. Richard Muller, 1991, 194-196.) But we must go beyond these to ask the missiological questions of God’s intention in terms of the Missio Dei as that occurs in word and deed in each particular context. (See Bosch, 1991, 21.) This method involves a critical hermeneutic that attempts to discover the particular “self-definition” (Bosch, 1991, 23) of God’s people in a particular time and place — and then challenges all subsequent self-definitions, including our own.

Daniel Shaw (following Dye, 1980) demonstrated from anthropology that the various contexts in biblical history can be described through the use of a “three cultures model” of kinship, peasant, and industrial societies (Shaw, 1988, 31-33). Yet interwoven throughout these radically-different contexts are clearly-identifiable themes and motifs in a word-deed conjunction of God’s self-definition of missional revelation throughout human history. To do this, the biblical data must be broken down to focus on specific themes and motifs that course their way through the tapestry of God’s mission. As shown in The Word Among Us (Gilliland, 1989, 74-100), the concept of God’s covenantal relationship with God’s chosen People (“I will be your God and you will be my people.”) is a theme that, though always the same, is radically different in each context.

But this is only half the story. The themes and motifs selected from the biblical narrative are chosen precisely because they interface with specific deep-structure themes or motifs of the worldview of the people in a specific missional context (Cf. Shaw, 1988, 193-194). As we delve more profoundly into the deep-level meanings of a culture, we will encounter certain themes and motifs that are central to that culture’s worldview. These worldview themes provide the connecting links whereby the self-definition of the People of God at a particular time in biblical history can be associated with the self-definition of the mission of God’s People in that new context. The variety of biblical contexts where the theme or motif may appear provide a number of closer or more remote contextual comparisons with the ways in which the theme may work itself out in the modern context. Such new manifestations of ancient motifs seems to be what Lammin Sanneh meant by the “translatability of Christianity.” (1989, 215).

By way of illustration, we could mention the following themes: the mission of the remnant, mission through dispersion of refugees, God’s mission as a “tree of life” whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, the place of human encounter with the divine, mission and washing, forgiveness, refreshment, water, mission and wholistic healing, mission and true (or false) prophets, mission and God’s rule over all nations, mission and monotheism (versus poly- and henotheism), mission and wealth and poverty, mission and the stranger in our midst, mission as light/illumination in darkness/blindness, mission as “a light to the Gentiles”, mission and food,

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eating, table fellowship, mission as reconciliation, return, re-creation.54

In selecting only certain themes as threads out of both the biblical tapestry and the contextual worldview, we may narrow the Gospel too much. On the other hand, if we end up with too large a list of seemingly unrelated themes, we cannot achieve a cohesive and consistent missiology. But neither of these problems need necessarily arise. Rather, if we are able to discover an integrating idea that holds together a number of these themes and motifs, we may be able to construct a truly biblical basis of mission for a particular context. (Cf. Van Engen, 1987, 523-525.)

Bosch’s concept of the missionary God of history and God of compassion that radically transforms humanity was for him just such an integrating central idea that allowed biblical missiology to impact the South African context (1978, 44). For Verkuyl and Glasser, along with many of others, the Kingdom of God provided the necessary unifying idea. The concept of covenant or the glory of God might also serve as viable integrating ideas. The point is that the themes selected, their mutual interaction, and the particular integrating idea that presents itself to hold them together — all these must arise from the interaction of the themes as self-definitions both in their biblical contexts and in the new missionary context. As Arthur Glasser has said it,

We have rather deliberately chosen the Kingdom of God as the particular diachronic theme most seminal to understanding the variegated mission of the people of God touching the nations (1990, 9,13).

Bible and mission? May all of us involved in missiological reflection continue to explore new methods, whereby we may preserve the unique authority of Scripture as our only rule of faith and practice — yet allow it to question, shape, direct, and deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, our ongoing participation in God’s mission.

REFERENCES CITEDAnderson, Gerald H, edit.

1961 The Theology of the Christian Mission (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill).

Anderson, Ray1991 The Praxis of Pentecost: Revisioning the Church’s Life

and Mission (Pasadena, Fuller Theological Seminary).Arias, Mortimer

1984 Announcing the Reign of God: Evangelization and the Subversive Memory of Jesus (Phil.: Fortress).

Barth, Karl1933 The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford U. Press).

Berkhof, Hendrikus1985 Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics (G.R.:

Eerdmans).Berkhof, Hendrikus and Philip Potter

1964 Keywords of the Gospel (London: SCM).Bosch, David J

1978 “The Why and How of a True Biblical Foundation for Mission” in: Gort Jerald D., edit., Zending Op Weg Naar de Toekomst: Essays Aangeboden Aan Prof. Dr. J. Veruyl (Kampen, J.H. Kok).

1980 Witness to the World (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott).

1991 Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis).

Blauw, Johannes1962 The Missionary Nature of the Church (G.R.:

Eerdmans).Boer, Harry

1961 Pentecost and Mission (G.R.: Eerdmans).Branson, Mark Lau and C. Rene Padilla, edits.

1986 Conflict and Context: Hermeneutics in the Americass (G.R.: Eerdmans).

Chopp, Rebecca S.1986 The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation

and Political Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis).Conn, Harvie M.

1984 Eternal Word and Changing Worlds: Theology, Anthropology and Mission in Trialogue (G.R.: Zondervan).

Cook, Guillermo1985 The Expectation of the Poor: Latin American Basic

Ecclesial Communities in Protestant Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis).

Costas, Orlando1982 Christ Outside the Gate: Mission Beyond Christendom

(Maryknoll: Orbis).de Groot, A.

1964 De Bijbel over het Heil der Volken (Roermond: Romens).

de Ridder, Richard1971 Discipling the Nations (G.R.: Baker).

Escobar, Samuel1987 La Fe Evangelica y las Teologias de la Liberacion (El

Paso: Casa Bautista de Publicaciones).Flannery, A.P, edit.

1975 Documents of Vatican II (G.R.: Eerdmans).Gilliland, Dean

1983 Pauline Theology and Mission Practice (G.R.: Baker).Gilliland, Dean, edit.

1989 The Word Among Us: Contextualizing Theology for Mission Today (Dallas: Word).

Glasser, Arthur F.1990 Kingdom and Mission: A Biblical Study of the

Kingdom of God and the World Mission of the His People (unpublished course syllabus, Pasadena: FTS).

Glover, Robert 19 46 The Bible Basis of Mission (Los Angeles: Bible House

of Los Angeles).Gutierrez, Gustavo

1974 A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis).

54 An exploration of this method in the South African context was recently suggested by B. Wielenga (1992).

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Haight, Roger1985 An Alternative Vision: An Interpretation of Liberation

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1989 Paradigm Change in Theology (N.Y.: Crossroad).Miguez Bonino, Jose

1975 Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Phil.: Fortress).

Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, edit.1989 The Hermeneutics Reader (N.Y.: Continuum).

Muller, Richard A.1991 The Study of Theology: From Biblical Interpretation to

Contemporary Formulation (G.R.: Zondervan).Newbigin, Lesslie

1986 Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (G.R.: Eerdmans)

1989 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (G.R.: Eerdmans).Padilla, C. Rene

1980 “Hermeneutics and Culture — A Theological Perspective” in: John R.W. Stott and Robert Coote, edits. Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture (G.R.: Eerdmans), 63-78..

1985 Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (G.R.: Eerdmans).

Rowley, H.H.1955 The Missionary Message of the Old Testament

(London: The Carey Kingsgate Press).Sanneh, Lamin

1989 Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis).

Scherer, James A.1987 Gospel, Church, & Kingdom: Comparative Studies in

World Mission Theology (Minn.: Augsburg).Segundo, Juan Luis

1976 The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis).Senior, Donald and Carroll Stuhlmueller

1983 The Biblical Foundations of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis).

Shaw, R. Daniel1988 Transculturation: The Cultural Factors inTranslation

adn Other Communication Tasks (Pasadena: William Carey).

Stott, John R.W.1975 Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers

Grove: InterVarsity).Sundkler, Bengt

1965 The World of Mission (G.R.: Eerdmans).Van Engen, Charles

1981 The Growth of the True Church (Amsterdam: Rodopi).1989 “The New Covenant: Knowing God in Context,” in:

Dean Gilliland, edit. The Word Among Us (Dallas: Word).

1990 “A Broadening Vision: Forty Years of Evangelical Theology of Mission, 1946-1986,” in: Joel Carpenter and Wilbert Shenk, edits. Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Mission, 1880-1980 (G.R.: Eerdmans).

1991 God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church (G.R.: Baker).

1991 “The Effect of Universalism on Mission Effort,” in: William Crockett and james Sigountos, edits. Through No Fault of Their Own: The Fate of those Who Have Never Heard (G.R.: Baker).

Verkuyl, Johannes1978 Contemporary Missiology: an Introduction (G.R.:

Eerdmans).Vicedom, Georg F.

1965 The Mission of God: An Introduction to a Theology of Mission (St. Louis: Concordia).

Willis, Wendell, edit.1987 The Kingdom of God in 20th-Century Interpretation

(Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson).

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by: Charles Van Engen“What Is Theology of Mission” by Charles E. Van Engen

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“What Is Theology of Mission” by Charles E. Van Engen

55,56 In The Concise Dictionary of the Christian Mission, Gerald Anderson defined theology of mission as, “concerned with the basic presuppositions and underlying principles which determine, from the standpoint of Christian faith, the motives, methods, strategy and goals of the Christian world mission” (Neil, Anderson and Goodwin, edits: 1971:594).

Theology of mission is a multi- and inter-disciplinary enterprise. It is a relatively new discipline, with its first text appearing in 1961, in a collection of essays edited by Gerald Anderson, entitled, The Theology of Christian Mission (Anderson: 1961). In that volume the tri-partite nature of theology of mission was clearly represented.

As shown in Figure 1, the theology of mission has to do with three areas, shown graphically by three inter-locking circles. Biblical and theology

Theology of mission is THEOLOGY (circle A in the diagram), because fundamentally it involves reflection about God. It seeks to understand God’s mission, God’s intentions and purposes, God’s use of human instruments in God’s mission, and God’s working through God’s People in God’s world.58 Thus theology of mission deals with all the traditional theological themes of systematic theology — but it does so in a way that differs from how systematic theologians have worked down through the centuries. The difference arises from the multi-disciplinary missiological orientation of its theologizing.

In addition, because of its commitment to remain faithful to God’s intentions, perspectives, and purposes, theology of mission shows a most fundamental concern over the relation of the Bible to mission, attempting to allow Scripture not only to provide the foundational motivations for mission, but also to question, shape, guide, and evaluate the missionary enterprise.59

Theology of mission is THEOLOGY OF (circle C in the diagram). In contrast to much systematic theology, here we are dealing with an applied theology. At times it looks like what some would call pastoral or practical theology, due to this applicational nature. This type of theological reflection focuses specifically on a set of particular issues — those having to do with the mission of the Church in its CONTEXT.

57 The three-arena nature of this method is not original with me. A number of others have highlighted something similar, particularly those who

59 See, e.g., Robert Glover: 1946; G. Ernest Wright: 1952; J. H. Bavinck: 1960: Gerald Anderson: 1961 in loco; Harry Boer: 1961; Johannes Blauw: 1962; Roland Allen: 1962; Richard De Ridder: 1971; George Peters: 1972; Orlando Costas: 1974, 1982, 1989; John Stott: 1976; Lesslie Newbigin: 1978; J. Verkuyl: 1978, chapter IV; David Bosch: 1978, 1991, 1993; Dean Gilliland: 1983; Gailyn Van Rheenen: 1983; William A. Dyrness: 1983; Donald Senior and Carroll Stuhlmueller: 1983; Roger Hedlund: 1985; Marc Spindler: 1988; Ken Gnanakan: 1989; Arthur Glasser: 1992; and Charles Van Engen: 1992, 1993. A combined bibliography drawn from these works would offer an excellent resource for examining the relation of Bible and mission.

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Theology of mission draws its incarnational nature from the ministry of Jesus, and always happens in a specific time and place. Thus circle C involves the missiological use of all the social science disciplines that help us understand the context in which God’s mission takes place.

psychological issues, the study of the relation of Church and state, and a host of other cognate disciplines to understand the specific context in which we are doing our theology of mission reflection. Such contextual analysis moves us, secondly, to more particular understanding of the context in terms of a hermeneutic of the reality in which we are ministering. This in turn, thirdly, calls us to hear the cries, see the faces, understand the stories, and respond to the living needs and hopes of the persons who are an integral part of that context.

A part of this contextual analysis today includes the history of the way the church in its mission has interfaced with that context down through history. The attitudes, actions, and events of the Church’s mission that occurred in your context prior to your particular reflection will colour in profound and surprising ways the present and the future of your own missional endeavors.

Thus you will find some scholars dealing with the history of theology of mission60 who, although they are not especially interested in the theological issues as such, are concerned about the effects of that mission theology upon mission activity in that context. They will often examine the various pronouncements made by church and mission gatherings (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Ecumenical, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic) and ask questions, sometimes polemically, about the results of these for missional action.61 The documents resulting from these discussions become part of the discipline of theology of mission.

Thirdly, theology of mission is specially oriented toward and for MISSION (circle B in Figure 1). The most basic reflection in this arena is found in the many books, journals, and other publications dealing with the theory of missiology itself.62 However, neither missiology nor theology of mission can be allowed to restrict itself to reflection only. As Johannes Verkuyl stated,

Missiology may never become a substitute for action and participation. God calls for participants and volunteers in his mission. In part, missiology’s goal is to become a “service station” along the way. If study does not lead to participation, whether at home or abroad, missiology has lost her humble calling. ... Any good missiology is

also a missiologia viatorum — “pilgrim missiology” (1978:6,18).

Theology of mission, then, must eventually emanate in biblically-informed and contextually-appropriate missional action. If our theology of mission does not emanate in informed action, we are merely a “resounding gong or clanging cymbal” (I Cor. 13:1). The intimate connection of reflection with action is absolutely essential for missiology. At the same time, if our missiological action does not itself transform our reflection, we have held great ideas — but they may be irrelevant or useless, sometimes destructive or counter-productive.

So our missional orientation that comes forth as a fruit of our theology of mission must translate into action. And missional action always occurs in a CONTEXT. This brings us back to circle C — and our pilgrimage of mission on-the-way begins again to reflect on a hermeneutic of the context, which in turn calls for a re-reading of Scripture that flows into new missional insights and action.

One of the most helpful ways to interface reflection and action is by way of the process known as “praxis.” Although there have been a number of different meanings described to this idea,63 it appears that Orlando Costas’ formulation is one of the most constructive.

“Missiology,” Costas says,

is fundamentally a praxeological phenomenon. It is a critical reflection that takes place in the praxis of mission... (It occurs) in the concrete missionary situation, as part of the church’s missionary obedience to and participation in God’s mission, and is itself actualized in that situation... Its object is always the world, ... men and women in their multiple life situations... In reference to this witnessing action saturated and led by the sovereign, redemptive action of the Holy Spirit, ... the concept of missionary praxis is used. Missiology arises as part of a witnessing engagement to the gospel in the multiple situations of life (1976: 8).

60 See, for example, Rodger Bassham: 1979; David Bosch: 1980; James Scherer: 1987, 1993a, 1993b; Arthur Glasser and Donald McGavran: 1983; Arthur Glasser: 1985; Efiong Utuk: 1986; James Stamoolis: 1987; and Van Engen: 1990.

61 See, for example, Donald McGavran: 1972; Donald McGavran, edit.: 1972; Arthur P. Johnston: 1974; Harvey Hoekstra: 1979; Roger Hedlund, edit.: 1981; and Donald McGavran: 1984; and David Hesselgrave: 1988. One of the most helpful recent compilations of such documents is James A. Scherer and Stephen Bevans, edits.: 1992.

62 Examples of some readily-accessible works would include J. H. Bavinck: 1977; Bengt Sundkler: 1965; Johannes Verkuyl: 1978; C. René Padilla: 1985; James Scherer: 1987; F. J. Verstraelen: 1988; David Bosch: 1980, 1991; Phillips and Coote: 1993; and Van Engen, Gilliland and Pierson: 1993. Clearly the most comprehensive work that will be considered foundational for missiology for the next decade is David Bosch: 1991.

63 See, e. g., Robert McAfee Brown: 1978, 50-51; Raul Vidales: 1975, 34-57; Spykman et al: 1988: xiv, 226-231; Robert Schreiter: 1985, 17, 91-93; Orlando Costas: 1976, 8-9; Leonardo and Clodovis Boff: 1987, 8-9; Waldron Scott: 1980: xv; Leonardo Boff: 1979, 3; Deane Ferm: 1986, 15; René Padilla: 1985, 83; Rebecca Chop: 1986, 36-37, 115-117, 120-121; Gustavo Gutierrez: 1984a, 19-32; Clodovis Boff: 1987, xxi-xxx; and Gustavo Gutierrez: 1984b, vii-viii, 50-60.

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The concept of “praxis” helps us understand that not only the reflection, but profoundly the ACTION as well are part of a “theology-on-the-way” that seeks to discover how the church may participate in God’s mission in God’s world. The ACTION is itself theological, and serves to inform the reflection, which in turn interprets, evaluates, critiques, and projects new understanding in transformed action. Thus the inter-weaving of reflection and actions in a constantly-spiraling pilgrimage offer a transformation of all aspects of our missiological engagement with our various contexts.

The reader may see from Figure 1, above, that the three circles are brought together by means of an “Integrating Theme” that constitutes the central idea interfacing all three circles. Because of the complexity of the inter- and multi-disciplinary task that is theology of mission, mission theologians have found it helpful to focus on a specific integrating idea that would serve as the hub through which to approach a re-reading of Scripture. This “Integrating Theme” is selected on the basis of being contextually-appropriate and significant, biblically relevant and fruitful, and missionally active and transformational.

Clearly we are trying to avoid bringing our own agendas to the Scriptures and superimposing them on Scripture. This was the mistake made by liberation theologians, from which they have not recovered. Rather, what is being sought is a way to bring a new set of questions to the text, questions that might help us see in the Scriptures what we had missed before.64 This new approach to Scripture is what David Bosch called, “critical hermeneutics.”65

As we re-read Scripture, we are faced with new insights, new values, and new priorities that call us to re-examine the motivations, means, agents, and goals of our missiology. This, in turn will call for re-thinking each one of the traditional theological loci. Thus we will find ourselves involved in a contextual re-reading of Scripture to discover anew what it means to know God in context. Robert McAfee Brown called this type of reflection, “Theology in a New Key” (1978), and “Unexpected News” (1984).

In Latin American theology, this theological process has especially focused on issues of christology and ecclesiology. In today’s missiological enterprise, it appears that we need to allow our re-reading to offer us new insights into the scope of content of our missiology, derived from a profound re-thinking of all the traditional theological loci.66

Due to the complex nature of the enterprise, it seems to work best to allow one’s reflection to flow through the focus of the “Integrating Theme,” that can help hold the various ideas together — particularly when we are moving from a re-reading of Scripture (circle A) to a praxiological action-reflection process of discovering the missiological implications of our re-reading of Scripture — toward circle B.

In 1987, the Association of Professors of Mission discussed at length what missiology is, and how it does its reflection. In the subsection dealing with theology of mission, it was said that,

The mission theologian does biblical and systematic theology differently from the biblical scholar or dogmatician in that the mission theologian is in search of the “habitus,” the way of perceiving, the intellectual understanding coupled with spiritual insight and wisdom, which leads to seeing the signs of the presence and movement of God in history, and through his church in such a way as to be affected spiritually and motivationally and thus be committed to personal participation in that movement...

Such a search for the “why” of mission forces the mission theologian to seek to articulate the vital integrative center of mission today... Each formulation of the “center” has radical implications for each of the cognate disciplines of the social sciences, the study of religions, and church history in the way they are corrected and shaped theologically. Each formulation supports or calls into question different aspects of all the other disciplines... The center, therefore, serves as both theological content and theological process as a disciplined reflection on God’s mission in human contexts. The role of the theologian of mission is therefore to articulate and “guard” the center, while at the same time to spell out integratively the implications of the center for all the other cognate disciplines (Van Engen: 1987, 524-252).

Conceptually we are involved here in something that philosophy of science has called “paradigm-construction” or “paradigm-shift.”67 We know that paradigm-shift is normally understood (especially in

64 For a more in-depth discussion on this issue, with supporting bibliographical comments, see Van Engen: 1993, 27-36.65 See David Bosch: 1991, 20-24.66 Harvie Conn has given us a summary form of just his sort of thing in 1993a, 102-103.67 See, e. g., Carl Hempel: 1965, 1966; Stephen Toulmin: 1961, 1972; Ian G. Barbour: 1974, 1990; Thomas Kuhn: 1962, 1977; James H. Fetzer:

1993a, 147-178; 1993b, Hans Küng and David Tracy, edits.: 1989, 3-33; and David Bosch: 1991, 349-362.

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Philosophy of Science) as a corporate phenomenon that occurs over a rather long period of time and involves the reflective community interacting with reference to a particular issue. However, David Bosch has initiated many of us into seeing paradigm-formation as a powerful way of helping us re-conceptualize our mission with reference to specific communities, in specific contexts.

In these terms, a paradigm becomes “a conceptual tool used to perceive reality and order that perception in an understandable, explainable, and somewhat predictable pattern” (Van Engen: 1992b, 53). It is, “an entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques, ... shared by the members of a given community” (Küng and Tracy: 1989, 441-442). Thus a paradigm consists of “the total composite set of values, world-view, priorities, and knowledge which makes a person, a group of persons, or a culture look at reality in a certain way. A paradigm is a tool of observation, understanding and explanation” (Van Engen: 1992b, 53).

The mission theologian takes utterly seriously the biblical text as text (circle A) and tries to avoid super-imposing particular agendas on the text. However, it is equally true, as Johannes Verkuyl has said, “if study does not lead to participation,.. missiology has lost her humble calling” (J. Verkuyl: 1978, 6). Thus we find that theology of mission is a process of reflection and action involving a movement from the BIBLICAL TEXT to FAITH COMMUNITY in its CONTEXT. By focusing our attention on an Integrating Theme, we encounter new insights as we re-read Scripture from the point of view of a contextual hermeneutic. These new insights can then be re-stated and lived out as biblically-informed, contextually-appropriate missional actions of the FAITH COMMUNITY in the particularity of time, worldview, and space of each particular CONTEXT in which God’s mission happens.

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Vicedom, Georg F.1965 The Mission of God: An Introduction to a Theology of

Mission (Transl. by A. A. Thiele and D. Higendorf from the German original, Mission Dei [1957]). St. Louis: Concordia.

Vidales, Raul1975 “Methodological Issues in Liberation Theology,”

Frontiers in Theology of Latin America. Rosino Gibellini, ed. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 34-57.

Winter, Ralph D. and Stephen Hawthorne, eds.1981 Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.

Pasadena: William Carey Library.Wright, G. Ernest

1952 God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital . London: SPC.

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by: Charles Van Engen“Methodology in Exegesis” by George E. Ladd

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“Methodology in Exegesis” by George E. Ladd

“Exegesis” means finding the author’s intended meaning of a text, whether scriptural or profane, regardless of the time or place where that text was written. Our concern is with the exegesis of texts in the New Testament. The work of exegesis may be broken down into several distinct steps, although in the actual work of exegesis, the exegete will not always be conscious of these several steps.

Textual. The exegete must first assure himself of the integrity of teach text he interprets. This requires at least an elementary knowledge of the materials, the principles, and the history of textual criticism. For the most part, we possess a sound New Testament text, but often questions will arise which involve the text. This will be true particularly for those who use the King James Version and find it frequently differing for the Revised Standard Version. The KJV was based upon the Textus Receptus which was an inferior text, based on much later manuscripts than those now available to us. For an outline of this discipline and illustrations, cf. chapter III of G. E. Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism.

Lexical. The second question is the meaning of words. Words derive their meaning from usage, and the context of New Testament Greek is the vernacular language of the day with a Semitic environment. The first tool the student needs is an excellent Lexicon, such as, W. F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament (Chicago, 1957). A good lexicon gives the student access to the conclusions of scholars who have mastered the entire corpus of Hellenistic and Septuagintal Greek. The intelligent student will wish to know something about the influences which enter into the formation of the Greek of the New Testament; see E. C. Colwell, “Greek Language” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, II, 479-487. One must do more than merely look up the meaning of a word in the lexicon. One must understand the idiom of the language. For instance, psyche means “soul”; but in Greek dualism, “soul” was capable of a separate existence when freed from the body, whereas “soul” (nephesh in the O.T.) is the life or animating principle of the body. See Mark 10:45. Aletheia means “truth”; but truth for the Greek meant correspondence to reality, while to the Hebrew, it meant reliability, trustworthiness (emeth in the O.T.). See John 1:17. The precise meaning of many words is debatable. Does morphe “form” (Phil. 2:6) mean “essence” as in classical Greek (J. B. Lightfoot) or has it derived its meaning

in O.T. Greek where it can mean “image” or possibly “glory”? Does harpagmos (Phil. 2:6) mean “an act of grasping,” “a thing to be seized,” “a thing to be tightly held onto”? Linguistically, all are possible. We are fortunate to possess a magnificent work, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. by G. Kittel, trans. by G. W. Bromiley, 6 volumes to date, which discusses all such questions in detail. For further discussion see G. E. Ladd, chapter IV in The New Testament and Criticism.

Grammatical or Syntactical. The student must next ask about the relationship between words, i.e., the grammar or syntax involved. This requires at least an elementary knowledge of Greek grammar and syntax. Often an important exegetical insight will depend upon the syntax of a Greek verb. Jesus said, Tetelestai (John 19:30) “it is finished.” This is a perfect tense, which indicates completed, perfected action. This is not a cry of relief that his sufferings were now over; it is a cry of victory that his work was complete. Acts 16:6 reads, “having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word in Asia.” The word is an aorist participle (koluthentes) which usually designates action antecedent to that of the main verb. In this case, Paul went through Phrygia and Galatia, after having been forbidden to preach in Asia, and suggests the North Galatian Theory. However, on rare occasions, the aorist participle has merely punctiliar action; in this case, the South Galatian Theory is possible: “They passed through... Phrygia and Galatia, (then) being forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia.”

It makes a great difference in preaching whether “The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God” (KJV), i.e., subjective genitive, or “faith in the Son of God” (RSV), i.e., objective genitive (Gal. 2:20). Again, is the “love of Christ” which controls me my love for Christ (objective genitive) or Christ’s love for me (subjective genitive)? These are two different theologies. All such problems require at least a modicum of knowledge of Greek grammar and syntax.

Historical. Every text has its own historical setting and the accurate student must interpret it in the light of history. Who were the Pharisees? What do we know about them? Why were they so violently opposed to Jesus? What are meats offered to idols (Rom. 14; I Cor. 8)? Why did this create a problem in the Pauline churches? What is the meaning of “the Son of Man”? Why did Jesus prefer this title to designate himself? What is the history of

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the term? What did it mean to the first century Jews whom Jesus addressed? The layman incorrectly assumes that it means humanity. What is the history of the term “Son of God”? In theological idioms it means deity, but the untutored reader may be amazed that it did not convey this meaning in Judaism. What is the history of the term? What new meaning did Jesus pour into it? What is the history of the concept of the Suffering Servant (Isa. 53) in Judaism? Why was it so hard for Jews, including Jesus’ disciples, to understand that the Messiah must die? Why did the cross continue to be a stumbling block to Jews (I Cor. 1:23)?

The exegete must ask about the historical setting of each text in the context of the whole book of which it is a part. When we ask about the historical setting and provenance of the four Gospels, we must answer, in all honesty, we have only partial knowledge; we must create hypotheses on the basis of such evidence as we have. The exegete must be able to distinguish between relative probability, possibility, and speculation. However, most of the Pauline epistles can be interpreted against a known historical setting; but even here, our knowledge is all too scanty. A vigorous debate now rages about the nature of the problem in the Corinthian church; to what extent was it Jewish, to what extent Graeco-Gnostic? Is Gnosticism a misleading term in N.T. times? The exegete must be alert to such problems which belong to the realm of New Testament introduction. For some of the theological problems involved in the question of history, see G. E. Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism, chapter 7.

Contextual. It is important to observe not only the historical setting of a given passage but also the literary setting which may often determine the meaning of a given passage. To cite only one illustration: the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 has been used as a text for evangelistic sermons to illustrate what it means to be lost. However, the context of the story is the complaint of the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus welcomes the fellowship of “publicans and sinners,” (the Am ha-aretz) who ignored the scribal traditions) and ate with them, thereby himself ignoring the scribal oral tradition. Jesus met their criticism by the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. However, the point of the three parables in their context is not the lost sheep but the seeking shepherd- not the lost coin but the searching housewife- not the lost son but the welcoming father. Jesus’ point was that God does not sit back waiting for lost men to turn to him, rather, in Jesus’ mission god is seeking out the lost as a shepherd seeks his sheep and as the housewife searches for the lost coin; and furthermore, god welcomes the undeserving penitent with free

unmerited grace, treating him not as a hired servant but as a son. From the setting, we know that these are parables about the nature of God expressed in the mission of Christ, not parables about lostness.

Comparative. A very important step in exegesis is the comparison of similar passages. This must be carried on at many levels. The meaning of a given passage must be compared with the teaching of similar passages by the same author. Parallel passages within the Synoptic Gospels must be compared and the effort made to account for differences. It is almost universally accepted that Matthew and Luke used Mark as the core of their Gospels, and the exegete must constantly ask how and why Matthew and Luke vary the wording of their source. For more on this problem, see G. E. Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism, pp. 119 ff.

A second level of comparison is the Synoptics with John. For instance, what is the exegete to do with the fact that John gives a picture of the message of John the Baptist different from that of the Synoptics? And gives a different picture of the events in the life of Jesus?

A third level of comparison is that of quotations in the New Testament with the Old Testament. This involves both form and meaning. Sometimes a quotation in the New Testament gains its significance from the Greek form in the LXX which differs materially from the Hebrew. Compare Acts 15:16-17 with Amos 9:11-12. Frequently a New Testament citation is given a meaning which it did not have in its original Old Testament context. Hosea 2:23 and 1:10 are prophecies about the final salvation of the visible nation Israel; but Paul applies them to the Christian Church (Romans 9:25-26). What significance does this fact have for the relationship of the church and Israel? Psalms 110:1 is, in its own context, an announcement of the accession of the king in Jerusalem, for verse 2 says, “The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter.” Peter applies it to the ascension of Christ and his session at the right hand of God. In other words, Peter deliberately reinterprets the throne of David to mean the throne at God’s right hand where Jesus is seated as Lord and Messianic King (Acts 2:36) instead of the throne in Jerusalem.

The comparative step can range even further and compare materials in the New Testament with similar passages in the Qumran literature, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Philo, Hermetic writings, etc. This step, while necessary for thorough scholarship to deal with historical questions, is not necessary for the ordinary pastoral exegesis.

The rhetorical question must be considered: how is the language of a given text to be understood? Is it to be taken literally or symbolically? This is a

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particularly relevant question in the Old Testament prophets. Are we to think of Ezekiel’s prophecy of the new temple in chapters 40-48 in literal terms, or is it a prophecy in Old Testament cultic idiom which is fulfilled in Revelation 21-22? Is the marvelous river in Ezek. 47 meant to be understood literally, or is it fulfilled in the river of life of Revelation 22:1? To what extent is the book of Revelation to be taken symbolically? Is it symbolic of purely spiritual realities, or does it predict in symbolic terms specific events which will take place on earth? To what extent are the parables of Jesus to be allegorized? Are the details of the parables usually to be pressed, as in allegory, or are they simply “local color” reinforcing the one central point of the parable? To what extent do the parables employ allegorical detail?

The most important step, for which all the others exist, is the theological. What theological truth is expressed by a given text? For instance, in studying the Pauline doctrine of justification, one must first study the words, both the Greek words in the N.T. and particularly the Hebrew words which lie behind them. One must compare the Pauline teaching with

contemporary Jewish ideas of righteousness; and one must finally construct Paul’s theology of justification.

In the illustrations cited above from Romans 9, what theological inferences are to be drawn about the relationship between the church and Israel? In the illustration cited from Acts 2, what can one conclude about the throne of David? The basic hermeneutic in interpreting prophecy must e the way the N.T. interprets the O.T. If all believers are the true sons of Abraham (Gal. 3:7) and if circumcision is a matter of the heart and not of the flesh (Rom. 2:29), and the real Jew is something inward and not outward (Rom. 2:28), then is the church the true Israel of God?

Phil. 2:1-10 is exegetically a most difficult passage (see G. E. Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism, pp. 105 ff.): practically every word is a challenge. But when one has wrestled with the philological problems, the all-important question is, What does this teach us about the person and work of Christ? (See Ralph Martin, Carmen Christi, 1967). However, this question cannot be answered until one has wrestled with the meaning of the words, one by one.

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“The Old Testament Roots of Mission” by Richard de Ridder

(Taken from Exploring Church Growth, Wilbert R. Shenk, ed., pp. 171-180,Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983. Used by permission.)

“At first sight the Old Testament appears to offer little basis for the idea of mission. . . . Yet if we investigate the Old Testament more thoroughly, it becomes clear that the future of the nations is a point of the greatest concern. . . . This indeed cannot be otherwise, for from the first page to the last the Bible has the whole world in view, and its divine plan of salvation is unfolded as pertaining to the whole world” (Bavinck 1960:11).

J. H. Bavinck’s thesis stands in marked contrast to the statement of Adolf Harnack who wrote, “To reject the Old Testament in the second century was an error the church rightly resisted; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a destiny the Reformation could not escape; but still to preserve it in the nineteenth century as one of the canonical documents of Protestantism is the result of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis” (Harnack 1924:217).

By these two opinions the lines are strictly drawn and the tensions between varied viewpoints of the Old Testament clearly expressed. Did the Christian church too hastily take over the Old Testament as part of its canon without sufficient reflection? Did the church in fact violate the New Testament when it held on the one hand that the cultic and civil legislation of the Old Testament was done away in Jesus Christ (at least literally) while it continued to insist that the Old Testament was a valid and necessary part of its sacred canon? At the same time the careful reader of the New Testament can only conclude that the use which the writers of the New Testament made of the Old Testament precluded the church from rejecting the Old Testament.1

Choosing the side of those who affirm the unity of Scripture (Old and New Testaments), we are forced to ask in terms of the purpose of this book. Does the Old Testament have any significance for the church’s mission? Are the roots of the New Testament church’s mission to be found only in the New Testament? Because great prominence is given by the church today to its calling to be a witness of its ascended Lord (Jesus), what does the Old Testament contribute to our understanding of God’s redemptive purpose? Does the Old Testament constitute a significant part of the message we proclaim and the

witness we bring? These questions are of great importance for the Christian mission. The way we answer them will define the content of our message.

The current practice of the church, in its corporate worship and contemporary theology as well as in its mission outreach, does not give much promise of finding a positive answer to the questions posed. In some Christian circles the Old Testament is treated as though it does not exist or was abrogated by the revelation of the New Testament. The New Testament is published separate from the Old Testament, not merely out of cost consciousness or convenience but also out of a principle assumption that the New Testament can stand alone, by itself. Old Testament books are among the last to be translated in the languages of the peoples to whom the church reaches out.

Our churches are almost completely barren of the rich Old Testament symbols, these having been long replaced by the cross alone (and often inappropriately by three crosses, which leads one to ask how all three of the crosses of Golgotha have such significance). The hymnology of many churches ignores almost completely the rich heritage of the Psalms and their universal themes, while experiential, sentimental substitutes replace them in our worship.

There is little awareness among many Christians that Jesus was a Jew of his day, that he spoke in terms of prevailing religious concepts and beliefs held by his contemporaries, and that it was his custom to worship in the synagogue and his feet often walked the Temple’s sacred courts. While we proclaim and claim him as the Savior of the Gentiles, we seem to be saying that it looks as if God had to begin over again his dealings with humankind when in love he gave his Son, the only begotten, that the world might be saved by believing in him, as though God to have a people had to call Gentiles to faith and obedience.

No matter how difficult it is to answer the questions posed about the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament mission, the matter we here treat is of great importance.2 Only because Jesus Christ is the messiah of Israel can he be the

1 1 Van Ruler (1971:10) gives a synopsis of Harnack’s thesis and the response of H. Bornkamm.2 2 Van Ruler (1971:11-14) sketches ten current views of the Old Testament held by the church and develops his critique of these views in

succeeding chapters.

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Savior of the world. The history of the church is a continuum of and an integral part of God’s dealings with Israel. Israel and the Old Testament reflect what God has in mind for humankind, for the whole world. God has planted only one olive tree, subject throughout the ages to his pruning and grafting (Rom 9-11).

We must begin, therefore, at the beginning.3 By doing so we will discover immediately that the revelation given by God is intimately bound up with history, that the faith we confess is grounded in events that took place and in which God was intimately involved. It may be well to observe at this point that Western culture has had considerable influence upon the Western church’s conceptions as to what took place when God revealed himself to humankind. Our conceptions of inspiration, for example, concentrate almost completely (and very simplistically) on words. However, it may not be forgotten that although words do constitute a part of that revelation, the words of God’s revelation are inseparably united with God’s deeds in history. God’s self-disclosures are themselves the stimuli to action.4 Humankind’s relationship to God takes precedence over all other relationships.

GENESIS 1-3

The understanding of the first three chapters of Genesis is foundational to an understanding of all that follows in Scripture. Several points will be noted, each of which to one degree or another touches the heart of the church’s message.

Although stated largely in theological terms, it must not be forgotten that what we are considering is based upon acts of God in the history of the universe and of humankind. However one judges or assesses the relationship of the report to the actual event (this refers to the question of the nature of the reporting and its recording), the truth remains that God acted, events occurred, and real events were recorded.

God active everywhere. We first of all meet God in action: “In the beginning God created” (Gen 1:1). The significance of this statement can hardly be exhausted by a simple proposition. What is said here about God’s actions characterizes all that we know of him throughout Scripture. God worked and continues to work: “My Father is always at his work to this very day” (Jn 5:17 NIV). One cannot interpret any history—whether of the world or of the church—unless one sees that God is not an absent deity who hides from humankind, but we can know him from what he has made (Rom 1:20). God’s deeds,

moreover, are not limited to the church but encompass the whole world. God is not only present everywhere, but active everywhere as well.

The Creator in control. The Genesis account gives no credence whatever to any form of philosophical or theological dualism, either between God and the creation or between God and the creature. God in his nature is distinct from the world and from the created order. God brought the world into existence. It is not described for us as an extension of God, but as a finite, created reality upheld only because the Creator continues to uphold it. As the New Testament teaches, when God’s purposes with the present created order are fulfilled, this world and the universe will come to an end and a new heaven and a new earth will be created (Rev 21:1).

Worthy citizens in God’s world. We are also clearly taught that God’s creative acts produced a “good” universe and world (Gen 1:31). No possible justification can be found here for world-denial or world-flight. God affirms the goodness of creation not merely in the sense of being technically or mechanically perfect but as fit also as the habitation and workshop of humanity, God’s image-bearers, moral creatures created without imperfection. The Christian message stands diametrically opposed to all worldviews which look at the world as intrinsically evil and justify humankind’s flight from it. To live in God’s world as God’s image-bearer and joyful servant is life.

Ruling function for man and woman. Man and woman were created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). Together they constituted what was necessary to function as that image. Rule over the world was given them to exercise together, a ruling function that extended over all that God made and included a moral element (Gen 2:15). Humankind is distinct from all the creatures the Lord God made by virtue of its receiving the breath of life from God (Gen 2:7). Adam’s own judgment concerning his special nature—the representative for humanity—was confirmed when God brought to him all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air (Gen 2:9), among whom Adam could find no suitable helper (Gen 2:20). These acts of God distinguish the Creator from created being and humankind from all the rest which God made. Man and woman have a God-given dignity, worth, and mission that separate them from everything else.

A common and unbroken family tree. Humankind constitutes a unity through the creative

3 3 Blauw (1962:18) states that “the key to understanding the whole of Scripture is found in Gen 1-11.”4 4 Kraft more fully explores this thesis (1979). It also agrees with the thesis of Harry R. Boer (1955) that the New Testament church did not

base its witnessing activity in a specific command or commission but was being responsive to the Holy Spirit and the great redemptive acts of God in Jesus Christ.

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act of God in bringing man and woman into being. The unity of the human race is set in the context of birth from human parents (Gen 2:23; 3:16, 20). Only Adam was the direct creation of God. Even Eve was formed out of his bone and flesh. The “Seed of the Woman” would someday be born from a human parent and partake fully of our human nature. The significance of this unity in God’s redemptive plan cannot be overestimated. When God later reveals his manner of working through covenants he establishes and promises to which he binds himself, it is in a family (nation, tribe, and so on) context in which he carries this out. Race, culture, nationality are nothing. We can be one in Christ Jesus because God has made of one all nations of the earth. God did this “that they should seek God . . . and find him” (Acts 17:27).

Humans distinct from spirits. Human beings are distinct from the world of spirits (good and evil). Although fuller understanding of the identity as to who tempted Eve and led to the fall of humankind is given later in the Scriptures, the Bible is clear about the fact that the spirits are created, finite beings, subject to God. There is no eternal dualism between God and Satan, between good and evil. The created being is not the hapless victim of gods and spirits of this world. The redeemed share the triumph over their vaunted powers and self-acclaimed deity. The spirits too are subject to Jesus.

God not sidetracked by sin. The introduction of sin nowhere compromises God’s complete control of creation, creature, or the spirit world. God asserted sovereignty as soon as the representative sinned and revealed clearly that, though humankind and the world will continue—although under greatly altered conditions (Gen 3)—, God remained in full control of history. History will move to the fulfillment of God’s plan. Covenants are not abrogated and promises never fail because God is the Lord of history and the controller of destiny.

From every tribe and tongue. It is clearly implied that God is concerned not with a part of the human race but with all humankind. God’s works are to be seen from a universal perspective. In fact, one needs to read to the twelfth chapter of Genesis before one finds any mention of the fathers of the Jewish people.

Eden exit: divine calling. It should also be clearly noted that Genesis 3 ends on a note of grace and mercy. Many have misunderstood the meaning of God’s acts of banishing and driving out Adam and Eve from Paradise as though this only indicated judgment and punishment. The words used in Genesis 3:23-24 leave a positive note, however. While on the one hand God made a separation of humans from the Garden and its Tree of Life, the act

of driving out included a sense of mission, of purpose, of divine calling. It is good news that even in a creation which will continue to be subject to frustration until the glorious freedom of the children of God is complete, humankind will find this world an arena in which work and service to God are possible (Rom 8:19-22). Nothing of world-rejection or world-flight is taught in the Bible.

These propositions form a sort of bridge to the rest of the Old Testament and the understanding of its meaning for mission. If indeed the Old Testament is from the beginning a record of God’s dealings with the human race, then the Christian mission is likewise an expression of this universal purpose of God. However, as soon as we say this, a host of inescapable questions intrude themselves into the discussion. Not the least important of these is the question that concerns the purposes of God’s dealings with Abraham and his seed in relation to other nations and peoples. It is obvious that Genesis 12 begins a new chapter in salvation history, but how are God’s acts to be understood? What did God have in mind? Was salvation henceforth to be limited to one people or nation only? If not, then what was the significance of Israel for the nations? Does the Old Testament imply that God “left off” dealing with the nations and concentrated on Abraham’s seed until Messiah Jesus came? Did Israel have no message for the people of the world? Did Israel have no mission except to wait out God’s time?

THE GOSPEL TO ABRAHAM

Paul in Galatians 2:8 says, “The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you’“ (NIV). This promise, found in Genesis 12:1-3, constitutes the turning point in history at which humankind’s primordial history ends and the age of the promise begins. The significance of that promise can hardly be overestimated, either for the Jews or for the Gentiles. Isaiah in later years let it be clearly known to people in his day that there could be no Golden Age for Israel unless the world shared in the blessings God was prepared to dispense.

That Yahweh intended this is clearly stated in Genesis 22:18 where what is said about Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 is transferred to his descendants: “Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me” (NIV). When God entered into covenant with Abraham, he did not abandon the nations but did so for the sake of the nations. “Abraham is chosen, not just for his own glory, the good fortune of his descendants, or the misery of his enemies. . . . Abraham is the instrument for the redemption of the world” (Martin-

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Achard 1962:35). Abraham was God’s means to an end. Genesis 12:1-3 is the keystone in the overarching purpose of God for humankind.

But why Abraham? Jew and Gentile have repeatedly asked that question. The answer cuts to the heart of the mercy and love of God. Abraham did not excel in any virtues over his fellows, no more than Israel over the other nations (Deut 7:7-8). In fact Joshua (Josh 24:2-3) specifically mentioned that Abraham came from a family of worshipers of other gods. No wonder the rabbis called him the first proselyte! (Bab. Talmud Aboda Zara 44-45; Sukka 232; Hagigah 8).

The whole history of Abraham and the story of his call and pilgrimage is a remarkable demonstration of how one who was himself dispersed by the command of God—”Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1 NIV)—became the gracious instrument by which those who had been dispersed by the judgment of God—”So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth” (Gen 11:8 NIV)—will again be brought back to the only source of life and into unity with each other (Gal 3:28-29). The narrative will seem to become more and more exclusive (Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Judah-David-Jesus), but this does not mean that the purposes of God were altered in the process, nor that God surrendered claim on the nations.

In this early promise of Genesis 12:1-3 the essential features basic to the missionary task are to be found. Although, as many have correctly observed, there is here no command to evangelize the nations in the way the New Testament expressed this, Yahweh asserts his lordship over the nations and will guide their destiny and accomplish his purpose. This purpose will be worked out through Abraham, whose election by Yahweh was for service, not personal advantage (De Ridder 1975:22ff).

Election may not be defined merely in terms of privilege or honor, as chosenness for an eternity of bliss. Election is always for a purpose and is based on covenant. Peter describes a chosen people as “a people belonging to God,” that they “may declare the praises of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9 NIV). That is why we may not regard Israel’s function as ended when Messiah came and the church began. If we do this, Israel becomes an isolated entity separated from the world rather than a people through whom God acts on behalf of the world. Israel (or any person) does not possess the right to withdraw itself from this purpose of God. The promise and covenant were sovereignly established; they will continue to be sovereignly administered. One can rebel, be disobedient, refuse to fulfill God’s purpose. Even

that kind of action does not mean that God is handicapped and consequently incapable of fulfilling his purposes.

To digress for a moment, this touches the heart of the misunderstanding of contemporary Judaism concerning its election. Election is always in the service of covenant, not vice versa. Today’s Jews limit the Jewish mission to survival as a separate people and find it unnecessary to put forth any effort to bring others to the only light that can dispel the gross darkness of the peoples.

To return to what was said earlier concerning God’s sovereign act of creation, Genesis 1:1 obviously constitutes the necessary basis for mission since no people or race may consider itself to be more worthy than any other people. All peoples are God’s concern, and he remains their righteous judge whose very righteousness becomes the ground of our hope that his sufficient grace will bring us into full and blessed fellowship. Whenever persons contemplate what God has done for them, they must be moved to share that best of news with others.

The work of missions must be understood, therefore, as being possible only in the context of covenant. Israel has no peculiar claim on God other than what God has sovereignly committed himself to being and doing. God’s people lived out their history (and God’s) in the sight of the nations, not in some hidden corner of the world. Yahweh set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the people of Israel (Deut 32:8), and he set them at the crossroads of the nations. When they went, it was there they prayed that God would be gracious and bless them, so that God’s way might be known on earth and his salvation among all nations (Ps 67:1-2).

Israel was a people that had no need for a missionary command because its very heart cried out, “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth” (Ps 67:3-4 NIV). Joy for the blessing of the Lord is not limited to fruitful fields that yield abundant harvests, but will be experienced when “all the ends of the earth will fear him” (Ps 67:7). To look for a command to carry on a witness to the peoples is to seek something which is not there because it was not needed.

The disobedience of Israel and its leaders is frequently placed too prominently in our assessment of the Old Testament people of God. One cannot dispute, of course, that then (just as now among Christians) disobedience characterized Israel’s response to Yahweh and that God frequently disciplined his people, afflicting and punishing them in varied ways. At the same time we must not forget that like ourselves contemporary prophets of those

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days were sometimes blind to the acts of God (one even prayed for death under the juniper tree whereas God could speak of 7,000 who had not bowed to Baal!) and that even in days of widespread apostasy many remained true to God.

Whatever was happening to Israel, its history was not the kind of affair that had no meaning for others. Everything was part of God’s plan, and through his acts in Israel God was stretching out his hands to the world.

We should not forget that there is a somewhat subtle difference, often overlooked, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Whereas Israel was called on to display the wonderful deeds of God, the New Testament church is called on to declare that message to the people (Sandmel 1968:33). Abraham was before his call a representative of the fallen race. He and his descendants embodied God’s grace and were a sign of how that grace overcomes human estrangement from God. The New Testament difference is that Genesis 3 (the story of the fall) is reenacted not in the privacy of a Garden but before the eyes of the whole world and through a people destined to be the light to the nations (Martin-Achard 1962).

THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS

Moving beyond the time of the patriarchs, it is necessary to make a brief stop at Mount Sinai. Here Israel was born as a nation, and the covenant promises made to the fathers were extended to a newly emerging nation, a people (Num 14:9). The Exodus, which was a manifestation of Yahweh’s unconditioned sovereignty, was an act not of humans but of the world-God. Israel had no special status among the nations by itself except what God gave to it. The focus was not what God had done but why he acted in this way for his people. At Sinai Israel and the world were given God’s answer. In later reflection on this (Ps 136:4-9), the inevitable conclusion is drawn: The God who saves is none other than the God who created the world! At Sinai God covenanted with Israel and took Israel into partnership with himself. No area of his people’s life will ever again be free from his purpose and will.5 Israel might never be “like the nations” (Deut 4:33-35; 17).

From Sinai onward Israel became a people among the nations. Having lived as a ger (a stranger, resident alien) in Egypt (Ex 22:21; 23:9; Lev 19:34), Israel continued a ger in her assigned

territory (Lev 25:23). Her treatment of the strangers in her midst, God said, must always be a conscious attempt to practice God’s concern for the stranger. Too little attention has been paid, I believe, to the presence within Israel of those whose bloodlines could not be traced to Abraham (De Ridder 1975:41-48). The non-Israelite could at any time claim the right to a share in the salvation of Yahweh.

The age of the prophets made it unmistakably clear for both Israel and the world that God’s purpose was universal. Although one searches in vain for specific commands to witness, the history of Old Testament Israel clearly demonstrates that wherever Israel was dispersed or wherever this people lived in voluntary dispersion, they shared their faith with the community and welcomed the Gentile into fellowship.6

CREATION, REVELATION, REDEMPTION

These three themes—creation, revelation, redemption—summarize the major emphasis of ancient as well as contemporary Jewish belief. They constitute the basis on which the Jews have systematized their faith. We would be misunderstanding that faith, however, if we thought that such themes were wholly otherworldly. The faith of God’s people is so utterly this-worldly. For example, release from the slavery of Egypt was a call to life, to shalom (peace), to fullness of life and the realization of the potentials latent within full surrender of life to obedience to Israel’s covenanting God. The righteousness and justice which God sought (Isa 5:7) would be the blessedness of God’s continued favor if obediently rendered to him. The shalom of Eden would be restored to the world through Israel (Isa 9:6-7; 11:6-8) when God’s mighty, liberating acts elicited from his people the righteousness and justice which alone are consistent with union in his mission and purpose.

It would be interesting to pursue this meaning of shalom in detail. What is important to note is that the world is always taken up in Israel’s destiny. The hope of Israel is the hope of the world (Zimmerli 1976). The fulfillment of the promises will mean peace to the world (Zech 9:9-10; Isa 2:2-4; Mic 4:1-3). Passages could be multiplied. This significant relationship of God’s people to the world is not the passive kind of relationship so often described as the dominant theme of the Old Testament.7 It is rather the active participation of God’s people in the affairs

5 5 Brueggemann (1968) demonstrates how the legal material revealed at Sinai is theological in a decisive way.6 6 See my work (1975—a reprint of The Dispersion of the People of God) for a detailed study of the extent and motivation for proselytizing in

the Old Testament period.7 7 This is frequently expressed by the terms “centrifugal” and “centripetal,” a distinction I find increasingly difficult to maintain except in a very

limited application.

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of the world. They must maintain the right relationship to God by pursuing righteousness and showing justice to others. Both together complete the covenant obedience of the law revealed at Sinai.

John Stek defines justice as humankind’s vocation, as right dealing with their neighbors, as the justice of the kingdom of God, the “befriending” (ahab) of fellow humans. The end, he says, is liberation:

Liberation in the Old Testament is redemption of man from every power (social, political, economic, cultural, religious, ideological, spiritual—the “principalities and powers,” Eph 3:10; 6:12; Col 2:15) that injects itself between Yahweh and man to thwart Yahweh’s purpose, to demean man’s true dignity, to exploit man’s labor, to sterilize man’s reproductive powers, to diminish man’s provisions, to rob man of his appointed blessing, to cut man off form his divinely intended destiny. Liberation is unto covenant, to the re-establishment of the lord-servant relationship between God and man so that man stands once more in his full dignity directly under the claims of God and under his care and benediction. God’s mission is to effect that liberation. It is also his servant’s co-(m)mission (Stek 1978:133-65).

Nothing less than this is the call of the church to be the people of God in the new covenant age. Engrafted into the olive tree, Gentile and Jew are now one in Jesus Christ. The church would do well to begin to read its sacred books in the light of all that God has revealed. The good news can neither be understood nor preached unless it be understood in the perspective of the Old Testament witness concerning God and the creation, created beings and their relationship to God, as well as their place in creation and the course of history.

Too often basic biblical concepts, foundational to the Christian message, have been ignored or abstracted from their context and the Bible made a tool for whatever program of hope we present to the world. A more submissive reading of the Bible is required of us, for only in that way can we truly hear the Lord of the Word and not just the Word of the Lord (Frei 1974). Such a way of reading salvation history will at the same time release us from “our ethnic, geographical, chronological and confessional parochialism” (Stek 1978:133).

REFERENCES CITED

Bavinck, Johan H.1960 An Introduction to the Science of Missions. Philadelphia:

Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company.

Blauw, Johannes1962 The Missionary Nature of the Church. New York:

McGraw-Hill.

Boer, Harry R.1955 Pentecost and Missions. Franeker: T. Wever Company.

Brueggemann, Walter1968 Tradition for Crisis. Richmond: John Knox Press.

De Ridder, Richard R.1975 Discipling the Nations. Grand Rapids: Baker Book

House. A reprint of The Dispersion of the People of God. Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1971.

Frei, Hans1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press.

Harnack, Adolf1924 Marcion: Das Evangelium vom Fremden Gott. Leipzig:

J. C. Hinrichs.

Kraft, Charles1979 Christianity in Culture. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Martin-Achard, R.1962 A Light to the Nations. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

Sandmel, Samuel1968 New Testament Issues. New York: Harper & Row.

Stek, John H.1978 “Salvation, Justice and Liberation in the Old Testament.”

Calvin Theological Journal. Vol. 13, No. 2, November 1978.

Van Ruler, Arnold A.1971 The Christian Church and the Old Testament. Geoffrey

W. Bromiley (trans.). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Zimmerli, Walther1976 The Old Testament and the World. John J. Scullion

(trans.). Atlanta: John Knox Press.

Richard R. De Ridder, Grand Rapids, Michigan, is Professor of Church Polity and Missions at Calvin Theological Reformed Seminary. He has served in numerous pastorates in Christian Reformed churches and as a missionary to Sri Lanka from 1956 to 1960. Among his publications are Discipling the Nations (Baker Book House, 1975), My Heart’s Desire for Israel (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1974), and God Has Not Rejected His People (Baker Book House, 1977).

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“The Living God Is a Missionary God” by John R. W. Stott

Reprinted from You Can Tell the World, James E. Berney, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979).

Appears as a chapter in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, eds. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1981:10-18).

Used by permission of InterVarsity Press through the Copyright Clearance Center.

Millions of people in today’s world are extremely hostile to the Christian missionary enterprise. They regard it as politically disruptive (because it loosens the cement which binds the national culture) and religiously narrow-minded (because it makes exclusive claims for Jesus), while those who are involved in it are thought to suffer from an arrogant imperialism. And the attempt to convert people to Christ is rejected as an unpardonable interference to their private lives. “My religion is my own affair,” they say. “Mind your own business, and leave me alone to mind mine.”

It is essential, therefore, for Christians to understand the grounds on which the Christian mission rests. Only then shall we be able to persevere in the missionary task, with courage and humility, in spite of the world’s misunderstanding and opposition. More precisely, biblical Christians need biblical incentives. For we believe the Bible to be the revelation of God and of his will. So we ask: Has he revealed in Scripture that “mission” is his will for his people? Only then shall we be satisfied. For then it becomes a matter of obeying God, whatever others may think or say. Here we shall focus on the Old Testament, though the entire Bible is rich in evidence for the missionary purpose of God.

The Call of Abraham

Our story begins about four thousand years ago with a man called Abraham, or more accurately, Abram as he was called at that time. Here is the account of God’s call to Abraham.

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you , and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” So Abram went, as the LORD had told him;

and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Gen. 12:1-4).

God made a promise (a composite promise, as we shall see) to Abraham. And an understanding of that promise is indispensable to an understanding of the Bible and of the Christian mission. These are perhaps the most unifying verses in the Bible; the whole of God’s purpose is encapsulated here.

By way of introduction we shall need to consider the setting of God’s promise, the context in which it came to be given. Then we shall divide the rest of our study into two. First, the promise (exactly what it was that God said he would do) and second—at greater length—its fulfillment (how God has kept and will keep his promise). We start, however, with the setting.

Genesis 12 begins: “Now the LORD said to Abram.” It sounds abrupt for an opening of a new chapter. We are prompted to ask: “Who is this ‘Lord’ who spoke to Abraham?” and “Who is this ‘Abraham’ to whom he spoke?” They are not introduced into the text out of the blue. A great deal lies behind these words. They are a key which opens up the whole of Scripture. The previous eleven chapters lead up to them; the rest of the Bible follows and fulfills them.

What, then, is the background to this text? It is this. “The Lord” who chooses and called Abraham is the same Lord who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and who climaxed his creative work by making man and woman unique creatures in his own likeness. In other words, we should never allow ourselves to forget that the Bible begins with the universe, not with planet earth; then with the earth, not with Palestine; then with Adam the father of the human race, not with Abraham the father of the chosen race. Since, then, God is the Creator of the universe, the earth and all mankind, we must never demote him to the status of a tribal deity or petty godling like Chemosh the god of the Moabites, or Milcom (or Molech) the god of the Ammonites, or Baal the male deity, or Ashtoreth the female deity, of

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the Canaanites. Nor must we suppose that God chose Abraham and his descendants because he had lost interest in other peoples or given them up. Election is not a synonym for elitism. On the contrary, as we shall soon see, God chose one man and his family order, through them, to bless all the families of the earth.

We are bound, therefore, to be deeply offended when Christianity is relegated to one chapter in a book on the world’s religions as if it were one option among many, or when people speak of “the Christian God” as if there were others! No, there is only one living and true God, who has revealed himself fully and finally in his only Son Jesus Christ. Monotheism lies at the basis of mission. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (I Tim. 2:5).

The Genesis record moves on from the creation of all things by the one God and of human beings in his likeness, to our rebellion against our own Creator and to God’s judgment upon his rebel creatures—a judgment which is relieved, however, by his first gospel promise that one day the woman’s seed would “bruise” indeed “crush” the serpent’s head (3:15).

The following eight chapters (Genesis 4-11) describe the devastating results of the Fall in terms of the progressive alienation of human beings from God and from our fellow human beings. This was the setting in which God’s call and promise came to Abraham. All around was moral deterioration, darkness and dispersal. Society was steadily disintegrating. Yet God the Creator did not abandon the human beings he had made in his own likeness (Gen. 9: 6). Out of the prevailing godlessness he called one man and his family, and promised to bless not only them but through them the whole world. The scattering would not proceed unchecked; a grand process of ingathering would now begin.

The Promise

What then was the promise which God made to Abraham? It was a composite promise consisting of several parts.

First, it was the promise of a posterity. He was to go from his kindred and his father’s house, and in exchange for the loss of his family God would make of him “a great nation.” Later in order to indicate this, God changed his name from “Abram” (“exalted father”) to “Abraham” (“father of a multitude”) because, he said to him, “I have made you the father of a multitude of nations” (17:5).

Second, it was the promise of a land. God’s call seems to have come to him in two stages, first in Ur of the Chaldees while his father was still alive (11:31;

15:7) and then in Haran after his father had died (11:32; 12:1). At all events he was to leave his own land, and in return God would show him another country.

Third, it was the promise of a blessing. Five times the words bless and blessing occur in 12:2-3. The blessing God promised Abraham would spill over upon all mankind.

A posterity, a land and a blessing. Each of these promises is elaborated in the chapters that follow Abraham’s call.

First, the land. After Abraham had generously allowed his nephew Lot to choose where he wanted to settle (he selected the fertile Jordan valley), God said to Abraham: “Lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which you see I will give to you and to your descendants forever” (13:14-15).

Second, the posterity. A bit later God gave Abraham another visual aid, telling him to look now not to the earth but to the sky. On a clear, dark night he took him outside his tent and said to him, “Look toward heaven and number the stars.” What a ludicrous command! Perhaps Abraham stated, “1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30..,” but he must soon have given up. It was an impossible task. Then God said to him: “So shall your descendants be.” And we read: “He believed the Lord.” Although he was probably by now in his eighties, and although he and Sarah were still childless, he yet believed God’s promise and God “reckoned it to him as righteousness.” That is, because he trusted God, God accepted him as righteous in his sight.

Third, the blessing. “I will bless you.” Already God has accepted Abraham as righteous or (to borrow the New Testament expression) has “justified him by faith.” No greater blessing is conceivable. It is the foundation blessing of the covenant of grace, which a few years later God went on to elaborate to Abraham: “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you...for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you...and I will be their God” (17:7-8). And he gave them circumcision as the outward and visible sign of his gracious covenant or pledge to be their God. It was the first time in Scripture that we hear the covenant formula which is repeated many times later: “I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

A land, a posterity, a blessing. “But what has all that to do with mission?” you may be asking with impatience. My answer is “Everything! Be patient a little longer and you will see.” Let us turn now from the promise to the fulfillment.

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The Fulfillment

The whole question of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy is a difficult one in which there is often misunderstanding and not a little disagreement. Of particular importance is the principle, with which I think all of us will agree, that the New Testament writers themselves understood Old Testament prophecy to have not a single but usually a triple fulfillment—past, present and future. The past fulfillment was an immediate or historical fulfillment in the life of the nation of Israel. The present is an intermediate or gospel fulfillment in Christ and his church. The future will be an ultimate or eschatological fulfillment in the new heaven and the new earth.

God’s promise to Abraham of a numerous, indeed of an innumerable, posterity was confirmed to his son Isaac (26:4, “as the stars of heaven”) and his grandson Jacob (32:12, “as the sand of the sea”). Gradually the promise began to come literally true. Perhaps we could pick out some of the stages in this development.

The first concerns the years of slavery in Egypt, of which it is written, “The descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong; so that the land was filled with them” (Ex. 1:7; cf. Acts 7:17). The next stage I will mention came several hundred years later when King Solomon called Israel “a great people that cannot be numbered or counted for multitude” (I Kings 3:8). A third stage was some three hundred fifty years after Solomon; Jeremiah warned Israel of impending judgment and captivity, and then added this divine promise of restoration: “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of David my servant” (Jer. 33:22).

So much for Abraham’s posterity; what about the land? Again we note with worship and gratitude God’s faithfulness to his promise. For it was in remembrance of his promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that he first rescued his people from their Egyptian slavery and gave them the territory which came on that account to be called “the promised land” (Ex. 2:24; 3 6; 32:13), and then restored them to it some seven hundred years later after their captivity in Babylon. Nevertheless, neither Abraham nor his physical descendants fully inherited the land. As Hebrews 11 puts it, they “died in faith not having received what was promised.” Instead, as “strangers and exiles on the earth” they “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (see Heb. 11:8-16, 39-40).

God kept his promises about the posterity and the land, at least in part. Now what about the

blessing? Well, at Sinai God confirmed and clarified his covenant with Abraham, and pledged himself to be Israel’s God (for example, Ex. 19: 3-6). And throughout the rest of the Old Testament God went on blessing the obedient while the disobedient fell under his judgment.

Perhaps the most dramatic example comes at the beginning of Hosea’s prophecy, in which Hosea is told to give his three children names which describe God’s awful and progressive judgment on Israel. His firstborn (a boy) he called “Jezreel,” meaning “God will scatter.” Next came a daughter “Lo-ruhamah,” meaning “not pitied,” for God said he would no longer pity or forgive his people. Lastly he had another son “Lo-ammi,” meaning “not my people,” for God said they were not now his people. What terrible names for the chosen people of God! They sound like a devastating contradiction of God’s eternal promise to Abraham.

But God does not stop there. For beyond the coming judgment there would be a restoration, which is described in words which once more echo the promise to Abraham: “Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered” (Hos. 1:10). And then the judgments implicit in the names of Hosea’s children would be reversed. There would be a gathering instead of a scattering (“Jezreel” is ambiguous and can imply either), “not pitied” would be pitied, and “not my people” would become “sons of the living God” (1:10-2:1).

The wonderful thing is that the apostles Paul and Peter both quote these verses from Hosea. They see their fulfillment not just in a further multiplication of Israel but in the inclusion of the Gentiles in the community of Jesus: “Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy” (I Pet. 2:9-10; cf. Rom. 9:25-26).

This New Testament perspective is essential as we read the Old Testament prophecies. For what we miss in the Old Testament is any clear explanation of just how God’s promised blessing would overflow from Abraham and his descendants to “all families of the earth.” Although Israel is described as “a light to lighten the nations,” and has a mission to “bring forth justice to the nations” (Is. 42:1-4, 6; 49:6), we do not actually see this happening. It is only in the Lord Jesus himself that these prophecies are fulfilled, for only in his day are the nations actually included in the redeemed community. To this we now turn.

God’s promise to Abraham receives an

intermediate or gospel fulfillment in Christ and his church.

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Almost the first word of the whole New Testament is the word Abraham. For Matthew’s Gospel begins, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac....” So it is right back to Abraham that Matthew traces the beginning not just of the genealogy but of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He knows that what he is recording is the fulfillment of God’s ancient promises to Abraham some two thousand years previously. (See also Lk. 1:45-55, 67-75.)

Yet from the start Matthew recognizes that it isn’t just physical descent from Abraham which qualifies people to inherit the promises, but a kind of spiritual descent, namely, repentance and faith in the coming Messiah. This was John the Baptist’s message to crowds who flocked to hear him: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham” (Mt. 3:9; Lk. 3:8; cf. Jn. 8:33-40). The implications of his words would have shocked his hearers since “it was the current belief that no descendant of Abraham could be lost” (J. Jeremias, Jesus’ Promise to the Nations, SCM Press, 1958, p. 48).

And God has raised up children to Abraham, if not from stones, then from an equally unlikely source, namely, the Gentiles! So Matthew, although the most Jewish of all four Gospel writers, later records Jesus as having said, “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness” (8:11-12; cf. Lk. 13:28-29).

It is hard for us to grasp how shocking, how completely topsy-turvy, these words would have sounded to the Jewish hearers of John the Baptist and Jesus. They were the descendants of Abraham; so they had a title to the promises which God made to Abraham. Who then were these outsiders who were to share in the promises, even apparently usurp them, while they themselves would be disqualified? They were indignant. They had quite forgotten that part of God’s covenant with Abraham promised an overspill of blessing to all the nations of the earth. Now the Jews had to learn that it was in relation to Jesus the Messiah, who was himself seed of Abraham, that all the nations would be blessed.

The Apostle Peter seems at least to have begun to grasp this in his second sermon, just after Pentecost. In it he addressed a Jewish crowd with the words: “You are the sons...of the covenant which God gave to your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your posterity shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant [Jesus], sent him to you first, to bless you in turning every

one of you from your wickedness” (Acts 3:25-26). It is a very notable statement because he interprets the blessing in the moral terms of repentance and righteousness and because, if Jesus was sent “first” to the Jews, he was presumably sent next to the Gentiles, whose “families of the earth” had been “far off” (cf. Acts 2; 39) but were now to share in the blessing.

It was given to the Apostle Paul, however, to bring this wonderful theme to its full development. For he was called and appointed to be the apostle to the Gentiles, and to him was revealed God’s eternal but hitherto secret purpose to make Jews and the Gentiles “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:6).

Negatively, Paul declares with great boldness, “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants” (Rom. 9:6-7).

Who then are the true descendants of Abraham, the true beneficiaries of God’s promises to him? Paul does not leave us in any doubt. They are believers in Christ of whatever race. In Romans 4 he points out that Abraham not only received justification by faith by also received this blessing before he had been circumcised. Therefore Abraham is the father of all those who, whether circumcised or uncircumcised (that is, Jews or Gentiles), “follow the example of [his] faith” (Rom. 4:9-12). If we “share the faith of Abraham,” then “he is the father of us all, as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations”‘ (vv. 16-17). Thus neither physical descent from Abraham, nor physical circumcision as a Jew, makes a person a true child of Abraham, but rather faith. Abraham’s real descendants are believers in Jesus Christ, whether racially they happen to be Jews or Gentiles.

What then is the “land” which Abraham’s descendants inherit? The letter to the Hebrews refers to a “rest” which God’s people enter now by faith (Heb. 4:3). And in a most remarkable expression Paul refers to “the promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the world” (Rom. 4:13). One can only assume he means the same thing as when to the Corinthians he writes that in Christ “all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours” (I Cor. 3:21-23). Christians by God’s wonderful grace are joint heirs with Christ of the universe.

Somewhat similar teaching, both about the nature of the promised blessing and about its beneficiaries, is given by Paul in Galations 3. He first repeats how Abraham was justified by faith, and then continues: “So you see that it is men of faith

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who are the sons of Abraham” and who therefore “are blessed with Abraham who had faith” (vv. 6-9). What then is the blessing with which all the nations were to be blessed (v. 8)? In a word, it is the blessing of salvation. We were under the curse of the law, but Christ has redeemed us from it by becoming a curse in our place, in order “that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (vv. 10-14). Christ bore our curse that we might inherit Abraham’s blessing, the blessing of justification (v. 8) and of the indwelling Holy Spirit (v. 14). Paul sums it up in the last verse of the chapter (v. 29): “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”

But we have not quite finished yet. There is a third stage of fulfillment still to come. God’s promise to Abraham will receive an ultimate or eschatological fulfillment in the final destiny of all the redeemed.

In the book of Revelation there is one more reference to God’s promise to Abraham (7:9ff). John sees in a vision “a great multitude which no man could number.” It is an international throng, drawn “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues.” And they are “standing before the throne,” the symbol of God’s kingly reign. That is, his kingdom has finally come, and they are enjoying all the blessings of his gracious rule. He shelters them with his presence. Their wilderness days of hunger, thirst and scorching heat are over. They have entered the promised land at last, described now as “a land flowing with milk and honey” but as a land irrigated form “springs of living water” which never dry up. But how did they come to inherit these blessings? Partly because they have “come out of great tribulation” (evidently a reference to the Christian life with all its trials and sufferings), but mostly because “they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” that is, they have been cleansed from sin and clothed with righteousness through the merits of the death of Jesus Christ alone. “Therefore are they before the throne of God.”

Speaking personally, I find it extremely moving to glimpse this final fulfillment in a future eternity of that ancient promise of God to Abraham. All the essential elements of the promise may be detected. For here are the spiritual descendants of Abraham, a “great multitude which no man could number,” as countless as the sand on the seashore and as the stars in the night sky. Here too are “all the families of the earth” being blessed, for the numberless multitude is composed of people from every nation. Here also is the promised land, namely, all the rich blessings which flow from God’s gracious rule. And here above all is Jesus Christ, the seed of Abraham, who

shed his blood for our redemption and who bestows his blessings on all those who call on him to be saved.

Conclusion

Let me try to summarize what we learn about God from his promise to Abraham and its fulfillment.

First, he is the God of history. History is not a random flow of events. For God is working out in time a plan which he conceived in a past eternity and will consummate in a future eternity. In this historical process Jesus Christ as the seed of Abraham is the key figure. Let’s rejoice that if we are Christ’s disciples we are Abraham’s descendants. We belong to his spiritual lineage. If we have received the blessings of justification by faith, acceptance with God, and of the indwelling Spirit, then we are beneficiaries today of a promise made to Abraham four thousand years ago.

Second, he is the God of the covenant. That is, God is gracious enough to make promises, and he always keeps the promise he makes. He is a God of steadfast love and faithfulness. Mind you, he does not always fulfill his promises immediately. Abraham and Sarah “died in faith not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar” (Heb. 11:13). That is, although Isaac was born to them in fulfillment of the promise, their seed was not yet numerous, nor was the land given to them, nor were the nations blessed. All God’s promises come true, by they are inherited “through faith and patience” (Heb. 6:12). We have to be content to wait for God’s time.

Third, he is the God of blessing. “I will bless you,” he said to Abraham (Gen. 12:2). “God ...sent him [Jesus] to you first, to bless you,” echoed Peter (Acts 3:26). God’s attitude to his people is positive, constructive, enriching. Judgment is his “strange work” (Is. 28:21). His principal characteristic work is to bless people with salvation.

Fourth, he is the God of mercy. I have always derived much comfort from the statement of Rev. 7:9 that the company of the redeemed of heaven will be “a great multitude which no man could number.” I do not profess to know how this can be, since Christians have always seemed to be a rather small minority. But Scripture states it for our comfort. Although no biblical Christian can be a universalist (believing that all mankind will ultimately be saved), since Scripture teaches the awful reality and eternity of hell, yet a biblical Christian can—even must—assert that the redeemed will somehow be an international throng so immense as to be countless. For God’s promise is going to be fulfilled, and Abraham’s seed is going to be as innumerable as the

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dust of the earth, the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore.

Fifth, he is the God of mission. The nations are not gathered in automatically. If God has promised to bless “all the families of the earth,” he has promised to do so “through Abraham’s seed” (Gen. 12:3; 22:18). Now we are Abraham’s seed by faith, and the earth’s families will be blessed only if we go to them with the gospel. That is God’s plain purpose.

I pray that these words, “all families of the earth,” may be written on our hearts. It is this expression more than any other which reveals the living God of the Bible to be a missionary God. It is this expression too which condemns all our petty parochialism and narrow nationalism, our racial pride (whether white or black), our condescending paternalism and arrogant imperialism. How dare we adopt a hostile or scornful or even indifferent attitude to any person of another color or culture if our God is

the God of “all the families of the earth”? We need to become global Christians with a global vision, for we have a global God.

So may God help us never to forget his four-thousand-year-old promise to Abraham: “By you and your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

Study Questions

1. Why, according to Stott, is it important to know the grounds on which the Christian mission rests? For what other reasons could such foundational knowledge be important?

2. What was the context of God’s promise to Abraham? How was the promise of a land, a posterity, and a blessing fulfilled in the past? How is the promise receiving fulfillment in the present? How will God’s promise to Abraham receive its final fulfillment in the future?

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“The New Covenant” by Charles E. Van Engen

(Taken from Charles Van Engen, “The New Covenant: Knowing God in Context,”in: Dean Gilliland, edit. The Word Among Us (Waco: Word, 1989).

The Historical Development of the Covenant

The Covenant refers to the actions of God in history which reveal the eternal God’s hiddenness in relationship with His people through time and space. But this presents a real problem, as Martin Noth has explained.

In the biblical witness we deal with a revelation of God which has occurred within history while, after all, God cannot be limited to history and time.68

To soften the dialectic between God’s eternality and humanity’s temporalness, Noth speaks of Israel’s continual, “re-presentation,” the constant re-enactment, and re-participation of the People of God in both past and future events where God had broken into history in relationship with God’s People.

As in all history, so this history is especially involved in the tension between the course of time and the presence of God which is not bound by time, between the “mediateness” and the “immediateness” of God, of which Karl Barth speaks in discussing God’s unending creations. “Re-presentation” is founded on this — that God and his action are always present, while man in his inevitable temporality cannot grasp this present-ness except by “re-presenting” the action of God over and over again in his worship.69

The Covenant: Same Meaning, Many Forms

In the covenant we find a historically-conditioned (or better, a historically-contextualized) relationship between an eternally-present God and a temporally-specific humanity. The historicity of the covenantal forms also means a tremendous variety of cultural, political and social contexts in which the covenant

68 Martin Noth, “The ‘Re-Presentation’ of the Old Testament Proclamation,” in: Claus Westermann, edit. Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics (Richmond: John Knox, 1960) 77.

69 Ibid., 83-85. Noth quotes here from Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik (III:1, 1945) p. 83.

may be found. Thus in the covenant we have essentially the same relationship at all times and in all places, and yet one which takes on radically different forms in each time and place. Referring to this relationship as “the covenant of grace,” Herman Bavinck emphasized its eternal sameness.

The covenant of grace is everywhere and at all times one in essence, but always manifests itself in new forms and goes through differing dispensations... God remains the first and the last in all the dispensations of the covenant of grace, whether of Noah, Abraham, Israel, or the New Testament church. Promise, gift, grace, are and remain the content of it...The one great, all-inclusive promise of the covenant of grace is: “I will be your God, and the God of thy people.” A single straight line runs from the mother-promise of Gen. 3:15 to the apostolic blessing of 2 Cor. 13:13...It is always the same Gospel (Rom. 1:2 & Gal. 3:8), the same Christ (John 14:6 & Acts 4:12), the same faith (Acts 15:11 & Rom 4: 11), and always confers the same benefits of forgiveness and eternal life (Acts 10:43 & Rom 4:3).70

70 Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith: A Survey of Christian Doctrine. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1956) 274-276. More recently Fred Klooster presented a similar perspective in, “The Biblical Method of Salvation: A Case for Continuity,” in: John S. Feinberg, edit. Continuity and Discontinuity: Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments (Westchester: Crossway Books, 1988) 150.

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Old Testament scholars like Norman Gottwald,71 Lucien Cerfaux,72 and Gerhard von Rad73 have emphasized the continuity of the covenant concept throughout Israel’s history. Although we may not subsume the great diversity of Scriptural perspectives as tightly within the covenant concept as W. Eichrodt did,74 it is almost impossible to understand the continuity and meaning of God’s revelation to humanity apart from the concept of the covenant. In its most fundamental and essential meaning, the covenant could be stated, “I will be your God, and you shall be my people.”75 This timeless, relationship was expressed in various epochs in strikingly similar structural forms.

1. There is recitation of God’s mighty acts.2. The Word of God spells out the covenantal

relationship.3. Promises are associated with the covenantal

relationship.71 Norman Gottwald. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the

Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979) 95. Gottwald points to Exodus 19:3-8; 24:1-11; 34:2-28; Deut. 26:16-19; and Joshua 24 as examples of “theophanic and covenant texts which were “included as sources for premonarchic Israel because they contain reflections of how the relations between Yahweh and Israel were conceived in early times.” Cf. Ibid., p. 57. See also N. Gottwald. A Light to the Nations: An Introduction to the Old Testament (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1959) 102ff; and James D. Newsome, Jr. The Hebrew Prophets (Atlanta: John Knox, 1984) 40ff, 57ff, 120-123ff, 210.

72 L. Cerfaux. The Church in the Theology of St. Paul (N.Y.: Herder & Herder, 1959) 31-32. Cf. also Jakob Jocz. The Covenant (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1968) 283. Fred Klooster calls the covenant, “basically an oath-bound promisory relation.” Cf. Fred H. Klooster, op cit, p.149. See also David L. Watson, “Salt to the World: An Ecclesiology of Liberation,” in Mark Branson and R. Rene Padilla. Conflict and Context: Hermeneutics in the Amer;americas (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1986) 121-124.

73 Gerhad von Rad. Old Testament Theology Vol. I (N.Y.Y.: Harper & Row, 19622) 129-133. Von Rad points to Deut. 26:5ff as an example of the “historical summaries” which articulate this unified covenantal perspective. Cf. Dale Patrick, “The Kingdom of God in the Old Testament,” in: Wendell Willis, edit. The Kingdom of God in 20th-Century Interpretation (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 1987) 67-79.

74 See Walther Eichrodt. Theology of the Old Testament (London: SCM, 1967).

75 Compare, e.g., Gen. 17; Ex. 19, 24, 29, 34; Lev. 26; Josh 24; I Sam 12; II Sam. 23:5; Ps. 89; Jer. 31; II Cor.6; and Rev. 21. Cf. Wolfgang Roth and Rosemary Reuther. The Liberating Bond (N.Y.: Friendship, 1978) 2-3; Jakob Jocz. The Covenant. (G.R: Eerdmans, 1968) 23-31; and Lucien Cerfaux. op. cit., 31-32. I have dealt with the universal significance of Israel’s covenantal theology in, C. Van Engen. The Growth of the True Church (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981) 116-160. (See the accompanying footnotes in this latter volume for bibliographical support.) See also “diatheke” in G. Kittel. TDNT Vol. II (G.R.: Eerdmans) 106-134; and John Bright, A History of Israel (Phil: Westminster, 1959) 148-15162, 356-359, and 440-442;. and Henrikus Berkhof. Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of Faith. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1979) 229-230; 339-340; 423-426.

4. Worship and Sacrifice are carried out by the people.

5. YHWH gives a physical sign or symbol of the covenant.76

Grace, revelation, law, cultic practice, communal self-identity, corporate response, and the meaning and goal of YHWH’s acts in history are all incorporated and given meaning in this covenantal relationship. As John Kromminga said it, quoting from W. van der Merwe, “The covenant is to be understood as that relationship between God and creature, ordained in eternity, instituted in history and directed to consummation.”77

And yet we are all aware of the radically-distinct contexts in which this timeless relationship has been expressed. This incredible diversity can be illustrated by summarizing the covenant in at least six contextual manifestations.

1. Adam: The Covenant and the ultimate victory over evil

(Gen. 3:9-21)2. Noah: The Covenant and the preservation of all

living things(Gen. 6:17-22; 9:1-17)

3. Abraham: The Covenant and the election of Abraham’s seed for the sake of the nations

(Gen 12; 15; 17 – We must also include here the “representation” of that covenantal relationship in both an inherited and a personal way with Isaac: Gen. 26:3-5; and with Jacob: Gen. 28:13-15)

4. Moses: The Covenant and the law, a nation formed

(Ex. 2:24, 19:4-6; 20:1-17; 24: 1-10; 25: 10-22; 31:16-17; 32; 34: 1-10; 40: 18-38; Lev. 26: 6-12; Deut. 9:15; Num. 14. In Ex. 32 and Num. 14, God offers to make from Moses “a great nation,” each time specifically in reference to promises made earlier to Abraham. With Joshua, the covenant is related to the possession of the promised land, but intimately connected with Moses and the Exodus. Cf. Deut. 29:1-29; 30:1-20; Josh. 5; 24)

5. David: The Covenant and the Davidic reign — a kingdom

76 For the details concerning these forms, cf. my, The Growth of the True Church pp. 123-124. Also cf. John H. Hayes. An Introduction to Old Testament Study (Nashville:Abingdon, 1979) 195-197; 303ff.

77 James Dekker, “The 8th Reformed Missions Consultation: Covenant in Search of Mission,” RES Mission Bulletin (V:1, March, 1985) 1.

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(I Chr. 16: 15-17; 17: 1-27; parallels in II Sam. 7:1-29; 23:5; Ps. 89:34-37; 105:8; 111:5; 106:45; Isa. 42:6; 55:3; 59:21; II Kings 1-12)

6. Jesus Christ: The Covenant and the Holy Spirit, redemption wrought once-for-all, the Church, the Kingdom come & coming

(Isaiah 54:10; 55:3; Jer. 4:3-4; 31:31;32:36-40 Ezeq. 34:24; Mt. 3:11,16; 26:28; Mr. 14:24; Lk. 22:20; I Cor. 11:25; Acts 3:25-26; II Cor. 3:6; Heb. 7:22; 8:6,8; 9:15, 19-20, 10:12,24,29; 13:20; Rom. 11:27; Gal. 3:6 Heb. 13:20-21)78

The Covenant: Same Meaning, Fuller Knowledge

Thus on the one hand, we see the continuity of the covenantal relationship of God with His children at all times and in all contexts. But there is also something wonderfully progressive about this history which forces us to accept the fact of the incompleteness of that which Adam, Noah, or Abraham, or Moses, or David knew of God’s nature and revealed will. Precisely because we see the “continuity” of progressive revelation, we also see the deeper, fuller, and more complete self-revelation of God down through history. This seems to be the intention of the writer of Hebrews when he says,

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. (Heb. 1:1-2)

Whether it was an understanding of God’s nature, God’s redemptive activity, God’s providential care of the world, God’s love for all the nations, or God’s ultimate plan for the whole of creation — in each manifestation of the covenant there was something more deeply revealed, something more fully understood. Here is the crux of the matter. Within a fundamental sameness of the relationship, each subsequent historical-cultural-political context revealed something more concerning God’s nature and relationship with His People.

78 Cf. Carlos Van Engen. Hijos del Pacto: Perdon, Conversion y Mision en el Bautismo (G.R.: TELL, 1985) 41-51. See also NIV Study Bible (G.R.: Zondervan, 1985) 19. Cf. G. Ernest Wright. The Old Testament Against it Environment (London: SCM, 1950;) 54ff; and H.H. Rowley. The Missionary Nature of the Old Testament (London: Kingsgate, 1955) chaps. II-IV.

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by: Charles Van Engen“Importance of Narrative Theology for Biblical Theology of Mission” by Charles Van Engen

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“Importance of Narrative Theology for Biblical Theology of Mission” by Charles Van Engen

Although there is a range of possible approaches to Scripture, in this course we are using a method (a hermeneutic) that goes beyond a purely historically-oriented re-telling of the story, and beyond an exclusively grammatical, lexical study of the text. At the same time, we stop short (at the other end of the spectrum) of a totally subjective approach that ascribes to the text whatever meaning we may feel that we see or sense in the narrative.

We want, rather, to see the theological insights and orientations of the original compilers of the text, in their contexts, as they incorporated those meanings in the narrative, within the narrative’s particular time, place and culture. As we see these word-deed meanings of the text, within the social, cultural, religious, relational, and personal issues of the original context, we then may allow those meanings to illumine our understanding and word-deed missiological praxis today and tomorrow.

This approach to Scripture involves what David Bosch called, “critical hermeneutics.”

We cannot, with integrity, reflect on what mission might mean today unless we turn to the Jesus of the New Testament, since our mission is moored to Jesus’ person and ministry...(But) to affirm this is not to say that all we have to do is to establish what mission meant for Jesus and the early church and then define our missionary practice in the same terms, as though the whole problem can be solved by way of a direct application of Scripture...(Due to both the historical and socio-cultural gaps between then and now), a historico-critical study may help us to comprehend what mission was for Paul and Mark and John, but it will not immediately tell us what we must think about mission in our own concrete situation...

The approach called for requires an interaction between the self-definition of early Christian scholars and actors and the self-definition of today’s believers who wish to be inspired and guided by those early witnesses...

The critical hermeneutical approach goes beyond the (historically-interesting) quest of making explicit early Christian self-definitions, however. it desires to encourage dialogue between those self-definitions and

all subsequent ones, including those of ourselves and our contemporaries. It accepts that self-definitions may be inadequate or even wrong. So its aim is that those self-definitions be extended, criticized, or challenged...In light of this the challenge to the study of mission may be described...as relating to the always-relevant Jesus event of twenty centuries ago to the future of God’s promised reign by means of meaningful initiatives for the here and now...The point is that there is no simplistic or obvious moves from the (Old or) New Testament to our contemporary missionary practice. The Bible does not function in such a direct way. There may be, rather, a range of alternative moves which remain in deep tension with

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each other but may nevertheless all be valid. (David Bosch: 1991, 22-24).79

Although Bosch writes specifically with reference to the New Testament, he would agree that the approach he is suggesting is acceptable for both testaments. (See Bosch: 1978 and 1993.

David Tracy says that a critical narrative approach is important because, “human beings need story, symbol, image, myth, and fiction to disclose to their imaginations some genuinely new possibilities for existence: possibilities which conceptual analysis, committed as it is to understanding present actualities, cannot adequately provide (Tracy: 1988, 207).

In his School of World Mission master’s thesis on, “The Momina Theme of Life: Developed Biblically, Theologically and Contextually,” Les Henson summarizes the seven uses that Alisdair MacIntyre attributes to narrative. “(MacIntyre) argues that: (1) intelligible human action is narrative in form, (2) human life has a fundamentally narrative shape, (3) humans are story-telling (creatures), (4) people place their lives and arguments in narrative histories, (5) communities and (6) traditions receive their continuities through narrative histories, and (7) epistemological progress is marked by the construction and reconstruction of more adequate narrative and forms of narrative.” (Henson: 1992, 19)80

It is not easy to offer a coherent definition of what we mean by “narrative theology.” Two possible definitions have been offered by Gabriel Fackre and James Gustafson. Gabriel Fackre says,

Narrative theology is discourse about God in the setting of story. Narrative (in its narrow sense) becomes the decisive image for understanding and interpreting faith. Depiction of reality, ultimate and penultimate, in terms of plot, coherence, movement, and climax is at the center of all forms of this kind of talk about God (Fackre: 1983, 343).

In contrast to this, James Gustafson defines narrative in relation to its function.

Narrative functions to sustain the particular moral identity of a religious (or secular) community by rehearsing its history and traditional meanings, as these are portrayed in Scripture and other sources. Narratives shape and sustain the ethos of the community. Through our participation in

such a community, the narratives also function to give shape to our moral character, which in turn deeply affect the way we interpret or construe the world and events and thus affect what we determine to be appropriate action as members of the community. Narratives function to sustain and confirm the religious and moral identity of the Christian community, and evoke and sustain the faithfulness of its members to Jesus Christ (Gustafson: 1988, 19-20).

With specific reference to missiology, there are a number of reasons why a narrative approach to Scripture (a narrative theological hermeneutic of mission) is helpful for doing biblical theology of mission.

1. A narrative hermeneutic reflects the nature of much biblical material.

2. Narrative provides us a way to speak about God and faith in such a way that bridges and includes both propositional, left-brain (so-called “objective”) language about God and faith with experiential, right-brain (so-called “subjective”) language about God and faith in an integrated, integral, personal unity whereby being, knowing, and doing come together in real life.

3. Narrative helps us connect the issues in the text with the matters of life in today’s contexts.

4. Narrative helps us think in highly integrative and multi-disciplinary ways, a matter essential to missiology.

5. In relation to today’s global theological conversations in missiology, narrative provides us the images, pictures, metaphors and stories that are necessary for rounding out the propositional, textual and historical aspects of missiological reflection. This contributes to the possibility of a global conversation by the whole Church in terms of the full scope of its participation in God’s mission

6. Narrative helps us ask questions regarding the Missio Dei with reference to the text of Scripture, the contexts in Scripture and our lives — in the midst of the community of the People of God in Scripture and today. These narrative questions can help us critically reflect on text, context, and community in terms of the ultimate meaning, purpose, direction, and goal of the Kingdom of God present in Jesus Christ that moves toward the future coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ.

79 Notice the similarity between Bosch’s approach to hermeneutics and what Paul Hiebert has called “critical contextualization” from an anthropological perspective.

80 Henson is quoting from Hauerwas and Jones: 1989, 8.

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In an excellent extended footnote, Les Henson gives a helpful overview of some of the extensive literature dealing with narrative theology. Henson says,

For a discussion of and introduction to the subject of narrative theology, the following writers are helpful. Goldberg’s (1981) book is probably the best starting point. He writes from a Jewish perspective and covers the materials prior to 1981. R.W.L. Moberly (1986, 77-82) provides a helpful introduction from a conservative perspective. Grant R. Osborne (1991, 153-173) provides a useful critique of the subject from a conservative-fundamentalist position. Hauerwas and Jones (1989) is intended to be an introduction to the subject. It is comprised of selected articles by a variety of authors and covers three major topics: narrative rediscovered, narrative as a critical tool, and narrative’s theological significance. Paul Lauritzen (1987, 322-339) considers the work of Metz and Hauerwas. V. Philips Long (1987, 102-109) considers the approach of Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg. Others include Fackre (1983, 340-352); David Nelson Duke (1986, 137-149); Gary L. Comstock (1987, 688-717); Ronald L. Grimes (1986, 1-17); and David Gunn (1987, 65-75).

REFERENCESBosch David.

1978 “The Why and How of a True Biblical Foundation for Mission,” in: J.D. Gort, edit.: 1978, 33-45.

1991 Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis.

1993 “Reflections on Biblical Models of Mission,” in James M. Phillips and Robert T. Coote, edits.: 1993, 175-192.

Comstock, Gary L.19887 “Two Types of Narrative Theology,” Journal of the

American Academy of Religion LX:4 (Winter), 688-717.

Duke, David Nelson1986 “Theology and Biography: Simple Suggestions for a

Promising Field,” Perspectives in Religious Studies XIII:2 (Summer), 137-149.

Fackre, Gabriel.1983 “Narrative Theology: An Overview,” Interpretation.

XXXVII:4 (Oct.), 340-353.

Goldberg, Michael1981 Theology and Narrative: A Critical Introduction. Phil.:

Trinity Press, Intnl.

Grimes, Ronald L.1986 “Of Words the Speakers, of Deeds the Doers,” The

Journal of Religion LXVI:1 (Jan.) 1-17.

Gunn, David M.1987 “New Directions in the Study of Biblical Hebrew

Narrative,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament XXXIX (Oct.), 65-75.

Gustafson, James M.1988 “Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative,

Ethical, and Policy,” The Stob Lectures. G.R.: Calvin College.

Hauerwas, Stanley and L. Gregory Jones.1989 Why Narrative?. G.R.: Eerdmans.

Henson, Les1992 The Momina Theme of Life: Developed Biblically,

Theologically and Contextually. (FTS/SWM unpublished, master’s thesis). Pasadena: FTS.

Lauritzen, Paul1987 “Is ‘Narrative’ Really a Panacea? The Use of

‘Narrative’ in the Work of Metz and Hauerwas,” The Journal of Religion LXVII: 3 (July), 322-339.

Long, V. Philips1987 “Toward a Better Theory and Understanding of Old

Testament Narrative,” Presbyterion XIII:2 (Fall), 102-109.

Moberly, R.W.L.1986 “Story in the Old Testament,” Themelios XI:3 (April),

77-82.

Osborne, Grant R.1991 The Hermeneutical Spiral. Downers Grove: IVP.

Tracy, David1988 Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in

Theology. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Van Engen, Charles.1993 “The Relation of Bible and Mission in Mission

Theology,” in: Van Engen, Gilliland, and Pierson: 1993, 27-36

Van Engen, Charles, Dean Gilliland, and Paul Pierson, edits.1993 The Good News of the Kingdom: Mission Theology for

the Third Millenium.

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“Paradigms of Mission in the Four Gospels” by Johannes Nissen

(Used by Permission)

IntroductionTo begin with I have a few introductory remarks.

First I would like to thank the head of the Institute of Systematic Theology, Hans Raun Iversen, for his invitation to give a lecture on paradigms of mission in the Gospels.

Since this lecture is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Danish Mission Society and is given in connection with a new book on the New Testament, I want to take the opportunity to thank some other persons as well. This includes the former mission secretary of DMS, Ellen Christensen, who strongly supported my plans to publish a book on mission. I also express my thanks to the publisher, ANIS, as well as the general secretary of the Ecumenical Council, Holger Lam. Finally I want to thank Peter Lodberg at the University of Aarhus for good suggestions to the manuscript.

The book should seen as a contribution to the dialogue between biblical scholarship and missiology. There is a need for such a dialogue. Biblical scholars, on the whole, tend to emphasize the diversity of the biblical message and the historical conditioning of each text. This makes them very hesitant to draw a direct connection between the biblical text and today’s missionary enterprise. Biblical scholarship gives a fuller understanding of the text in its original meaning. At the same time, however, it frequently fails to show whether, and, if so, how the Bible can be of significance to the church-in-mission.

By contrast, missiologists writing on the “biblical foundation for mission” tend to err in the opposite direction. They are inclined to overlook the rich diversity of the biblical record and therefore to reduce the biblical motivation for mission to one single idea or text—for instance the Great Commission, or more recently in liberation theology circles, Jesus’ appeal to Isaiah in Luke 4; on the other hand they tend far too easily to read back into the Bible aspects of the missionary enterprise in which they are involved today.

In a fruitful dialogue between the two fields, the renewal of biblical studies can contribute to the renewal of mission. In the same way the renewal of

mission can provide new perspectives on the Scripture.

This brings me to two other items which must be touched upon in this introduction: the method and the title of this lecture.

The method of interpretation is important. Any use of the Scripture must face the risk that the biblical text just becomes a mirror reflecting back what we want it to say. Therefore, some method must be used which allows the text to speak its piece, to function as a window through which we see something besides our own thoughts.81

A combination of historical analysis and hermeneutical reflections is the best way to avoid such a risk. This means that we have to abandon the traditional approach according to which it is the task of the exegete to find the historical meaning of the text and then let others do the application. This approach is unsufficient, since it presupposes that the historical investigation can be separated from the interests of the interpreter.

The title of my paper is “Paradigms of Mission in the Four Gospels.” And I take “paradigm” to mean almost the same as “model.” This seems also to be the case with two books which have been of much inspiration in my work. D. J. Bosch: Transforming Mission. Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission from 1991 (New York), and Mortimor Arias: The Great Commission. Biblical Models for Evangelism from 1992 (Nashville).

It seems to me that the two terms have at least two aspects in common. The first aspect is descriptive. Paradigms and models reflect the experience, the beliefs and the values of a specific community. The second aspect is normative. Paradigms and models are somehow imperative. They give a pattern or perspective on the life of the readers.

Instead of “paradigm” or “model” one could also use a third term: “aspect.” As I see it, this term has three dimensions: (1) a historical-descriptive dimension, (2) a normative dimension, and (3) a subjective dimension. I am asking specific questions of the text. I am looking at the text from a specific point of view, a specific angle. In short, we are all looking at the text through our lenses.

81 Cf. W. M. Swartley: Slavery, Sabbath, War and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottdale, PA, 1983), pp. 183 ff.

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The term paradigm might also have this subjective element. D. J. Bosch has compared a paradigm with a map. He states: “I recognize that different theological interpretations, including my own, reflect different contexts, perspectives and biases.” This is not the same as regarding all theological positions as equal. “I realize that my theological approach is a ‘map,’ and that map is never the actual ‘territory.’ Although I believe that my map is best, I accept that there are other types of maps and also that, at least in theory, one of those may be better than mine...” (187).

(In the New Testament, the gospel is addressed to different people and problems in different geographical and cultural settings during more than half a century. Biblical truth is concrete, shaped usually by specific contexts, needs and opportunities.)82

The Bible present models of how to apply the gospel perspective to different situations in different cultures in different time periods of the church. (Or to quote a missiologist: “The Bible contains a number of parameters for mission, normative guidelines for disciples of Jesus to perform their mission in accordance with God’s intention and action.”)83

After these introductory remarks I now turn to the various paradigms of mission in the Gospels. Needless to say, I cannot give a detailed analysis of the four Gospels. In what follows I have to limit myself to some major characteristics of each Gospel.

The Matthean Didactic Paradigm: Disciple - Making In many circles the Great Commission in

Matthew 28 has been regarded as the major—if not the sole—motivation for mission. For more than two or three centuries this text has been a powerful inspiration to Protestant missions. The commission was often understood as a command.

The great Duch theologian, A. Kuyper stated (in 1890): “All mission flows from God’s sovereignity, not from God’s love and compassion.” He also said: “All mission is, formally, obedience to God’s command; materially, the message is not an invitation, but an order, a burden. The Lord sends his command: ‘Repent and believe!’, not as a recommendation or an admonition, but as a decree.”

Even today among many evangelicals the Great Commission is understood as a command to be obeyed. However this is a problematic understanding because it places mission in a context of legalism. It removes the church’s involvement in mission from

the domain of gospel to that of law (Bosch 1991, 341). The command develops a “weight” of its own; it leads a life of its own; it becomes a marching order of a Christian militia, engaged in a holy war. Early Christian mission was an essential result of Pentecost. It was this event that became the driving force in mission. The “debt” or “obligation” Paul had to Greeks and non-Greeks (Rom 1:14) was the debt of gratitude, not of duty.84

Biblical texts which are often used in the liturgy or the life and mission of the church tend to develop a specific meaning. We read them isolated from their proper contexts. It is the task of the biblical scholars to remind us of the original meaning. In this way we might get fresh light and new perspectives on our contemporary experiences. (A re-reading of the text in its own context gives a fascinating potential to understand in a new and creative way, the meaning of mission for the church today.)

In what follows I shall comment on some important aspects of mission in Matthew, especially the Great Commission. Since this presentation has to be brief, I have to leave out a number of issues. For a more detailed description I must refer to my book.

The mission instruction itself is found in Matt 28:19-20a: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

A few words must be said on the four terms: go, make disciples, teach and baptize. The first verb “go therefore” has been of special importance in Western missionary thinking. It has often been seen as an event in itself. But in the Greek construction it is an auxiliary verb (aorist participle “poreuthentes”) to the main verb “make disciples.”

However, the Western tradition tended to emphasize the “going” rather than the “making of disciples.” The locality, not the task, determined whether someone was a missionary or not; one was qualified if one was commissioned by an agency in one locality to go and work in another. The greater the distance between these two places, the clearer it was that the individual was a missionary.85

In the text itself the main verb is “make disciples,” and going, baptizing and teaching are subordinated to this discipling. The paradigm of mission in Matthew is disciple-making. This is confirmed by the entire Gospel. In a contextual reading of Matthew, it is evident that the whole

82 Cf. W. M. Swartley, op. cit., p. 188.83 F. J. Verstraelen: “The Real Issues Regarding the Bible: Summary, Findings, and Conclusions,” in F. J. Verstraelen a.o. (eds.), Rewriting the

Bible: The Real Issue (Harare/Zimbabwe, 1993), pp. 263-289.84 Cf. C. J. Bosch: The Structure of Exposition of Matthew 28:16-20, in W. R. Shenk (ed.), Exploring Church Growth (Grand Rapids/Michigan,

1983), pp. 218-248.85 Cf. D. J. Bosch (1983), pp. 229f.

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gospel is didactic in character and intention and that the last commission comes as the climax of a the didactic model.

If we are serious about taking Matthew 28 as the paradigm for mission today, our evangelization should concentrate on what we call Christian education! Where did we get the idea that evangelism and Christian education are separate things in the mission and ministry of the church? Certainly not in the “Great Commission.” Mission, for Matthew, was catechetical mission.

Christian education is already evangelism. It is no less than the evangelization of each generation, learning together the way of the kingdom, in a community of disciples, at each stage in life and throughout all of the experiences of life, and in each particular context. Disciples are not born, they are made, and it takes a whole lifetime, with no graduation in sight (cf. Arias, 19-20).

Another consequence is that the difference between home mission and foreign mission disappears. Or better, it is not (any more) a difference of principles, but of scope.

What about “teaching”? It is important to recognize that, for Matthew, teaching is by no means a merely intellectual enterprise (as it is often for us and as was for the ancient Greeks). Jesus’ teaching is an appeal to his listeners’ will, not primarily to their intellect; it is a call for a concrete decision to follow him and to submit to God’s will.86

For Matthew, to become a disciple is to be incorporated into God’s new community through baptism and it means living out the teaching of Jesus. His teaching is described in the love commandment and in the Sermon on the Mount.

It has been discussed during centuries whether Christians are able to live according to the standards of the Sermon on the Mount. It has often been argued that it is impossible to fulfil these radical demands. However, the failure of Christians to live according to these requirements does not absolve them from the challenge to do so.

Particularly in our contemporary world of violence and counter-violence, of oppression from the right and the left, of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, it is imperative for the church-in-mission to include the “superior justice” of the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5:20) in its missionary agenda. Its mission cannot concern itself exclusively with the personal, inward, spiritual and “vertical” aspect of people’s lives (Bosch, 70).

We should notice also that the Sermon on the Mount points to the content of mission, e.g. God’s kingdom and justice (or righteousness, “dikaiousyne”). The translation of the Greek word “dikaiousyne” poses problems. We often translate it with “righteousness” and then understand it in a Pauline way. The consequence is that its content is purely spiritual. An alternative way is to use the translation “justice” which then is understood as social justice or justice as something we are doing.

The word used for “righteousness” or “justice” (dikaiousyne) is not only the personal level of spirituality or behaviour; it has to do with the total order of God in the world. “God’s will on earth as in heaven,” including what we today call the “structures” of society. So mission has to do with justice—in persons, communities and nations.

If we ask for the addresses of mission in the Gospel of Matthew we will have two groups. The first one is “all the nations” mentioned in Matthew 28. The other one is the little ones, that is the poor (e.g. 5:3), children (e.g. 18:2-5), the weary and overburdened (11:28), “the least ones of all” (25:40, 45). The “little ones” in the strange strategy of Jesus, became not only the objects but also the subjects of mission.

What are the implications of taking seriously this understanding of mission? M. Arias asks: Can a church of the “great ones,” “the strong ones,” “the prosperous ones” or the “comfortable ones” evangelize or be evangelized by the little ones? Who are the little ones in our society? What are we doing for them, and what is their place as subjects of mission through our churches? (p. 32).

The Marcan Paradiam: The Inclusive Kingdom and the Cross

Other perspectives on the mission in Matthew could be added. However, due to the limit of time I will now comment briefly on the understanding of mission in Mark’s Gospel.

Mark like Matthew has a mission command towards the end of his Gospel. “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (16:15). To this is added that those who believe and are baptized will be saved, while those who do not beleive will be condemned. Furthermore, it is promised to all believers that they will cast out demons, speak in tongues, pick up snakes, and drink poisen unharmed (v. 16-18).

Many of us would be quite pleased with the first part of this commission which centers on the good news as the content and which speaks of the whole creation as the goal of mission. We would probably

86 Cf. H. Frankemolle, “Zur Theologie der Mission im Matthausevangelium,” in K. Kertelg, Mission im Neuen Testament (Herder 1982), pp. 93-129

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have more difficulties with the added promises. We naturally ask if it is a fact that all Christian missionaries have abilities to pick up snakes and drink poisen unharmed and are enabled to speak in tongues. Are the driving out of demons and the gift of healing regular features of mission?

It is widely recognized by scholars that the commission is part of a “longer ending” of Mark (16:9-20) which is an addition to the original text. The oldest manuscripts do not have these last twelve verses. There is also a certain tension between these verses and the gospel as such. While the appendix promises “signs and wonders,” Jesus in the Gospel rebukes the Pharisees for demanding “signs” (8:11f) and strongly warns his disciples against “the signs and wonders” which are performed by “false Christs and false prophets” (13:22-23).

This “longer ending” probably reflects the concern of the Christians in the second century—at a time when there was a growing interest in charismatic gifts and miracles. This is not to say that these formulations are without interest today but their value must be checked against the orignal text of the gospel.

Do these cautions mean that the Gospel of Mark is without a mission perspective? Not at all. But the focus of mission should not be on the additions at the end but on the gospel itself. Furthermore, the gospel as literary genre is the Marcan paradigm of mission. In other words, the gospel is the creation of a new literary genre, created to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ in story form (Arias 37).

As D. Senior states: “The Gospels are mission literature in the fullest sense of the term. They are not propaganda, not equipment designed for proclamation to nonbelievers. They are mission documents for the church itself, meant to justify, renew and motivate the church’s claim on the heritage of Jesus’ own boundary-breaking ministry.”87 This is also true for our churches. The challenge is that we read the Gospel in order to be justified and renewed by Jesus’ boundary-breaking mission.

The content of this Gospel is none other than the coming of the kingdom of God. Mark indicates clearly that the kingdom is multi-dimensional, and it has to be announced in many ways—through preaching, teaching, healing, exorcism, calling and forming disciples, feeding, comforting and confronting. It is proclamation in action. The presence of the kingdom is power in action, to heal, to transform, and to confront.

One other feature must be mentioned. The fact that the “longer ending” of Mark does not belong to the orignal Gospel has led some scholars to the conclusion that “the episode of the empty tomb forms Mark’s final commission” (L. Doohan). This is an interesting observation; it means that the commission is given from the empty tomb. The consequence is that from now on mission is marked by the crucified Christ.

It has been noted by several scholars that “a way” or “journey” motif seems to permeate the entire span of Mark’s Gospel. The title that heads Mark’s Gospel seems to fit this journey character: “the beginning of the gospel” (1:1). Jesus’ whole story—from Galilee to Jerusalem and back again—is the “beginning” of proclamation, the beginning of the church’s “way,” which is begun and shaped by the way of Jesus.

Being on the way is an important aspect of the Marcan paradigm of mission. In the tomb the young man said to the women: “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you into Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (16:7). “His way has flowed into their way...their way has become the way of discipleship.”88

The entire journey motif gives an inherently missionary character to Mark’s Gospel. “The Christian message is described as a way, as a mobile, dynamic transmission of God’s Word that sweeps through the heart of Judaism, overcoming opposition and death, and moves out into the world” (Senior, 216).

The original ending of the Gospel is a puzzle: “So they (i.e.: the women) went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). However, this ending is intentional; it is the author’s device to get the readers involved in the story. It was an invitation to discipleship and to mission. They are called to be part of the unfinished, ongoing story of Christ’s mission on earth. To be in mission is to be on the way.

The two endings of the Gospel of Mark represent two paradigms which point in different directions. The “longer ending” with its promises to perform miracles represents a form of mission which is not unlike Luke’s description of the first Christians in the book of Acts. No wonder that the Pentecostal movement often has been inspired by such formulations. However, this model of mission tends to be triumphalistic in its character. Here is developed a theology of glory which does not really count the reality of the cross and suffering.

87 Cf. D. Senior & C. Stuhlmueller, The Biblical Foundations for Mission (London, 1983), p. 211.88 R. Pesch, Das Markusevangelium (Herder 1980), vol I, p. 60. Cf. also D. Senior, op. cit. p. 216.

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The original Gospel, on the other hand, represents a theology of the cross which is not unlike the Pauline missionary paradigm with its insistence on the crucifixion; cf. Paul’s declarations in 1 Cor 1:23—“We preach Christ as crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,” and 2:2—“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

The Lucan Paradigm: The Proclamation of the Jubilee

While most evangelicals regard Matthew 28:16-20 as the key missionary passage in Scripture, many others—particularly within liberation theology and ecumenical circles—point to Luke 4:16-30 as the most important text. There is no doubt about the significance of this story in the Gospel of Luke. The idea of Jubilee permeates his gospel. The Lucan paradigm of mission is the proclamation of the Jubilee.

The story opens with the words:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (v. 16-18).

At least three fundamental concerns of Luke are expressed in Luke 4:16-30: 1.) The centrality of the poor in Jesus’ ministry, 2.) the setting aside of vengeance, and 3.) the Gentile mission (Bosch, 89). Here I shall limit myself to a few notes on the first concern.

It is remarkable that some interpreters understand this text in a spiritual sense. The terms “poor,” “captives” and “oppressed” have been seen as “categories which designate those who are victims of inward repressions, neuroses or other spiritual ills.”

However, Luke’s way of treating the Old Testament is significant. In the quotation from Is 61:1-2 he omits one sentence (“to heal the brokenhearted”). Instead he inserts a sentence from Is 58 (“to set the oppressed free”). This rearrangement of the material is probably due to the fact that Luke wanted to avoid a possible spiritualization of the words from Is 61.89

The point in Luke 4 is that those on the periphery—the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed—are the recipients of Jesus’ Spirit-filled ministry.90 This interpretation is confirmed by the entire Gospel.

Jesus shares table-fellowship with tax collectors and sinners (cf. Luke 5:27-32; 15:12). More than other evangelists Luke emphasizes Jesus’ association with women. Jesus is open to “official” outsiders such as the Gentile centurion (7:1-10) and the Samaritans.

Thus, there is no doubt that the social dimension plays a significant role in Jesus’ ministry. This is not to say that the Jubilee refers only to the social aspect of life. Jubilee has a wide meaning. It means good news to the poor, restoration of life, forgiveness of sin, healing, rectification. In short, “release,” jubilee, is necessary for human life; consequently it is the missionary priority.

Whatever salvation is, in every specific context, it includes the total transformation of human life, forgiveness of sin, healing from infirmities, and release from any kind of bondage. (Luke uses “aphesis” for both “forgiveness” and “release” or liberation—compare 24:47 with 4:18.) This comprehensive understanding of salvation is evident in both the gospel and Acts (Bosch, 107).

Luke’s emphasis on good news to the poor has often led theologians to the conclusion that he is the evangelist of the poor. However, in view of the extensive material on the rich, including positive stories about the rich, Luke “can more correctly be called the “evangelist of the rich.”91

Elsewhere I have tried to show that Luke visiualized a community where the members share common resources (cf. Acts 2:41-47 and 4:31-37). Therefore people are called to take the step from an economy of having to an economy of giving. There are a few examples of rich people who took the decisive step towards a new lifestyle. One of these is Zacchaeus, Luke 19,1-10 (Nissen, 1984, 83ff.).

The Lucan model of the Jubilee is of relevance in our world which is torn between rich people in the North and poor people in the South (cf. the debt crisis). In that sense the ecumenical emphasis on Luke as an important model of mission is very significant.

But some representatives of this interpretation might forget the comprensive character of this model, and over-emphasize the social or even political aspect. The Jubilee has to do with the personal and the social, the spiritual and the material, the religious and the secular. Bosch has characterized Luke’s paradigm as “practicing forgiveness and solidarity with the poor.”

In the ongoing discussion between the evangelicals and the ecumenicals the evangelicals sometimes ask the WCC: “Do you weep for the lost?” The ecumenical counter-question is: “Do you

89 Cf. J. Nissen, Poverty and Mission. New Testament Perspectives on a Contemprary Theme (Leiden 1984), p. 75.90 Cf. D. Senior, op. cit., p. 260.91 Cf. L. Schottroff & W. Stegemann, Jesus von Nazareth—Hoffnung der Armen (Stuttgart 1978).

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weep for the poor?”92 It is significant that both questions are addressed in the Gospel of Luke. Here Jesus is portraited as a “friend with sinners” as well as a “friend with the poor.”

The Johannine Paradigm: The Universality of Christ and the Incarnation

“What do you seek?” (John 1:38). These are the first words of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. They indicate a theme of great importance for the author. Throughout the Gospel people are searching for something. It seems as if they are searching for fellowship with God and other persons, for the meaning of life, for a place to belong.

Three passages are of particular interest because this search is performed by persons coming from various traditions. In chapter 3 Jesus is approached by Nicodemus, a representative of the Jewish leaders. In chapter 4 he meets a representative of the Samaritans. And in chapter 12 some Greeks desire to see Jesus.

The dialogue between the universality and the particularity is also reflected in the “I am” sayings of Jesus. Let us take one example. In John 14:6 Jesus says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” These words express a continuity with other religious traditions as well as a certain discontinuity.

It is certanly not accidental that in chapter 14 as elsewhere, John uses specific notions and terminology from the religious traditions of his contemporary world. For instance, among Jews it was quite usual to speak about the way. In Jewish tradition we meet the term the “Way of the Torah,” and the Qumran community designated itself as the Way. A third example is the “way” of John the Baptist. The muliticiplicity of religious ways and paths was an issue in the New Testament period.

Today we have a similar variety of ways. The first Sura of the Qur’an is characterized as the way (or straight path). In Hindu tradition there are three ways to salvation. The Buddhist self-descriptions are the Noble Eightfold path and the Middle Way. In Chinese tradition Tao is seen as the way, the chief way.

These traditions from the New Testament period and from modern time indicate that the longings and aspirating of humanity are to be recognized. They reflect the universal condition of all human beings, created in and through the eternal Word of God. Here is the element of continuity.

But equally the Christian community believed then, as it must still do, that the Way of God has been

most clearly discerned in the way that Jesus followed—the path of rejection and suffering, of abandonment and death. This way of Jesus is clearly discontinuous with all other religious ways.93

John’s use of notions from the religious traditions of his contemporary world might be intentional. It seems as if the author deliberately incorporated a variety of symbols, traditions and perspectives in his Gospel in order to emphasize the universality of Jesus Christ.94

John’s language is open-ended. It has a distinctive and strong universalistic character. This is clearly seen from the Prologue. In the first half John describes the divine-human encounter in general terms. He uses terms like Logos, God, all things, life, light, shines, darkness, world, etc. In the second half he uses specific Christian terms as the only begotten Son, Father, grace, truth, Jesus Christ, glory.95

The Prologue sets the tone for the rest of the Gospel. It is the conceptual “center” of the Gospel from which all of its other dimensions radiate. The central affirmations are made in v.1 and v. 14 (Cahill). Jesus is the Word with God from the beginning, and so intimately bonded with God that the Word can be called “God” (v. 1-2). The revealing Word begins a progressive penetration of the human sphere. All created reality is made in and through the Word; all created reality finds “life” and “light” through it (him), v. 3-5. This Word is so embedded in the human sphere that it becomes “flesh” and lives in the midst of the community (v. 14).

Thus from the start the Gospel is cosmic and universal. The issues are all ultimate: the origin and meaning of creation, the attainment of authentic life, search for God. These are elements common to all religious systems. (Cf. Senior 284). The important thing, however, is that the Gospel moves from these universal elements to the earthly, historical Jesus. It is a movement from the universal to the particular, from eternity to history, from the more impersonal to the personal. And human beings are called to follow that movement, and thereby realise that Jesus Christ is the unique revealer of the living God (1:18).

The Fourth Gospel is significant for the universal mission of the church because of its peculiar combination of the universality of Christ and the incarnation. John offers an incarnational model of mission (cf. also the the emphasis on the Cosmic Christ in Colossians and Ephesians).

Furthermore in John there is a fundamental link between incarnation, resurrection and mission. The

92 Cf. D. J. Bosch, Beyond Melbourne and Pattaya: A Typology of Two Movements, in JAMS News Letters, Nos 16-17 (May-Oct 1980), p. 21-33.

93 Cf. K. Cracknell, Toward a New Relationship: Christians and People of Other Faith (London 1986), p. 84-85.94 Cf. G. MacRae, “The Fourth Gospel and Religionegeschichte,” Cath. Bibl. Quarterly 32 (1970), pp. 13-24.95 Cf. M. Vellanickal, “The Gospel of John in the Indian Context,” Jeevadhara 68 (1982), pp. 140-155.

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good news of the incarnation becomes the good news of the resurrection. It is told in John 20:19-23 how the living Christ “came and stood among them,” that is, the fearful disciples. The Lord was “coming” in the resurrection as in the incarnation. That coming was not a brief visit from the eternal world. The Word came to stay, “to dwell among us.”

The coming of the living Christ is the presuppostion for the great commission: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (20:21). Mission is to be sent. The entire Gospel is about sending and being sent. Once and again the Johannine Jesus says that God is “the one who sends me.” Jesus is “the sent one”; consequently the church’s identity is about being sent (e.g. 4:38; 17:3; 20:21).

There are conflicting interests in the modern use of John’s Gospel. On the one hand, this gospel has been one of the favourite instruments for evangelism through literature and a much frequented source for evangelical and conservative Christians. On the other hand this Gospel has shown to be quite popular among Christians who are strongly engaged in dialogue with other religious traditions, e.g. in India.96

In biblical scholarship there is a debate on the question of John and Gnosticism. Did the author express Gnostic ideas? Did he increase the gnosticizing tendency of his time, or did he resist that tendency?97 The author seems to be very reader-oriented. But how far did he go along with his readers? And how far should we go in our dialogue with people of other faith?

The tendency to move from the more particular to the more universal was itself a phenomenon which could be seen in many religious systems of that time. But for John’s community it is not due simply to the impact of a more cosmopolitan culture. The universalism of the message flowed from the universal significance of Christ himself. Jesus revealed God, and only faith in this Jesus was adequate. John intends us to see that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of the expectations of human beings. But he “wishes to imply that as long as one tries to grasp Jesus as a Jew or a Greek as a Gnostic or a traditional Christian would, he both succeeds and fails, for Jesus is the fulfillment of these expectations, but he is caught up in none of them. Only the great act of self-giving love which engenders love within the Christian community can reach him” (MacRae, p. 23).

Concluding Remarks The survey of the mission paradigms in the

Gospels points to a number of issues. In a concluding part of my lecture I shall comment briefly on three problems. The first problem is about the question of unity and diversity.

Some Christians consider diversity to be negative. But it need not be so. Diversity can also be seen as a strength. It testifies to the genuinness of revelation in history. In this way biblical thought differs from the timeless myth and rigid religious systems. It is rooted rather in a historical community’s ongoing relationship with God. “The diverisy of thought within the Bible reflects the diversity of God’s actions in different historical situations and the diversity of human response to God’s actions.”98

It should be noticed that there is no one cohesive “theology” of mission in the Bible, but a series of traditions which are often, but not always interrelated. Ultimately they converge around the figure of Jesus and the church’s impulse to proclaim the good news of salvation to the world (Senior, 344).

One might relate the problem of unity and diversity to the distinction between the mission (of God) and the missions (of the churches), between missio Dei and missiones ecclesiae. The models of the New Testament reflect the different experiences of churches in mission. Mission is basically a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission.99 There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is the fountain of sending. The Gospel of John contributes to this theo-logical or even trinitarian approach to mission.

A second problem is how to relate the Gospel to culture. Here again we touch upon the variety of mission theologies. I have tried to express this in the title of my book which is taken from John 1:14. The original meaning of the second sentence is something like: “he pitched his tent and dwelt among us.” The metaphor is to live in a tent rather than a stone house. This imagery gives a very dynamic understanding of mission.

In recent years inculturation has become an important model of contextualizing theology. Inculturation is derived from the incarnation. The incarnational dimension of the Gospel being “en-fleshed,” “em-bodied” in a people and its culture,

96 Cf. C. Duraisingh &C. Hargreaves (ed.), India’s Search for Reality and the Relevance of the Gospel of John (Mysore 1975).97 Cf. J. D. G. Dunn, op. cit., p. 298.98 The Bible. Its Authority and Interpretation in the Ecumenical Movement , ed. by E. Flessemann-van Leer (Geneva 1980), p. 32.99 Cf. J. Aagaard, “Trends in Missiological Thinking in Modern Protestant Missiology,” in Intern. Review of Mission 62 (1973), p. 8-25. Cf. also

Bosch 1991, p. 390.

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of a “kind of ongoing incarnation” is very different from any model that had been in vogue for many years. In this paradigm it is not so much a case of the church being expanded, but of the church being born anew in each new context and culture (cf. Bosch, 414).

The diversity responds to the multiple need of the communities. As Soares-Prabhu says, “The New Testament stands as a model of the “accomodation,” “adaption” or “inculturation,” through which the Christian proclamation must become “all things to all men that (it) might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:22).100

The third problem relates to the method and the hermeneutics. We have to ask the question: how do we read, quote and use the Bible? We are all of us in constant danger of using the biblical texts simply to confirm what they have been saying all the time, and hence the richness and depth of the whole Bible does not come to life.101

Previously in this paper I have pointed to the tendency among Christians today to use only one of the biblical paradigms—be it the Great Commission in Matthew, the proclamation of the Jubilee in Luke, or Mark’s “longer ending.” Such a favouring of one single paradigm can easily lead to a reductionism.

We read the Bible selectively. None of us can fully overcome this problem, but we can do two things. We can correct wrong notions by a serious study of the biblical text and by following a method which helps us to hear the text on its own terms. And we can attempt to reach at a more comprehensive approach. An actual understanding of mission must include evangelism as well as social responsibility, unless we are to be guilty of distorting the holistic gospel.

In today’s mission our goal cannot be to imitate the specific things Jesus and the first Christians did; rather we must take the model of incarnation itself to hear and discover anew, as they did, how to express and embody the gospel in our context.102

We cannot suppose that our present concerns are directly reflected in the first-century experiences. Therefore Christians must ask seriously whether the issues to which the first Christians speak apply to our situations.

There are many shifting situations, and therefore also a great need of flexibility. Here we should not fail to see the importance of the Holy Spirit. Let me conclude this lecture by referring to some words from John 16:12f.: “I have many things to say to you but

you cannot bear it now. When the Spirit comes, he will guide you into all truth....”

This text is a remarkable one. It says plainly that there is more to be learned than can be found in the recorded teachings of Jesus to his disciples during the years of his ministry. The text can also be seen as a correction of the way some Christans use the Bible. They consider it to be a book containing timeless truths. This, however, is a misunderstanding of the nature of revelation. The revelation is not the communication of a body of timeless truths which one has only to receive in order to know the whole mind of God. Revelation is rather the disclosure of the direction in which God is leading the world and his children. The stuff of the Bible is promise and fulfilment. It is a story of a journey, of a pilgrimage, of a movement.103 It is a continuation of what John said: “He pitched his tent and dwelled among us.”

100 Cf. G. S. Prabhu, “The New Testament as Model of Inculturation,” in Jeevadhara No. 33 (May-June 1976), p. 268-282.101 Cf. F. J. Verstraelen, After Melbourne and Pattaya: Reflections of A Participant Observer, in JAMS News Letter No 16-17 (May-Oct. 1980),

p. 33-49.102 Cf. J. Nissen, “Firmness and Flexibility: Paul’s Mission to the Greeks,” in L. Thunberg a.o. (eds.), Dialogue in Action. Essays in Honour of J.

Aagaard (New Delhi 1988), p. 56-84.

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1987 The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged. New updated ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

103 Cf. L. Newbigin, The Good Shepherd (Madras 1974), p. 123. Cf. also Nissen 1988, p. 79.

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“An Exegetical Study of Matthew 28:16-20” by Karl Barth

(Thomas Wieser, trans.)Reprinted from The Theology of the Christian Mission, Gerald H. Anderson, ed.,

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961. Used by permission.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Matthew 28:16-20

Here we have part of the New Testament testimony about events that took place during the forty days after Easter.

Let us recall what happened in those days according to the New Testament record. It was during this period that the purpose of Jesus’ life and death, and with it the mission of his followers, could for the first time be seen, heard, and grasped by men. It was the time of the Son’s coming in the glory of the Father, ushering in not more and not less than the approaching end of this world and the beginning of a new one. “To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). It became manifest in those forty days that neither the proclamation of God’s kingdom at hand, as first heralded by John the Baptist and later by Jesus himself, nor the miracles and signs accomplished by Jesus were empty words. The petition “Thy kingdom come” had not been uttered in vain after all; “this generation,” the generation of those alive at the time, was indeed not to pass away before “all these things” had taken place as foretold by Jesus according to Mark 13:30. It became manifest that some of the people who gathered around Jesus actually did not taste death before they had seen the kingdom of God come with power (Mk. 9:1). The disciples truly were not to go through all the towns of Israel before the Son of man came (Mt. 10:23). Now he came, and now “all these things” happened. Peter’s confession at Caesarea (Mt. 16:16), at the time premature, was now proven to be right and necessary. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Right and necessary, therefore, was the name “Lord,” kyrios, which the disciples had given to their master. It became manifest, in other words, that the eschaton had really begun. All these things were revealed when Jesus, after his death and

burial, rose from the tomb and appeared to his followers anew, thereby “coming again” already then and there. He appeared to them not in order to continue his ministry of teaching and healing so to speak during the second part of his earthly life, but to disclose the hitherto hidden purpose of his life and death to his followers and to give them the charge of proclaiming his Lordship and the kingdom now manifest before their eyes. This is, very briefly, the content of the Easter stories at the end of the four Gospels, at the beginning of the Book of Acts, and of 1 Corinthians 15. This is the fact of Easter.

Two preliminary observations about the form of these stories will facilitate our understanding.

1. We must be quite clear that these accounts relate a real event in space and time, and not just some thought or idea. They speak of an empty tomb (Mt. 27:62-66, 28:11-15), and of the newly visible, audible and touchable body of Jesus (Lk. 24:39 f.; Jn. 20:24 f., 1 Jn. 1:1). These characteristics are all mentioned within the context of the story of Jesus and his followers, even of the history of the world (Pontius Pilate!). Christ’s appearance is in itself an historical moment, marking the end of all preceding, and the antecedent and the turning point of all coming events. To speak here of a “myth” would be to confuse categories. Easter is an absolutely unique event. We must immediately specify that this unique event is the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1; 2 Pet. 3:13), of the Last Day, of the glory of God in the flesh (Jn. 1:14). It is the presence of the eschaton. Such an event could only be described in incomplete and contradictory terms, such as are used in the Easter narratives. Think of the relationship between the reports of Matthew and Luke, or of the Synoptics and John, or of the Gospels and 1 Corinthians. It is impossible to construe from these reports a history in our understanding of the term. The topographical and chronological precision is lacking. There is no clear differentiation of the various scenes and no corroboration by impartial witnesses of the events described. These narratives are recounted not in the style of history but, like the story of creation, in the style of historical saga. The content bars any attempt at harmonizing. All these narratives deal no doubt with a common subject and are in basic agreement. Yet each of them needs to be read independently, as a unique testimony of God’s

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decisive word and intervention at the turning point of the eons. Quite obviously each narrative needs to be consulted to clarify the others.

2. These texts speak of an “historically” inconceivable event, but do not mean that this event was subsequently interpreted or construed, much less invented by the faith and piety of the Church. They unequivocally refer to an event which laid the foundation of, and gave shape to, the faith of the emerging Christian community. The crux of it was that Jesus’ presence among his own revealed God to them. This revelation in Jesus’ presence, placing the faithful in the center of time, disclosed to them the past and the future will and work of God. It is therefore both a recapitulation of the history of Israel, culminating in the earthly life of Jesus, and an anticipation of the history of Jesus’ reign in the Church and in the whole world. God’s action, past and future, was present in those forty days as if it were still going on, or already going on.

One more preliminary remark about Matthew 28:16-20 as it relates to the other Easter stories. Two sets of narratives are to be distinguished among them.

1. The stories of Jesus and the women. These underscore the manifestation of the fact of the Resurrection (the empty tomb) and the identity of the risen Lord with the crucified (28:1-6 and 9). Add to it the charge to the women to tell the disciples what they had seen (28:7-8 and 10). This charge is particularly significant because, according to Mark 16:8, the women “said nothing to any one for they were afraid” and, according to Luke 24:11, their words seemed to the disciples “an idle tale.” Incidentally this particular role of the women in relation to the disciples may be interpreted as an analogy of the relationship between the historical community of Israel and the now emerging Christian community of the end of time.

2. The stories of Jesus and the disciples. Here again the manifestation of the fact and of the identity (28:17-18; Lk. 24:37f.; Jn. 20:19 f.) is important. However, it is overshadowed by the charge to the disciples to go and tell the world what they had seen (28:19; Lk. 24:27; Jn. 20:21). The passage about Jesus and the disciples is missing in Mark’s original text. Mark 16:9-20 is a later addition. The charge to the disciples is validated by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. John 20:22 indicates that the fourth evangelist understood Easter and Pentecost as one and the same event. In content, they most certainly belong together. Easter together with Pentecost, Pentecost together with Easter, constitute the gathering of God’s people at the end of time.

Our text clearly belongs to this second set of narratives about Jesus and his disciples. Parallel texts are Luke 24:36-49 and John 20:19-29. In addition

Luke 24:13-35 relates the incident on the road to Emmaus; Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:4-12, the Ascension; John 21:1-23, the appearance at Lake Tiberias and the conversation with Peter. The Gospel according to Matthew, which offers the most coherent account, relates only the one appearance of Jesus before his disciples. To this we now turn our attention.Verse 16

“The eleven disciples” (also Lk. 24:9, 33) are the first twelve of Jesus’ followers, whose number is temporarily diminished by the loss of Judas. They embody and represent the Israel of the end of time. These “eleven”—according to biblical arithmetic!—equal “twelve,” for even in their incompleteness they account for the totality of Israel. 1 Corinthians 15:5 explicitly mentions Jesus’ appearance to the twelve. Judas could not impair the full number.

“…went to Galilee…” Significantly, Matthew leads Jesus’ history back to the place of its origin (Mt. 4:12-17); to the Galilee of the Gentiles, to the people who walked in darkness and have seen a great light. The history of the end stands in continuity with the previous events in the life of Jesus and the history of Israel, which in turn point to the end. (Luke transposes this scene to Jerusalem, to the life center of Israel, which is seen here—Lk. 24:47—as the point of departure for the eschatological proclamation to all nations.) Note how the two narratives, topographically incompatible and with different theological emphases, nevertheless agree in substance.

“…to the mountain…” What mountain is referred to here—the mountain of the transfiguration or that of the Sermon on the Mount? (Cf. B. Weiss.) It might be better not to identify it geographically and merely think of a mountain opposite Mount Zion to the north.

“…to which Jesus had directed them.” According to verse 7 it was the angel, according to verse 10 it was Jesus himself, by means of the women, who directed the disciples, “his brethren,” to go there. The order must have gone to the disciples, since now the eleven turn up. The combination with the appearance to the five hundred brethren (1 Cor. 15:6), as proposed by Olshausen and Schlatter, seems therefore unlikely.Verse 17

“And when they saw him…” This seeing () implies that the revelation of the fact of Jesus’ resurrection and of the identity of the risen Lord with the crucified, earlier accorded to the women, is now to be granted to the disciples as well. The expression “he came” () in verse 18, however, suggests for the time being a certain distance and objectivity of this revelation.

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“… they worshiped him,” as did the women in verse 9, and as all shall do again at the Ascension (Lk. 24:51). Thomas’ confession, “my Lord and my God,” serves as a necessary commentary. Worship is offered in the presence of the revealed God. Jesus encountered them as God, and they encounter him now as worshipers.

“… but some doubted”; as in Luke 24:37 f. and John 20:24 f. (Thomas has suffered great injustice at the hands of exegetes. His insistence upon touching the body of Jesus to relieve his doubt is quite normal and apostolic!) Older exegetes (Starke, Rieger, Olshausen) found it inadmissible to ascribe the doubt to the apostles, and accordingly assumed the presence of others. But this is improbable in the light of verse 17. J. Weiss finds the phrase linguistically crude, disruptive, isolated, and “against the temper of this harmonious ending.” Yet the comparison with Luke and John indicates the necessity of the element of doubt even for Matthew. Calvin correctly interpreted: worship and doubt have a common cause; the servant figure of the man Jesus was garbed in the glory of God. Revelation always has a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quem. Veiled, it arouses doubt; unveiled, it commands worship. All of us waver again and again between the two. Rieger is therefore right when he says that this sentence was included “as a reminder that faith requires struggle. Don’t be surprised if your belief is a continuous conquest of unbelief.” This element of doubt to be conquered by faith is represented here by “some” (), as in John by Thomas, and in Luke by almost all apostles. Only the gift of the Holy Spirit puts an end to the struggle and casts out doubt. Doubting apostles and a doubting church after Pentecost truly have no place in the New Testament. Spiritus sanctus non est scepticus, said Luther. But here the apostles are only at the beginning. They stand in the shadow of the death of Christ. They reenact the doubtful role they displayed at the time of the Passion.Verse 18

“And Jesus came and said to them”: with these words Matthew perhaps hints at the event of Pentecost, not mentioned elsewhere in his record. It is at any rate certain that when Jesus drew near the objective revelation was subjectively appropriated. Bengel comments, “eo ipso dubitantibus fidem faciens.” By approaching them Jesus awakened faith in the doubters! This, then, is the “sequence” to the doubting in verse 17 which J. Weiss missed.

“‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’” According to the “therefore” () of verse 19, this affirmation of power is the objective presupposition on the part of Jesus for the immediately following imperative. As the one

described in verse 18, Jesus has the power and authority to address the disciples the way he does in verse 19. Hence the disciples’ carrying out of the charge will not at all be determined by the excellency and strength of their own will and work; nor will it be jeopardized by their deficiencies. Behind the command of verse 19 stands the commander himself, Jesus, as described in verse 18. He assures the execution of the command over against both the disciples’ weakness and any interference by a third party.means “right and power” and

corresponds to the Latin term potestas. The parallel is only seemingly missing in Luke. The fact that Jesus is invested with the highest authority as a guarantee for his command is also attested by Luke inasmuch as Jesus is there both the content and the interpreter of the Scriptures. According to Matthew’s version, Jesus’ prophecy to the high priests (26:64) has now been fulfilled, “Hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven,” and with it Daniel 7:14, “To him was given dominion and glory and kingdom.” The kingdom is truly his, and he will deliver it to the Father (1 Cor. 15:24). God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him a name above every name, the name of kyrios, that at this name every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Phil. 2:9 f.). He disarmed, according to 1 Corinthians 15:24 even destroyed, the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him (Col. 2:15). He is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come.” God “has put all things under his feet” (Eph. 1:21-22). “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). What does all this mean? It means that the divine claim to all things created in heaven and on earth is, very concretely, Jesus’ claim; the divine authority is Jesus’ authority; the divine acting, ruling, and judging is Jesus’ affair. As the holder of this Jesus stands behind the command in verse 19; he is the authority to those whom he sends out, and as such guarantees the implementation of the command to the disciples as well as against interference of third parties. Those who accept the command fall under this ; they are responsible to and covered by this authority.

All authority in heaven and on earth! This affirmation is exclusive. Objectively speaking, there is no authority besides the authority of Jesus. All power, all right, belongs to Jesus. Remaining are only principalities and powers already subjected to

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him, of which he is the head (Col. 2:10). There are therefore no such things as natural law and natural power, asserting their own domain over against Jesus’, deserving homage, trust, fear, and obedience in their own right. Thus it is impossible to postulate, on the basis of the (Rom. 13:1 f.) a secular power instituted by God alongside the kingdom of Christ, a political realm that would not be included in the kingdom of Christ.

But who is the holder of such ? Because all authority has been “given” to him we are prevented from thinking in the abstract of an eternal, nonincarnate Son of God, of the To him authority need not be given; he holds it from eternity to eternity. The New Testament constantly speaks of this Son of God, yet never abstractly. The eternal Son is always man at the same time. Of him our text speaks. To the man Jesus is given the The man Jesus is the commanding Lord in verse 19.

That all authority has been “given” to him must however not be interpreted to mean that he received it only in his resurrection. Such an assumption is refuted by a number of very clear texts in the Gospels where the affirmation made in verse 18 undeniably refers to Jesus before his death. “‘All things have been delivered to me by my Father’“ (Mt. 11:27). “The Father. . . has given all things into his hand” (Jn. 3:35). Jesus knew “that the Father had given all things into his hands” (Jn. 13:3). “‘Thou hast given him power over all flesh’“ (Jn. 17:2). “He taught them as one who had authority” (Mt. 7:29). “‘The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins’“ (Mt. 9:6). See also Matthew 21:23 f. is given to the man Jesus as divine authority can alone be given to a human creature. Only when man prays for it, believes in God, is obedient to Him, is it given as free grace. Because God’s free grace is eternal, authority is given everlastingly; potentially in God’s design to create and save the world, actually in the incarnation of the Word. “Er ist ein Kindlein worden klein, der alle Ding erhält allein.” By forgiving sins and accomplishing signs and miracles, Jesus made at least a partly visible use of his authority long before his resurrection. There was never a time when he was devoid of it. His “emptying himself” (Phil. 2:7) was nothing but the hiddenness of his majesty, caused by human blindness. What he achieved in the state of utmost weakness, his death upon the cross, was truly a manifestation of his might. “Sa divinité se tenoit pour en peu de temps comme cachée, c’est á dire elle ne démonstroit point sa vertu” (Calvin). In the Resurrection, however, Jesus reveals himself to the disciples as the one who held, holds, and will hold all authority, a fact that had hitherto been hidden

from the disciples as well as from the world. It is of this revelation of the risen Lord that verse 18 speaks.Verses 19-20a

This is the crucial affirmation of the whole text. It is the charge and commission of the risen Jesus, the authority for which was asserted in verse 18.

“Go therefore and make disciples . . .” Make them what you yourselves are! Have them learn here, with me, where you yourselves have learned! Call them into the twelve of the eschatological Israel! Let them share in its place and task in the world!

We have already noticed the strangeness of biblical arithmetic. The twelve are designed to be countless. In the same manner as Jesus “made” apostles from the first disciples (Mk. 3:14-15), the apostles are called to make apostolic Christians of all others. The kingly ministry of the Messiah is here entrusted to the first disciples constituting the king’s troops.

The sweeping imperative, “Go therefore,” rests on the authority which is given to Jesus. As soon as his authority is announced in verse 18 there follows the charge, “make disciples!” The reminiscence of the “sending” in Matthew 10 and of its parallel in Mark 16:15, “‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation,’“ largely obscures the peculiarity of our text. The same reality is envisaged here as in chapter 10. Yet there it appears in its implicit and hidden form, while here in its explicit and visible form. In both instances the founding, through Jesus’ word, of the apostolic Church is envisaged. It is the Church that receives the apostles’ word and actively transmits it. “‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you’“ (Jn. 20:21). This apostolic Church, existing not for itself, but “for Christ,” on behalf of him (2 Cor. 5:20), is the decisive event of the eschaton that has broken into time. The existence of the new community consists not only in the apostles’ preaching of the Gospel and their fellow men’s listening. It is constantly renewed as the listeners themselves become “apostolic” and, as new disciples, begin to proclaim the good news. Consequently the charge is not only but ”make disciples.” John 17:20-23 might well be the appropriate commentary to this charge. “‘I do not pray for these only, but also for those who are to believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. . . and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me.’“

And now the great problem of our text:“. . . all nations . . .” On

the basis of these words the text is called “the great commission.” What does “all nations” mean?

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It means, first of all, people from among all nations who are received into discipleship. They become significant for the existence of their respective nations because the nations now come within reach of the apostolate and its proclamation and receive their concealed center through the Christian community living in their midst. Note the which occurs twice. It cannot refer to Not the nations as such are made disciples. This interpretation once infested missionary thinking and was connected with the painful fantasies of the German Christians. It is worthless.

“All nations” means, furthermore, people from Gentile lands, from the goyim. This does not exclude Israel. Her right of the firstborn, her dignitas primogeniturae, as Calvin called it, remains unimpaired. Yet the disciples are summoned to go out to the Gentile people and nations. For now the eschatological Israel shall appear, the people gathered by the Messiah who appeared at the end of time. This is the eschatological community. It is gathered from among the Jews and Gentiles. The doors and windows of the house of Israel, so far closed, must open. The apostles’ mission is “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16). Accordingly, Mark 16:15 states, “‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.’“ Matthew expresses the same idea, only in more concrete terms, when he speaks of “all nations.” Through this mission the community of Jesus becomes manifest in his resurrection as the universal community. It is the eschatological Israel, the Israel which receives into its life and history the chosen ones from among the Gentiles. In fact it had never been anything else. Even during his life before death Jesus had never given it any other foundation than that which now became apparent: not as a special community within Israel, and hence not as a new form of the previous Israel in history, but as the Israel of the end time, fulfilling the destiny of the historical Israel, as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations” (Is. 42:6, 49:8). It is important to see this. Already the relationship to verse 18 and its parallels rules out any limitation of Jesus’ dominion. How could he, to whom all power is given, have ever intended founding a pious little Jewish club? The name of the “Son of man” is the name of him whom “all peoples, nations, and languages” shall serve (Dan. 7:14). The field where the Son of man sows the good seed is the world (Mt. 13:38). The ransom for many ( Mk. 10:45) and the shedding of blood for many (certainly imply Jesus’ identification with the suffering servant of God in Isaiah 53 (see in particular verses 11-12). Of him it is said, “‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore

the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’“ (Is. 49:6). “He shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. . . . So shall he startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him” (Is. 52:13 f.). From the very beginning Jesus calls his disciples “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” (Mt. 5:13-14). Already John the Baptist had proclaimed that God would raise up children to Abraham from the stones (Mt. 3:9). Jesus himself spoke of the many that will come from east and west and sit at table with the patriarchs (Mt. 8:11); of the angels whom the Son of man shall send out at the Parousia to gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (Mt. 24:31; see also 25:31 f.); of the servants that will go out to the streets and gather all they find, both bad and good (Mt. 22:9 f.); even of the testimony his disciples will bear also before the Gentiles (Mt. 10:18).

Jesus at first kept this universality of the new community relatively hidden, as he did with the power and authority given him (verse 18), and with the name of Messiah (Mt. 16:20). Why? The previous, historical, Israel had not yet run its course before Jesus’ death. His life had not yet been spent as a ransom for many. Not everything was ready yet. The table had not been set. The guests could not yet be invited. Israel was not yet fully prepared to fulfill its eschatological mission. Aware of this “not yet,” Jesus understood his mission to be—temporarily—to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But even as he pronounced this rule, he made an exception (Mt. 15:24). In the very strange passage of Mark 4:10-12 an even stricter rule is announced. Initially he did “not yet” address himself directly and properly to the whole people of Israel, but only to his disciples. Aware of this “not yet” he charged his disciples to go—temporarily—nowhere among the Gentiles and to enter no town of the Samaritans (Mt. 10:5). This “not yet” again overshadows the relative seclusion of the primitive apostles in Jerusalem. They had first to overcome their reluctance to get in touch with the Gentiles (Acts 10), and finally entrusted Paul with the mission to the Gentiles (Gal. 2). Nevertheless, while this “not yet” casts its shadows even over the time after Easter, it was in fact overcome. The great turning point in history had since been marked. The “delivering” of Jesus to the Gentiles, foretold in the second and third announcements of his imminent suffering, had taken place (Mt. 27:2). This event separates the times. Now the eschatological Israel begins. Jesus’ rejection by the Jews becomes the offer of grace to the Gentiles. In the rejection and death of its Messiah, the history of Israel has reached its end and goal; the hidden church of Jews and

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Gentiles awaits its revelation. The messianic Israel is in fact revealed by the words of verse 19. What does it matter if the revelation was apparently not fully realized right away? The number twelve of the eschatological Israel is even externally again complete by the addition of Paul. The activity of the apostles must set in with this very revelation: “Make disciples of all nations.”

This “all nations” in no way contradicts the earlier teaching and practice of Jesus. The narrow path within Israel had to branch out into the wide world of all nations, and the inroad into the wide world had to begin as the narrow path within Israel. “Salvation is from the Jews” (Jn. 4:22). From the Jews—this is the first, limited, and hidden form of the eschatological community, represented by the eleven. Salvation comes from the Jews—to the Gentiles—this is its second, unlimited, and manifest form, represented by the eleven plus one.

To say that the primitive apostles acted as if they had not heard the Great Commission (J. Weiss, Klostermann) is misleading. Already the eleven, as Jesus saw and addressed them, are the eleven plus one who shall carry out the mission. The Church as a body will obey the command: its proclamation, first exclusively addressed to Israel, is immediately understood by the Jews of all lands in their own language (Acts 2:6 f.). Spread by Paul, the twelfth apostle, it becomes the message to the Gentiles.

It is therefore not necessary to draw upon the assumption of a “backward projection on the part of the later Church” (Klostermann) in order to explain verse 19. Nor do we have to declare the commission as “interpolated,” to justify the mission to the Gentiles by the “supra-Jewish substance of the Gospel,” and to find its Magna Charta in the history of “early Christian missions” (J. Weiss). As recapitulation and anticipation, revealing the hidden reality of the eschatological community, the Great Commission is truly the most genuine utterance of the risen Jesus.

“… baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The making of disciples is achieved by baptism and teaching.

Baptizing is the priestly function of objectively introducing others into the realm of God’s reign. Initially it is the function of Jesus himself. Yet here he transmits it to his first disciples after he had them taste in advance the fruit of his sacrificial death—at the Last Supper—and then had suffered death.

Baptizing in a name meant, in the Jewish custom of the day, to administer to someone a cleansing bath intended to certify a state to be attained. A Gentile slave, for instance, was administered baptism as a sign of his liberation when he left. Baptizing in the name of the Father and of

the Son and of the Holy Spirit means to give to someone the cleansing bath which certifies to him and to others that he belongs to this God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then, are for him what the name of the triune God really stands for. He in turn has to confess and to confirm that he belongs to this God.Some special observations:1. If the BD reading (a reference to two Greek manuscripts: B—Codex Vaticanus; D—Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis) (“after having baptized them”) were correct, the administering of baptism would only be a secondary task to laying the groundwork for the primary task of teaching.2. The text does not propose a liturgical formula to be used for baptism (as maintained by Zahn). Baptism “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38) therefore does not speak against the authenticity of the text (as has been suggested by J. Weiss).3. Stress is laid, not on the act of baptizing itself, since cleansing rites attesting initiation were a current Jewish practice of the time; rather, the emphasis is on the particular kind of baptism the disciples are asked to administer. A Gentile becomes a disciple when he is assured of his belonging to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.4. The external act of baptizing is a signum pro re. The disciples are commanded, and therefore they expect to be able, to bring about the state of affairs to be certified. By the intermediary of the disciples the Gentiles shall be joined with those who belong to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thereby becoming themselves disciples. Luke 24:47 explains the meaning of this incorporation. Repentance and the forgiveness of sin shall be preached to the Gentiles in Jesus’ name. They become disciples as sinners who, set free by God and thankful to God, are wrenched from the separation from God.

The command to baptize is to be understood in the same light. It is the transferral of the messianic power of Jesus, the priest of all men, to Peter. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 16:19), a most genuine word of the risen Lord. Genuine and very significant, furthermore, is the invocation of the name of the triune God at the very moment when the universal existence of the apostolic Church at the end of time is revealed. This is the only place in the New Testament where this name is invoked with such simplicity (cf. 1 Cor. 12:4-6; 2 Cor. 13:13; 2 Thess. 2:13-14; Eph. 4:4-6; 1 Pet. 1:2).

“…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” As baptism constitutes the existence and the nature of discipleship, teaching constitutes the ways and works of the disciples.

“Teaching,” is the function of the prophet and teacher by preaching and instruction. Now Jesus appoints his disciples to this teaching

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office. To become a Christian means to become a Christ to others by participating in Christ’s kingly, priestly, and prophetic ministry. The apostles accede to this ministry after passing through the crisis, i.e., through their failure during the Passion when their apostleship, humanly speaking, had become utterly discredited. They had failed in in observing what Jesus had commanded them. Yet without inquiring into the validity of their conversion (see, however, Lk. 22:32), Jesus freely entrusts them, the undeserving, with teaching the Gentiles this “observance,” and with guiding them in the ways and works of disciples. (means “to keep,” “to preserve,” to protect something entrusted to one’s care.)

“…all that I have commanded you.” What did Jesus command them to do? To follow him, in order “to be with him” (Mk. 3:14). They are to live within the earthly confines of the kingdom of God and to submit to the order of life established there. All this is not as an end it itself, for the sake of their own personal morals and salvation or of the well-being of society, but that the order of service be preserved which he had given them, his heralds and apostles. All “baptized” become eo ipso subservient to this order of service, the very foundation of the Christian community. They in turn need to be called to acknowledge, to keep, and to confirm their belonging to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They need to be nurtured in this service in order that their works may become those of disciples and a Christian community may exist in the world. It exists only where the things commanded by Jesus are “observed.” This nurturing of the Gentiles who, by baptism, become servants of the triune God, is the task of the apostles. As the witnesses to Jesus’ life and resurrection, they are entrusted with the task for all times and in all places. All others receive it only from them, secondhand. The apostles, and they alone, are called to teach in the Church. For there is no room in the Church for any other object of but the one commanded by Jesus to the apostles. What they have been commanded, they must teach without omission, the whole content of the order of service. This is the New Testament affirmation of the self-sufficiency of the Scriptures, the crossroad where we must part from the Roman Catholic Church. Teaching in the Church can only be repetitive of apostolic teaching.

There remains one more question with regard to verses 19-20a. What about the explicitly stated task (Mt. 10:8 f.) to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to make clean the lepers, to cast out evil spirits? We know from Acts and from several Letters that such special “gifts,” though not widespread, were not lacking in the later Church. Nevertheless, the part of

Jesus’ commandment dealing with doing signs has been fulfilled and become superfluous with the Resurrection of Jesus, the sign of signs. Signs may happen again. But they cannot be postulated as essential marks of the eschatological community. In its past, the forty days, as in its future, the Second Coming, this community is surrounded by the one “sign of the Son of man.” When in Mark 16:17 ff. the gift of “accompanying” signs is declared to be an almost indispensable attribute of faith, it only shows the noncanonical character of that text. The task of the apostles, and therefore also of the apostolic Church, consists in baptizing and teaching in the light of this sign—in the light of Easter morning, in the light of “the hope laid up for you in heaven” (Col. 1:5).Verse 20b

“And lo, I am with you. . .” The Church of the eschaton which broke into time and now is manifest and recognized is not left alone. Its founder possesses not in vain all authority in heaven and on earth (verse 18). “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20). Jesus himself, with all his power and authority, stands behind the apostles when they carry out this command and commission. “He who hears you hears me” (Lk. 10:16). “So every one who acknowledges me before man, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 10:32). Ergo nunquam plane exspirabit ecclesia christiana (Bengel). This is why the Christian Church can never speak or act on its own authority and for its own cause. The self-seeking and self-exalting idea of the Roman Catholic Church is thereby attacked at the very roots.

“I am with you” is, according to Genesis 28:15; Judges 6:12; Haggai 1:13, the affirmation of the immediate presence of God. In making it, Jesus once more says who he is. “I am with you.” This is not to say that he will always be with his people in the same way as he is now. These forty days are unique, only to be compared with the return in glory which, rightly understood, begins already with the forty days. However, the Church between Ascension and Second Coming is not without a master. And because the Church is in the world, the world is not without a master either. The Church has no right to consider the world as “masterless,” merely neutral or even hostile, or else it has not grasped Jesus’ “with you.”

“I am with you”: in remembrance of my past life, death and resurrection, I speak and act today. In the Holy Spirit I fill and rule the present, any present, with my word. I will come with the future, any future. I stand at the door and knock. With my past, my present, and my future I shall be with you evermore.

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This is the promise of the risen Lord, covering the time beyond the forty days. It is the point of departure for the subsequent events at the end of time. As the apostles receive and grasp this promise and stand on this firm ground, they are the rock on which Jesus builds his Church, stronger than the gates of Hades.

“… to the close of the age.” We must reckon with three different times or ages. From creation to the appearance of Christ: the time as it passes, and is actually past, with the appearance of Christ. From Christ’s appearance to his return in glory: the eschaton as revealed in Christ’s resurrection. From his return in glory into eternity: God’s own eternal time in which the temporal is suspended. Accordingly, “to the close of the age,” of this age, must signify until the time when the eschaton, ushered in with the appearance of Christ, will have run its course, when the universe will be subjected to God’s reign, when the distinct reign of Christ will come to an end, and God will be everything to everyone (1 Cor. 15:27 f.). Because of Jesus’ presence, the sum and substance of our text, the Great Commission of the risen Lord to baptize and evangelize is valid throughout the days of this “last” age.

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“The Great Commission” by John R. W. Stott

A Message to the World Congress on Evangelism by a Chaplain to the Queen of England

(Originally published in three parts in Christianity Today: Part 1 – 12(15):3-5, April 26, 1968;Part 2 – 12(16):10-14, May 10, 1968; Part 3 – 12(17):10-13, May 24, 1968. Used by permission of CT.)

PART 1

The Church is under orders. The risen Lord has commanded it to “go,” to “preach,” to “make disciples”; and that is enough. The Church engages in evangelism today, not because it wants to or because it has been told to. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.

It is right, therefore, to go back to the very beginning and re-examine the Church’s marching orders.

The so-called Great Commission or Universal Commission occurs five times in Scripture, at the end of each of the four Gospels and once at the beginning of the Acts. There is no need to suppose that these are five versions of a single occasion; during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, the risen Lord probably repeated the same commission many times, in differing words and with different emphases.

John records what Jesus said on the day of the Resurrection itself (20:19-23).

Matthew records what he said later to a group of disciples on a mountain in Galilee (28:16-20).

Luke in his Gospel seems to be giving his own summary of what the Lord said on the subject during the whole forty-day period (24:44-49), for immediately before the discourse it is still Easter Day (v. 43) and immediately afterward it is already Ascension Day (v. 50).

In Acts 1:6-8 Luke gives another version of the commission, the final one, uttered just before the Ascension.

The fifth version is in Mark 16:15-18. From the plain evidence of the manuscripts it is generally acknowledged that Mark’s original conclusion has been lost and that this so-called Longer Ending is a later addition by another hand. We must therefore treat the passage with great caution; in this discussion I will omit it.

Let us begin with John’s account (20:19-23). It is the evening of the first Easter Day. For fear of the Jews, the disciples had met secretly, behind closed doors. Through these closed doors comes the risen Jesus. He has already appeared privately to Mary Magdalene and Peter, to the other women, and to the two disciples traveling to Emmaus. This, however, is the first official appearance to the Twelve. What he

says to them is in striking contrast to their actual situation. They are terrified, but he tells them to have no fear and rather to be of good courage. They are in hiding, but he bids them throw open the closed doors and, risking persecution and death, march out to the spiritual conquest of the world.

He spoke four short sentences—of greeting, of command, and of promise:

1. First, “Peace be unto you!” He said this twice (vv. 19, 21), and again the next week, when Thomas was present (v. 26). Although superficially it was only the familiar Jewish greeting, there was more here, much more. As Bishop J. C. Ryle has said, “the first words that our Lord spoke to the disciples afford a beautiful proof of his loving, merciful, tender, thoughtful, pitiful, and compassionate spirit.” When Christ says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” he neither speaks nor gives as the world does (John 14:27). He was actually giving the Twelve the peace they needed, and he went on to confirm his word with a sign. “He showed unto them his hands and his side” (v. 20)—visible, tangible evidence that it was he who had died for them, and that he who had died had risen again. What sort of peace was this, then?

a. It was peace of conscience through his death. Those disciples had met as fellow sinners, for they had denied and deserted their Lord. Their greatest need was forgiveness and the assurance of forgiveness. How could they proclaim forgiveness to others until they had been forgiven themselves, and knew it? So he spoke his word of peace to them, and the scars in his hands and side were evidence (however dimly they understood it) that he who promised them peace had actually “made peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). His death had an abiding significance; he still carried its marks in his body.

Our first need, too, before we can begin to evangelize, is the forgiveness of our sins and the assurance of forgiveness. And the risen Christ still speaks peace to the conscience of his people, still confirms his word with a sign. Are not the bread and wine of Communion today what the hands and side of Jesus were on that day? They are visible, tangible tokens that he loved us and gave himself for us.

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b. The peace Christ gave was also peace of mind through his resurrection. The disciples who gathered in that room on the first Easter Day were one in doubt as well as in sin. Even though the Lord had repeatedly predicted his death, it took them by surprise. They had not expected it. How could Jesus be the Messiah if he had ended his days on a cross, on an accursed tree? Their faith lay in dishevelment; their minds were in turmoil.

So the “peace” Jesus spoke and the sign he gave were for the mind as well as for the conscience. His wounded hands and side were evidence not only that he had died but that he had risen, and that the One who had risen was the same One who had died. “Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord” (v. 20). It was the same for Thomas a week later. Great is our joy when the bright light of the Resurrection shines into the dark corners of our doubt.

The Church’s very first need, then, before it can begin to engage in evangelism, is an experience and an assurance of Christ’s peace—peace of conscience through his death that banishes sin, peace of mind through his resurrection that banishes doubt. Jesus repeated his greeting for emphasis: “Peace be unto you.” We cannot preach the Gospel of peace to others unless we ourselves have peace. Indeed, the greatest single reason for the Church’s evangelistic disobedience centers in its doubts. We are not sure that our own sins are forgiven. We are not sure that the Gospel is true. And so, because we doubt, we are dumb. We need to hear again Christ’s word of peace, to see again his hands and his side. Once we are glad that we have seen the Lord, and once we have clearly recognized him as our crucified and risen Saviour, then nothing and no one will be able to silence us.

2. “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (v. 21). Although this is the simplest form of the Great Commission, it is at the same time the most profound form, the most challenging, and therefore the most neglected.

In these words Jesus gave not only a command to evangelize (“the Father sent; I send you”) but also a pattern (“As the Father sent me, so send I you”). The Church’s mission in the world is like Christ’s. He was the first missionary, and all our mission is derived from his.

How did the Father send the Son? Here are three answers:

a. The sending involved birth into the world. The Son did not stay in heaven; he was sent into the world. Nor did he come into the world in the full regalia of his divinity. He laid aside his glory. He became poor. He did not come in human disguise; he actually took our nature and was born into the world.

b. The sending involved life in the world. Having assumed man’s nature, the Son shared man’s experience. Once “the Word was made flesh,” he “dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He exposed himself to temptation, sorrow, loneliness, opposition, scorn. He mixed freely with men, even in sinful, secular society. He was criticized for fraternizing with publicans and sinners. “This man receives sinners and eats with them!” men sneered. Indeed he did. It is our boast: one of his most honorable titles is “friend of publicans and sinners” (e.g., Matt. 11:19).

c. The sending involved death for the world. God’s Son did more than just take upon himself man’s nature and life; he assumed man’s sin as well. If he was “made flesh,” he was also “made sin” and “made a curse” (John 1:14; II Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13). Of course, the sin-bearing death of Jesus in its atoning significance and power was absolutely unique. Yet in a secondary sense we too are called to die, to die for the very people we seek to serve. Not until the seed dies is the fruit born. “The disciple is not above his master. . . . If any man serve me, let him follow me. . . . If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (see John 12:24-26; Luke 9:23). We must be ready to lay down our lives for others, not only in martyrdom but also in self-denying service—to be despised and rejected sometimes in the living death of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, ridicule, and obscurity.

By his birth, by his life, and by his death, then, God’s Son identified himself with man. He did not stay aloof; he made himself one with us. All this was involved in his being sent by the Father into the world.

Now he says to us, “As the Father sent me into the world, so send I you.” Failure to obey the implications of this seems to me to be our greatest weakness in evangelism today. We do not identify. We shout advice to drowning men from the safety of the shore; we do not dive in to rescue them. But Jesus Christ did not broadcast salvation from the sky. He visited us in great humility.

Our hesitancy is somewhat understandable. It derives partly from our sharp reaction against those who lay such stress on identification that they have renounced the duty to proclaim the Gospel. “We must sit down beside these unbelievers,” they say, and they are quite right. But they wrongly continue: “We have nothing to say to them. We must listen to them. We must let them teach us.”

By all means we must be ready to listen and learn; and we must also be ready to speak. Evangelism modeled on the ministry of Jesus is neither proclamation without identification nor identification without proclamation. It is both

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together. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, the proclamation of God; in order to be proclaimed, however, the Word was made flesh.

Frankly, this is my own greatest problem as a parish minister. I love to preach the Gospel—to those who will listen to it. No ministerial activity brings me greater joy than the exposition of God’s Word to those believers and unbelievers who come to church to hear it. But how am I to identify with the people of the parish who will not hear? How can I become one with secular men and women, as Christ became one with us, so that I can express and demonstrate my love for them and win a right to share with them the good news of Christ? I cannot be content to shout the Gospel at them from a remote and sheltered vantage point; I want to become their friend and argue it out with them side by side. I want to witness to Christ in their very midst. Just how to do this is an urgent question for those who want to follow in the footsteps of the Master.

3. “Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (v. 22). These verses have a trinitarian framework: the Church’s mission is modeled on the Father’s sending of the Son and empowered by the Son’s sending of the Spirit.

I do not think that Jesus gave these disciples a special gift of the Spirit at that moment. His teaching about the Spirit, both in the upper room and during the forty days, suggests rather that here we have a dramatic anticipation of Pentecost, when he would pour out the Spirit upon them and endue them with power for their evangelistic task. He repeatedly promised this to them during the forty days. and here he breathed on them to confirm his promise with a sign. Just as before his death, in anticipation of it, he gave them broken bread, saying, “Take, eat, this is my body,” so before his outpouring of the Spirit he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Just as he enforced his word of peace by showing them his hands and his side, so he enforced his promise of the Spirit by breathing on them. They knew the Spirit was his gift, the Holy Breath of Jesus Christ himself.

4. But the Church needs more than power; it needs a message. To this the Lord says; “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained” (v. 23). Upon these controversial words (with the words in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 about binding and loosing) the Roman Catholic Church has built its rigid system of sacramental confession and priestly absolution. But we deny this interpretation by applying to Christ’s words the two most basic principles of biblical interpretation. A text can never be interpreted in isolation; it must be viewed in its

double context, that is, in both its historical and its biblical setting.

a. The historical context. In trying to understand a text we must ask what the speaker meant by it and what his hearers understood by it. We must be careful not to read into it alien ideas of a later age. What, then, did the apostles understand by this statement about the remission and the retention of sins?

That they did not imagine they were being given priestly or judicial authority to forgive sins is abundantly plain from the fact that later they neither claimed nor exercised such powers. Never in the Acts or the epistles did an apostle (or anybody else) require the private confession of sins or grant absolution to sinners.

What the apostles did, and did constantly, was preach the Gospel, declaring with authority the terms on which God forgives sins. Throughout the Acts and the epistles they do this, promising pardon to penitent believers and warning of judgment to impenitent unbelievers. The apostles understood that the authority the risen Lord had given them was the authority of a preacher, not that of a priest.

b. The biblical context is as important as the historical. We must allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, particularly when there are parallel passages. So here we ask: What else does Scripture report about the risen Lord’s teaching on forgiveness of sins?

The answer is not far away. Luke records Christ’s commission: to preach repentance and remission of sins to all nations on the basis of his name. Christ’s charge to them was not to give remission but to preach it, on condition of repentance.

This, then, is how we must interpret the Lord’s vivid statement: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” He was not giving men authority to remit or retain sins, for, as Christ’s contemporaries rightly asked when he forgave sinners, “who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). He was simply telling them in a dramatic way to proclaim with authority the circumstances in which God remits sins and retains them. But the historical and the biblical context require us to interpret the verse in this way, just as the Reformers did.

Our commission, then, is to identify ourselves with the world, as Christ did, and to proclaim to the world the Gospel of divine forgiveness. In this striking paragraph in John’s account, identification and proclamation are brought together.

The whole world is burdened with a bad conscience; mental institutions are full of guilt-laden souls. But the Church has a message that can set men free, and it must proclaim that message with authority

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and without compromise! It is a message of blessing and of judgment: of the remission of sins to those who repent and believe, and of the retention of sins to those who will not.

In summary: In this first form of the Great Commission, given on Easter Day and recorded by the Apostle John, Christ emphasizes four marks of Christian evangelism:1. an assured personal experience of peace in both

mind and conscience;2. a humble, sacrificial identification with those to

whom we are sent;3. the power of the Holy Spirit in our ministry;4. an authoritative proclamation of the divine terms

of peace.This was the risen Lord’s word to the infant

Church when it was still in hiding; it may yet bring the Church out of hiding today.

PART 2

At the time of the Great Commission as Matthew records it (28:16-20), more than a week—we do not know just how much time—had passed since the first Easter Day. The disciples of Jesus had returned north to Galilee, and there on a mountain, by appointment, Jesus met them again. This was probably the occasion Paul meant when he said that Jesus appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time (I Cor. 15:6).

When they saw him (evidently from a distance, at first), their reactions ranged from adoration to unbelief. Some “worshipped him” (NEB, “they fell prostrate before him”), but “some doubted.” Jesus then came and spoke to them. He made an announcement (Matt. 28:18), issued a command (19, 20a), and then gave them a promise (20b).

1. The announcement he made: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (v. 18).

That this affirmation preceded the commission to go forth to the nations is of vital importance. Indeed, without this announcement of his authority, the Great Commission would have lacked justification as well as impetus. Not until one is convinced of the full authority of Jesus Christ is he in a position to hear and to obey Christ’s commission to go.

a. What was this authority he claimed? “All authority in heaven and on earth.” Here Christ used different prepositions, as if to distinguish the two spheres over which his authority extended—the earthly and the heavenly.

Take earth first. Since he has all authority on earth, he has authority over his servants; this is doubtless a part of his meaning. He is like a commanding officer, who can deploy his forces as he chooses and send them wherever he likes. He has authority to say to anyone, “Go!” He has said it to the

Church, but as a whole, the Church has dared to disobey its sovereign Lord.

Since his authority takes in all the earth, it extends beyond those whom he sends to all the nations to which they are sent. Although Satan, the “prince of this world,” had usurped this authority, it now has been given to Christ.

But Christ declared that he had been given all authority in heaven as well. No doubt this means, in part, that the authority he claimed on earth was recognized in heaven, and that the disciples won on earth would be acknowledged and accepted in heaven.

But it involves more than that. It signifies that Jesus Christ has supreme authority in those “heavenly places” (as Paul called them in his Ephesian letter) in which evil “principalities and powers” still operate and wage war (cf. Eph. 6:12). Having raised Jesus Christ from the dead, God has “made him sit at his right hand in heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet . . .” (Eph. 1:20-22). The authority of Jesus Christ extends over all creatures, whether human or superhuman; over the Church; over the nations; over the devil and all his works.

b. When was this authority given to Christ? He claimed it on that Galilean mountain as an accomplished fact (aorist edothe, “was given”). Probably it was given to him by the Father by virtue of the Cross and in anticipation of the Ascension. Certainly this statement is confirmed by the rest of the New Testament. It was at the Cross that he “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:15, RSV). It was by his blood that he ransomed men for God from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Rev. 5:9). And it was at his Ascension that God “highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).

The fundamental basis of all Christian missionary enterprise is the universal authority of Jesus Christ, “in heaven and on earth.” If the authority of Jesus were circumscribed on earth, if he were but one of many religious teachers, one of many Jewish prophets, one of many divine incarnations, Christians would have no mandate to present him to the nations as the Lord and Saviour of the world. If the authority of Jesus were limited in heaven, if he had not decisively overthrown the principalities and powers, believers might still proclaim him to the

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nations but they would never be able to “turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18).

Only because all authority on earth belongs to Christ dare the Church go to all nations. And only because all authority in heaven as well is his has it any hope of success. It must have seemed ridiculous to send that tiny nucleus of Palestinian peasants to win the world for Christ. For Christ’s Church today, so hopelessly outnumbered by hundreds of millions who neither know nor acknowledge him, the task is equally gigantic. It is the unique universal authority of Jesus Christ that gives Christians both the right and the confidence to seek to make disciples of all the nations.

2. The command he issued: “Go ye therefore” (v. 19).

This imperative, “Go ye,” immediately followed the indicative statement, “All authority has been given to me”; the announcement of Christ’s universal authority was an essential preliminary to the Great Commission.

Believers “go” because they are themselves under authority. They go to “all the nations” because the nations are under authority also. The commission is no longer to seek “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6); it is to make disciples of “all the Gentiles” (that is what the word “nations” means). So ends the most Jewish, the most particularistic, of the four Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew begins with the coming of Gentile strangers to worship the infant Christ; it concludes with the sending out of believers to win the Gentile world.

As they go, they have precise instructions to fulfill. Christ used three verbs: “make disciples,” “baptize,” and “teach.” Some scholars interpret this as a single command to “go and make disciples;” “baptizing them” and “teaching them” they consider the explanation of how disciples are made. I prefer to take the three verbs separately as descriptions of three distinct parts or stages of the one Great Commission of Christ to “go.”

a. “Make disciples of all nations.” The New English Bible rightly renders this, “Make all nations my disciples.” The addition of the possessive “my” brings out the sense. One cannot “make disciples” in the abstract, for there can be no disciples without a teacher.

How to do this is made plain in the other versions of the Great Commission. It is done by preaching the Gospel. For preaching the Gospel means preaching Christ so that men are converted to him and become his disciples. There is no getting away from this elementary truth: evangelism is preaching Jesus Christ and making disciples of Jesus

Christ. The central objective of all Christian evangelism is to secure the allegiance of men and women, not to a church, nor to a system of thought or behavior, but to the person of Jesus Christ. Discipleship comes first; the church membership, the theology, the ethical conduct follow.

In summoning people to discipleship, we will do well not to forget the solemn conditions laid down by Christ the Master. Unless one “hates” his family, takes up his cross, and renounces all that he has (putting Christ, that is, before his relatives, ambitions, and possessions), one cannot be his disciple, he said.

b. “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The theological implications of this are far-reaching. It means that discipleship to Jesus Christ involves ipso facto relationship to the Father and to the Holy Spirit as well; it means, too, that although the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are distinct persons, they possess but one Name into which disciples are baptized.

The Greek word translated “in” here might better be translated “into.” Christian baptism is not just in the Name but into the Name of the Trinity; it signifies union with God, the God who has revealed himself by this threefold “Name” as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Further, whatever the precise significance of baptism may be (and convictions on this vary), baptism is essentially a public act. People may become the disciples of Jesus secretly, but they must be baptized publicly. At the very least, baptism is the public confession and public acknowledgment of those who claim to be Christ’s disciples, and it thus admits them into the visible church.

So, in advancing from discipleship to baptism, Jesus moves from the private to the public, from the personal to the corporate, from conversion to church membership.

c. “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The purpose of Christ in the Great Commission is not fully met, however, when people are discipled and baptized; they must also be taught. A lifetime of learning and obeying follows conversion, until disciples are conformed to the image of their Lord.

What they are to be taught is “all that I have commanded you”—not what they may want to hear, nor what the teacher may want to say, but what Christ himself has taught. This is what they are to “observe,” that is, to believe and to obey.

Where is all the teaching of Jesus Christ to be found? The correct answer is not “in his discourses in the Gospels” but “in the whole Bible.” Properly understood, the teaching of Jesus Christ includes the Old Testament (for he sets his seal upon its truth and its authority), the Gospels (in which his own words

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are recorded), and the rest of the New Testament (which contains the teaching of the apostles through whom he continued to speak, in order to complete his self-revelation).

This, then, is the Lord’s own command: to instruct converts with biblical teaching. And it is important that from the very beginning they understand that the Bible’s teaching is Christ’s teaching. Those who have become disciples of Christ and have been baptized into Christ are to be taught what Christ commanded. They must learn to submit their minds to all, not just to some, of the teaching of Christ, if their conversion is to include their intellect. The disciples of Jesus may not select from his teaching what they like and reject what they dislike. Jesus is their Teacher and Lord, and they are under his authority and his instruction. “You call me Teacher and Lord,” he says to them, “and you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13). This lays upon the evangelist the solemn responsibility of being a good disciple himself, for how can he teach converts all that Christ has commanded if he does not himself submit to this expectation?

This is the Risen Lord’s conception of evangelism—a conception considerably more balanced and comprehensive than the usual view today. To be loyal to his commission, the evangelist must have three major concerns: first, conversion to Christ; second, the church membership of converts; and third, their instruction in all the teaching of Christ.

While it is no doubt legitimate to concentrate on the first concern in sporadic evangelistic missions and crusades, at the same time adequate provision must be made for admitting converts to church membership and for instructing them.

3. The promise he uttered: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Thus the promise in the first chapter of Matthew regarding “Emmanuel, God with us” (Matt. 1:23) is confirmed and further fulfilled in the last.

The Great Commission should never be isolated from its context. Here in Matthew it is preceded by the announcement of Christ’s presence. Without these, no one could obey Christ’s commission. How could anyone go forth to make disciples for Christ, to baptize them, and to teach them if he had no assurance of Christ’s authority behind him and no assurance of Christ’s presence beside him?

This was not the first time Christ had promised his disciples his risen presence. Earlier in this Gospel (18:20) he had said he would be in their midst when only two or three disciples were gathered. Now, as he repeats the promise of his presence, he attaches it rather to their witness than to their worship. It is not only when the Church meets in his Name but when it

goes in his Name that he promises to be with it. The emphatic “I” who pledges his presence is the One who has universal authority and who sends forth his people. It remains unquestionable, then, whether a stay-at-home church—disobedient to the Great Commission, and indifferent to the need of the nations—is in any position to claim or inherit the fullness of Christ’s promised presence.

But to those who go, who go into the world as Christ came into the world, who sacrifice their ease and comfort and independence, who hazard their lives in search of disciples—to them the presence of the living Christ is promised. In sending them out, he yet accompanies them. “Go,” he says, and “Lo! I am with you”—with you in the person of the Holy Spirit to restrain you and direct you, to encourage and empower you (cf. Acts 14:27). “I am with you always”—in days of safety and of peril, days of failure and of success, days of freedom to preach and days of restriction and persecution, days of peace and of conflict and war—“to the close of the age.” The promise of Christ spans the whole gospel age. Although the Christ who is speaking here has only recently died and been raised from death, he even now looks ahead to his return in glory. He who has just inaugurated the new age promises to be with his people from its beginning to its end, from its inauguration to its consummation.

The great sweep of this best-known version of the Great Commission is striking:1. Christ claimed to have been given all authority

in heaven and on earth.2. Therefore he sends the Church to make disciples

of all the nations.3. He bids those he sends to transmit to these

disciples all his teaching.4. He promises to be with his people all the days,

even “to the end of time” (NEB).

PART 3

Luke’s account of the Great Commission (24:44-49) differs from those of John and Matthew by appearing to be a general summary of the teaching rather than a particular utterance by Christ. John records what the risen Lord said during his first appearance to the Twelve on Easter Day itself. Matthew records his words on a later occasion when he met his disciples on a Galilean mountainside. That Luke summarizes what Jesus said on the overall subject is apparent; these six verses represent the sum of Christ’s teaching between the day of his resurrection (24:36-43) and the day of his ascension (vv. 50-53). If we had only Luke’s Gospel, we might get the impression that Luke thought the ascension followed the resurrection almost at once. But since he says in Acts 1:3 that forty days elapsed between the

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two events, we must conclude that he deliberately gives only a brief digest of the Risen Lord’s teaching about the Church’s worldwide mission.

In the account in Luke’s Gospel, the verb in verse 47 points to the nature of the Great Commission. This verb translated “preached” in most versions, is in fact the Greek word keruchthenai, “to be heralded.” It stands first in the Greek sentence, and so receives the chief emphasis. Christ’s will and purpose are “that there should be preached” a certain message throughout the world. He made his Church the herald of his Gospel, to publish it abroad to the ends of the earth.

The commission of the Church, therefore, is not to reform society but to preach the Gospel. Certainly, Christ’s disciples who have embraced the Gospel and are being transformed by it are intended to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matt. 5:13, 14). That is, they are to influence the society in which they live and work, helping to arrest its corruption and illumine its darkness. They are to love and serve their generation, and play their part in the community as responsible Christian citizens. But the primary task of the members of Christ’s Church is to be gospel heralds, not social reformers.

Again, the commission of the Church is not to heal the sick but to preach the Gospel. Of course I am not suggesting that doctors or nurses give up their professions. Their caring for the sick accords with the principle of neighbor-love so beautifully illustrated in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I am simply saying that the miraculous healing ministry exercised by Jesus and to some extent by his apostles (that is, instantaneous and complete healing without the use of means) is not part of Christ’s commission to the Church. I do not doubt or deny that God can, and sometimes does, miraculously heal the sick. But the Church today has no authority to exercise a regular ministry of miraculous healing.

Supernatural healing was plainly part of Christ’s charge to the Twelve and to the Seventy during his early ministry; both these charges Luke recorded earlier in his Gospel (9:1 ff; 10:1 ff). On these occasions the disciples were commanded not only to preach the Gospel but also to heal the sick and, according to Matthew 10:8, even to raise the dead. The Church cannot automatically assume, however, that these commands apply to it today, unless it is ready to obey as well all the other commands of the mission charge to the Twelve and to the Seventy. Are Christ’s twentieth-century disciples prepared, for example, to take with them on their evangelistic campaigns neither food nor money nor spare clothing? Are they prepared to forgo the use of public transportation and to walk barefoot, and indeed, to go only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt.

10:6)? No. These commands, including the command to heal the sick and raise the dead, belong to Christ’s charge to those disciples who shared in his own healing ministry during the days of his flesh. Significantly, they were not repeated in the Great Commission of the Risen Lord. According to this commission, which is still addressed to us today, the Church’s primary duty is to be neither a reformer of society nor a healer of the sick but rather a preacher of the Gospel.

Having sought to establish that the Great Commission to the Church is to be Christ’s herald in the proclamation of the Gospel, we can consider the details of the proclamation. Five aspects are given:

1. It is a proclamation of the forgiveness of sins. Literally the commission reads, “that there should be preached. . . forgiveness of sins. . .” This Gospel of Christ is good news of salvation for sinners, and the foremost meaning of salvation is the forgiveness of sins. This is confirmed by John’s version of the commission, in which Jesus declared, “Whosesoever sins ye remit they are remitted.”

Many today deny that the Gospel is essentially an offer of forgiveness. Some even dare to assert that “man come of age” is no longer so conscious of his sins as were his guilt-laden forebears, and that the Church must grow out of its agelong obsession with sin. But biblical Christians cannot even begin to agree with this modern tendency to softpedal sin. Jesus Christ has sent them to all nations to be heralds of the forgiveness of sins. This means that all men of all nations are guilty sinners under the judgment of God and stand in need of forgiveness.

In this task the Church seeks not only to obey the forthright command of Christ but also to follow the example of his apostles. They were faithful to their commission. In the first Christian sermon ever preached, the Apostle Peter cried to a conscience-smitten crowd, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins!” (Acts 2:38). “Let it be known to you, therefore, brethren,” said the Apostle Paul in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch, “that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you” (Acts 13:38).

2. It is a proclamation of the forgiveness of sins in the name of Christ. Literally the passage reads, “that there should be preached upon his Name. . . forgiveness of sins.” The preposition means not “in” his Name but “on” his Name, epi. This indicates that the Name of Christ is to be the ground or basis upon which the offer of forgiveness is made.

What this means is explained in the preceding three verses. “Then he said to them, ‘These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with

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you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead’“ (Luke 24:44-46).

The Christ upon whose Name forgiveness of sins is to be heralded is the Christ who once suffered for sins and then rose from the dead. He died to bear men’s sin and curse in his own body. He was raised to show that this death had been satisfactory for the removal of sin and to apply its benefits to future generations of sinners. Thus Jesus Christ is to be presented by the Church to the world as the crucified and risen Saviour of sinners. The Church has no authority to stray from these two central events in the saving career of Jesus. Nor can it presume to offer men forgiveness on any other ground than that of the Name of the Christ who suffered and rose. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven give among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The Church’s message was, still is, and ever will be that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. . . , that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures . . .” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).

Moreover, this message that the risen Lord entrusted to the Church is consistent, he says, with his earthly teaching, with the teaching of the Old Testament, and with the future teaching of the apostles. He states that his post-resurrection instruction is identical with “my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you.” Further, this was “that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” What the Old Testament writers said, the earthly Jesus endorsed; and what the earthly Jesus endorsed, the risen Christ further confirmed. After the resurrection, he had no need to contradict or even to modify what he had taught in the days of his flesh.

Furthermore, the apostles would bear testimony to him because they were “witnesses of these things” (v. 48). They had a unique competence, for they had been eyewitnesses of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. They could bear witness to Christ (Acts 1:8) in a way no one else would be able to. This their witness is preserved in the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament. We have, therefore, the risen Lord’s own authority for believing in the unity and consistency of the Bible. The fundamental message of the Old Testament—of the law, the prophets, and the other Old Testament writings and of the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Revelation in the New Testament—is the same. It is the offer of forgiveness to sinful men and women on the ground of the Name of the crucified and risen Christ. There is no other

message but the offer of forgiveness, no other ground but the name of Christ. This is the good news the Church is commissioned to herald. It is the Gospel according to the Scriptures, and it will never change.

3. This proclamation of the forgiveness of sins is grounded upon the Name of Christ and made on condition of repentance. Literally, the passage reads, “that there should be heralded upon his Name repentance and remission of sins.” The Gospel offered is not unconditional. It does not benefit its hearers willy nilly, “whether they hear or refuse to hear” (Ezek. 2:5). It is clear that sinners cannot be forgiven if they persist in clinging to their sins. If they want God to turn from their sins in remission, they themselves must turn from them in repentance. The Church is charged, therefore, to proclaim the condition as well as the promise of forgiveness. Remission is the gospel offer; repentance is the gospel demand.

Some modern evangelists shrink from this part of the Great Commission. They distinguish between the acceptance of Christ as Saviour and submission to Christ as Lord, and insist that the former does not include the latter. Submission is something that comes only later, they say. Although the best advocates of this view at least argue from a good premise, their deduction, I believe, is incorrect. With their premise that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone I wholeheartedly agree. They argue, however, that to add repentance or submission is to introduce works by the back door. So, determined at all costs (and rightly) to repudiate any contribution by works to salvation, they assert that only faith is necessary, and not repentance and submission to Christ as Lord.

Let me say again that I fully accept the reason for their concern, namely, the principles of sola gratia and sola fides. But I cannot accept their logic. The object of faith is Jesus Christ crucified and risen, crucified Saviour and risen Lord. One cannot cut Christ into pieces and believe in one part of him but not in the other. There is but one Christ, whole and entire, God and man, Saviour and Lord. And it is because Christ is one that faith is one. Faith can no more be divided into its constituent elements than Christ can be divided into his constituent elements. In other words, saving faith is an unreserved commitment, a total yielding to a total Christ. Paul called this response “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5, 16, 26), for he recognized that saving faith includes an element of repentant submission. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a sinner should trust Christ for salvation and at the same time withhold a part of himself from Christ. Salvation is indeed by faith alone, but saving faith includes repentance.

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This is clear also from the apostolic example. The apostles were faithful in their demands for repentance and continually linked it with remission. Notice Peter’s first two sermons: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,” he said. Again, “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 2:38; 3:19). Truly, as Paul said to the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill, “God commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). This is an authentic note of gospel preaching that the Church urgently needs to recover today.

4. The Church is charged with a proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, on the Name of Christ on condition of repentance, to all nations. The charge is now no longer to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” but “unto all the Gentiles” (a legitimate translation of the words). This aspect of the Commission receives the greatest emphasis. The Church has been sent, according to the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, “into all the world” to preach the Gospel to “all creation” (16:15). This ministry would quite naturally begin in the city of Jerusalem and in the province of Judaea, but would then move on to Samaria and finally “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). All this implies a recognition that Jesus of Nazareth was no mere Jewish teacher who founded a Jewish sect, but rather the Saviour of the world who summons all nations of the world to his allegiance.

The Church, in other words, is fundamentally a missionary society, commissioned and committed to proclaim the Gospel of salvation to the whole world. As long as any inhabitants of the globe have not heard the Gospel, the Church should have a heavy conscience. Christ has sent it to herald forgiveness to all the nations. But it has not done so. It has failed to fulfill his final command. It has been disobedient to its Lord.

There is still time to make amends, however. As the world population explodes, the Church’s task might seem to be getting harder and the goal of world evangelization more remote. But as the means of mass communication increase, and as the Church humbly seeks fresh spiritual power, the task once again appears possible.

5. The Church is to proclaim the forgiveness of sins on the ground of Christ’s Name and on condition of repentance to all the nations in the power of the Holy Spirit. Verse 49 reads: “And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”

It is essential to see this promise of the Spirit’s coming, and this command to stay in the city until the Spirit had come, in their historical context. Jesus was referring to the Day of Pentecost, for it was then that

he sent the promised gift from heaven (Acts 2:33). But because this day of Pentecost had not yet come, the disciples were told to tarry. Christians living today, however, have no need to tarry. The Christ who on that Pentecost day sent the promise of the Father to the Church gives the same promised Spirit to every believer today. The gift of the Spirit is one of the major blessings of the New Covenant in fulfillment of God’s word to Abraham: “that in Christ Jesus . . . we . . . receive the promise of the Spirit by faith” (Gal. 3:14).

Yet this sure truth of the gift of the Spirit to every believer needs two qualifications. First, the Church, for its life and its evangelistic task, needs an ever fresh experience of the power of the same Spirit. Second, in days past and perhaps still today, the sovereign Spirit has come in exceptional measure upon certain evangelists, mastering them, clothing them, anointing them, and empowering them for the proclamation of the Gospel.

Without the work of the Spirit, whether in his general operation or in his special ministries, the Church’s work and witness are bound to be ineffective. While the Church may be faithful in preaching to all nations remission and repentance in the Name of Christ, it is only the Holy Spirit who gives power to the preaching. It is he who convicts sinners of their sin and guilt, opens their eyes to see Christ, draws them to him, enables them to repent and believe, and implants life in their dead souls. Before Christ sent the Church into the world, he sent the Spirit to the Church. The same order must be observed today.

Here, then, are the five aspects of the Great Commission as summarized by Luke. The Church is called to proclaim the forgiveness of sins, on the basis of Christ’s saving Name, on condition of repentance, to all the nations, in the power of the Spirit. Confronted by these terms of its commission, the Church must readily confess that at each point it has been guilty of some failure. At times it has distorted the message of forgiveness, or forgotten the Name of Christ, or muted the summons to repentance, or enjoyed its comfortable privileges while ignoring the cries of the unevangelized nations. And at times it has had a sinful self-confidence and neglected the spiritual equipment promised by its Lord. Those who are sent to call others to repentance need to repent themselves.

In summary, then, the Risen Lord’s commission to the Church as recorded by Matthew, Luke, and John tells us that:

Our mandate is the command of Christ to go forth as his heralds; our warrant is the lordship of the Christ who bids us go;

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Our Gospel is the forgiveness of Christ, who died for sinners and rose again; our demand is repentant faith in Christ our Saviour and Lord;

Our authority is the Name of Christ in which we preach; our assurance is the peace of Christ that garrisons our hearts and minds;

Our method is the example of Christ, who sends us into the world as he himself was sent; our equipment is the Spirit of Christ, breathed upon us and clothing us with power;

Our task is to be witnesses to Christ to the ends of the earth; our reward is the presence of Christ to the end of time.

(John R. W. Stott served as rector of All Souls, Langham Place, one of London’s largest congregations. He holds the B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied theology at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. His books include Basic Christianity (now in a dozen languages), Men Made New, and Our Guilty Silence.)

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“Beyond Anti-Colonialism to Globalism” by Paul G. Hiebert

Missions has always had to deal with cultural and religious pluralism. In the past its response has often been colonial. In recent years there has been a strong reaction that has sought to eradicate the ethnocentrism and arrogance of the previous era. This reaction is an important corrective, but in itself leads us into pragmatism, relativism, and a superficial acceptance of the other. We need to go beyond anti-colonialism to find a solid base for affirming the truth of the gospel, and for guiding us in missions, and in our relationship to people of other religions.104

(Missiology: An International Review 19(3)263-281. July 1991. Used by permission of Missiology.)

Western missionaries and anthropologists, like all humans, have worldviews, and when those worldviews change, their thinking is affected. I would like to examine two fundamental worldview shifts precipitated by their encounter with other peoples and cultures, and their growing awareness that in many ways these were radically different from their own. In other words, it is a worldview transformation precipitated by their encounter with OTHERS—with people from other races, cultures, religions and societies; and, at a deeper level, with OTHERNESS.

Shifts in worldview do not come easily, for groups or individuals. Wibert Shenk points out,

Rapid transition brings trauma and disintegration. Old values appear obsolete to many people, and they reach for new but untried alternatives. Other people recoil and attempt to reinforce the traditions against encroaching [change]. . . . [A change in eras is a] moment in history when profound change occurs and we move from one order to another—a change in ethos, in values, in myths, in political relationships, in economic systems. (1980:34).

I suggest that there are three historical eras in the West’s reaction to pluralism, particularly cultural pluralism, as traders, government officials, missionaries, and anthropologists encountered it at increasingly deeper levels of awareness and relationship. Underlying each is a worldview that profoundly shaped the way Westerners related to other peoples, and the ways they did missions.

In a secondary sense, these are stages North American churches are now experiencing as they encounter foreigners in their midst. They are also stages we experience as individuals when we move into cultures different from our own.

As is the case with all general schema, this one is simplistic, but all general maps must be in order to make sense of an infinitely complex world. It is important to keep in mind that this is not a chronological history, but a schema of the development of worldviews in contemporary Western thought. In fact, many people and agencies still operate in colonial mode, and others in reaction to that paradigm. A few have begun the difficult task of moving on to deeper relationships of mutuality with those of other races and cultures.

Also, this schema is presented not as a firm answer, but as a tentative proposal that calls for further discussion and the formulation of other, more accurate understandings of ourselves and our times.

The Colonial Era:First Encounters with an Other kind

Aside from a few daring travelers returning with strange tales, the first serious encounter by Westerners of radically different cultures began with the age of exploration and trade. This led to foreign settlements, missions, and eventually Western colonial rule. With these came a growing awareness in the West of the “otherness” of the peoples, cultures, religions in other parts of the world.

Traders and GovernmentsThe first response of Western traders and

governments to these racial and cultural differences was a sense of their own superiority. Western science and technology were becoming increasingly powerful, and their superiority to the sciences and technologies of other cultures seemed self-evident. Moreover, Western governments were conquering other nations and making them colonies.

It is not surprising that in this context the idea of “progress” found ready acceptance as an explanation of cultural differences. Clearly the West was “civilized” and the rest of the world was “primitive.”

104 This paper is based on the Van Dyke Lectures given at Calvin Seminary by Frances F. and Paul G. Hiebert, 1991. An earlier draft was presented at the Network of Christian Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. Dec. 1, 1990.

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It was the “white man’s burden,” therefore, to educate the world.

MissionsMissionaries, too, were affected by the spirit of

their times. They equated Christianity with Western culture, and the latter’s obvious superiority over other cultures proved the superiority of Christianity over pagan religions. Shenk notes.

The seventeenth-century New England Puritan missionaries largely set the course for modern missions. They defined their task as preaching the gospel so that Native Americans would be converted and receive personal salvation. But early in their missionary experience these New Englanders concluded that Indian converts could only be Christians if they were “civilized.” The model by which they measurd their converts was English Puritan civilization. The missionaries felt compassion and responsibility for their converts. They gathered these new Christians into churches for nurture and discipline and set up programs to transform Christian Indians into English Puritans. (1980: 35)

In 1890, Rev. T. W. Pearce pointed out that merely introducing Christianity to China was not enough. Western civilization, in its entirety, had to “overcome” Chinese civilization (Chao 1987:12).

Later, missionaries sought to end slavery, and came to believe that commerce was the only lasting solution. Christianity, civilization, and commerce became the “threefold flag under which the missionary ship sailed for the next generations” (Shenk 1980:36).

During this era the missionaries stressed biblically defined needs: divine judgment of sin, repentance, and eternal salvation. They also advocated Western medicine, education, worship styles, architecture, and even dress. They translated the Bible literally, assuming that meanings were tied to forms. They measured communication by what they said, not by what people heard.

Missionaries often came as outsiders, living on compounds where they tried to recreate their Western-Christian cultures. Given the sense of racial superiority that pervaded their times, they often kept themselves apart from the national Christians. They also remained in charge of most things.

Most missionaries saw Christianity as true and other religions as false and “pagan.” With many notable exceptions, missionaries saw no need to study the local cultures or to contextualize their

message. Other religions had to be displaced, and because these religions pervaded every area of life, local cultures, too, had to be changed.

AnthropologyIn this context of cross-cultural encounters,

anthropology emerged as the science for the study of “otherness.” Like other scientists, anthropologists had a positivist view of their discipline. They believed their findings were objective truth. Moreover, like other scientists, they sought to construct one “Grand Unified Theory” (GUT) to integrate all data into a single system of knowledge.

Anthropologists believed, too, that their theories were unaffected by the historical, cultural, and personal contexts of science or the anthropologist. Their truth was universal truth.

The first anthropological theories had to do with the “otherness” of race. During the last half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists tried to account for racial variations by the theory of biological evolution. Behind their search lay the assumption that the white race was superior to other races. This justified the segregation of whites from other races overseas and slavery at home. When scientific evidence did not support this assumption, anthropologists turned their attention to cultural differences.

Here the response was the theory of cultural evolution. On one hand, this affirmed the unity of humankind and of culture. Lewis Henry Morgan (1877:vi) wrote, “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience and one in progress.” Anthropologists spoke of “culture,” not “cultures.” On the other hand, evolution accounted for cultural variations by arranging them along a scale from “primitive,” and “pre-logical” to “civilized” with the West at the top. It was assumed that left to themselves, the lower cultures would eventually develop civilization. With Western help, however, this time could be shortened. Evolution enabled anthropologists to affirm both unity and diversity in one grand unified theory.

These theories of evolution justified the initial response of Westerners to other peoples and cultures. They “proved” Western superiority, and gave scientific support for colonial rule, and for efforts to “civilize” other peoples.

TheologyThe Enlightenment divided human experience

into two spheres: public and private (Newbigin 1986, 1989). The former is the domain of universal, objective, rational truth. Here science and formal logic rule. The latter is the domain of subjective beliefs and emotions. Here the humanities and arts express their particularistic views of reality.

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During the colonial era, biblical scholars and theologians sought to give their disciplines credibility as objective truth by claiming that these were “sciences.” Most systematic theologies written before 1950 began with the claim that theology is, in fact, the queen of the sciences.

Like scientists, theologians had a positivist view of their discipline. It was objective truth encoded in formal statements and unaffected by the personality and culture of the theologian. Moreover, they sought to develop a comprehensive, systematic theology based on facts and reason. Disagreements led to heated arguments.

Like scientists, theologians focused their attention on universals. They gave little thought to the relationship of the gospel to the concrete particularities of history and culture in which it was revealed or proclaimed.

EpistemologyAt the worldview level, the epistemology that

emerged during this era was positivism (sometimes called naive realism): the belief that science was a new and unique type of knowledge. Its knowledge, carefully tested and proved, was assumed to be timeless, objective, universal truth. Other systems of knowledge (and many included religion here) were superstitions based on pre-logical thought. People in other cultures had no science.

In positivism, scientific knowledge was thought to be an accurate photograph of reality. Scientific knowledge believed that as new facts were added, the whole picture of reality would become clear. Disagreements often led to confrontations, because if one theory was right, the other had to be wrong.

ResultsWhat did the colonial era produce? On the

positive side, a great many people benefitted from the medical, educational, and agricultural advances of the West. Colonialism also reduced the internecine wars that plagued many parts of the world and introduced ideas of nationhood and the welfare state.

In missions, driven by deep convictions regarding the truth of the gospel, a small cadre of missionaries braved what at times seemed impossible conditions to plant churches in the most remote regions of the world, to translate the Bible into a thousand tongues, and to lay the foundations for the medical and educational systems for many young nations. The global church today is a testimony of God’s blessing of their work despite their too often colonial ways.

On the negative side, the colonial era was one of arrogance and segregation. Few Westerners took other cultures seriously or sought to understand them

in their own terms. Many saw themselves as superior to the peoples they met.

In the end, the colonial era contained within it the seeds of its own demise. Education prepared people to run their own countries, and the Westerners began to interact with people of other cultures in deeper ways, which called into question their ethnocentrism. They were forced to take others, and otherness more seriously than they had so far before.

The Anti-Colonial Era:Taking the Other Seriously

Intense interaction with others produced in the West a reaction against colonialism and the arrogance and cultural oppression it exhibited. This anti-colonialism appeared first among sensitive missionaries and anthropologists who worked most closely with people in other cultures. It spread to governments and led to the collapse of the colonial empires after World War II. It is now spreading to business, education, theology, medicine, and other areas of life.

What is the nature of this anti-colonial revolution, and how does it affect missions, anthropology, theology, and epistemology?

MissionsBecause of their close relationships to people in

other cultures, many missionaries began to react to colonial attitudes and to take otherness seriously. Early on Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson called for the planting of indigenous churches that were self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. These three “selves” became the watchwords for progressive missions and led to the development of autonomous churches around the world.

Since the 1970s the question of the fourth self has become the center of mission debates. Do churches in other cultures have the right, even responsibility, of reading and interpreting the Scriptures in their own historical and cultural contexts? The contextualization of theology is a more explosive issue than the earlier questions of indigenization which had to do more with church polity and worship symbols. Contextualization has to do with the very nature of the gospel itself. Is there one gospel or many? Do we speak of theology or theologies? Do other religions have truth in them, or are they all false? Is Christianity unique, or is it one among many valid religions?

Reacting to earlier missionaries who equated Christianity with Western culture, theology with Western theology, and the church with Western churches, missionaries began to encourage young churches to develop their own theologies. Some began to study other religions to find bridges of communication to them. A few sought areas of

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common faith such as worship forms and beliefs in a transcendent God, to join leaders in other religions to oppose secularism and other evils in the modern world. Those who opposed contextualization were labeled colonial.

In the end, contextualization often became an uncritical process in which the good in other cultures was affirmed, but the evil in them was left unchallenged. Young churches were free to interpret the Scripture as they saw fit, unchecked by the church in other parts of the world or through history. The emphasis moved to local theologizing.

In communication, the emphasis shifted from what the missionary said to what people understood. It became clear that people interpreted messages in terms of their own cultural contexts. In Bible translation, attention turned to dynamic equivalent translations. Here a distinction was made between the forms and the meanings of words. Good translations were those that preserved the meanings, even if this meant changing the forms.

With a shift to context and receptor came an emphasis on “felt needs.” The needs missionaries should address were now defined by the people being served, rather than by the missionaries or even by the Scriptures.

In their encounter with other religions, missionaries began to move away from confrontation and radical displacement, which now seemed colonial and arrogant, to dialogue. Other religions were accepted as valid systems of belief having their own internal logic and understandings of truth. It was important, therefore, for missionaries to understand and respect them. The anti-colonial stance is essentially laissez-faire.

Such a situation calls for “dialogue,” not proclamation. On one level, dialogue is a way to understand other religions so as to make the gospel known clearly to people in those religions. In anti-colonialism, however, it came to mean the process by which we learn from other religions or seek a religious synthesis that eliminates our differences. Such a consensus is often found first in common worship services, spiritual exercises, and theologies of God and Creation. What is sacrificed is the uniqueness of Christ and his salvation because this is an offense to non-Christians.

AnthropologyThe serious acceptance of other people as fully

human and other cultures as having their own logic and integrity began in anthropology with British Structural Functionalism, and with New Anthropology and its emphasis on ethno-semantics, ethno-musicology ethno-hermeneutics, and so on. Each society was seen as an integrated whole. Each

had its own culture or conceptual “paradigm.” No society had the right to judge another by its own values. To do so was cultural arrogance. Ethnocentrism became the cardinal sin, and cultural relativism the acknowledged good.

Unwilling to judge other cultures by Western standards, and lacking any transcultural basis for making ontological judgments between cultures, anthropology was reduced to phenomenology—to describing and explaining societies in terms of their own truths and values. It focused on emics—on helping us understand other cultures from within. Moreover, lacking criteria for critiquing cultures, it no longer became an advocate of culture change, particularly of change initiated from without.

Anthropology now focused first on social and then on cultural diversity. Each society was seen as an autonomous group with its own social organization. Its culture and worldview had its own internal logic, and had to be understood from within. Ethnographies and ethno-semantic studies of various people and cultures became the hallmark of sociocultural anthopology.

Communication, in this view, was measured not by what the message meant to the sender, but by how it was understood by the receiver, who reinterpreted it in the categories and logic of his or her own culture.

Carried to the extreme, human knowledge becomes totally subjective. Ronald Sukenick wrote,

All versions of “reality” are of the nature of fiction. There’s your story and my story, there’s the journalist’s story and the historian’s story, there’s the philosopher’s story and the scientist’s story. . . . Our common world is only a description. . .reality is imagined. (1976:113)

Societies and cultures, too, become islands of subjectivity. True deep understanding across cultural boundaries was seen as virtually impossible. In the end, some anthropologists argued that anthropology said more about the cognitive pilgrimages of the anthropologists than about other cultures.

This view of knowledge as culture-bound and subjective was reinforced by a theory of language that divided word and other symbols into forms and meanings, and saw the link between these as purely arbitrary. What was important was meanings, and these existed in the minds of people.

TheologyTheology, too, was confronted by pluralism

(Tracy 1979). With the emergence of Liberation Theology, Indian Theology, local theologies, and

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other theologies, it became more difficult to speak of a single comprehensive systematic theology. It also became more difficult to speak of truth and theological absolutes.

The anti-colonial reaction led to a deconstructionism that tied theologies to specific cultural and historical contexts. They were seen as solutions to particular problems such as oppression, racism, and sexism. It was important, therefore, to understand the contexts in which theologies emerged in order to understand the problems they addressed. Here the theologians turned to the social sciences for help. In some cases, theories of language, religion, and culture became the foundations for theological discourse.

But deconstructionism went further. Theologians soon realized that not only the questions, but also the very categories in which a theology was cast, were determined by the cultural frame of the theologian. Theologizing was seen, therefore, as a subjective human process, and theologies as human creations. The result was theological relativism. One could no longer speak of Theology because there was no basis for judging between theologies to determine their truth or falsehood.

The logical conclusion to the progression was the denial of the uniqueness of Christ as the only way to salvation (Ariaraja 1985, Hick and Knitter 1987, Swidler 1990; for a review of many recent works on the subject see Clooney 1989, and Knitter 1989).

In the end, deconstructionism at the level of the common folk reduced theology to problem solving. As Bibby points out (1987), many Christians have no integrated theology by which to understand reality. Rather, they have a toolbox of disparate theologies which they use to solve different problems in their lives.

Because theologies were seen as culture and person-specific, to seek to convert others to one’s own faith was seen as religious imperialism. Mutual affirmation and peaceful coexistence, not debate, were affirmed.

EpistomologyUnderlying these shifts in anthropology,

missions, and theology is a shift in epistemology—in how we look at systems of human knowledge. With the growing awareness of others and of the contextual nature of all human knowledge, it was hard to defend the positivism of the colonial era. To take others seriously, we had to take their beliefs seriously.

The epistemological foundation for anti-colonialism was instrumentalism (Hiebert 1985a). This allowed for a real external world but reduced knowledge to subjective speculations about that

world, speculations shaped by our cultures and histories. There is no way to show that our knowledge is objectively true. At best, we can say that it works and helps us solve our daily problems. The result is a pragmatic rather than an ontological approach to knowledge and life.

In instrumentalism, knowledge is subjective, encased in Kuhnian paradigms (Kuhn 1970). It makes good sense to those operating in the paradigm but is largely unintelligible to those in another one. Because all observers are locked in paradigms and have no external vantage point to see reality, there is no way they can test whether one or another paradigm is true or false. Paradigms can be judged only from within.

True communication between Kuhnian paradigms is essentially impossible. Meaning is found in people’s heads and in cultures. People can understand external messages only in terms of their own paradigms. Communication must, therefore, be measured not by what the sender means, but by what the receptor understands.

One consequence of instrumentalism is deconstructionism—giving up the search for one grand unifying theory of knowledge, and celebrating pluralism and diversity despite their incongruity and lack of coherence. Jean-Francois Lyotard and other post-modernists see the world as fragmented and unpresentable. They detest the idea of what Habermas called “the unity of experience” and celebrate pluralism and contradiction (cf. Harvey 1984 and Arac 1986). In this spirit Lyotard declares,

[I]t must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent illusion to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games (which under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity. . . . Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences. . . . (1984:80-81)

Linda Hutcheon (1980:xiii) notes, “Willfully contradictory, then, post modern culture uses and abuses the conventions of discourse. There is no outside. All it can do is question from within.”

In post-modernity, there is no basis for debate over truth. We must tolerate differences and celebrate diversity. To seek to convert others to our beliefs is arrogance.

Another consequence of instrumentalism is relativism and pragmatism. We do not choose

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theories on the basis of truth. Rather our choices, are determined by historical accidents such as birth, by our participation in social groups that shape our thinking, and by our personal idiosyncrasies. The only rational basis for selecting theories is their usefulness to us.

ResultsThe anti-colonial reaction was a necessary

corrective. It called into question Western cultural arrogance, and it forced Western Christians to differentiate between the gospel and their culture.

In itself, however, anti-colonialism does not provide us with a basis for relating intimately with “others.” It moves us beyond our initial prejudices to mutual respect but leaves us as separate islands of subjective being. Furthermore, it lives in reaction, not proaction. Its agenda is to root out the last vestiges of colonialism, but this does little to help us work together to solve the global crises facing humankind.

Finally, anti-colonialism brings us to theological relativism. Paul Knitter says (Swidler 1990: back cover), “[I]n our contemporary world, in which we are aware of the presence of others and the absence of absolutes, Christian theology, to be truly Christian, can no longer by only Christian [italics in the original].”

This leads us to deny the uniqueness of Christ and his salvation, and destroys the foundations of Christianity itself. It also undermines evangelism and missions and, in the end, precipitates the demise of missiology as a discipline of study.

The Global Era: Hard LoveAnti-colonialism is a corrective to colonialism

with its cultural arrogance, but it does not provide us with the foundations for working with or relating intimately to people different from ourselves.

There are two responses to anti-colonialism. Some, sensing the void of relativism, turn back, looking for certainty in more subtle forms of neo-colonialism. Others look forward, past the present relativizing experience of pluralism for deeper foundations beyond. Berger’s metaphor is helpful. In positivism we stand on the firm ground of absolutes. When we enter the river of pluralism, the water rises to our necks. Some retreat in fear to the solid bank behind them. Some continue on and are swept away by the river. Some swim to the firm bank beyond. What is the bank beyond? How does it affect missions, anthropology, theology, and epistemology?

MissionsWhat are the consequences of a global

perspective for missions and for our relationship to other religions?

A reevaluation of mission history. To move beyond anti-colonialism, we need to reassess the history of missions. Colonial writers presented Western missionaries in a totally positive light. Anti-colonial writers paint them as servants of colonialism and destroyers of cultures.

In recent years, historians such as Lamin Sanneh (1991) have begun to reinterpret mission history from a global perspective. They see both the good and the bad in the modern missionary movement. They recognize that, despite its weaknesses, the movement did plant the church throughout the world.

Critical contextualization. The response of colonial missionaries to other cultures was often one of radical displacement. Consequently, to become Christian, the people had to become Western.

In reaction, anti-colonial advocates called for contextualization. People should keep their cultures and social systems when they become Christian. This affirmation of other cultures and societies is an important correction, but carried too far it produces an uncritical contextualization that compromises the gospel.

A global response calls for an ongoing process of critical contextualization (see Hiebert 1987). The gospel is not part of any culture. It comes as the message of salvation, not from West to East, but from God to people in all cultures. For them to hear and believe, the gospel must be communicated in ways they understand and value.

The gospel calls us to all follow Christ. In doing so, however, it also stands in prophetic judgment on all our societies and cultures. It affirms what is good in each, but condemns what is evil: our corporate idolatries and rebellions against God and our sins of oppression and injustice. As William Dyrness points out (1989), our concern to communicate the gospel in culturally sensitive ways must be guided by two commitments: to effective communication and to biblical truth.

Double translation. During the colonial era, Bible translation was formal. It was assumed that if one translated the forms, the meanings would follow. Further analysis showed that this assumption was not true. People reinterpret what they hear in terms of their own cultures and worldviews. Care has to be taken if meanings are to be preserved in cross-cultural communication. This concern led to dynamic equivalence translations that sought to preserve meanings by changing forms.

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This view of symbols can reduce meanings to subjective perceptions in the heads of people. There is no objective reality against which to test meanings. Moreover, there is little recognition of the fact that changing forms to preserve meanings introduces another type of distortion into the message (Nida and Reyburn 1981).

The solution offered by the newly emerging field of semiotics which we examine below is “double translation.” The translator seeks to preserve the connection between meanings, forms, and realities in the translation (Pike 1982). For example, information needed to make a passage clear in another culture may be added as a commentary note (i.e., shekels are not translated into dollars, but a footnote gives the approximate value of a shekel in dollars for readers who have no idea of what a shekel is worth). In this way care is given to both form and meaning.

Semiotics recognizes that forms and meanings are linked to realities and that meaning lies in our understanding of reality. This is related to the correspondence between our mental maps and those realities. Communication, therefore, is measured, not by what the sender means or the receptor comprehends, but by the correspondence between what the sender and the receptor experience and understand about reality.

Incarnational witness. Given a global perspective, how do we respond to other religions? We cannot assume a colonial stance of prejudice and arrogance. Nor can we take the anti-colonial position that all of them are equally good. We must enter into dialogue with those of other faiths, with both humility and sensitivity, and critique and challenge (Stott 1985). The purpose of this dialogue is not a Hegelian search for a synthesis of our faiths. Nor is it even a way to make mutual understanding and communication possible. Ultimately, it is to point people to Christ, who stands not on our ground or the ground of any other culture. His ground defines the reality of all other grounds. Our desire is not to win arguments but to persuade people to follow Christ.

Our witness must be incarnational in nature. We must go where people are, speak their language, and become one with them as far as our consciences allow and we are psychologically able. People need to hear the gospel in their heart language and see it lived in us. Incarnational also means, however, that there is something outside their language and culture in the gospel and its messengers.

Felt and real needs. Colonial missions focused on the ultimate human need for salvation; anti-colonial missions on felt needs such as food, material well-being, and self-esteem. Today we realize we may need to start with felt needs, but we must move to the ultimate needs which the gospel addresses: salvation, reconciliation, justice, and peace.

AnthropologyThe anti-colonial era in anthropology

challenged the ethnocentrisms of earlier theories and led anthropologists to understand other cultures in greater depth. The emphasis on understanding cultures from within helped us see reality as people in those cultures see it.

But in anti-colonialism, truly understanding other people from within is impossible. Cultures are like Kuhnian islands. Only those raised on them know their way around. Outsiders, such as anthropologists, bring their own questions, categories, and other biases. Consequently, they never gain a complete or an accurate view of the local terrain.

Carried to the extreme, this means anthropological fieldwork is not about understanding another culture, but about understanding our own mental response to the encounter of other cultures. Anthropology is then not an objective analysis of human cultures, but autobiographies of the personal pilgrimages of anthropologists entering other cultures.

This instrumentalist view destroyed any claims anthropology had to objective knowledge. Science, too, was reduced to one view among many. In the end, instrumentalism relativized not only cultures, but all systems of human knowledge.

In anthropology this has led, since the 1970s, to a rejection of relativism. The move has been so strong that Clifford Geertz (1984), in his presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, reminded us that the theory of cultural

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relativism had been, in fact, a helpful corrective at one stage in the development of anthropological theory. But what replaces relativism? The answer in anthropology is a semiotic view of symbols and a critical realist view of knowledge.

Semiotics. To forge a new global view of humanity we must reexamine the nature of symbols. In instrumentalism symbols are defined in terms of forms and meanings. Knowledge, therefore, is totally subjective. In semiotics symbols stand for realities and are defined in terms of realities (objects), forms (representamen), meanings (interpretants) (Peirce 1955. See Figure 1). Semiotics begins with a real world with a real history and sees symbols as the links between that world and our mental maps of it (Pike 1980, 1987).

Symbols, therefore, have both objective and subjective dimensions to them. Truth and meaning lie not in the head, but in the correspondence between our maps or models, and reality. This means we must test our knowledge (which is symbolic) against reality by careful examination and independent verification. We must also recognize that our knowledge is partial and biased. In short, we see through a glass darkly, but we do see. We are not totally blind.

Complimentarity. Semiotics is linked to a critical realist epistemology. In this we recognize the complimentary nature of human knowledge. Because our minds are incapable of comprehending the whole of reality at once, we must break our knowledge of it down into different maps or blueprints. Each of these asks different questions and uses different methods of analysis to examine reality, and each contributes to our understanding of the whole. Different maps help us see things, but because they map the same reality, they cannot contradict one another (Hiebert 1985a). Disagreements lead not to polemical debate, but to further analysis to correct one or both of the maps.

One area of complimentarity in anthropology is the relationship between emic (inside) and etic (outside) analyses (Berry 1990). We need emic studies to help us understand the maps people have of the world. For these are real maps. On the other hand, we need etic analysis to compare these maps with the maps of other peoples and with reality. We need good ethnographies and good comparative studies to understand the nature and range of human cultures.

Another area of complimentarity is the relationship between anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, the other sciences, and the humanities. Each contributes something to our understanding of humans. We need them all to get a more complete picture.

To these, as Christians, we would add the need for theological insights into the nature of reality. Theology, however, is not simply a system of beliefs to be added alongside the others. It is the master blueprint on which all other blueprints are mapped. But we must go further. All systems of knowledge must be understood within the biblical worldview. It is divine revelation in Scriptures that ultimately defines the questions, provides the categories, and outlines the methods that help us see reality. It is this world known by God, not the worlds we create, that is the real world. All other systems of knowledge, including the sciences, must emerge out of this biblical realism.

A third area of complimentarity is insights from different cultures regarding humanity. Our Western perspectives are colored by our Western worldview, and there is much we can learn from other peoples. Both our knowledge and theirs need to be tested against reality and biblical revelation.

Unity and diversity. Critical realism in anthropology also affects our view of the unity and diversity of humankind. The colonial era stressed our common humanity with the other. The anti-colonial era stressed the differences between us. Today anthropologists are emphasizing again the underlying oneness of human beings, while recognizing our diversity. We all share common mental processes and common human experiences such as birth, maturation, and death. The ways these are understood and expressed, however, varies greatly from culture to culture.

Metacultural grids. We must reject the relativism of the anti-cultural era, but on what basis can we pass judgment on cultures without falling back into a colonial ethnocentrism? Anthropologists are increasingly aware that true participation with others at a deep level changes us. As we learn to see the world through the eyes of two cultures, we are forced to develop a “metacultural” framework above these cultures that enable us both to see them from without, and to compare them. We become both inside participants in and outside observers of the cultures. This “inside-outside” perspective enables us to translate from one to the other (c.f. Berry 1990). It also gives us a more objective vantage point to compare and judge them both.

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The

development of a metacultural grid is the hallmark of anthropologists and other bicultural people. Having participated deeply in other cultures, and having become both “empathetic insiders” and “comparing outsiders,” they develop mental perspectives that enable them to relate to any number of other cultures.

TheologyWhat implications does a global view have for

theology? During the colonial era theologians spoke of theology as a universal, objective system of truth. In the anti-colonial reaction they speak of “theologies” as particularist, subjective understandings of truth.

From a semiotic perspective, we must differentiate between God’s revelation, and our understanding of it. Moreover, we recognize that God speaks to humans in specific contexts, but his message has universal truth and application. We must, therefore, speak of both theologies and Theology.

In semiotics, communication is not simply the sharing of information. It calls for a response in a real world. So, also, God reveals himself to us in the context of history and our histories. His purpose is not simply to give us information, but to call us to discipleship and obedience. Theology, therefore, is more than information. It calls us to new life in Christ.

Text and context. During the colonial era, scholars, missionaries, and pastors emphasized the text. They had little awareness of ways cultural and historical contexts shaped the way they and their audiences understood the text, particularly in cross-cultural settings. During the anti-colonial era they focused on the contexts, and were in danger of losing sight of the text.

In a global perspective, we turn our attention again to the biblical texts, but seek to understand them in the contexts in which they occur, as well as their meaning in many human contexts today. We also recognize that the gospel, like most messages, seeks to change the contexts in which it is communicated.

Systematic theology and narrative theology. One important area of complimentarity in theology is that between systematic and narrative theologies. The colonial era stressed the former. The anti-

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colonial era reacted against systematics in favor of particular narrative theologies. In a global perspective, we realize that in reading individual narratives we formulate universal and systematic views of reality. On the other hand, divorced from narrative realities, systematics can become arid. Globalism reminds us, however, that particular narratives have not ultimate meaning in themselves. They must be understood within one divine history that begins with Creation, includes the fall and God’s redemptive acts, and ends in eternity.

Doing theology. How do we resolve the tension between theological absolutes and theological pluralism—between Theology and theologies? The answer lies, in part, in developing a theology of how to do theolgy. This theology must recognize the fact that different persons and different cultures understand the Scriptures differently. It must also enable them to work toward a common understanding of the truth of the Scriptures.

Theologizing must begin with Scripture, because it is God’s revelation to us. It is not human reflections about God (although it contains these). It is God revealing himself to us from outside our human predicaments.

Theologizing must be led by the Holy Spirit, who instructs us in the truth. We need also to recognize that the same Holy Spirit at work in us is also at work in the lives of believers in other contexts. To deny them the right to interpret the Scriptures for themselves is to deny this fact. This work of the Spirit guards us from our cultural parochialisms, and from theologies based on human reason alone.

Finally, theology must be done in the community (Kraus 1979). It is ultimately the task not of individuals but the church. This corporate nature of the hermeneutical task helps guard us against the privatization of faith and from our personal misinterpretations of the Scriptures. Just as others see our sins before we see our own, so Christians in other cultures see our cultural biases and their impact on our theology more clearly than we see them ourselves.

EpistemologyResponding to Kuhn’s subjectivism, Larry

Laudin (1977) and others argue for a critical realism that takes both the objective and subjective nature of human knowledge into account. They argue that human perceptions are tied to external realities, but not with a one-to-one correspondence, as in photographs. Rather, the relationship is one of limited correspondence and analogy, as in maps and

blueprints. Moreover, just as several maps are needed to help us understand reality, so different complimentary theories are needed to help us understand reality.

As we have seen, in critical realism we speak of the truth with reference to reality. We also speak of truth—our partial understanding of that greater Truth. Our understandings are both objective (to the extent they are tested against reality) and subjective (because they are ours as humans in our specific cultural and historical contexts).

Disagreements do not lead us into confrontation. On the other hand, we are not disinterested in contradiction. Dialogue between those with different understandings does not lead to a subjective Hegelian synthesis, but to a search to determine whose map or model fits reality and truth most closely. If our road maps vary, we drive the streets to determine which is correct.

ConclusionsMuch has been written in recent years of the

challenge of modernity to Christianity. It has led to a secularism that denies the existence of God, the deity of Christ, and the reality of the miracles recorded in the Bible. It has marginalized those who continue to hold religious convictions by relegating religion to the private sphere of personal opinions and feelings.

Today we face another challenge to Christian faith, namely post-modernity. Here spiritual experiences are no longer denied; they are all affirmed. The issue is not secularism but relativism and pragmatism. The debate centers about the uniqueness of Christ and his claim to be the only way to salvation (John 14:6). To deny this uniqueness, however, is to deny the truth of the gospel.

Many accuse us of religious arrogance when we proclaim Christ as the only Saviour and Lord, but speaking the truth is not arrogance. Newbigin notes (1989:166), “To affirm the unique decisiveness of God’s action in Jesus Christ is no arrogance; it is the enduring bulwark against the arrogance of every culture to be itself the criterion by which others are judged.”

We must be careful to proclaim the gospel, not our culture. We must also speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). But biblical love is not superficial sentiment. It is a deep commitment to be for the other. This means we affirm their full dignity as humans created in the image of God. It also means we care enough to confront them when we believe they are wrong. Above all, we must continue to point people to Christ as the way, the truth, and the life.

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Table 1SHIFTS IN WESTERN THOUGHT

Colonial Anti-colonial Global

Missions: Colonial Anti-Colonial Global other religions: displacement dialogue for consensus dialogue to find the truth translation: formal dynamic equivalence double translation symbols: form = meaning

(formal linguistics) form/meaning

(Saussurian linguistics) form <-> meaning

<-> reality (semiotics) contextualization: non-

contextualization uncritical

contextualization critical

contextualization need: real need felt need real and felt needs message: West to East discovery from within from above to all cultures missionary: outsider insider incarnational attitude: confrontational non-confrontational hard love, non-Hegelian

Anthropology: Evolution Functionalism Post-functional culture &

humanity: unity (culture) diversity (cultures) unity/diversity

view point: etic emic etic/emic truth: absolute relative absolute/relative communication: sender oriented receptor oriented correspondence theory theory: one comprehensive

theory one particularistic

theory integration of several

complimentary theories

Theology: Theology Theologies Metatheology nature: systematic,

comprehensive deconstructionist,

pluralist metatheology leading to

community-based theology focus: text

(theology) context

(social sciences) text/context

(theology/social sciences) hermeneutics: literal interpretive double horizon

Epistemology: Positivism Instrumentalim Critical Realism goal: Truth pragmatism &

problem solving Truth / truth &

problem solving nature of truth: absolute relative, perspectival absolute/relative, approximate knowledge: objective subjective objective/subjective unity: G.U.T. deconstructionist &

incommensurable Kuhnian paradigms

complimentary models but interrelated, common human experience

view of reality: reductionist reductionist integrative perspective: in culture A in culture B metacultural perspective

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“The Enduring Validity of Cross-Cultural Mission” by Lesslie Newbigin

(Reprinted with permission from theInterntaional Bulletin of Missionary Research 12(2):50-53, 1988.)

It is a great honor to be invited to share in this event, an event that is significant for all of us, from whatever part of the world we come, who are committed to the Christian world mission. My first duty is to recognize the dedicated and imaginative leadership that has made the Overseas Ministries Study Center a source of strength for that mission in all its many forms of outreach, and which has now prompted this very significant move to New Haven and the launching of the Center on a new stage of its life.

Perhaps my only real qualification for being invited to address you is that I happen to come from overseas. I do not mean by that to endorse what was once described as the missionary mythology of salt water, the idea that crossing a stretch of salt water was the necessary condition for being a missionary. When I am asked to state my employment I usually answer “missionary” and can do that without endorsing the salt-water myth, but it is not unimportant that the first word in the title of this Center is the word “Overseas.”

When the family of William Howard Doane founded the Center in 1922, it was for those who were then called—without embarrassment—”foreign missionaries” and who needed a period of rest from their labors in foreign parts. The Center has followed a general trend in replacing the words “foreign missions” with “overseas ministries.” I do not quarrel with that, though I do sometimes reflect upon the significance of the change. It was made, I suppose, because the old term was felt to have about it a hint of arrogance. It suggested images of the old pith helmet and the white man’s burden. We are very eager to be disinfected of that old but clinging aroma. A missionary in training told me the other day that what he was getting was “hairshirt missiology,” so eager were his mentors to repent of the sins of our missionary predecessors.

We speak now of “overseas ministries” or—more comprehensively—of cross-cultural mission and ministry. It is to the study of the issues involved in these cross-cultural ministries that this Center is dedicated. I want to affirm my conviction of the great importance of such studies, and therefore of this Center, for the life of the church. Whatever may or may not have been the sins of our missionary predecessors (and of course it is much more relaxing

to repent of one’s parents’ sins than that of one’s own), the commission to disciple all the nations stands at the center of the church’s mandate, and a church that forgets this, or marginalizes it, forfeits the right to the titles “catholic” and “apostolic.” If there was a danger of arrogance in the call for the evangelization of the world in that generation, there is a greater danger of timidity and compromise when we lower our sights and allow the gospel to be domesticated within our culture, and the churches to become merely the domestic chaplains to the nation. I am not impressed by those who thank God that we are not like the missionaries of the nineteenth century—which the beloved Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette called “the Great Century”—the century that made it possible for us to talk today of the world church. Of course it is true that there were elements of arrogance in the missionaries of that century, but that was just because in the preceding centuries Christianity had become so much domesticated within Western culture that when we carried the gospel overseas it sometimes looked like part of our colonial baggage.

The truth is that the gospel escapes domestication, retains its proper strangeness, its power to question us, only when we are faithful to its universal, supranational, supracultural nature—faithful not just in words but in action, not just in theological statement but in missionary practice in taking the gospel across the cultural frontiers. The affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lumen Gentium, the light of the nations, is in danger of being mere words unless its value is being tested in actual encounters of the gospel with all the nations, so that the gospel comes back to us in the idiom of other cultures with power to question our understanding of it. In this sense the foreign missionary is an enduring necessity in the life of the universal church, but, of course, the missionary journeys have to be multidirectional and not—as in the former period—only from west to east and from north to south. I speak with some feeling because it is my privilege to work in Birmingham alongside a missionary sent to us by the Church of North India and I know that England needs the witness of a Christian from India as least as much as India needs missionaries form the West.

A Center like this, where the issues of cross-cultural mission are being explored, has an

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importance greater than what have traditionally been called “foreign missions.” Its presence here—alongside the great centers of learning and teaching that are now its neighbors—will be a reminder of the universality of the gospel, of the enduring validity of the call to make disciples of all nations. And that reminder is needed, for there are many voices in our culture that question that universality and validity of that call. The contemporary embarrassment about the missionary movement of the previous century is not, as we like to think, evidence that we have become more humble. It is, I fear, much more clearly evidence of a shift in belief. It is evidence that we are less ready to affirm the uniqueness, the centrality, the decisiveness of Jesus Christ as universal Lord and Savior, the Way by following whom the world is to find its true goal, the Truth by which every other claim to truth is to be tested, the Life in whom alone life in its fullness is to be found.

Since the publication of the lecture by C. P. Snow with the title “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” the phrase that he coined has become very common, at least in my own country. We speak of the two cultures, and the phrase corresponds to a familiar reality. Our university campuses are divided into the faculties of science, on the one hand, and arts and humanities, on the other. Theology, of course, belongs to the latter category. Theology is not about objective facts: for that you enroll as a student of science. Theology, like the rest of the matters studied in the other half of the university, is not about facts: it is about things in which our subjectivity is involved—about values where personal choice is of the essence of the matter. The physicist-priest W. G. Pollard, in commenting on this, says that these two cultures are not really comparable entities. The scientific culture is in the prime of its power—vigorous, coherent, convinced that it is dealing with reality and gaining a more and more full understanding of it. In the world of science there are, of course, differences of opinion, disputes, controversies, and rival schools of thought. But all these are understood to be about what is really the case, so that one expects to convince one’s opponent of his error. One works on the assumption that eventually agreement will be reached. One does not accept pluralism (the coexistence of mutually contradictory accounts of what is the case) as a good thing. It is something to be overcome.

By contrast, says Pollard, the other culture is not a coherent culture at all. What goes on in the faculties of arts and humanities is the fragmented remains of what was once a coherent culture, but is so no more. Here one abandons the hope of finding truth on which all will agree. Here pluralism is accepted as normal. What remains is not a culture

comparable with the scientific culture. It is, in Pollard’s words, “an ever-changing variety of remnants of what was once a universal culture in the western world.” And of course it is to this that theology belongs. Statements about the universal scope of Christ’s saving work are not taken to be statements of objective fact, of what is actually the case. They are statements in story form of certain kinds of religious experience. They may be properly included in a syllabus for the comparative study of religions. Or they may be contributed to a dialogue in which different types of religious experience are shared. But they are not to be announced as factual truth, truth absolutely and for all.

It was not always so. Pollard speaks of the remnants of what was once a universal culture, though it was geographically limited to the Western world. Theological statements about Christ and his nature and work were part of a coherent understanding of reality, of how things really are. This was itself the result of sustained intellectual effort of a rigor comparable to what we now see in the scientific culture. Dr. Frances Young, in her recent inaugural lecture as professor of theology in the University of Birmingham, reminded her academic audience of the immense intellectual energies that went into the effort of the early church fathers to formulate the truth of the gospel in the thought world of the age in which they lived. That age was, like ours, one of relativism and syncretism in matters religious. Its intellectual atmosphere is tartly described in a famous phrase of Gibbon when he said that in that age all religions were for the people equally true, for the philosophers equally false, and for the government equally useful. Professor Young contrasts the intellectual vigor with which the great theologians of the early centuries resisted this easygoing and seductive relativism with the contemporary drift toward utilitarianism and relativism. The latter she describes as “the modern version of the fall of Sophia, a breakdown of confidence in human powers of knowing, a failure of nerve easily compounded by disillusionment with the exploitative hybris of modern science and technology.”

Alan Bloom, in his much discussed book The Closing of the American Mind, has traced the origins of this breakdown. At least for me it was both illuminating and alarming to see the shadowy figure of Nietzsche behind what seemed to be our innocent and even laudable preference for talking about “values,” “commitments,” and “lifestyles,” rather than for talking about right and wrong, truth and error. Nietzsche, says Bloom, was the first to recognize that, on the basis of modern critical thought, it is strictly impossible to speak of truth and

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error, of right and wrong, and to draw the conclusion that the only thing left is the will to power. This nihilism has, says Bloom, been domesticated in our culture in the soft-sounding language of “values.” We ask of a statement not “Is it true?” but “Are you sincere?” We speak not of right behavior but of authenticity. But nihilism will not permanently accept his comfortable domestication. Moral chaos must be the end of this road. And it will not be checked by appeals to tradition, to natural law, or to older “values.” Only the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, only the living word of the Creator can bring light out of darkness, order out of chaos.

Western culture was once a coherent whole with the Christian vision at its center. it has disintegrated. If we seek now, as we must, a coherent vision for the human race as a whole, it cannot be on the basis of a tried relativism that gives up the struggle for truth. Nor can it be by pretending that the scientific half of our Western culture can provide coherence for the life of the world. We are at present busy exporting our science and technology to every corner in the name of “development” and “modernization.” But we also know that if all the six billion of the world’s people succeeded in achieving the kind of “development” we have achieved, the planet would become uninhabitable. There is an absurd irony in the fact that we are busy exporting our scientific culture to every corner of the world without any compunction about arrogance, but we think that humility requires us to refrain from offering to the rest of the world the vision of its true goal, which is given in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Relativism in the sphere of religion—the belief that religious experience is a matter in which objective truth is not involved but one in which (in contrast to the world of science) “everyone should have a faith of one’s own”—is not a recipe for human unity but exactly the opposite. To be human is to be a part of a story, and to be fully human as God intends is to be part of the true story and to understand its beginning and its ending. The true story is one of which the central clues are given in the Bible, and the hinge of the story on which all its meaning turns is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the message with which we are entrusted, and we owe it to all people to share it. If this is denied, if it is said that every people must have its own story, then human unity is an illusion and we can forget it.

I do not believe it is an illusion. I believe the word of Jesus when he said that being lifted up on the cross he would draw all people to himself. I believe it because the cross is the place where the sin that divides us from one another is dealt with and put away. But I believe that the truth is credible only when the witness born to it is marked not by the

peculiarities of one culture, but by the rich variety of all human cultures. We learn to understand what it means to say that Jesus is the King and head of the whole human race only as we learn to hear that confession from the many races that make up the human family. In the end we shall know who Jesus is as he really is, when every tongue shall confess him in all the accents of human culture. That is why this Center for the study of the issues raised in cross-cultural ministry is important for us all.

We have already, in the ecumenical fellowship of churches, a first foretaste of that many tongued witness. We owe the existence of this worldwide family to the missionary faithfulness of our forebears. Today and henceforth all missionary witness must be, and must be seen to be, part of the witness of this worldwide, many cultured fellowship. Every culturally conditioned expression of the Christian witness must be under the critique of this ecumenical witness. The one Christ is known as he is confessed in many cultures. But we must reject the relativism that is sometimes wrongly called “the larger ecumenism.” I am not referring to the fact, for which I thank God, that we are now much more open to people of other faiths, willing to learn from them, to share with them, to learn to live together in our one planet. I am referring to the fact that it is sometimes suggested that as the churches have come together to form one fellowship across their doctrinal differences, so—by a natural extension—the great world religions must move toward a fellowship of world faiths and that this latter movement would be a natural extension of the former.

In fact, such a move would not be an enlargement but a reversal of the ecumenical movement. That movement was not born out of a lazy relativism. It was born through the missionary experience of the nineteenth century, when Christians, divided by centuries of European history, found themselves a tiny minority in the midst of the great ancient religious systems of Asia. In this new situation perspectives changed. The issue “Christ or no-Christ” loomed so large that the issues dividing Christians from one another seemed small. They did not disappear. The long theological wrestlings of Faith and Order are witness to the seriousness with which they were treated. But—real though they were—they were relativized by a new realization of the absolute supremacy of Jesus Christ. The separated Christian confessions would never have accepted membership in the World Council of Churches without its firm Christological basis—Jesus Christ, God and Savior—a phrase later put into its proper trinitarian and biblical frame. It was only because the absoluteness of Jesus’ Lordship was acknowledged that the confessional positions could be relativized.

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What is proposed in the so-called larger ecumenism is the reversal of this. It is a proposal to relativize the name of Jesus in favor of some other absolute. We have to ask: What is the absolute in relation to which the name of Jesus is relativized? Is it “religion in general”? Then where—in the medley of beliefs and practices that flourish under the name of religion—is the criterion of truth? Let it be brought out for scrutiny. Or is it, perhaps, “human unity”? But if so, unity on whose terms? André Dumas has correctly pointed out that all proposals for human unity that do not explicitly state the center around which unity is conceived to happen have as their hidden center the interests of the proposer. We have a familiar word for this. “Imperialism” is the word we normally use to designate programs for human unity originated by others than ourselves. The center that God has provided for the unity of the human race is the place where all human imperialisms are humbled, where God is made nothing in order that we might be made one. It is an illusion to suppose that we can find something more absolute than what God has done in Jesus Christ. It is an illusion to suppose that we can find something larger, greater, more inclusive than Jesus Christ. It is a disastrous error to set universalism against the

concrete particularity of what God has done for the whole creation in Jesus Christ. It is only through the specificity of a particular historic revelation that we can be bound together in common history, for particularity is the stuff of history, and we shall not find meaning for our life by trying to escape from history.

But we rightly bear witness to the universal scope of that particular history, the history that is the theme of our Scriptures, as we listen to the response of every human culture in every tongue and idiom to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The promise that the Holy Spirit will lead the church into the fullness of truth is set in the context of the missionary commission. So the insights given in the exercise of cross-cultural mission are essential to the fulfillment of that promise. That is why the work of this Center is of importance not only to those who will be its students and its residents, but for all of us, for our growth into the fullness of truth, for our learning with all the saints the length and breadth and depth and height of the love of God, and to the One who by the power at work in us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or think, to that One be glory in the work of this Center, in the church, and in Christ Jesus forever.

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“Some Missiological Perspectives from 1 Peter 2:4-10” by P. J. Robinson

(Missionalia 17(3):176-187. November 1989. Used by permission of Missionalia.)

Reading 1 Peter is a fascinating exercise. One cannot bypass or escape its strong and persuasive message. It contains several perspectives which are of basic importance to all who adhere to the Christian faith in a hostile world. In moving pastoral terms it admonishes the scattered communities of believers not to be intimidated to the point of losing their faith. To suffer is bitter. But to suffer without reason is even more devastating—and that was precisely what was happening to these small Christian communities spread all over Asia Minor, a vast area of approximately 206,400 square kilometres (cf. the provinces mentioned in 1:1).

A careful reading of 1 Peter makes one aware of the many difficulties and obstacles with which these early Christians had to cope. Besides the long distances which separated these small mixed communities of Jewish and non-Jewish believers, there were social tensions and prejudices between natives and displaced aliens and outsiders in their midst. Elliott (1981:65) correctly observes that for a movement composed of converts from such diverse regions, cultures and religious backgrounds the first problem was a practical one, namely that of social coordination and unification. The problem was, however, intensified by the hostility in the believers’ environment and the pressures for conformity. They were continually looked upon and treated as “aliens and strangers” (paroikoi and parepidemoi 1:1; 2:11). This implies that they were subjected to all sorts of political, legal, economic and social restrictions and disadvantages. How painful their situation was, speaks from the following quote from Elliott (1981:68),

Excluded from voting and land-holding privileges as well as from the chief civic offices and honors, they enjoyed only limited legal protection, were restricted in regard to intermarriage and the transfer of property, could be pressed into military service, were free to engage in cultic rites but were excluded from priestly offices, and yet shared full responsibility with the citizenry for all financial burdens such as tribute, taxes and production quotas. “Only the citizens enjoyed full civic rights, while the [alien] residents [known as metoikoi,

paroikoi, katoikoi, synoikoi] were regarded as foreign-born natives, although they might have been born in the city and have grown up there” (Tcherikover).

The dynamics of such a situation is difficult to visualise. But unless we grasp the full extent of the painful animosity and discriminatory attitudes in respect of all aspects of daily life—and these apply to the social, political, economic and religious spheres—we shall not be able to grasp the message of comfort which this letter was designed to convey to those suffering Christians and we shall miss the missionary incentives given to people who would otherwise lose their motivation. Studies like those of Leipoldt and Grundmann (1966) and Elliott (1981) are of considerable help in providing a deeper insight into those early Christians’ struggle to survive (see also Smit 1988).

The question to which we have to attend here is whether it is valid to speak of missionary incentives in 1 Peter when obviously some of the key words about the missionary church are missing from this letter. To illustrate this point we may refer to the absence of two of the most significant New Testament words in this regard, namely ekklesia, which from early on became the technical term for church or congregation, and euangelizesthai, which was the term used to denote the spreading of the good news. However, to conclude from this that 1 Peter has nothing to say about the mission of the church is, to put it mildly, to miss its main thrust and message. The fact is that 1 Peter deals with both concepts in a characteristic way.

In a study on the ecclesiology of 1 Peter, Schröger (1981) has proved beyond doubt that the theme of the church holds a central place in the letter. He points out how this theme has been introduced by the use of some of the most important Old Testament epithets or designations for the people of God (1981: 1-8). A careful analysis of the key-passage 2:4-10 will furthermore show that all these epithets are of special importance in locating the witnessing task of the church in the world (see Blauw 1964:126-136). One could in fact argue that 1 Peter is an excellent missionary document which deals with the most basic question about the church in the world, namely its existence in society as a new and distinct community

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with a totally new lifestyle. Studies like those of van Swigchem (1955) and Lippert (1968) give full support to such a statement.

Another significant feature of the letter is that the congregation’s witness is to a large extent described in terms of the endurance of faith in a trying situation of suffering (cf. 1:6-7; 2:18-25; 3:13-18; 4:1-6,12-19; 5:8-10). This is not so strange if one takes into account that martyreo, the word for witness in the New Testament, has with time gained the combined meaning of witness and suffering, as the English word “martyr” attests. When the risen Christ commissioned his apostles to go into all the world he called them “my witnesses” (mou martyres; those who will both witness to me and suffer for my sake [Acts 1: 8]). Right through the history of the church the suffering of the witnesses proved to have a vital missionary impact. As the saying goes: The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church (cf. Frend 1981; von Campenhausen 1974; Bosch 1979:74-77; Robinson 1990).

In spite of what has been said about the obvious importance of this letter for ecclesiological thinking in general and Missiology in particular, one can only marvel at the fact that such little consideration has been given to it. A quick glance at some of the important missiological publications of recent years confirms this regrettable misappreciation and underrating. In the works of Bavinck, Bosch, Gensichen, Kane and Verkuyl, neither the passage under discussion nor the letter itself has received more than a passing reference or at most a few lines105 It is given more attention, however, in the publications of Blauw, Costas, Kromminga, Lippert, Senior & Stuhlmueller and van Swigchem106. Surprisingly, more attention has been paid to the letter by systematic theologians like Barth (1959), Berkhof (1973), Heyns (1967) and Küng (1967)—to mention but a few—in their attempts at developing a biblical ecclesiology.

For the purpose of this paper only chapter 2:4-10 will be considered, mainly for two reasons. In the first place, a thorough treatment of the whole letter would take up too much space. Secondly, scholars are almost unanimous that this passage is of central importance within the wider context of the letter. This applies to both its location within its literary context as well as the nature of its content (Elliott 1981:134). On the one hand it forms the culmination of an introductory affirmation of the dignity, identity

and commonality of Christian believers (1:3-2:10), on the other hand it establishes the basis and premise for the subsequent exhortation of Christians to engage in concerted action (2:11-5:11). In his study, Elliott (1981:135) elaborates as follows on our passage:

It is unified with its preceding context by the golden thread running through the entire segment of I Peter: the bond between the faithful community and her glorified Lord. And as a statement on the election, corporateness and holiness of the believing community, it points both backward to the holiness paraenesis in 1:13ff and the birth-growth theme of 1: 22ff, and forward to the social exhortation of 2:11ff. Here in 2:4-10 the injunction to a holy life, brotherly love, growth in the word and witness to the world receives its most detailed support.

A missionary ecclesiology in the making

In reading through 1 Peter and especially the passage marked for this study, one cannot escape the feeling of looking through a window into the workshop of God. There in Asia Minor in testing circumstances which to the small groups of Christian believers often felt like a burning furnace (1:6, 7; 4: 12), God was creating something totally new, namely a witnessing or missionary church. This dynamic process and its far-reaching implications are unfolded in 1 Peter 2: 4-10.

The passage begins with the exhortation to come to Christ (v. 4). The word here used for “to come” (proserchomai) is typical of cultic practices. Although some scholars think that it indeed has a cultic connotation here (cf Schneider 1935:682), 1 Peter uses the word to indicate the decision of faith which has to be taken about Christ the Lord. This decision, which is the most basic decision of one’s life, marks a definite transition from being ignorant about the living God to knowing and serving him with one’s total life. This is emphasised by the use of the contrasting pote...num de (“then...but now”) in verse 10, of which Stählin (1942:1110) speaks as the all-inclusive turning point in history. Past and present thus come to stand over against each other as two mutually excluding periods (Bolkestein 1977:86). In the case of the believers themselves this indicates a contrast between their previous and their present life. Conversion to Christ divides life into

105 Bavinck (1954:57f.) remarks that I Peter is “the clearest and most gripping word about the missionary calling of the whole congregation”. Bosch has just one reference to 1 Peter (1979: 85). Gensichen (1971:90) carries only a short note to indicate the church’s missionary dimension and intension. Kane (1979) has no reference worth mentioning. The same is true of Verkuyl (1978).

106 Blauw (1964:126f.) and Costas (1974:21f.) open up several valuable perspectives in their respective studies. The most extensive treatments on this passage are those by van Swigchem (1955) and Lippert (1968: 61f., 88f.). Kromminga (1964) deals extensively with 2:9. Senior & Stuhlmueller (1983:297f.) discusses 1 Peter under the fitting theme of “the witness of hope”.

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two distinct periods, namely the parelelythos chronos (times past) and the epiloipos chronos (remaining days; cf. 4: 1-3). The time during which they have done the “things that men desire” (v. 2) and also served like slaves the will of the Gentiles (ta ethne), has come to its final end. According to van Swigchem (1955: 44ff.) this is emphatically stated by the use of the perfecta in verse 3. For a long time they had lived outside God’s mercy (pluperfect eleemenoi) but now they have entered a totally new situation in which they do receive God’s mercy (cf. aor. eleethenteo in v. 10 to make the transition).

“Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy” (v. 10). Here past and present stand in the sharpest possible contrast. Like “darkness” and “light” in verse 9 so “no people” (lo ammi, from Hos. 1:9, 12; 2:22) and “God’s people” here form counter-positions. “Darkness” without the article indicates the unbound and undefined situation of being alienated from God. Although they had been part of a nation, they did not belong to the nation, namely God’s people. Although they had been part of a community, they were not part of the eschatological community of God. During that time they did not receive mercy. They had to find their own salvation. But that time is now past. They have obtained mercy and are now the people of God. It is important to note that their new situation is not described by imperatives: “Do this!” or “Be such!” or “Become that!”. 1 Peter uses indicatives: “You are...”, because “you have received mercy”. It is therefore obvious that it is only in the context of God’s mercy that one can understand the church’s election and calling. Those who have come to Christ henceforth belong to him alone and have put themselves fully at his disposal. They have to keep his word in faith and obedience.

Christians in Asia Minor and elsewhere should therefore constantly keep in mind that the relationship with Christ is the sole basis for the church’s existence. To illustrate his point the author introduces the “stone” metaphor. He quotes from Isaiah 28:16 and combines it with Psalm 118:22. The stone which the builders had rejected turned out to be the one specially selected by God as the cornerstone. This cornerstone is none other than Christ (Mark 12:10). He is the One rejected by humanity but chosen by God. People can ignore and reject him but only to their own detriment. Reference is here made to Isaiah 8:14 and Luke 2:34 where the stone metaphor is applied to Christ. Therefore, for those who have faith, Christ is the source of salvation but for those who reject him, he is a stone to trip over, a rock to stumble against (2:8).

The author thus draws a sharp distinction between pisteuontes (believers) and apisteuontes (those who do not believe). By using verbs rather than nouns the contrast thus drawn receives a dynamic character (cf. verses 7 & 9; see also van Swigchem 1955: 44). The present tense of verbs furthermore emphasises the fact that faith is not a sporadic act but a continuing process. In the congregation’s relation to the world it creates an open situation, a situation of hope for the world.

In verse 5 the invitation to come to Christ is developed further to indicate its sociological significance, namely the forming of a new community. Men and women must be willing to be used like living stones in a spiritual building. It is noteworthy that the author does not use the word for temple but the term oikos (house, dwelling place, home), a word to which Elliott attaches a great deal of importance. According to his sociological exegesis and analysis we have here the key to 1 Peter’s message. He regrets the tendency of commentators to assume a predominantly or exclusively cultic meaning for oikos in 2:5 and 4:17, thereby obstructing any real interest in the political, economic and social implications of the term (1981:165). “Oikos” he says, “denotes a group of persons, a household as well as the domicile in which they lived; that is the basic social community to whom the message of salvation was addressed. Households thus constituted the focus, locus and nucleus of the ministry and mission of the Christian movement” (1981:188). The conversion of such domestic units meant that households of Christians became the basic social and cultic centres, economic support systems, and practical means for the further extension of the Christian movement (1981:189).

What Elliott has argued here seems to be in full agreement with Hebrew thinking. In his commentary on 1 Peter, Schröger (1981) points out that the idea of a temple built of stone to serve as the dwelling place of God never received divine approval. God always preferred to live in the midst of his people in their tents or dwelling places (2 Sam. 7:1-7). When Peter then receives this ancient concept of the oikos as the meeting place of God with his people, he moves away from the static temple-concept, which rather revealed Canaanite influence, and replaces it with the original Hebrew concept. The dynamic character of the oikos concept is further emphasised by the adjective pneumatikos (spiritual). The place of God’s presence in the world of women and men is a creation of the Spirit.

The building of this spiritual house is not something which has been accomplished by a single act once and for all. According to Goldstein (as quoted by Schröger 1981:69) the present tense of

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oikodomeisthe points to the fact that communion with Christ and with one another as believers is never a completed act but rather an ongoing event. The participle proserchomenoi points to that which is in the process of happening with every believer. Whoever comes to Christ, simultaneously drawn into the field of force of the Spirit. Special notice must therefore be taken of the meaning of oikodomeisthe. Within the context in which it is used here it signals a very urgent message to humanity. In this divided world with its thriving hatred, conflict and loneliness, God presents us through the Holy Spirit with a new community or fellowship, knit together in love, justice, and peace. God is thus remaking our broken and failing society. The mere existence of the Christian congregation should be a signal of hope, provided that it never conforms to the conflict and divisions of this sinful world.

Our conclusions thus far are also supported by the image of the “holy priesthood” (cf. royal priesthood in v. 10). Especially noteworthy is the fact that the congregation was never meant to be only the field of activity of a few institutionalised offices. Rather, the whole congregation is called to share in the priestly office. The members themselves are the labour force of the Holy Spirit, serving God’s saving purpose for all the nations. What God had envisaged for Israel as his people in Ex 19:6 has now been fulfilled in the New Testament congregation (Torrance 1955).107 All believers, everyone of them, share in this service of God. They belong to him. That is why they are called “holy” (Schrenk 1957:250). They represent God in the world and stand before God on behalf of the world. The service they have to render as a royal priesthood is to offer “spiritual sacrifices.” These sacrifices are spiritual because they are initiated and directed by the Spirit (Bolkestein 1977:77). There is the risk of misunderstanding these offerings in a cultic sense and of restricting them to a sacred space, such as a temple or church building. If, however, the congregation keeps in mind its own character as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, it will be safeguarded against such misconception. Bolkestein (1977:77) correctly comments that the sacrifices acceptable to God are not offered in a sacred space separated from the world, but are made in everyday life, on the street, at the work place, at the market, in the midst of ordinary life, in politics, in labour and recreation. These sacrifices are acceptable to God only on the ground that they are related to Christ’s sacrifice.

The importance of Christ is further elucidated in verses 6-8. As we have already seen, the image to explain this truth was taken from the building site. Christ is likened to a cornerstone or foundation stone (Schröger: “Grundstein”). If the image of verse 8 (“a stone to trip over and, a rock to stumble against”) is kept in mind, it seems more likely to be a foundation stone which upholds the new temple and binds it together. This then strikingly emphasises Christ’s fundamental importance to the new structure (Bolkestein 1977:80-81; Schröger 1981:70-76). All the lithos (stone) sayings were taken from the Old Testament (cf. Isaiah 28:16, Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 8:14) and then interpreted christologically (cf. Mark 12:10). The image serves to warn the readers that they are approaching a watershed. Here the ways are parting between those who believe and those who do not. Although verse 8 draws a dark picture of those who reject Christ, the invitation in verse 4 is kept intact so that the hopeless may have hope.

In verses 9 and 10 the passage and even the letter as a whole reaches its climax (Bolkestein 1977:83). As Blauw has pointed out, these verses proceed from the stark contrast between those who reject the Gospel and the church which has accepted it (1964:127). In a powerful hymn-like description the unique character of the church is set out. Despite all the above mentioned difficulties and suffering which Christians are experiencing, the letter addresses them with several lofty expressions gleaned from the Old Testament. In sharp contrast to those who are heading toward disaster as a result of their unbelief (v. 8), the Christian congregation hears: “But you are...a chosen race...a royal priesthood...a holy nation...God’s own people” (v. 9). All these designations were applied to Israel of old (Ex 19:5-6, Isaiah 43:20, 61:6). The fact that they are now used for the Christian church indicates on the one hand that the church is deeply rooted in the history of Israel and, on the other, that God’s plan with humankind is now transferred from Israel to the church (cf. Brown 1984:77-79). The church is called a “chosen race” (genos eklekton), “a royal priesthood” (basileion hierateuma), “a holy nation” (ethnos hagion) and “God’s own people” (laos eis peripoiesin). Three of the four collective nouns relate to the image of “people”. The church is here seen as the introduction to God’s massive restoration programme of humankind and, with them, of the whole creation. (cf. Rom 11:25-26; 14:11; 15:7-13). That is why they are called a new race (genos), not as

107 Torrance (:81) makes a valuable distinction between the institutional priesthood and the royal priesthood of the congregation. He writes: “The purpose of the institutional priesthood was to serve the royal priesthood, and the purpose of the royal priesthood, that is of Israel as a kingdom of priests, was to serve God’s saving purpose for all nations. So with the Christian Church. The real priesthood is that of the whole Body, but within that Body there takes place a membering of the corporate priesthood, for the edification of the whole Body, to serve the whole Body, in order that the whole Body as Christ’s own Body may fulfill His ministry of reconciliation by proclaiming the Gospel among the nations.”

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one alongside the first race (Gentiles) and the second race (Jews) but as one that transcends both. The church is therefore constituted irrespective of race or nationality. This aspect is further elaborated by the notion ethnos (nation) which includes the cultural and sociological aspects. The phrase in which ethnos is used here, is fascinating. It is used with the adjective “holy” which was previously primarily applied to Israel as people of God (am Yahweh). While ethnos was traditionally used to refer to a Gentile nation it is here combined with the adjective hagion (holy) to indicate the people of God (literally: holy Gentiles or pagans). The same applies to the notion laos which has been transferred from the Hebrew concept am, the noun used in the Old Testament to distinguish Israel from the goyim (Gentile nations).

The chiasmic pattern which emerges in this description of the church clearly illustrates, in the first place, that since the advent of Christ no single nation can in any exclusive sense be the people of God. The new people of God is gathered from every nation. This creates an opportunity for all humankind to become the people of God (contra Brown’s statement of exclusiveness 1984:81). Secondly, to become the people of God does not depend on the will of any human person. The church is God’s creation. It is he who calls us “out of darkness into this marvelous light”. It is he who lays the precious foundation stone on which the salvation of the whole world depends. Thirdly, the synthesis of the offices is of special significance. The believers are priests who do a prophetic work (Kromminga 1964:137). The overall picture of the church is that of a community in service and not of a community to be served. It furthermore emphasises that the church does not exist for itself: because it has its existence in the saving acts of God it is basically directed towards the world as an agent of God’s mercy (Robinson 1987:86-87).

The significant recognition that the church as the people of God does not exist for itself, is emphasised particularly by the emphatic position of hopos in verse 9 (Blauw 1964: 128, 132). The church is what it is “in order that thus you may proclaim/declare/tell out/shew forth/ the aretas (the wonderful deeds/praises/virtues/triumphs [New Afrikaans Translation: “verlossingsdade”]) of him who called you...” The word eksangeilete which is used only here in the New Testament, has the meaning of raising the praises of God. It can also mean, as Schniewind puts it, “to proclaim far and wide” God’s wonderful deeds of mercy (1957:68). Although this word does have a definite cultic meaning it is not

possible to restrict its meaning here, as Balch has done, to that of a purely cultic act. It has to be interpreted within the new situation in which the old sacred space of the temple building gave way to the totally new concept of “a spiritual house” and a “royal priesthood”. This means that the praises of God for his wonderful acts of salvation are now echoing all over society and in all walks of life. The members of this “royal priesthood” are saying out loudly, that is, spelling out with all their words and deeds, that God is a Saviour and that their own existence as his people is proof thereof. Karl Barth (1959:872-910) justly emphasised the raison d’être of the congregation as that of a praise-giving community which should proclaim God’s saving acts in the world. The church’s mission is not something apart from its existence. The church exists because it has been sent and is now active accordingly (Barth 1960:809).108

A missionary ferment in society

It is quite evident from what has been said so far that the presence of the scattered groups of Christian believers, despite the lack of recognition and acceptance by their fellow citizens, was operating as a ferment within the old structures of society. The way society, and in particular Jews, reacted to them, gives ample proof of the fact that their new lifestyle was threatening and challenging the traditional pattern at its core (cf. Frend 1981:178ff.). They took a moral stance quite different from existing customs. What impressed even more was the fact that they responded to ill-treatment and injustice by persistently doing good. They were repeatedly admonished to continue doing good which, according to van Unnik (1954/55:92-110), meant a lifestyle that would redress every evil and restore just and sound relationships (cf 3:13-17; 4:19). Through their good works they were achieving the exact opposite of what their enemies were aiming at.

As was pointed out in the previous section, one of the key concepts in the missionary presence of this congregation is oikodomeisthe, that is the building up of a new fellowship embracing all believers in Christ. This fellowship proved to be very effective. It succeeded in creating a network of new social relationships not only locally or regionally but far beyond (cf 5:8). People accepted responsibility for one another right across the lines of traditional social differences of sex, age, status and race. Harnack elaborates on ten such forms of service rendered by Christians to one another and to their fellow citizens, including care of widows, orphans, the sick,

108 Blauw (1964: 169. Note 12) notes that Barth was the first systematic theologian who saw the existence and the task of the Christian as lying in witness.

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prisoners, and travellers (1908:153ff). These services made a lasting impression on the Gentile communities and became a very important factor in propagating the Christian faith. Noteworthy is the remark of Stephen Neill (1966:41):

What the Stoics had aimed at, the Christians seemed to have produced; here was a society in which all were welcome without distinction, from which the age-long discrimination between Jew and Gentile, bond and free, Greek and barbarian, man and woman seemed to have been really banished.

Perhaps it is not too farfetched to conclude that the coming into being of the Christian community revealed a pressing deficiency in society at large. Social deprivation and alienation was the order of the day (see also Elliott 1981:99, Note 79). The church offered a tangible alternative: a new society based on the triad of reconciliation, justice and peace. This new fellowship was at the same time a fundamental critique of the destructive status quo. To use the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez (1983:202), this was a “remaking of history from beneath”.

The important question for Missiology is whether the church of today, particularly in present-day South Africa, still manifests this nature and style. Is it still able to offer a healing fellowship to all disenfranchised and alienated people, no matter who or where they are? Orlando Costas (1974:11) had made a remark that hits the target:

The issue today is not whether or not people are being converted to Christ but whether this is happening as part of a total process: is the church a community totally committed to and involved in the fulfillment of the gospel in the context of the concrete historical situations in which men and women find themselves?

The question which we as South African Christians and particularly we as members of the Missiological Society must squarely face, is whether the church in our land is a visible sign of the reconciling and unifying power of the Spirit of God and therefore a growing influence of healing in this painfully polarised society. Is the church a ferment of the kingdom which initiates at all levels God’s new society?

In conclusion we may say that 1 Peter underlines two basic facts about the church and its mission. In the first place it emphasises the importance of the congregation’s existence as a new community or fellowship within the broader society. It perceives the congregation’s presence as mission (cf. Robinson

1982). The missiological principles laid down by this letter are intimately intertwined with what the church is. The congregation itself (that is, its being) is part of the message it proclaims. Faith and life are the two sides of the same coin. The congregation exists “in order that” it should proclaim the amazing liberating acts of God. A congregation that does not witness accordingly is a contradiction in terms. A congregation that does not, through its members, take the Word of God and the witness about his saving acts to every walk of life, is not the church referred to by 1 Peter. They are not God’s people!

Secondly, it is of the utmost importance that the congregation should heed its identity as a witnessing community. Every aspect of its life and work should be in line with its nature and so directed as to strengthen that particular identity. This does not apply only when the church has to suffer as a result of antagonism and hatred but also when it experiences no resistance but, rather, tends to be widely accepted and popular. The church continually has to renew and determine its own identity lest it suffers a loss of witnessing zeal. The invitation in the opening sentences of the passage we have examined is therefore of crucial missionary significance: “Come to him!”, because this is where all biblical mission starts. The movement toward Christ must, however, be followed through to be of real missionary significance. Christ must be followed into the world. The true church has to heed Christ’s prayer in John 17:18f., “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified”.

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REFERENCES CITEDAring, P. G.

1971 Kirche als Ereignis. Ein Beitrag zur Neuorientierung der Missionstheologie. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag.

Balch, D.L.1981 Let Wives be Submissive. The domestic code in I Peter.

(SBL Monograph Series Nr 26). Chicago: Scholars Press.

Barth, K.1959 Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/3,2. Zollikon-Zürich:

Evangelischer Verlag.1960 Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/1. Zollikon-Zürich:

Evangelischer Verlag.Bavinick, J. H.

1954 Inleiding in de Zendingswetenschap. Kampen: Kok.Berkhof, H.

1973 Christelijk Geloof. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Blauw, J.

1964 The Missionary Nature of the Church. London: Lutterworth.

Bolkestein, M. H.1977 De Brieven van Petrus en Judas (De Prediking van het

Nieuwe Testament). Nijkerk: Callenbach.Bosch, D. J.

1979 Heil vir die wereld. Pretoria: N. G. Kerkboekhandel (Eng. edition 1980: Witness to the world. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott).

Brown, R. E.1984 “The Petrine Heritage in First Peter: ‘The People of

God’“, in The Churches the Apostles left behind. New York: Paulist Press, pp. 75-83.

Brox, N.1979 Der erste Petrusbried (EKK, XXI). Einsiedeln:

Neukirchener Verlag.Costas, O. E.

1974 The church and its mission. Wheaton: Tyndale House.Elliott, J. H.

1966 The elect and the holy. An exegetical examination of 1 Peter 2:4-10 and the phrase basileion hierateuma. Leiden: Brill.

1981 A home for the homeless. A sociological exegesis of 1 Peter, its situation and strategy. London: SCM.

Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler1988 “Christian mission and the partriarchal order of the

household”, in: In memory of her. New York: Crossroad, pp. 260-266.

Frend, W. H. C.1981 Martydom and persecution in the Early Church. A

study of a conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Grand Rapids: Baker.

Gensichen, H. W.1971 Glaube für die Welt. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn.

Gilhuis, J. C.1979 “. . . ik zag een kerk.” De missionaire gemeente onder

het gehoor van Petrus. Kampen: Kok.Goppelt, L.

1976 “Die Verantwortung der Christen in der Gesellschaft nach dem 1. Petrusbrief”, in: Theologie des Neuen Testaments II. Göttingen: Vadenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 490-508, 528.

1978 Der erste Petrusbrief (KEK 12/1). Göttingen: Vadenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Gutierrez, G.1983 “Theology from the underside of history”, in: The

power of the poor in history. Maryknoll: Orbis, pp. 169-221.

Harnack, A.

1908 The mission and expansion of Christianity in the first three centuries, Vol. 1. London: Williams & Norgate.

Heyns, J. A.1967 Die kerk as diens aan die koninkryk. Annale

Universiteit van Stellenbosch. Vol. 31 Series B no 1, pp. 17-44.

Kane, J. H.1979 Christian missions in biblical perspective. Grand

Rapids: Baker.Kromminga, G. C.

1964 The communication of the gospel through neighboring. Franeker: Wever.

Kung, H.1967 De Kerk. Freiburg: Herder Verlag.

Ladd, G. E.1979 A theology of the New Testament. London: Lutterworth

(4th edition).Leipoldt, J. & Grundmann, W. (eds.)

1966 Umwelt des Urchristentums. Band I: Darstellung des neutestamentlichen Zeitalters. Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt (4. Auglage 1975).

Lippert, P.1968 Leben als Zeugnis. Stuttgart: Verlag Kath. Bibelwerk.

Michel, O.1954 Art. Oikos/Oikodomeo, TWNT V, pp. 139-145.

Neill, S.1964 A History of Christian Missions. The Pelican History of

the Church 6. Middlesex: Penguin Books (Reprint).Niebuhr, H. Richard

1951 Christ and culture. New York: Harper & Row.Robinson, P. J.

1982 Die presensie van die gemeente in missionere perspektief. Unpublished D. Th. thesis. University of Stellenbosch.

1987 “The church and its witness”, in: H. L. Pretorius et al: Reflecting on mission in the African context. Bloemfontein: Pro Christo Publications, pp. 82-101.

1990 “1 Petrus 4:12-19”, in: Verdere preekriglyne vir Lydenstyd (Woord teen die Lig I/8), Cape Town: N. G. Kerk-Uitgewers.

Schneider, J.1971 Die Katholischen Briefe (DNTD 4). Göttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.1957 Art. Proserchomai, in TWNT II, pp. 680-682 (first

published 1935).Schniewind, J.

1957 Art. Angelia ktl, in TWNT I, pp. 56-71 (first published 1933).

Schrenk, G.1957 Art. Hierateuma, in TWNT III, pp. 249-251 (first

published 1938).Schroger, R. F.

1981 Gemeinde im 1. Petrusbrief. Untersuchungen zum Selbstverständnis einer christlichen Gemeinde an der Wende vom 1. zum 2. Jahrhundert. Passau: Pasavia Universitätsverlag.

Senior, D. & Stuhlmueller, C.1983 The biblical foundations for mission. Maryknoll: Orbis

Books.Smit, D. J.

1988 Hoop in lewe en lyding. . . Oordenkings en Bybelstudie uit 1 Petrus. Cape Town: Lux Verbi.

Stahlin, G.1942 Art. Nun, in TWNT IV, pp. 1106-1110.

Steuernagel, V. R.1986 An exiled community as a missionary community. A

study based on 1 Peter 2:9, 10, Evangelical Review of Theology 10:1 (Jan.), pp. 8-18.

Torrance, T. F.1955 Royal Priesthood. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

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TWNT1935ff Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament,

Stuttgaart: Kohlhammer.Van Swigchem, D.

1955 Het missionair karakter van de christelijke gemeente volgens de brieven van Paulus en Petrus. Kampen: Kok.

Van Unnik, W. C.

1954-55“The teaching of good works in 1 Peter”, New Testament Studies 1, pp. 92-110.

Verkuyl, J.1975 Inleiding in de nieuwere Zendingswetenschap. Kampen:

Kok. (English edition 1978: Contemporary Missiology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.)

Von Campenhausen, H.1974 “Das Martyrium in der Mission”, in: Kirchengeschichte

als Missionsgeschichte Vol I. Munich: Chr. Kaiser.

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“Many Faces of Paternalism in Mission” by Charles E. Van Engen

Paternalism rears its ugly head in many places, and in many forms, often hiding itself behind subtly-contrived masks. Paternalism involves an extreme of some sort in our interpersonal relationships with those whom we seek to serve in mission and ministry. Although the following categorizations may appear to some as trivial knit-picking, and to others as exaggerated caricature, it is my belief that each contains an element of truth. If we carefully and honestly study these extremes, we may recognize in them some dangerous tendencies in our thinking, ministry, and mission.

1. The Financier Syndrome

a. Giving money only if we can control its use, or it is guaranteed to produce the results we want

or b. Not giving money because we feel it “would not be good for them” – the ultimate of the “self-help” syndrome.

or c. Giving money in such a way that it makes the recipient of our witness totally dependent on us because there are no provisions made for continued support of the program on the part of the recipients.

2. The Mothering/Smothering Syndrome

a. Deciding what the recipients of our mission really need and fomenting change accordingly, regardless of whether they realize they need it or not.

or b. Hearing the recipients of our mission say they need something, but deciding that they really do not. Or deciding independently from the recipients that, even though they may in fact need something, we do not need to be concerned about it – “it’s their problem.”

3. The Organization Syndrome

a. Designing a program by ourselves and then asking the recipients of that program to ratify it – sort of a “take it or leave it” approach. Or manipulating the recipients in such a way that they have no choice but to receive the services already predetermined for them.

or b. Running a program for the recipients of our mission without asking them

anything about it. (“We do our thing – you do yours.”) For example, bringing in services and/or structures which the recipients never asked for, teaching things we have decided “would be good for them to know,” bringing in experts to tell the recipients what they need without allowing the recipients the opportunity of contributing to their own development.

or c. Doing nothing until we have been asked first. (“I’m so good I only do things by special invitation ... and then only when the event is well-planned, long in advance, and done right.”)

4. The Invasion Syndrome

We bring in services and people, we create programs, or budget money and locate all this in a setting without the petition, or the participation, or the over-sight of the recipients of these services. So we end up ministering to (and not with); doing things for (and not alongside) the recipient.

We think we know best what the recipient needs without listening carefully to the recipient to find out the truth that no one knows the needs of the people of the area better than the recipients themselves. In fact the recipients themselves should be the judges of the appropriateness of new plans and programs. Careful incarnational mission will be ministry of the receptors, by the receptors, and for the receptors – with the facilitating, enabling, ennobling, encouraging, and active participating on the part of the donors in the midst of close, loving relationships with the receptors.

5. The Isolation Syndrome

a. This is an insidious double-think which wishes to assert the autonomy of the recipients, but from an isolationist point of view. It is like the parents who, not wanting to influence their child’s thinking, never give advice, guidance, or suggestions, either. People caught in this syndrome decide independently of their recipients those arenas they will talk about, and those arenas of mission and ministry they will remain aloof, independent, and isolated. Even when the recipients wish to consult about some

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issues, the isolation syndrome will cop out by saying, “that is their problem.” This syndrome assumes that “self-governing” categorically eliminates mutual cooperation, and that any cooperative efforts in joint participation on the part of the donor will automatically be paternalistic. So in order to avoid being “paternalistic,” this syndrome paternalistically decides, independently from the recipients, not to actively participate with the recipients in issues and agendas which may be important to the recipients, but are not important to the donor.

or b. The flip side of this syndrome is the “co-opting” syndrome. Rather than being isolationist, this syndrome invites the recipients to join with the donors in joint committees, but the most basic and influential decisions are not made by that joint committee – they are either pre-decided, or directed after the group gathers. The recipients, then, are “co-opted,” because they were present at the gathering at which something was talked about, were able to voice an opinion, but in the final analysis, were unable to influence the direction of the projects. If the donor organization has “policies” decided outside the context of ministry which cannot be negotiated, either side of the isolationist syndrome will tend to take effect. If the participants themselves have pre-determined agendas, or are not willing to respect and actively support the joint decisions, either side of this syndrome will take place.

6. The Big Cheese Syndrome

a. Deciding not to do something (even though it may be important now) because “they could never carry it on or keep it up (in the case of a building) when we are gone, so we will not do it at all.”

or b. Thinking our time is so valuable that we can only do big, important things like political advocacy, management of funds, administration of personnel, preaching & teaching, walking in the courts and in city hall, relating to the church uptown, to denominational judicatories, to relief agencies. It’s for the recipients to deal with the person on the sidewalk, to sit with the sick and

dying, to deal with the drunks, addicts, prostitutes, and pimps. It’s for the recipients to do witnessing, sharing faith, listening to the woes of their people. It’s for the recipients to do the preaching, pastoral care, healing, and general ministry – the “big cheese” has no time for the little people.

7. The Prince-and-the-Pauper Syndrome

a. Living so far above the standard of the people we serve that we really never experience life as they live it.

or b. Being overly conscious of our status and trying too hard to hide it by living in such poor conditions that all we have time for is to try to stay healthy and survive the conditions in which we have chosen to live.

8. The “Professional” Complex

The idea that we give services to recipients in an essentially impersonal fashion without getting “personally involved” in the lives of the recipients. Once the services have been provided we retreat to our own living space and our own personal relationships which may be completely disconnected from (and sometimes contradictory to) the lives of the people to whom we want to minister. The incarnational mission of Jesus and His disciples in the New Testament (as well as the very personal involvement of the judges and prophets in the Old Testament) tells us that impersonal “professional” services are not the essence of the Christian way of ministry. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness and goodness cannot be communicated in an impersonal way.

9. The “Fix-It” Syndrome

Too often in mission and ministry, if we become interested at all, it is because we believe we can quickly “fix” things, without seriously considering the long-range, systemic difficulties – and the fact that we may ourselves be part of the system which perpetuates the very problems we seek to “fix.” Too much of urban ministries of the late 60’s was of this type of work – and the results were not very positive. Incarnational mission and ministry means donor and recipient discovering together a new future for both donor and recipient in mission ministry in the host culture.

10.The “Reproducing Ourselves” Syndrome

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a. This mode of thinking has predominantly influenced North American mission endeavors, where the particular denominational polity, theology, and perspective (including content and style of theological education) are simply reproduced in the recipient culture. Interdenominational missions have, unfortunately, also tended to reproduce themselves, their agendas, their structures, and their methodologies – even at times their names. So we see “Latin American Mission Churches” and “African Inland Churches,” where the mission structure was simply carried over into national church structures. If our agenda is agriculture, based on management-by-objective, with well-defined target dates for local autonomy, the entire structure will tend to be reproduced in the receptor culture. Politically, the donor will be anxious to create “democracy” in the host culture, “like we do it back home.” Socially, the donors will tend to want to create family structures like those in which the donors were reared (thus polygamy may be out of the question). If the donors are Western, they will tend to foster the creation of democratic, horizontally-mutual and equal social relationships, even in the midst of hierarchically-structured host cultures (like those which predominate in Asian countries).

or b. The flip side of this syndrome is to think that all cultures are so unique (no common-humanity issues here), that nothing of the former culture is applicable. All polity, policies, methodologies and goals of the donor agency are “foreign” and therefore irrelevant, not useful, or possibly harmful to the receptors. Thus we think that new indigenous churches “only need the Bible,” and then can create their own polity, theology, and corporate life. Twenty centuries of church history are thus irrelevant, and thus new indigenous churches must create their own “local theologies,” and essentially “re-invent” the wheel. Theological education becomes facilitating local reflection. Agriculture becomes non-technical self-help, digging in the trenches alongside the indigenous people (like the early Peace Corps). Healing becomes

Christianizing the local diviners. And socio-political and economic issues become solely the problem of the recipients in relation to their own tribe and nation, and not open for discussion by the “foreign” mission donors.

or c. Either side of this syndrome tends to retard the development of leaders who are both indigenous in their content, style, and method of leadership, and transformational in bringing to their own culture new directions and insights garnered from many “foreign” sources and adapted to the host culture. Letter “a” above tends to produce leaders very rapidly, but they will be so “foreign” to their own culture, that eventually the host culture will tend to reject them, and then will need to begin again in its leadership development. (Example: The Presbyterian Church in Tabasco, Mexico – Cf. David Bennet, Tinder in Tabasco.) Letter “b,” on the other hand, will retard leadership development because the host culture will tend to muddle around for decades trying to find appropriate models (which may or may not be found in the host culture), always rejecting anything that seems to borrow from something “foreign.” To avoid this, a model will finally be taken, baptized as “indigenous,” and uncritically adopted. (Example: The strong European theological roots of Latin American Liberation The European theological roots are carefully down-played so that Liberation Theology may be considered to be a “Latin American” theology. Thus the foundational assumptions of that which was borrowed from Europe tend to be utilized without the careful critique they deserve.)

We can readily see that paternalism is an ever-present danger in mission and ministry. It appears mostly when we hold to some position or idea in a doctrinaire fashion, or take some action regardless of the circumstances, opinions, wisdom, or feelings of the people we are called to serve. Can we escape paternalism altogether? Probably not. Maybe all we can do is be aware of these traps. In each decision, in each circumstance, at the initiation of each program, in the training of each new person, we need to pray much for wisdom, and sensitivity – and then ceaselessly evaluate our thinking, values, and behavior in relation to those traps. We need Christ’s

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mind for Christ’s Church, participating in Christ’s mission. Ultimately, we need to be aware that there is one Spirit, one Body, and one hope and calling. together, as multi-cultural members of one Church, seeking to work together as mutual partners, together we seek to be Christ’s Church in a particular place and specific culture. There need be no “us-and-them” mentality – there cannot be – because all together we seek to be obedient to one Lord in that place. When

donors and recipients together share their visions, their goals, their strategies, and their work as adult, equal, actively cooperative, and mutually-accountable partners, most of the pitfalls outlined above can be avoided, and healthy, loving, visionary, and creative mission can be undertaken.

© Copyright 1989 Charles Van Engen

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“The Flaw of the Excluded Middle” by Paul G. Hiebert

Originally published in Missiology: An International Review X(1):35-47. Used by permission of Missiology.

Western worldview has a blind spot that makes it difficult for many Western missionaries to understand, let alone answer, problems related to spirits, ancestors and astrology. Dr. Hiebert here brings us a reevaluation of these problems from a biblical perspective which challenges some of the assumptions of Western theology and opens the door for a more holistic, relational and relevant theology of mission.

“John’s disciples asked, ‘Are you he that should come, or do we look for another?’” (Lk. 7:20). Jesus answered not with logical proofs, but by a demonstration of power in the curing of the sick and casting out of evil spirits. So much is clear. Yet when I read the passage as a missionary in India, and sought to apply it to missions in our day, I had a sense of uneasiness. As a Westerner, I was used to presenting Christ on the basis of rational arguments, not by evidences of his power in the lives of people who were sick, possessed and destitute. In particular, the confrontation with spirits that appeared so natural a part of Christ’s ministry belonged in my mind to a separate world of the miraculous—far from ordinary everyday experience.

The same uneasiness came to me early in my ministry in India. One day, while teaching in the Bible school in Shamshabad, I saw Yellayya standing in the door at the back of the class. He looked tired, for he had walked many miles from Muchintala where he was an elder in the church. I assigned the class some reading and went with him to the office. When I asked why he had come, he said that a few weeks earlier smallpox had come to the village and taken a number of children. Doctors trained in Western medicine had tried to halt the plague but without success. Finally in desperation the village elders had sent for a diviner who told them that Maisamma, Goddess of Smallpox, was angry with the village.

To satisfy her and stop the plague the village would have to perform the water buffalo sacrifice. The village elders went around to each household in the village to raise money to purchase the buffalo. When they came to the Christian homes, the Christians refused to give them anything, saying that it was against their religious beliefs. The leaders were angry, pointing out that the goddess would not

be satisfied until every household gave something as a token offering—even one paisa or penny would do. When the Christians refused, the elders forbade them to draw water from the village wells and the merchants refused to sell them food.

In the end some of the Christians had wanted to stop the harassment by giving a paisa, and to tell God they did not mean it, but Yellayya had refused to let them do so. Now, said Yellayya, one of the Christian girls was sick with smallpox and he wanted me to pray with him for God’s healing. As I knelt, my mind was in turmoil. I had learned to pray as a child, studied prayer in seminary and preached it as a pastor. But now I was to pray for a sick child as all the village watched to see if the Christian God was able to heal.

Why my uneasiness both in reading the scriptures and in the Indian village? Was the problem, at least in part, due to my own world view—to the assumptions I as a Westerner made about the nature of reality and the ways I viewed the world? But how do I discover these assumptions? They are so taken for granted that I am rarely even aware of them. One way is to look at the world view of another culture and then to contrast it with the way I view the world.

Ills and Remedies in an Indian Village

There are many illnesses in an India village. People become sick with hot diseases such as smallpox and must be treated with cold medicines and foods; or they have cold diseases like malaria and need hot food and medicines. Some need treatment for boils, cuts and broken bones, others for mental illnesses. Women may be cursed with barrenness. Individuals or whole families may be plagued by bad luck, by constantly being robbed or by having their houses burn down. Or they may be seized by bad temper, jealousy or hate; be possessed by spirits; or be injured by planetary forces or black magic.

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Like all people, Indian villagers had traditional ways of dealing with such diseases. Serious cases, particularly those that were life threatening or had to do with relationships, they took to the sadhu or “saint.” This would be a person of God who claimed to heal by prayer. Because God knew everything, including the nature and causes of the illness, the saints asked no questions. Moreover, because they were spiritual, they charged no fees, although those who were healed were expected to give a generous offering to God by giving it to the saint.

Other cases villagers took to a mantrakar or magician, particularly cases in which the villagers suspected some evil human or supernatural cause. The magician cured by means of knowledge and control of supernatural spirits and forces believed to exist on earth. If, for example, any were to venture out on an inauspicious day when the evil forces of the planets were particularly strong, they might be bitten by a viper. To cure this the magician would have to say the following magical chant (mantra) seven times for each stripe across the viper’s back: OM NAMO BHAGAVATE. SARVA PEESACHI GRUHAMULU NANU DZUCHI PARADZURU. HREEM, KLEM, SAM PHAT, SVAHA.

This combines a powerful formula to counter the evil forces and a series of powerful sounds (Hreem, klem, sam, phat, svaha) that further empower the formula. Sometimes the magician used visual symbols (yentras—see figure 1) or amulets to control spirits and forces in the world. Because they can divine both the nature and the cause of the evil plaguing the patient, they need ask no question, and, like the saints, they receive the offerings of those who have been helped.

A third type of medical practioner was the vaidyudu or “doctors” who cured people by means of scientific knowledge based on the ayyurvedic or unani system of medicine. Because of their skills in diagnosis, these, too, asked no questions. Villagers report these vaidyudu would feel their wrists, stomachs and bodies and be able to determine their illnesses. They charged high fees for this knowledge was powerful, but they gave them a guarantee: medicines and services were paid for only if the

patient was healed.

In addition there were village quacks who healed people with folk

remedies. Their knowledge was limited so they had to ask questions about the illness—where it hurt and for how long, had they been with someone sick and what had they eaten. For the same reason they charged low fees and gave no guarantees. People had to pay for the medicines before receiving them. (It should not surprise us that Western doctors were often equated at the beginning with the quacks.)

What happened to villagers who became Christians? Most of them took problems they formerly took to the saints to the Christian minister or missionary. Christ replaced Krishna or Siva as the healer of their spiritual diseases. Many of them in time turned to Western allopathic medicines for many for the illnesses they took to the doctor and quack. But what of the plagues that the magician cured? What about spirit possession, or curses, or witchcraft or black magic? What was the Christian answer to these?

FIGURE 1MAGICAL CHARMS IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE

Magical charms, when properly used in a south Indian village, will automatically bring about the desired results. These charms combine powerful figures, sounds, and words. A: Yantra for a headache, including writing it on a brass plate, lighting a candle before it after it is wrapped in string, covering it with red and yellow powders, and tying it to the head. B: Yantra for assuring conception, involving inscribing it on a piece of paper of copper sheeting and tying it to the arm of the barren women. C: Used for malaria.D: To the god Narasimha, for power and general protection.

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Neither the missionary evangelist or doctor had an answer. These did not really exist, they said. But to the people for whom these were very real experiences in their lives, there had to be an answer. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of them returned to the magician for cures.

This survival of magic among Christians is not unique to India. In many parts of the world, the picture is the same. In the West, magic and witchcraft persisted well into the 17th century, more than a thousand years after the coming of the gospel.

An Analytical Framework

In order to understand the biblical texts, the Indian scene and the failure of Western missionaries to meet the needs met by magicians, we need an analytical framework. To create this, we need two dimensions of analysis (see figure 2).

The Seen-Unseen Dimension

The first dimension is that of imminence-transcendence. On one end is the empirical world of our senses. All people are aware of this world, and develop folk sciences to explain and control it. They

develop theories about the natural world around them—about how to build a house, plant a crop or sail a canoe. They also have theories about human relationships—how to raise a child, treat a spouse and deal with a relative. When a Naga tribal person attributes the death of the deer to an arrow, or a Karen wife the cooking of a meal in terms of the fire under the pot, they are using explanations based upon empirical observations and deductions. Western science, in this sense, is not unique. It may be more systematic in the exploration of the empirical world, but all people have folk sciences that they use to explain many of the ordinary, immediate experiences of their lives.

Above this level are beings and forces that cannot be directly perceived but are thought to exist on this earth. These include spirits, ghosts, ancestors, demons, and earthly gods and goddesses who live in trees, rivers, hills and villages. These live not in some other world or time, but are inhabitants with humans and animals of this world and time. In medieval Europe these included trolls, pixies, gnomes, brownies and fairies who were believed to be real. This level also includes supernatural forces

such as

FIGURE 2AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE

ANALYSIS OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

ORGANIC ANALOGYBased on concepts of living beings relating to other living beings. Stresses life, personality, relationships, functions, health, disease, choice, etc. Relationships are essentially moral in character.

MECHANICAL ANALOGYBased on concepts of impersonal objects controlled by forces. Stresses impersonal, mechanistic and deterministic nature of events. Forces are essentially amoral in character.

UNSEEN OR SUPERNATURALBeyond immediate sense experience.Knowledge of this based on inference or on supernatural experience.

HIGH RELIGION BASED ON COSMIC BEINGScosmic godsangelsdemonsspirits of other worlds

HIGH RELIGION BASED ON COSMIC FORCESkismetfateBrahman and karmaimpersonal cosmic forces

OTHER WORLDLYSee entities and events occurring in some other worlds and in other times

FOLK OR LOW RELIGIONlocal gods and goddessesancestors and ghostsspiritsdemons and evil spiritsdead saints

MAGIC AND ASTROLOGYmanaastrological forcescharms, amulets and magical rites

evil eye, evil tongue

THIS WORLDLYSees entities andevents as occurring in this world and universe

SEEN OR EMPIRICALDirectly observable by the senses. Knowledge based on experimentation and observation.

FOLK SCIENCEinteraction of living beings such as humans, possibly animals and plants

FOLK NATURAL SCIENCEinteraction of natural objects based on natural forces

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mana, planetary influences, evil eyes, and the powers of magic, sorcery and witchcraft.

Furthest from the immediate world of human experience are transcendent worlds beyond this one—hells and heavens; and other times such as eternity. Here are African concepts of a high god, and Hindu ideas of Vishnu and Siva. Here is located the Jewish concept of Jehovah who stands in stark contrast to the Baals and Ashtaroth of the Canaanites who were deities of this world, of the middle zone. To be sure, Jehovah entered into the affairs of this earth, but his abode was above it. On this level, too, are the transcendent cosmic forces such as karma and kismet.

The Organic-Mechanical Continuum

Scholars have widely noted that humans use analogies from everyday experiences to provide them with pictures of the nature and operations of the larger world. Two basic analogies are particularly widespread: 1) to see things as living beings in relationship to each other, and 2) to see things as inanimate objects that act upon one another like parts in a machine.

In the first or “organic” analogy, the elements being examined are thought to be alive in some sense of the term, to undergo processes similar to human life, and to relate to each other in ways that are analogous to interpersonal relationships. For example, in seeking to describe human civilizations, Spengler and Toynbee speak of them as living things. Civilizations are born, they mature and they die. Similarly, traditional religionists see many diseases as caused by evil spirits that are alive, that may be angered, and that can be placated through supplication or the offering of a sacrifice. Christians see their relationship to God in organic terms. God is a person and humans relate to him in ways analogous to human relationships.

Organic explanations see the world in terms of living beings in relationship to one another. Like humans and animals, they may initiate actions and respond to the actions of others. They may be thought to have feelings, thoughts, and wills of their own. Often they are seen as social beings who love, marry, beget offspring, quarrel, war, sleep, eat, persuade and coerce one another.

In the second or “mechanical” analogy, things are thought to be inanimate parts of greater mechanical systems. They are controlled by impersonal forces or by impersonal laws of nature. For example, Western sciences see the world as made up of lifeless matter that interacts on the basis of forces. Gravity pulls a rock down to the earth not because the earth and rock wish to meet—neither earth nor rock have any thought in the matter. In

Western science even living beings are often seen as being caught up in a world ultimately made up of impersonal forces. Just as we have no choice about what happens to us when we fall out of a tree, so it is often thought we have no control over the forces in early childhood that are believed to make us what we are today.

Mechanical analogies are essentially deterministic; living beings in a mechanistic system are subject to its impersonal forces. But if they know how these forces operate, they can manipulate or control them for their own advantage. In a sense they become like gods who control their own destiny.

Mechanistic analogies are basically amoral in character. Forces are intrinsically neither good or evil. They can be used for both. Organic analogies, on the other hand, are characterized by ethical considerations. One being’s actions always affect other beings.

Many of the similarities between modern science, magic and astrology which have been pointed out by anthropologists are due to the fact that both use mechanistic analogies. Just as scientists know how to control empirical forces to achieve their goals, the magician and astrologer control supernatural forces of this world by means of chants, charms and rituals to carry out their purposes.

One of the greatest cultural gaps between Western people and many traditional religionists is found along this dimension. The former have bought deeply into a mechanical view of this universe and of the social order (cf Berger 1974). To them the basis of the world is lifeless matter controlled by impersonal forces. Many tribal religionists see the world as alive. Not only humans, but also animals, plants and even rocks, sand and water are thought to have personalities, wills and life forces. Theirs is a relational not a deterministic world.

The Excluded Middle

The reasons for my uneasiness with the biblical and Indian world views should now be clear. I had excluded the middle level of supernatural but this-worldly beings and forces from my own world view. As a scientist I had been trained to deal with the empirical world in naturalistic terms. As a theologian, I was taught to answer ultimate questions in theistic terms. For me the middle zone did not really exist. Unlike the Indian villagers, I had given little thought to spirits of this world, to local ancestors and ghosts, or to the souls of animals. For me these belonged to the realm of fairies, trolls and other mythical beings. Consequently I had no answers to the questions they raised (see figure 3).

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How did this two-tier world view emerge in the West? Belief in the middle level began to die in the 17th and 18th centuries with the growing acceptance of a Platonic dualism (Bufford 1981:30), and with it, of a science based on materialistic naturalism. The result was the secularization of science and the mystification of religion. Science dealt with the empirical world using mechanistic analogies, leaving religion to handle other-worldly matters, often in terms of organic analogies. Science was based on the certitudes of sense experience, experimentation and proof. Religion was left with faith in visions, dreams and inner feelings. Science sought order in natural laws. Religion was brought in to deal with miracles and exceptions to the natural order, but these decreased as scientific knowledge expanded.

It should be apparent why many missionaries trained in the West had no answers to the problems of the middle level—they often did not even see it. When tribal people spoke of fear of evil spirits, they denied the existence of the spirits rather than claim the power of Christ over them. The result, as Newbigin has pointed out (1966) is that Western Christian missions have been one of the greatest secularizing forces in history.

What are the questions of the middle level that Westerners find so hard to answer, and how do they differ from questions raised by science and religion? Science as a system of explanation, whether folk or modern, answers questions about the nature of the world that is directly experienced. All people have social theories about how to raise children and organize social activities. All have ideas about the natural world and how to control it for their own benefits.

Religion as a system of explanation deals with the ultimate questions of the origin, purpose and destiny of the individual, a society and the universe.

In the West the focus is on the individual; in the Old Testament it was on Israel as a society.

What are the questions of the middle level? Here one finds the questions of the uncertainty of the future, the crises of present life and the unknowns of the past. Despite knowledge that seeds once planted will grow and bear fruit, that travel down this river on a boat will bring one to the neighboring village, the future is not totally predictable. Accidents, misfortunes, the intervention of other persons and other unknown events can frustrate human planning.

How can one prevent accidents or guarantee success in the future? How can one make sure that a marriage will be fruitful and happy, and endure? How can one avoid getting on a plane that will crash? In the West these questions are left unanswered. They are “accidents”, “luck” or “unforeseeable events”, hence unexplainable. But many people are not content to leave so important a set of questions unanswered, and the answers they give are often in terms of ancestors, demons, witches and local gods, or in terms of magic and astrology.

Similarly, the crises and misfortunes of present life must be handled: sudden diseases and plagues, extended droughts, earthquakes, failures in business, and the empirically unexplainable loss of health. What does one do when the doctors have done all they can and a child grows sicker, or when one is gambling and the stakes are high? Again, many seek answers in the middle level.

And there are questions one must answer about the past: why did my child die in the prime of life, or who stole the gold hidden in the house? Here again transempirical explanations often provide an answer when empirical ones fail.

Because the Western world no longer provides explanations for questions on the middle level, it is not surprising that many Western missionaries have no answers within their Christian world view. What is a Christian theology of ancestors, of animals and plants, of local spirits and spirit possession, and of “principalities, powers and rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ep 6:12)? What does one say when new tribal converts want to know how the Christian God tells them where and when to hunt, whether they should marry this daughter to that young man, or where they can find the lost money? Given no answer, they return to the diviner who gave them definite answers, for these are the problems that loom large in their everyday life.

Implications for Missions

FIGURE 3A WESTERN TWO-TIERED

VIEW OF REALITY

RELIGION

faithmiraclesother worldly problemssacred

(EXCLUDEDMIDDLE)

SCIENCE

sight and experiencenatural orderthis worldly problemssecular

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What implications does this all have for missions? First, it points out the need for missionaries to develop holistic theologies that deal with all areas of life (see figure 4), that avoid the Platonic dualism of the West, and take seriously body and soul. On the highest level this includes a theology of God in cosmic history: in the creation, redemption, purpose and destiny of all things. Only as human history is placed within a cosmic framework does it take on meaning, and only when history has meaning does human biography become meaningful.

On the middle level, a holistic theology includes a theology of God in human history: in the affairs of nations, of peoples and of individuals. This must include a theology of divine guidance, provision and healing; of ancestors, spirits and invisible powers of this world; and of suffering, misfortune and death.

On this level, some sections of the church have turned to doctrines of saints as intermediaries between God and humans. Others have turned to doctrines of the Holy Spirit to show God’s active involvement in the events of human history. It is no coincidence that many of the most successful missions have provided some form of Christian answer to middle level questions.

On the bottom level a holistic theology includes an awareness of God in natural history—in sustaining the natural order of things. So long as the missionary comes with a two-tier world view with God confined to the supernatural, and the natural world operating for all practical purposes according to autonomous scientific laws, Christianity will continue to be a secularizing force in the world. Only as God is brought back into the middle of our scientific understanding of nature will we stem the tide of Western secularism.

A second implication is that the church and mission must guard against Christianity itself becoming a new form of magic. Magic is based on a mechanistic view—a formula approach to reality that allows humans to control their own destiny. Worship, on the other hand, is rooted in a relational view of life. Worshipers place themselves in the power and mercy of a greater being.

The difference is not one of form, but of attitude. What begins as a prayer of request may turn into a formula or chant to force God to do one’s will by saying or doing the right thing. In religion, we want the will of God for we trust in his omniscience. In magic we seek our own wills, confident that we know what is best for ourselves.

The line dividing them is a subtle one as I learned in the case of Muchintala. A week after our prayer meeting, Yellayya returned to say that the child had died. I felt thoroughly defeated. Who was I to be a missionary if I could not pray for healing and receive a positive answer? A few weeks later Yellayya returned with a sense of triumph. “How can you be so happy after the child died?” I asked.

“The village would have acknowledged the power of your God had he healed the child,” Yellayya said, “but they knew in the end she would have to die. When they saw in the funeral our hope of resurrection and reunion in heaven, they saw an even greater victory, over death itself, and they have begun to ask about the Christian way.”

In a new way I began to realize that true answers to prayer are those that bring the greatest glory to God, not those that satisfy my immediate desires. It is all too easy to make Christianity a new magic in which we as gods can make God do our bidding.

References CitedBerger, Peter, et al

1974 The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Vintage Books

Bufford, Roger K. 1981 The Human Reflex: Behavioural Psychology in Biblical Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row

Newbigin, Lesslie1966 Honest Religion for Secular Man. Philadelphia: Westminster Press

FIGURE 4A HOLISTIC THEOLOGY

GOD

COSMIC HISTORYThe ultimate story of the origin, purpose and destiny of the self, society and universe.

TRUTHENCOUNTER

OTHER RELIGIONS

HUMAN HISTORYThe uncertainties of the future; the crises of the present; and the unexplainable events of the past. The meaning of human experiences.

POWERENCOUNTER

ANIMISTIC SPIRITISM

NATURAL HISTORYNature and order of humans and their social relationships, and of the natural world.

EMPIRICALENCOUNTER

SECULARISM

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“The Contextualization and Translation of Christianity in Acts 9: 22, 26” by Shawn Redford

Prepublication edition of chapter for Acts of the Apostles. Heritg/Gallager eds.Forthcoming from Orbis Books

Introduction

Numerous well-developed perspectives or strategies in Mission Theory have held their place in the spotlight over the history of missionary practice.109 Some of these have been the watchword, ecumenism, the Church Growth movement, cultural anthropology, social action, receptivity theory, signs and wonders, power encounter and contextualization. Recently the translation model of missions has been gaining favor among missiologists.110 However, since the introduction of ‘contextualization’ in 1972, this theory has grown in appreciation to become commonly accepted in evangelical mission theory today with relatively little biblical work done to critique or validate the practice.111

The accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, 22, and 26 provide a narrative account that demonstrates integration between contextualization and the translation model of missions. Moreover, through the repeated accounts sharing Paul’s conversion experience, the message of Acts 1:8 is illustrated narratively. Beginning in Jerusalem and Judea (Acts 9), moving to Judea and Samaria (Acts 22), and onward to Samaria and the Ends of the Earth (Acts 26), each presentation of Paul’s conversion represents wider and wider socio-cultural circles. Whether or not this is intended by Luke, these three accounts illustrate evangelism in expanding multi-cultural contexts, showing the maturation of Paul’s witness, and the translation of Christian witness through time.

The thesis of this chapter is that Luke’s narrative accounts of Paul’s conversion demonstrate progressive steps stretching the witness of the church multi-culturally resulting in a progression from (the modern missionary concepts of) contextualization to

the translation principle in Christian mission. These passages call us to understand the importance of relational integrity in the midst of missionary witness. The encounter of contextual and translation models in Paul’s missionary activity provides biblical critique and integration between these two areas.

This progression is a step from the familiar to the unfamiliar – from comfort to discomfort – from small boundaries to greater boundaries – from one culture to another. In each case the familiar aspects provide solid footing while the unfamiliar ground is a painful process in understanding God’s will. Ultimately the passages demonstrate God’s graceful approach to the missionary as the missionary grows in the process of understanding God’s mission.

Contextualization

Since contextualization and the translation model will often be topics of this chapter, some definition will be helpful. I have defined contextualization as follows:

Contextualization is an attempt to communicate the gospel in word and deed so that we as missionaries will express ourselves in a way that correctly matches the receptors expected actions, customs, language(s), worldview and deep level understandings. 112

Contextualization involves communicating well enough so that the communication itself is not a barrier to the presentation of the Gospel; presenting the Gospel in a timely manner; presenting the Gospel in appropriate portions. It is communication that is foremost directed and guided by the Holy Spirit for the sake of the salvation of the receptors, and finally

109 Wilbert Shenk outlines the history of Mission Theory in Changing Frontiers in Mission. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1999). He correctly calls for a corrective on the use of the terms ‘technique’, ‘methodology’ (Wilbert Shenk, Write the Vision. (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1995), 53-64. and ‘strategy’ (Wilbert Shenk, 1999, 103-104) in missions theory due to these terms association with modernism, Christendom, and military practice. Evangelism and mission are ultimately based on relationships. These terms result in a forced persuasion that really has no place in Christian mission.

110 In personal conversations with Ryan Bolger, Jehu Hanciles and Wilbert Shenk, there has been a general preference for the translation model over other models of mission. The translation model of mission is discussed in Walls, Andrew The Missionary Movement in Christian History. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996), Part 1 and in Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1989).

111 Wilbert Shenk, 1999, 77.112 Charles Van Engen and Shawn Redford, “Syllabus for Biblical Foundations of Mission” (Pasadena: Fuller Theological Seminary 2002), 108.

This is my own definition. Arthur Glasser states: “Contextualization represents the careful and refined use of a people’s cultural forms in order that the truth of the gospel can be correctly expressed in their language through a judicious use of their own thought forms.” Arthur Glasser and Charles Van Engen, Dean Gilliland, Shawn Redford (eds.) Announcing the Kingdom. (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks Pre-Publication Edition:Chap. 7, Subheading C.)

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it is a process that transforms and challenges the missionaries understanding of Scripture by stripping away the missionary’s context.

Contextualization is not minimizing the impact of Scripture that is to be shared with the receptor for the sake of the receptor’s comfort. It is not “watering down” the Gospel. It is not reducing the whole of the Gospel so that the receptor has no ability to understand the implications of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Contextualization might meet the felt needs of the receptors. It might share a message that the receptors want to hear. It might even be a message that admonishes the receptors and meets their felt needs at the same time. However, contextualization most often will include loving and graceful elements because the Bible is fundamentally a series of messages about the love and grace of God calling all humanity into redemption.113

The Translation Model

The Translation Model is equally difficult to define. In short, this model focuses on the effect that takes place when indigenous Christians move away from any original missionary influence (often this takes multiple generations) and freely allow their own interests and concerns to bring new questions, new shape, new meaning and new focus to the Christian message resulting in a translated Christianity (not transplanted) that produces unforeseen and added contribution to the mission of God and the nature of God in their midst. Likening the process to linguistic translation, Walls comments that:

Translation involves the attempt to express the meaning of the source from the resources of, and within the working system of, the receptor language. Something new is brought into the language, but that new element can only be comprehended by means of and in terms of the pre-existing language and its conventions. In the process that language and its system is effectively expanded, put to new use; but the translated element from the source language has also, in a sense, been expanded by translation; the receptor language has a dynamic of its own and takes the new material to realms it never touched in the source language.114

Like many missionaries, I wish that my own mission practice had greater development, especially in my early years. As a young Christian, I had great zeal to proclaim God’s message to others and little understanding of God’s plan in mission, combined with a terribly awkward way of expressing myself. Often I would bluntly ask absolute strangers, “Do you know Jesus?” resulting in polite responses that were ultimately focused on finding the nearest exit (airplane passengers were an especially captive and annoyed audience). Though the process was similar to extracting impacted wisdom teeth, I came to realize that God was giving me a great deal of grace by allowing for my clumsy steps in mission.

Acts 9:1-9

Though given independently Paul’s commission was substantially the same as that given to the eleven in Galilee and on Olivet. The fact that the glorified Redeemer felt it expedient to appear in person to this man and to give him his commission from His own lips is most significant.115

And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and throughout Judea …

Geographically, Paul is near Damascus, far from Jerusalem and outside of the Judean region. However, Paul and his companions form the cultural context of this account. Paul is the focus of God’s mission in Acts 9 and Paul is deeply rooted in Jewish structures as a Pharisee. Although born in Tarsus, Paul represents Jerusalem in thought and further represents one of the most difficult problems in mission – the problem of those who are convinced that they have everything solved. Paul is representative of Jerusalem and Judea because he is entrenched in the Jewish understandings and structures of his day. Paul’s Judaic tenacity is manifest in his headstrong determination to hunt down followers of Jesus Christ in order to deliver imprisonment or death.

Contextual Issues

In a total absence of Paul’s grace towards God and God’s followers, God’s grace is evident in the highly contextual manner in which God addresses Paul. God’s choice to speak in Aramaic (or Hebrew) demonstrates the beginning of God’s contextual focus towards Paul (v.4-5 cf. Acts 26:14). While Greek would certainly have been an understandable language for Paul, it is unlikely that Paul’s own

113 Charles Van Engen and Shawn Redford, 2002, 108-109.114 Andrew Walls, 1996, 28.115 Archibald McLean, Where the Book Speaks. (New York: Revell, 1907), 33.

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ethnocentrism could have accepted God if God didn’t speak in the language Paul would have expected, that of the Jews. God could certainly have used dreams, visions, or other non-verbal communication, but God chose to use something familiar and expected in order to reach into Paul’s context. It is most likely that the men with Paul ‘stood speechless’ because they heard God speaking in their mother tongue and could not see anyone (v.7). If they could not understand the words of Jesus, confusion would be the likely response (there is more detail on this in Acts 22).

Furthermore, God addresses Paul in a culturally familiar and expected Old Testament pattern of intensification (“Saul Saul”) using the Hebrew form of Paul’s name. (v.4 cf. Gen 22:11 “Abraham, Abraham!” Gen. 46:2 “Jacob, Jacob.” Ex. 3:4 “Moses, Moses!” 1 Sam. 3:4,6,10 “Samuel! Samuel!”)116

Since we know that this passage is a translation, the Greek phrase ejgwv eijmi jIhsou`" (“I am Jesus”) is probably based on the underlying Aramaic

["WvyE hn:a} ().117 Paul, upon hearing the “I AM” phrase from the voice of God, would likely have been reminded of the

tetragrammaton hwhy (YHWH) with Moses (v.5, cf. Ex. 3:14). The impact of God’s response would have absolutely overwhelmed Paul as he realized God’s authority. Additionally, the “I AM” phrase missonally links Paul with Moses, and this is relevant because Paul would eventually see his calling as having continuity with the Old Testament. Kaiser astutely notes:

it can hardly be argued that this [Paul’s mission] was some sort of late shift in the apostolic plans and that it marked the first time that the message of salvation would now be extended to the non-Jewish world. In fact, Paul cites as his authority the Old Testament.118

Paul, like Moses, heard directly from YHWH. More importantly, Paul was called to break the bondage of Jewish missionary apathy towards the Gentiles in the same way that Moses was called to lead Israel from Egyptian bondage in order that they might become a missionary force for the nations (Ex. 7:5,17, 9:16, Rom 9:17).

The entire passage is ultimately one of establishing the proper identity and authority of Paul and Jesus. Just as Jesus’ ministry (missio Christi) took place in a specific context, Jesus now comes to Paul in a specific context (missio Christi) with a specific language demonstrating God’s power to halt the self-righteous perceptions and activity of Paul (v.1). Paul is so invested in his own ideas and feels so empowered by his cultural tradition (v.2) that he must face a greater power in order for him to stop persecuting Christianity (v.4). However, this is not a power encounter with the demonic. Paul could only be stopped by a greater power (cf. Lk. 11:21-22). Therefore the use of power is contextual.

Although Jesus could certainly have stopped Paul in numerous ways, Jesus chose to use power to communicate to Paul. The self-righteousness found in Paul on the Damascus road should be a constant reminder for all modern missionaries to repeatedly seek God’s will in mission. Self-righteousness is an extremely powerful and deceptive psychological force that has nothing to do with God or God’s mission because self-righteousness masks God’s real desire in mission and falsely affirms our own misunderstandings.

The interaction between Jesus and Paul is an excellent example of contextual admonishment (vv.3-9). It is a mistake to think that contextualization should diminish or soften the message of God. Contextualization is foremost an activity that correctly communicates the message of God, whatever that message may be. However, if someone is called to the very difficult and rare task of admonishing another, contextualization is essential for producing an understandable message (cf. 2 Sam 12:1-14, Luke 4:16-30; Acts 22:3-22).

The Translation of Christianity

Within this passage we again see the principal example of God reaching into human history and revealing the Christian message for the nations. The first translation of the Christian message is always one of God to humanity. As Andrew Walls states, the “incarnations of Christ are contingent on that first Incarnation with its firm anchorage in time and space, its ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ Similarly, biblical translation is re-translation, with the original always at hand.”119 We see this translation of the message in God’s call to Paul, just as God called Israel through Abraham for mission, Christ called the Jews for

116 Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles. (Herm. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 210.117 F. F. Bruce, The Acts of the Apostles. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1990), 456. - cf. Gustaf Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua. (London: SPCK 1927), 18.118 Walter Kaiser, Mission in the Old Testament. (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks 2000), 8, 75-82.119 Andrew Walls, 1996, 29.

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mission, and the Holy Spirit called the Church for mission. Archibald McLean sees this translation as so influential that he counts Paul’s conversion as a ‘sixth great commission passage’ (including Mt. 28:18-20; Mk. 16:15-16; Lk. 24:46-47 Jn. 20:21-23; Ac. 1:6-8).120

God translates the message for Paul and as Paul understands that message, he owns it and begins a process of reshaping Christianity by taking the Christian message in the new direction of Christ for the Gentiles. The blindness of Paul’s self-righteousness is replaced with eyes to see God’s missional love for all humanity resulting in new questions for Jewish believers, new directions and unforeseen issues that sprang from a newly developed Judaic Christianity. This began to reshape the meaning of mission in the first century (cf. Acts 15, 22, 28).

It is understandable that Paul was self-righteous as a Jew, but this is much harder to address in Christians. Speaking from personal experience as a maturing Christian, I was steeped in self-righteousness and legalism with a dangerous passion for evangelism. With a college fraternity as my first mission field, I joined and hoped to share my developing faith. I had taken a new communal step by living with the men that I had hoped would also find faith in Jesus, but I later realized that the stripping of my own self-righteousness was God’s real focus. I learned slowly that God had to do a great work in me before I could genuinely share my faith and cross boundaries ‘to the nations.’

Acts 22:3-22

If the church, under the inspiration of its head, Jesus Christ, lives by the conviction that the world is on a course that leads to death, it has no other choice than to invite men and women to become a part of God’s new order, the kingdom of life. The church that is not evangelizing is a church that does not truly believe the Gospel. It is a faithless church.121

And you will be my witnesses … throughout Judea and Samaria …

The context of Acts 22 is radically different from that of Acts 9. The Jews are now confounded as they exist in the tension of cultural boundaries. The prejudice of the Jews towards the Gentiles is an immense boundary. This context represents a nearly

identical tension that existed between Judea and Samaria, which gave the apostles missional difficulty (cf. John 4).

Acts 22 represents a mixture of ethnically Jewish and Gentile people (21:27, 29) that includes Jewish Christians (21:20) and Gentile Christians (21:25). The Jewish Christians are Judaizers. They have blended their newfound Christianity with their own misunderstood forms of Jewish law resulting in unhealthy and missionless spirituality. The tension of Acts 15 has not diminished. The Jewish believers are even more entrenched in their cultural imperialism as their ethnic values police the spiritual community. Moreover, Paul is the scapegoat for their wayward spirituality, which eventually erupts in an urban riot.

In addition, it is very likely that Paul is undergoing reverse culture shock since he has recently returned from his third missionary journey in Gentile lands. Moreover, Paul has changed radically from his conversion in Acts 9. Paul is now an experienced missionary familiar with Jewish and Gentile tendencies as they relate to God’s mission.

Contextual Issues

The self-righteousness that Paul exhibited in Acts 9 is now being thrust upon him by self-righteous and syncretistic Jewish believers. Paul’s speech is contextual, evangelistic, and reforming in nature. As in Acts 9, contextual admonishment is hard at work. Paul ultimately admonishes the syncretism among Jewish believers. The syncretism of the Jewish believers is not simply their Judaizing tendencies. Their syncretism also includes their lack of understanding that God’s missional plan includes the Gentiles as co-believers and co-workers in sharing Christ’s message with the nations.

Paul captures the attention of this crowd by using the heart language of the Jews (v.2). Paul learned from God’s grace in Acts 9 to work within certain expectations of his audience even if those are built on misconceived perspectives (such as the idea that God is Jewish). Furthermore, Paul uses the term “brothers and fathers” (v.1) and quickly notes his Jewish heritage as “a zealous Jew, educated in the strict tradition of the law” (v.3). Paul even builds upon the common heritage of both the Jews and Judaizing Christians when using the term “the God of our ancestors” (v.14). The additional corroboration of the Ananias’ testimony, noted by Paul as a devout Jew (v.12) and a Christian believer, permits Paul to share Jesus’ title as “the Righteous One” with

120 Archibald McLean, Where the Book Speaks. (New York: Revell, 1907), 31-33.121 Wilbert Shenk, 1995, 54.

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understandably little reaction from the Judaizers (v.14). However, Paul is not merely trying to gain credibility. He is sharing his journey relationally with those who are weak in their own understanding of God’s mission.

Paul builds within his speech noting his conversion and his experience with God. The first time reader might expect that Paul is going to simply affirm the crowds existing perception of the Christian faith. However, Paul has a message to deliver and he does deliver this message with contextual skill that ultimately illustrates the purpose of Israel’s privilege “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” (v.21). This is not Paul’s purpose alone. It has always been the role that God wanted for Israel (cf. Gen. 12:1-3, 17:4-6, 18:18, 22:17-18, 26:4, 27:29, Num. 24:9, Ps. 72:17, Isa. 61:9, Jer. 4:2, Zech. 8:13).

It is only at this point that the crowd erupts. The news of God’s appearance to Paul and his experience with “Jesus of Nazareth” (v.8) is not what causes the crowd to erupt. It is the news that God purposefully seeks out the Gentiles through Jewish agents of mission. This is what causes the crowd to yell “away with such a fellow from the earth, for he should not be allowed to live” (v.22). Tannehill has noted that Paul emphasizes “his Jewish roots and the Jewish roots of his mission.”122 Paul is emphatically stating that the Jews and the Judaizing Christians have misunderstood their role – their relational purpose with God is integrally linked in God’s mission.

The apparent discrepancy between Acts 9:7 and Acts 22:9 has often been an issue of debate or ignored altogether, but it has not been addressed from a missiological standpoint.123 The account of Paul’s companions in Acts 9:7 takes place at the beginning of Paul’s transformation in mission – “The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard (Greek: ajkouvnte~ root: ajkouvw) the voice but saw no one.” Paul has no comprehension of the nature of God’s mission for the Gentiles nor that this responsibility is placed upon Paul and his companions. The men with Paul

actually did hear the words that God spoke to Paul. We are only told, however, about Paul’s response to this message.

The context of Acts 22 is critically important as we consider the contrast in Acts 22:9 – “Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear (Greek: oujk h[kouvsan root: ajkouvw) the voice of the one who was speaking to me.” Paul is using the narrative of his conversion to address this angry audience. Paul is likely saying “Now those who were with me saw the light but did not listen to the voice.”124 Familiar echoes of Matthew 13:13 come to mind – “and hearing they do not listen” (not to mention the very same root verb (ajkouvw) used twice with similar meanings in the Greek: kai; ajkouvonte~ oujk ajkouvosin cf. Acts 28:23-28).125 Paul is implying that despite a very similar experience, they never followed God in mission. It is quite surprising that Luke records nothing of Paul’s companions in the years that follow the Damascus road experience. It is highly likely that there is no sign of Paul’s companions’ involvement in God’s mission to the Gentiles.

However, Paul does not make this change to simply tell the Judaizers additional information. He has begun with an indirect style of communication that gives an initial narrative understanding of the situation in order to gracefully tell the hardened Judaizers that they have not listened either. This is common in contextualized admonishment, as it helps the listeners manage the difficulty of the message (cf. 2 Sam 12:1-14, Luke 4:16-30). Through Luke’s account in Acts 22, we are allowed to see the maturation of Paul’s evangelistic skills and missional comprehension, while the church has remained entrenched in a past that understands very little about God’s desire for their involvement in mission. When Paul finally states this same idea directly in verse 21, the crowd understands what Paul is saying.


This passage represents the birth pains within the translation model of Christianity as the Jewish

122 Robert Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts. (Philadelphia and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 2:276.123 It should be pointed out that even a direct contradiction over details in a story would not have bothered first century readers because they did

not subject Scripture to a scientific microscope. The problem that modern Western readers face when addressing these passages is that of trying to force Scripture to match Western worldview assumptions. In short, the problem is with readers seeped in modern Western thinking and not Scripture. While the explanation provided for Acts 9:7 and Acts 22:9 may ease this tension, modern readers should be able to live with the dialectic since it is unlikely to play a significant role in our faith or in God’s mission. One concern that some Western readers have will not be addressed here. This is the issue over whether Paul’s companions were standing or had fallen (Acts 9:7 “The men … stood speechless” and Acts 26:14 “We had all fallen to the ground …”). There are explanations such as the idea that Paul’s companions fell or stood at different times than Paul did. However, this issue should not be a problem for us because it is an excellent example of a minor issue in the midst of a narrative framework that was never intended to offer a scientific or legal level of precision.

124 The words “they did not listen” would be familiar for Jews who had studied with the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah and Jeremiah – Ex. 16:20, Jud. 2:17, Ps. 81:11, Isa. 65:12, 66:4, Jer. 7:13,26, 17:23, 25:7, 34:14, 44:5

125 Translation mine. For linguistic Greek comparisons, see Luke 10:39, Acts 14:9, Acts 22:22, Matt 18:16, Mark 9:7, John 10:8.

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believers are screaming over their inability to control and shape the newly maturing Gentile Christianity. Already the Gentile forms of Christianity have brought uncomfortable and unforeseen questions to Jewish believers including the Gentile’s lack of interest in Judaizing (cf. Acts 21:28). Paul is caught within this stress as a midwife trying to assist in what has become a recently discovered and unwanted pregnancy. As the Gentile Christians take on these new forms and new understandings in mission, the syncretistic Jewish Christians are angry over the freedom that the Gentiles have found in Christ. Gentile Christianity is about to walk free from the control of Jewish ethno-paternalism. Andrew Walls states, “Early Christianity was thus already touched by the translation principle. Not even Jewish Palestine could be culturally and linguistically sealed off from the Hellenistic world; and the very words of Jesus come to us in Greek dress.”126

However, this lesson should not go unnoticed in modern-day mission practice and in missiology as a discipline. The interplay in Acts 22 between a syncretistic church and Paul’s missionary activity has tremendous application for today. The church uninvolved in God’s mission can often be a destructive force for the missionary. Many missionaries (like Paul) have returned from active involvement in God’s mission only to be drawn into a missionless church filled with issues that have nothing to with God’s plan for humanity. Like the Judaizing Christians of Acts 22, the Western church has often been co-opted by polarized cultural values, such as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that wreaked havoc on missionary practice. Polarization and division in the church do have the capacity to hinder real missionary activity. The good news, however, is that even this type of church will not ultimately stop God’s missionary plan.

There is a lesson for the missionary in this too. Missionaries can often forget to build missionally motivated churches. Who was leading the Jerusalem church to become God’s missionary people? Charles Van Engen reminds us:

As the church translates its nature into priorities, … it must go one step further and convert that knowledge and faith into action in the world through its members. … Without such careful and intentional planning, missionary congregations never

emerge and are never built up to become God’s people in mission in the world.127

As God began to develop my own missional understanding through extremely talented missionaries working among the Maasai of East Africa, I was also learning first hand that the church must reflect God’s design in being a mission based community. It was no longer ‘my’ witness but ‘our’ witness and the missionaries had to avoid the pitfall of being the ‘mission experts.’ The entire church had to manifest Christ’s presence and witness in order for there to be a translation of the Christian faith.

Acts 26: 2-23

Now, in the good providence of God, he [Paul] has the right of way, and with the audience and escort of centurions, chief captains, governors, and kings, leisurely takes up his triumphal procession toward Rome. He had touched the fringes of Rome’s domain and now he was closing in on the heart of the empire.128

And you will be my witnesses in … Samaria and to the ends of the earth!

Stepping into Paul’s testimony in Acts 26, we again find a radically different context from Acts 9 and Acts 22. At least two years have passed in Paul’s life (cf. 24:27) and that time has been spent in prison. Paul is standing before multiple rulers. Agrippa is ethnically Jewish with knowledge of Jewish customs (v.3) but his cultural makeup is largely Hellenistic.129

Much like the Samaritans, Agrippa represents a blend of ethnic and cultural values. Little is known about Festus. Caesar is the unexpected and absent participant in this audience. Paul is informed that Festus will be writing to Caesar based on this speech (25:23-27). The context of Acts 26 is then Rome itself, which represented uncharted territory much like “the ends of the earth.”

Although Paul is in prison, this discussion is not about securing his freedom because Paul’s real trial will take place in Rome (cf. 25:12, 21, 25). Paul is primarily concerned about sharing his faith with the rulers that surround him and sending a record of his faith before he arrives in Rome.

126 Andrew Walls, 1996, 32.127 Charles Van Engen, God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. 1991), 145.128 Charles K Ober, Bible Studies in Missions. (New York: The International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations. 1899), 35-36.129 D. N. Freedman, The Anchor Bible Dictionary. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:99-100.

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Contextual Issues

The most obvious difference of Jesus wording in Acts 26 is the added phrase “It’s hard to kick against the goads.” It is astounding to realize the contextual significance of this phrase. The term ‘goad,’ however, could have two possible cultural meanings.

In Acts 26:14, in Paul’s conversion story, Christ tells Paul that it hurts him to kick against the goads. Although the idea of the goad for oxen is common in the Jewish world, Paul (or Luke) seems to be adopting the Greek proverb here; this is most suitable in an address to the Hellenist Agrippa. … the proverb (also in the plural) is a stock quotation by the first century A.D. (Italics added).130

Herod Agrippa II was a ruler who understood the power of the Roman army. In fact, Josephus later attributes a speech to Agrippa in which the main point is “that the Romans were simply too strong to succumb to any uprising which Jewish revolutionaries could mount (War 2.345ff.)”131 The meaning of the phrase “to kick against the goads” for a first century Hellenistic authority would have been “an expression of futile and detrimental resistance to a stronger power, whether it be that of a god, of destiny, or of man.” 132 The use of this phrase helps modern-day readers to see King Agrippa’s culture through Paul’s eyes. Agrippa is more Hellenistic than Jewish and familiar with authoritarian values. This Greek colloquial phrase would have captured Agrippa’s attention in much the same way that Paul captured the crowds’ attention in Acts 22 by speaking in their language. More importantly, the phrase would have conveyed that Paul found himself in the same predicament with God as Agrippa did with the Roman army – one of overwhelming power that can crush at will. To put it in theological rather than missiological terms:

In Ac. 26:14 … the fact remains that the common Greek and Roman saying προς κεντρα λακτιζειν [“to kick against the goads”] does not occur at all in the Jewish sphere. It thus seems that Christ’s warning to Paul not to attempt futile and harmful

resistance takes the form of a suitable Greek proverb. To be quite blunt, Paul or Luke puts a Greek proverb on the lips of Jesus. It is, of course, no accident that this proverb should occur in the account of Paul’s conversion which is given to the Hellenist Agrippa. If it comes from Paul himself, this means that he cleverly adapts himself to the situation, as on other occasions. Out of regard for his particular hearers, he works in a suitable proverb which it is most unlikely that he himself should not have known. (Italics added)133

Paul was doing what any good missionary would do. He was translating the message (literally) and adding his own contextual insights to share the Christian message in understandable ways for his Greek speaking audience.

Paul’s inclusion of the Greek proverb has merit from a standpoint of linguistic translation as well. It should additionally be noted that the likely Aramaic

verb for ‘persecution’ (¹dr) had a focus of military attack or revenge, denoting ‘chasing one’s enemies,’ ‘pursuing someone,’ or ‘hurting someone.’134

However, the Greek verb (diwvkei") can communicate religious persecution or positive connotations, such as ‘following after’ or ‘aspiring after someone.’135 Including the proverb provides consistent meaning with respect to Paul’s militant style before his conversion. Paul’s choice to include this proverb is as valid from a standpoint of missionary translation as it is contextually. The two are integrated in the process.

Andrew Walls notes the reality of what Paul is doing:

translation is the art of the impossible. Exact transmission of meaning from one linguistic medium to another is continually hampered not only by structural and cultural difference; the words of the receptor language are pre-loaded, and the old cargo drags the new into areas uncharted in the source language. In the end the translator

130 Kittel, G. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. 1985), 427.131 D. N. Freedman, 1992, 1:100.132 G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley and G. Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. 1976),

3:664.133 Ibid. 3:666-667.134 Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. (Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill. 1996),

3:1191-1192.135 Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker (ed.) . A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other

early Christian literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 254.

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has simply to do his best and take risks in a high risk business.136

Paul continues with an expanded version of the former accounts (v.16-18) that combines understandings that Paul developed over time. It is insignificant to Paul that the message is a merger of various elements in his growth as a Christian. What is significant for Paul is that this audience can now hear God’s missionary plan revealed to the Gentiles (v.17). Some of these ideas may even be written to Caesar. While God is rescuing Paul from death, he also rescues Paul from the Jewish and Gentile understanding of God’s mission (v. 17). The Jews believe they own God and for the most part have little interest in God’s mission, while the Gentiles see the God of the Jews as a foreign deity, insignificant to their own society – “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23).

Ultimately the focus of God’s mission is expressed in the crossing of spiritual boundaries (v.18). Paul announces God’s plan for the Gentiles to cross from darkness to light, from Satan’s power to God, and from sin to forgiveness, giving the Gentiles a “place among those who are sanctified by faith” in God. (v.18). For the tri-cultural Herod Agrippa, ethnically a Jew and culturally Greco-Roman, this must have been mind-boggling. Paul’s similar cultural background as a Greek-speaking Jew and Roman citizen, gave him a very rare opportunity relationally with Agrippa as he announced God’s plan to break the barriers that divided Jew and Gentile. Paul revealed God’s unchanging plan for the very cultures that Agrippa governed in tension. Kaiser notes:

Later in his career, Paul stood on trial for his life before King Agrippa in Acts 26:22 and affirmed: “I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen.” He did not see himself as an innovator, or as one who introduced meanings that were not already in the text.137

The “light from heaven” is the one commonality that has not yet been mentioned, because it can only be fully understood in Acts 26. Paul describes the light as a great and brilliant “light from heaven” that left him blind (9:4, 22:6, 26:13).138 The light that Paul describes in this passage is more than an expression of God. The imagery of the light is almost certainly linked to Paul’s understanding of “a light to the

Gentiles,” (vv.18, 23 cf. Lk. 2:32 Ac. 13:47) ringing familiar echoes of the Old Testament theme – a “light to the nations” (cf. Isa. 42:6, 49:6, 60:3) – and an eschatological hope (Rev 21:24). The light that Paul had seen was the light of God’s mission providing a way to Jesus in a world of darkness.


For the first time in this comparative study, the human agent of mission (missio hominum) has to decide whether or not to translate into another linguistic context. For a second time, we are allowed to see a translation of God’s message into a new mother tongue (the first occurring in Acts 9). Although Greek was a secondary language for the Jews, it was most likely the mother tongue for these officials. Paul’s comment regarding God’s choice to speak in Hebrew or Aramaic in Acts 26:14 indicates that Paul is very likely speaking in Greek (cf. Acts 21:37).

Paul’s use of the vernacular may seem like an obvious concept for today’s missionaries, but there are many cases where secondary languages are preferred by missionaries, such as Swahili in Maasai-land, rather than the mother tongues such as Maa (the Maasai language). Contextualization should begin with the heart language of the people because ultimately Christianity will rest in the peoples’ hearts as the translation takes place.

Although Paul may not have envisioned the future of Christianity translated into Gentile thought and practice (this perception would be difficult for any cross-cultural missionary), he was faithfully obedient as a missionary to begin that process and entrust the Gentile world with the Christian message. Even though Festus and Agrippa show little interest in following Christ, they do carry out an uncommon missionary role as they translate Paul’s message for Caesar and send it on to realms untouched by Paul – they are the unwitting translators of the Christian message.

Conclusion

Whatever the variety of wording in Luke’s three reports … the salient fact is clear. Paul has been commissioned to break bounds. And, while taking every opportunity to speak to his fellow-countrymen, he recognizes a particular calling to the world

136 Andrew Walls, 1996, 26.137 Walter Kaiser, 2000, 61.138 Notice that there is no mention of Paul’s companions hearing the message in 26:13-14 because the Jewish misunderstandings of God’s

mission are not relevant to this context.

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outside the covenant of God’s promises, as the Jewish people and he himself had understood them”139

The maturing of Paul’s ministry provides us with an image of the integration between contextualization and the translation model of mission. God is contextual towards Paul and Paul contextualizes the Christian message for the Gentiles. Any missionary in a cross-cultural setting must begin with his or her best attempt to share the Gospel message in the most understandable way possible. However, contextualization alone is not enough.

Like Paul we must be prepared for an eventual transformation that bursts before us and expands our own limitations in understanding Christian mission. Eventually this transformation becomes a translated Gospel as external paternalism and outside cultural values are replaced with concerns and values that spring from the newly maturing missional community. Just as God entrusted Paul and all of Paul’s Jewishness with the mission Dei (Acts 9), Paul entrusted the Gentile world with the missio Dei and they move on to entrust mission to others. As this new missional community expresses God’s love, grace, and redemption to the world, they too will transform others and be transformed in the process, giving their trust over to another new and unforeseen era of mission.

Although many missionaries have returned from years spent among the Maasai while others remain, they all report a very fruitful ministry. While many of the missionaries had experienced frustration over the lack of evangelistic zeal among Maasai Christians, the Maasai have now begun to take on God’s mission with a fervor that is unlike anything the missionaries had witnessed. The very lack of missionary presence was actually a crucial stepping-stone in Maasai believers expressing their faith in new and creative ways. The missionaries were surprised as Maasai acts of healing and conversion began to take place in their absence.

To experience the translation of the Gospel is a rare privilege that we, as missionaries, can rejoice in if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Andrew Walls notes this privilege for Paul:

But it looks as though Paul was less impressed by the passing of faith to the Gentiles … than by the fact that through Christ one nation had been made out of two. Jew and Gentile, who had not in centuries

been able to eat in each others' houses without calling the whole covenant of God into question, now sat down together at the table of the Lord. It was a phase of Christian history that did not last long. Not long after Paul's time, Gentiles so dominated the Christian Church that in most areas Jews were hardly noticeable in it. Christianity became a Gentile matter, just as in its earliest days it had been a Jewish matter. But, for a few brief years, the one-made-out-of-two was visibly demonstrated, the middle wall of partition was down, the irreconcilables were reconciled. This was, surely, not simply a historic episode, but a paradigmatic one, to be repeated, even if briefly, again and again. It is repeated as people separated by language, history and culture recognize each other in Christ.140

Works Cited

Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich and Danker1979 A Greek-English lexicon of the New

Testament and other early Christian literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruce, F. F.1990 The Acts of the Apostles. Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans. Conzelmann, Hans

1972 Acts of the Apostles. Herm. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. (German original, 1972).

Dalman, Gustaf.1927 Jesus-Jeshua. London: SPCK.

Freedman, D. N.1992 The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 1. New

York: Doubleday.Glasser, Arthur F. and Van Engen Charles E., Gilliland Dean S., Redford, Shawn B. (eds.)

2003 Announcing the Kingdom. Grand Rapids: BakerBooks: Pre-Publication Edition.

Kittel, G. 1985 Theological Dictionary of the New

Testament: Abridged in One Volume. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans.

Kittel, G., Bromiley, G. W., and Friedrich, G. (eds.)1976 Theological Dictionary of the New

Testament. Vol. 3. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans.

Koehler, Ludwig and Baumgartner, Walter.1996 The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the

Old Testament. Vol. 3. Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill.

139 Max Warren, I Believe in the Great Commission. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976), 32.140 Andrew Walls, 1996, 25.

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135

McLean, Archibald.1907 Where the Book Speaks. New York: Fleming

H. Revell Company. Ober, Charles K.

1899 Bible Studies in Missions. New York: The International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations.

Sanneh, Lamin O.1989 Translating the Message: The Missionary

Impact on Culture. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.Shenk, Wilbert R.

1995 Write the Vision: The Church Renewed. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International.

1999 Changing Frontiers of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Tannehill, Robert C.1990 The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts. Vol. 2.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press.Van Engen, Charles E.

1991 God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

Van Engen, Charles E. and Redford, Shawn B.2002 “Syllabus for Biblical Foundations of

Mission” Pasadena: Fuller Theological Seminary.

Walls, Andrew1996 The Missionary Movement in Christian

History. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.Warren, Max

1976 I Believe in the Great Commission. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

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“Form and Meaning in the Contextualization of the Gospel” by Paul G. Hiebert

(From The Word Among Us: Contextualizing Theology for Mission Today. Dean S. Gilliland, ed. Pp. 101-120. Dallas: Word, 1989. Used by permission.)

Two questions face every cross-cultural missionary. First, what shall we do with the existing cultural practices, particularly those related to the people’s religion? How should we respond to veneration of ancestors, witchcraft, magical charms, idol worship, and human sacrifice? Second, how can we best express the gospel in the new culture? Can we use the people’s words for God when these are deeply tied to their existing religious beliefs, or should we introduce foreign terms which they do not understand? Can we reinterpret their marriage and funeral customs to convey a Christian message, or will the message itself become captive of their old beliefs?

Central to the debates in missions that have surrounded these questions is the relationship of form and meaning.141 To understand these debates, we will look briefly at a history of missionary responses in the past century, and then at the nature of symbols in human cultures.

FORM AND MEANING IN MISSION HISTORY

The history of the modern mission movement coincided with the histories of Western colonialism and modern science. It is important, therefore, that we understand the relationship between meanings and forms within the context of colonialism and science, and the recent changes that have taken place within them.

Era of Positivism:Meaning and Form Equated

The first missionaries in the modern mission movement, such as Ziegenbalg, Plutschau, Carey, and Judson, went as guests to the lands in which they served. As guests they had a high appreciation of the cultures around them. They adopted local dress and lifestyles, translated the Scriptures into local languages, and used local worship forms in the churches. The techno-economic differences between the East and West were not great, and the

141 For some key discussions on the subject, see Eugene Nida, Message and Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); Charles Kraft, Christianity in Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979); and Eugene Nida and William Reyburn, Meaning Across Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981).

missionaries found much to admire in the courts of India and Burma.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, European colonial expansion had established a dominance of the West. With this grew a sense of cultural superiority that affected not only rulers and traders, but missionaries from the West as well.

The nineteenth century was also characterized by the emergence of positivism as the dominant epistemology underlying Western thought. In positivism, human knowledge—particularly scientific knowledge—was seen as true in an absolute sense.142 By means of careful observation the human mind could perceive reality as it is. Scientific theories, properly proved, were, therefore, facts. The atomic theory of matter and evolution were not our human understandings of reality—they were part of reality itself. Form and meaning became one. Truth could be stated in formulas and logical propositions.

Such an epistemology required precise symbols and words to express truth. Consequently, a great deal of effort was made to develop mathematics and a scientific language that did not have the “fuzziness” and ambiguities of ordinary symbols.143 In these technical languages, meaning and form are closely tied. Precise meanings require precise words, or the meanings are lost.

The obvious (at least to those in the West) superiority of science led scientists and other Western people to reject other systems of beliefs as “prelogical,” “animistic,” “primitive,” and “superstitious.” In the confrontation of science and these systems, these systems had to go. It was assumed that in time they would be replaced by scientific thinking.

Colonialism, positivism, and the explosion of science had a profound effect on Western missions. Missionaries were products of their time, and it should not surprise us that they came increasingly to equate Christianity with Western civilization.

142 For a more extended discussion of various epistemological positions and the current epistemological shifts taking place in the sciences and theology, see Paul G. Hiebert, “Epistemological Foundations or Science and Theology,” TSF Bulletin 8 (March-April 1985), 5-10; and “The Missiological Implications of an Epistemological Shift,” TSF Bulletin 8 (May-June 1985), 6-11.

143 See R. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).

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Many missionaries also thought in positivist terms. For them, forms and meanings were essentially one. They believed that the Scriptures had to be translated literally and the gospel expressed in precise words and symbols or the meanings would be lost. There was a widespread fear that the use of native symbol forms would introduce “pagan” meanings that would lead to syncretism. Consequently, the use of local symbol systems was widely rejected. Native architectural forms, melodies, drums, marriage and funeral rites, and art forms were suspect. Conversion involved not only following Christ, but also adopting Western cultural forms.

To avoid syncretism, Western forms were often introduced to convey Christian meanings. Western tunes, ritual forms, instruments, and words were used in the hope of preserving Christian meanings. The result was a foreign gospel which, in the eyes of the natives peoples, answered Western questions and was tied to Western cultural ways.

There were attempts to counter this equation of Christianity with the West, the most notable of which was the call by Venn and Anderson for the “Three Selves.” Young churches in new lands should be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. But this was more a call for an indigenous church than a contextualized gospel. The emphasis was on social relationships between sending and receiving churches, not on the cultural symbols in which the gospel was expressed. There was some discussion of adopting indigenous architectural styles and dress forms for the clergy. But in Bible translation, theological writings, and rituals, forms and meanings were still seen as essentially one.

Pragmatism:The Divorce of Form from Meaning

The twentieth century has seen a rapid decline in colonialism. Men and women in Western colonies, trained in modern schools, led nationalist movements that challenged Western rule. In a remarkably few decades colonial empires collapsed and “colonialism,” which once was uttered in pride, became a pejorative label.

Positivism and its equation of form and meaning were also under heavy attack. Anthropologists had shown us that people in different cultures see the world in different ways, and that systems of knowledge had to be understood within their cultural contexts. Sociologists and psychologists made us aware of the subjective dimension of human knowledge, including science. Philosophers of science called positivism into question. But the linguists, who separated meaning from form, made the greatest immediate impact on missions and the debates regarding contextualization.

Linguists studying the structure of human languages became aware of the profound ways in which these languages shape the way people see the world.144 They pointed to markedly different meanings that are associated with certain objects, such as trees, rocks, and even humans, in different cultures, and to similar meanings that are often associated with very different forms. Many linguists argued that no universal set of symbols underlies all human thought; not only do different languages have different words for the same thing, but also those words have different connotations in the cultural contexts within which they are found. Forms and meanings could no longer be treated as one.

The impact of these linguistic insights on Bible translation was far-reaching. Translators began to realize that literal translations not only lost but also distorted much of the meaning of particular passages. Some words—such as mountain, lamb, snow, or plow—cannot be translated in many languages because these concepts do not exist in them. Many other words—such as God, sin, sacrifice, and ancestor—have such different meanings in different cultures that they are almost unusable in Bible translations.

Out of these insights emerged an emphasis on dynamic equivalent translations.145 In these the translator sought to convey in another language the meanings found in a particular text even thought this required a change in the forms found in the passage. For example, if Papua New Guinea highlanders had no sheep and sacrificed pigs in the same way the Israelites in the Old Testament offered sheep, then it might be best to translate “sheep” as “pigs” in the highlanders’ Bible. At least, then they would understand the importance of sacrifice in the Old Testament. If the translator were to use the Hebrew or English word for sheep, or coin a new word, the non-Christians would have no understanding of these texts at all.

The concept of “contextualization” expanded this emphasis on translating meaning, not form, to all areas of mission activity. It said, wherever possible, local forms should be used to convey the gospel. In communication, it is good to employ drama, bardic narratives, traditional story-telling forms, narrative melodies, and dance if these are more meaningful to the people than preaching and translated Western hymns. Local marriage and funeral ceremonies, ancestor veneration rites, and important festivals

144 Much of the discussion has centered around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), and Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956).

145 Nida, Message, and Kraft, Christianity and Culture.

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should be modified to convey Christian meanings. In theology, the thought patterns within the culture, which are familiar to the people, should be used to express biblical truths.

Behind this divorce of form and meaning lay an epistemological shift from positivism to instrumentalism. Instrumentalists argue that we cannot know whether human knowledge is ever true, because it is subjective. We only know whether it is useful or not. The result is relativism—all systems of explanation have their own internal integrity and we cannot say that one is better than another. The result is also pragmatism—we should assess ideas in terms of their usefulness in helping us solve problems.

In instrumentalism, form and meaning are divorced. Because knowledge is seen as subjective, what is important is preserving meanings in the mind, and meanings are not attached to external forms and realities. We can, therefore, use any forms as long as inner meanings are understood (some would say “discovered”).

The separation of meaning from form and its expression in dynamic equivalence translation and contextualization are important steps in our understanding of the mission process. We are freed from a rigid formalism that tied Christianity to Western ways and hindered the crosscultural communication of the gospel. Young Christians in other cultures were also freed to study and interpret the Scripture in their own settings. But the divorce of meaning from form poses another set of dangers which we must examine.

A Too Simple View of CultureFirst, the separation of form and meaning is

based on a too simple view of culture. In this view, language is the basis of culture, and all other areas of culture can be understood by analogy to linguistics. But culture is more than rituals, gestures, life styles, and technology. In these, as we will see later, the relationships between form and meaning are often complex. Moreover, even in language the linkage between form and meaning is not always arbitrary.146

If we divorce meaning from form and reduce culture to purely mental processes—to ideas, feelings, and values, we reinforce the Neoplatonic dualism between mind and matter, ideas and behavior, that has plagued Western thought. Thought categories become arbitrary creations of the mind, and cultures become isolated islands of meaning between which there can be no real communication. People in other cultures will interpret what we say in

146 The broad study of symbol systems, including language, has led to the theoretical field known as semiotics.

terms of their own cultural categories, and there is no way to test whether their ideas correspond with ours or not.

Furthermore, if we separate meaning and form we are in danger of reducing Christianity to a set of beliefs to which people must mentally subscribe. There need be no change in behavior, no change in culture, no change in life. Cultural forms and systems become essentially value free. But humans are sinners, and capable of creating social systems and symbols that are oppressive and evil. Not all cultural practices can be used to communicate the message of the gospel.

An Asocial Perspective of SymbolsIn the second place, a total separation of meaning

and form tends to be asocial. It does not take seriously enough the fact that symbols are created and controlled by social groups and whole societies. As individuals and minority groups we may create our own symbols and words to express our faith in our own circles. When we try to reinterpret symbols used by the dominant society, however, we are in danger of being misunderstood and ultimately of being captured by its definitions of reality.

One of the greatest powers a society has is to impose its views of reality upon people. It does so by enculturating its young and acculturating those who join in. Ultimately, this definition of reality begins by controlling the definitions of key words. When we call people to become Christians, we call them to accept a new definition of reality, and, therefore, a new definitions of key concepts. The result is a struggle to control the meanings of important words.

In primal societies with local tribal religions, the coming of a universalist religion, particularly when it is backed by political dominance, generally leads to quick victories. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism soon impose their definitions of reality on tribal peoples. In old civilizations, however, the struggle to control the meanings of words is often difficult. For example, in South India the Christians use devudu for God, but Christians constitute only some 5 percent of the people in most regions. The Hindus who dominate the culture and make up over 75 percent of the people also use the word, but with Hindu connotations. In such a setting it is difficult for the Christian community to maintain a biblical understanding of God. In the long run the church is in danger of accepting the Hindu world-view of the dominant society around it.

The belief that we as individuals can freely redefine old and create new symbols reflects our Western individualism In much of the world, however, it is the group and its leaders who define

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the key cultural symbols, and enforce the dominant beliefs.

The radical separation of form and meaning is asocial in another sense. It overlooks the extensive debate regarding “natural symbols.” Mary Douglas and others hold that there are universal human symbols found in most societies arising out of our common human experiences. For example, she argues that the human body as an organic system is an analogy all people use in understanding reality.147 Similarly, with few exceptions, going up spatially is seen as moving in the direction of the gods and the sacred. Temples and shrines are commonly placed on the tops of hills. Steps lead up into churches and mosques. Likewise, the birth process is widely used as an analogy for other transitions in human life, such as initiation ceremonies, admission into closed societies, and even death. Sexual union is widely used as an analogy for unions of many types, including union with God.

An Ahistorical View of SymbolsThird, to separate meaning and form is to ignore

history. Words and other symbols have histories of previously established linkages between form and meaning. Without such historical continuity, it would be impossible for people to pass on their culture from one generation to the next or to preserve the gospel over time.

We are not free to arbitrarily link meanings and forms. To do so is to destroy the people’s history and culture. Moreover, it is to forget that people who become Christians gain a second history—the history of Christianity. Among their new spiritual ancestors are Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, and many others.

A Modern BiasThe separation of meaning from form reflects a

modern, individualistic view of human experience. As Mary Douglas points out, people in tribal and peasant societies do not view symbols in that way.148 For them, form and meaning are intricately related in important symbols, particularly religious symbols. To say a word of curse is indeed to curse. To perform the rain dance is not a way of asking the gods to send rain; it is to create rain. The rituals are thought to cause things to happen. Symbols, in fact, are seen as performative.

A problem arises when modern missionaries use traditional ritual forms and give them new meanings, or change established practices in churches in non-Western societies, or introduce dynamic equivalent

147 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (New York: Vintage, 1973), 12.

148 Ibid., see especially chapters 3 and 6.

translations that are easily changed. In the eyes of many non-Western Christians, they are denying the sacred nature of the gospel, for sacredness rests, in part, in tight linkages between form and meaning.

Relativism and PragmatismThe greatest danger in separating meaning from

form is the relativism and pragmatism this introduces. Relativism undermines our concern for the truth of the gospel. Pragmatism turns our attention from the cosmic history of creation-fall-redemption to solving the immediate problems of our everyday life.

Critical Realism:Form and Meaning Re-Wedded

Faced with the corrosive effects of pragmatism and relativism, there is a growing movement in the sciences to find an epistemological foundation that affirms truth but does so with humility, not arrogance; that affirms objectivity but allows for the subjective dimension in human knowledge.149

On the international scene there are attempts to move beyond an anticolonialism which is still tied to the old colonial agendas in order to find new ways of building global relationships between nations whose independence and autonomy is not in question. In missions, too, there is a growing concern that cultural relativism and pragmatism have undermined the Christian message. Missions must search for new epistemological foundations that enable missionaries to proclaim the gospel boldly and without compromise, but in love and humility.

In all these fields there are many who are moving toward what Barbour calls a “critical realist epistemology.”150 In this epistemology, knowledge is in human minds, so there is a subjective dimension to it. But this knowledge corresponds to the realities of the external world, so it has an objective, truthful dimension to it. This correspondence between inner and outer worlds is not that of a photograph, but that of a map, blueprint, or model. In other words, the correspondence is complex and varied. At some points a map must correspond exactly with reality, or

149 In Anthropology this is reflected in the rejection of cultural relativism that has dominated anthropological thought since the late 1970s. For an analysis of this, see G. W. Stocking, Jr., “Afterword: A View from the Center,” Ethnos 47 (1982): 172-86; and Clifford Geertz, “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 86 (June 1984): 263-78. In the philosophy of science, this is reflected in books by Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); and Jarred Leplin, ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

150 See Eugene Nida and William Reyburn, op. cit., for an excellent discussion of how an awareness of literary genre and level of symbols is essential in Bible translation.

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the map is useless. At other points, a map reveals hidden realities. For example, a political map colors one country green and another country yellow. This does not mean that these countries are physically these colors. Rather, it means that one territory belongs to one country, and the other to another. Finally, on a map some points are arbitrary. A country may be colored blue or green or yellow without destroying the truthfulness of the map. The only requirement is that the whole country be colored the same color.

In critical realism we as Christians affirm the absolutes of God, the universe he created, and history. The last includes the events of history and God’s involvement in them. On the other hand, we recognize that our understanding of those absolutes is partial. This does not mean those understandings are totally subjective and relative, but that they should be growing. We see “through a glass, darkly,” but we do see. We see enough to live in a real world, and, through divine revelation, we see the path to salvation and fellowship with God.

In critical realism, however, form and meaning are related in complex ways, depending upon the nature of the symbol. In some, the linkage is arbitrary, and forms can readily be changed in order to preserve a given meaning. In others, the two are equated. To change the form is to change the meaning. In most, however, the relationship is more complex.

Given this epistemological foundation, the missionary is not against contextualization, as was the case in positivism. In positivism missionaries equated form and meaning and assumed that the introduction of the former automatically led to an understanding of the latter. The missionary, however, also rejects an uncritical contextualization in which forms are changed readily in order to preserve subjective meanings. Rather, we pursue a critical contextualization realizing that meaning and form are related in complex ways, and that the gospel has both objective and subjective dimensions to it. This, however, requires that we examine more carefully the varied nature of the symbols we use to communicate the gospel in other cultures.

Form and Meaning in Symbols

If we cannot equate meanings and forms nor totally separate them, where does this leave us with regard to contextualization? Here, recent insights in semiotics are helpful. The fact is that in any culture the relationship between meanings and forms varies according to the nature of the symbol. In some the relationship is arbitrary, so forms can readily be changed in order to preserve meanings. In other symbols the relationship is more complex, ranging

from loose to tight linkages. To change the forms in these inevitably changes the meanings is some way. In still other symbols, meaning and form are essentially one. To change the form is to change the meaning. In contextualization, therefore, we need to examine the nature of symbols in the Scriptures and church, and the nature of symbols in the society into which these are being contextualized. Here symbolic anthropology provides us with useful insights.151

Meaning and Form Arbitrarily Linked

It is easiest for those of us from the West to begin by looking at symbols in which the link between form and meaning is arbitrary and loose. A simple example is giving names to our children. Young parents in the West spend hours looking for the “right name,” but in the end the choice is theirs. A creative few make up new names, but most are limited by social convention (certain names are girls’ names, and others are boys’ names), and by history (names that have been used in that culture in the past).

Similarly, the link between form and meaning in ordinary words used in everyday discursive speech is essentially arbitrary. In English, we look at a tree and say “tree.” We could have said “chetu,” or “preta,” or even “dog.” There is no essential sound pattern in the word tree that links it to the objects we call trees. Once we have agreed in our community to call this object a tree, however, the linkage becomes one of social and historical, not private, definition. It is then passed down from generation to generation. In other words, the link is no longer arbitrary. I may try to change it, but my efforts are meaningless if I cannot get the community to accept the changes.

This social nature of symbols explains why subgroups in a society seek to control or change the definitions of words. For example, the black community in the United States made a conscious effort to change the meaning of “black.” Now, women are pressing for inclusive language. In both cases there has been considerable resistance by whites and males. The ability to control the definitions of words that the people use is one of the greatest powers dominant groups in a society have, for in controlling definitions, they control the way the people see reality.

Discursive language is the basis of most of our verbal communication. We use it to talk about the ordinary, everyday things of life—things we can see and experience directly. We change it easily as new words are coined to represent new realities we

151 See Janet Dolgin, David Kemnitzer, and David Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977): and Clifford Geertz, ed., Myth, Symbol and Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

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observe or create (Coriolis, calculator, satellite) and concepts we need (paradigm, world-view).

In contemporary missions, discursive symbols present a number of theoretical problems, but we readily translate the Scriptures into local languages using the words and sounds of the local society. We realize there will always be some slippage, particularly in the connotations associated with different words. This means we must work hard to make certain that the meaning of a passage is preserved as accurately as possible in the new language. In order to do this, we readily change the forms. “Tree” becomes chetu in Telugu, and “woman” becomes stree. We no longer argue, as did the church leaders in the Middle Ages, that people should not translate Scripture because this distorts its meaning and destroys its truthfulness and trustworthiness.

Similarly, as missionaries we are to identify with the lifestyles of the people we serve as far as our consciences and psychological capabilities allow. We should dress as the people dress, eat their foods, and live in their kinds of houses, for in so doing we build trust and communicate to the people our love and acceptance of them.

Meanings and Forms Loosely Linked

In many symbols the links between form and meaning are arbitrary. In others, however, the links vary along a continuum ranging from loose ties based on similarities and analogies, to more direct ties based on direct connections, and to symbols in which form and meaning are one.

Among “loosely connected” symbols, form and meaning are often linked to each other on the basis of similarities and analogies. Humans live on the same earth and many of their experiences are the same. They see the sun, moon, and stars. They see animals and plants. It should not surprise us then that certain “natural symbols” have wide cultural distributions, such as the association of light with life, up with sacred, darkness with evil, and so on.152 Humans also have similar bodies. Normally they have one head, two arms, and two feet. They are born, eat, reproduce, and die. These common experiences serve as the basis of widespread biological symbols. Finally, all humans create culture. All eat food and drink water. Most use fire, shelters, and simple technologies. These, too, provide humans with ready symbols and analogies for thinking about their lives.

152 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); and Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973).

Universal SymbolsIn the 1930s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf

sought to show that different cultures classify natural phenomena in different ways, and that, in essence, their classifications are essentially arbitrary.153 Each society creates categories according to its own internal perceptions of reality.

Recent studies have shown, however, that the categories cultures create to describe the external material world are not totally arbitrary. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated that there is a clear progression in basic color categories, both within and between cultures, as the number of these categories increases from four to eight.154 In other words, color categories are not totally cultural creations. They also reflect the order in nature and the biological processes of perception. Sahlins notes “the unexpected findings challenge such basic doctrines as the arbitrary nature of the sign or, even more fundamental, the sui generis character of culture.”155

Hunn has shown that there is widespread cultural agreement with regard to the basic categories for birds and other animals.156 Miller has done the same with the plant world.157 In other words, many symbols dealing with the natural world do reflect basic differences found in nature itself.

It is not enough, however, to simply show that all cultures agree that black and white are different, and that “cows” are not a kind of “bird” and differ from “horses.” Most symbols have secondary connotations. Are any of these widespread or universal?

Natural SymbolsThe human body itself provides many basic

symbols that have multiple uses. Douglas argues that “the organic system provides an analogy of the social system which, other things being equal, is used in the same way and understood in the same way all over the world.”158 For example, the head, arms, breasts, legs, and life itself provide metaphors that people in most cultures use to think about their worlds. Blood

153 See Sapir, Selected Writings, and Whorf, Language.154 The original analysis appeared in Brent Berlin and Paul Kay,

Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). There has been a great deal of discussion of their findings in journal literature since, but essentially their thesis has withstood critical analysis.

155 Marshall Sahlins, “Colors and Cultures,” Symbolic Anthropology, Janet Dolgin et. al., eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 166.

156 Eugene Hunn, “Utilitarian Factors in Folk Biological Classification,” American Anthropologist 84 (December 1982): 830-47.

157 Jay Miller, “Matters of the (thoughtful) Heart: Focality or Overlap,” Journal of Anthropological Research 38 (Fall 1982): 274-87.

158 Douglas, Purity, 12.

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is generally associated with red and life; and excreta with defilement and impurity.

Eliade, in his extensive survey of religions, notes the common triad of land-fertility-female that is found in most agricultural societies.159 Similarly, male is commonly associated with battle and violence. Sexual union is commonly used as an analogy of union with God, death, or end and/or exit; birth is an analogy for beginnings, fertility, and newness, and the birth channel, as gates and thresholds.

Hallpike makes a strong case that long hair is a symbol of being in some way outside society, and that cutting of hair symbolizes reentering society or living under a particular disciplinary regime in society.160

Nature provides us with other natural symbols. There is an almost universal association of “up” with “sacred.” Temples and shrines, as we have noted, are generally built so that people have to climb step or hills to reach them. “Down” and worlds under the ground are usually seen as dangerous or evil. Eliade analyzes the meanings of sky (symbol of transcendence), water (symbol of both death and rebirth), sacred space, mountains, and cosmic trees or poles (axis mundi) reaching to heaven in religions around the world.161

A case can be made that children in most cultures learn adult roles by imitating them. Thus a girl may play “mother” by behaving as she observes real mothers behave.

Cultural SymbolsAnother category of symbols in which meaning

and form are indirectly linked has to do with human cultures and technology. Lévi-Strauss argues that most cultures equate the cooking of food with being human (not animal) and civilized.162 Mauss shows that gift exchanges are widely used in establishing human relationships.163 Transvestites in many cultures wear the clothes of the opposite sex as a sign of their lifestyle.

On another level, Marshall McLuhan shows how the products of technology, such as books, cars, and radios, serve as symbols that shape the society.164 In other words, the forms these media take have their own messages apart from the formal messages they

159 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1959).

160 C. R. Hallpike, “Social Hair,” Man 4 (1969): 256-64.161 Eliade, The Sacred.162 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York:

Harper and Row, 1969).163 Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Cohen and West, 1954).164 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of

Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

convey. For example, the introduction of the clock radically altered life in Europe.

Meanings and Forms Tightly Linked

In some symbols, meaning and form are linked more closely than those we have considered so far. The closeness of these ties makes such symbols, and those we will consider next, more stable. They often provide the skeleton on which the rest of the culture is hung. As Peter Berger points out, “[t]he cultural imperative of stability and the inherent character of culture as unstable together posit the fundamental problem of man’s world building activity.”165 In the past, many of these symbols were religious. Now that religious symbols have lost their character as overarching, stable symbols in many modern societies, we must find integration elsewhere.

Expressive SymbolsIn symbols expressing emotions, the experience

itself in a central part of the message. A child’s cry, an adult’s laughter, an injured person’s groans, an angry person’s gestures—all of these may be culturally shaped or masked, but the basic patterns are widely distributed. To eat together is to relate. To bow or prostrate one’s self before another is widely understood to mean subservience.

Dance and music are another case. Here the rhythms, melodies, and styles are themselves much of the message. For example, the loudness and beat of heavy metal rock music conveys a feeling of rebellion that is reinforced by words. Firth has noted a very wide association between percussion sounds, such as firecrackers, drum beats, and gun shots with the summoning of and dealing with spirits.166

The taking of drugs offers yet another case. Here the means produces the message—the ecstatic experience, the higher vision of reality. Similarly, meditation and self-torture are closely tied to the experiences they are expected to generate.

Ritual SymbolsThe ties between meaning and form in rituals

and sacred symbols vary a great deal from society to society. Douglas notes that one of the characteristics of modernity is the divorce of form and meaning.167 Thus, a modern Christian says, “I go to church in order to worship.” In other words, going to church is not itself part of worship, but brings one to a place where worship (often perceived as an inner personal experience) occurs. On the other hand, in most traditional societies meaning and form in rituals and

165 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 6.

166 Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973).

167 Douglas, Purity, chapter 3.

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sacred symbols are essentially one. A Christian in these societies would say, “In going to church I am worshipping.” The very acts of washing, dressing in special clothes, and going to church are themselves part of worship—a testimony to the world of one’s faith.

The same debate continues in the church regarding the Lord’s Supper. Catholics and other high-church Christians see the bread and the wine as more than loose symbols of the body and blood of Christ. After the consecration it in fact “becomes the body and blood of Christ” in some mysterious way that ordinary language and thought cannot express. The forms, particularly after consecration, do in fact become the message, the means by which grace is administered to the repentant sinner.

In traditional societies many ritual symbols are of this nature. For example, among the Shilluk the kings are believed to descend from Nyikang, a leader of the Shilluk in the heroic age. The investiture of a new king is a lengthy ritual in which, among other things, the king-elect sits on the royal stool which is the locus of divine and kingly power. The stool does not just represent this power—it is believed to contain it.168 Along the same line, idols are often seen not only as reminders of the gods or even as abodes in which the gods live, but as the gods themselves.

The same close equation of form and meaning is found in contagious and imitative magic intended for evil. In the former, the form must be from the person against whom the magic is performed—a lock of hair, a finger nail, a piece of clothing, or a footprint. In the latter, the form must replicate the person in some basic way. A doll is molded and given the name of the person. Then what is done to the doll is believed to occur to the person. The same tie is seen in other forms of magic. In magical chants every sound must be correct, or the chant is ineffective. In amulets, the shape itself has magical power.

The location of sacred sites is often essential to their meaning. The tombs of saints or kings mark the site of the body. The sacred tree of pole is the axis mundi where earth breaks through into heaven. The same is true of the sacred land. Palestine is not just any land for Jews and Muslims. To offer them free land in another part of the world would not meet their demands.

Forms Equated with Meanings

There are a few symbols in which form and meaning cannot be separated. To change one is to change the other.

168 E. E. Evans-Prichard, Essays in Social Anthropology (London: Faber, 1962), 66-86.

Historical SymbolsSpecific historical facts are tied to specific times

and places. To alter these is to introduce error. For example, God came to earth in the form of a man, living in Palestine some two thousand years ago. He lived, died, and rose again, and by these actions he both completed and communicated to us his salvation. He was named Jesus and we as Christians are called to name that name (2 Tim. 2:19; 1 Jn. 4:2).

It is helpful here to note the distinction between art and history. The religious artist is seeking to communicate a deeper spiritual message, not a historically accurate picture of events. Thus, a noted Korean artist painted a series of pictures on the life of Christ in which Christ is depicted as a Korean teacher with a black hat (in traditional Korea all teachers wore such hats). The houses and clothes are Korean in style. If the artist were to claim this as historical fact, his drawings would be false. But he has tried to depict the deeper truth that Christ identified himself with humanity, all humanity, in his life and death.

Performative SymbolsSome symbols, generally religious or legal, not

only communicate. They perform a change. For example, when a judge says to a defendant, “I find you guilty,” he is not just communicating information. By his pronouncement he transforms a person innocent before the law into a criminal. In other words, he changes that person’s status in society. The person becomes another kind of person. Similarly, when a king issued an edict, it in fact became law.

Similarly, for Christians, when a minister says, “I pronounce you husband and wife,” he or she changes the bride and groom into a married couple in the eyes of the state and society. In Catholic and other high churches with sacramental views of marriage, the pronouncement goes further. It not only changes the couple’s social status and calls on God to bear witness to this, but also changes the divine order of things recorded in heaven. In both these cases of law and ritual the form the symbols take is essential to their meaning.

Boundary SymbolsA case might be made that in boundary

symbols form and meaning are essentially one. Fences and rocks marking fields, lines marking lanes in roads or volleyball courts, and temple walls not only show where boundaries are; they create those boundaries

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IMPLICATIONS FOR CONTEXTUALIZATION

What implications does all this have for contextualization?

First, it is clear that contextualization is more complicated than we have thought. On the one hand, we need to avoid the anticontexual approach that characterized many earlier missionaries with positivist epistemologies. They often sought to avoid syncretism by introducing new symbols. The result was often nominalism. The gospel remained foreign. It did not take root at the core of people’s lives. They were right, however, in their deep commitment to the truth and its preservation.

On the other hand, we need to avoid the reductionism of an uncritical contextual approach characteristic of instrumentalism and its divorce of form and meaning. In our eagerness to make the gospel understood by the people, we readily use and reshape the symbols of the culture. We are in danger, however, of reducing meaning to subjective understanding, whether of senders or receptors. With no objective dimension to it, we are left with pragmatism and relativism. The only measures we have of successful communication are people’s positive responses. There is not way to test whether the receptor’s understanding of the message corresponds in any way with that of the senders.

What we need is a more comprehensive model that takes into account the variety of symbols. We need to examine carefully the nature of the symbols in the gospel—in Scripture, rituals, and Christian life—in order to determine the extent to which they can be changed to fit another culture.169 We need also to examine the nature of the symbols in the new culture we want to use to convey the biblical message. Some of these can be used because their meaning corresponds in some essential way with symbols in the gospel. Others cannot be used because they are too closely tied to non-Christian meanings. For example, the use of aqua blue in Indian dramas signifies the Hindu god Krishna. It would be almost impossible to use that color on the face of an actor in a Christian drama without drawing in Hindu mythology.

This view of symbols is rooted in a critical realist epistemology that focuses on the search for truth and affirms that is can be known, but that recognizes both the subjective and objective nature of human knowledge. Meaning is located in people and shapes them. It is also located in an objective world which enables people to test the correspondence between their understandings. Communication is 169 Eugene Nida and William Reyburn pioneered a reevaluation of

the relationship between form and meaning in Meaning Across Culture.

measured, therefore, not in what the sender sends, nor what the receptor receives, but in the correspondence between what the sender sends and the receptor receives.

Second, we must examine how the nature of the missionary task affects contextualization. The Bible translator seeks to make the Scripture known in a new language. His or her responsibility is to remain true to the original text. Consequently, he or she must “provide the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, so that it too may be employed effectively by receptor-language expositors in their task of transposition.”170 Preachers, on the other hand, seek to apply the biblical message in the local context. Their task, therefore, is to draw as much as possible upon the local culture’s experiences and idioms in order to make the implications of the message clear.

Third, we need to guard lest the people misunderstand the nature of the symbols we use in communicating the gospel. We need to make clear in teaching and preaching what is history and what is poetry or allegory or culturally determined styles. In particular, we must guard lest Scripture passages be taken to be magical formulae to acquire supernatural power or to harm a rival. In this process of “critical contextualization” we need church leaders and missionaries working together to contextualize the gospel in a new cultural setting.171 They need a thorough knowledge of symbols of Scripture and church history, and of the receptor culture and its symbol systems.

We need to be aware, too, that national leaders and missionaries are influenced by their own cultures in the way they see symbols. Leaders in traditional societies often do not separate meaning and form in religious symbols while missionaries from modern societies do. The result is misunderstanding. Modern missionaries readily change Christian symbols in order to make them more meaningful. National leaders see such changes in the traditional symbols of the church as destroying the gospel itself.

Finally, it is important that we see contextualization as a long process, not an instant achievement. For first generation converts their old religious symbols are too closely tied to pagan religious beliefs to be used in expressing Christianity. For instance, it was the early African converts as much as the missionaries who rejected the use of drums used in spirit worship rites. On the other hand, the traditional ties between form and meaning in

170 Nida and Reyburn, Meaning, 32.171 For a more detailed discussion of critical contextualization and

some steps in the process see Paul G. Hiebert, “Critical Contextualization,” International Bulletin 11 (July 1987): 104-12.

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native symbols are weakened among second- and third-generation Christians in the culture. It is possible, therefore, for them to reexamine the old forms and use them in new ways in the church with less of a danger of syncretism. Thus, the early church rejected Greek sculpture which was generally religious, but the later church turned it into art and put it into museums.

Contextualization is, indeed, no simple task. It is important, therefore, that we seek to understand it more fully. Moreover, contextualization is not a once-for-all task. It is an ongoing process by which Christians seek to live as God’s people in communities in a fallen world. It is important, therefore, that we institute procedures whereby the church as a community of believers seeks to understand God’s Word to it and through it to the world in which it lives.

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“The Lausanne Covenant” by the International Congress on World Evangelization

INTRODUCTION

We, members of the Church of Jesus Christ, from more than 150 nations, participants in the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, praise God for his great salvation and rejoice in the fellowship he has given us with himself and with each other. We are deeply stirred by what God is doing in our day, moved to penitence by our failures and challenged by the unfinished task of evangelization. We believe the gospel is God’s good news for the whole world, and we are determined by his grace to obey Christ’s commission to proclaim it to all mankind and to make disciples of every nation. We desire, therefore, to affirm our faith and our resolve, and to make public our covenant.

1. THE PURPOSE OF GOD

We affirm our belief in the one eternal God, Creator and Lord of the world, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who governs all things according to the purpose of his will. He has been calling out from the world a people for himself, and sending his people back into the world to be his servants and his witnesses, for the extension of his kingdom, the building up of Christ’s body, and the glory of his name. We confess with shame that we have often denied our calling and failed in our mission, by becoming conformed to the world or by withdrawing from it. Yet we rejoice that even when borne by earthen vessels the gospel is still a precious treasure. To the task of making that treasure known in the power of the Holy Spirit we desire to dedicate ourselves anew. (Isa. 40:28; Matt. 28:19; Eph. 1:11; Acts 15:14; John 17:6, 18; Eph. 4:12; 1 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 4:7)

2. THE AUTHORITY AND POWER OF THE BIBLE

We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We also affirm the power of God’s word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. The message of the Bible is addressed to all mankind. For God’s revelation in Christ and in Scripture is unchangeable. Through it the Holy Spirit still speaks today. He illumines the minds of God’s people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes and thus discloses to the

whole church ever more of the many-coloured wisdom of God.(2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21; John 10:35; Isa. 55:11; 1 Cor. 1:21; Rom. 1:16; Matt. 5:17, 18; Jude 3; Eph. 1:17, 18; 3:10, 18)

3. THE UNIQUENESS AND UNIVERSALITY OF CHRIST

We affirm that there is only one gospel, although there is a wide diversity of evangelistic approaches. We recognize that all men have some knowledge of God through his general revelation in nature. But we deny that this can save, for men suppress the truth by their unrighteousness. We also reject as derogatory to Christ and the gospel every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions and ideologies. Jesus Christ, being himself the only God-man, who gave himself as the only ransom for sinners, is the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name by which we must be saved. All men are perishing because of sin, but God loves all men, not wishing that any should perish but that all should repent. Yet those who reject Christ repudiate the joy of salvation and condemn themselves to eternal separation from God. To proclaim Jesus as “the Saviour of the world” is not to affirm that all men are either automatically or ultimately saved, still less to affirm that all religions offer salvation in Christ. Rather it is to proclaim God’s love for a world of sinners and to invite all men to respond to him as Saviour and Lord in the wholehearted personal commitment of repentance and faith. Jesus Christ has been exalted above every other name; we long for the day when every knee shall bow to him and every tongue shall confess him Lord.(Gal. 1:6-9; Rom. 1:18-32; 1 Tim. 2:5, 6; Acts 4:12; John 3:16-19; 2 Pet. 3:9; 2 Thess. 1:7-9; John 4:42; Matt. 11:28; Eph. 1:20, 21; Phil. 2:9-11)

4. THE NATURE OF EVANGELISM

To evangelise is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. Our Christian presence in the world is indispensable to evangelism, and so is that kind of dialogue whose purpose is to listen sensitively in order to understand. But evangelism itself is the proclamation of the historical, biblical Christ as

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Saviour and Lord, with a view to persuading people to come to him personally and so be reconciled to God. In issuing the gospel invitation we have no liberty to conceal the cost of discipleship. Jesus still calls all who would follow him to deny themselves, take up their cross, and identify themselves with his new community. The results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his church and responsible service in the world.(1 Cor. 15:3, 4; Acts 2:32-39; John 20:21; 1 Cor. 1:23; 2 Cor. 4:5; 5:11, 20; Luke 14:25-33; Mark 8:34; Acts 2:40, 47; Mark 10:43-45)

5. CHRISTIAN SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men from every kind of oppression. Because mankind is made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, colour, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he should be respected and served, not exploited. Here too we express penitence both for our neglect and for having sometimes regarded evangelism and social concern as mutually exclusive. Although reconciliation with man is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and man, our love for our neighbor and our obedience to Jesus Christ. The message of salvation implies also a message of judgement upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist. When people receive Christ they are born again into his kingdom and must seek not only to exhibit but also to spread its righteousness in the midst of an unrighteous world. The salvation we claim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities. Faith without works is dead.(Acts 17:26, 31; Gen. 18:25; Isa. 1:17; Psa. 45:7; Gen. 1:26, 27; Jas. 3:9; Lev. 19:18; Luke 6:27, 35; Jas. 2:14-26; John 3:3, 5; Matt. 5:20; 6:33; 2 Cor. 3:18; Jas. 2:20)

6. THE CHURCH AND EVANGELISM

We affirm that Christ sends his redeemed people into the world as the Father sent him, and that this calls for a similar deep and costly penetration of the world. We need to break out of our ecclesiastical ghettos and permeate non-Christian society. In the church’s

mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary. World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world. The church is at the very centre of God’s cosmic purpose and is his appointed means of spreading the gospel. But a church which preaches the cross must itself be marked by the cross. It becomes a stumbling block to evangelism when it betrays the gospel or lacks a living faith in God, a genuine love for people, or scrupulous honesty in all things including promotion and finance. The church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology.(John 17:18; 20:21; Matt. 28:19, 20; Acts 1:8; 20:27; Eph. 1:9, 10; 3:9-11; Gal. 6:14, 17; 2 Cor. 6:3, 4; 2 Tim. 2:19-21; Phil. 1:27)

7. COOPERATION IN EVANGELISM

We affirm that the church’s visible unity in truth is God’s purpose. Evangelism also summons us to unity, because our oneness strengthens our witness, just as our disunity undermines our gospel of reconciliation. We recognize, however, that organisational unity may take many forms and does not necessarily forward evangelism. Yet we who share the same biblical faith should be closely united in fellowship, work and witness. We confess that our testimony has sometimes been marked by sinful individualism and needless duplication. We pledge ourselves to seek a deeper unity in truth, worship, holiness and mission. We urge the development of regional and functional co-operation for the furtherance of the church’s mission, for strategic planning, for mutual encouragement, and for the sharing of resources and experience.(John 17:21, 23; Eph. 4:3, 4; John 13:35; Phil. 1:27; John 17:11-23)

8. CHURCHES IN EVANGELISTIC PARTNERSHIP

We rejoice that a new missionary era has dawned. The dominant role of western missions is fast disappearing. God is raising up from the younger churches a great new resource for world evangelization, and is thus demonstrating that the responsibility to evangelise belongs to the whole body of Christ. All churches should therefore be asking God and themselves what they should be doing both to reach their own area and to send missionaries to other parts of the world. A re-evaluation of our missionary responsibility and role should be continuous. Thus a growing partnership of churches will develop and the universal character of

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Christ’s church will be more clearly exhibited. We also thank God for agencies which labour in Bible translation, theological education, the mass media, Christian literature, evangelism, missions, church renewal and other specialist fields. They too should engage in constant self-examination to evaluate their effectiveness as part of the church’s mission.(Rom. 1:8; Phil. 1:5; 4:15; Acts 13:1-3; 1 Thess. 1:6-8)

9. THE URGENCY OF THE EVANGELISTIC TASK

More than 2,700 million people, which is more than two-thirds of mankind, have yet to be evangelised. We are ashamed that so many have been neglected; it is a standing rebuke to us and to the whole church. There is now, however, in many parts of the world an unprecedented receptivity to the Lord Jesus Christ. We are convinced that this is the time for churches and para-church agencies to pray earnestly for the salvation of the unreached and to launch new efforts to achieve world evangelization. A reduction of foreign missionaries and money in an evangelised country may sometimes be necessary to facilitate the national church’s growth in self-reliance and to release resources for unevangelised areas. Missionaries should flow ever more freely from and to all six continents in a spirit of humble service. The goal should be, by all available means and at the earliest possible time, that every person will have the opportunity to hear, understand, and receive the good news. We cannot hope to attain this goal without sacrifice. All of us are shocked by the poverty of millions and disturbed by the injustices which cause it. Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple life-style in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.(John 9:4; Matt. 9:35-38; Rom. 9:1-3; 1 Cor. 9:19-23; Mark 16:15; Isa. 58:6, 7; Jas. 1:27; 2:1-9; Matt. 25:31-46; Acts 2:44, 45; 4:34, 35)

10. EVANGELISM AND CULTURE

The development of strategies for world evangelization calls for imaginative pioneering methods. Under God, the result will be the rise of churches deeply rooted in Christ and closely related to their culture. Culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture. Because man is God’s creature, some of his culture is rich in beauty and goodness. Because he is fallen, all of it is tainted with sin and some of it is demonic. The gospel does not presuppose the superiority of any culture to another, but evaluates all cultures according to its own criteria

of truth and righteousness, and insists on moral absolutes in every culture. Missions have all too frequently exported with the gospel an alien culture, and churches have sometimes been in bondage to culture rather than to the Scripture. Christ’s evangelists must humbly seek to empty themselves of all but their personal authenticity in order to become the servants of others, and churches must seek to transform and enrich culture, all for the glory of God.(Mark 7:8, 9, 13; Gen. 4:21, 22; 1 Cor. 9:19-23; Phil. 2:5-7; 2 Cor. 4:5)

11. EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP

We confess that we have sometimes pursued church growth at the expense of church depth, and divorced evangelism from Christian nurture. We also acknowledge that some of our missions have been too slow to equip and encourage national leaders to assume their rightful responsibilities. Yet we are committed to indigenous principles, and long that every church will have national leaders who manifest a Christian style of leadership in terms not of domination but of service. We recognize that there is a great need to improve theological education, especially for church leaders. In every nation and culture there should be an effective training programme for pastors and laymen in doctrine, discipleship, evangelism, nurture and service. Such training programmes should not rely on any stereotyped methodology but should be developed by creative local initiatives according to biblical standards.(Col. 1:27, 28; Acts 14:23; Tit. 1:5,9; Mark 10:42-45; Eph. 4:11-12)

12. SPIRITUAL CONFLICT

We believe that we are engaged in constant spiritual warfare with the principalities and powers of evil, who are seeking to overthrow the church and frustrate its task of world evangelization. We know our need to equip ourselves with God’s armour and to fight this battle with the spiritual weapons of truth and prayer. For we detect the activity of our enemy, not only in false ideologies outside the church, but also inside it in false gospels which twist Scripture and put man in the place of God. We need both watchfulness and discernment to safeguard the biblical gospel. We acknowledge that we ourselves are not immune to worldliness of thought and action, that is, to a surrender to secularism. For example, although careful studies of church growth, both numerical and spiritual, are right and valuable, we have sometimes neglected them. At other times, desirous to ensure a response to the gospel, we have

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compromised our message, manipulated our hearers through pressure techniques, and become unduly preoccupied with statistics or even dishonest in our use of them. All this is worldly. The church must be in the world; the world must not be in the church.(Eph. 6:12; 2 Cor. 4:3, 4; Eph. 6:11, 13-18; 2 Cor. 10:3-5; I John 2:18-26; 4:1-3; Gal. 1:6-9; 2 Cor. 2:17; 4:2; John 17:15)

13. FREEDOM AND PERSECUTION

It is the God-appointed duty of every government to secure conditions of peace, justice and liberty in which the church may obey God, serve the Lord Christ, and preach the gospel without interference. We therefore pray for the leaders of the nations and call upon them to guarantee freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom to practise and propagate religion in accordance with the will of God and as set forth in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also express our deep concern for all who have been unjustly imprisoned, and especially for our brethren who are suffering for their testimony to the Lord Jesus. We promise to pray and work for their freedom. At the same time we refuse to be intimidated by their fate. God helping us, we too will seek to stand against injustice and to remain faithful to the gospel, whatever the cost. We do not forget the warnings of Jesus that persecution is inevitable.(1 Tim. 1:1-4; Acts 4:19; 5:29; Col. 3:24; Heb. 13:1-3; Luke 4:18; Gal. 5:11; 6:12; Matt. 5:10-12; John 15:18-21)

14. THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father sent his Spirit to bear witness to his Son; without his witness ours is futile. Conviction of sin, faith in Christ, new birth and Christian growth are all his work. Further, the Holy Spirit is a missionary spirit; thus evangelism should arise spontaneously from a Spirit-filled church. A church that is not a missionary church is contradicting itself and quenching the Spirit. World-wide evangelization will become a realistic possibility only when the Spirit renews the church in truth and wisdom, faith, holiness, love and power. We therefore call upon all Christians to pray for such a visitation of the sovereign Spirit of God that all his fruit may appear

in all his people and that all his gifts may enrich the body of Christ. Only then will the whole church become a fit instrument in his hands, that the whole earth may hear his voice.(1 Cor. 2:4; John 15:26, 27; 16:8-11; 1 Cor. 12:3; John 3:6-8; 2 Cor. 3:18; John 7:37-39; 1 Thess. 5:19; Acts 1:8; Psa. 85:4-7; 67:1-3; Gal. 5:22, 23; 1 Cor. 12:4-31; Rom. 12:3-8)

15. THE RETURN OF CHRIST

We believe that Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly, in power and glory, to consummate his salvation and his judgement. This promise of his coming is a further spur to our evangelism, for we remember his words that the gospel must first be preached to all nations. We believe that the interim period between Christ’s ascension and return is to be filled with the mission of the people of God, who have no liberty to stop before the End. We also remember his warning that false Christs and false prophets will arise as precursors of the final Antichrist. We therefore reject as a proud, self-confident dream the notion that man can ever build a utopia on earth. Our Christian confidence is that God will perfect his kingdom, and we look forward with eager anticipation to that day, and to the new heaven and earth in which righteousness will dwell and God will reign forever. Meanwhile, we rededicate ourselves to the service of Christ and of men in joyful submission to his authority over the whole of our lives.(Mark 14:62; Heb. 9:28; Mark 13:10; Acts 1:8-11; Matt. 28:20; Mark 13:21-23; John 2:18; 4:1-3; Luke 12:32; Rev. 21:1-5; 2 Pet. 3:13; Matt. 28:18)

CONCLUSION

Therefore in the light of this our faith and our resolve, we enter into a solemn covenant with God and with each other, to pray, to plan and to work together for the evangelization of the whole world. We call upon others to join us. May God help us by his grace and for his glory to be faithful to this our covenant! Amen. Alleluia!

(International Congress on World Evangelization, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 1974)

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“Missions and the Renewal of the Church” by Paul G. Hiebert

(Taken from Exploring Church Growth. Wilbert R. Shenk, ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983. Used by permission.)

“Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years” (Hab. 3:2).

Any long-range vision for missions must include not only the planting of new churches, but also the renewal of old ones. The former without the latter eventually leads only to lands full of dead and dying churches. The birth of new congregations is no guarantee that they will remain spiritually alive.

Many missionaries and church leaders have tried to establish “steady state” churches—churches that remain forever strong in faith and ministry. But there is no spiritual “steady-state,” neither in churches nor in individuals. Spiritual life, like all forms of life, is involved in processes of health and illness, of reinvigoration and decay. A church can remain vitally alive only as it periodically experiences times of life renewal. We deal here with one of the sets of processes that affect the life of a church, and, at length, with one of the types of structures for renewal.

INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Christianity is a set of allegiances and beliefs. But it is more. It is a set of relationships. Faith may be an intensely personal matter, but Christianity is also a community of believers, the church, united under the lordship of Christ.

Because the church is a corporate body of human beings, it must take on social forms. Without these forms, there would be no relationships between believers, and no visible congregation. There would also be no transmission of the gospel from one people to another, or from one generation to another, for these, too, require social structures. To be sure, the church cannot be understood solely as a social organization. It is the body of Christ, and the Spirit of God is at work within it. But to the extent that the church is made up of people and congregations in relationship to one another, it will be influenced by the social and cultural dynamics of human institutions. Among these dynamics we here look only at the process of institutionalization and its effect, both positive and negative, on local congregations and other church organizations.

GENERATIONS IN AN INSTITUTIONInstitutions such as churches, mission agencies, and schools undergo changes from the time of their birth

to their maturity. These changes can be analyzed by looking at the successive generations of people within a particular institution.

The first generation is made up of the “founding fathers and mothers” who have some things in common. They are drawn together by a vision of something new, for which they have paid a high price. Often they have left some old institutions to join the new movement. Friends and relatives sought to draw them back and, when this failed, cut them off. Moreover, they faced high risk, for there was no assurance that the new organization they founded would survive. Cut off from their old world, they are bound together by strong ties of fellowship and oneness of purpose.

The second generation is made up of the children of the founders, or by the generation that takes over from the founders. Here a major structural change takes place. While the founders paid a high price to leave their old institutions to form the new one, the children grow up within the framework of the new institution and its programs. The cost is not so high, but neither is the commitment. Members of the second generation do grow up amid the excitement, sacrifice, and commitment of a new movement, but they acquire secondhand the vision that motivated their parents.

By the third, fourth, and fifth generations, the new movement has become “the establishment.” These generations grow up within the institutional structures. In churches the children go to Sunday school and youth meetings with their friends, then with those friends they make profession of faith and are baptized. In schools and mission agencies, people work their way through the ranks to positions of leadership. For all of them, to remain within the institution is the path of least resistance and cost.

The strength of these generations is their stability and continuity over time. The life of the church like any institution depends upon one generation succeeding another. But the weakness of these successive generations is nominalism. The spiritual vision of the founders is dimmed by the routines of institutional life. What began as a movement has become a bureaucratic organization.

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PROCESSES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATIONOver the generations, an institution normally grows and matures. And with maturation come the problems of middle age—a loss of vision and a hardening of the categories. This maturation or institutionalization of human organization is characterized by a number of related processes.

First, informal associations give way to formal social roles. At the beginning of a movement there are few formal roles. There is often no official or salaried custodian, or secretary, or treasurer. Different members volunteer to type correspondence, to handle finances, and to welcome newcomers. As an institution grows, more and more roles are formalized.

Second, ad hoc arrangements are replaced by rationally formulated rules and constitutions in which relationships are standardized and generalized. At the outset, many things are handled by casual arrangements. At the last moment the pastor may ask someone to lead the singing, but soon such arrangements must be made well in advance so that the names can be put into a bulletin. In time the question arises as to who in fact can appoint the song leader, and the decision becomes part of the growing number of rules by which the church is run. Finally, when these rules become unwieldy and confusing, a constitution is drawn up to organize them into a formal whole. What began in the first generation as a casual arrangement, by the second becomes normative, by the third law, and by the fourth sacred. To change it becomes increasingly difficult.

In part, formal rules and constitutions are functions of size. They are necessary for large institutions to function smoothly. They are also functions of culture. Western cultures with their obsession for uniformity, efficiency, and rationality tend to organize institutions along the lines of bureaucracies in which tasks and relationships are divided and allocated to different people. The result is a mechanical approach to human organization, in which people become standardized parts within a “factory” which has as its goals production and gain. In many parts of the world social organizations are based on kinship and are organic in nature. Tribes, clans, lineages, and families tend to be more particularized or tailored to the individual characteristics of the persons involved. Moreover, they must be inclusive for they cannot reject kinsfolk just because they do not fit into the structure.

Third, charismatic leaders are succeeded by bureaucratic leaders. As Max Weber points out (1968), founders of new movements tend to by dynamic, prophetic leaders who command a following by means of their personal charisma. Such leaders can rarely lead a mature, established

institution, for they act too much on personal impulse and outside established procedures. Formalized roles and relationships call for a priest or administrator who is selected by due institutional processes and is identified with the people and the institution. This transition from charismatic founder to bureaucratic leader is crucial for the survival of an institution. If it does not take place, the institution dies. It is for the succeeding leaders to turn the vision of the founder into reality; to do so they must build and administer a complex institution.

The most difficult leadership position to fill is that of successor to the founder, for it is here that the transition must begin. Often it is a position with little honor. Honor goes to the founder whose picture is generally central on the wall of fame. Only as personal knowledge of the founder dies and memories of him or her fade are leaders measured by their own contributions.

Finally, unity based on implicit trust in one another’s faith gives way to unity based on explicit affirmation of common creeds and written confessions of faith. In the intimacy of the early gatherings, everyone knows everyone else personally. In such cases, theological differences are bridged by mutual trust. As churches and other institutions grow and become more impersonal, the bond holding members together must be formally defined. Moreover, outsiders want to know what the organization stands for. Consequently there are pressures to make explicit the beliefs and goals of the institution.

BENEFITS OF INSTITUTIONALIZATIONIn a number of ways the processes of institutionalization are beneficial for the building of churches. One has been called “redemption and lift”; it is found particularly in churches that spring up in poor non-Christian communities. In many parts of the world Christian converts come from the lower classes of society. First-generation members are generally nonliterate, economically poor, and socially powerless. But many of these early converts send their children to mission or church schools so that second-generation members are school teachers and government clerks. They in turn send their children to college to become doctors, college teachers, and government officials. This rapid rise of Christian communities means that in time even churches planted among the poor become self-supporting and develop their own advanced leadership. The danger, of course, is that in this rapid social rise, the church loses contact with the community from which it came, and can no longer witness effectively to that community.

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Another benefit of institutionalization is efficiency. Unformalized social organizations consume a great deal of time and energy simply to maintain themselves. New decisions must constantly be made for each activity, no matter how small. In a sense, institutionalization is for social organizations what habit formation is for individuals. It reduces the effort necessary to operate the institution by clarifying decision-making processes and by routinizing decisions.

A third benefit of institutionalization is the ability to mobilize large numbers of people and resources in order to carry out an otherwise impossible program of missions and ministry.

A final benefit is the theological maturation of the church. New converts, particularly in mission churches, are often theologically naive. Most come from non-Christian backgrounds and have little understanding of the Bible or of a biblical worldview. Their children, raised in the church and often a Christian school, have a much deeper understanding of the Bible and its message. By the third generation, there arise Bible scholars, translators, and theologians who can indigenize the gospel in their own culture far more effectively than can any missionaries. The long-range survival of the church in a land—and its remaining true to the Christian faith through the centuries—depends to a considerable extent upon the emergence of such leaders rooted in a deep understanding of the Scriptures.

DANGERS OF INSTITUTIONALIZATIONInstitutionalization also has its dangers. What begins as a means to help the congregation can, in the end, strangle it.

One negative consequence of institutionalization is that the vision is often lost in the process of carrying it out. For example, in order to evangelize a neighboring community, the church forms a committee. To keep committee minutes, a secretary is hired and an office set up. In the end, the secretary, pressured to type letters and make reports, sees little connection between those tasks and the evangelization of the neighborhood.

Another danger is that the focus on goals gives way to a concern for self-maintenance. Churches are started to evangelize and minister to peoples among which no churches exist. But as time passes, more of their resources and efforts are spent on simply maintaining the institutional structures. Young churches often make do with the simplest of facilities in order to focus their efforts on their mission to the world. Older churches spend more and more on sanctuaries and parking lots for themselves and schools for their children. Older mission agencies and educational institutions tend to spend an

increasing proportion of their efforts and budgets on administration.

This shift of priorities from tasks to self-maintenance is due, in part, to the fact that there is no one in the administrative structures or on the committees where decisions are made who represents the world outside and its needs. Decisions are made by the insiders—by those whose cars get muddy in the unpaved lot. The turning-inward process also occurs as the identity of members gets tied up with the organization and their roles within it.

The fourth danger is the shift in focus from people to programs. Young institutions are generally more people oriented. There is a strong emphasis on fellowship, trust, and meeting human needs. As an institution grows, more and more emphasis is placed on building programs and maintaining institutional structures. In a slowdown, institutional needs take priority over human needs.

PROCESSES OF RENEWAL

In view of these processes, which seem almost inevitable, is there no hope for institutions? True, there are some benefits, but the evils seem to outweigh them in the long run.

Some say the only hope is to get rid of institutions. Our only hope is to oppose the formation of formal social organizations and to return to a relatively unstructured way of life. Get rid of the establishment with its bureaucratic organization, its rules and procedures, and its dehumanizing power. But, as Peter Berger points out (1973), anti-structural movements have never been successful. For one, they are unable to build stable enduring societies or organize people into communities of common purpose and mutual support. At best such movements survive because they have a symbiotic relationship to a more institutionalized society. For another, they themselves are subject to the subtle forces of institutionalization. The symbols of their rebellion soon become the emblems of their identity, which they impose with institutional harshness upon their members.

The answer to the hardening of institutional categories is not anti-institutionalism, but institutional renewal. Institutions can be regenerated periodically so that their evils are tempered and their ministries enhanced.

Since we are speaking here of the renewal of the church as a human organization, we must make it clear that spiritual renewal is first and foremost the work of God, and this cannot be programmed. There is no “formula” for revival. To seek one is itself idolatry, for formulas make human gods capable of forcing God to do their bidding. But God does work through the spiritual, cultural, social, and

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psychological processes he created in human beings. As Edwin Orr points out (1975), God responds to sincere prayers. God also uses individuals, human experiences, sermons, songs, books, sacred places, sacred times, and other cultural symbols to move in the lives of people. When we seek renewal, we need to understand the human processes that can make us open to the possibility of renewal—that can help us to listen so that when God speaks we will hear.

CONVERSIONOne pattern of institutional renewal is that of personal conversion. The emphasis in the believer’s church upon personal commitment to Christ and to the church after one has reached the age of accountability in a sense recreates in each individual the costliness of leaving an old way of life and the high commitment to a new one that characterized the founders of the church. Ideally, each new generation enters with a fresh vision and new life.

In reality, however, two factors temper this ideal. First, the children are now, in fact, raised as if they were inside the church. Theologically, during their most formative years, they are rarely considered really lost. Institutionally, moreover, they are very much insiders. They attend services and are treated as participants. In the face of widespread acceptance, the meaning of their exclusion from the few technical rights of church membership often escapes them.

The second factor weakening the conversion experience is the institutionalization of conversion itself. Young people are soon expected to experience conversion at certain times in their lives, at certain occasions, and in certain ways. Furthermore, young people often act in imitation of one another. Consequently, conversion itself can become the path of least resistance rather than a costly new beginning. When all are being converted, those who hold back may have to pay a greater price.

NEW BEGINNINGSAnother pattern of renewal is the beginning of a new institution or movement. As bureaucratic inertia and nominalism make a church or denomination appear almost lifeless, there is a strong temptation among those with vital spiritual life to begin anew. The possibility of reviving the old seems almost hopeless.

Their theology does not permit the Catholics to split. Consequently their new beginnings take the form of new movements or orders within the church. For example, the Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, and other Catholic organizations began as renewal movements that led eventually to fully institutionalized orders. The result, again, is a proliferation of bureaucratic structures, each of which must face the question of renewal.

INTERSECTING RENEWAL MOVEMENTSThe best modern example of crosscutting renewal movements is the East African Revival that has been continuing for more than forty years. In it, people interested in spiritual life and the renewal of the church gather in informal meetings for Bible study, prayer, confession and forgiveness of sins, and mutual exhortation. They come from many different churches and denominations. There is little or no formal structuring of the movement. The institutionalized churches raise funds, organize schools, hospitals, and church programs, build church buildings, and hire pastors. The revival groups meet informally, carry out no large organized activity, and maintain no offices or paid personnel. The result is an ongoing renewal of the established churches from within.

The pattern closest to this in Western churches is the emergence of parachurch organizations such as the Christian Business Men’s Club, Navigators, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Youth for Christ, and Campus Crusade. However, unlike the East African Revival, these movements have led to formal organizations that, in time, have experienced the problems of institutionalization. Moreover, parachurch organizations have drawn personnel and resources from the churches and often created rivalries between the two. Because parachurch movements can limit their membership to those with talent and high spiritual commitment, they attract some of the best Christian leaders. But the church, which cannot turn away the weak, the poor, the uneducated, and the broken outcasts of society, is left weakened by the loss of talents and resources. There is often less excitement and honor in the care of those on the margins of society.

RITUALS OF RENEWALA fourth structure for renewal is rituals. Rituals play an important part in all religions. In them people draw apart from the secular routines of everyday life in order to focus their attention on religious matters. Ever since the Reformation, the Protestant churches in the West have tended to look at rituals with a disapproving eye. The rise of secularism (probably due in part to this anti-ritualistic stance) has only reinforced this rejection of ritual. The result has often been to stress corporate fellowship rather than worship of God as the central purpose of Sunday services, and to introduce informal, but not less rigid, ritual forms such as bulletins, special clothes, and implicit spiritual hierarchies.

It may well be that Protestants need to rediscover the importance of multivocal rituals if they wish to counteract the growing secularism of the modern age, for rituals like symbols are languages for speaking of

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spiritual things. As in the case of institutions, the answer to dead rituals is not no rituals, but living rituals. Such rituals are important in bringing renewal not only to individuals but to institutions as well.

RITUALS OF RENEWAL

Rituals play an important part in all religious life. This is particularly true of nonliterate peoples from whom rituals and myths are the encyclopedias in which religious knowledge is stored. Literate people store such information in books, but nonliterate peoples must do so in forms that can be readily recalled. For this reason, rituals that can be reenacted and stories that can easily be remembered are the primary means by which most people around the world retain and transmit their religious beliefs.

Religious rituals are also important in the expression of religious feelings. As Otto points out (1923), the religious experience is closely tied to a sense of mystery, awe, and fear in the face of the supernatural. Such feelings are important in giving expression and reinforcement to the beliefs we hold most deeply.

Finally, rituals call for personal response, often in some tangible form. To participate in a ritual is to reaffirm one’s commitment to the beliefs it enacts.

STRUCTURE OF RITUALSAll rituals share a basic structure: they stand as sacred events in opposition to ordinary, secular life. Everyday life is semichaotic. Unexpected occurrences and accidents interrupt a sequence of events that in itself often lacks order. In the face of this disorder, secular life, left to itself, becomes increasingly meaningless.

RITUALS OF RESTORATIONRituals can be divided into two types. The first of these, and by far the most common, are rituals of restoration. In these people gather together to restore their faith in the beliefs that order their lives, and rebuild the religious community in which these beliefs find expression.

Rituals of restoration have several basic characteristics. First, they are generally characterized by a high degree of ritual order. For example, the order of Sunday morning services is often fixed and repeated from week to week. The Lord’s Prayer is recited again and again (in ordinary life such repetition appears foolish—one does not tell the same joke again and again to the same audience). The songs are generally printed and their melodies and words highly predictable. Even the congregational responses may be spelled out in detail. Only in the sermon do we allow some originality, and even there the content must remain within the normally expected

theological framework. This high order restores in the participants a sense of order and meaning in the universe, in their community, and in their own lives.

Second, restorative rituals take place within the state of community. That is, people occupy formal roles and relate in institutionalized ways to one another. For example, in ordinary church services the members act as pastor, deacon, choir leader, and layperson. Many of these distinctions are reinforced by titles, differences in clothing, and special locations in the sanctuary. Role differentiation and hierarchy are evident in the organization of the service. The leader is a priest or head appointed by the institution. As such, he or she represents the people before God. Consequently, restorative rituals reinforce the authority and structures of the establishment.

Third, there is a sharp focus on religious activity and a strong sense of expectation that something will occur. People leave behind the cares of everyday life. Ordinary tasks are forgotten as full attention is given to the service at hand.

Finally, these regenerative rites are generally held in places central to the lives of the people. The church, particularly in villages and towns, is in the middle of the community and carries with it the religious feeling of home—a place where people find security, meaning, and a sense of rest.

RITUALS OF TRANSFORMATIONIf restorative rituals are characterized by a high degree of structure, transformative ones are characterized by a high degree of creativity and antistructure. That is, they often reject the normal structure of an institution and seek to create a new one. In so doing, they cut through established ways of doing things and restore a measure of flexibility and personal intimacy to the organization.

Transformational rituals are found in all religions of the world, including Christianity. They include such practices as pilgrimages, camps and retreats, special revival services, festivals, mass rallies, and, in many countries, religious fairs. On the level of the individual and family they also include rites of passage associated with birth, marriage, death, and other transitions of life. In the early and medieval church transitional rituals played an important part in the lives of the people. Only in recent years, and in Western Protestant churches in secular, urban settings, have they lost much of their significance.

In some crucial ways transformative rites are the opposite of restorative rites. First, they are characterized by what Victor Turner (1969) calls “liminality.” This is the state of being in limbo—of being torn out of the familiar settings and relationships in which we live our lives. For instance, the pilgrim leaves familiar territory to travel

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to a strange place where everything is new. There is a structure, but it is a totally new one characterized by flexibility, creativity, and change rather than the reinforcement of an existing order. The result is an openness to change, for the ties to everyday life that often draw us back into existing structures are broken.

Second, transformational rituals are characterized not by community but by communitas. This term introduced by Turner (1969) connotes a lack of formal roles and relationships. In other words, in communitas there is no rigid social structure and no hierarchy. Participants are all equals. In the presence of God, all human distinctions become meaningless. This sense of communitas bonds participants together into a single group and opens them up to change.

There is an exception to this state of communitas. For the leaders of the pilgrimage, camp, or festival, the ritual is not a place set apart from their normal lives. It is their place of work. Consequently for them these rituals are their community. But leaders of such rites are generally prophets. They are often charismatic leaders who in the role of addressing “the voice of God” to religious institutions and their members often pose a threat to the “priests” who run the establishment.

Communitas is a short-lived state of affairs. One cannot live in it for long without beginning to transform it into community, for communitas does not provide for all the requirements of ongoing social life. In time people need doctors, merchants, teachers, and a great variety of other workers to maintain the society. When Peter suggested on the Mount of Transfiguration that they build houses, he had already begun the transformation from an ethereal experience to ordinary life.

Third, rituals of transformation, like those of restoration, are associated with a high sense of focus and of expectation. Outside matters are left behind. In transformational rituals this often includes a geographical separation that makes disengagement from the world complete.

Finally, transformative rites allow for a great deal of creativity. This creativity destroys the old order, but it also builds a new one.

The goal of transformative rites is to bring about change. The combination of liminality, communitas, high expectations, and antistructural creativity makes deep and lasting changes possible in short periods of time. Changes in fundamental beliefs are often reinforced by strong emotions and a commitment to act upon the new convictions. These transformations are often spoken of as conversions, rededications, and new commitments.

TRANSFORMATIVE RITUALS AND THE RENEWAL OF THE CHURCHTransformative rituals were very much a part of Judeo-Christian life until recent times. In the Old Testament the levitical priests scattered throughout the land conducted the normal restorative rituals. However, three times a year all adult males, particularly heads of families who served as family priests, were expected to go to Jerusalem. There they gathered as pilgrims in the great festivals of regeneration. All ordinary social distinctives were broken down as the people assembled before the Lord. Special music, art, and even dance gave expression to the creativity of these events. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most important events in the life of Christ—his initiation into Jewish adulthood, his death, and his resurrection—took place on such occasions.

Festivals, pilgrimages, and even the Crusades played important roles in the medieval church. The toil of daily life and the routine of local services were broken by special occasions that made the people aware of a greater Christendom, of the world outside, and of the great historical heritage of their faith. The great cathedrals, the pilgrimage sites, and Palestine itself restored to many a sense of the sacred and of God’s presence in human history.

Even in frontier America, transformative services played a key part in the religious life of the people. The evangelistic crusades, revival meetings, and mission conferences were annual events on the calendars of many churches.

Today, in Western urban society, our regenerative rites are largely secular—the major sports events, the political rallies, and professional conferences. In churches the revivals and crusades have been replaced by summer camps and weekend retreats. They play an important part in personal renewal, but they have less effect upon the structures of the institutionalized church. Denominational conferences, anniversary celebrations, and festivals such as Easter and Christmas do involve whole churches, but they are often controlled by the priests of the institution. Citywide crusades do break down barriers between denominations and provide Christians with a greater vision of the scope of Christianity as a whole, but they are sporadic and far between.

Restorative rites can renew commitment and vision, but only by reaffirming the institutional structures. It takes transformations and revolutions to break the stranglehold these structures can have in the church. It may well be that churches in the West may need to rediscover the importance of such regenerative rituals if they want to counter the evils

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of institutionalization and bring new life back into the church.

TRANSFORMATIVE RITUALS AND MISSIONSWhat implications does all this have for missions? It is clear that we must strive not only to plant new churches, but to renew constantly the life of the old ones. Dead forms of Christianity are little better than non-Christian religions. Consequently, missions like churches must plan for the hundred-year span and longer.

But there is another reason why missions must take renewal rituals into account. Many of the societies in which missions are found are nonliterate societies that encode their beliefs in religious rituals. Missionaries who come from literate societies that store their beliefs in books often do not realize this and seek to get rid of rituals, dramas, stories, and other folk means for preserving knowledge. The result is that new Christians often have few ways to remember their beliefs. They cannot read the Bible. The preacher may come only on rare occasions. As P. Y. Luke and John B. Carman found (1968:127), the theology of most Indian village Christians is recorded in their songs. This “lyric theology” is memorized and sung in the homes at night, sustaining the people’s faith.

The contrast between Protestant services and the people’s traditional ceremonies is probably greatest in the areas of transformative rituals. Festivals, religious fairs, pilgrimages, and rites of passage such as birth, initiation, marriage, and death break the drudgery of everyday life, provide excitement, and make life more meaningful. Here modern Christian missionaries have provided the fewest functional substitutes to replace the old ways. Consequently Christianity often appears drab and uninteresting.

Several innovative attempts have been made to change this picture. J. T. Seamands began a Christian religious fair in South India that attracts Christians from a wide area for a week of meetings and excitement. The Korean churches have united to organize nationwide rallies that strengthen the

believers and serve as a witness to the people of the growing church in the land.

Church planting and church renewal are the two central tasks of missions. The first without the second leads to widespread nominal Christianity; the second without the first leads to life without a mission. In fact, the two go together. An effective mission to the world often revives the home church, and renewal at home often leads to a new missionary vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, Peter1974 The Homeless Mind: Modernization and

Consciousness. New York: Vintage Books.

Eliade, Mircea1963 Myth and Reality. New York: Harper.

Luke, P. Y. and Carman, J. B.1968 Village Christians and Hindu Culture. London:

Lutterworth Press for Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, W.C.C.

Orr, Edwin1975 The Eager Feet: Evangelical Awakenings 1790-1830.

Chicago: Moody Press.1975-78 Evangelical Awakenings. 5 vols. Minneapolis:

Bethany Fellowship.

Otto, Rudolph1923 The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Originally published as Das Heilige in 1917.

Ratzlaff, Don1981 “The Parachurch Power Shift.” The Christian Leader

(May 5).

Turner, Victor1969 The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine Publishing

Company.1973 “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of

Religions 12:191-230.1978 Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Cultures:

Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weber, Max1964 The Theory of Social Organization. New York: Free

Press.1968 Economy and Society. Vol. 1. New York: Baedminster

Press.

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“Ten Major Trends Facing the World Church” by Howard A. Snyder

(Reprinted with permission fromWorld Evangelization, May-June 1, 1988, pp. 5-11.)

What forces will shape the church’s worldwide life and witness over the next fifty years? It is possible to know? Or is this idle and pointless curiosity?

While we cannot predict the future with certainty, we can at least observe current trends and ask about their probable impact on the future. We can attempt to discern the “signs of the times” and seek to interpret them in the light of God’s revealed Word.

This is what I and my colleague, Daniel V. Runyon, set out to do. We asked about one hundred Christian leaders—evangelists, scholars, missionaries, writers and denominational officials—to tell us what they saw as the most significant trends facing the church today and tomorrow. Using an initial survey and a follow-up, we elicited “trends perceptions” from over fifty knowledgeable people as the basis of our study.

Our sample covered a spectrum of theological and ecclesiastical perspectives (including, for example, both charismatics and non-charismatics, and some Roman Catholics). Respondents indicated their perceptions and ranking of major trends in the church, or trends in the world affecting the church. Most respondents were North Americans, so in that sense the study was limited, but we chose people with a broad knowledge of and experience in the international scene. It would be very useful now to conduct a similar survey of Christian leaders from so-called Third-World nations and compare the results.

This methodology is somewhat impressionistic, but it does give a fascinating and useful reading on perceived trends, and, thus, on the issues church leaders will be dealing with as the world church moves into the twenty-first century. The results of our study were published as Foresight: Ten Major Trends That Will Dramatically Affect the Future of Christians and the Church (Thomas Nelson, 1986). In this article I have summarized and updated the main points from the book.

The ten most significant trends which will affect the church over the next fifty years, I believe, are the following:

1. From regional churches to a World Church.2. From scattered growth to broad revival.3. From Communist China to Christian China.

4. From institutional religion to kingdom theology. 5. From clergy/laity to community of ministers.6. From male leadership to male/female

partnership.7. From secularization to religious relativism.8. From nuclear families to family diversity.9. From church/state separation to Christian

political activism.10. From safe planet to threatened planet.

This profile of trends varies markedly from recent trends discussion in Christianity Today and elsewhere, mainly because we have tried to look at the whole world scene, not just North America. In that perspective, it seems clear that the most dominant, shaping trend is what might be called the new internationalization of the church—the emergence of the World Church.

1. From Regional Churches to World ChurchThe church has always considered herself

“universal”, but today this is empirically true as never before. In the nineteen centuries following the resurrection of Jesus, Christianity grew to embrace one-third of all humanity—yet more than eighty percent of these were whites. In the twentieth century Christianity has become a global faith; the most universal religion in history. The church is said to be growing at the rate of some sixty-five new churches daily, mostly in the populous, poorer nations of the southern hemisphere. Today Christians number about one-third of all humanity and more than half the population in two-thirds of the world’s 223 nations. The Christian church has become an amalgam of the world’s races and peoples, with whites dropping from over eighty percent to about forty percent.

This new internationalization of the church is producing a historic revolution: a shift of the church’s “center of gravity” from the North and West (mainly Europe and North America) to the Two-Thirds World. In 1900 the northern hemisphere counted some 462 million Christians, 83 percent of the world total, while the South had about 96 million Christians, or seventeen percent of the total. By 1980 the church in the South had grown to 700 million, nearly half of the world total. Today the church of the historically “Christian” nations is probably the minority church worldwide.

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Missiologist Walbert Bühlmann puts this change in perspective in his book, The Church of the Future (Orbis, 1986). He suggests, “What is effectively the center of gravity of Christianity in the West has shifted more and more,” reaching the critical point in 1970 where fifty-one percent of Catholics were living in the southern continents of Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Oceania. “By the year 2000 a good 70 percent of all Catholics will be living in the southern hemisphere,” he notes. As we have noted, this is similar to trends for the whole church, worldwide.

Bühlmann points out the significance of this shift:

...the Third Church is approaching, church of the Third World but also church of the Third millennium. Roughly speaking we can say that the first Christian millennium, with the first eight councils all held in the East, stood mainly under the leadership of the First Church, the Eastern church; the second millennium stood under the leadership of the Second Church, the Western church, which shaped the Middle Ages and, from the time of the “discovery” of the New World, undertook all missionary initiatives. Now the coming third millennium will evidently stand under the leadership of the Third Church, the Southern church. I am convinced that the most important drives and inspirations for the whole church in the future will come from the Third Church.

Bühlmann adds that the church is now a church in six continents with mission in six continents. “One of the most important new duties of the Second Church leaders,” he argues, is therefore, “to bring to the knowledge of their people the fact that they are no longer the church but have become part of a greater church.” Today, he says, “when the church lives in six continents, each having its own political, cultural, and ecclesiastical consciousness, the church there must not merely be accommodated in exterior things, but radically ‘incarnated’ into these cultures.” The key missiological challenge is to do this without compromising the biblical character and truth claims of the Gospel.

What do these changes mean for the future? We shall likely see a World Church emerge that is much more diverse ethnically and culturally; exhibits a greater mutual respect for the leadership, styles, ministries, and traditions of other Christian believers; it is increasingly urban; and ministers more intentionally to the poor, oppressed, and suffering.

2. From Scattered Growth to Broad RevivalNew hope for revival in North America and

Western Europe is being sparked by rapid church growth in places like Lain America, South Korea and Central Africa. The United States has seen a dramatic increase in Bible study groups, evangelization programs, and various kind of religious education activities outside formal worship. These and other signs may point to a new spiritual awakening in North America, with perhaps something similar happening in Europe.

Church membership as a percentage of population has continued to increase in the United States, reaching nearly sixty percent by 1976 (compared with thirty-six percent in 1900 and twenty percent in 1850). It would be a mistake, of course, to read these data as spiritual renewal when so many historic churches and denominations are declining and society is becoming increasingly secularized and materialistic. But many people anticipate a deep and genuine new movement of revival in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Elements of this resurgence include a “third wave” or charismatic renewal reaching beyond the present Pentecostal and charismatic churches; other renewal currents in mainline denominations; a spiritual resurgence of Roman Catholicism; and new dialogue and fellowship among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox believers. The growth of house churches and of “power evangelism” churches may be seen as part of this anticipated new wave of revival.

Now that the world has become one interconnected global communications network, the unprecedented Christian growth worldwide is bound to have an impact in the traditionally Christian lands of North America and Europe. A key feature of the twenty-first century will be that of the main currents of influence in the World Church will flow from Third World areas to Europe and North America, rather than the other way around. To a significant degree the same will be true ideologically and politically beyond the church as the United Sates’ new debtor status undercuts its political and economic dominance in the world.

The net result of these factors may well be a worldwide spiritual awakening and evangelistic harvest unprecedented in history.

3. From Communist China to Christian ChinaThe Christian church has come alive powerfully

in China over the past ten years or so. While no one knows for sure how large the church has grown, the Chinese Church Research Center in Hong Kong estimates 30 million Christians, or 50 million if border regions and secret believers are included. Dr.

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James Hudson Taylor leans toward the 50 million figure. I believe this is a reasonable estimate. It amounts to about five percent of the population and more than fifty times the number of believers thirty-six years ago when missionaries were expelled by the Communist revolution.

Today the Chinese church exists in three main groups: a somewhat fragmented Roman Catholicism, the officially recognized Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and the house churches growing in the populous nonurban areas. The success of widespread lay leadership and house churches or other small groups, and the sheer numbers involved, suggest that the contemporary renewal in China is among the great Christian movements in history.

The resurgence of Chinese Christianity is likely to impact world Christianity in several ways. The Chinese church may provide sources of major new vitality, leadership, and structural forms for the church worldwide. Chinese Christianity will also enrich the theology and self-understanding of the world church. Historically the church has been dominated successively by Greek, Roman, European, and North American cultural and thought forms. We have yet to discover what the impact will be of a new and dynamic church rooted in one of the oldest and culturally richest societies on earth, as is true in China today.

4. From Institutional Tradition to Kingdom TheologyA World church touched by renewal will require

a global theology—not a uniform theology for all places, but an understanding of the faith which is at once biblically faithful, functional for the growth and witness of local churches, and yet able to make Christian sense of the world scene. Such a theology seems to be coalescing around themes of the reign or rule of God, stressing God’s sovereign direction, despite and through human agency, in the course of world history. The kingdom theme is receiving increasing attention in conferences, journals, and book publishing. Evangelical futurologist Tom Sine notes, “A tremendous conversion of vision is occurring around the reign of God. Where we need help from missiologists now is to understand what a vision of the kingdom means for our life and mission today. We really need help in taking the power and imagery of that vision and bringing it into all aspects of life” (Missiology, January, 1987, 21).

Pressures for a new “world theology” that expands the way Christians understand the universe and their role in it are coming form several sources. The most important of these are internal, arising from the first three trends noted above. External pressures come from economic, social, scientific, and political

developments now shaping the world. These range from world health and environmental concerns to increasing economic interdependency to concerns over nuclear weapons.

The next fifty years will likely see a major breakthrough in scientific understanding of the fundamental nature of the physical universe. Since Einstein’s theory of relativity was published in 1915 scientists have been seeking a general Theory of Everything (TOE) which would link the four basic forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces of nuclear energy. Recent research by physicists worldwide may signal a breakthrough.

Scientific discovery and verification of a unified theory of the physical universe will have deep theological and practical implications. This will be a new Copernican revolution. It will serve to underscore the need for a plausible Christian theology of the universe—a convincing “Christian Theory of Everything” which is both biblically sound and scientifically believable.

Increasingly, Christian thinkers are pointing out that the kingdom of God was prominent in Jesus’ teaching and is a central category unifying biblical revelation. Kingdom theology speaks of justice in economic, political, and social relationships, and ecological harmony and balance throughout the creation. God as supreme Ruler and Friend of all will finally be worshipped and glorified by the whole creation. Biblically, this is not an other-worldly, disembodied, nonhistorical reality, but is something sufficiently like present experience that human bodies will be resurrected to be a part of. Kingdom theology foresees not the total destruction of this world but its liberation (Rom. 8:21) through a process of death and resurrection.

Such a theology has wide-ranging implications for all areas of the church’s life, including worship, fellowship or community, witness in evangelism, peace, and justice, and the church’s relationship to political and economic powers.

5. From Clergy/Laity to Community of MinistersA new model of pastoral leadership appears to be

emerging in areas where the church is most dynamic and growing. This points to quite a different kind of church in the future. The New Testament pattern of each congregation being led by a group of spiritually mature leaders is receiving new emphasis. A long-term trend toward plural leadership, the ministry of all believers, and the “equipping” model of pastoral leadership appears to be emerging, especially outside of the United States. The evidence here is so far not conclusive, but I personally believe there is a trend

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here of long-term significance. I ground this particularly in my observation that equipping all believers for significant ministry, rather than the professional minister/laity distinction, is more dynamic and renewing in the church’s life than is the traditional pattern which grew up in the second century of church history.

The equipping model, based especially on Ephesians 4:11-12, stresses the primary function of nurturing and leading the congregation so that each believer functions as a gifted minister within the body. This model may be implemented in a range of culturally viable patterns, but its main features are: 1) plural or team leadership, 2) mutuality and consensus decision-making among leaders, rather than top-down authority, and 3) primary focus on enabling all believers for their particular gift ministries and spiritual priesthood.

As the equipping model is adopted more broadly, some results will be a greater emphasis on and practice of the priesthood of believers, the emergence of alternative forms of pastoral training and theological education, and a more organic integration or “networking” of a wide range of Christian ministries.

6. From Male Leadership to Male/Female PartnershipIn the last decade the North American church

turned a historic and probably irreversible corner with a shift toward women as pastoral leaders on a par with men. Something parallel is happening or probably will happen worldwide in the church—eventually, probably even within Roman Catholicism.

In 1970 only two percent of United States pastors were women. That doubled to four percent by 1984, and continues to grow. The number of women in seminary jumped 223 percent from 1972 to 1980, compared to a 31 percent increase in male enrollment. Today about twenty percent of all Master of Divinity graduates of U.S. and Canadian seminaries are women, which reflects an increase in women M.Div. recipients of 219 percent in the last nine years.

Based on these and related statistics, we foresee by the year 2000 approximately twenty to twenty-five percent of pastors in the U.S. will be women, with the total possibly approaching fifty percent by the middle of the next century.

Women already comprise a significant minority of ordained pastors in many U.S. church bodies. By 1985, ten percent of all Disciples of Christ pastors were women. The figure was twelve percent in the United Church of Christ, seven percent in the Episcopal Church, five percent among United

Methodists, and six percent among Presbyterians. In Pentecostal groups, typically ten to twenty percent of pastors are women.

The implications of this trend include the following:

1. The definition of the pastoral role will probably become broader and more flexible as women bring more variety, fresh ideas, differing perspectives, and a broader range of leadership styles into church leadership.

2. The emphasis on community, informality, and nurture in the church will increase.

3. Theologically and conceptually, more women in church leadership will increase the tendency toward organic and ecological models of the world and the church.

4. More women in ministry may augment the trend toward “lay” ministry and the equipping of believers.

7. From Secularization to Religious RelativismThe church has always faced the problem of how

to be in the world yet not of it. But secularization comes in waves. Today the church faces a tidal wave, with many Christians in North America and Western Europe accommodating to values shaped more by the world than by the gospel. Surveys show little difference between the views and behaviors of those who claim to be committed Christians and those who don’t. Fortunately the picture is somewhat better in many areas of the Third World.

In the last fifty years attitudes in the United States have largely changed from the survival mentality of the Great Depression to a drive toward self-identity and recognition as persons. Yet the understanding of the road to success hasn’t changed much. The survivor of the Depression sought security through good pay and financial stability. The modern “identity achiever” still follows the materialistic route to success.

Secularization leads either to secularism or religious relativism. The tendency among those who retain faith in God is to compromise the unique claims of the faith, particularly in a world of varied and competing religions and ideologies. In such a context, values are severed from any ultimate grounding or truth claim. They become relative and are based merely in subjective experience. Technical civilization furthers this relativism by producing an ever-expanding array of material goods which become the stuff from which life’s meaning is constructed.

8. From Nuclear Families to Family DiversityBy and large, Protestant churches still assume

the importance of the nuclear family (two parents,

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two or more children). Yet in fact often that’s not the primary population around them, especially in cities.

The “typical family” in the traditional sense is becoming extinct in North America. Only seven percent of the U.S. population fits the profile of father as breadwinner and mother taking care of the home and two or three children. The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that nearly one fourth of all American children now live with just one parent and sixty percent will spend at least some time in one-parent households. This is a dramatic change from 1960 when only one child in ten lived with a single parent.

Demographers now distinguish as many as thirteen separate types of households, and these are rapidly eclipsing conventional family patterns. Similar trends appear to be emerging in many parts of the world. In some places the traditional extended family pattern may be reaffirmed as a strong Christian option.

Some of the multiple forms of shared living today are morally unacceptable to Christians, such as unmarried couples living together or so-called homosexual “marriages”. But others are morally neutral. Diversity and homogeneity both have their place, in society as well as in the church where there are “many members but one body”. Single households, extended families, and shared households are viable Christian options. The challenge for the church will be to minister to this diversity without compromising the gospel.

9. From Church/State Separation to Christian Political ActivismWhatever their motivation, Christians today are

becoming involved politically in increasing numbers. We expect, as a result, that Christian moral values may be restored to some extend in places where they have been eroding. In Latin America, the Philippines, and South Korea Christians seem to be showing increased interest in the political process. One aspect of this is the base ecclesial communities in Latin America. (See article on page 17.)

In North America, Christians in the 1930s entered a new phase of political involvement. The religious right, increased political activism by fundamentalists and evangelicals, and the growing number of theologically conservative Christians holding public office reflect what appears to be a new trend. Meanwhile, the “people power” revolution of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines and the ouster of the dictator Duvalier in Haiti, in both of which the Roman Catholic Church played a key role, reveal other dimensions of Christian political activism.

Conflicting views of church and state have been with us throughout history. At one level the struggle

has been between the legitimate claims and powers of political and religious authority; at another the questions is how to achieve a balance between spirituality and social and political involvement. In their quest for the spiritual, monks and mystics through the ages attempted to transcend not only human affairs but the material world itself. In contrast the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian and saw no conflict in attempting to Christianize secular government (and in the process substantially politicized the church).

Early in the twentieth century conservative Protestantism, especially, tended to drive a wedge between religious experience and matters of economic and public policy. Adherents often turned inward, sharply dividing the spiritual and material realms. Yet the trend today is toward political involvement. In the United States, the most visible example is the so-called New Right.

While most media attention in the United States has focused on such conservative new Right groups as the Moral Majority, not all Christian political efforts are on the side of political conservatism. Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) is a broadly based coalition working for greater sensitivity and activism on issues of social justice, poverty, and international peace. Bread for the World, another primarily Christian organization, lobbies for legislation and policies that will provide adequate food for the world’s peoples. Sojourners magazine and the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C., work for international justice and promote a new abolitionism against nuclear weapons. In 1986, a new broad-based political action committee, JustLife, was formed to advocate a “consistent prolife stance” on the issues of poverty, abortion, and the nuclear-arms race. Dr. Ron Sider, who has been active in the worldwide networking of evangelicals, now heads both JustLife and Evangelicals for Social Action.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argues in his book, The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), that U.S. society alternates in approximately thirty-year cycles between periods of “private interest,” which are more inward-focused and self-centered, and “public purpose,” when concerns for reform, social justice, and the common good take precedence. The rise of the American New Right has come toward the end of a period of “private interest.” A growing concern now with issues of peace, justice, and international cooperation may reflect a shift toward a period of “public interest.” If so, this may provide a significant opportunity for world Christians across the lines of nationality and political ideology to work cooperatively for the fundamental moral and economic values of the Kingdom of God.

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As Christian political involvement expands to include far-reaching issues such as foreign policy and the earth’s resources, a crucial question is whether or not Christians can distinguish between kingdom priorities and narrowly nationalistic interests. This applies equally to believers throughout the world, whether in South Africa, Lebanon, Taiwan, Central America, the United Sates, or elsewhere. The issue can be boiled down to this simple question: Will tomorrow’s Christian be able to see, and persuade others to see, that the priorities of God’s kingdom are ultimately more in one’s own national (or ethnic or tribal) interests than are narrower self-serving aims?

10. From Safe Planet to Threatened PlanetDespite volatile changes and regional conflicts

since World War II, over all the globe has been relatively “safe” compared with what we now see on the horizon. Three major world realities present new threats to humanity and to the church, however. These dangers are so basic and potentially lethal that they constitute a historically unprecedented set of megadangers for all earth’s peoples.

These realities are (1) the widening gap between rich and poor, (2) growing threats to our ecosphere, and (3) the dangers of nuclear armaments.

Long-range threats to the world’s physical environment, particularly those related to the deterioration of the earth’s ozone layer, are increasing with little being done about them. One need not be a prophet to see that eco-crisis and nuclear terror in a world increasingly split between rich and poor, yet intimately linked by the mass media and monetary interdependencies, could easily add up to a recipe for global convulsions as devastating as any world war (or possible leading to war).

These issues present not a scenario for despair but simply the dimensions of the challenges facing the World Church. Europe survived the Black Death of the fourteenth century, though in many places half the population died. Floods, earthquakes, disease, and wars have threatened major parts of the globe in the past and will do so again. Today’s issues, however, are unprecedented in their scope and in the

way they interact and touch the very fabric of life for all earth’s peoples.

From a Christian standpoint, these issues caution us against triumphalism or an easy optimism. Human sin is still with us, not only in each individual and group, but cumulatively, clogging the structures of our social and environmental systems. As we move into the twenty-first century, the world is one family at war with itself and threatening to poison or explode its own home.

ConclusionWhere do all these currents leave the church?

First of all, these and related trends will require much more study and analysis. Some are clear and empirically validated; others are more questionable and may clash with significant counter-trends. But all represent areas of ferment or challenge for the church.

In Foresight we have reviewed these trends in light of John Naisbitt’s best-selling Megatrends, pointing out where we think Naisbitt’s conclusions need modification or qualification. We suggest some possible long-range implications of these trends, and in conclusion suggest four possible “alternative futures” for the church and world society: a new totalitarianism, or “Friendly Fascism”; “Armageddon” (all-out nuclear war); nuclear terrorism; and world revival. Any of these scenarios is possible, in whole or in part, or perhaps in combination or sequence. The future rests on the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of God’s people and, finally, on God’s sovereign activity. Attending to actual and potential trends can aid Christians in sorting out the challenges they face and responding faithfully to the good news of the Kingdom.

Howard A. Snyder has served as teaching pastor at Irving Park Free Methodist Church in Chicago, Illinois, assistant professor of church history and theology at North Park Theological Seminary, and associate professor of church renewal at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. His books include The Problem of Wineskins (1975) and Signs of the Spirit: How God Reshapes the Church (1988). He was one of the plenary speakers at the 1974 Lausanne Congress.

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“Can the West Be Converted?” by Lesslie Newbigin

(Originally published in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 1987, pp. 2-7. Used by permission.)

Let me begin by confessing that my title is a borrowed one. A dozen years ago, at the Bangkok Conference on “Salvation Today,” I happened to be sitting next to General Simatupang, that doughty Indonesian Christian who, having driven the Dutch out of his islands, turned to theology as the most agreeable field for the exercise of the arts of war. We were in plenary debate, and Simatupang had just made an intervention. As he returned to his seat beside me, I heard him say under his breath, “Of course, the Number One question is, Can the West be converted?”

In the following years I have become more and more sure that he was right. If one looks at the world scene from a missionary point of view, surely the most striking fact is that, while in great areas of Asia and Africa the church is growing, often growing rapidly, in the lands which were once called Christendom it is in decline; and, moreover, wherever the culture of the West, under the name of “modernization,” penetrates, it carries with it what Lippmann called “the acids of modernity,” dissolving the most enduring of religious beliefs including the beliefs of Christians. Surely there can be no more crucial question for the world mission of the church than the one I have posed. Can there be an effective missionary encounter with this culture—this so powerful, persuasive, and confident culture which (at least until very recently) simply regarded itself as “the coming world civilization”? Can the West be converted?

I am posing this question at a time when, especially in evangelical circles, great attention is being paid to the question of gospel and culture, to the question of the contextualization of the gospel in different cultures. Recent missionary literature is full of the subject. “Contextualization” is an ugly word but a useful one. It is better than the word long used by Protestants—”indigenization”—which always tended to direct attention to the past of a culture rather than to its present and future. And it is better than the traditional Catholic term “adaptation,” which suggested that the missionary was the bearer of a pure, culture-free gospel which had then to be adapted to the receptor culture, and thus concealed the fact that every statement of the gospel from the New Testament onwards is already culturally conditioned. “Contextualization” directs attention to

the actual context, shaped by the past and open to the future, in which the gospel has to be embodied now. But why is it that we have a plethora of missionary studies on the contextualization of the gospel in all the cultures of the world from China to Peru, but nothing comparable directed to the culture which we call “the modern world”?

I say “nothing comparable.” There have of course been great theologians who have dealt with the question of gospel and culture from within the parameters of this modern world—men like Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr. But these have not had the perspective which the experience of cross-cultural missions provides. Where can we find a cross-cultural perspective for the communication of the gospel to modern societies? Can the experience of cross-cultural missions to the many pre-modern cultures of our world in the last two centuries illuminate the task of mission to this modern world? I am not forgetting the important experience of dialogue between Christians of the first and third world, and between Christians and people of other world faiths. But this experience has a limited relevance because all of it is conducted in the European languages and therefore within the terms which our modern Western culture provides. No one takes part in them who has not been qualified to do so by a modern-style education in a European language. This kind of dialogue, with perhaps some exceptions, is too dependent on the language and thought-forms of the West to provide a radical challenge in the power of the gospel to the West.

One of the most persuasive writers to articulate a Christian affirmation in the terms of our culture is Peter Berger. As a sociologist, he has developed a way of using the sociology of knowledge not (as so often) to undermine but to undergird the Christian claim. In his book The Heretical Imperative he has argued that the distinctive fact about modern Western culture, as distinct from all pre-modern cultures, is that there is no generally acknowledged “plausibility structure,” acceptance of which is taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is heresy. A “plausibility structure,” as Berger uses the term, is a social structure of ideas and practices which creates the conditions which determine whether or not a belief is plausible. To hold beliefs which fall outside this plausibility structure is to be a heretic in the

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original sense of the word haeresis, that is to say, one who makes his own decisions. In pre-modern cultures there is a plausibility structure and only the rare individual questions it. It is just “how things are and have always been.” In modern societies, by contrast, we are required to make our own decisions, for there is no accepted plausibility structure. Each one—as we often say—has to have a faith of his own. We all have to make our own decisions. We all have to be, in the original sense, heretics.

In this situation Berger describes three possibilities for Christian affirmation, which he calls (not very happily) deductive, reductive, and inductive. The first simply selects one of the religious traditions and affirms it—preferably in such a loud voice that other voices are reduced to silence. Of this strategy he takes Karl Barth to be the most notable exponent. But, after a few respectful genuflections towards the great Swiss theologian, he rules him out of the debate. Even thirteen thick volumes of dogmatics are not enough if you cannot show rational grounds for choosing this starting point rather than another. It will not do simply to say, “The Bible tells me so,” if you cannot show reasons for choosing the Bible rather than the Qur’an, the Gita, or Das Kapital.

The second, or reductive, strategy is typified in the Bultmann program of demythologization. Here the fact that the “plausibility structures” of traditional religion simply collapse in the atmosphere of modern secular society is fully recognized. In effect, says Berger, Bultmann takes the beliefs of the modern secular town-dweller as the criterion of what can be believed. When, in a famous phrase, Bultmann says, “One cannot use electric lights and radio and call upon modern medicine in case of illness, and at the same time believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the New Testament,” he is in effect taking the modern worldview as ultimate, and this must in the end mean the abandonment of even those parts of the Christian tradition which Bultmann seeks to safeguard. One does not need Jesus in order to endorse an existentialist view of life.

Berger therefore opts for the third alternative, which he calls the inductive. This is to take the universal human experience of what, in another book, Berger calls “signals of transcendence,” the religious experience which is the presupposition of all theologians whether of Barth or of Bultmann, of the Hindu, the Muslim, or the Buddhist, as the basis for religious affirmation. The paradigmatic figure here, of course, is Schleiermacher. The way he pointed is, according to Berger, the only way forward in the conditions of our modern secular world. The movement associated with the name of Barth is, in Berger’s view, a temporary excursion into a blind

alley, and we are now returning to the main road. To the obvious question, “How, amid the many different signals of transcendence, does one distinguish the true from the false?” Berger answers with the words of the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali that they must all be weighed in “the scale of reason.” He insists that in giving this answer he is not surrendering to a rationalism of the style of Enlightenment. He defends what he calls “sober rational assessment” as the only way of distinguishing between true and false religious experience, but he does not attempt to describe the criteria for assessment or the grounds upon which these criteria rest. Perhaps the adjective “sober” has more than ordinary importance here, for the original context of Al-Ghazali’s image of the “scale of reason” is a passage in which he likens the actual religious experience to a kind of inebriation and goes on, “The words of lovers when in a state of drunkenness must be hidden away and not broadcast,” but later, “their drunkenness abates and the sovereignty of their reason is restored; and reason is God’s scale on earth.” This accords with Berger’s own statement that religious certainty is “located only within the enclave of religious experience itself,” and cannot be had except “precariously in recollection” in the ordinary life of the world.

It seems clear that the “sober rationality” with which we are to assess the value of different religious experiences does not belong to the enclave but to the public world outside. It is not a rationality which rests upon the religious experience but one which judges it. And it is not difficult to see that it is the rationality which rests upon the assumptions of our culture.

I believe that Berger is correct in his diagnosis of our culture in terms of the “heretical imperative.” In contrast to all preceding cultures, ours has enormously extended the range of matters on which each individual has to make his own choices. A vast amount of what previous ages and cultures have regarded as given facts which must be accepted are now matters for personal decision. With the aid of modern technology, if he is wealthy enough, modern man chooses where he will live, whom he will meet, how he will behave and what style of life he will adopt. He can, if he has mastered the arts of “modern living,” change at will his job, his home, his company, his entertainment, and his spouse. The patterns of belief and behavior which ruled because they were not questioned have largely dissolved. Each person makes his own decisions about what to believe and how to behave. It is therefore entirely natural that religion too is drawn into this way of understanding the human situation. It is natural that religion too becomes a matter of personal choice.

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We are all now required to be—in the original sense—heretics.

But what are the implications of this? What are the implications of a division of human experience into two parts—the enclave where alone religious certainty can be had, and the public world where religious experience is to be “weighed in the scale of reason”? We come here to what is perhaps the most distinctive and crucial feature of the modern worldview, namely the division of human affairs into two realms—the private and the public, a private realm of values where pluralism reigns and a public world of what our culture calls “facts.” This dichotomy of the public and the private is something which is absent from traditional cultures. We shall have to look at it more closely. But let us accept it for the moment. Let us accept Berger’s statement that in respect of what goes on in the enclave of religious experience we are all subject to the heretical imperative. But what about the public world where we all meet and where all things are weighed in the scale of reason? It is this world that we must examine if we are to understand modern culture. In this world pluralism does not operate. It is the world of what are called “facts” (we shall have to examine that word in a moment; meanwhile let it stand in its ordinary meaning). In respect of what we call “facts” pluralism does not operate. Here statements are either true or false. If statements of alleged facts are in mutual contradiction, we do not take it as an occasion for celebrating our faithfulness to the principles of pluralism and freedom of thought. We argue, we experiment, we carry out tests until we reach agreement about what are the facts, and then we expect all reasonable people to accept them. The one who does not accept them is the real heretic. Of course, he will not be burned at the stake, but his views will not be published in the scientific journals or in the university lecture rooms. In respect of what are called “facts,” a statement is either true or false, right or wrong. But in respect of what are called “values,” and supremely in respect of religious beliefs on which these values are believed to rest, one does not use this kind of language. Value systems are not right or wrong, true or false. They are matters for personal choice. Here the operative principle is pluralism, respect for the freedom of each person to choose the values that he or she will live by.

Here, plainly, is the real plausibility structure which controls our culture and within which Berger himself operates, and which he takes for granted. His choice of the inductive method for dealing with religious truth-claims belongs to this plausibility structure. His “sober rationality,” in contrast to the inebriation of religious experience, is the rationality of this worldview. The inductive method which he

espouses has been basic to the whole development of the modern scientific worldview from the time of Bacon and Galileo. Looked at from the point of view of the gospel its value is both real and limited. It is a valid way of coming to the truth because the created world is both rational and contingent—rational as the creation of God who is light and not darkness; contingent because it is not an emanation of God but the creation of God who has endowed it with a measure of autonomy. Because this is so, a Christian would argue, the study of things and happenings in the created world can give us true understanding of them. That is the foundation upon which science rests. But the inductive method has a validity which is limited in that it cannot decide the question by whom and for what purpose the world was created. The answer to that question cannot be reached by any method of induction until the history of the universe has reached its terminus; short of that point, the data for a valid induction are not available.

Within the worldview of modern science it is perfectly possible and proper to insist, as Berger does, that the phenomena of religious experience should be studied along with all the other facts that are available for our inspection, and that conclusions should be drawn by induction from these studies. In this way it is proper to challenge the kind of narrow positivism which has sought to deny cultural acceptance to the phenomena of religion. Berger is a true follower of Schleiermacher in commending religion to its cultured despisers, in seeking to show that there is a place for religious affirmation within the “plausibility structure” of the modern scientific worldview. But this whole method simply excludes the possibility that it might actually be the case that the one who is creator and sustainer and sovereign of the universe has personally made himself known at a certain point in the human story. Any such claim is simply bracketed with other claims to be included in a syllabus for the comparative study of religion. It has been silenced by co-option into the modern scientific worldview. The gospel is treated as an account of something which happened in one of those many enclaves in which religious experience takes place. It has to be brought out of the enclave into the public world to be weighted in the scale of reason along with all the other varieties of religious experience, and on the basis of all the facts.

At this point we come to the crux of the matter. What, in our culture, is the meaning of the word “fact”? In its earliest use in the English language it is simply the Latin factum, the past participle of the verb “to do,” something which has been done. But plainly it has acquired a much richer meaning. In ordinary use “fact” is contrasted with belief, opinion, value. Value-free facts are the most highly prized

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commodities in our culture. It is upon them that we think we can build with confidence. “Fact,” says Alisdair MacIntyre, “is in modern western culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry.” The aristocrat in question is Lord Bacon who advised his contemporaries to abjure speculation and collect facts. By “speculation” he referred primarily to the Aristotelian belief that things were to be understood in terms of their purpose. But in advising his contemporaries to collect facts, he was not launching a program for magpies collecting any odds and ends that might be lying about. That is not how modern science was born. The new activity was shaped, as every rational activity must be shaped, by another speculative framework—namely the belief that things should be understood in terms not of their purpose but of their cause, of how they work. Facts thus became value-free, because value is a concept related to the purpose for which a thing either is or is not well fitted. Here is the origin of what MacIntyre called the “folk-concept” of “facts” which dominates the consciousness of modern man. There is, in this view, a world of facts which is the real world, an austere world in which human hopes, desires, and purposes have no place. The facts are facts and they are neither good nor bad; they are just facts.

It follows that the scientist uses a different kind of language from the religious person. Religious statements are normally prefaced by the words, “I believe,” or “we believe.” In textbooks of science no such preface is used. The writer simply states the facts. And it is this world of facts which is our shared public world. Our values, our views of what is good and bad, are a matter of personal opinion, and everyone is free to have his own opinions. But on the facts we must all agree. Here is the core of our culture, the plausibility structure in relation to which we cannot be heretics and remain part of society, the area where pluralism does not reign. Facts are facts.

But are they? If we go back to Bacon and the beginning of modern science we can see that what happened was that different questions were being asked about the things with which people had always been familiar. The Greeks had asked the question “Why” and had tried to explain (for example) motion in terms of purpose. Modern science asks “How?” and tries to explain things in terms of cause and effect. Both questions are—of course—proper, but neither by itself is enough to bring full understanding. You can set out to understand the working of a machine in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry, and you can give a complete account of its working in these terms. But it would be foolish to say that you “understand” the machine if you have no idea of the purpose for which this assembly of bits of metal was put together in this way. And it is certain

that, if you have no idea of its purpose, there is no meaning in calling it good or bad. It just is. If, on the other hand, you know what it is for, you can and must judge it either good or bad according to whether or not it achieves its purpose.

Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue has chronicled the attempts which have been made in the past 200 years to find a rational basis for ethics within the modern scientific worldview. He demonstrates two things: first, that the morality for which a basis was sought was one carried over from the pre-scientific age; and second, that all attempts to ground ethical precepts in the “facts” as science understands them have failed. As Kant and others have insisted, from statements of fact, “This is so,” you cannot move logically to statements of value or obligation: “This is good,” or “This ought to be done.” But this is only so if “facts” have already been defined in such a way as to exclude purpose. To take one of MacIntyre’s examples: from the factual statement, “This watch has not lost five seconds in two years,” you may immediately conclude, “This is a good watch”—provided that “watch” is already understood as an instrument for keeping time. If “watch” means only a collection of bits of metal which can be used according to the personal preference of its owner for decorating the sitting room or for throwing at the cat, then no such conclusion follows and everyone is free to have his or her own opinion as to whether it is a good watch or not.

This simple illustration takes us, I think, to the heart of the matter. “Facts,” as our culture understands them, are interpretations of our experience in terms of the questions “What?” and “How?” without asking the question “Why?” And facts are the material of our public, shared culture, the culture into which we expect every child to be inducted through the system of public education. That human nature is governed by the program encoded in the DNA molecule is a fact which every child is expected to understand and accept. It will be part of the school curriculum. That human beings exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever is not a fact. It is an opinion held by some people. It belongs to the private sector, not the public. Those who hold it are free to communicate it to their children in home and church; it has no place in the curriculum of the public schools and universities. And since the publicly accepted definition of a human being excludes any statement of the purpose for which human beings exist, it follows necessarily that (in the ordinary meaning of the word “fact”), no factual statement can be made about what kinds of behavior are good or bad. These can only be private opinions. Pluralism reigns.

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Here, I submit, is the intellectual core of that culture which at least from the mid-eighteenth century has been the public culture of Europe, and has—under the name of “modernization”—extended its power into every part of the world. Two hundred years ago it was hailed in Europe as, quite simply, the dawning of light in the darkness: the Enlightenment. And it still bears that glow about it. For millions of people all over the world what we call the modern scientific worldview is accepted quite simply as the true account of how things in fact are, in contrast to the dogmas, myths, and superstitions of traditional religion.

And we must gratefully acknowledge the immense achievements of these past two centuries. Who can deny to the men of the Enlightenment and their successors the credit for liberating the human spirit from many ancient fetters, for penetrating the secrets of nature and harnessing nature’s power for human purposes? Surely this has been the most brilliant period in human history thus far, and we are—with all our weaknesses and perplexities—its heirs. It would be easy at this point to throw in some remarks about the signs of disintegration which our culture is showing—the loss of faith in science, the skepticism about out ability to solve our problems, the disappearance of belief in progress, and the widespread phenomena of anomie, boredom, and the sense of meaninglessness. But let us, for our present purposes, ignore all this. Let us rather ask what is involved in a real encounter between the gospel and this culture of ours at its best and strongest. Let us attempt something quite different from what Berger proposes. Instead of weighing the Christian religious experience (along with others) in the scale of reason as our culture understands reason, let us suppose that the gospel is true, that in the story of the Bible and in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the creator and lord of the universe has actually manifested himself to declare and effect his purpose, and that therefore everything else, including all the axioms and assumptions of our culture, have to be assessed and can only be validly assessed in the scales which this revelation provides. What would it mean if, instead of trying to understand the gospel from the point of view of our culture, we tried to understand our culture from the point of view of the gospel?

Obviously to ask that question is to suggest a program for many decades. Let me simply suggest four points as prolegomena to the answering of the question.

1. The first point to be made is that modern science rests upon a faith which is the fruit of the long schooling of Europe in the worldview of the Bible. Historians of science have devoted much

thought to the question why the marvelous intellectual powers of the Greeks, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Egyptians, in spite of their achievements in science and mathematics, did not give rise to the self-sustaining science which has dominated our culture for the past 200 years. Briefly the answer seems to be that modern science rests upon the faith (which of course can never be proved) that the universe is both rational and contingent. If the universe were not rational, if different instrument readings at different times and places had no necessary relation with each other but were simply random facts, then science would be impossible. Scientists are sustained in their long and arduous labors by the faith that apparent contradictions will eventually be resolved because the universe is rational. But if that were all, science would not be necessary. If there were no element of contingency, if all that exists necessarily existed as the outward expression of pure rationality, then all the experimenting, exploring, and testing work of science would be unnecessary. If—as India has tended to think—all that exists is emanation from primal being, then pure contemplative reason alone is enough for making contact with reality. If the world were not rational, science would be impossible; if the world were not contingent, science would be unnecessary. Because it is a rational world, but not the only possible world, we both can and must bestir ourselves to find out what kind of world it is. Science rests upon a faith which cannot be demonstrated but is simply presupposed, and the roots of this faith are in the biblical story which shaped the life of Europe for the 1,000 years before modern science was born.

2. The second point is this. Modern science achieved its great breakthrough in the seventeenth century by setting aside the question “Why?” and concentrating on the question “How?” It left the question of purpose to what Bacon called the speculation of philosophers and theologians and concentrated on the question of cause. It asked of everything not “What is its purpose?” but “How does it work?” That question gave unlimited scope for probing, dissecting, exploring, and experimenting. Purpose is a personal word. It implies a mind which has a purpose real in the mind though not yet realized in the world of objects; it can be known only by listening to the person whose purpose it is. But for understanding cause we have to examine what is already there in the world of objects. This is a different kind of enterprise, as different as dissecting a brain to find out how it works is from listening to a person to find out what he means. Both are proper activities in their proper place. But clearly the elimination of the question of purpose can only be a methodological strategy; if there were no such thing

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as purpose then the scientist could have no purpose in adopting this strategy. The scientist acts purposefully when, as a decision on method, he investigates cause and ignores purpose. Plainly it is an error to move from this section on method to the conclusion that there are no purposes at work in nature other than the investigative purpose of the scientist.

3. The third point is as follows. Human beings are also part of nature and can be investigated by the methods of modern science. For this purpose they are treated as objects whose behavior can be understood in terms of cause and effect and without reference to their alleged purposes. The practitioners of what are called the behavioral sciences seek to formulate laws of human behavior analogous to the laws of physics and chemistry. On the basis of these laws the administrator, the civil servant, and the advertising consultant seek to direct or influence human behavior. In doing so, they are crediting themselves with a capacity for purposeful activity directed to rationally chosen ends, a capacity which the method denies to those who are investigated. We are familiar with the specter of the ultimate achievement of this kind of scientific management of human affairs in the various scenarios for genetic engineering. At this point we are bound to ask the question: What will direct the behavior of those who use the methods of science to direct human behavior? Science itself cannot provide the answer to this question because its method eliminates purpose as a category of explanation. If there is a purpose to which in fact all human life ought to be directed, this purpose cannot be discovered by the methods of science. The scientist has his own purposes, but they have no basis in the world of “facts.” They are his personal choice. Science acknowledges no objective world of values in the light of which his purposes could be judged right or wrong. And since the scientist, like every human being, has different purposes at different times, and since his method excludes the possibility of an objective criterion for judging between these purposes, he is left under the control of whichever is the strongest impulse of his nature. He becomes, in fact, an agent of nature. Man’s mastery of nature turns out in the end to be nature’s mastery of man. We have been conned by the oldest trick in the book. Marching triumphantly forward we failed to notice the jaws of the trap closing behind.

4. Fourth, this way of understanding things which we call the modern scientific worldview has now achieved global dominance. There is, of course, no way in which it can be proved to be the truth about things from outside of its own presuppositions. When, as those who have served as missionaries know, it meets older traditional views, such as those

of India and Africa, which are equally coherent and equally compelling to those who dwell in them, the decisive argument has usually been: Look! Our view works. It delivers the goods. Look at our machines, our medicines, our technology. It works! Today we are not able to give that answer with the same confidence. We acknowledge the enormous achievements of the modern scientific worldview, but its failures are becoming apparent. It is not opening for us a rational view of the future. We can no longer say, as we did a generation ago, “This is just how things are.” And more to our present purpose, it will no longer do for Christianity to accept, as Berger invites us to do, a position in one of the enclaves of this culture, even as one of its privileged old-age-pensioners. It will no longer do to say that the Christian faith is one among the possible private options available within the parameters of this culture. It will no longer do to confuse the fact of plurality with the ideology of pluralism—the view that since no one can really know the truth we must be content with a multiplicity of opinions. It will no longer do to accept the dichotomy between a public world of so-called “facts” and a private world of so-called “values.” We shall have to be bold enough to confront our public world with the reality of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, the one in whom the eternal purpose of almighty God has been publicly set forth in the midst of our human history, and therefore to affirm that no facts are truly understood except in the light of him through whom and for whom they exist. We shall have to face, as the early church faced, an encounter with the public world, the world of politics and economics, and the world of science which is its heart. It will not do to accept a peaceful coexistence between science and theology on the basis that they are simply two ways of looking at the same thing—one appropriate for the private sector and one for the public. We have to insist that the question, “What is really true?” is asked and answered.

I confess that when I say these things I feel alarmed, for I can hardly imagine all that they will entail. And yet I cannot avoid believing that they are true. Nearly 150 years ago W. E. Gladstone wrote these solemn and prophetic words:

Rome, the mistress of state-craft, and beyond all other nations in the political employment of religion, added without stint or scruple to her list of gods and goddesses, and consolidated her military empire by a skillful medley of all the religions of the world. Thus it continued while the worship of the Deity was but a conjecture or a contrivance; but when the rising of the Sun

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of Righteousness had given reality to the subjective forms of faith, and had made actual and solid truth the common inheritance of all men, then the religion of Christ became, unlike other new creeds, an object of jealousy and of cruel persecution, because it would not consent to become a partner in this heterogeneous device, and planted itself upon truth and not in the quicksand of opinion. . . . Should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government, it will be a proof that subjective religion has again lost its God-given hold upon objective reality; or when, under the thin shelter of its name a multitude of discordant schemes shall have been put upon a footing of essential parity, and shall together receive the bounty of the legislature, this will prove that we are once more in a transition state—that we are traveling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us to that in which it found us.

What Gladstone foresaw is essentially what has been happening in the years since he wrote. The end result is not—as we imagined twenty-five years ago—a secular society, a society which has no public beliefs but is a kind of neutral world in which we can all freely pursue our self-chosen purposes. We see that now for the mirage that it was. What we have is, as Gladstone foretold, a pagan society whose public life is ruled by beliefs which are false. And because it is not a pre-Christian paganism, but a paganism born out of the rejection of Christianity, it is far tougher and more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganisms with which foreign missionaries have been in contact during the past 200 years. Here, without possibility of question, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.

Can the West be converted? God alone knows the answer to that question. I do not see except in the dimmest way what would be involved in a serious response to this challenge. I can only see that it must mean great changes in the way we see the task of the church. There is no space at the end of this essay to do more than suggest the headings of an agenda that will take decades rather than years to undertake.

1. I would put first the declericalizing of theology so that it may become an enterprise done not within the enclave, in that corner of the private sector which our culture labels “religion,” but rather in the public sector where God’s will as declared in Jesus Christ is either done or not done in the daily

business of nations and societies, in the councils of governments, the boardrooms of transnational corporations, the trade unions, the universities, and the schools.

2. Second, I would place the recovery of that apocalyptic strand of the New Testament teaching without which Christian hope becomes merely hope for the survival of the individual and there is no hope for the world. The silencing of the apocalyptic notes of the gospel is simply part of the privatization of religion by which modern culture has emasculated the biblical message.

3. Third, I would put the need for a doctrine of freedom which rests not on the ideology of the Enlightenment but on the gospel itself. The world will rightly distrust any claim by the church to a voice in public affairs, remembering that the freedom of thought and of conscience which the Enlightenment won rests upon an illusion—the illusion of autonomy—and it therefore ends in new forms of bondage. Yet we have no right to say this until we can show that we have learned our lesson: that we understand the difference between bearing witness to the truth and pretending to possess to truth; that we understand that witness (marturia) means not dominance and control but suffering.

4. Fourth, I would affirm the need for a radical break with that form of Christianity which is called the denomination. Sociologists have rightly pointed out that the denomination (essentially a product of North American religious experience in the past 200 years) is simply the institutional form of a privatized religion. The denomination is the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture. Neither separately nor together can the denominations become the base for a genuinely missionary encounter with our culture.

5. Fifth, there will be the need to listen to the witness of Christians from other cultures. The great new asset which we have for our missionary task is the presence among us of communities of Christians nourished in the cultures of Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. We need their eyes to see our culture afresh.

6. But finally, and this is fundamental, there will be the need for courage. Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities and powers—realities to the existence of which our privatized culture has been blind. To ask, “Can the West be converted?” is to align ourselves with the apostle when he speaks of “taking every thought captive to Christ,” and for that—as he tells us—we need more than the weapons of the world.

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“A Parable of Fishless Fishermen” by John M. Drescher

Issues: Is a person a fisherman if year after year he never catches any fish?

Now it came to pass that a group existed who called themselves fishermen. And lo, there were many fish in the waters all around. In fact the whole area was surrounded by streams and lakes filled with fish. And the fish were hungry. Week after week, month after month, and year after year these who called themselves fishermen met in meetings and talked about their call to fish, the abundance of fish, and how they might go about fishing. Year after year they carefully defined what fishing means, defended fishing as an occupation, and declared that fishing is always to be a primary task of fishermen.

Continually they searched for new and better methods of fishing and for new and better definitions of fishing. Further they said, “The fishing industry exists by fishing as fire exists by burning.” They loved slogans such as “Fishing is the task of every fisherman,” “Every fisherman is a fisher,” and “A fisherman’s outpost for every fisherman’s club.” They sponsored special meetings called “Fishermen’s Campaigns’’ and “The Month for Fishermen to Fish.” They sponsored costly nationwide and worldwide congresses to discuss fishing and to promote fishing and hear about all the ways of fishing such as the new fishing equipment, fish calls, and whether any new bait was discovered.

These fishermen built large, beautiful buildings called “Fishing Headquarters.” The plea was that everyone should be a fisherman and every fisherman should fish. One thing they didn’t do, however, they didn’t fish.

In addition to meeting regularly, they organized a board to send out fishermen to other places where there were many fish. All the fishermen seemed to agree that what is needed is a board which could challenge fishermen to be faithful in fishing. The board was formed by those who had the great vision and courage to speak about fishing, to define fishing, and to promote the idea of fishing in faraway streams and takes where many other fish of different colors lived.

Also the board hired staffs and appointed committees and held many meetings to define fishing, to defend fishing, and to decide what new streams should be thought about. But the staff and committee members did not fish.

Large, elaborate, and expensive training centers were built whose original and primary purpose was to teach fishermen how to fish. Over the years courses were offered on the needs of fish, the nature of fish, where to find fish, the psychological reactions of fish, and how to approach and feed fish. Those who taught had doctorates in fishology. But the teachers did not fish. They only taught fishing. Year after year, after tedious training, many were graduated and were given fishing licenses. They were sent to do full-time fishing, some to distant waters which were filled with fish.

Some spent much study and travel to learn the history of fishing and to see faraway places where the founding fathers did great fishing in the centuries past. They lauded the faithful fishermen of years before who handed down the idea of fishing.

Further, the fishermen built large printing houses to publish fishing guides. Presses were kept busy day and night to produce materials solely devoted to fishing methods, equipment, and programs to arrange and to encourage meetings to talk about fishing. A speakers’ bureau was also provided to schedule special speakers on the subject of fishing.

Many who felt the call to be fishermen responded. They were commissioned and sent to fish. But like the fishermen back home they never fished. Like the fishermen back home they engaged in all kinds of other occupations. They built power plants to pump water for fish and tractors to plow new waterways. They made all kinds of equipment to travel here and there to look at fish hatcheries. Some also said they wanted to be part of the fishing party, but they felt called to furnish fishing equipment. Others felt their job was to relate to the fish in a good way so the fish would know the difference between good and bad fishermen. Others felt that simply letting the fish know they were nice, land-loving neighbors and how loving and kind they were was enough.

After one stirring meeting on “The Necessity for Fishing,” one young fellow left the meeting and went fishing. The next day he reported he had caught two outstanding fish. He was honored for his excellent catch and scheduled to visit all the big meetings possible to tell how he did it. So he quit his fishing in order to have time to tell about the experience to the

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other fishermen. He was also placed on the Fishermen’s General Board as a person having considerable experience. Now it’s true that many of the fishermen sacrificed and put up with all kinds of difficulties. Some lived near the water and bore the smell of dead fish every day. They received the ridicule of some who made fun of their fishermen’s clubs and the fact that they claimed to be fishermen yet never fished. They wondered about those who felt it was of little use to attend the weekly meetings to talk about fishing. After all, were they not following the Master who said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men?”

Imagine how hurt some were when one day a person suggested that those who didn’t catch fish were really not fishermen, no matter how much they claimed to be. Yet it did sound correct. Is a person a fisherman if year after year he never catches a fish? Is one following if he isn’t fishing?

Mennonite pastor John M. Drescher is the author of Testimony of Triumph. Meditations for the Newly Married, What Should Parents Expect? and other books.

This article appeared first in Church Growth: America Magazine. September-October 1978. Used by permission.

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Part of the Article ”Missiology as a Discipline and What It Includes” by James Scherer

(Reprinted from Missiology: An International Review 15(4), October 1987. Used by permission.)

(This presentation given at the 1987 APM Annual Meeting seeks to answer the question of “what missiology is” and “what it includes.” It reflects on the various ways and interdisciplinary perspectives from which missiology can be taught, and supports the notion that missiology in America today must be integrative and complementary, while at the same time defining its own essential norms. The study is not able to come up with a fully agreed definition of what missiology is, due to flux and pluralism.)

In his splendid account of the founding and first fifteen years of history of the American Society of Missiology (ASM), Wilbert Shenk concludes that “the ASM has devoted relatively little formal attention to clarification of the definition of ‘missiology’ as a discipline. In a real sense,” he continues, “this comprises an important part of the ‘unfinished task’ before the ASM” (Shenk 1987:30). It will be the purpose of this essay to work toward the clarification of the definition of missiology, to identify its major components, and to indicate what it ought to include.

The new Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “missiology” as “the study of the church’s mission especially with respect to missionary activity” and indicates that the first use of the term was in 1924 (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1986). This is surely one of the first definitions of “missiology” to be attempted by a general dictionary of the English language.

Responses to James Scherer’s Paper from Different Disciplinary Perspectives

1. Response by Charles Forman, Yale Divinity School

Church HistoryHistory is basic to the study of missiology. Any

student of missiology needs to be trained to think historically, to understand a historical framework, and to see the background for current practice and current issues.

History should not be only institutional and impersonal. There is need for biographical materials to convey to the student the personal realities, the

motivations, and the commitments of those who have been part of the church’s mission.

General church history needs to be enriched and enlivened by mission history. Most church historians have limited their horizon to the Western world; they need to include the whole globe in their view. Most of them have concentrated on earlier periods and intra-church problems, ignoring the missionary movement of the recent period, which has transformed the life of the church. Mission history can also show the role of the many groups of people who seem unimportant in standard church history—the women, the nonwhite races, the “developing” populations. Mission history deals with places where the church is on the move and reminds the church that it is marching toward an eschatological goal, and these dynamic elements are needed in a field which has often been static.

Many of the contributions which mission history can make to general church history it can also make to general world history. Here, too, is a field which needs to expand its horizons and recognize the contributions of new groups of people.

When mission history is trying to act as a corrective to other fields of history, it needs to correct itself in the same terms. It needs to be sure that its own work is done in ways which recognize the importance of people who have usually been on the margins. It must consider missions from the recipients’ point as well as the donors’ point of view. Some historical writing from the churches of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is now appearing and more of it needs to be encouraged.

The recipients have not always been in other lands. The church in America has been affected by its contacts with other parts of the world and has received much from those to whom we had formerly reached out. This is a side of church history which deserves more study.

2. Response by Charles Van Engen, Western Theological Seminary

Systematic Theology

James Scherer offered us two contrasting definitions of missiology as a discipline. J. Verkuyl’s

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represents a theologizing from a philosophical, a priori perspective on the Missio Dei in terms of God-Church-mandate-task. By contrast, Alan Tippett’s definition represents more of a praxeological reflection “from below” concerning the processes of encounter of God with humanity in particular contexts.

DefinitionTheologically, we would wish to avoid any

dichotomy between these two contrasting viewpoints. First, because our theology of mission must always start “from below,” and must always be critical reflection on the text in context as an interpreted text. Revelation, salvation, and mission are incarnational and known by us only in human experience and in life. Thus a true theology of mission and a correct missionary theology cannot be “theological head games” or “arid speculation and analysis.” Second, we would avoid the dichotomy because there are certainly other equally valid ways of defining missiology as a discipline. For example, we could approach a definition by way of Vatican II’s concept of the people of God in the world, or through “discerning the signs of the Kingdom” (Uppsala to Nairobi), or, as Orthodox mission might put it, “the church’s sacramental presence as the doxological and sacramental presence of God in the world.”

Scope and FunctionThe search for adequate theological definition of

missiology has helped us to understand better the scope (the “proprium”) and function of theology within the field of missiology. We would want to distinguish the entire field of dogmatic theology from both the process and the content of doing critical biblical-theological reflection concerning mission broadly understood, the “Missio Dei” and the “Missiones ecclesiarum” in today’s contexts. However, the arena of “theology of mission” narrowly circumscribed is the specific, critical, disciplined reflection concerning the center of our understanding of the “why” and “what” of the church’s being sent. And here the most basic issue is critical and careful articulation of the “why” of

mission, the formulation of those fundamental principles which function at once as motivation, corrective, and norm for all missiology in all its cognate disciplines.

The mission theologian does biblical and systematic theology differently from the biblical scholar or dogmatician in that the mission theologian is in search of the “habitus,” the way of perceiving, the intellectual understanding coupled with spiritual insight and wisdom, which leads to seeing the signs of the presence and movement of God in history, and through his church in such a way as to be affected spiritually and motivationally and thus be committed to personal participation in that movement.

The CenterSuch a search for the “why” of mission forces

the mission theologian to seek to articulate the vital integrative center of mission today. Again, several possibilities could be mentioned. Orthodox mission would emphasize the praise of God, whereby in the liturgy the people of God are caught up to the throne of God. Others might speak of the cross as central here, while others would offer the “compassion of God” or “bearing witness to the kingdom” as central. Praise, cross, compassion, kingdom, people of God—each one emphasizes something different about missiology.

Of interest, however, is that each formulation of the “center” has radical implications for each of the cognate disciplines of the social sciences, the study of religions, and church history in the way they are corrected and shaped theologically. Each formulation supports or calls into question different aspects of all the other disciplines. The “why” thus strongly influences the “what” and “how” of missiology.

The center, therefore, serves as both theological content and theological process as a disciplined reflection on God’s mission in human contexts. The role of the theologian of mission is therefore to articulate and “guard” the center, while at the same time to spell out integratively the implications of the center for all the other cognate disciplines.

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“The Old Testament Basis for the Christian Mission” by G. Ernest Wright

(Taken from The Theology of the Christian Mission, G. H. Anderson, ed. Pp. 17-30. Nashville: Abingdon, 1961. Used by permission.)

The rootage of Christian mission in the faith of Israel may be discussed from several perspectives, of which three in particular are here mentioned. The first centers in the assembling of the texts which portray the redemptive relation existing between the Chosen People and the peoples. A second and the deeper level of discussion centers in the doctrine of God which the Old Testament presents as an integral and exceedingly vital part of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Atonement, and the Ecclesia, of which the mission of the Church is an important element. A third level, closely allied with the second, might proceed from a discussion of the offense of the Old Testament for the missionary enterprise, an offense deriving both from the contemporary Church’s misunderstanding of the Old Testament and from the offense inherent in the very nature of the Gospel itself.

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H. H. Rowley, in his small volume The Missionary Message of the Old Testament, has performed a worthwhile service in assembling what might be classed as the various “missionary texts” of the Old Testament.172 He affirms that “Moses was the first missionary of whom we have any knowledge,” for God had sent him both to save Israel and to lead them to worship Him, to the end that in Israel “all the families of the earth will bless

172 (London Carey Press [1945]). See also Alfred Bertholet, Die Stellung der Israeliten und der Juden zu den Fremden (Freiberg und Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1896); J. Hempel, “Die Wurzeln des Missionswillens im Glaube des Alten Testamentes,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Vol. LXVI (1954), pp. 244-72; Max Löhr, Der Missionsgedanke im Alten Testament (Freiberg und Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1896); Hartmut Schmökel, Jahwe und die Fremdvölker (Breslau: Maruschke und Berendt, 1934); E. Sellin, “Die Missionsgedanke im Alten Testament, “ Neue allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, Vol. II (1925), pp. 34-45, 66-72; W. Staerk, “Ursprung und Grenzen der Missionskraft der alttestamentlichen Religion,” Theologische Blätter, Vol. IV (1925), pp. 25-37. For additional bibliography see especially Joachim Jeremias, Jesus’ Promise to the Nations (London: SCM Press, 1958), pp. 76-79, whence the above citations were derived; and Bibliography of the Theology of Missions in the Twentieth Century, compiled by Gerald H. Anderson (2nd ed. rev. and enlarged; New York: Missionary Research Library, 1960), pp. 1-10.

themselves” (i.e., find blessing).173 Visions of this goal are to be glimpsed in a large number of passages, especially in the Psalms and Prophets. The following motifs predominate: In the days to come all nations shall stream to Jerusalem as the religious capital of the world. There they shall bow before the Lord, sing praises to Him, learn of His righteousness and acknowledge His universal rule. There God will be enthroned; and there He will judge the peoples with equity, and bring peace to replace the sword.174 God’s claim to sovereignty over the whole world, a universal rule that He will one day bring about, is never doubted but triumphantly affirmed again and again in appropriate contexts. These are especially in passages which relate creation and history, in prophetic views of “the last days,” and in the psalms which reflect the celebration of God’s universal rule in relation to the office of the Davidic king (i.e., the royal and “enthronement” hymns).

As to the mission of Israel in the world, the Old Testament, of course, gives no united voice, except on the fact of the mission and on the necessity of becoming and remaining a loyal “people of God.”175 The deepest penetration into the method of the mission appears in the Books of Jonah and Second Isaiah. The former undoubtedly sees in the figure of the unwilling prophet the Chosen People herself who

173 Gen. 12:3; 18:18; 28:14; 22:18; 26:4. Following Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1922), p. 165, Rowley gives a minimal (and nontheological) interpretation of these words. Yet they play a central role in the Genesis theme of the Promises to the Patriarchs, and a radically reductionist interpretation is scarcely in keeping with the theological content of the Yahwist and Elohist works as a whole. Cf. the broader interpretation of S. R. Driver, Genesis (London: Methuen [1960]), p. 145; Gerhard von Rad, Das erste Buch Mose (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1949), pp. 14 ff., 132 ff.; Walter Zimmerli, 1. Mose 1-11: Die Urgeschichte (Zürich: Zwingi-Verlag [1957]), pp. 295, 421; and the present writer, The Old Testament Against Its Environment (London: SCM Press, 1950), pp. 51-52 and note 13.

174 E.g., 1 Kings 8:41 ff.; Is. 2:2-4; Mic. 4:1-4; Is. 11:1-9, 19:23-25, 56:6-7, 66:18-24; Jer. 3:17; Hab. 2:14, 20; Zeph. 3:9-10; Zech. 9:9-10; Ps. 22:27-28, 47:6-8, 67, 68:28-32, 72:8-17, 86:9-10, 102:15-22.

175 On the importance of this last emphasis in both testaments, see the writer, The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society (London: SCM Press, 1954). pp. 125 ff. The roles of missionary and martyr are important but passages about them are not as frequent as admonitions to exhibit the fruits of loyalty before the world.

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attempt to escape from God’s calling of them for an important responsibility in the redemption of the world. In the figure of “servant of the Lord” Second Isaiah presents the people of God with an eloquent and deeply moving portrayal of their mission, one fulfilled in Christ and become the pattern for the Church’s life in the world. Not only has the servant suffered for his own sins (Is. 40:2; 42:18-25), but he has vicariously borne in his body the wounds inflicted by the world’s evils (52:13-53:12). Moreover his present mission is that he continue his humble mien before the world (“a bruised reed he will not break”) and serve as a mediator of the redemptive righteousness of God, of “a convenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind” (42:1-7). In the crisis of world history the servant is God’s witness in the trial of the nations, His chosen agent to testify that the Lord of history and the meaning of history is the God of Israel, beside whom “there is no saviour” (43:8-13). Consequently, for the servant to assume that his essential task is self-salvation and the restoration of his people to their land is too trivial, too “light,” an understanding of his calling. God has appointed him “a light to the nations, that [the news of] my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. . .I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people. . , to say to the prisoners, ‘Come forth,’ and to those who are in darkness, ‘Appear’“ (49:5-9).176

It is in Second Isaiah, therefore, that the finest missionary texts in the Old Testament appear. The people of God as both His elect and His servant in the crisis of the empires is a picture of poignant power, and through Christ must lie at the very center of the Church’s self-understanding. It cannot be emphasized too strongly, however, that the terms “elect” and “servant” in Second Isaiah and in Biblical theology as a whole do not connote primarily a substantive or ontological status. Numerous problems have surely arisen in the history of the Church because the Bible has been misinterpreted at this point. Instead, the primary emphasis in the terms 176 The recent revival of the individual, as opposed to the

collective, interpretation of the figure of the servant, whether considered as resting on a mythological or “ideal” basis, does not comment itself to this writer: see Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh (New York: Abingdon Press [1954?]), Chap. VII;I. Engnell, “The Ebed Yahweh Songs and the Suffering Messiah in ‘Deutero-Isaiah,’“ Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Vol. XXXI (1948), pp. 3ff.; and C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah(London: Oxford University Press, 1948), especially Chap. X. For a defense of the more usual view in modern scholarship, see H. H. Rowley, The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952), Chaps. I and II; James Muilenburg, Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 5 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), pp. 406-14; and the writer, ibid., Vol. I (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952), pp. 373-74; The Old Testament Against Environment (london: SCM Press, 1950), pp. 60-68.

was understood to be verbal, having to do with function or mission, not status. The latter was simply for the sake of the former, and could be withdrawn at any time when the mission was betrayed.

II

At a different level of discussion, however, one could well point to the significance of the canon of Scripture for the Christian doctrine of God. The trinitarian formula in one sense can be understood as an attempt to state in the language of the Greco-Roman world the complexity of the divine self-revelation in the Scripture as a whole. For all three “persons” of the Trinity the Old Testament reveals much, without which the Church would be so impoverished as to be easy prey to idolatry. In the Old Testament faith is a gift to a people living amidst the basic idolatries of mankind. There God reveals Himself as the sole saviour against the multitude of rival claims to knowledge, security, and wisdom in ancient and respected religious cultures. The Old Testament’s radical devaluation of all earthly powers breaks the natural man’s easy adjustment to the “natural” order, including particularly his adjustment by the institutional means of cult and state which so easily become the vital links between earth and heaven. In this sense it can be claimed that the Old Testament is the Church’s bulwark against the “natural” powers that invade and weaken, where they do not destroy, her faith.177

For certain other facets of the Old Testament’s revelation of God we may point to the theological inferences drawn from or seen to compose the real meaning of the event of the Exodus. In the earliest period of the nation’s life in Palestine the spring and fall nature festivals had been “historicized” as celebrations of God’s act of deliverance from Egyptian slavery and His leading and feeding of Israel in “the great and terrible wilderness.” With this theme is associated the conquest of Canaan, understood, not as Israel’s victory, but God’s gift of a land to the dispossessed who were outside the protection of the law. The sacraments of worship were commemorations of events which had been interpreted as the gracious deeds of God. The events had created the community, and their celebration served the purpose of community renewal. The pagan festival was by contrast an acted rite or cultic drama, in which the primordial security in nature was achieved and the basic rhythm of nature on which life is dependent was continued. The drama was not primarily a celebration but a rite which recreated the

177 Cf. The writer’s article on this topic in International Review of Missions, Vol. XL (1951), pp. 265-76; and his God Who Acts(Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 8; London: SCM Press, 1952), Chap. I.

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event of nature and secured again its benefits. It had its setting in magic and dealt with the elemental forces of life, reproduction, and death in nature. The Old Testament sacrament by contrast centered in particular events in history and brought community renewal through meditation on God’s action, common worship, and renewal of commitment. This is surely the soil in which the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is to be understood, though in the history of its interpretation and celebration there would appear to be a poorly adjusted conflict between the two basic conceptions to which allusion has been made.

In any case the celebration of the Lordship of God by historical narration meant ultimately that the Bible as a religious literature would center, not in ritualistic spiritual, or ethical teachings, but in the history of a people who were on the crossroads of the world in the first great era of imperialism. Theology thus produced an interest in history and in historical tradition, until even the creation is represented as simply the beginning of historical time and of the Lordship of God over time. Furthermore, the association of God with particular events in time and place brought meaning into history and resistance to every attempt to convert the faith into a philosophy. Time thus is more than a cyclical or rhythmic framework of human existence; it is more akin to purpose in history. When Jesus affirms according to Mark 1:14 that “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand,” he is speaking of the salvation of God which is being effected in history, which began with Abraham and is “filled full,” completed, in Christ. The canonical “time” of God’s purpose is surely the setting of the incarnation. God in Christ is an event in history, in “time” and space. He is an action of God, and to emphasize the ontological aspects of the divinity of Christ at the expense of his active, functional relation to God and to God’s “time” or purpose in time, is surely in some measure to miss the point.

One may suggest, therefore, that it is the Old Testament’s presentation of the nature of God’s self-revelation which, on the one hand, keeps the eye focused on what is central in the Incarnation, and, on the other, reveals with clarity the setting of the Church’s mission. God’s active lordship over His creation, over all “times” and places, His actively prosecuted claim to sovereignty over all men—this is the only setting in which the Church’s mission and the individual Christian’s vocation in the world is meaningful. In a sense it is because God has a mission and has placed Christ at the center of it that the Church exists at all or that the question of the Church’s mission is even raised. The Old Testament basis for the Christian mission must surely center, then, in its doctrine of God, in its revelation of the

nature of the first Person of the Trinity and of the very ground of the Trinity itself. This is the God who is determined to be Lord, and not simply the philosophical Absolute or First Cause or the Ineffable in whom we are absorbed and “saved” from history.

Central to God’s action in history is His election, His choosing, His formation and commissioning of a new community: “I will be your God, and you shall be my people.” The language whereby the meaning of this election was made clear was that of Covenant, a particular type of treaty well-known in ancient times. God’s action was a free, unmerited gift which drew Israel to Him, as one is indeed drawn to a gracious Giver. The bond between God and people was thus established in a gracious act which pulled from the recipients a gracious response, or, where the response was otherwise, gave rise to feelings of guilt, infidelity, betrayal of personal relationship. The language which gave expression to this bond, and the requirement of fidelity implicit within it, was adapted from a certain type of covenant in the realm of international law, that is, from vassal treaties of the second millennium B.C.178 In this form God appears not as a king among kings, but as a suzerain, a “King of kings and Lord of lords,” who enters a special relationship with His vassal. He identifies himself to the vassal as one whose gracious acts should lead the vassal to keep the covenant, not because of legal necessity, but because he wishes to be gracious in return. The rights or prerogatives of the suzerain are then specified, and the vassal is left free to order his own life within the framework which the prerogatives of the Ruler specified. Thus in the Biblical text the Ten Commandments specify the will of the Lord, the elemental bounds within which the people of the Lord must live. These commandments alone are called the “Words” of God and considered to be direct revelation. All other laws are mediated; they are the “ordinances” (mishpatim), most of which we know to have arisen in judicial decisions which have been preserved to become precedents. A clear distinction thus exists between the Decalogue and all other laws of a mediated nature. The former may be described as the legal policy of the new community, within which it is free to order its life by the adoption of a variety of specific legal procedures (“ordinances”). Old Testament law was never meant to be constitutional law; the original Mosaic covenant was an order of freedom, freedom to live within the boundaries determined by the Lord, which were a denial of the right to serve other lords and the requirement of internal peace within the community.

178 See George E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: Biblical Colloquium, 1955; reprinted from The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. XVII [1954], pp. 26-76).

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Judaism arose in the postexilic period as a reform movement based on the collection of the variety of legal materials in an atmosphere of delayed eschatology, and their interpretation as the Law or constitution within which every step was to receive regulation. In the New Testament Jesus and Paul revert to the older Israelite conception of the Covenant, jumping over as it were the Judaistic reformulation.

The political symbol of the ruler in special treaty with his people stands behind the Old Testament’s confessions of faith and provides the structure of the language of the faith. In this context “truth” is not primarily an idea or ideal, but an acknowledgment of God’s covenanted claim upon us, a fidelity in commitment and action so that mind and will function together under a commission or vocation. God as Ruler in the form of commanding general is He who would make the world His kingdom, and the convolutions of history are to be understood in this light. God the Ruler as Judge, setting exterior standards of right to which men and nations are responsible, is the dominant form under which He is presented in prophecy. As the Lord Shepherd, and Father of His people, God is also their Saviour, their Rock and Fortress, He who blesses and forgives.

In other words, the covenant language is wholly symbolic, and truth is understood within the frame of reference that language provides. Here again the very language of the faith prevents its complete conversion into a philosophy, an ethical system, a sacramentalism, or a mysticism. It is held within history, and the truth it envisages is not, therefore, the same truth which another religion with a totally different symbolic apperception of reality may seek or promise. This is one way of affirming that the way to Christ must be through the faith of Abraham, not through the other religions. While it may be held that the Biblical language must be continually translated into the tongues of the contemporary world, yet that language itself sets limits to these attempts, creates tensions, and causes a return to Scripture before a new attempt is made. The basic Old Testament symbols of the active sovereignty or kingship of God and His fatherhood over His people appear to be so integral to the Christian understanding of truth that they can never permanently be set aside. Theologically, it may be said that God has chosen to reveal Himself within these historical forms, that while He Himself is independent of them, He has nevertheless given Himself thus to us and does not intend that we shall really know Him in the Church by means of the nonhistorical, nontemporal, nonsymbolic. While a tension exists between the real and the symbol, we

are only given the latter, and for Biblical man this was clearly sufficient as the guide to life.

Finally, we have only the space to mention the fact that the Exodus gave rise to a language which was central to the Bible as a whole: for example, “deliver,” “redeem,” “salvation,” “bring out,” “lead forth,” “mighty acts,” “signs and wonders,” and the like. The event became a nucleus around which a whole cluster of meanings adhered which influenced the nature of prayer and piety, and which always kept before the worshipping community the direction of God’s action and the nature of His righteousness. The prayers of Israel, as a result, were firmly rooted in the great variety of life’s problems, tragedy, sin, frustration. God’s saving action in the past became the ground or hope and trust that salvation could be known as a present experience in history, and not solely as a future event beyond current history, as was the case in later Jewish apocalypticism. This element in the Israelite’s faith in the living God, as much as any other, is the soil which made possible the New Testament’s reinterpretation of Judaism’s apocalyptic hope so that in Christ it could become both “here” and “not yet.” Christianity in this sense was able to rescue the hope of the Jews from the realm of historical embarrassment and to reform it as the context of the Church’s life.

The righteousness of God, furthermore, was seen to be the ultimate power at work in history to deliver or to save the weak, the oppressed, the poor, the enslaved, the dispossessed. It is not a distributive justice, but a zealous action on behalf of the weak, a redemptive action for earth’s needy, regardless of their social status. Here, then, was the ground of hope in history, that what is now present is not what shall be, that we can lift up our hearts to the Lord who alone gives power to the faint and makes them mount up with wings like eagles. And as God is righteous, so His people are to be righteous. This meant that weakness and poverty were not to be made into a source of profit by the strong (cf. Ex. 22:25-27 in the earliest Israelite teaching collection of legal precedents). The commandments to love God and neighbor (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18) had their setting originally in this type of legal and community context. The meaning of economic life was not profit, but the love and service of the neighbor as our obedience to the Lord.

The special concern for the poor was an integral part of the earliest legal corpora in Israel, and furnished part of the background for the prophetic announcement of God’s controversy with Israel for her failure to maintain a just order. The prophetic proclamation of God’s judgment furnished the means whereby Israel’s destruction at the hands of Mesopotamian imperialism was understood. Central

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to the Bible is God’s creation of a new community in which the individual finds his true humanity.179 The ethic of this community, therefore, is not merely the private affair of individuals but is at the same time a social ethic for which the community as a whole bears responsibility. And there will be no peace where the Lord is disobeyed. The Old Testament’s proclamation of the righteousness of God, of the community’s responsibility for obedience as a community, of history as God’s struggle, not only with the nations, but with His Chosen People for unrighteousness—all this is surely a vital and integral part of the Church’s Gospel and self-understanding, of its view of history, of its understanding of man, and of its mission in the world. Could it be said that one of the difficulties of the missionary effort in the past has been the temptation to view the Gospel as a matter of individual conversion by proclamation and education, while the corporate aspects of the Church’s life were largely left unexamined, only to become identified with a particular secular ethos in the Western world?

Other aspects of Old Testament theology, including especially its anthropology, are here omitted for lack of space, and some readers may feel them more important than what is here written. Yet the theocentric emphasis, which alone can give adequate theological meaning to the canon of Scripture, seems to me to be the real setting of the Church’s mission, and without it there would be no mission. If this is true, then the Old Testament’s revelation of the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ is a vital part of the Scriptural basis of the Church’s mission. That basis is not primarily an injunction to the Church to preach the Gospel to the world, though this is certainly part of it. Instead it is the doctrine of God, the God who Himself is the mission.180

179 This is the central thesis of the writer’s monography, prepared with the aid of an ecumenical committee in Chicago, The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society, op. cit.

180 See further Emil; Brunner. Die Unentbehrlichkeit des Alten Testamentes für die missionierende Kirche (Basler Missionsstudien, No. 12; Stuttgart und Basel: Evang. Missionsverlag, 1934). The theme of this brief essay is as follows: “The Church stands or falls with the Old Testament, as it likewise stands or falls with Jesus Christ. With out the Old Testament, there is no Jesus Christ...Jesus takes form not only on Palestinian, but on Old Testament soil...The Old Testament is related to the New Testament as is the beginning of a sentence to the end. Only the whole sentence, with beginning and end, gives the sense.” Brunner then expounds his thesis by means of the Old Testament offices of prophet, king, and priest. Jesus as the Christ is the Word of God, the King in whom God’s kingdom is come, and the one in whom the right offering by the right priest is brought. The message of the cross is completely incomprehensible apart from the Old Testament. Indeed, the revelation of the love of God in Christ could only be mystically-sentimentally or esthetically grasped, apart from the Old Testament.

III

In spite of what has here been said, however, it is not assumed that numerous questions do not remain. Indeed, the Old Testament has always been and will always remain something of a problem to the Church, and certainly to the Church’s mission. While at any one period there have been various levels of misunderstanding in the interpretation of the Old Testament, the question is nevertheless posed as to whether the essential offenses of the literature must not be considered as an integral part of the Gospel’s offense in the world.

The most common impression concerning the Old Testament is that for the Word of God it is a very inadequate book, with blood on so many of its pages and with faulty moral examples so numerous as to enable Christians by its means to excuse almost any action they may care to take. This problem is particularly acute, however, for those who expect of Scripture primarily a series of ideals, or who impose upon it a doctrine of inspiration which God did not design it to bear. If the Old Testament proclaims God’s sole Lordship over history and His role as the righteous redeemer of history, then one would expect history to be portrayed as it is, with heightened apprehension of its real nature, rather than simply as in ideal one would like it to be. Here all men stand revealed as they are, the object of both God’s judgment and salvation. Sin is here taken so seriously that wherever God touches it, blood is understood to flow. This is true when men rebel against God, when God punishes by holding men accountable for their acts, when God’s representative or elect fulfills his (or its) mission in the world, or even when rites of atonement are undertaken. Evil is so serious a matter that blood, understood as the seat of life, must be spilled both because of it and in atonement for it.

One phase of this problem which commonly is thought to be most acute is the Conquest of Canaan. Here God is presented as the Commanding General of a war of conquest. Two things in particular may be noted. One is that “the wars of Yahweh” (in the Conquest) are interpreted within the institution of Holy War, a particular institution of the premonarchial days of Israel. It was a part of that history, and, one might say, an institution which God used to gain His historical ends. If God is Lord of history, one cannot assume that He withdraws when the conflicts of men become bloody. Hence the Lordship of God is even here to be affirmed, and at the same time the context of historical evil in which that Lordship is seen to be at work by mediate means, using people as they are to effect His ends. God’s election does not deliver His servant from history,

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nor even, it appears, from the ambiguities in all historical action. The authority of the Bible lies primarily in its truth about God, but its focus in history prevents that authority from being transferred to absolutize anything in the human scene, including even His elect people’s testimony to Him.

Still another area of difficulty which Christians have encountered in the Old Testament is the problem of the laws and the Law. Is not the Old Covenant filled with so many laws as to make it a religion of works, which in Christ is set aside for freedom under grace? Or as Protestant orthodoxy was at one time inclined to say: Is not the Old Covenant the proclamation of the law of God which led men to despair and thus prepared them for the proffer of grace in Jesus Christ? The interpretation of the Old Testament as a legal document which stands at the opposite pole from the New Testament is a misunderstanding, derived particularly from the books of Romans and Galations. Yet these epistles of the Apostle Paul are to be understood as polemic against Judaism, not as an exposition of the relation of the Old to the New Testament. As already pointed out, the Pentateuchal laws were the legal procedures adopted by a people who were living within the covenant. The rubric “ordinances,” given them, and the fact that they were mediated, was Israel’s way of indicating the difference existing between them and the Decalogue. The latter alone was the “Words” of God. With this distinction clearly in evidence between legal policy and procedures, it can further be said that the whole structure was given Israel, not to lead her to despair, but as a guide to life for a people whom God had already saved and redeemed. It is precisely the genius of the original Mosaic convenant that obligation was tied to the recital of God’s saving acts, that didache (teaching) was seen to follow from kerygma (proclamation), that obedience was placed within the context of response to gracious, redeeming activity. Judaism, on the other hand, created from the variety of scattered legal materials a constitution, so that covenant became the gift of the Law and obedience to that constitution. It can thus be argued that Paul’s attack on the Judaism of his time was in a sense a reformulation in Christ of the original intention of God in Israel. In any event, Law and Gospel cannot be considered an adequate formula for the understanding of the relation between the Testaments, because it falsifies the revelation of God to Israel.

Finally, it is often claimed that the exclusivism of the Old Testament’s claim, based upon the doctrine of God’s jealousy and wrath, makes it difficult for the Church to enter a viable relationship with people of other religions. We live in an age of tolerance, when it is necessary for mankind to live

together without undue friction, and it is being claimed that the Christian religion is not a help but a hindrance to mutual understanding. Its exclusive claims and its lack of tolerance, which appear to divide it into many camps, each in competition with the others, hardly furnish a setting for the unifying of mankind. Modern Christianity in the multiplicity of its missionary forms181 is an enemy to itself, and, more importantly, to the achievement of one world.

From one perspective, namely the sectarianism of the churches, the charge against the Christian mission is surely true. The churches as institutions have gone far to absolutize their external forms, so that the element of exclusivism in the Gospel, which belongs to God alone, is transferred to externals. On the other hand, there is adequate evidence that major Christian groups understand full well the prophetic indictment against all religious forms and piety which are anchored anywhere but in God Himself. Hence the contemporary churches are now suffering and must expect to suffer the judgment of God. Among the evidences of this is the very fact that their evangelizing efforts do not meet with more success, and that the figure of Jesus Christ in Scripture is more respected universally than the Church’s attempts to preach and to teach him. The Church’s mission has always been more hampered by the churches themselves than by Biblical difficulties.

At a deeper level, however, there can be no doubt that the Biblical witness demands an exclusivism of faith, and that particularly so when the God and Father of Jesus Christ is known as the God before whom all other gods are idols. The absolute claims to sovereignty on God’s part, His determination to be God and God alone, surely set limits on the tolerance of Christians in matters of syncretism, that is, in the reinterpretation of Biblical faith in such manner as to relieve the tension between it and another religion. Yet it is the radical Lordship of God which for the Christian actually makes possible the breaching of the barriers which divide the world. The reason is that the Christian is (ideally) created by God as a humble person who faces another human being as a brother in need like himself, not as a subject to be proselytized. He knows that he cannot make converts; only God Himself can do that. He must share what has been given him, but it is God who validates it. He is a servant of God to the needy, not an imperialist or righteous patriarch who with

181 For example, before the Second World War there were some ten American denominations sponsoring missionaries in Japan. By 1959 there were eighty-five. Sixty per cent of the missionaries thus sent were working outside the bounds of Established indigenous churches. (Data supplied by T.F. Romig, Secretary for Personnel, ecumenical Missions and Relations, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.)

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gracious condescension assists the unfortunate. He is one also who has a keen eye to discern God’s work by the Holy Spirit, knowing that the charisma of God cannot always be channeled into the organizational bounds in which he has been reared. Indeed, at a given moment in history it may not be God’s will to enlarge the numbers of converts, but possibly instead to reform another religion from within, and that especially where no community of Christians exists to replace an old one being broken.

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by: Charles Van EngenSelections from The World of Mission by Bengt Sundkler

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Selections from The World of Mission by Bengt Sundkler

(Professor of Church History and Missions at Uppsala UniversityFormerly Bishop in Bukoba, Tanzania)

Pp. 7-31, 38-66, 305-307. Eerdmans 1965English translation copyright © 1965 Lutterworth Press

This book originally appeared as Missionens Värld, Missionskunskap och missionshistoria, Scandinavian University Books. Copyright © 1963 Svenska BokfÖrlaget, Stockholm, Sweden.

The English translation is by Eric J. Sharpe

Used by permission of Lutterworth Press through the Copyright Clearance Center.

FOREWORD

The great surveys of the history of Christian missions by modern writers such as K. S. Latourette and S. C. Neill provide an invaluable framework for the understanding of the growth of the Church throughout the centuries. This book approaches “the world of mission” from a slightly different angle. The historical account has been reduced to a brief section centering on the problem of missions and politics. Otherwise the main emphasis is on the ecological aspect: the milieu in which the Church has to live, and the interchange between Church and milieu.

This book on the Christian mission represents an attempt to come to terms with the specific problems posed by the study of missions. In most other theological subjects the teacher has a body of relatively well-known parallels and associations on which to draw. Thus, to take only one example, general church history can, and indeed must, be linked with the geography, political history, history of literature and art history of Western Europe. This support is largely lacking in connexion with the study of missions. The Western student of missions is faced with the difficult task of mastering such unfamiliar backgrounds as the religions and cultures of the Orient and Africa. But the task is unavoidable for anyone who would study missions with a full measure of understanding.

This book concentrates on three main problems, or groups of problems: first, the biblical basis and theology of mission; secondly, a historical review, concentrating on the problem of Church and State, or missions and politics; and finally, a section in which the young churches are viewed against the

background of their respective religio-historical and social milieus.

This approach has inevitably led to a revision of traditional priorities. For instance, we are not particularly concerned to describe the missionary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; there are more important things in the history of missions. Nor have we followed the traditional missionary grand tour, from country to country in Asia and Africa. There are far too may countries to visit, and their number is steadily increasing! We have instead tried to stress that we are here dealing with missions and churches in two main types of milieu: in the “animist” tribal milieu, and in the milieu of the great religions of Asia. In the former case we occasionally meet with tribal and folk churches which are relatively dominant; in the latter, Christians are often no more than a tiny minority. This comparison and contrast is by no means without its special significance.

An approach of this kind has furthermore made the omissions of many intrinsically interesting problems inevitable. Thus it has not proved possible to carry out a planned comparison between the problems confronting the Christian mission in the West and those facing missions in the Orient and Africa. The current problem of the relationship between mission and ‘Inter-Church Aid’ is another which we have had to leave practically untouched.

CHAPTER I

ALL NATIONS-ONE PEOPLEThe Old Testament

The history of missions begins with Abraham. The Lord said to Abraham:

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Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. (Gen. 12: 1-3)

It is true that the covenant with Abraham had been preceded by God’s covenant with Noah, Gen. 9: 8-17. Some have even claimed that it is Noah’s covenant which is the real foundation of the Christian mission. And that covenant, sealed with the sign of God’s “bow in the cloud”, is indeed an important expression of the universal purpose of the Old Testament.

When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

But the story of Noah’s covenant is followed in the Bible by an event which is painted as nothing less than catastrophe—the confusion of Babel. Men in their conceit had determined to build a city, and a tower reaching to the heavens. But the Lord came down and confused their language, so that they were no longer able to understand one another’s speech. Then He “scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth...”.

The multiplicity of languages has been one of the basic problems facing missions ever since. Mission is translation, in its widest meaning: interpretation into new thought-forms. But mission implies, too, a task of translation in a more specific sense: the translation of the message of salvation into more than a thousand languages. According to the teaching of the Bible, the vast variety of the languages of man is not only beauty and richness: it is also a curse. It is the task of mission to break the curse and replace it by understanding and unity. When Abraham left his home in faith, knowing nothing of the future, he took the first decisive step along this road.

The covenants of Noah and Abraham are important elements in the Bible’s interpretation of the history of salvation; in fact the call of Abraham and the election of Israel are of primary importance for this view. Without this perspective—in the history of salvation—it is impossible rightly to understand the place of the Old Testament in the history of missions. “The missionary thought of the Old Testament” is not something which can be confined to the stories of Ruth and Naaman (non-Israelites admitted to the Israelite family); nor have we sounded its depths

when we have followed Jonah on his adventurous journey to Nineveh.

It is the theology and the history of salvation contained in the Bible that make it a unity—that hold together and yet arch over all its many books, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. There we may see a double “line of salvation” on the two principles of election and substitution: a minority is elected, chosen, to bear, by a process of substitution, blessing to the masses. This is perhaps best shown by a diagram.

AB

C

DE

F

A

C

DE

B

F

Mankind, created by God but fallen into sin (A), is represented after the call of Abraham by the chosen people Israel (B). But the process of election continues; the chosen are now only a fragment of the people. When the people as a whole (the tribe of Judah) no longer measure up to their calling, they must in their turn be represented by “the faithful remnant” (C). Finally this remnant is reduced to one man, who takes upon himself the burden of Israel. Isaiah call him “the suffering servant”. In him Daniel sees “a son of man”. This Solitary was chosen to represent mankind on the Cross—to save the nation; to save the nations; to save all men. Here takes place the great renewal, the great transformation. From this point the line of salvation changes direction. Instead of a progressive reduction, leading from the people to the remnant, from the remnant to the Solitary, there bursts from the Cross a progressive expansion—to the Apostles (D) who bore out the message of salvation of the missionary Church; from them to the new people of God, the ecclesia (E); and through the Church to the company of the redeemed of mankind in the kingdom of God (F).

This “diagram of salvation” shows how the missionary thought of the Old Testament coincides with that of the Bible as a whole. Without the Old Testament background it is unlikely that we shall understand the universalism of the New Testament, and it is well that we should pay it proper attention.

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The catastrophe of Babel’s tower marks the end of the first chapter in the history of mankind. Its original universal purpose and its cosmopolitan scope became drastically reduced. The perspective of salvation became foreshortened and narrowed into a way of substitution. The blessing had to be concentrated upon one people—a people chosen by God for His very own.

The election made Israel the people of God, and His property. It separated them from other nations. Even the word meaning “nation”, goy, goyim, differs from the word used of Israel, which is ‘am. As the property of Yahweh they are ‘am qadosh, a people of holiness.

The call of the patriarch Abraham and the election of Israel to be the people of God also meant that Israel came to be isolated, a “peculiar people” among men. But this could never be absolute; the lines of communication between the chosen people and the Gentiles could never be entirely broken: “...in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” This fundamental passage in fact contains the two great contradictory themes in the Bible’s history of missions. We may perhaps call them particularism and universalism. But there is a hint in Gen. 12 that the contradiction can be resolved. Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 40-55) brings this line to its fulfillment in a universalism which crowns the Old Testament view of the nation and the nations, Isa. 49: 5-6, 12-13. This is not a universalism liberated from its focus in the chosen people; it goes almost without saying that the people of God stand at its centre. Here, however, we must draw a clear distinction between mission and universalism. The “universalist” vision of Deutero-Isaiah aims neither at proselytism in the Jewish sense nor at mission in the modern sense. The very existence of Israel, bearing witness to Yahweh as God and King of Israel, confirms at the same time that He is God and King of the whole world. The fate of the world depends on the role played by Israel, and the witness of Israel among the nations. As Blauw has said, “The chosen people by living for the Lord, live for mankind.”

This theme is further illustrated by the “coronation” psalms (Ps. 96-101 and 110).

The LORD reigns; let the earth rejoice;let the many coastlands be glad! (Ps. 97: 1)

The festive congregation in the temple at Jerusalem, singing to the Lord, sang also as a confession of faith—the faith of the chosen people and their protest against the idols of the world around them. At the New Year festival in Babylon there was celebrated the coronation of the god Marduk; the people shouted, “Marduk has become king,” and at

the same time shouted defiance to the whole of the Near East. Nowhere were the claims of Babylon rejected so summarily as by the singing congregation of Jerusalem. Confessing their faith in Yahweh, they made their implicit protest: “Marduk is not king.” None but Yahweh has the right to be called king, for he is “a great King above all gods,” Ps. 53:3. “For thou, O Lord, art most high over all the earth; thou are exalted far above the gods,” Ps. 97: 9.

Deutero-Isaiah had the same confidence:

How beautiful upon the mountainsare the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”(Isa. 52: 7).

The conflict between particularism and universalism in Israel was in the last resort resolved in the idea of Israel and the Jerusalem temple as standing at the focus of the world and of the nations. With the temple at the centre, universalism could be seen as something centripetal. For universalism can be either centrifugal or centripetal—centrifugal universalism actualized by a messenger, who crosses frontiers and passes on his news to those who are afar off; centripetal by a magnetic force, drawing distant peoples in, to the place or the person who stands at the centre. In the Old Testament, the temple is the centre of centripetal movement: the Gentiles must come to Zion, to the holy mountain at the centre of the world. To turn once more to Deutero-Isaiah:

Lo, these shall come from afar, and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Syene. (Isa. 49: 12)

But there is more involved than merely a journey to Zion. The centripetal universalism of the earlier part of the Book of Isaiah includes the picture of a sacramental banquet, to be held at the end of time.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. (Isa. 25: 6)

At the centre of this eschatological vision—this vision of the future—there stands the Messiah, both as the suffering servant of Isaiah and the son of man of Daniel. But the Messiah is not a missionary, going out to win adherents. The accent is placed entirely on God’s initiative, on the new creation which will take

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place when Zion is raised up once more on the last days.

Another similar vision of the last days is found in Zechariah, a prophet whose universalism is centripetal like that of Isaiah. Zechariah’s vision is more tangible; he sets out the role of the chosen people in these words:

In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zech. 8: 23)

This view implies that, although the Gentiles serve strange gods and must thus be regarded as the enemies of Israel and Yahweh, they nevertheless have their place in the divine plan of salvation. There is another line, running alongside the line of election, which began with Abraham and ended at the Cross. This second line began with the universal covenant of Noah; it embraced all living creatures. Even the Gentiles are subject to the lordship of the God of Israel, since he is God of the whole world. He is their Creator, and he draws their line in, to meet the line of salvation and blessing along which move the chosen people.

All the nations thou hast made shall come and bow down before thee, O Lord, and shall glorify thy name. (Ps. 86: 9)

So we see that there are two aspects of universalism in the Old Testament: one is the line of election and blessing, and stretches from Abraham to the Messiah; the other is the line of the Gentiles. The Christian faith claims that these meet at the Cross.

CHAPTER 2

ONE KING—ALL PEOPLESThe New Testament

The motifs which we have noted as playing such a large part in the Old Testament recur in the missionary outlook of the new Testament. Indeed, the understanding of the missionary sayings of the New Testament depends in large measure on the recognition of the organic unity of the Bible, and these sayings must in every case be viewed against the background of the Old Testament world of ideas. We may begin with a verse which is seldom quoted in missionary contexts, Matt. 5: 14, the saying about the city on the hill. Gerhard von Rad has shown that these words do not refer to simply any city on any hill, but to “the city of God on the hill of the world”. They provide a characteristic expression of Israelite-

Jewish universalism—a view which we also find in another closely related saying of Jesus:

I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. (Matt. 8: 11-12)

This has to do with that same vision we have previously met with in Isaiah: the actual words are based on a passage in chapter two:

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD

shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills;

and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.(Isa. 2: 2-3)

The centripetal tendency here is plain. The subject is the eschatological pilgrimage of a whole nation to Mount Zion—a pilgrimage which leads, according to the Matthean vision, to sacramental participation in a great banquet. The link between mission and Eucharist—”my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”, Matt. 26: 28—is set in the wider context of the history of salvation. A related passage which may be mentioned at this stage, is the description of the cleansing of the temple in John 2: 13-17. This text corresponds typologically to those texts in the Old Testament in which Yahweh is described as renewing the world from his throne in the temple. Jesus’ symbolical action in cleansing the Court of the Gentiles was a declaration that He had prepared a place for a new humanity, the new people of God. But this characteristically takes place at the very heart of affairs, in the temple itself. Jesus, the saviour of the world, stands at the centre; toward Him stream the peoples and nations: this is what is meant by centripetal motion. It is true that some of His Jewish contemporaries asked whether He was contemplating going out to the Jewish diaspora (John 7: 35). But He had His place; and that place was Jerusalem. There He was to die on the cross for all men; there He was to be lifted up—again, on the Cross. And being lifted up He would draw all men to Himself (John 12: 32). The Risen Lord told His

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disciples “not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father”, Acts 1: 4. All lines converge on the centre, where stands Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of Man. It is there He acts; it is there He dies for the sake of the world, that He might draw all men to Himself. On the Cross, Christ unites the two Covenants: the line of Abraham with its theme of election and the universal line of Noah both point forward to the same Cross.

The universality of this Cross is emphasized in the ‘missionary commandment’, Matt. 28: 18-20. Christ is King: He who was lifted up on the Cross comes as the Risen Lord, with His universal message and His command. This text, too, can be better understood in the light of one of the most famous passages in the whole of the Old Testament:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom,

that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Dan. 7: 13-14)

The Matthean tradition sees the prophecy of Daniel as having been fulfilled in the Risen Lord. The last words of St. Matthew’s Gospel are in fact a Christological re-expression of the text from Daniel. But both are connected with the ancient Near Eastern coronation ritual of exaltation, presentation and enthronement. In this way is completed the line which begins with the coronation hymns of the Psalter, with their universal perspective, and which ends in the proclamation of the universal rule of the King. For the “missionary commandment” is mightier than a commandment: it is a proclamation of the Kingship of Christ over the peoples. “The Lord is now King” was proclaimed by the solemn assembly of the Old Covenant in the temple. “Christ is now King” answers the missionary Church in all ages, among all peoples, in every tongue.

This claim—that Christ is King—can however be defined still more closely. The claim was first made at the moment in the history of the world when the Romans had no king but Caesar, and when the Jews had no king of their own (Herod was of course a foreigner). At that moment Jesus came before Pontius Pilate, the representative of the kingdoms of this world, and confessed that He was a king, though

His kingdom was not of this world. Christ the King applies to Himself both the idea of the Son of Man in Dan. 7: 14 and that of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah. There is a close and important connexion between these two concepts and mission. It is said of the Son of Man in Daniel that “all peoples, nations, and languages [shall] serve him,” Dan. 7: 14. And the Servant was set to be “a light to the nations, that...salvation may reach to the end of the earth”, Isa. 49: 6. Christ the King, by identifying Himself with the Son of Man, and with the Servant, proclaims the universality of His commission. The Cross and Resurrection usher in a new epoch in the history of salvation. We have seen that in the Old Testament there had taken place a “progressive reduction”—from mankind to the people of Israel to the “remnant” to the Solitary, the King-Messiah. Now the history of salvation proceeds in a “progressive expansion”, from the Solitary to the many: from the Cross to the Apostles to the Church to mankind. For the aeon of the Spirit has come. The risen Lord, who commanded His Apostles “not to depart from Jerusalem”, Acts 1: 4, now shows them their future commission, in all its world-wide significance:

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1: 8)

This is not to say that there is no tension between universalism and particularism in the New Testament. Indeed, the existence of this tension must be recognized, if we would understand the place of the “missionary commandment” in the context of the Gospel. On the one hand Jesus is seen as a particularist, concentrating on His own people; on the other, as consciously universalist, a King whose rule extends over the whole world. This tension seems to be present in Matthew. We have Matt. 28: 19, with its command to “Go...and make disciples of all nations,” and we have the clearly limited instruction to “Go nowhere among Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans,” Matt. 10: 5. How are we to understand this apparent contradiction?

Scholars have long argued as to the solution. Nineteenth-century scholars, conservatives and liberals alike, were largely agreed that Jesus’ own view of His commission underwent a certain measure of development. Liberals, from David Strauss to Johannes Weiss, considered that there had taken place an evolution, from the narrow rejection of the Gentiles in Matt. 10 to a more generous attitude on the part of Jesus. Conservatives such as Martin Kähler (a theologian whose influence on German

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Evangelical missiology and particularly on Gustav Warneck, was considerable) stressed that only the Risen Lord, being Lord of the whole world, could issue such orders to His disciples. Gustav Warneck supported this view, claiming that the Risen Lord, as He appears in Matt. 28, is the “universal missionary”: in other words, that Jesus was clearly a universalist.

Harnack and the modern liberals reversed this judgment. In their view Matt. 28: 18 was a late gloss, without evidential value. Only Matt. 10 consists of genuine sayings of Jesus. The conclusion, inevitably, was that Jesus was a particularist, and that He had no conception of the Gentile situation. The edge of Harnack’s criticism was however blunted somewhat by the emphasis he laid on Jesus’ mercy toward publicans and Samaritans. But although Harnack believed that research had shown Jesus not to have possessed a transcendent extensive universalism, he did not hesitate to speak of Jesus’ “intensive universalism”. F. Spitta, a contemporary of Harnack, read in his New Testament that Jesus actually crossed the boundaries of Israel towards Tyre and Sidon. Therefore Jesus must have been “the first missionary”, and the founder of the Christian mission. Another interesting contribution came from Albert Schweitzer, whose very first theological publication was a study of Matt. 10 and the particularism of Jesus. Not surprisingly Schwietzer’s solution was along the lines of eschatology. Matt. 10, he claimed, must be viewed in an eschatological light. Jesus was a particularist because the end of all things was at hand. And such universalism as He represented was likewise eschatological. Not until the final messianic age dawns will the Gentiles recognize the Risen Lord. His final conclusion was that Jesus thought like a universalist, but acted like a particularist.

However, it is possible—and indeed highly likely—that this particularist debate has missed the mark altogether. The alternative, “universalism or particularism”, is essentially a modern alternative, taking no account whatever of the biblical outlook on life. Furthermore it overlooks the central Old Testament perspective of the place of Israel and Zion at the centre of the world. We have seen something of the way in which central New Testament concepts—the Son of Man, the Church, the Wedding Feast—can be understood only against their appropriate Old Testament backgrounds; and we have taken due note of the fact that the tendency of these latter was clearly centripetal. It is this tendency that resolves the tension between particularism and universalism, since it is a demonstration of the simple fact that anyone seeking to influence the whole world must start at the centre before he can reach the periphery.

That is why the universal message of salvation is so firmly grounded in the particular biblical history of salvation—that which was accomplished in and through the people of Israel. It is precisely in His particularism that Jesus’ universalism is best seen, and, it may be added, it is precisely His sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, at the heart of the world and of human history, that sets the seal on His universal kingly rule. The commandment of the Risen Lord was followed by His promise of perpetual fellowship; and the charge to His disciples to stay in Jerusalem was also accompanied by a promise, “the promise of the Father”, Acts 1: 4. Such was the disciples’ foretaste of Pentecost.

The coming of the Holy Spirit marked the first completed stage in the course of the Church, God’s new pilgrim people. It is entirely appropriate to the biblical line of salvation that the descent of the Dove should have taken place in Jerusalem, at the heart of the world. There was reopened a perspective towards the nations, and many of their tongues were heard on that day. For language has its given place in the economy of salvation: the catastrophe of Babel (Gen. 11) was finally repaired at Pentecost (Acts 2). The confusion of languages and discord among nations has in principle been overcome by the new unity of the Spirit, given in the Church. The Spirit and mission are inseparable in the new aeon which dawned at Pentecost—an insight stressed repeatedly in the Fourth Gospel, where we find a saying of Jesus which sums up the whole of the history of salvation, and this is bound up with the gift of the Spirit.

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so send I you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20: 21)

The eschatological emphasis of these themes is still more in evidence in the last book of the Bible, with its “great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues”, Rev. 7: 9. Here, too, is the link between martyrdom and mission. Here is the crown and climax of the line which began in the first book of the Bible, continued through Babel and then, via Pentecost, is fulfilled before the throne of God. The path leads from the Tower, through Tongues, to the Throne. It is the assurance of this, and the vision of the Crown, which has given the missionary Church strength and courage to witness “before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9: 15) to the unsearchable riches of Christ.

From Jerusalem the horizon widens, in accordance with the words of the Risen Lord; “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judaea

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and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1: 8). The crux was the transition from Jewish to Gentile, from Israel to the Hellenistic world round about. This is the problem with which the Acts of the Apostles—our first history of missions—deals. The Jerusalem church turned naturally to the circumcised in Judaea first of all. At the same time it probably modeled its missionary strategy on the words of commission addressed by Jesus to the twelve in Matt. 10. The witnesses went out two by two, without gold or silver or copper in their belts; without a pack; nor had they two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff. They were the new pilgrim people of God, on the march with the news of the coming of the Messiah.

The first of those who broke through the Israelite ethnic barrier, and crossed the border into Samaria, was the Apostle Philip. But he went one step further. Led by the Spirit, he taught and baptized the Ethiopian courtier, a representative of Africa, Acts 8: 5, 26-39. Peter was forced to come to terms with the problem of Jew and Gentile in connexion with the case of a Roman proselyte, the centurion Cornelius. The solution, it is recorded, came to him in a vision; it is formulated in words, the significance of which can scarcely be overestimated for the future of the young Church:

Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. (Acts 10 : 34f.)

The consequences were drawn in Antioch, where the early Christians preached to Greek-speaking refugees from Cyprus and Cyrene. The barrier of the law had been broken. The Gentile mission was a fact. This development was officially sanctioned by the Council of Jersalem in A. D. 49. The exclusive judaizing party in the Jerusalem church was not allowed to have the last word. The circumstances surrounding this decision are far from clear; the picture which emerges is highly complex. There were “Jewish” groups in the Gentile congregations who refused to accept Paul as a genuine Apostle, and who rejected his interpretation of the faith; these demanded that all Christians should be subject to the Torah. Nevertheless the decree promulgated by the Apostles stated that “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” to demand no more from the uncircumcised than that they should abstain from meat sacrificed to idols. The sign of membership in the Church, the new Israel, was no longer circumcision, but baptism and faith.

Peter became the Apostle of the Jewish diaspora. Paul, on the other hand, had been commissioned as the Apostle of the Gentiles, and was recognized as

such by the other Apostles. Yet at no time did he forget Jerusalem and Jewish culture. It was natural for him to keep in touch with the Jerusalem congregation. One of his concerns was to help the “saints” in Jerusalem by means of a collection from the young missionary churches. In this connexion Paul clearly stresses the central role of the Jerusalem congregation in the Church: the Gentile Christians have been permitted to share in the spiritual benefits mediated through Jerusalem, and it is therefore only seemly that they should be prepared to place their resources at the disposal of the saints in Jerusalem, 2 Cor. 8-9. It has been pointed out by the Danish scholar Johannes Munck that the Apostle, on his way to deliver the gift to Jerusalem, traveled with an usually large company, and that these were possibly representatives of Gentile Christian communities, on pilgrimage to the Holy City of Israel. And when Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, describes the extent of his work as a missionary, he takes as his starting point, not Antioch, but Jerusalem: “...from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ”, Rom. 15: 19.

Paul was also passionately concerned with the twofold problem posed by Israel’s rejection of the Messiah. The fact that Paul was “the Apostle of the Gentiles” must be viewed against the background of the role of Israel; not until this is done can the radically new aspects, and the greatness, of Paul’s interpretation by understood. The words of Rom. 9: 3-5 indeed come from Paul’s heart:

For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed for ever. Amen.

Here Paul reaches a solution which attempts to do justice both to the Gentile mission and to the mission to the Jews. Israel was not given its place in the history of salvation merely for its own sake, but also for the sake of the Gentiles; and in the New Covenant, the Church has not been brought into being for its own sake only, but also for he sake of Israel—to inspire and prompt the Jewish people to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. This emphasis—that the conversion of the Gentiles is to prompt the Jews to believe—is something radically new and original in the thought of Paul.

In the second chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle shows how the reconciliation accomplished by Christ has brought to an end the

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differences between Jew and Gentile. “For he is our peace, who has made us both”—Jew and Gentile—”one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (v. 14). This new unity was of the essence of the Church, the new people of God, who had in fact taken over Israel’s place as the hidden centre of history and of the world. The key to the Apostle’s tireless missionary labour was his consciousness of having been called and commissioned, stemming from his experience on the Damascus Road, Acts. 9. He knew himself to be an Apostle of Jesus Christ, set apart (aphorismenos) for the preaching of the Gospel of God, Rom. 1: 1. The words of the Acts of he Apostles, that he was “a chosen instrument” to carry the name of the Lord “before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” provide an appropriate summary of his work. Paul the Apostle knew, too, that he was an eye-witness (for he had seen the Lord), and therefore a reliable instrument for the transmission of the Apostolic tradition. His message never varied: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. However, his approach to “the Gentiles and kings” was not altogether identical with his approach to the children of Israel. The basic religious question, the cry of the heart, was different. The problem of the Jew was guilt, the consequence of the transgression of the law. The Gentile’s problem was the fear of death. But both received substantially the same answer. He who cancelled the bond which stood against us with its legal demeans”, Col. 2: 14, is the same Christ through whom “the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality....O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” I Cor. 15: 54-55.

“From Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ,” wrote Paul in Rom. 15: 19. The claim was comprehensive, perhaps, but it gives us some idea of he missionary strategy of the Apostle of the Gentiles. We may note some of the lines of that strategy.

1. First a negative definition: Paul would not build on another’s foundation. His ambition, he wrote, was “to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on another man’s foundation”, Rom. 15: 20. He did not feel called to preach in those places in which others had already made a start, and in which the Church already had its representatives. There was one exception, however: Rome. But Rome was no little provincial city; it was the capital of the oikoumene. And further, Rome was important to Paul as the base for his projected mission to the West, to Spain. Thus for Paul, the ellipse of the known world, round the Mediterranean, had the two foci of Rome and Jerusalem.

2. Once Paul had founded a church in the capital of a country or a province, he regarded the Gospel as

having in principle been preached in that country. It was now the concern of the congregation to take the message of the Gospel out to the rest of the district. The breadth of the Apostle’s confidence in the evangelistic capabilities of the young churches has been stressed in two twentieth-century missionary classics, Johannes Warneck’s Paulus in Lichte der heutigen Heidenmission (1913) and Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or ours? (1912).

3. The Apostle, who had himself grown up in a port, was well aware of the importance of international trading centres as missionary bases, particularly for the Jewish diaspora. At the same time it must be remembered that these considerations were of minor importance compared with the central role of Jerusalem. On Cyprus, in Pisidia, Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia he founded a church—or a number of churches—which could serve as centres of missionary strategy. He was not concerned with mission in country areas: his programme was based on the cities—Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Thessalonica, Rome.

4. This enabled him to attain another goal. He came to the great centres of Hellenistic religion: Pahpos in Pamphylia, with its famous temple of Aphrodite; Corinth, the home of many religions, but also a centre for the worship of Aphrodite; Ephesus, the city to which worshippers of Artemis came on pilgrimage from all over the ancient world; Athens, with its Acropolis and its mystery religions; and Rome, with its Pantheon and its cults. Thus the Apostle of Jesus Christ came to the greatest cult centres of the Hellenistic world, and there confronted these cults with the message of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

5. As a Jew, it was only natural that Paul should make his way first of all to the centres of the Jewish dispersion. Of the Roman Empire’s 40-60 million inhabitants, some 4 1/2 million were Jews of the diaspora. Paul was particularly concerned to come into contact with one particular category among the people of the synagogue: the “God-fearers”—those who, though not circumcised, worshipped Yahweh, observed the Sabbath and avoided certain kinds of food. Among these the Apostle encountered a far greater openness than among the narrow proselyte groups. The majority of “God-fearers” were women, and it is characteristic that Paul’s first convert in Europe was a woman. She was one of the “God-fearers”: Lydia, a seller of purple goods, who was converted and baptized in Philippi, where she provided lodgings for Paul, Acts 16: 14. However, we have seen from our sketch of Paul’s attitude to the Jews that his efforts to establish contact with Jewish groups were not dictated simply by considerations of strategy. Of immeasurably greater importance was

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the theological conviction that in every place the Gospel should be preached to the Hebrews first of all.

6. The Apostle’s labours ended in martyrdom. Paul and the other Apostles were well aware that mission and martyrdom belong together in the strategy of God. In the course of his labours the Apostle experienced that measure of “the sufferings of Christ” which he had to undergo. “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,” Col. 1:24. Paul calls himself an atoning sacrifice for the world, and there is not the slightest doubt that his martyrdom, and that of Peter, in Rome, was of vital significance for the mission of the young Church.

Paul’s mission is characterized by the line from the cross of Christ to the kingly rule of Christ. This is expressed powerfully in Phil. 2: 5-11, in which Paul interprets the connexion between Christ’s death on the cross and the message of the Christian mission, that Christ is Lord. Here as elsewhere in Paul’s missionary thought, it is the eschatological element which places the message in its right perspective. Similarly it is Paul’s eschatology which explains the restless eagerness with which he attempted to pass on the message to the greatest number of people in the shortest possible time. (According to Cullmann, the obscure saying in 2 Thess. 2: 5-7 refers to the role of mission in the last days: “what is restraining him” is the world mission and “he who now restrains it” is the Apostle Paul himself.) Paul’s view of mission is Christocentric and universalist throughout: “So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, to be reconciled to God,” 2 Cor. 5: 20. The message which is to be passed on to the world is a message of reconciliation; Christ the King, who sends out His ambassadors, is at one and the same time the content, and the guarantor, of the message; in fact He is fundamentally the Bearer of the message: He is Himself the Missionary for the world.

CHAPTER 4

CHRIST IS KINGA Theology of Mission in Outline

Christ is King—such is the message and the claim of Christian mission. This is a vital theme for modern missionary theology, with its foundation in biblical theology. The view of the missionary obligation of the Church has been deeply influenced, both by modern biblical research, in which

eschatology is given a large place, and by the apocalyptic events of the present world situation. There are three conclusions which may be drawn from this. First, that Christ is the King who will return; secondly, that Christ is King of the Church; and thirdly, that Christ is King of the world.

Christ is the King who will returnIn our day missionary thought has become more

and more conditioned by the idea of the end of all things. The international missionary conference in Whitby, Canada, in 1947 expressed the missionary task of the church in the words “expectant evangelism”. It is vital that the biblical history of salvation should be taken seriously, since on this view mission is the most important thing that can take place in the interim period between the Resurrection and the Second Coming of Christ. Mission makes sense of this interim period. Its task is to prepare the way for the return of the King, convinced that he has already won the victory, once and for all.

This view implies that all human programmes and all human expectations are called in question. It is also a conscious criticism of the “established church” principle in the missionary enterprise, and of a too-optimistic “folk church” ideal on the mission field. This calls for a few words in explanation. Unrealistic attempts have in the past been made to transplant our Western ideas of “national churches” or “folk churches” from Europe to Africa and Asia. But the biblical revelation of the history of salvation shows the missions that they are not called to build churches in the style of fortified castles or European manor-houses, but as porches—giving access to the Temple of the Lord. Or, to put it somewhat differently, to found a church on the mission field is to establish a colony of the Kingdom of God.

The people of Christ are revolutionaries in a totalitarian world, a company of pilgrims on their way to the New Jerusalem. In I Peter 2: 11 they are called paroikoi, strangers and foreigners, homeless wanderers in the world. This view of the nature of the Church has been expressed in dynamic terms in the idea of “the Apostolate of the Church”, which has been a central theme in ecumenical missionary discussion since the 1950’s. The Church is sent—sent into the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But it is a vital necessity that the Church should make it perfectly plain what is meant by the word “Gospel”. If we turn to the New Testament we find that this is far more than merely a Greek term; more even than a theological concept. To be sure, terms and concepts are necessary—but they cannot convert the world. The Gospel which can save the world is not an idea; nor is it a thing; it is a Person—the

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Person of Jesus Christ. The early Church confessed its faith in Christ as Lord, and it was this confession which formed the basis of her missionary message. Thus the Gospel of Christ—that Christ is risen and will return, that He is Lord and King—sums up the proclamation of the missionary Church, in word and deed, in all generations.

But at the same time it is actually Christ Himself who is the missionary. It is his Holy Spirit who draws men to Himself, and then sends them out as His messengers. Such is the twofold secret of mission: the call of Christ, the power by which He draws men to Himself, and the commission of Christ, by which He sends men to the ends of the earth and to the end of time.

The practical implications of this view are far-reaching. It means that the Church must be constantly prepared to review its methods and its results, and to rethink its strategy, in this light. There can be no ready-made solution. The Church must consider every case on its own merits, and in every case determine what is the most important factor, to which all else must give place. This view makes missions far more mobile and flexible than ever before. Institutions and organizations are not the most important things. The Church—the new pilgrim people of God—is a group, a dynamic group, bearing its message to the world; if it is less than this is does not deserve the name of Church. The life of the whole Church has a missionary dimension. As Emil Brunner has said, “The church exists by mission, as fire exists by burning.” And on the deepest level every Christian is a missionary.

Christ is the King of the ChurchMission, based as it is on biblical theology and

conscious of the end, is well aware that its calling is to build up the Church. But this Church is a porch to the Temple of the Lord, a colony of the Kingdom of God. This realization is necessary for the understanding of the much-discussed problem of the establishement of the indigenous church. It is common knowledge that the Protestant missions have for a century past regarded the establishment of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating churches as one of its most important concerns. It may be of value at this stage to summarize the discussion which has attended this problem.

The “three-self” programme was formulated in the mid-nineteenth century by Henry Venn of the Church of England and the American Congregationalist Rufus Anderson, and was later taken up by the German theologian and missiologist Gustav Warneck. Since then, the object of evangelical missions has commonly been expressed in terms of this three-point plan. Self-government, or

autonomy, implies, as far as the missionary Church is concerned, that the indigenous church should as soon as possible be placed under its own ordained leadership and have its own ordained ministry. Self-support implies that the church must as soon as possible become independent of the financial support provided by Western missionary societies and rely instead upon the economic resources of its own people and its own country. The question of “stewardship” has assumed important proportions in such contexts as these. And finally, self-propagation implies that it is the task—the essential task—of the young church to carry the Gospel out to its own surroundings, to the people of its country as a whole, and even beyond its national frontiers.

The “three-self” formula was valuable as an instrument of church construction on the mission field. And it would not be too much to say that the nineteenth-century missionary debate—from the simplest of village congregations to the highest organs of the churches—constantly circled around one or other of these questions. Its programme as such was highly stimulating. But it gave rise to problems, particularly in the matter of the relationship of the three parts to one another. It was claimed on a number of occasions that the Western “mother-church” or missionary society was only in a position to “grant” independence to such young churches as had become financially self-supporting. Five-year plans and ten-year plans were drawn up, the object of which was to calculate the rate at which the financial support of the Western missions might be withdrawn, and the young church’s contribution increased. This was a symbolic expression of the idea that the Western missions stood in a “John the Baptist” relationship to the young churches: the mission must decrease in order that the Church might increase. Henry Venn looked forward to the “euthanasia” of the missions when they had completed their task: the missions should aim at process of “devolution”—i.e. the transfer at the earliest possible date of the responsibility for practical government to the administrative body of the young church in question. The main topic of conversation in mission-church debates was usually when this was likely to be able to take place. It is perhaps not surprising that this did little to improve relations between the two parties.

It is interesting to note that there was often a close relationship between the “independence” debate in the Church and the quest for political independence in the country concerned. Dramatic changes in the political life of the country often helped to bring Church independence more rapidly than might otherwise have been the case. This is seen in the case of a number of churches founded by

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German missionaries. Their leaders were twice interned, during the two World Wars, and it became possible to speak of “orphaned missions”. Thus the Lutheran Chhota Nagpur Church in Central India, which had been founded by the Gossner mission, gained its autonomy soon after the First World War. This type of situation has been even more pronounced during and after the Second World War, especially in Tanganyika. Further examples of the same tendency—rapid autonomy forced on by political crises—are to be seen in the Protestant Churches of the Congo.

Among the positive measures undertaken in order to speed up the process of autonomy was improved education, and in particular theological education. New constitutions were drawn up in order to regularize the relation between mission and Church, and these as a rule presupposed that missionary conferences and missionary councils were as soon as possible to be replaced by synods under indigenous control. Africans and Asians became the Presidents or Bishops of the new churches. The Whitby conference of 1947 called the new relationship between mission and Church “partnership in obedience”. This development was consolidated during the 1950’s. Asian, African and Latin American church leaders, meeting at Willingen (Germany) in 1952, expressed their convictions in these words: “We are convinced that missionary work should be done through the Church. We should cease to speak of missions and churches and avoid this dichotomy not only in our thinking but also in our actions. We should now speak of the mission of the Church.”

Recent experience has however shown that the most important factor in the life of the young Church is not autonomy but “Christonomy”: not independence, but Christ-dependence. The Christian mission is far more than an organ for the foundation and creation of churches. It is not concerned to create static religious societies, closed ghettoes in the midst of a non-Christian world. The Church must continually be crossing its own frontiers; it must be a point of contact between the Gospel and the non-Christian world, and a centre for the evangelization of that world. The Church is sent into the world; the Church is the people of God on the march. It is thus only reasonable to speak of the Church as being synonymous with mission. In fact the Church is mission. And because Christ is the King of the Church, it can never cease to labour for Christian unity: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all...” Eph. 4: 5. It is not without significance that during this century it has been the young churches who have stressed, time and time again, that the unity of the Church is the greatest of

all Christian concerns. And the existential wrestling with the problem experienced by the churches of India, Ceylon, and East and West Africa has been an immeasurable source of inspiration for ecumenical discussion in the West. The integration of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches in 1961 was a most important expression of the dynamic view, that mission and ecumenics are essentially one and the same. This is one of the great steps forward of recent years.

Christ is the King of the WorldChrist is the Saviour of the world, and the

propitiation for the sins of the whole world (cf. I John 2: 2). Thus Christ is a matter of concern for the world, and the Church and the world are in the last resort subject to one and the same Lord. Oscar Cullmann has likened this situation to two concentric circles, the Church forming the inner circle, the world the outer circle. According to the Scriptures, both together form that kingdom over which the King exercises his authority. Therefore the difference between the Church and the world is not that the Church belongs to Christ while the world belongs to some other “authority”. Both in fact belong to Christ. Nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between the two: the Church knows and recognizes Christ, and is called to make Him known; the world, on the other hand, does not know Him—whether this be taken to imply that the world does not yet know Christ, or that the world no longer knows Him. The Kingly power of Christ is revealed in the Church and recognized in the Church; in the world, the power of Christ, though latent, is hidden.

The authority of Christ as King has consequences for the social responsibility of the Church, and for her encounter with the non-Christian religions. We shall deal with these in turn.

The Social Responsiblity of the ChurchThe history of mission shows that there is a close

relationship between the bearing of witness to Christ and social action. If the authority of Christ the King is to be recognized in, say, present-day India, the Gospel, which is the concern of all men and of the whole man, must also be demonstrated in social service. This connexion has not infrequently been interpreted to mean that the Church’s social contribution can serve as some form of preparation for the real work of missions. Thus medical and educational work have been looked upon as preparation for preaching, or “direct” witness to Christ. Consequently, missions have all too often been regarded as an attempt on the part of the Church to “save” the world—to attract non-Christians from

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the world into the Church. In such cases “the Church” has usually meant the mission station.

But the connexion between proclamation and service must be thought out afresh, and given a radically new orientation. In the first place, because the recognition that Christ is Lord both over the Church and the world forbids such an over-simplified argument: we simply cannot draw a hard and fast line between the spheres of religion and the world; nor can we define “mission” as that part of the Church’s work which attempts to conquer the secular sphere by removing men and women from its influence. Is it not rather so, that the world is the latent Kingdom of Christ, in which the Church is called to make Christ known? The lordship of Christ is the lordship of Love, and His claim on the world is conditioned by the claims and the challenge of Love, with all its profound social consequences. The Lord of this world is also the bread of life, and the claims of Love are best seen in the drama of the broken bread. It is thus that Christ in His Love comes into the world, and the Church is called to follow her Lord along this path. The Church is called to witness to her Lord in a world which Christ desires to win by Love. It is Christ who calls His Church to serve all men, and the whole man, in a love which knows no other justification than that the need of the world, and the Church’s possibilities of helping, are realistically evaluated. We must remember that Christ suffered and died outside the wall of the city—outside the walls, in the Johannesburg location, in the slums of Calcutta, where Christ is identified with His brethren, where He once more gives Himself to the world in the liturgy of Love. And it is in small and great situations, with concrete application and with the stamina of Divine Love, that his call to His faithful people can be made real.

But the social responsibility of the Church may equally well be turned in another direction. At the East Asia Christian Conference, meeting at Kuala Lumpur in 1959, the Christians of Asia claimed that democracy could not become a living reality in Asia if it were not based on Christian principles. Social responsibility was on this occasion crystallized in the work of developing the political and social resources of the Asian countries. Thus obedience to the Lord of the world implies a deep concern—which is both social and prophetic—for the social and political problems of the new states. It is in situations such as these that the cumulative experience of the churches, mediated through the World Council, has been applied to the field of social witness. J. H. Oldham spoke of “the responsible society”—an idea wholly in line with the experience of Asian church leaders. The discussion continues, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even, perhaps, in the West.

Christ and the Religions of the WorldChrist is the Lord, not only over the Church, but

over men of other faiths. Christ has died and been uplifted for Hindus and Buddhists, as well as for Christians. He is the Saviour of the world, and the propitiation for the sins of the whole world. Such is the missionary message and the claim of Christianity when confronted by the faith of Islam, Hindu mysticism or the serious asceticism of Buddhism. It is with this message that the Church is called to make Christ known, and it is through this message that the Christ is called to bring men of other faiths to their rightful Lord.

On this point, it would seem that mission must take account of a danger which is greater now than a generation ago. It is probably true to say that the areas of contact between the Church (or the mission) and the non-Christian religions are more circumscribed now than they were a mere thirty years ago. Too few missionaries are given the opportunity of getting to know the non-Christian religions, and of taking active part in the real missionary task of confrontation between the Gospel and the religions. This is a serious matter. The demands of love are such, that before witness can be borne to the Lordship of Christ over men of other faiths, the messenger must know—and know intimately—the people concerned. Knowledge of the social and religious milieu in which the service of Christ is to be fulfilled is an absolute necessity, quite apart from the interpretation the missionary places on the relationship between the Gospel and the religions. This has been made abundantly clear in the experience of the young churches. If it be true that Christ is Lord over men of other faiths, and the Answer to their questions raised by the religions, then to hear witness to Him requires close knowledge of the situation of those religions. For the Final Answer cannot be accepted as a real answer until it becomes the answer to a real question and a real desire, the answer to the concrete questions asked by real men and women.

This situation of witness implies the further problem of how other relgions are to be interpreted, and how contact is to be made with their several worlds. This has been a theological problem in every age of the Church, and it may be worth pausing at this point to take a closer look at the question of the Gospel and the religions. In the last resort the answer depends on certain basic theological assumptions, sometimes conscious and explicit, sometimes unconscious, but no less important for that. Many different approaches are recorded. We shall consider only four of them here: four characteristic ways of

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looking at the problem—the Catholic, Lutheran, Liberal and Barthian solutions.

The Catholic ApproachThis approach is first seen in the work of

Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215). Clement, taking up a line of thought begun in the Logos theology of St. John’s Gospel, and in the Apologists, taught that the Christ-Logos, “the true light that enlightens every man” (John 1: 9) is represented in the world of the religions by scattered or disseminated logoi, “logoi spermatikoi”. These lesser lights anticipate the coming of the true Light.

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the seminal theologian of the Church of Rome, developed this view into a system in which the natural religion of mankind is seen as a praeparatio evangelica, a forecourt of the Temple. The fundamental theological thesis, that grace does not annul, but fulfills, nature, made it possible to hold a generous view of the religions, and resulted in extensive accommodation in practice. Nature, as it exists in the empirical religions, was fulfilled and consecrated by being adopted into the Church’s scheme and brought within the sphere of Divine grace.

A modern exponent of the Catholic missionary attitude was the Belgian Jesuit, Pierre Charles (d. 1954), who expressed the Catholic view in a thought-provoking way. His basic assumption was that there must of necessity by concord between the Creator and the Redeemer. God’s creative activity cannot be limited to a time “in the beginning”; He has not ceased to create. His creative activity in all ages harmonizes with His plan of salvation. It is true that sin has disturbed the order of God’s creation; but sin has not been able to make that order wholly evil. Human nature is not displeasing to God merely because it is human. In the purpose of God the Church must be universal. Therefore there is room in the Church for everything she is able to accept: in other words, for everything which does not explicitly contradict the Divine nature. Herein lies the purpose of creation, not only of the separate gifts given to men, but also of social institutions, art, customs, language, systems of faith, religious rites: all this finds its due place as the raw material from which the Church is built. Divine Providence has been at work in all ages, among all peoples, and though it has met with opposition from the sins of men, its labours have not been entirely fruitless. To condemn or reject this work is tantamount to dishonouring God. Clearly, the practical consequence of such a view must be a spirit of tolerance. Superstition is not condemned out of hand as Unglaube, the diametrical opposite of faith; instead the watchword is “fulfillment”. The non-Christian religions are only to be conquered by

being fulfilled, though they are at the same time corrected and purified; they blossom and bear fruit in their own true goal, the Alpha and Omega of all creation and all reality.

This is the line followed by all Catholic missionary theology, and substantially that of a great part of the Anglican Church since B. F. Westcott. It is thus characteristic that the theology of Pierre Charles should have profoundly affected the missionary theory and practice of the Church of England in recent years, though his view of the Church has been modified, and reinterpreted in dynamic terms, as a growing organism.

The Lutheran ApproachLuther’s own attitude to the non-Christian

relgions must be seen against the background of his age, of his relations with the theology of the Church of Rome and—most important—of his evangelical rediscovery.

The only non-Christian religions with which Luther had any acquaintance were Judaism and Islam, the latter being particuarly topical. But he had also come across non-Christian piety in his studies in the field of Greek and Roman literature. The expansion of the world in an age of exploration, and the greater knowledge of non-Christian religions which came as a result, belong to a later age than that of Luther.

Luther’s attitude to Roman Catholic theology was two-fold. On the one hand he was careful to perpetuate what he considered to be fundamental Christian truths; but on the other he attacked the Roman interpretation whenever he suspected it of advocating “salvation by works”. The same may be said of his attitude to the non-Christian religions. Thus Luther is able to speak of a general knowledge of God, and to develop the mediaeval doctrine that natural law consists in the knowledge of the sovereign will of God, and that all men are to some extent acquainted with that law. In this way Luther made possible a theological interpretation of the religions, but an interpretation, it would be well to note, which depends in the last resort on his evangelical view of Christianity.

All men know that God exists, and that He is a God of law. But not all men stand in a right relationship of trust toward God. Many rely on their own ideas instead, worshipping the creation instead of the Creator. Such is the paradoxical situation in which the adherents of the non-Christian religions stand: they know that God exists; but they do not know who He is.

It is characteristic of Luther’s view that faith in God and trust in God belong together. In the Greater Catechism he wrote, in his exposition of the first

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commandment, “For these two, faith and love, belong together. That on which your heart relies, I say, is in reality your God....To have a God means to have something in which your heart can trust unreservedly.”

This perfect confidence, and hence this true knowledge of God, are not granted to man merely for the asking. Men rely on their own notions of the Divine, and worship creation instead of the Creator. True faith, and knowledge of God as He is, are accomplished by the work of the Holy Spirit, and come through the enlightenment given by the Gospel. Alongside the general revelation must be placed the special revelation, the revelation given in Christ, and mediated by Him in and through the Gospel. The content of the special revelation is the knowledge of the identity and nature of God.

Revelation in Christ fulfills general revelation, and puts natural law in its proper place. In Christ there is revealed the true nature of God as grace and mercy; and in fellowship with Him we are enabled to make proper use of the law. The law exists, not to enable us to build up a form of righteousness on the precarious foundation of our own vanity and accomplishments, but to help us to live in the world in service of our neighbour.

Regin Prenter, a modern Danish Luther specialist, has interpreted Luther’s attitude to the non-Christian religions as being evidence of a “paradoxical” view of religion. Prenter characterizes the non-Christian religions as “truth off the rails”. They contain a certain measure of truth, in that they are fully aware that God exists, but they are “off the rails” in that, although they know that God exists, their views of His identity and nature are mistaken.

The Liberal ApproachThe Liberal position is one of cultural openness

and positivism. Among the factors giving rise to this approach may perhaps be mentioned a closer acquaintance with the history of religions, an interest in the development of the individual personality, and in general a positive view of progress. Traditional and theological categories, such as “natural religions” and “general revelation” were re-interpreted and deprived of their eschatological elements in order to leave room for the findings of “comparative religion” or “the science of religion”. The religions tended to be interpreted as manifestations of a deep-seated human instinct. At the same time the evolutionism of the late nineteenth century, in its religious application, regarded Christianity as the end and goal of all religious development. In Great Britain, this view was popularized by Max Müller and Monier Monier-Williams, and was taken up by a number of prominent missionaries, among whom J. N. Farquhar

(1861-1929) is worthy of particular mention. In Germany, E. Troeltsch became the spokesman of the religio-historical school of missionary thought. Much of his best work was done on the question of the absoluteness of religion, viewed as a separate and distinct category within the thought and spiritual life of man.

Characteristic of the Liberal position, particularly in the English-speaking world, was an active concern in social matters. W. Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel of the 1920’s may be regarded as a late and extreme expression of this particular tendency.

On the ecumenical front there has in recent years been continual discussion between representatives of the Liberal position and those who have held to a more traditional missionary theology. The 1928 Jerusalem conference of the I. M. C. may be taken as an example of such discussion. On this occasion the Liberal argument, that there are to be found “values” in the non-Christian religions, was subjected to severe criticism, not least by Continental theologians. The most fully developed statement of the Liberal approach is perhaps that of the American theologian, W. Hocking, in his much-discussed book Rethinking Missions (1932).

The relation between the Gospel and the religions is a problem which presses hard upon theologians in the young churches. The liberal approach has prompted some of them to undertake bold ventures of speculation. As an example, we may point to the work of the Indian laymen G. V. Job, P. Chenchiah and V. Chakkarai, and in particular to their joint book Rethinking Christianity in India (1938).

The Barthian ApproachThe brunt of Karl Barth’s polemic has been

borne by Liberal Protestantism, whose religio-historical approach placed historical Christianity on a par with other religions. This led to the revelation in Christ being allowed only relative validity, since in the history of religions Christ is viewed against the background of religions generally. “Liberal Protestantism did not see the religions of revelation: it saw the revelation of religion,” and it therefore fell into “the heresy of religionism”. In Barth’s view, religion is an attempt on the part of godless man to re-establish contact (re-ligere) with God, without recognizing the fact of the Fall, without taking sin seriously, and without allowing the necessity of salvation in Christ. Religion is therefore Unglaube, the opposite of faith, and the revelation of God in Christ is such as to abolish religion altogether. Everything necessary to man’s salvation is given in Christ. But since Christ is an active participant in the

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work of creation (Col. 1: 16), He is also in the last resort the subject of the religions. Men of other faiths—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—who are to be approached with the Word concerning Christ, have themselves been created by Christ. From this point of view Christianity as a historical phenomenon and as a religion is subject to the same conditions as other religions: like them, Christianity is subject to the judgment of the revelation of Christ and His Cross. Liberal Protestantism judged Christ against the background of the religions; theology judges the religions, Christianity not excepted, by the measure of Christ.

Barth’s contribution has led to a re-evaluation on the part of Evangelical missionary theologians: the distinction that must be drawn is not between Christianity and the religions but between the Gospel, Christianity and the religions. But they are one and all subject to the judgment of the Cross, and all stand related to reality, as it has been made known in the revelation of Christ. According to Barth, there is one criterion, and only one, which divides Christianity from its noble parallels, such as Amida Buddhism or India’s religion of bhakti. That is the name of Jesus, the Gospel of the living Christ. The idea of “points of contact” between the Gospel and the world of the religions Barth rejects sharply—mercilessly, even. Incidentally, it was this question which led to the celebrated conflict between Barth and Emil Brunner. The crux was the question of anthropology—a subject in which Barth has little interest. Barth’s categorical Nein! (1934) was written in answer to Brunner’s attempt to recognize and explain the extent of knowledge of God in the religions, outside the revelation of Christ.

A number of missionary scholars have, under the influence of “dialectical theology”, advocated an “Evangelical science of religion”, as distinct from the general comparative history of religion. This trend is to be seen in the work of the German scholars Althaus, Frick, Hartenstein, Holstein and Rosencranz, who have stressed the need for a study of religion in which the ostensible objectivity of the history of religions is abandoned; instead, they claim, the religions must be viewed and understood in the light of the Gospel itself. Of particular importance for the Evangelical mission in our day has been the fact that the Dutch scholar Hendrick Kraemer, in his influential book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938), appears to have accepted Barth’s view of the impossibility of “points of contact”, thereby going a long way toward accepting Brunner’s overall view of the relationship between the Gospel and the religions.

One positive result of Kraemer’s work has been to help liberate missions from naïvety in their

attempts at adaptation: for the belief that it was possible to disengage an idea here, and a concept there, from the complex world of the religions, and use them to help build the church, can scarcely be regarded as other than naïve. Kraemer, like Karl Hartenstein before him, stressed that a religion must be viewed as a whole, focussed on its given centre. Cultural elements and religious phenomena must therefore undergo a radical change of meaning when they are separated from this centre and pressed into the service of Christ. Kraemer further claims that points of contact in the religions can serve only an antithetical purpose in the context of the Christian message (though this is of course not to say that they can only be evaluated negatively). The only genuine point of contact is to be found in the attitude of the missionary: it is the missionary who brings about “communication” between the Gospel and the religio-sociological milieu. But it must be remembered that Kraemer is consistently dialectical in his dialectical theology, and that he has succeeded in combining his radical emphasis on the revelation in Christ with a desire (and an ability) to understand the heritage and forms of expressions of other religions. He has of course been a missionary himself: from 1922 to 1935 he was in the service of the Netherlands’ Bible Society in Indonesia.

In his most recent books Kraemer has made a number of valuable and stimulating contributions to the discussion of the “problem of communication”—a question which has been closely studied at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey. Another scholar who has recognized, on the basis of practical missionary experience, the difficulties and opportunities attending the communication of the Christian message in the present cultural situation is H. R. Weber.

It was perhaps only to be expected that Kraemer’s The Christian Message—the most important work of missionary theology this century—should have been interpreted in some quarters as advocating the breaking off of the dialogue with the religions. Such was, however, very far indeed from being Kraemer’s intention. The heated debate between Kraemer and the Norwegian missionary, K. L. Reichelt, at Tambaram only served to confirm that impression, at least in Asia. Not until the 1950’s was the debate taken up once more, this time with a new emphasis. Asian theologians and churchmen—D. G. Moses and P. D. Devanandan in India, D. T. Niles and S. Kulandran in Ceylon—have expressed their views on a matter which is of the essence of the situation. It is characteristic that they should have begun with the problem of anthropology, with the concrete religious needs and aspirations of Asian men and women, and attempted to view these in the light

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of the Gospel, in order to confront Asian religion with universal Christianity. The International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches have tried to meet this most pressing of all missionary needs by setting up a number of research centres at strategic points in Asia: Kyoto, Hong Kong and Bangalore. From these centres scholars are able to watch developments in the world of the Asian religions, and are enabled by this means to gain a deeper understanding of the encounter between the Gospel and the religions.

The Commission to TranslateThe missionary task is to proclaim Christ as

king, and to make Him known to the nations. This implies that the Gospel must be translated, in word and deed. But an observation such as this can be applied in a virtually unlimited number of ways. A whole theology of mission can in fact be built on the thesis that mission is translation. The overall task of the missionary Church is to interpret and translate, in its preaching, teaching and works of love, the will of God to salvation, as it is revealed in the eternal mission, the Father’s sending of the Son. This commission to translate may be summarized under six heads.

1. Mission is translation. “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you, “ John 20: 21. This we have seen to be one of the fundamental missionary texts of the New Testament. In reality there is but one mission, from which all other missions are derived: the first mission, from eternity, the Father’s missio (sending) of His Son.

In order that men might know who God is, He translated His will to salvation, by sending His Son into the world of men. The eternal Christ emptied Himself of His glory, and accepted our human condition, with all its limitations. He humbled Himself, and identified Himself with us. In order that we might know who God is, God sent the Logos, the Word, and the Word spoke the language of our poverty.

2. Translation is a risk, but a risk which must be taken. A Swedish author has written that “translation is an impossibility. To re-express the work of an English, a French or a Hottentot author in Swedish terms is in the last resort impossible. But translations are needed, and that is why some people must spend their time in the attempt to achieve the impossible.” Such is the measure of difficulty attending all translation, and the missionary task of interpretation is no exception. In point of fact, it is highly improbable that the content of the biblical message, expressed in Greek or Hebrew, will ever come fully home to a Zulu, a Tamil or a Swede. St. Augustine was one of the first to realize the existence this

problem; he pointed out the difficulties attending the “christianization “ of the Latin language. Two persons meet, and in the course of conversation both use the word salus; the Christian means “salvation from evil”, the non-Christian still uses the word in its classical sense of “good health”. The situation has not improved since St. Augustine’s day.

It is not self-evident that the missionary task of translation will ever be possible. But should success come, it will be due less to the missionary than to the work of the Holy Spirit. He who proceeds from the Father and the Son builds a bridge of understanding between man and man, and between nation and nation; He alone makes it possible for an African or a Swede to receive the message of the Gospel. The Spirit builds, in new lands, a Church speaking new languages.

God Himself took a risk of translation when He became incarnate, when He translated the Word into our stumbling language—and misunderstanding is inevitable. The offer of salvation becomes a stumbling-block. His translation—His offer of self-giving and self-effacing love—led direct to a cross. But the cross of risk and suffering is inscribed anew upon every translation as soon as an attempt is made to express the message in new terms.

But the risk must be taken. Otherwise there can be no communication.

3. Strangers and translators.(a) The Church is a stranger to the people and

their culture. We may recall our sketch of the biblical theology of mission, and say that she is a porch of the heavenly temple, or “a colony of heaven”. She has not grown up of herself, by virtue of her own natural resources: she is sent by others, a link in a chain of mission, a succession of servants stretching back to the Father’s sending of His Son. She is sent by others, from other lands, incorporated as a link in the long, holy chain created by the Holy Spirit in and through the tradition and history of the Church. Sent from Jerusalem and Antioch to Greece, Italy, Gaul and Ireland; from the country of the Franks and Saxons and Angles to the country of the Swedes and Goths; from Sweden to Zululand; from Sweden to Minnesota, and from Minnesota and Kansas to Tanganyika and Hong Kong. The Church in Africa is not a spontaneous growth; she has been sent by others, planted like some exotic shrub by the emissaries or missionaries of other churches.

(b) But the “strangeness” of the Church is even more fundamental. The message of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour is a message of repentance, conversion, change and newness of life. This means making a radical break with the past: “the old has passed away. Behold the new has come,” 2 Cor. 5: 17. It follows that in order to be able to translate at

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all, the would-be translator must know his original text, through and through. In order to preach the Gospel in Zulu you have to know the Gospel, and not merely Zulu!

(c) The converse holds good, too: the translator must know not merely the Gospel; he must know Zulu, Zulus and Zululand. The apostolic impulse to make Christ known compels the missionary to a responsible and thorough study of his future milieu, with all its cultural, religio-historical, social and other aspects. This particular aspect of missionary work needs to be stressed today, more than ever. The present generation of theologians have stressed, and rightly so, the foreignness of the Church in the world, but now it is true to say that the “Apostolate of the Church” requires that the emissary of Christ must go “the second mile” with men of other faiths. The missionary is no longer able to shut himself up in his “Mission station”. He must go to meet them with whom he would speak; he must seek them where they are, listen to their troubles, speak their language and serve them in boundless human solidarity. The missionary must even be prepared to face situations in which solidarity compels him to recognize that other religions are attracting him. His proclamation of Christ as King is never more relevant than in such situations as these.

4. When the Gospel is carried forth and translated into new languages and new cultures, new aspects of the given Message are revealed. When the Word, as once given, is proclaimed in new situations, among new peoples, new tribes and new languages, the missionary catches a glimpse of new facets of the given Word, the Message takes on new dimensions. It may be a new meaning, some richer and deeper interpretation never before seen, and perhaps waiting to be revealed in that particular situation.

5. The spiritual heritage of the Church Universal is projected on to previously existing patterns, in Africa or Asia. The result of this projection is a combination of old and new, and can never be wholly identical with the tradition as known in the sending church. There have been cases of missionaries breaking down the patterns they have found. That is why it is a matter of vital concern in Africa or Asia what kind of mission comes to build the Church there. It may be a narrow, ignorant and therefore despotic mission; or it may be a mission with breadth and depth, capable of exercising a liberating influence, and of arousing creative forms in the life of the people.

6. Choice and interpretation must be a matter for the young church itself to decide. When the missionary church receives beliefs and customs through the mission, it acts selectively. Some things it rejects; others it chooses as being fit for

incorporation in the new pattern which it is in process of drawing up. This choice and this interpretation is the responsibility of the church, not of the mission. The task of the mission is not to direct, but to stimulate. The church’s own African or Asian leaders carry out creative work on the basis of the material placed at their disposal.

We must not attempt to force them into our time-worn patterns; we must, on the other hand, show interest in, and sympathy for, let us say, the African’s own cultural heritage; and we must be prepared to learn from him. It is as important that missionaries should be prepared to listen, as that they should be prepared to teach. As Arthur Cripps, a missionary in Southern Rhodesia, has well said, “We came to teach; we stayed to learn.”

The question of the attitude of the missionary church to its own national heritage is however highly complex. On the one hand we find that most Christian converts of the first and second generations tend to reject their national heritage, its form, its colour and its rhythm. They have often shown too great a readiness to invest the forms and customs introduced by the first missionaries with an aura of sanctity. But on the other hand the best of these converts soon show signs of a healthy impatience with the exotic Westernness of the traditions brought by the missionaries. These are the men and women on whom the burden of translation ought to lie heaviest. It is in this situation that the need of solid theological education is most felt: an education which leaves room for a constructive confrontation between Christian theology and the traditional heritage.

It is possible, in a free Africa, India or Indonesia, to accept the manifold variety of God’s creation; it is equally possible to give that variety full expression in the various forms of worship and the devotional life. But at the same time the leaders of the Church will emphasize that the task of the Church in a politically independent Africa is not primarily to be an African Church, but to be the Church of Christ in Africa.

The Missionary—a TranslatorWe have seen that the biblical theology of

mission, with its eschatological dimension, implies that mission is the concern of the whole of the Church of Christ. But at the same time the Church has always observed the practice of setting apart and sending out men and women for special service. Christ the King sends out His ambassadors. Commissioned and sent by the Lord of the Church, the missionary goes out into the world with the Gospel, and his task is that of translating the message of salvation in Jesus Christ. However, the word “missionary” has been somewhat of a problem. The great age of expansion in the history of the Christian

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mission came simultaneously with the period of Western imperialism; the growing nationalism of Asia and Africa, reacting as it did against all forms of colonization often connected the words “mission” and “missionary” with Western imperialism and its patriarchal attitude. The expression “native helpers” was still being used in missionary statistics, well on into the twentieth century, to describe the local leaders of the young churches. The implication is clear: they were looked upon as the missionary’s assistants. It was taken for granted that it was the Western missionary who provided the initiative and stood at the head of affairs. The “missionary council” or “missionary conference” on the “mission field” was the final authority in all matters concerning the growth of the young church

In recent years, a Copernican revolution has taken place. The first stages could be seen during the period between the two World Wars, and a decisive statement of policy was made by the international missionary movement at the Tambaram conference of 1938. But the actual revolution has really been precipitated by developments since the Second World War. The Church—the young church in the Congo, in Korea and elsewhere—has now come to occupy the central position, the point of departure and penetration for mission. Leadership is now in the hands of the young churches’ own people, and the task of the missionary has changed accordingly. It must be reshaped with reference to the new national leadership of the church concerned.

The distinction once drawn between “the Christian West” and the non-Christian East is now totally irrelevant. The whole world is now a mission field, and we all have our place on the missionary map. The missionary is no longer merely the one who crosses geographical or cultural boundaries; instead he stands on the boundary between belief and non-belief, and there bears witness to Jesus Christ. Of course the missionary commission is still valid “to the end of the earth”, and the missionary must still go, a stranger, to other peoples and other tongues; but he goes as the representative of a supernational fellowship, whose message he must interpret and translate as faithfully as possible. It must not be supposed, therefore, that the coming of autonomy to the churches of Asia and Africa has rendered the missionary obsolete and unnecessary. His presence in the young church serves as a necessary reminder of the supranationality of the Church of Christ, and as a symbol of the Catholicity of the Church. There, too, he can be a witness of Christ: a bridge-builder between church and church, nation and nation, man and man.

The stranger, in order to bear witness, must attempt to translate his message. And mission,

viewed from one angle, is the translation, in word and deed, of Christ’s message of salvation. This commission cannot be carried out unless the person concerned be prepared to penetrate deep into a new world, a new language and a new culture, in a serious attempt to identify himself with those to whom he is sent. An identification of this nature can take place on one of two levels. It may take place on the level of social fellowship: that is, in an attempt to understand and appreciate, as far as is humanly possible, the cultural patterns of the people or tribe concerned. But this is insufficient for the missionary, who is sooner or later forced to identify himself with his people on a deeper level, in Christ. The missionary and his people work together and bear responsibility together: soon they are compelled to confess their sins together and pray together for forgiveness. It is at this level that the barriers of race, nationality and prejudice are broken down. Throughout the whole of the history of the Church missio and passio have been found together—necessarily so. The nature of the One who took upon Himself the form of a servant is most truly revealed in the Cross (Phil. 2: 7). It is at the same Cross that the King’s emissary learns what it is to be a missionary.

The development and growth of the young church makes new demands of the foreign missionary. He may have to relinquish his front seat, and slip into the background, as an advisor to the church’s own national leaders, as an instructor in a theological college, teacher training college or medical school, as an expert in many fields, as a consultant in the use of mass media—the Press, literature, radio, TV. The list might be extended almost indefinitely. But whatever shape his work may take, he must come as a friend, as a trusted fellow-worker, and perhaps as a pastor of souls. This is a question of identification on the deepest level. The world missionary movement has not forgotten how, at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, the young Indian, V. S. Azariah (later Bishop of Dornakal, d. 1945), turned to the leaders of the Western missions, saying, “You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS!”

The time has perhaps come for the white missionary to make a similar appeal to the Church leaders of Asia and Africa. But whoever may take the initiative, the fact remains: that the result of the missionary’s labours depends in no small measure upon the personal fellowship which springs from common obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ.

In the 1950’s it was proposed that the problematical word “missionary” should be removed,

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and replaced with “fraternal worker”. This vague term, not without some measure of condescension, was to be applied primarily to those “short service” workers; short service having come to replace the earlier ideal life-long missionary work, particularly since the Second World War.

The conditions under which the missionary works, and his possibilities for service, are very much affected by political climate. This is a topic to which we shall have frequent occasion to return in our historical section. The Western missionary’s chance of making any contribution at all in the Communist countries of Asia has virtually disappeared. Other missionaries working in autonomous Asian churches found there to be “no room for whites” (the exaggeration was deliberate).182

In India the problem was rather similar. Permits of residence were issued to missionaries only if it could be proved that there was no Indian able to carry out that particular duty. Under this heading India was prepared to accept, for example, medical or agricultural “experts”. But the Westerner wanting to enter India in the service of the Gospel is liable to find his way barred.

In recent years, and particularly since the Second World War, the churches of the West have come to recognize the necessity of interchange between the East and West. This has in some cases led to practical results in that leaders of the young churches have been invited to come and spend some time in parish or administrative work in the West. The presence of African clergymen or Asian theologians in the churches of the West is thoroughly stimulating, and a necessary expression of the universal mission of the Church Universal.

It is important that we should remember that “missionaries” do not have to be Westerners. The term is one which applies to every Christian messenger, irrespective of nationality or race. Apolo Kivebulaya of Uganda (d. 1928), the Apostle of the Pygmies of Central Africa, and many others of the same people, members of the Anglican Church in Uganda, may serve to remind us that in this century Africans are acting as missionaries to other tribes and peoples. The National Missionary Society of India, founded in 1905, was a mission of Indians to Indians. The Church of Samoa in Oceania has sent out many missionaries to the islands of the Pacific. The Samoans, with their fragile canoes, have long been bold sailors; now their instinct is filled with a new spirit, as they sail into unknown waters bearing the Christian message.

The churches of Asia, gathered recently for conference, drew up an inventory of their missionary

enterprise. The result is striking: these young churches supported about two hundred missionaries in various parts of Asia. We may give some examples, as indication of what is happening in the world of mission.

From the Church of South India: missionaries to Thailand and Malaysia.

From the Mar Thoma Church: ashrams have been founded in various parts of India (outside Malabar) with c. 130 Indian missionary workers; one family to Katmandu in Nepal.

From the United Church of North India: to East Africa.

From West Pakistan: evangelistic teams to Kashmir.

From the Methodist Church in India: missionaries to Burma.

From the Karen Church of North Burma: missionaries to South Burma and Thailand.

From the Presbyterian Church of Korea: to Thailand.

From the United Church of the Philippines: five missionaries to Thailand; three to Indonesia; three to Iran; one to Korea; two to Honolulu and two to the United States.

From the Methodist Church of the Philippines: one to Okinawa; four to Malaya and Sarawak.

From the United Church of Japan (Kyodan): to Okinawa and Formosa; one family to Indonesia.

From Anglican Churches in East Asia: comprehensive exchange of Asian workers between Anglican Churches in the area; particularly to Malaysia and Hong Kong.

From ten Indonesian Churches: to other parts of the Indonesian archipelago.

From the Y.M.C.A. in Asia: exchange of personnel with other strategic points in the Asian Y.M.C.A. network.

EPILOGUE

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

We have called this book “The World of Mission”. Mission—a dull word, say some; it conjures up a picture of drawing-room prayer meetings and Victoriana. A challenging word, say others; it reminds us of imperialism and conversion by force. In fact neither “mission” nor “missionary” are particularly complimentary terms just now—if they ever have been!

This matters little to the Christian mission. The only really important thing is the commission which the Lord of the Church has given, once and for all.

182 Cf. G. Schultz, Kein Platz Mehr Für Weisse (1956)

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That commission was prepared in the Old Testament. It was first given when Abraham went forth from the land of his fathers. Since then the people of God have always been on the march, toward a goal which has been set by Christ the King. In the New Testament we see mission as the enthronement of Christ the King in the world, until the day on which He returns in glory to claim His Kingdom. His Church is sent into the world, to the ends of the earth and to the end of time, conscious that it is this commission which, together, with her worship, provides her raison d’etre in the world. These two elements—worship and embassy; Eucharist and mission—belong together. They are in fact two aspects of the same thing. The history of salvation which we have seen depicted in the Bible, and which forms the essence of the biblical doctrine of mission, lies behind each and every manifestation of the missionary church in the world—in West and East alike. Missionaries in Hong Kong, Honduras, Halifax and Houston are all alike ambassadors, members of the great embassy which has been sent out into the whole world—and which was decreed by God before all worlds.

The study of Christian mission presses upon us a question: what is the nature of that power which is able so to attract men and women that they are prepared to take the extraordinary step of abandoning the faith of their fathers and the acknowledged religious practices of their people and join the company of the White Christ? It is not something self-evident; nor can it be put down to the pressure of environment; it is least of all natural for a man to leave the known and familiar and take the step out into the uncertainty of a new faith. It is a surprising, indeed, a paradoxical step to take.

One answer would be to point to the power of mercy—mercy shown to people in sickness, in prison, in loneliness and in distress. The same power is revealed in the new life and the new death: the new life in a fellowship sealed by love and forgiveness; the new way of meeting the terrible reality of death, no longer in fear and sorrow, but in hope and confidence and with singing. It is on this level—the profound level of man’s ultimate questions concerning the meaning of life, suffering and distress—that the Word and the Sacraments of the Christian community seem able to awaken a real response.

We are thus bound to take full account of the reasons given by converts themselves as to why this important step was taken. We have touched upon others in the course of our account. But it must be recognized that we cannot give a final and categorical explanation of what it is that has taken place. Above and beyond these factors there is something more: factor X. The Church, remembering what the Scripture says (“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him,” John 6: 44), speaks of “prevenient grace” and “the drawing of the Father”. The interpretation of this fact has varied in the history of theology, but the fact itself remains: that the Holy Spirit of God is at work, preparing the hearts of men, calling them and gathering them out of every nation and tribe and tongue into the Church of Jesus Christ. From that vision and conviction the Church and the individual derive confidence when they hear the call:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. (Gen. 12: 1-2)

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“Financing World Mission Today” by Charles E. Van Engen

(The following essay is a summarized and adapted version of David Barrett, “Silver and Gold Have I None: Church of the Poor and Church of the Rich?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research (7:4, Oct, 1983) 146-151).

This essay discusses Christian financial resources at the global level and asks how extensive they are today and how effective they may be for tomorrow’s mission.

Jesus did not carry money or own any. He had no silver or gold, no cash income, no property, no stocks or shares, no current account, no savings account, no hedge against inflation, no tax havens, no financial reserves. He had nowhere to lay his head. He was less well off than the foxes or the birds. He lived in poverty. But his impact on the world was enormous. He founded what was largely the original Church of the Poor, a fellowship of the oppressed, the exploited, the politically powerless, the deprived, the dispossessed... Today he has 1.3 billion followers who receive annual incomes totaling $6.5 trillion and who own two-thirds of the earth’s entire resources. On this basis, global Christianity has become overwhelmingly the Church of the Rich. To what extent are these people having any impact today?

In this article we investigate only one aspect of Christian finance, namely, money donated each year by the entire world community of all Christians. Starting with United Nations and World Bank data, it has been possible to build up a computerized global table of Christian financial resources...

Personal Income and Lifestyle

Average income at the world level is around $2,400 per person each year. Because Christians are concentrated in the Western world, their average income is far higher at $4,500. Non-Christians average only $1,350. Since lifestyle depends on income, Christians across the world can be seen to live on the average at a level over three times higher than non-Christians.

195 Million Christians in Absolute Poverty

There is a further factor, however: income distribution is so unequal that, whereas 52 percent are comparatively well off, 13 percent live in absolute poverty.

The degradation and agony of absolute poverty are thus shared by missions of our fellow Christians. Some 109 mission Christians live in the world’s twenty-six poorest countries. In all developing

countries, Christians living in absolute poverty number some 109 million. This is 24 percent of the world’s 800 mission absolutely poor, as well as 13.4 percent of all Christians. Of these, half live in Latin America, a third in Africa, the rest in South and Southeast Asia. This is what we usually mean by the “Church of the Poor.” By the world’s standards, they have nothing...

Yet another side of the paradox is that this Church of the Poor is poor only in material goods. They are far from being spiritual paupers. Spiritually, it is the Church of the Rich. Some of the richest and most dynamic forms of Christianity today, and the most rapid church growth, are to be found in these areas of material poverty and destitution. Within this Church of the Poor we count the 5.5 million involved in the charismatic renewal throughout India and South Asia; the 200,000 base ecclesial communities in Latin America; and the entire 30-million-strong African Indigenous Church movement among Africa’s lowest social classes. This Church of the Poor is the only part of global Christianity whose lifestyle is similar to that of Jesus on earth...

Christian Financial Resources

What about total resources? How much in aggregate are the world’s 1.3 billion church members worth each year on the world scene, considering here ONLY the aspect of financial income? The answer is easy to compute, but startling to comprehend. 5.9 trillion dollars. The largest slice of this (43%) goes to Europe, the next (36%) to North America. The influential worldwide community of Evangelicals alone have personal income totaling just under 1 trillion dollars a year.

Global Christian Giving

In theory, many confessions and communions assert that Christians should tithe, which means giving 10% of their income. If all did this, the total would be $647 billion a year. In practice, they give a third of this- something like $181 billion, if we include every kind of Christians. But it makes more sense here to restrict the definition of “Christians” to all affiliated church members. In this case, their

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annual donations total $160 billion. Forty-nine percent of this comes from North America, 34% from Europe. Africa contributes a mere 2%, Asia less than 1%.

Where Does the Money Go?

Though Christians number only 32% of the world population, they receive 62% of the entire world’s annual income- and spend 97% of it on themselves...

Of the remaining 3% of Christians’ income, a meager 1 percent, or $60 billion a year, is given or donated to secular or non-Christian causes and charities; and about 2%, or $100 billion a year, is given or donated directly to Christian causes. This latter sum forms the vast bulk what the churches and parachurch agencies across the world receive to run the worldwide Christian church and its annual operations.

Individual Giving

These huge sums of money become more intelligible when reduced to what the average individual contributes. On the world level, the average church member gives $76 a year (which is $1.46 a week). As one would expect, individual giving is highest in the strongholds of the Church of the Rich (the affluent West)- $212 a year in North America; is much lower in the strongholds of the Church of the Poor in Africa ($20 a year) and in Latin America ($15 a year); and is lowest of all ($4.70 a year) in the Church of the Absolutely Poor in the continent with the lowest per-capita income of all, South Asia.

Global Foreign Missions

It is in its global religious outreach that the Christian world seems least certain of itself and of its missions. Only 5% of global Christian giving ($5 billion a year) goes to support the Christian world mission. Outreach, foreign service, evangelism among non-Christians, conversion, new and experimental types of mission and ministry, translation of the Scriptures into non-Christian languages- these attract the LEAST money. The remaining 95% of the global Christian giving ($95 billion a year) goes on the home church and its ministries at home. The average church member, donating his/her $1.46 a week, gives out of this only $0.07 (seven American cents) to support Christian foreign missions. This indicates the very low level of commitment to the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus Christ: “Make disciples of all nations.” In this

respect the entire Christian world is a Church of the Poor- poor in spiritual dynamic and in missionary vision and obedience.

Conclusion

First, the terms “Church of the Poor” and “Church of the Rich” have many complementary and overlapping meanings...

Second, there is plenty of money available worldwide to meet all reasonable Christian global goals and obligations. There is entirely enough to undertake the effective prosecution of the Christian world mission...

Third, responsibility to act is not confined to Western Christians in their Church of the Rich. We noted above that in the Church of the Poor, there is a combination of 20 million relatively affluent Christians on top of 195 million Christians in absolute poverty. This means that if these newly-rich elites, including leadership hierarchies, redistributed their income and their wealth, they would solve much of the imbalance without outside interference or charity from the West...

Eighty-five years ago Samuel Zwemer, apostle to Islam, put it succintly... Difficult regions like Arabia, he said, and indeed the whole world, “could easily be evangelized within the next thirty years if it were not for the wicked selfishness of Christians.”

To a large extent, the global sharing of Christians of money, wealth, property, and goods could solve most of the world’s problems, including those of famine, poverty, disease, unemployment, dangerous water supply, and so on. Because this is so, there is a sense in which Christians are to blame for the persistence of the present disastrous state of affairs. Every Christian with an income of over $500 a year ought to be deeply concerned and actively involved in this problem. At the least, each should consider donating 10% of his or her income to Third-World missions or charities, or to studying, preaching, writing, teaching or researching about the situation. Every Christian who ignores this obligation lies under the solemn judgement of God on this issue.

Total Global Christian Income ($5.9 Trillion)

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What Does It Mean for Us to Be Global Christians?

1. Exposing ourselves to world affairs, world religions, and world cultures through reading, travel, and contact with people of other cultures.

2. Voting for changes that will benefit the whole world, not only for the good of our own country.

3. Considering possible overseas professional assignments and then becoming actively involved in a national Christian church in that country.

4. Giving at least 10% of our income to Christian causes, and seeing to it that at least half of that goes toward the ministry of the church in other parts of the world.

5. Looking at all the non-Christians around us in our neighborhood, work, school, and community; and consciously and carefully working to build personal loving relationships with them, seeking to meet their needs wherever possible.

6. Being ready to receive missionaries from other parts of the world who bring us new insight into what it means to be a member of the World Church, and who may keep us informed of developments around the world.

7. Living a carefully-planned, simple life-style which avoids consumerism and preserves, saves, recycles, and shares the world’s goods.

8. Considering a lifetime career as a professional global Christian – otherwise known as a missionary- being totally immersed in the church in another culture. Encouraging our children to consider this option for themselves.

9. Praying for fellow Christians in other countries, including friends and missionaries who live and work there.

10. Incorporating mission education units into our church’s Christian education program at all age levels: children, youth and adults.

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by: Charles Van Engen“Our Challenge for Today” by John R. W. Stott

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“Our Challenge for Today” by John R. W. Stott

Keynote Address of the European Leadership Conference on World Evangelization

The real challenge of Europe and the world, it seems to me, lies neither in its history, that Europe was the locale of the 16th century of reformation, nor in its geography, with its east, west, north, south divisions, nor in its steady secularization for 250 years since the Enlightenment, nor in its colossal spiritual, moral and material needs, but rather the basic challenge of Europe is the challenge of Christ who by rights is the Lord of Europe and who sends us into our continent as His witnesses and His servants. On the first evening of our conference we should focus our gaze on Christ. In my view there is nothing more important for the re-evangelization of Europe than that we develop a Christological basis for mission.

I want then to remind you of six stages in the saving career of Jesus: His incarnation, cross, resurrection, exaltation, Spirit-gift and parousia; and I want to show how each of these stages, according to the New Testament, has an inescapable missionary dimension, although in several cases a neglected one.

I. The Incarnation of Christ: The Model for Mission

So, firstly, the incarnation of Christ, or the model for mission. According to the Willow-bank report, the incarnation was the most spectacular instance of cultural identification in the history of humankind. The Son of God did not stay in the safe immunity of His heaven, remote from the sin and the pain and the tragedy of the world. He actually entered our world. He emptied Himself of glory and humbled Himself to serve. He took our nature, lived our life, endured our temptations, experienced our sorrows, bore our sins and died our death. He could not have identified Himself more closely with us than He did. It was the total identification of love, although without any loss of His own identity. But in becoming one of us, He did not cease to be Himself; in becoming man He did not cease to be God. And now He sends us into the world as the Father sent Him into the world. In other words, our mission is to be modeled on His. I do not hesitate to say, and hope I carry you with me, that all authentic mission is incarnational mission. Because it involves identification with people but without any loss of our Christian identity. It involves entering into other people’s worlds as He entered into ours.

I mention the apostle Paul as an example because you could argue, and some people have argued, that

Paul did not enter personally into the lives of people he sought to evangelize. It has also been argued that Paul was essentially a preacher to anonymous faces, in the synagogue or in the open air that he could see in the distance. Some have argued that he kept his distance from the people whom he addressed. But I want to say, no, on the contrary, although he was free, he made himself a slave of all people. He understood his own mission in terms of incarnational identification. “To the Jews, I became a Jew in order to win Jews. To those not under the law, I became like one not under the law, so as to win those not under the law. To the weak I became weak in order to win the weak. I’ve become all things to all people, so that by all possible means, I might win some.” That’s the principle of incarnation. It’s identification with people where they are.

So what might that mean for us in Europe? Two things, I want to suggest at least.

1. We are called to enter other people’s thought worlds—the world of their philosophy or ideology. I’ve always liked the title of that book many of you will know; by Dr. James Sire, published by American InterVarsity Press, entitled, The Universe Next Door. The subtitle is A Basic Catalogue of World Views. He defines the meaning of naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, deism, and so on, but he refers to each of these ideologies or world views as a universe next door, another universe, an alien universe of thought to our own Christian world view, and it will take an incarnation to enter into that other universe, to seek people for Christ. The person I think who is writing most about this in my own country today is Bishop Lesslie Newbigin. He has been a missionary, all his life, for many years in Madras in South India and more recently in Birmingham, in central England. Five years ago his book was published, The Other Side of 1984, in which he argued that the Enlightenment had now run out of steam and that the time is ripe for a genuinely missionary encounter with Enlightenment culture. Then he followed that up with another book two years ago entitled Foolishness to the Greeks, and he asks what would be involved in such an encounter between the gospel and the whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living, that we call the modern western culture. Bishop Newbigin laments the way in which Christians withdrew from the public arena into their own privatized world. And he urges us to go over to

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the offensive with this western world view. It’s time for us, he says, to challenge the scientific world view that is central to western culture and its reductionist claim to be able to explain everything. It’s time for us to challenge the atheistic materialism that is at the basis both of capitalism and of communism. The church must affirm, he writes, that the central frame of a nation’s life, cannot remain empty, and if Christ is not there, an idol will certainly take its place. I believe we need to call for a new generation of evangelical thinkers, of evangelical apologists, who will dedicate their God-given minds to confront our world cultures with the claims of Jesus Christ. We need thinkers who will take the initiative to unmask secular culture, to demonstrate its bankruptcy, and present the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that He is seen to offer men and women what other ideologies cannot offer them, but that He can fulfill all human aspiration. We need to enter into other people’s thought world.

2. We have to enter into their heart world. In other words, the world of their hurts, the world of their alienation and of their pain. This shows the place of social concern in relation to evangelism, or at least, this is one of the arguments for it. Just as it was not possible for missionaries in Africa to ignore the evils of polygamy or slavery, just as it is not possible for missionaries in Asia, or particularly India, not to oppose the caste, the dowry system, child marriage and sarti, just as it is not possible for missionaries in Latin America to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of Indian tribes, or the great and appallingly degrading poverty of the masses, so it is not possible in Europe to disregard the plight of the deprived, the immigrant, the homeless, the unemployed and the alienated youth. We have to enter into their heart’s world, because a passionate concern for people’s felt needs is part and parcel of the incarnation. I’ve often quoted and like a phrase used by Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, some years ago when he said that we have to state and commend the Christian faith and we can do so only by going out and entering into the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost the way. That’s incarnation—entering into other people’s worlds, the world of their mind and of their heart.

II. The Cross of Christ: The Cost of Mission.Now I turn secondly to the cross of Christ or the

cost of mission. One of the most neglected aspects of biblical mission today is the indispensable place of suffering and even of death. I bring you three examples from Scripture.

1. We see it clearly in the suffering servant Isaiah. Before the servant can be a light to lighten the nations and bring salvation to the ends of the earth, He offers His back to those who beat Him, His cheeks to those who pulled out His beard, His face to mockery and spitting, and before He could sprinkle many nations, He was despised and rejected by men, familiar with suffering and given over to death. In biblical categories, the servant must suffer, and it is that which makes mission effective. Every form of mission leads to some form of the cross. The very shape of mission is cruciform and we can understand mission only in terms of the cross.

2. My second example is our Lord Jesus Himself who taught and exhibited this principle and extended it to His followers. You remember when those Greeks came to Him and wanted to see Jesus. He said unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it multiplies. In other words, death is more than the way to life. Death is the condition of fruitfulness. It was for the Messiah. It is for the Messianic community. Whoever serves me, says Jesus, must follow me.

3. The third example, and I think in some ways the most remarkable of them all, is how Paul applies the principle to himself. Let me read to you these texts: Ephesians 4:13, “that you should not be discouraged because of my sufferings for you which are your glory.” II Tim. 2:10, “I endure everything for the sake of the elect in order that they may obtain salvation with eternal glory.” II Cor. 4:12, “So then death is at work in us, but life in you.”

Now, I believe those three statements of Paul are among the most startling in the whole of the New Testament. Paul dares to claim that through his sufferings others will enter into glory, that through his endurance, others will be saved, and that through his death, others will live. You may ask, Is he out of his mind? No. Does he really mean it? Yes, he does. It is not, of course, that he attributes any atoning efficacy to his sufferings and death, as he does to the sufferings and death of Jesus. It’s rather that people receive salvation and life and glory only when the gospel is preached and those who preach the gospel faithfully, invariable suffer for their faithfulness. Paul was in prison because of the gospel that he preached. He was in prison because of Jewish opposition to his gospel of salvation to the Gentiles, and it is in this way that the evangelist’s sufferings are the means and almost the condition of other people’s salvation. Does not this truth sound very alien to our comfortable West European ears? There are many Christian martyrs in other parts of the world, but not many in Western Europe. I ask myself, where is the willingness to suffer for the gospel today? In our evangelical tendency to

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triumphalism, it is easy to overlook the necessity of tribulation and the false prosperity gospel that we need to have the courage to declare to be false, blinds people to the biblical warning of adversity. Yet the fact remains that if we compromise less we would undoubtedly suffer more. The gospel is still foolishness to the intellectually proud and will never become intellectually respectable and that is still a stumbling block to those who imagine that they can save themselves. The gospel humbles the self-righteous and rebukes the self-indulgent, and people who have the gospel, persecute those who preach the gospel, and they do it in the church as well as in the world. But I ask, are we ready to bear the pain of being ridiculed for the good news of Jesus Christ? Are we willing to suffer the loneliness of being ostracized, and maybe in our own church, or the hurt of being spoken against and slandered? Indeed, are we ready to die with Christ to popularity and promotion, to comfort and success, to our arrogant sense of personal or cultural superiority, or to our selfish ambition to be famous or rich or powerful? It is the seed which dies that multiplies.

III. The Resurrection of Christ: The Mandate for Mission.

It’s important to remember that the resurrection preceded the Great Commission. Jesus could never have issued His Commission to go until and unless He had risen from the dead and been given authority, all authority in heaven and earth. That’s the theme of that interesting book by Johannes Blouw, published in 1962, called The Missionary Nature of the Church. Johannes Blouw points out that the Old Testament prophetic vision of the last days was of a pilgrimage of the nations to Jerusalem. Mt. Zion would be exalted above other mountains and all the nations would flow to Zion. In the New Testament, however, I quote Johannes Blouw, the “centripetal missionary consciousness” is replaced by a “centrifugal missionary activity.” In other words, instead of the nations flowing to the church, symbolized by Mt. Zion, the church now goes out to the nations. What was the turning point between the centripetal and the centrifugal? Johannes Blouw answers that it was the resurrection. So that Jesus could then claim that all authority was His, therefore, go, and make disciples of all nations. So, it’s because all authority belongs to the risen Lord that He sends us to all nations. The universal mission of the church derives its legitimacy from the universal Lordship of Jesus. The resurrection supplies our mandate for mission.

IV. The Exaltation of Christ: The Incentive for Mission.

I want to argue now that it is the supreme exaltation of Jesus that is the major missionary motivation, because God has super exalted Jesus—given Him the name above every name, the rank above every rank, the dignity above every dignity, that every knee should bow to Him and every tongue confess that He is Lord. And every knee and every tongue means every knee and every tongue, and we have no liberty to place any restriction upon that repeated “every.” It means every secular knee, every Marxist knee, every Muslim knee, every Hindu knee, every Jewish knee, that every knee should bow to Christ—that is the will of God. And therefore it should be the will of His people also. We cannot acquiesce on religious pluralism or religious syncretism which is becoming increasingly common in some particularly liberal and ecumenical circles today, because both of them are forms of spiritual polygamy. Our simple answer to them is that God Himself does not agree. On the contrary, God has honored Jesus above everybody else, and desires everybody else to do the same. Wasn’t that what provoked Paul in Athens? He was alone amid the glories of ancient Greece, wandering about those magnificent temples and shrines and statues that we know there were in Athens at the time. Luke in Acts 17:16 says his spirit was provoked within him. Why? Because the city was smothered with idols. What fascinates me is that this paroxuneo verb, provoked, is the very word that is used in the Septuagint of God’s reaction to idolatry. God is provoked to anger and jealousy by the idolatry of His people. Paul, who is so identified with God, felt the same provocation of spirit, in the face of idolatry, that God does Himself.

Another example is Henry Martyn, in Muslim Iran in the early 19th century; he said, “I could not endure existence, if Jesus were not glorified. It would be hell to me if He were thus always to be dishonored.” Now, the same should be true of us in the idolatry of 20th century Europe, in the culture in which we live. The primary motivation for mission, if I understand the New Testament right, is not obedience to the Great Commission, as important as that is. It’s not even compassion and love for the lost, as important as that is. It’s jealously for the honor and glory of Jesus.

We read in Romans 1:5 that Paul went out “for the sake of the Name.” It doesn’t even tell us whose name. It’s the same in 2 John, but it’s the name—the name above every name. It’s for the sake of that name, that it should receive the honor that is due to it. It is for the sake of the name that he went out to win the nations—jealousy for the name of Jesus. So we make no particular claims for the church in any of its empirical manifestations. We make no particular

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claim for Christianity, whatever that means, in any of its institutional or systematized forms, but we do claim uniqueness and finality for Jesus Christ. He has no peers, no successors, and no rivals.

V. The Spirit-Gift of Christ: The Power for Mission.

Now Pentecost was a missionary event because the Holy Spirit is a missionary Spirit. That is the theme of Harry Boer’s book that you may know: Pentecost and Missions. After all, did Jesus not promise in the temple precincts, in John 7:37-39, that when the Spirit came, He would flow out in rivers of living water from the inner being of the believer. That’s the missionary Spirit flowing out of us. William Temple, in his Readings on St. John’s Gospel, writes, commenting on the text, “No one can possess or rather be indwelt by the Spirit of God, and keep that Spirit to himself. Where the Spirit is, He flows forth, and if there is not flowing forth, He is not there.”

And in Acts we watch enthralled as the missionary Spirit creates a missionary people, thrusts them out in ever-widening circles, beginning in Jerusalem and ending in Rome and gives boldness and power to the Christian witnesses.

Now, let us be honest with one another. There are differences between us. We have to acknowledge it as a matter of Christian integrity, as there are differences in the whole evangelical constituency, in our evaluation of the pentecostal and charismatic movements that are growing so fast in the world. Therefore, there is a difference between us with regard to the place of signs and wonders in evangelism and in church growth. But, acknowledging that difference, I want to concentrate on what I think all evangelicals should be able to affirm together with regard to the ministry of the Spirit: that evangelism is impossible without God the evangelist, to take the title of David Wells’ book after the Oslo Consultation on the Holy Spirit.

We can agree that regeneration is to be born of the Spirit and not of the will of man or the will of the flesh, but again, we can acknowledge that conversion involves a power encounter in which the principalities and powers are driven back and the superior power of Jesus Christ through the Spirit is demonstrated. Not I think necessarily through Biblical miracles, but certainly in the rescue of sinners from the powers of darkness and in their transfer to the kingdom of God’s dear Son. We evangelicals affirm also that the Holy Spirit is able to revive and renew and reform even ancient European churches, which appear often to be dead or moribund, that He is able to bring fire to the fireplace and breath to the dead dry bones. And that unless the church

embodies the gospel which it proclaims, in a life of love, joy, peace, freedom in the Spirit, then it cannot proclaim the gospel with any degree of credibility. So, we need to humble ourselves before the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit today. Sociological knowledge and communications technology are important. Indeed, they are gifts of God to be used in evangelism, but beware, brothers and sisters, beware, lest they diminish our reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit. Only the Spirit of God can take the Word spoken in human weakness and carry it home with power in the mind, the heart, the conscience, the will of the hearers. Only the Holy Spirit opens the eyes of the blind to see the truth as it is in Jesus. Only the Holy Spirit unstops the ears of the deaf to listen to the voice of Christ and opens the mouths of the dumb to confess that He is Lord. As the Lausanne Covenant put it, “The Holy Spirit is the chief witness to Jesus Christ and without His witness, ours is futile.”

VI. The Return of Christ: The Urgency of Mission.

I think we need, all of us, to recover the eager eschatological expectation of the first Christian believers, because if we did, it would undoubtedly increase our sense of evangelistic urgency. Jesus told us that the gospel of the kingdom has got to be preached throughout the world and only then the end will come. Also, have you ever noticed this logic in II Corinthians 5, that it’s because we shall all stand before the Judgment seat of Christ, that therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. There is a certain fear as an evangelistic motivation, that one day we shall stand before the Judgment seat of Christ and give an account of our ministry. So no wonder Paul grounded his charge to Timothy to preach the word with urgency, not only on the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, but on His appearing and His kingdom, II Timothy 4:1,2. The time is short, the need is great and the task is urgent.

We cannot therefore escape this Christological basis for mission that is so plain in the New Testament. The challenge then of today’s need is primarily the challenge to see Jesus as adequate to meet the world’s need. In Europe we have these days to repent of our Euro-pessimism, of that cynical unbelief that says that while third world churches continue to grow by leaps and bounds, the European churches are certain to go on declining. To cure that Euro-pessimism, our greatest need is a fresh vision of our Lord Jesus Christ, incarnate, crucified, risen, reigning, bestowing the Spirit and coming again in glory. Only Jesus Christ can give us clarity of purpose, strength of motivation, the courage and the

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authority, the power and the passion to evangelize the world in our day.

Perhaps I may now lead in a brief prayer.Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of

lords, emperor of all empires, ascended, exalted, glorified, unrivaled, we worship you. We bring to you the homage of our hearts. We ask your forgiveness that sometimes our vision of you becomes blurred and other times is grossly inadequate. Forgive us that we’re pigmy Christians

because we have a pigmy Christ. Open our eyes to see you as you are. Grant that the Holy Spirit may exercise His distinctive ministry bearing witness to you and glorifying you in our lives. Grant that the whole of your saving mission may be to us an increasing inspiration that we long for the evangelization of the world and the re-evangelization of Europe and that you will be in fact what you are by right, the Lord of Europe and this world, by the glory of your Name. Amen.

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by: Charles Van Engen“Matthew 28:18-20 Interpreted from the Point of View of the Apostolate” by R. Recker

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“Matthew 28:18-20 Interpreted from the Point of View of the Apostolate” by R. Recker

Reprinted from Zending Op Weg Naar De Toekomst, J. Verkuyl, ed., Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1978, pp. 46-58. Used by permission.

In his recent volume, Inleiding in de nieuwere zendingswetenschap, Dr. J. Verkuyl deals with the various forms of the Great Commission as they occur in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts. These expressions of Christ’s mandate to the apostles and to the early congregations are viewed by Verkuyl in the context of the overriding missionary purpose of the entire documents. 183 He also ties in the Great Commission very closely to the resurrection of the Christ, to his enthronement as exalted Lord, to the outpoured presence of the Holy Spirit, and to the worldwide focus of the messianic program.184 He affirms that the missionary mandate is never to be viewed as outmoded, in that according to the witness of the evangelists and of the Acts of the Apostles the missionary dimension is bound up with the very essence of the Church of Christ.185

In regard to the Gospel of Matthew, Verkuyl views the book as catechetical material which was designed to equip new believers to understand that the heart of their faith centered around the person and the work of Jesus and the coming of his kingdom. It was also aimed at stimulating such newly-won Christians to and equipping them for participation in the ongoing advance of the Gospel in the world. Therefore Verkuyl can observe in regard to the Gospel of Matthew: “It is...a textbook for missionary purposes.”186 This is a good take-off point for this article.

In dealing with the Great Commission in relation to the apostolate we have to do with the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel, and this conclusion is integrally related to the Gospel in its entirety. For Matthew is here setting forth what he considers to be the climax of the earthly public life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Karl Barth is correct in calling attention to the fact that this text is part of Matthew’s setting forth of the fact and the identity of the resurrected Christ. But in particular it is a setting forth of the relationship between the Christ and his disciples.187 Both of these

183 J. Verkuyl, Inleiding in de nieuwere zendingswetenschap (Kampen: Uitgeversmaaischappij J. H. Kok, 1975), 145, 150-1, 153.

184 Ibid., 146, 151.185 Ibid., 155.186 Ibid., 148.187 Karl Barth, “An Exegetical Study of Matthew 28:16-20”,

The Theology of the Christian Mission, ed. Gerald H.

observations are of great import for the issue which confronts us. Yet both of these considerations must be again set in the context of the resurrected Christ who spoke to his disciples concerning the “kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

In his Gospel Matthew clearly sets forth the identity of the Christ of God, regarding his claims and his mission. Christ as the promised Son of Man (Mt. 26:64) is the King, the true Son of David, exalted to the right hand of the Lord, to the position of all authority in heaven and on earth. And so the dynamic of the Gospel must press on to cosmic, to universal scope—it must also include the world of the Gentiles! That is the primary revelation of the Gospel of Matthew, for Matthew has come to see the Christ as the Christ of God, and so in world context. In this regard A. A. van Ruler makes a very appropriate remark in commenting on Mark 1:22.

He posits himself...He appeals to nothing or to no one, He simply posits himself as the great decision in human life, in the cosmic reality, and in the history of the Kingdom of God. That is his authority. He himself is that authority. He is the authority of God himself in time. He is God himself, present in human flesh.188

So at the heart of the Great Commission we must see the Great Apostle, Jesus Christ.189 Secondarily, we will have to ask the question whether or not Matthew just as clearly sets forth the identity of the disciples of Christ, the identity of the apostolate. Are the disciples set forth as agents of the King, as the representative ministers of his royal claims, as the apostolate of the Great Apostle of the triune God? Yet that must not be seen as the primary accent of the evangelist Matthew.

This climax of his Gospel reveals that Matthew was convinced that the authority of the triune God has now been concretized in the person of the Christ

Anderson (New York/Toronto/London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961), 58.

188 A. A. van Ruler, Dichter bij Marcus, Over het evangelie naar Marcus 1-8 (Nijkerk: Uitgeverij G. F. Callenbach BV, 1974), 18-19.

189 Cf. Richard R. De Ridder for a good treatment of this matter: Discipling the Nations (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975).

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as Mediator of the Father’s will. But he sees Him now, not as the Mediator who works atonement, but as the mediating Prince who subjugates the universe to the royal rule of God. As the representative Man, as the Second Adam, Christ gathers into his hands all the reins of power in the created universe. The Son of Man rules 190 in kingly fashion and claims that He does this by messianic right, as his messianic inheritance. He could walk in regal fashion through the shadows of death and humiliation, but the concept seems to leap to life in reference to the flow of history and its divine culmination. In reference to this latter phase it is as the resurrected, victorious Christ that Matthew sees Him as having been given this glorious office and power! And Matthew sees this latter phase as possible only on the basis of the princely messianic bearing of the Christ as He walked as the Son of Man humiliated.

By claiming such power (exousia) the Christ of God apostolically ties together the revelation of God from Genesis to Revelation. Man under God will thus subdue the earth (Gen. 1:28), and the Son of Man having the authority to break the seals of the book will guide the affairs of history in that the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ (Rev. 11:15). Anarchic disorder and rebellion to God’s rule have been declared invalid, and His hegemony has been reasserted and validated in history by the atoning work of the Suffering Servant of the Lord.

Yet it must be stated that the Christ has all authority only as the Mediator of the triune God. It is only as the Apostle of God that He authoritatively implements, directs, empowers, and effectuates the divine purpose in and for his world; only thus does He guide the divine crusade to resubjugate all of creation to the Creator-Goel-Saviour/Redeemer-Perfecter-God. Simply put, the Christ has this status, authority, power, a royal office for a purpose. As the instrument of the will of the heavenly Father, He is subservient to certain historical goals posited by the Father. It is in the very nature of office that the agent is co-opted into something bigger than himself. Office implies that this life be subservient to higher goals, to the enrichment of the communal context, and thereby to the manifestation in the world of the God who is glorious. Summarily put, the Christ is speaking here of apostolic authority, and in this too, He is the revelation of the Father who had sent Him. In this regard too, he who has seen the Son of Man enthroned, has also seen the Father who is enthroned from the beginning.

190 Matthew 13:37, 41; 16:13-16, 28; 17:22; 19:28; 20:18-19, 28; 24:27-31, 37, 39, 44; 25:31; 26:24, 45, 64.

Now the possession and expression of authority on the part of the Christ prior to Golgotha and the Resurrection, to which Barth has called our attention,191 was anticipatory of the work which was completed at Golgotha and proleptic of his sitting down at the right hand of God, on the throne of the universe, enthroned on the seat of power in regard to the course of history. It must also be remembered that Christ’s life and ministry were of one piece, and that at every point of it He was translucent to the reality of the kingly rule of God and was in fact the mediating presence of that rule. In Christ the kingly rule of God has impinged on history in intense fashion. The kingdom of God had come near.

Yet it must be observed that there was also progression in that mediating revelation of the kingly rule of God and in the exercise of the Mediator’s God-given authority. Christ moved in accord with the progression of salvation-history in obedience to the appointment of the Father (Acts 1:7). Christ as the messianic Prince provided by Yahweh, the Lord of Israel, became ever more explicit in his assumption of the command of the armies of the God of Israel. Thus the so-called Great Commission must be seen in the first instance as the self-revelation of the Christ of God, and so of the triune God himself. The Christ is revealed as King; we shall return to this later on.

The other pole of the Great Commission has to do with the apostolate. Jesus as the resurrected Christ is speaking to his disciples when He enjoins them: “Make disciples of all the nations.” In effect He saying, you are my intermediaries; you concretize my claim as King over the nations. Matthew pictures this revelation as coming to the eleven disciples in Galilean context. But in what capacity do the twelve (presently attentuated to eleven) stand here as addressed by the Christ?

Barth rephrases Christ’s injunction as follows: “Call them into the twelve of the escatological Israel! Let them share in its place and task in the world!” 192 The twelve must be seen therefore not as twelve individual apostles who as missionaries were to gather in the New Testament Church but as the representatives (the spiritual progenitors) of the twelve spiritual tribes of the reborn Israel of God. They are the nuclear Church of the New Testament era. They are the people of God, of the new covenant drawn together in, around, and by the Messiah of God—the Jesus-community—and thus they are eventually called Christians (Acts 11:26).

The disciples are the followers of the Christ who have capitulated to his royal claims, the true Sons of

191 Barth, op. cit., 62.192 Ibid., 63.

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Israel who can no longer accuse Jesus of blasphemy. They are those subjects of this King who are ready to hear his word and to recognize and promote his royal claims in regard to themselves and to the entire world. They are those who have not only felt the impact of his apostolic word but also willingly and gladly bear that apostolic word in its course throughout the earth. They are disciples who have become one with their Master to the point that his will has become their will; the effectuation of his royal purposes has become their life-long ministry/mission.

The apostolic community was the first Church and thus was the prime apostolic witness to the reality, meaning and intent of Christ’s person and only historical link between the Christ and the continuing New Testament Church. And as such this is a once-for-all link. We have that link available to us only in the form of the tradition as inscripturated in the New Testament. In and through the early apostolic community we stood there (and stand there) by the Christ, and our self-conscious identity was formed by his regal claims.193

The twelve must be seen as representative of the entire New Testament Church. H. N. Ridderbos speaks of them not only as representing the people of God, but also as “the kernel and beginning” of the people of the Messiah.194 It was thus to the New Testament Church,195 through these representatives as the primal nuclear Church, that the Christ gave the Gospel, the sacraments, the keys of the kingdom, the Pentecostal spirit, gifts and offices, the Great Commission, and the inscripturated Word. It is here at the point of the identification of the primal apostolate that the Church must see clearly in order that she might avoid the historical dichotomy which has arisen between leadership (hierarchy) and laity.

If the New Testament apostolate is conceived of narrowly as the twelve in their role as office-bearers, as the twelve patriarchs of the new Israel of God, how then does the mandate to disciple the nations pass over to the ongoing historical church? If in episcopal fashion, as some conceive of it, the

193 H. N. Ridderbos, “De Apostoliciteit van de kerk volgens het Nieuwe Testament,” De Apostolische Kerk (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1954): “De apostelen zijn dus het medium tussen de Messias en zijn volk”, 50.

194 Ibid., 50.195 Cf. J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology. The

Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971): “Thus the fact that Jesus’ disciples number twelve...announces the establishment of the eschatological people of God...,” 235. Cf. also Barth, op. cit., 63, and H. N. Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1962), 353, 372-4.

mandate is transferred to an ongoing episcopally-qualified hierarchy, then we are still in trouble. For then the mandate and the responsibility to disciple the nations rest only or primarily upon the duly qualified and recognized officers of the Church of Christ. We are then left essentially with preacher or officer-dominated church and mission enterprise. And too often the officers become a substitute for the life and activity of the whole body.

The basic question is: Does the apostolic-royal word of the King mandate and qualify the entire Christ-community as it comes to expression in organizational ways, in representative official ways, and in the casual, everyday life of its membership in general society? Is it the responsibility of the hierarchical leadership? This is the most fundamental question which must be answered in regard to the apostolate. Must we distinguish the citizens of the King’s rule from the official apostolate of his rule? Must the Church be conceived of as a two-stage community, of hierarchy and of laity, in which the hierarchy represents the essence of the Church and carries the ball for the church-team? Or put from a different angle, is a disciple first of all a member of the Church who then receives the gift of an office, an apostleship, to disciple the nations on behalf of the Church and the Christ? Is it so that one is first of all a member of the Church and then is specially tapped on the shoulder to engage in mission? So conceived one becomes something more when one becomes an officer of the Church; there is a plus involved, which the person did not have as a simple member of the Church: he becomes a true disciple (apostle), is taken up into the genuine church when becoming an officer. To conceive of the matter thus would be to reenter the dead-end street into which he Church has historically gone. No, the hierarchy is not the sense of the Church, nor does any representative of the Church and of the Christ take the place of that church or of the Christ which he represents.

Involved here are the old question as to whether the Great Commission comes to the Christian already at his baptism into the faith, and the whole concept of leadership and followers in any community. One can conceive of leadership as a substitute for the community which he represents, or one can conceive of leadership as a taking of the lead in expressing the identity, meaning, and purposes of a community. In the latter sense one must be a member of the body, with all that entails, before one can represent that body in a leadership role either within or without that body. Leadership in this sense is a focus of the identity of the body. It is the body particularized and extended representatively. The body exists before the leadership emerges, and the leadership lives by

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the grace of the continued life of the body, which in turn lives by the grace of the Head of the body. Peter F. Rudge designates this model as “systemic leadership” in contrast to the “traditional”, “charismatic”, “human relations” and “classical” models.196 He states that the

essence of systemic leadership is that the leader has a dual concern, with the purpose of the organization and with its environment, both of which he interprets to the organization in such a way that the whole body may respond accordingly. In theological terms, the concerns are the purpose of God (and of His church) and the world in which the church lives; and the church leader’s task is to express these concerns in such a way that the church adapts to such a conjunction of purpose and situation.197

This reveals an intimate reciprocal relationship between leader and the community which he represents.

In the case of the first twelve, they were at one and the same time the representatives of the twelve new tribes, the nucleus of the new Israel, and the twelve patriarchs (leaders) of those twelve individuals, but spiritually in their loins were contained all the later members of those tribes. In the nature of the case Christ could only address the entire New Testament Church through this small nuclear beginning which He himself had formed. This primal historical group is our link to the historical Christ by way of their inscripturated apostolic witness.

Thus is does not make a great deal of difference for this issue whether these words of Christ were uttered only to the eleven or to the eleven in the context of the five hundred. But it does matter that we affirm that the entire New Testament Church is the apostolate of the living, reigning Christ. The Great Commission lies in the bosom of and informs the whole church of Christ, not just its official leadership.198 This is true because the royal Christ is

196 Peter F. Rudge, Ministry and Management. The Study of Ecclesiastical Administration (London: Tavistock Publications in association with Hicks Smith & Sons, 1968), 51-66.

197 Ibid., 54: “The ministry does not belong to individuals: it belongs to the body and to Christ. Individual ministers exercise their office by expressing in their lives what is true of the whole church and of Christ Himself,” 51.

198 H. R. Boer, Pentecost and Missions (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1961): The Great Commission “always has been, is now, and always will be the heart and soul of all true missionary witness,” 47; “The Church as a whole is missionary in all her

present in the midst of his Church by way of his Pentecostal Spirit forming the very heart of her identity. In regal fashing the Christ walks in the midst of the candlesticks, in the midst of his ongoing Church, holding her responsible to himself, calling her to account for the manner in which she fulfills her mission (Rev. 2, 3). And He himself, in his royal intent, provides the norm for his judgment of her faithfulness (Rev. 1:13). Just as the Gospel is given to all, just as the sacraments are given to all, so too the responsibility of discipling the nations is given to the whole Church of the New Testament era.

This is true in that the messianic King rules over all his disciple-citizens; and thus the identity of the King, his meaning and significance as He claims the nations as his messianic inheritance, holds true for all of his subjects. To submit to Christ’s reign is to submit to his messianic claims. To profess that He is in fact the Christ (Messiah) of God implies that one must profess that He is the Lord of the ethné199. It is impossible to be the New Testament Church of Christ and fail to be an advocate of this King in the midst of the nations and peoples of the earth. It is Matthew who in dramatic fashion brings together various Old Testament strands in a conclusion to his Gospel which focuses on the nations.

Paul Minear has emphasized the importance of a self-conscious sense of identity on the part of the Church as the New Testament people of God, as the body of Christ, and as the temple of the Holy Spirit.200 Can the Church of God apply the term apostolate to itself, and be biblically convicted and compelled by that image? This is crucial for the well-being and advance of the Church of Christ on earth. And only when the Church is truly convicted of the truth that she in her entirety must be a light to the world and the salt of the earth can she effectively function through various representative individuals and through her leaders. It is true that nearly all of the work/ministry/mission of the Church in the world must, in the nature of the case, be done representatively. Neither the entire Church nor even a segment thereof can be present in every spot. The Church is sent in her entirety (John 20:21); yet time and again in history her faithfulness, veracity and authenticity, and that of the Gospel which she brings, have been tested in and through one isolated individual representative of her membership.

In the last few years we have gained an increasing respect for the significance and cruciality

relationships,” 161-162.199 Cf. Isaiah 49:5-6; 21:4-5; 59:17-20; 61:11; 62:1-2; 65:1;

66:18-19; Psalm 96, 67, etc.200 Paul Minear, Images Of The Church in The New

Testament (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 24-26.

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of the communal witness of the Church in contrast to an emphasis on the glamorized heroics of certain popular individuals. Yet on the other hand, we must not lose sight of the truth that under the providential guidance of God the future of the Church often turns upon her radical obedience as it is precipitated in one individual at a moment of kairos in history. The communal Church in history cannot do without its Stephen, its Paul, its David Livingstone, its Mary Slessor and a host of others. There is a reciprocal influence being exerted between the community and the individual, and the individual and the community. A mutual fructification takes place between the community and the individual, inspired by the Spirit of the reigning missionary Christ. But this can only function in a healthful way when the whole people of God has a true sense of identity as the apostolate of Christ and a corresponding dedication to the fulfilling of that identity. A New Testament concept of the identity of the people of God such as this rejects and condemns any radical dichotomy between clergy and laity, as well as between pastor and missionary/evangelist. The whole Church is to be the light of the world, a city set on a hill.

It is the entire Church of Christ which is the bearer of the Gospel of Christ, and that Gospel as articulated by Matthew is the Gospel of the Kingdom. Matthew proclaims that the Christ of God rules over the nations, for all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. This climax of the revelation of God in Christ to which Matthew has been building up can only be understood against the backdrop of Old Testament history. The particularization of God’s gracious activity in and through Israel tended to eclipse Israel’s consciousness that God, whom she confessed to be the God of all the earth, intended to redeem his entire cosmos and that she, as the servant of God, was to subserve God’s purposes in the earth. But that consciousness did live on in the plaintive songs of the Psalmist and in the crescendo-leaps of faith expressed by the prophets. Passages such as Psalm 2:67; Is. 42:1-9; 43:10; 45:20-25; 49:1-7; 51:4-5; 52:10-15; 55:3-5; 56:7-8; 60:1-5 are some of the biblical loci that form the basis of the messianic expectations which transcend the old dichotomy and somehow encompass the nations in the shalom of God.

Mt. 28, as triumphant throne-speech of the ascended Son of Man,201 also clarifies and celebrates the progression in Christ’s own public ministry. For in the days of his flesh He too had to carry out his 201 R. De Ridder, op. cit., “Matthew 28 is the throne-speech

of the enthroned Lord, not the proclamation of his enthronement,” 175; cf. also F. Hahn, Mission in the New Testament (Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, Inc., 1965), 65-68.

public ministry at that salvation-historical stage in God’s plan where He Found himself prior to Golgotha.202 As a true son of Israel He carried out his ministry in a predominately particularistic context. Thus He charged his disciples, “Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans: but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 10:5-6). And Jesus could say without qualification to the Canaanite woman, “I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 15: 24). According to the prophecy of Isaiah, the Messiah of God was to fulfill a two-stage ministry. As the Servant of the Lord He was first of all “to raise up the tribes.” Jacob is again to be brought to the service of the Lord. And as though that were too small a thing, he is also to be “given” as a “light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth” (Is. 42:6; 49:6-7). The Servant of the Lord will renew the people of Israel, but amazingly He will also renew the nations of the earth. And the first stage would seem to be subservient to and contributive to the second stage. The prophet was consumed with the vision that the Lord of Israel is the one and only God and Savior in all the earth (Is. 43:11; 44:6-8; 45:5, 14, 18, 21-22; 46:9; 47:10), and it is in that context that the promise of Is. 49:24-26 is given. Mt. 12:18-21 quotes the Servant passage from Isaiah 42:1 ff., which proclaims “that he shall declare judgment to the Gentiles...And in his name shall the Gentiles hope.”

It is only against this double backdrop of the Old Testament era and of the period of the public ministry of Jesus that one can fully appreciate the beauty and triumph of Matthew’s presentation of the claims of the messianic King as set forth in the Great Commission. As the crowned Prince of the House of David, who is at the same time the victorious Son of Man on the throne of the universe, He could claim his messianic reward from the Father: “the nations for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession” (Ps. 2:8). Though Matthew sets a Jewish context for the appearance of the Messiah, in that he states that He is to be born as son of David and of Abraham and called Jesus to indicate that He would save his people from their sins, there are throughout the Gospel portents and intimations of a universalistic future (Mt. 2:1-12; 8:10-11; 21:43; 22:9; 24:14). Matthew is the Gospel of the Kingdom with Israelitic lineaments, but its main message is set in the parentheses of the dramatic picture of Galilee of the Gentiles, a people who sat in darkness, who are

202 Jeremias, op. cit., “First, God’s promise must be fulfilled and Israel must be offered salvation. First, the servant of God must pour out his blood for the many, before the hour of the Gentiles comes.” 247.

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now to see a great light (4:15-16; 26:32; 28:7, 10 , 16). It is the Gospel of a King who emerged out of the heart of Israel, and it appears to be addressed to Jewish Christians. Matthew thereby underscores the continuity of the people of God of the New Testament era with the people of God of the Old Testament era. They are joined together by the messianic King, Jesus Christ, who, though coming to Israel with Jewish credentials and Jewish lineaments and limited in the scope of his public ministry, had a wider aspirations as King: He would be the true son of David with enlarged tent walls. Yet He would not come by his inheritance via the pathway of Satanic suggestion (4:1-11), but rather by walking as a true Son of Abraham. Thus would all the nations of the earth be blessed in and through Him.

Matthew declares that Jesus reigns as King, and all those who would recognize his kingship are exhorted to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (6:33). Men are urged to come to Him, leaving their burdensome state, and to subject themselves to his reign, his authority, his yoke, and to learn of Him.203 They are to be informed by the mind of the King; they are to be instructed by his Torah. The King of Israel who is the Son of David (20:30), after Solomonic fashion (12:42), brings the wisdom of heaven to bear upon the affairs of human life. His presence makes a difference for men who succumb under the burden of sinful existence. Jesus the true son of Israel faithfully fulfills all righteousness. He does this by effectively rendering the Kingdom of God present in Israel by way of parable and miracle. The kingly rule of the God of Israel had come upon men in a remarkable way. It is thus noteworthy that when Jesus healed the blind-dumb man who was possessed of a demon, Matthew portrays the multitude amazedly raising the question, “Can this be the Son of David?” (12:23). But in quick contrast Matthew presents a quotation of the religious community of the Pharisees negating the royal claims of the Christ: “This man doth not cast out demons but by Beelzebub the prince of demons” (12:24). Jesus in his reply goes right to the heart of the matter, to the kingdom motif: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation...But if I in the Spirit of

203 The yoke of the Torah, subservience to the kingly word, would seem to follow on to the yoke of the sovereign, subservience to the King’s reign. Christ’s rule brings life and so his yoke is easy and his burden is light, this in stark contrast to the oppressive nature of many human and demonic sovereignties. Cf. further the rich Old Testament background of this figure of submission to a sovereign, Lev. 26:13; Gen. 27:40; Deut. 28:48; I Kings 12:4, 9, 10, 11, 14; II Chron. 10:4, 9, 10, 11, 14; Is. 9:4; 10:27; 14:25; 47:6; Jer. 2:20; 27:8, 11 ,12; 28:2, 4, 11, 14.

God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come upon you” (12:25-28).

And it is this same Matthew who in the stygian darkness of unbelief around the cross records a tiny spark of wonder and incredible faith in the heart of the Roman Centurion, who exclaims as the Matthaean representative of the gentile world: “Truly this was the Son of God” (27:54). Again in the same context Matthew records another breath of faith and hope by informing the reader that there were many women there, who had followed Jesus from Galilee of the Gentiles (27:55). This is potent symbolism. This growing universal point of view is also evident earlier on in Matthew, e.g., in what he records in chapter 18 regarding the nature of discipleship. Part of that discipleship is to have an eye open for the world in its need. Jesus himself was moved with compassion when He saw the multitudes as sheep scattered, having no shepherd; He observed: “The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest” (9:37-38). It is in this context that Matthew places the sending out of the twelve on a temporary mission to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. For Matthew it is the twelve who are sent out, symbolically representing the entire revitalized Israel of God. Their message is to be the regal announcement that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (10:7), and they go forth with a sense of urgency. They are to note that the cites of Israel which reject their coming and message will be worse off in the coming day of judgment than will be the land of Sodom and Gomorrah.

But even at this early point Matthew takes the opportunity to universalize the significance of the mission of the New Testament people of God, the New Israel. They are sent out by the Christ with authority to stand not only before councils, synagogues, governors, and kings for the sake of Christ but also as a testimony before the Gentiles. They are thus to bear witness before the children of men and before the structured expressions of human society. And they are encouraged with the promise that they do not walk alone but will be accompanied by the comforting presence of the speaking Spirit of the Father (10:20). They are assured that they will be hated by all men for his name’s sake. They are exhorted to remember that a disciple is not above his teacher in respect to suffering. They are not to fear, for the Father is with them. Christ himself will be the royal advocate of the disciple who confesses Him before men. Part of discipleship is to follow Christ in the path of suffering, and to that end the disciple must love Him above all. So to walk is to be worthy of the Christ. It is in this pathway that a disciple will find his life. The disciples are sent out as apostles, as

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sheluchim! The shaliach 204represents the one who sends him. Thus Christ can affirm: “He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me” (10:40).

Though one must not absolutize certain temporary aspects of Matthew’s account of this mission of the twelve, the universalizing context in which he places it suggests that this is part of the backdrop of the climax of his gospel-witness to the Christ: Mt. 28:18:20. It is time for the messianic harvest, and Jesus is delivered over to the Gentiles (27:2) in more than one sense. In a way too wise and wonderful for human contrivance, the rejection of Jesus on the part of the Jewish religious leadership as King of the Jews leads to the enthronement of David’s son over a universal kingdom which will have no end. As the messianic countdown takes place in the heart of Jerusalem, the Messiah of God is called Jesus of Nazareth (26:71) and, fittingly, “Jesus the Galilean” (26:69). The Christ who enlightens the people of Galilee who sat in darkness (4:23-25) is to be set forth as the “light of the world” (5:14). And the message of Jesus, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17), was to be the message which the disciples were to pass on. Much of Israel would harden its heart in impenitance, but the gentile world was to provide the new horizon of apostolic activity.

Matthew understood that the gospel message of the kingly rule of God in Christ requires more than simple acceptance. It requires an obedient response to the King. And this response involves more than worshipful adoration, it involves the faithful worldwide representation of the rule of the King. The throne-speech of the newly crowned world-messianic King calls for the bringing of the gentile world under the dominion of the King by way of the faithful witness of his disciples. The world of the ethné is to be discipled by Jesus’ followers. As they live their lives dispersed amongst the gentile world, the world which is out of tune with Yahweh, they are to baptize the peoples and to teach them all that the King has commanded them. The nations are thus to be brought into subjection to the King of Kings; and furthermore, there is to be formed in them the very mind of the King. He is the God of the Word, of the Torah, of Wisdom, of the Psalm, and of the Prophet; and under the King’s command that Word of God is

204 The shaliach figure as basic to the concept of the apostle is not undisputed. For contrasting views see: pro, K. H. Rengstorf, “apostolos”, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. I, ed. G. Kittel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964); con, Alan Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958), 324-325.

to be impresses upon the world of the Gentiles. Thus the messianic light will dawn upon the peoples (Is. 9:1-2). God through Israel, and through a humble son of Israel, come from Galilee, displays his regal mien before the nations and affirms: I am “the Lord of all the earth!” (Joshua 3:11-13). And the word at the end of Matthew’s gospel repeats this affirmation: the undying claims of God are intensified in Jesus the King and set in a unmistakably universal context.

We have sought to demonstrate that Matthew 28:18-20 is the summarizing and integrating capstone of the entire Gospel.205 Matthew sets forth the dynamic thrust of Christ’s entire life and ministry. There is a consistency to the entire book, focused as it is upon the Jewish context and mind. For Matthew the Great Commission is the logical conclusion of a truly messianic understanding of the prophets of the Old Testament. It is in fact in keeping with the cast of the entire Old Testament, of the divine plan of salvation revealed therein. This conclusion of the Gospel is also in line with the subtle implications of Christ’s earthly ministry; thus, contrary to some opinion,206 it is not at all incomprehensible that the risen victorious Lord would make such a throne-speech. The Great Commission draws together several threads of the Gospel of Matthew in this climax of the self-revelation of the Christ of God to Israel and to the world. He is verily the messianic King, who in fact has entered upon his reign. He is a King who claims sovereignty over all the nations. He is a King who calls forth loyal subjects, disciples, who are to be formed by his Torah, his instruction, his Word. The yoke of his reign and the yoke of his revealed will go together. The “teach” passage is 205 J. Verkuyl, op. cit., 145, “Vergeleken bij het slot van de

andere Evangeliën is het slot van het Mattheüs-evangelie niet alleen zeer krachtig, maar het is eigenlijk het hoogtepunt en de samenvatting van dat Evangelie. Dit slot is de sleutel van waaruit het geheel moet worden verstaan. Het is de afsluiting van het Evangelie, waarin alle data worden samengevat.” Translation: “Compared to the end of the other Gospels, the end of the Matthew Gospel is not all that strong, but it is actually the highpoint of the summing up of the Gospels. This end is the key from which the whole must be understood. It is the closing of the Gospel in which all data has been collected.”

206 Adolf Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, translated and edited by James Moffatt, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908, 1961; Harper Torchbook Edition): Jesus “cannot have given any command upon the mission to the wide world. The gospels contain such a command, but it is easy to show that it is neither genuine nor a part of the primitive tradition. It would introduce an entirely strange feature into the preaching of Jesus, and at the same time render many of his genuine sayings unintelligible or empty,” 37.

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thus consistent with Matthew’s Gospel from its beginning onward. And those who are addressed in this throne-speech are the representatives of the renewed Israel, the apostolate, the entire New Testament people of God. This is supported by the promise of his presence “always, even unto the end of the world.”

The royal claim of the messianic Prince is already there in embryo in Matthew 11, where Christ proclaims: “All things have been delivered unto me of my Father.” And this is the Father whom the Christ addresses as the “Lord of heaven and earth!” But in chapter eleven the climax is an exhortation to centripetal mission: the weary and heavy laden are urged to come unto the Christ in order to participate in the Messianic rest. That follows and builds on the dynamic of centripetal movement sketched throughout the Old Covenant. The weary must come to the living Lord by way of Israel, by way of Jerusalem, by way of Israel’s promised Messiah. And their subjection to the yoke of Christ will bring them true rest in intimate personal covenantal relationship with the Father in Christ.

In the Great Commission the movement of discipleship is presupposed as flowing out from the Christ into the world, which He claims as his own and seeks to win for his Kingdom through his Spirit, Word, and disciples (Word bearers). The disciple is one who, under the authority of the Christ, is consciously active as the representative agent of the King. The disciple is one whose eyes have been opened by the King to see the harvest; he is presumed to be living in the midst of the nations. The disciple who submits to the Christ is about-faced, marched out of Jerusalem, and called upon to mediate the King’s claims to the nations. There is a messianic harvest which must be reaped. Christ’s earlier call to pray to the Lord of the harvest for reapers is now answered by authoritative royal messianic assignment! The messianic Prince designates the renewed flock as the apostolate, as world reapers in the name of the Triune God. The focused communal movement of the gathered is to be outward toward the ends of the earth. And the gathered flock goes forth with hope, with joy and good courage, for, in the words of Paul Minear,

“As apostolate, the Church is the vanguard of a kingdom that cannot be shaken...”207

207 Paul Minear, “The Covenant And the Great Commission”, Missions Under the Cross, Addresses delivered at the Enlarged Meeting of the Committee of the International Missionary Council at Willingen, Germany, 1952; with Statements issued by the Meeting, edited by Norman Goodall (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1953), 79.

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by: Charles Van Engen“The Work of the Holy Spirit” by D. T. Niles

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“The Work of the Holy Spirit” by D. T. Niles

(Taken from Christian Mission in Theological Perspective: An Inquiry by Methodists, edited by Gerald Anderson, pp. 89-108, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.

Used by permission. The article originally appeared as a chapter in Upon the Earth by D. T. Niles, Mebrow-Hill, 1962.)

“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”And they said, “No” (Acts 19:2).

“Come”—”Come and see”: that was the Lord’s first invitation to his disciples (John 1:39). “Go”— “Go and preach”: that was his last command to them (Mark 16:15). This reversal of direction is a constitutive part of the Christian life.

The story, which the Gospels tell, begins with Bethlehem when God in Jesus came to dwell with men. But that story comes to a definite end where the Gospel writer says, “He parted from them” (Luke 24:51). He himself had said to them a few hours before his death, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Mary of Magdala, when she met her risen Lord, clung to his feet. He said to her, “Mary, do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). Of course, the story continues; but with the coming of the Holy Spirit, it moves out of the villages of Galilee and towns of Judea into the highways of life. It is with this movement that we are concerned in this chapter.

When Paul came to Ephesus, he found some disciples there. They had been baptized into the baptism of John, but they had not even heard of the Holy Spirit. Paul baptized them again into the name of the Lord Jesus, “and when [he] had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them; and they spoke with tongues and prophesied” (Acts 19: 1-6).

Peter and John came to Samaria. There were some disciples there who had already been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. But they had not received the Holy Spirit. Peter and John laid their hands upon them and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, and they received him (Acts 8:14-18).

Nicodemus came to Jesus to talk with him about the signs he did (John 3:1 ff.), and the way in which God was with him. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “You cannot see the signs of the Kingdom, you cannot see them as signs, unless you are born anew. This birth is by water and the Spirit. John baptizes with water, I baptize with the Spirit.”

Jesus said to his disciples (Acts 1:4, 8), “Depart not from Jerusalem but wait for the promise of the

Father. Before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit. And when the Spirit has come upon you, you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.”

The Experience of the Spirit

What do these incidents add up to? Is it not clear that they show the absolute importance of the coming of the Holy Spirit into the lives of Christ’s disciples, and that it is by the Spirit alone that men see and understand the signs of the kingdom of God in the life and ministry of Jesus, as well as find power and authority to proclaim these signs to the world? On the day of Pentecost, the disciples spoke with tongues (Acts 2:4). The gospel became a gospel for all the nations. Whenever the Holy Spirit comes into the life of a person now, nothing less takes place. He is swept into that movement which would take the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. It is said that when the apostles laid their hands on those who believed, with prayer for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit came: so he comes even now when the mission of the church claims a person, lays hands upon him, and he surrenders to that claim.

The Christian faith is more than a “Jesus religion.” It is concerned with the consequence to men of who Jesus is.

Jesus is ascended on high. He sits at the right hand of the Father. His kingdom is exercised upon earth. He must rule till all God’s enemies are subdued.

Jesus is risen from the dead. He is alive on earth. He is constantly seeking the lost, upholding the fainthearted, strengthening the weak, spreading his love abroad in the hearts and lives of men.

The Holy Spirit is come to lead those who believe to participation in power in this ongoing ministry of Christ. He is come also to prepare a believing response to Christ among those who have not as yet accepted him.

It is said that, when God made the heavens and the earth, the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters (Gen. 1:2). Because of that movement of the Spirit, chaos responded to the creating Word of God. When the angel brought his announcement to Mary (Luke 1:35), it is said that the Holy Spirit came upon her and the power of the Most High

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overshadowed her. That was how Mary brought forth Jesus.

That is how it always is. It is the Spirit in our hearts that teaches us to say “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15). It is when the Holy Spirit comes that we even learn to pray as we ought (Rom. 8:26). “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. 4:30), is Paul’s warning. The Holy Spirit has come. He is preparing a response to the gospel here, there, and everywhere; and he is seeking to lead the church in its mission into those places and to those persons whom he has so prepared. The Holy Spirit guided the first Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:6 ff.) to fashion a policy that would meet the kind of preparation among the Gentiles which he had already effected. The Holy Spirit would not allow Paul and Silas to go to Bithynia (Acts 16:6,7) but took them instead to Troas where Paul received the call to take the gospel to Europe. Paul went, on his last visit to Jerusalem, bound in the Spirit, not knowing what should befall him there (Acts 20:22). What happened to him there took him ultimately to Rome, the center of the empire.

The fact is that the possibility of Christian obedience is bound up with the experience of the Holy Spirit. He directs the campaign in which the Christian is a participant, so that without him the Christian life simply becomes a religious exercise. The issue is never only, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”; it is also, “Have you received the Holy Spirit?”

To avoid serious misunderstanding, let it be insisted that the way in which the distinction is here made between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit should not lead anyone to theorize about distinctions within the Godhead, as if man can understand or explain what the life of God is like. The distinction is drawn only because it is an important distinction when we are considering God’s work of salvation. When God dealt with human history, that was how he dealt with it so that it becomes determinative for us and our obedience. However, it affords no basis on which altars can be set up to three gods. There is only one God about whom, when men approach him, they find that their obedience has three decisive moments in it. I accept Jesus Christ. I receive the Holy Spirit. I am a son of the Father. But, when Jesus Christ is accepted, we find that he and the Father are one (John 10:30). When the Spirit is received, we know that the Lord is the Spirit (II Cor. 3:17). When we seek to live as children of the Father, we see that it is only Jesus who is able to establish us in this relation (John 14:6), and that it is only the Spirit who is able to maintain us therein (Rom. 8:27). There is one God in three persons, not

an identity of the three but a unity of them, a unity which reflects itself in the Christian experience.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). An electric fan can circulate the warm air in a room. Many church activities and even some evangelistic missions achieve little more. It is a different matter when one is able to go out where the breezes blow and feel the breeze on one’s face. To receive the Holy Spirit, one must stand where the Spirit blows. There, where God is so obviously at work, is the place to be caught by the Spirit of God. To come into close association with a person alive in the spirit is to come where one may catch contagion. The symbol of the Spirit is not only wind but fire. Some men are so aflame with the Spirit that to draw near to them is to be where the sparks fall. A Christian congregation is a failure if, in its midst, the Spirit does not break out into flame and fire; if, there, those who do not have the Spirit do not receive him. Jesus said, “If you, who are evil, now how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:13). To any other prayer God’s answer may be “no”; but to the prayer for the Holy Spirit, God’s answer is always “yes.”

When our Lord said to his disciples, “Wait for the Spirit,” this was what he asked them to wait for. They needed the Holy Spirit in order that in their own lives they may be filled with the presence of Jesus Christ. They needed the Holy Spirit in order that they may be led to follow their Master in his continuing ministry in the world. And they needed the Holy Spirit so that each may find the locus of his own obedience. “When the Spirit comes,” said Jesus (John 14:26), “He will bring to your remembrance the things I have taught, he will take what is mine and declare it to you, he will make me glorious in you” (John 16:14).

The Launching of the Mission

But when our Lord said, “Wait for the Spirit,” he meant also, “Wait until the mission of God is launched in the world.” In their different ways, Christmas and Pentecost both celebrate the coming of God to become part of human history, to be involved in it. The coming of God in Jesus Christ determined what man’s history shall be. The coming of God in the Holy Spirit regulates the tides of this history.

I was discussing this point with a friend of mine when I was preparing this paper. He was a person greatly influenced in his thinking by the writing of the mystics of all religions. He said to me, “It is generally thought that the postulate of a personal God

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is a concession to the religious instinct. In your thinking you seem to make God even time-bound.” My answer was “Yes: but probably not in the sense in which you mean it. God is time-bound until time itself will be redeemed and set free. He entered into time, and that entrance is the basis of our hope in cosmic redemption.” “But the incarnation,” my friend countered, “was only for the purpose of revealing God.” I said, “No. Certainly by the incarnation God is revealed, but the incarnation is not just revelation. It is what it means—the entrance of God into human life in order to be part of it. The avatars of Hinduism are not incarnations in this sense. They are revelations. They are interventions in human affairs and in human lives. Jesus is God incarnate. That is why the Christian faith announces not only an incarnation but a resurrection—a continuous participation of God incarnate in the movement of human history. That is also why the Christian faith announces an end-event when this action of God entering into time will have reached fulfillment, and time itself is no more because death is swallowed up in victory” (I Cor. 15:54). “All this is dogma,” my friend said. “What is the experiential proof?” “The experiential proof,” I replied, “lies in receiving the Holy Spirit. God’s entrance into history is a double entrance. He becomes part of it in Jesus Christ. He makes this part embrace the whole through the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the content of the gospel—the good news of what God has done. The Holy Spirit is the missionary of the gospel. It is he who makes the gospel explosive in men’s lives and in human affairs.”

“Until Jesus was glorified,” says John (7:39), “the mission of the Holy Spirit could not be launched.” But when Jesus was glorified, the Spirit came. He came to lead men to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (II Cor. 4:6). Acceptance of the Christian witness must be prepared for by the Holy Spirit in the lives of men. Apart from that preparation, they will neither understand nor believe. Ask any convert and he will tell you that he is unable to explain how he came to believe. C. S. Lewis gives to the story of his conversion the title Surprised by Joy. It is always a surprise when one suddenly sees life according to a new pattern, when, within the soul, one’s knowledge of Jesus catches fire and becomes a living awareness, when the will accepts the mastery of Christ and is satisfied.

What of Unbelief?

But what of unbelief? No consideration of the work of the Holy Spirit can avoid this question. In the teaching of Jesus there are two emphases which determine the perspective in which this question must be viewed. He spoke of those who were known as

believers but whom the Lord would not acknowledge (Matt. 7:23). He also spoke of those who were known as having said, “no,” but who turned out to be those who had done “yes” (Matt. 21:28-30). The elder son who stayed with his father finally stayed outside the home, while the younger son who left his father finally found his place within the home (Luke 15:11-32). “The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it” (Luke 11:32). “Many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Mark 10:31).

The second emphasis in the teaching of Jesus on this question is that on the Holy Spirit as the author of true discipleship. The scribes and the Pharisees persistently rejected Jesus and opposed his work, but his judgment upon them is pronounced precisely at the point where they attributed his work to the devil (Matt. 12:24; Mark 3:30). “A word against the Son of man,” he says, “will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (Matt. 12:32). Unbelief is a refusal to say “yes” to Jesus Christ, but such refusal may be based on a rejection of Jesus Christ because of who he is. It is this rejection which is the sin against the Holy Spirit, for by the Holy Spirit Jesus has been made known and yet rejected.

Any reflection, then, on unbelief as one meets it in the course of one’s Christian ministry of witness must be a reflection in the shadow of the last judgment which will be an event of many surprises. It will also be a reflection on the work of the Holy Spirit as he witnesses to Jesus Christ and draws men to him. In his last discourse in the upper room, Jesus spoke of the work of the Holy Spirit as that of convincing the world of sin because they do not believe in him, of righteousness because of his death, and of judgment because by his triumph the ruler of this world is judged (John 16:8-11). Here becomes evident the inextricable link between the person and the work of the Holy Spirit and the person and the work of Jesus Christ to the souls and consciences of men. Who can say where and in whom this work is being performed?

How does he work? He works through the ministry of the church, which ministry he surrounds with his previousness and impregnates with his presence.

The life and mission of the church is the result of the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world. Because of him, the church in engaged in the proclamation that Jesus is Lord. By the Holy Spirit alone is the announcement born that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (I John 4:2). He thrusts the church out to make this proclamation, he empowers the church to make it under all circumstances, he effects in the church a demonstration of it, he gives to men

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the gifts of repentance and faith by which they accept the Lord who is proclaimed and confess him.

But here precisely is the problem that not all who hear demonstrably believe, so that the question is raised: What of unbelief? An answer to be true to the New Testament, must say two things, the one said under the shadow of the last judgment and the other said in the light of the warning about sin against the Holy Spirit.

Can we put into words what needs to be said in the shadow of the last judgment? At least one instance can be given, that which it is necessary to say when the question of belief and unbelief is discussed with respect to the uniqueness and particularity of the Christian gospel and its relation to other faiths. This discussion always runs into difficulty precisely because the relationship being discussed is never a static one. The Holy Spirit is at work. He is eliciting response in the hearts and minds of men to the working of God upon their lives. Their lives are lived within their faiths, sometimes as those who accept them and sometimes as those who do not. Into this situation, the Holy Spirit brings the witness of the church to the lordship and saviorhood of Christ. This witness evokes the response of faith. It sometimes meets with rejection. It oftentimes results in raising questions in the minds of the hearers and leaving those questions there. The Holy Spirit takes all these ways in which people respond to the gospel, and uses them in his own ministry of leading them to confess Jesus as Lord; or even where that confession is absent, of making Christ’s lordship a felt pressure upon their lives. The whole business is too complex for neat answers. We cannot meet a dynamic situation with rigid orthodoxies; we can only recognize it through lives of sensitive obedience. It cannot be otherwise since the mission of the church is a mission within the mission of the Holy Spirit.

But just because this is so, the other word is of equal importance: that it is the gospel proclaimed which causes the double movement of faith and unbelief. Mark sets forward the story of Jesus in this very form, a story culminating in the cross. In John this double movement centers in the figure of Judas. “So, after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out: and it was night” (John 13:30). In light of the gospel, unbelief is the terrible tragedy of sin.

Is there, then, nothing more to say? There is, because the world’s hatred, which the gospel precipitates, itself creates the suffering church, which is for the world’s redemption; and the coming of the Holy Spirit will bring to bear witness to Christ on the church’s witness to him (John 15:18-27). Also there is more to say because the world’s hatred is not a

surprise to God (John 15:19); it was known in his great wisdom always.

The classic discussion in the New Testament of the problem of unbelief is that by Paul in his Letter to the Romans concerning the unbelief of Israel (Rom. 9:11). At the very outset of his argument Paul moves away from the unbeliever as his starting point. Not all Israel were faithless, there were those who believed (Rom. 9:27). Besides, this faith was possible to all because all heard the good tidings (Rom. 10:18). Why, then, did they not believe? The answer has to be in terms of the actual consequences which their unbelief produced. Because of the unbelief of Israel the gospel went to the Gentiles and, by their acceptance of it, became manifest as God’s offer of free salvation to all men (Rom. 11:32). So it became clear that Israel’s unbelief itself was held within the wisdom and design of God (Rom. 9:18), while the promise implicit in the faith of those in Israel who believed has also been fulfilled (Rom. 11:31-33).

The inner significance of this argument of Paul becomes luminous when we read what he has to say in the previous chapter. “The hope is,” he writes (Rom. 8:11, 14, 19, 21), “that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God. They are God’s sons who follow the leading of God’s Spirit. Within them lives the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, bringing to their whole being new strength and vitality. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own.” A direct connection is here made between the liberty of the sons of God—those who are in Christ—and the liberation of the whole cosmos. Faith and hope jump from the redeemed community to the redemption of all things, a jump which is possible only because the in-between situation of belief and unbelief is comprehended within the mystery of God’s plan of salvation.

The Holy Spirit is the agent of the new creation, the new heavens and the new earth, which he creates in Christ. And, because this is so, the church comes to see its own meaning as the community of the Holy Spirit, becomes aware of the encompassing ministry of the Holy Spirit by which its own ministry is sustained, and understands the task of its own upbuilding in relation to the great work of salvation.

In speaking about salvation, the thrust of the Christian hope is to include “all”: it is in speaking about the church that the selective principle applies. A direct consequence of the church’s mission, when men find faith in Christ, is that the mission itself is strengthened. The mission is intended to produce

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missionaries, the evangel must produce evangelists. Bishop Azariah introduced the practice in his diocese of people confirmed placing their hands on their heads and saying, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel” (I Cor. 9:16). That is what the confirmation service is about: prayer for the Holy Spirit that one may live the witnessing life. But it is just here that the selective principle applies (John 15:2). The army of Gideon had to be reduced, the vine needs to be pruned, the confessed and confessing people of God in the world will necessarily be a remnant. It is of the church that it is true that “many are called but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14).

In the work of the Holy Spirit, then, there is the quality not only of comprehension but also of selection, not only of wideness but also of narrowness—a contradictoriness which ought to be no surprise for anyone whose faith is grounded in the Bible. For, as the Bible makes plain, the work of God is always characterized by universality of intention as well as particularity of method. Israel is for the nations, the church is for the world. When the gospel is proclaimed there are the few who are led by the Spirit to faith, who become members of the community whose task it is to proclaim the gospel. When the gospel is proclaimed it becomes also, within the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the power of God for the salvation of the world.

There is only one Savior, Jesus Christ (I Tim. 2:5), and all who are saved will be saved by him. There is only one end-event toward which all things move, their recreation in Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:10). There is only one finale to the story of man and that will be its fulfillment in the eternal city where God and his Christ are the light by which men will walk and into which the treasures of the nations will be gathered (Rev. 21:23-26). The ministry of the Holy Spirit in the world is to recall the world to its moorings, to reestablish it on its true foundation, to make actual the once-for-allness-for-all-men of what God has done for man in Jesus Christ. “The Holy Spirit is my witness,” said Jesus (John 15:26). “He will claim on my behalf all truth that belongs to me” (John 16:13-15). “He will own on my behalf the light wheresoever the light may be. I am the truth, I am the light—the light that enlightens every man” (John 14:6; 8:12; 1:9).

This argument must now be concluded, and yet no way of concluding it seems to be wholly satisfactory. Paul concludes his argument with a shout of praise: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33). God has unlimited resources of grace and mercy. He also remains wholly free so that no one has rights over him. His people have no claims on him above those of others. But this is only one half of the

conclusion of the argument. The other half lies in the fact that this shout of praise is the shout of the people of God, those who have found their sonship in Jesus Christ. They witness to the fact that for all men God has provided a place of reconciliation, a mercy seat, a visible Savior, and a visible company which is the saved and saving community.

Let our Lord’s own parable concerning the last judgment say the last word. The sheep and the goats are separated (Matt. 25:31-46). So, at the last, will God’s judgment separate men. And the judgment turns on the question, Had they accepted him? But, as the parable makes clear, the form in which he had presented himself to them for their acceptance was the form of one despised and rejected of men. There is no salvation except in Jesus Christ, but who shall decide how and in what guise Jesus comes to men and claims their acceptance!

The Nature of the Church’s Mission

There we must leave it, and turn to a search for an understanding of the nature of our own obedience, of the meaning and significance of the mission of the church. First of all, the church’s mission is to be the people of God. Redeemed by Christ and raised from death in him by the Holy Spirit, the Christian community exists as the result and the demonstration of the facts of the gospel. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus said (Matt. 5:14). The Christian community cannot escape this responsibility. In the night, it has to be the moon reflecting the light of the sun. In the day, it has to be the mirror in which men can see themselves. Its task is to make plain the way of life, to reveal life, and to direct it. The proclamation of the Christian gospel must arise from a demonstration of what it means. The Christian must be a witness of what he proclaims, he must be an evidence of it. “We are,” says James, “the first specimens of his new creation” (Jas. 1:18). It is true that the treasure will always remain in earthen vessels (II Cor. 4:7), but the treasure will be there. There will be proof that the door of heaven has been opened and that God has come among men. “If a man loves me,” said Jesus, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Emmanuel is the promise “God with us” (John 14:23). To us who believe in Jesus Christ, it is the promise that the presence of God will be mediated to them. God has made us priests (Rev. 1:6); we are no priests unless we mediate God to the world.

“Men are not so foolish,” said Jesus (Matt. 5:15), “as to light a lamp and put it under a bushel. Neither is God less wise. When he lights a lamp he puts it where it will give light to the whole house.” The sanctuary is the place where the lamp is lit, where it

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is filled with oil, where its wicks are trimmed. It should never become the place where the lamp is left. The lamp is meant for the world outside. It is not a sanctuary lamp but a street light that the church represents. An ecumenical conference, called by the World Council Youth Department and held in Berlin in May, 1960, was reported on in the Ecumenical Press Service.208 The reports says that there was a session at the conference when the participants were asked to write press articles on peace arising out of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. One conference member is said to have remarked, “I should prefer to write a book on systematic theology. It is easier.” Of course it is. Systematic theology is an exercise within the precincts of the temple. Press articles demand converse with wayfarers on the road.

The church, it is commonly said, is a divine society. It is. But its divine nature lies in the actuality of its mission as the herald and carrier of the divine. The divine nature of the church is in its dynamics. It is, and remains wherever it is, the place where men find God; whether they find him as One who is troublesome or satisfying, as effecting their obedience or causing their rebellion.

Secondly, the church’s mission is to be the people of God everywhere—in every situation, in every land and nation, in all areas of life. The church anywhere represents the gathering of the firstfruits (Rev. 14:4, 15), which is the promise of the final harvest. That there be firstfruits everywhere, that in every city of earth there be a colony of heaven (Phil. 3:20): that is the task of the Holy Spirit through the mission of the church. The unfinished task of evangelism is the task of bringing the gospel to those who have not heard it, of building the Christian community within a people among whom such a community does not exist, of maintaining the Christian witness amidst current problems and tensions in all areas of human relationships, of exerting the pressure of the Christian way of life on those who do not yet accept it.

There is a sense in which, until all men are confessing Christians and all life is lived in the Christian obedience, the task of evangelism is not over. But the task to which the church is committed is not so much the finishing of it as the beginning of it. It is the beginning that is yet unfinished. When the leaven is hid in the meal (Luke 13:21), the beginning of the task is over. But there are so many situations in which the leaven is not so hid. Where the seed is sown (Mark 4:26), the beginning of the task is over. But there are hundreds of thousands of villages in Africa and Asia alone where the seed has not yet been sown. Where the city is built (Matt.

208 E.P.S. No. 19, May 20, 1960.

5:14), the beginning of the task is over. But there are many places in which the Christian city has not yet been built. “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). The end cannot come where the beginning is not over. To be the people of God everywhere, that is the mission. To go to the ends of the earth, that is the task. As we think of it cannot we hear the word of the Lord that came to Israel long ago, “You have compassed this mountain long enough. Go north”?

For a whole generation they had lived on the slopes of that mountain. (See Deut. 1.) It was their home. They had left Egypt, a crowd; here on this mountain they had been welded into a nation. Why could they not continue to live here? They could not, because they were a pilgrim people. The promised land lay north of where they were. They had to strike their tents and set off again on the march.

This mission of the church is to be the people of God. It is to be the people of God everywhere. It is also to be the people of God on a journey. A church at rest is no church. I was present one day at a discussion conducted by Dr. Nolde on some aspect of international affairs. During question time he was asked, “And for what solution are you prepared to settle?” His answer was, “For none.” “The Christian community,” he said, “cannot settle for any answer. We shall press for the best possible compromise in the present situation, but we shall also press for a complete change in the situation itself.” This is a good illustration of what it means for the church to be a pilgrim people.

A pilgrim people is bound to have a set of values which are different from those held by people who have settled down. It will tend to accumulate less luggage, it will not be overconcerned with creature comforts, it will enjoy its food provided for the journey.

When I was studying in the Theological College at Bangalore, I was to go one day with three of my friends to visit the waterfalls at Shimoga. We had planned to leave early in the morning. Sandwiches for the trip were prepared, and we had our thermos flasks filled with coffee. Unfortunately for us, at the very last moment, the picnic had to be called off. We decided to eat the sandwiches and have the coffee for breakfast. I can still recall how flat those sandwiches tasted and how insipid the coffee. On the picnic they would have been wonderful, on the breakfast table they were awful.

The sacraments of the church, the worship of the congregation, the study of God’s Word, the practices of religion in the home and in one’s personal life—all these are food for the journey. So many neglet them because they do not need them. Theirs is a sedentary

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life, and all this food is unnecessary. And even what food they take they do not relish. A beautiful cloth and flowers on the breakfast table will not make the difference. Even “music while we eat” is quite irrelevant. The sandwiches are for the road. Get up and get out. Go north.

This challenge to the church to take to the road implies also another consequence. It means that the church can never be satisfied with its forms of obedience. What the church is today in our several countries is the result of the obedience of our fathers in the faith. But their obedience cannot necessarily be ours. In one of the discussions in the Negotiating Committee for Church Union in Ceylon, a suggestion was made by one of the Anglican representatives that a paragraph be included in the Scheme of Union expressing repentance for the past sin of division. “I shall never repent,” said a Congregationalist, “for the action of the pilgrim fathers.” We don’t have to. It is not necessary for the past to have been wrong in order to make repentance now necessary. Repentance is our essential response to new tasks and new commands. There is no entail on the church’s past. A great deal has to be left behind. That is what it means to be a pilgrim people, that is what is involved in being called to take to the road.

In the gospel narrative the challenge of Jesus, that those who would follow him must take up the cross and follow him (Mark 8:34), appears before there is any mention of the cross on which he himself must die. What meaning then could it have conveyed to those who heard him? It would have only suggested to them that they must be prepared to die at the hands of the Romans, a likelihood contingent on Jesus’ leading an insurrection. Explaining this difficulty, Dr. Findlay quotes a traveler familiar with Bedouin life as saying that in the Aramaic the word “cross” simply meant “something sticking up from the ground” and that it was used generally to describe a peg. Even now, this traveler remarked, the Bedouin sheikh when he orders a move, says to the women of his harem “take up the cross and follow me.”209

Peter has confessed Jesus as the Christ, Christ had said that he must suffer and die and rise again. Peter had protested that this cannot be and been rebuked by the Master. Then Jesus says to them all, disciples and multitude: “You cannot follow me by staying where you are. You must break camp. You think that your security lies in the well-trodden paths of yesterday. I tell you that it lies only in following me along the unknown paths of tomorrow and sharing there both my passion and my victory. If you seek to save your life you will lose it. And what will

209 J. A. Findlay, A Portrait of Peter (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1935), p. 88.

it profit you if by staying behind you gain the whole world and lose your own soul?”

It is said of Abraham that he obeyed, not knowing whither he went (Heb. 11:8). The unknown is the pilgrim’s goal and obedience, it is also his hope and his heritage. And what a magnificent thing the unknown will be when finally the pilgrim arrives! A city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God! And, all along the way, what an exhilarating experience to find that while one leaves behind that which one has made his home—whether spiritually or materially—and takes to the road with fear; God provides safety for the journey, sustenance for the road, and a foretaste of one’s inheritance. “In his hands,” sang the psalmist (Ps. 16:11), whatever those hands will dispense, “are the joys for evermore.”

“It is not enough,” I heard Dr. Hockendijk say at a conference, “to speak of the church as engaged in mission. It is essential to realize that the church is a mission.” To use a phrase of Bishop Newbigin, “The church is an expedition.” And, because it is an expedition it creates consequences for other people, for those in whose midst this expedition has been launched. These consequences, too, are part of the church’s task in the world.

The consequence for others of having a pilgrim people in their midst is that such a people will exert a peculiar pressure on the forms of common life. Theirs will be a worldiness that is holy. They will live the common life as those who are soon to leave it behind. Also, they will cause even those who are not on the pilgrimage to serve it. The church loses one of its greatest opportunities of fulfilling its mission when the Christian community seeks to be self-contained. This is an insistent temptation for the small Christian groups that are scattered throughout the large lands of Asia and Africa. A pilgrim people must maintain their differentia as pilgrims, but they must belong to the society among whom their journey is set. This common association is of the heart of the business.

By far the greater part of the church’s mission is to bring to bear on people the pressure of the Christ. So will their living be influenced by him even when they are not Christians by commitment. In the Western world, there is a Christian national past in the lives of the nations on which such pressure can depend; in the lands of the younger churches such pressure must depend on the normality of the relationship between Christians and their fellow citizens in all walks of life. The Christian community has always to be a witnessing community but its intention to convert to Jesus Christ is never a conditioning factor in its relationships. It qualifies but does not condition, and because it qualifies, the

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church becomes in human affairs the instrument of the inescapability of Christ.

So to be sure you do not refuse to hear the voice of God! . . . Now he promises:

Yet once more will I make to trembleNot the earth only, but also the heaven.

This means that in this final “shaking” all that is impermanent will be removed, . . . and only the unshakable things will remain. Since then we have been given a kingdom that is “unshakable,” let us serve God with thankfulness in the ways which please him, but always with reverence and holy fear. … Our God is a burning fire. (Heb. 12:25-29; tr. J. B. Phillips.)

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“Eschatology and Missions in the New Testament” by Oscar Cullman (Olive Wyon, trans.)

(This article originally appeared in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, edited by W. D. Davies and D. Daube, Cambridge University Press, 1956. Used by permission.)

Does the expectation of the end paralyze the missionary impulse? Does it divert our attention from the task of preaching the Gospel here and now? It is sometimes said that this “hope” has an inhibiting influence upon Christian action; is this true? To give an affirmative answer to these questions would mean that “missions”—on the grand scale—would have been possible only because the eschatological hope had gradually faded. In point of fact, the missionary enterprise of the Church is often represented as a kind of “second best”—something which has been substituted for the unrealized hope of the kingdom of God. If this were true, then the Church has carried on its mission because it has been obliged to renounce eschatology.

Such ideas are due to a mistaken conception of early Christian eschatology. It is of course true that in the early Church there was a tendency to distort the Christian hope, which diverted the attention of Christian people from the sphere of present duty, as for instance at Thessalonica, in the time of Paul, and one hundred years later, in Asian Minor, in Montanism. But in the New Testament itself this tendency was explicitly rejected and condemned as heretical. The genuine primitive Christian hope does not paralyze Christian action in the world. On the contrary, the proclamation of the Christian Gospel in the missionary enterprise is a characteristic form of such action, since it expresses the belief that “missions” are an essential element in the eschatological divine plan of salvation. The missionary work of the Church is the eschatological foretaste of the kingdom of God, and the Biblical hope of the “end” constitutes the keenest incentive to action.

It is the purpose of this article to show that this thought can be traced throughout the New Testament, and is deeply rooted in New Testament eschatology.

The close relation between Christian action and the expectation of the end comes out in two prominent characteristics of New Testament eschatology: a) we do not know when the end will come; b) although the end lies in the future, the present is already part of the period which begins with the death and resurrection of Christ.

(a) This first point is connected with the fact that the very heart of Biblical eschatology is its

emphasis upon the divine omnipotence. Nowhere is this stressed more strongly than in the doctrine of creation and in the eschatological hope. Eschatology is the new creation. The last day will appear at God’s command, uttered with the same divine authority as the primal word: “Let there be light!” Both are the sovereign act of God. This means, however, that no human effort or knowledge will enable us to ascertain when the kingdom of God will come.

We will cannot achieve the coming of the kingdom of God by our own action: we cannot “bring in” the kingdom of God. The whole witness of the New Testament is so clear on this point that no further proof is needed. Then does this mean that all that is required from us, in response to the eschatological hope, is a passive attitude and not a stimulus to action? By no means! For it is only those who are firmly convinced that the kingdom comes from God who are given the courage to work here and now, whether success or failure be their portion. If we believed that the coming of the kingdom depended on us, when confronted by failure we would inevitably despair. But we can work joyfully and courageously, not in order to “hasten” the coming of the kingdom, but because we know that the kingdom comes from God.

On the other hand, no human effort will enable us to know when the kingdom of God will come. At this point, even Jesus himself, during his life on earth, had to confess: “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk. 13:32). It is very significant that the New Testament emphasizes this point: that the Son does not know when the kingdom will come, when it lays so much stress on the fact that no one knows the Father “except the Son...” (Mt. 11:27). This ignorance of the “day and the hour” is, however, a spur to Christian action, to “watchfulness”: “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Mt. 24:42). We are in the position of the householder who does not know when the thief will come (Lk. 12:39), or in that of the bridesmaids who do not know when the bridegroom will come, and must therefore keep their lamps trimmed and burning all night long (Mt. 25:1 ff.). It is true, of course, that Jesus expects his death and resurrection to be of decisive significance for the

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fulfillment of God’s purpose, for the end he has in view; and indeed, since the first Easter it has already been “introduced” by this fundamental saving event. But the Church is also aware that the “new creation” has not yet been realized. Thus, for the Church, seen in the light of the Resurrection, it is true that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (I Thess. 5:2); hence she too must “watch” and “not sleep, as others do.” Because the day of the Lord is always near, there should be no feverish agitation about its coming, as though the “time” mattered to us; on the other hand, it is the duty of every Christian to “watch,” sustained by hope.

(b) This brings us to the second characteristic of New Testament eschatology, which is indeed the basis of Christian action. The end is not yet, it is true, but since the Resurrection has taken place, we know that the decisive event leading to the end has already happened. The end may seem to be delayed, but this should cause no disappointment, doubt, or despondency. When faith in the Resurrection is strong, it breeds a firm conviction that the royal sovereignty of Christ has already begun, and that it will be exercised for a period of unknown length until Christ “delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power” (I Cor. 15:24). Thus it is a mistake to think that eschatology has nothing to do with the present day, and, therefore, that it has a paralyzing effect upon Christian action. Indeed, it is rather the other way round, because the kingdom of God has actually come nearer, with Christ, than would have been the case if all had been left to the usual course of events. From the chronological point of view, something has happened: the present “age” has taken a great leap forward. We are reminded that God is Lord of time. We have entered the final phase of this “age,” which will end with the return of Christ.

One eschatological element has, however, already been realized, which points clearly to the fact that we are already living in and from the end, although the end itself still has to come: the Holy Spirit. He belongs to the future, for God has given us “his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:22); we have “the first fruits of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:23). The miracle of Pentecost was rightly interpreted by Peter (Acts 2:17 ff.) when he appealed to the passage in the prophet Joel: “And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” This, however, is more than a foretaste; the Spirit is already part of the fulfillment. The risen Lord himself points this out when his disciples ask him when the kingdom will come (Acts 1:6-8). He says: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” In his reply to their question he points out that it is not for them “to know times or

seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.” But they will now receive the Holy spirit. This means that the end has already dawned, although this “age” is still present. Within this period there is a stage—of undefined extent—which still forms part of “this present age.” Thus our relation to eschatology is different from that of mankind at other periods in world history: “Children, it is the last hour,” says the writer of the First Letter of John (2:18).

We are living in an interim period which already belongs to the end, and yet still forms part of “this present age.” Thus, with Albert Schweitzer, we may describe the ethic which belongs to this period as an “interim ethic,” but not in the sense that it was only valid for the first century A.D. For the “interim period” is still going on. The future, it is true, still influences this ethic, but it is also influenced by that element of the future, which is partially realized in the present, namely, the Holy Spirit. The Holy spirit, who guarantees that one day our sinful bodies and the whole material universe will be re-created by him, enables us here and now to take the old law seriously, with all that this involves, and to fulfill it. Under the impulse of the Holy Spirit the eschatological summons to action: “Repent!” is seen in the right light. It is because the kingdom has come nearer to us, and, in the Holy Spirit, is, in part, already here, that it is now possible for us to act in a Christian way.

It is the presence of the Holy Spirit which makes the action of the Church, as such, eschatological. The Church itself is an eschatological phenomenon. It is in the center of the present lordship of Christ. It was constituted by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. That is why the task of the Church consists in the proclamation of the Gospel to the whole world. This is the very essence of the Holy Spirit’s work, and the meaning of the miracle of Pentecost, when, quite suddenly, all present understood one another. Precisely in the period to which we belong—between the Resurrection and the return of Christ—it is the duty of the Church to go out “into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature,” looking toward the end. That is why the disciples’ question to the risen Lord: “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” receives this answer: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:7-8).

The Holy Spirit, and the world mission: these are the “signs” of the final phase, determined by the future, in which we stand. Does this mean, however, that the kingdom of God will come only when all men have been converted? If that were so, then its

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coming would depend on man, and the divine omnipotence would be ignored. On the other hand, the conviction that evil will be intensified during the last days is part of Christian eschatology. All that matters, however, is the fact that the Gospel should be preached to all nations. Evidently, God means that everyone should have an opportunity of hearing the Christian message; therefore the call to repentance must be made to all. But the coming of the kingdom does not depend upon men’s acceptance of the call. This view contains the strongest incentive for human decision, and yet the divine sovereignty is not in the least impaired. The proclamation of the Gospel to all nations itself becomes a “sign” of the end, an integral element in the eschatological divine plan of salvation.

We must examine these ideas more closely; first of all, we must investigate their origin in Judaism, in order that we may have a clearer grasp of the novelty and the theological significance of the New Testament conception.

Pre-Christian Judaism has a sense of “mission,” it is true, but not as the precondition of the messianic kingdom. But we also find another conception which prepares the way for the New Testament doctrine of the Church’s mission as a “sign” of the end, which is, at the same time, corrected by it. In Judaism there were constant efforts to calculate the “date” of the messianic kingdom. We cannot here go into details about the various calculations and conclusions to which they led. Again and again these efforts proved abortive, for the kingdom of God did not “come” on the dates which had been calculated beforehand. During the New Testament period there arose a view, often expressed in the Talmud and in the apocryphal books, that the kingdom of God would not come until Israel as a whole had repented. In this connection, this question often appears in the Talmud: “Who is preventing the Messiah’s appearing?” To estimate the New Testament conception of the mission aright, we note that it is significant that within Judaism, according to Rabbinical texts, there were two different schools of thought, which answered the question in two different ways, and in so doing both broke away from the idea of the divine omnipotence, which, however, is the constitutive element in eschatology as a whole. The school of Eliezer gave up any attempt to calculate the date. It taught that the Messiah will come when all Israel has repented. This, however, makes the coming the kingdom dependent on the moral attitude of man, and this impairs the doctrine of divine sovereignty. The coming of the kingdom is no longer a divine, sovereign act. The opposite school of thought insists upon fixing a date, namely, the year A.D. 240, when, apart from man, the end of the world will come. The

leader of this school of thought does not answer the question: “What prevents the Messiah’s appearing?” by saying: “Israel has not yet fully repented,” but “the time has not yet come.” This view, however, also impairs the idea of divine sovereignty, because it links the coming of the Messiah with this element of calculation which depends upon human effort.

In the New Testament eschatology, on the other hand, the divine sovereignty is fully maintained, in so far as neither by his action nor his knowledge can man know when the kingdom will come. This is taken seriously in the particular conception of “mission” which we are here examining, according to which the end will not come until the Gospel has been preached to all nations. Before I present the evidence for this view, I will indicate two other lines of thought within Judaism which more directly prepared the way for the Christian conception of “mission” as the eschatological “sign” (or “promise”): (i) Elijah will preach repentance in the last days (Mal. 3:1; Ecclesiaticus 48:10,11); and (ii) there is the other view, according to which the kingdom will come when the number of the elect has been completed (Enoch 47:4,2 Baruch 30:2; 4 Ezra).

Now we come to the New Testament textual evidence. We must begin with the two parallel passages in the Little Apocalypse, Mark 13:10: “‘And the gospel must first be preached to all nations’”; and in Matthew 24:14: “‘And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.’” In both passages note particularly the clear chronological definition: in Mark “first” (after this comes the passage about the appearance of the Antichrist). In both passages the mission is mentioned as a divine “sign,” along with the eschatological woes: wars, famines, cosmic catastrophes, persecutions, etc., and the intensification of evil in men. Thus it appears that the coming of the kingdom does not depend upon the success of this “preaching” but only upon the fact of the proclamation itself.

We find further evidence for the same view in the Book of Revelation (6:1-8). In this passage it is clear what the second, third, and fourth riders mean. In each instance the reference is to one of the characteristic eschatological “plagues” which are personified by these mysterious figures. Their outward appearance corresponds with the destructive task which they fulfill upon earth. But what does the first rider mean? Many and varied interpretations have been suggested. First of all, we must note that the description of this first rider has no connection with the sinister aspect of the other three. On the contrary, he is a rather radiant figure; he is seated upon a white horse, and when we remember that

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white is always represented as a heavenly quality, it makes us question the theory that this first rider, like the other three, also had to pour out an eschatological plague upon the earth. Even the crown with which he is adorned gives him rather the air of a force for good. Finally, it is said of him: “He went out conquering and to conquer.” But the verb “to conquer” (in Revelation) does not carry with it the negative sense of “conquering by violence,” but, on the contrary, it describes the quality of God’s action. Therefore it is very improbable that, as is usually said, this first rider must mean some military power, like Rome or Parthia. To me, this seems out of the question, because this rider would then have the same task as the second rider, who sits upon a red horse and, of whom it is said explicitly: “its rider was permitted to take peace form the earth, so that men should slay one another.”

Who then is this first rider? This becomes clear when we compare this passage with the similar passage in Revelation 19:11ff. in which a rider on a white horse also appears. There is an explanation given: “Behold a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True,...and the name by which he is called is The Word of God.” In other words, it is his task to proclaim the Gospel to the world. This must also be the mission of the first rider, and indeed it fits in with the description of him. What, then, has the preaching of the Gospel in the world in common with the task of the other three riders? It also is a divine “sign” (or “promise”) of the end, and, as a final offer of salvation, it runs parallel with all those horrors, which are indeed connected with the evil in man. Further, in other passages in this book the necessity for the summons to repentance before the end is emphasized. In 11:3 the “two witnesses” are mentioned (Elijah and Moses) who prophesy. In 14:6-7 is the picture of the angel with the “eternal gospel” who addresses a final appeal to repentance “to every nation and tribe and tongue and people.”

The fact that the proclamation of the Gospel as an eschatological “sign” is not a peripheral phenomenon, comes out very clearly in the passage in Acts 1:6-7 which has already been quoted. Here, the risen Lord tells his disciples: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons.” Why? “The Father has fixed [them] by his own authority”; hence we have no business to pry into His mysteries; the “time” of the coming of the kingdom is known to Him alone, and is under “his own authority.” But there is one thing the disciples can be sure of: that they must proclaim the Gospel to all the world, until that “day” comes. This duty is laid upon them by the gift of the Spirit, which they have received. The period between the Resurrection and the unknown “day” of the Lord’s return must be filled with the missionary preaching

“in Jerusalem...and to the end of the earth.” For this is the era of “grace,” granted to mankind; it is God’s will that all men shall have the possibility of hearing the Gospel. Here, too, this allusion to the world mission before the end comes is not stated primarily as an imperative but as an indicative, as an eschatological statement: “You shall be my witnesses.” It is God who through His messengers gives us this “sign,” which offers the Gospel to the world. In all this the apostles are only the instruments through whom the eschatological plan of salvation is carried out.

But this view is also expressed in a missionary command in the famous words at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” This command also applies to the final phase of this “age,” which, as we know, is strictly limited. This comes out very plainly in the promise which is linked with the command: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” This is not a vague chronological statement like “always” (as we usually interpret it), but is a clear reference to the eschatological character of the missionary enterprise, which must take place precisely in this form, before the end of the age, and itself gives its meaning to this age.

In Pauline thought the missionary motive, as the precondition of the coming of salvation, permeates the whole theology of the apostle, and is intimately connected with his sense of missionary vocation. Paul’s sense of vocation is clearly influenced by eschatological ideas; this comes out in his conviction that he is an instrument of the eschatological plan of salvation. This is shown very clearly, first of all, in Romans 9-11. These chapters are a very apt commentary on the words in Mark 13:10: “‘And the gospel must first be preached to all nations.’ “ In chapter 10 the apostle emphasizes the fact that God is indeed carrying out His own plan, precisely as He intends, but that our human responsibility is equally clear. For all have the opportunity of hearing the Gospel (Rom. 10:14ff.). “But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed?...And how are they to hear without a preacher?” Opportunity must be given to all to hear the Gospel. The Jews have already had it; “but they have not all heeded the gospel,” hence the call now goes forth to the Gentiles before, finally, the Jews will enter the kingdom. So the word of the Gospel which must first of all be proclaimed to the Gentiles, has a particularly concrete meaning in Pauline terminology, in which the main emphasis is certainly upon the word “Gentiles.” But the chronologically-eschatologically determined character of the “missionary message” as a “sign” of the “end” is here also quite evident. Only Paul regards this “sign” first of all, so to speak, from

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“within,” that is, from the angle of his apostolic vocation as an instrument of this plan (of salvation). When he speaks of the divine eschatological plan, Paul continually emphasizes the fact that his calling is especially to the Gentiles. In Romans 11, where he speaks of the “mystery” of that divine plan, he mentions his own office: “Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry” (Rom. 11:13).

In the Epistle to the Colossians, 1:22-29, he underlines the close connection between his personal “office” and the divine plan of salvation (the “divine office,” verse 25), which is related to “this mystery among the Gentiles” (verse 27, K.J.V.). When we remember that Paul knows he has been “integrated” into a divine plan, whose fulfillment depends upon the coming of this kingdom, we understand better the “necessity” (I Cor. 9:16) laid upon him to “preach the gospel,” as a “debtor” both to Gentiles and to barbarians (Rom. 1:14). He regards himself as Christ’s prisoner on behalf of the Gentiles (Eph. 3:1). It is from this point of view that we understand more fully his eagerness to go to new places where the Gospel has not been proclaimed, from Jerusalem to Illyria, and when his work is finished in that part of the world, he intends to turn toward Spain. The time is short: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (I Cor. 9:16).

From all this it seems very probable that in the much disputed passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:6ff., —”you know what is restraining him...” with the following reference to the Antichrist, there is an allusion to the proclamation of the Gospel as a “sign” of the end. When we consider that this conception of the missionary message can be traced right through the whole of the New Testament, as we have seen, this hypothesis is as probable as any hypothesis can be. Usually the passage is taken to refer to the Roman Empire. But we can find no other passage in support of the view that the state, the manifestation of the Antichrist, delays the end. On the contrary, both in Jewish and in primitive Christian apocalyptic, the Antichrist is usually represented as some kind of Satanic empire. Precisely in 2 Thessalonians 2:4 it is described in images taken form the Book of Daniel, which there certainly refer to Syria. Can it be that in the very passage where Paul alludes to the Antichrist in these “images,” at the same time he would have introduced the state as that which “restrains” the Antichrist? If this is what he means, he would have brought strange confusion into the realm of eschatological ideas, since in the same passage he would have spoken of the state as the opponent of the Antichrist, and as a Satanic power.

On the other hand, a great deal could be said for the view, suggested first of all by Theodore of Mopsuestia and by Theodoret, and later on by Calvin, according to which “what is restraining him” in 2 Thessaloninas 2:6 is the eschatological missionary message. At first the Greek verb for “restraining” had a temporal meaning in the sense of “retarding,” “delaying.” Here the allusion is to the “time,” or “date” of the coming of the kingdom of God. Nowhere, however, is there a relation of this kind between the state and the “time” when the end is expected to come; we have, however, seen that there is (a relation) of this kind between the preaching of the Gospel to the nations and the question of the “date” of the parousia. According to the Synoptic passages in Mark 13:10-14 and Matthew 24:13-15 the Antichrist appears after the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, just as in 2 Thessalonians 2:6 ff. he will appear after “what is restraining him” has been removed.

Further, this assumption is directly connected with that Jewish Rabbinic question, “Who is preventing the appearing of the Messiah?” which we have already mentioned. We have already seen that the most usual Jewish answer to that question was: “the repentance of Israel which is not yet complete,” and this answer points clearly toward the Christian view of the eschatological necessity for the proclamation of the Gospel to the “heathen,” and it is corrected by it, in so far as here the essential element is the call to repentance.

The whole context in which the passage (2 Thess. 2) occurs also supports the idea of a relation with the preaching to the Gentiles, and shows why the Gospel must be preached to all nations before the appearance of Antichrist. In 2:9-12 we read of those “who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved”; and in 2:13-14 Paul sets—against those who reject the preaching of the apostle—the readers themselves, and of them he says: “God chose you from the beginning to be saved....To this he called you through our gospel.” The whole of the preceding chapter, too, deals with the relation between eschatological events and the acceptance or rejection of the Gospel which they have heard:

We are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren...because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing...This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering...when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon

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those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.

We could almost regard this as an allusion to the proclamation of the Gospel to the heathen, in this connection, if it were not included in the allusion to “what is restraining him.”

In the same passage there is first the neuter (2:6ff., “what is restraining him”), then the masculine (he who now restrains). If “what is restraining” is the missionary message, then it is probable that “he who restrains” or withholds is the apostle himself. This would fit in well with what we have said about St. Paul’s deep sense of missionary vocation, which indeed is influenced by the eschatological conviction that the Gospel must be offered to the non-Christian world. The question of Paul’s speaking of himself in this way in the third person should not cause any difficulty, since elsewhere he uses the third person in speaking of the grace granted to him (2 Cor. 12:2).

Even if this interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2:6 ff.—which has a solid foundation, and could be further supported by passages from early Christian writers of the first and second centuries—should not be correct, there are other New Testament passages which would give sufficient evidence for the fundamental insight of faith that the missionary enterprise is the work of God which His servants are carrying out during the final period of this age, in which we are living. For this final period is a time of grace, which God in His mercy has granted us for repentance. This view springs out of the nature of New Testament eschatology. It leaves the doctrine of divine omnipotence unimpaired, since it does not

make the coming of God dependent upon man, and excludes all human calculations. On the other hand, it greatly intensifies the responsibility of man in view of the eschatological period of grace, and finally gives the Church its peculiar commission, namely, in God’s name to carry the Gospel to all nations. This is the eschatological saving work in the period between the Resurrection and the return of Christ. From every point of view, this was, theologically speaking, a deep and fruitful conception which, alas! was soon forgotten, and only sporadically reappears as a missionary motive.

Like all other “signs,” that of the missionary enterprise cannot be limited to this or that generation. For it is characteristic of this final period, in which we are living, that it forms a unity, and that as a whole it is characterized by “signs.” But we can never say, “this is the final hour” in which the “sign” will appear. This means that the Reformers were wrong when they thought they could get rid of “missions” by saying that the Gospel had already been proclaimed to all nations by the apostles. Rather, it is of the essence of a “sign” that to the very end it should appear in each generation which belongs to the present final phase of this “age.” This means, however, that the missionary obligation covers the whole time which remains, right down to the unknown final end, and that each generation anew must proclaim the Gospel to the “heathen” of their own day, without wondering whether their ancestors before 1900 had had an opportunity of hearing it. Hence, in every generation the Church must carry on the apostles’ work and proclaim the Gospel to all nations, so far as is humanly possible at any given time.

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by: Charles Van Engen“The Contours of the Reformed Understanding of Christian Mission” by Jerald D. Gort

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“The Contours of the Reformed Understanding of Christian Mission” by Jerald D. Gort

(Taken from Mission Focus, Volume 7, Number 3, pp. 37-41, September 1979.Used with permission.)

Before proceeding to the central concern of this paper—an attempt to sketch the main lines of a Reformed apprehension of Christian mission—I want to formulate a broad definition of Christian mission itself, without qualifying terms, as a point of departure. The second section will deal with salient issues of Reformed theology which have an important bearing on mission. The third part represents an attempt to state the Reformed understanding of mission, or—less presumptuously—this Reformed writer’s perception.

Mission: a general definition

The simplest, most general definition of Christian mission that I can think of is: the coming of God to people. But it is doubtful whether this barest of statements speaks of Christian mission rather than of something that is virtually synonymous with the concept of “salvation.” A definition of mission in history has to include the element of human as well as divine instrumentality, the facet of missio hominis as well as missio Dei.

The coming of God to people through people would perhaps do. But here, too, the definition does not go far enough to describe Christian mission. It is probably more suited for use as an expression defining the general revelatory activity of God in the world of humankind.

A phrasing such as: “The liberating coming of God in Christ to people through his disciples” brings us nearer but not quite all the way to the goal of finding a proper definition. As it stands, this particular wording could be understood as including the pastoral care of the believing community, liturgical worship, etc. To avoid confusion we need a definition that distinguishes mission from pastorate.

“The liberating coming of God in Christ through his disciples to people who no longer know or have never known him”: this definition might serve as an acceptable general statement of Christian mission.

But the terms of such a highly condensed formula need to be spelled out in greater detail. Because one’s specific theological legacy provides the colors and composition of such further elaboration, we must first attempt a brief articulation of the elements of Reformed thinking that bear directly on a Reformed understanding of mission.

Mission: a Reformed understanding

As Fred H. Klooster recently pointed out in a cogent and helpful article, scholars have found it impossible to isolate any one central theme which could be said to integrate either all of Calvin’s thought or Reformed theology as a whole (1979:32-54). If any golden thread runs through the Reformed tradition, he argues, it is not of a doctrinal nature but rather a basic, prior stance: “allegiance to the Scriptural principle,” fidelity to the “whole of Scripture” (tota Scriptura) and “Scripture alone” (sola Scriptura) (1979:39).

Thus, instead of seeking one unifying theme, one ought to think in terms of several parallel, distinctive emphases of Reformed thought, all of which were developed within the framework of a conviction that Scripture is the only truly eye-opening source and final norm for faith and order and life and work.

A number of these distinctive emphases have played, and continue to play, a key role in shaping Reformed thinking in respect to the Christian missionary task. We must now direct our attention to them, but without losing sight of the fundamental commitment to this scriptural principle which—because it has exercised a formative influence on the Reformed attitude toward human history and culture—is in and of itself of singular import for the Reformed conception of mission.

1. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of manReformed theology begins with three questions:

Who is God? Who is man (what is the world)? How are they related? The order of these questions is an indifferent matter, for an answer to one is impossible without an answer to the other. True knowledge of man is unattainable without knowledge of the living God. And, conversely, genuine knowledge of God is impossible without knowledge of man. In like manner, the answer to the question of the relationship between God and man (world) is simultaneously dependent upon and presupposed by the answers to the other two questions. Where can such answers be found? For Reformed theology the answers in their essence are revealed with special—unique and unsurpassable—authority in Scripture.

There we discover that God and man are related in and through Creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion,

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Resurrection, and Parousia. These are not isolated, discrete events occurring at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of time, but are profoundly interrelated turning points, connected historical moments of nonpareil decisiveness in the ongoing, intense involvement of heaven with earth and earth with heaven. They teach us all we need to know about both God and man.

They teach us that man’s relationship to God is one of desperate, life-and-death ambiguity and that, left to himself, man will perversely break the ambiguity in favor of death, choosing a life without God. They teach us of beatific acceptance of contingency exchanged for the slavery of Promethean arrogance, the liberation of obedience for imprisonment of rebellion. They teach us of the salvific power of faith, hope, and love traded off for the chains of doubt, despair, and hatred; of the blessedness of trust turned in for the trap of suspicion; of the release of reconciliation for the bondage of guilt.

And this rejection of God by man is dreadfully reflected in the human condition. Each individual human life and the whole of collective human life is shot through with the evil consequences of the perversity of human choice.

But this is not the end of the story, for those same historical moments of world- and time-encompassing efficacy also teach us that things can be and will be radically different. The life-giving and liberating breath of the triune God, creating and recreating the world and humanity has not been extinguished. God’s commitment to the work of his hands is unconditional, and his gracious saving activity in the world of human history is unending. God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit offers the unfailingly powerful means for transforming human life—both personal and communal—and all human relationships, for changing the human condition to one of peace, justice, righteousness, and love. This is the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, the gospel of the messianic kingdom of God.

2. The gospel of the kingdom of GodReformed thinking has always made the

kingdom central. In the New Testament the gospel of the kingdom is God’s announcement of total human salvation through the reestablishment of his liberating rule in the earth. In the Reformed view this kingdom gospel applies directly to every single aspect of human life: religious, cultural, social, economic, and political. It applies to individuals but also to micro- and macro-structures created by man, to the inner but also the outer life of human beings.

It relieves not only spiritual but also physical burdens of men, women, and children. It brings

forgiveness of sins, but also sanctification of life—restored relationship between God and man, between individuals, between people and the natural world, and between the sexes and generations, nations, and races.

Reformed theology does not permit a division of the world of human reality into two totally unrelated irreconcilable realms of church and state, religion and politics, the spiritual and the material. Such a division, if followed consistently, leads to indifference toward and pessimism about human life. This construction perceives the world as the realm of darkness, doomed to pass away. Salvation is understood in purely spiritual terms. Only part of it is now available; it can be obtained wholly only in the next life. Therefore any “Christian” attempt to change the existing order is useless, even pernicious. The gospel only transforms individuals. At best these individuals may leaven society in incidental ways, but human effort cannot essentially alter human society.

In the Reformed view this interpretation is tantamount to a denial of biblical teaching regarding creation, man, and the saving work of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. God has not abandoned his creation. It is true that on Golgotha he uttered a terrible “No!”; but in the Incarnation and Resurrection and ultimately also in the Crucifixion he gave a resounding, life-giving “Yes!” Moreover, human beings are indivisibly whole, and the salvation of the gospel is likewise whole, pertaining here and now to the totality of human life and not only to part of it. Salvation obtains not only for people’s “heavenly” souls but also for their “earthly” bodies. There is more to heaven than earth, but there is also more to earth than heaven.

Of course our salvation is not complete in this life. Though whole in its breadth and total in its range, it will be fully attained only at the consummation of history when Christ returns to usher in the new order of things in its replete richness. Thus, there will be no new miracles of salvation in heaven but instead the glorious fulfillment of that which Christ has already powerfully and wholly wrought for us in this life, the exciting completion in depth and degree of the kingdom, which in him is nigh, has come, is at hand. Paul did not write: “Now I know in part; then I shall know in whole,” but rather: “Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.” Clearly, his frame of reference is a qualitative rather than a quantitative one.

3. Gospel and lawClosely connected with this kingdom emphasis

—and thus also of importance for the understanding of mission—is the Reformed conception of the

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relationship of gospel and law. According to the lights of Reformed thought, a vital relationship exists between the two in both the old and new dispensation. The gospel has not superseded the law, destroyed it, or made it of no account.

However, the new covenant does represent a radical turning of the tables in this relationship. In the Messiah the law is fulfilled; its locus and function have been changed. The law is no longer written on stone, external to and hanging above people, something by which they live—impelled by the threat of the destruction of death—to save their lives. In Christ the law is written internally in the hearts of believers; they live by it—empowered by the gift of life—to complete the destruction of death. In the new covenant the gospel is not the progeny of law; rather law is the fruit of the gospel. Right living no longer creates salvation; rather salvation creates right living. Faith enables works, and works are the life-blood of faith. Liberation is the vehicle of law and law the motor of liberation.

Thus, though altered radically, the relationship between gospel and law remains in force for Reformed theology. In the Reformed position theology and ethics belong together; in fact, theology is ethics and ethics theology. Ethics without theology is at best a form of humanitarian messianism, which cannot be trusted because it does not trust the ultimate One. But the converse is equally noxious: Theology without ethics is essentially narcissistic and in the end misanthropic. No Reformed theologian could share Luther’s musings on the desirability of removing the book of James from the canon.

The Reformed position understands ethics in terms of the kingdom. Without this kingdom emphasis, ethics can only take on the negative character of noninterference, can only be individual and microcosmic in nature, can only deal with personal righteousness or, at most, interpersonal relationships; social ethics are precluded. To the Reformed mind Christian ethics are ethics of the messianic kingdom of God; they touch every aspect of human life.

4. Semper reformanda; theologia crusis, the scriptural principleA fourth distinctive theme is semper

reformanda, the principle of continuous reformation. This theme has its roots in other key emphases of Reformed theology which require examination.

Theology of the cross. All Christian theology shares the conviction that the work of Jesus Christ is at the center of God’s never-ending, saving activity on behalf of humanity. Less agreement exists, however, on the question of which elements of that work are at the center of salvation history. The

theological choice on this matter profoundly affects one’s perception of and attitude toward history and the world. Incarnational theology in its most consistent expression, for example, can lead to a cozy relationship with the established order and may engender a reactionary stance with respect to the status quo.

Reformed theology always strives to be a theology of the cross. In and through the crucified Lord, God says both “No!” and “Yes!” to the world. Both utterances from the crown of Golgotha are definitive and must, therefore, be taken in full seriousness. God’s “Yes!” is in principle the final word, resting in Jesus Christ’s victory once and for all over sin and death and in his establishment of the new creation. That is why the Reformed view cannot permit indifference or antagonism or pessimism to the world. If God is not indifferent, how can his disciples be? Is the servant greater than the master?

But the dreadful thunder of God’s “No!” has not yet died away, for great blocks of human life remain in bondage to the forces of evil and the powers of darkness, and form a denial of the messianic kingdom. Reformed thinking must also take this into account in the assessment of the present world.

The scriptural principle. This has been described above. We need only add that the scriptural principle represents Reformed theology’s prior commitment to the transcendent authority of God, the Creator and Savior. There is only one Lord, and all human thought and activity is measured by and must be conformed to his will, revealed in his Word. As the first thesis of the Ten Conclusions of Bern (1528) puts it: “The holy Christian Church, whose only head is Christ, is born of the Word of God, and abides in the same, and listens not to the voice of a stranger” (Klooster 1979:41).

Semper reformanda. As a consequence of these two emphases, Reformed thinking—at any rate in its more consistent manifestations—assumes a critical stance vis-à-vis the authorities, prescriptions, traditions, institutions, and ideological predilections of the existing world order, as well as all historical occurrences within its confines. Any of these that prove to be merely of the present order—incompatible with the constitution of the messianic kingdom—are subject to the principle of ongoing renewal and transformation.

This principle, which has played an important role in Reformed thinking from the beginning, was used not only in connection with the church (ecclesia reformata semper), but also in terms of the whole of human society and culture (semper societas reformanda) (Verkuyl 1973:2). The gospel demands the conversion and sanctification not only of individuals in their spiritual, daily life, but also of the

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church and society. The evangel requires the renewal of political, economic, and cultural structures and institutions—not just any renewal, however, but one that can stand up to testing against the liberating promises of the gospel and law of God in Christ.

Theology: a Reformed perspective

What understanding of mission emerges from these distinctive concepts and key elements of Reformed theology?

I should like to argue for the adoption of the gospel of the messianic kingdom of God as the central, integrating theme, the cutting edge, the heart and perspective, the beginning and end of Christian mission. This kingdom perspective constrains us to view mission in the following manner.

The missionary task is as coherent, broad, and deep as the needs and exigencies of human life. The gospel of the kingdom is the gospel of the total liberation of men, women, and children from all bondages and enslavements in all times and places. As life is one and whole, so also is salvation one and whole. This cohesion and comprehensiveness of God’s salvation and human need imply the cohesion and comprehensiveness of Christian mission. The interpretation of the missionary task in light of the kingdom allows no distinctions between spiritual and material, here and there, now and then, mission and evangelism.

Mission is in the deepest sense God’s mission, not ours. It would be both foolish and pernicious to think that we could bring about the kingdom. The kingdom does not belong to us; it is Christ’s. He instituted it, is realizing it, and will usher in its final manifestation in his own predestined time. He is the Liberator engaged in the transformation of the whole of creation.

His activity is not limited to the church but is oriented toward and centered on the whole world. Nor is he limited by the church’s activity—or by the lack of it. He alone determines his coming and going: the Spirit listeth where it will. Thus, it is incumbent upon his people to be thoroughly open to the discovery of the operation of God’s Holy Spirit in “strange” places, to follow him where he leads and to find him where he is. Mission belongs to God.

At the same time, however, he calls the people of the new covenant to carry out their part of the task, to participate in his salvific work, to become associated in his liberation campaign. “It is Christ’s business to effect the transformation of society, but He enlists us to the watchful and prompt pursuit of that transformation” (Verkuyl 1973:2). Thus mission, though belonging to God, is the business of the church. Mission is, in a derivative sense, also mission ecclesiae.

Being derived from the missio Dei, the church’s mission must be carried out by the whole people of God, and then in a spirit of humility, cooperation, and mutuality. The missionary obligation does not inhere in personal inclinations or ecclesiastical position, but in the constraint of the gospel of the new covenant. It must therefore be carried out not only by certain groups or certain individuals, but by all of the parties to that covenant, wherever they live and work.

In like manner the church’s obligation to mission inheres in Christ, its head, and therefore does not rest only on certain churches or denominations in certain lands, but squarely on all churches everywhere. All churches share fully and equally the responsibility for the missionary task, and they must carry it out in complete, unquestioned mutuality. In fact, mutuality in mission is a cardinal aspect of our missionary obedience, for the great unfinished task laid upon us by Christ cannot be fulfilled without the combined resources of the full ecumenical church.

Making use of the insights, concerns, and emphases discussed above, we may now attempt a fuller statement of mission from the Reformed point of view.

1. The Reformed formal definition of missionFormally speaking it is the use of the whole body

of believers by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit as agents in his once-for-all yet ongoing, ever-constant yet ever-renewed liberating advent and epiphany to and among people everywhere who no longer know or have never known Him, until the feast of his final coming and appearing in fulgent glory. Put more briefly, Christian mission is the communication of the gospel of kingdom liberation by believers to those who have forgotten or have never heard it. But a formal definition of mission is inadequate; we must now to on to a more programmatic definition.

2. Mission includes both word and deedThe material content of the missionary task is

correlated to human exigency and to the liberation accomplished and offered by God in Christ; the elements of one are exactly parallel to the elements of the others. For this reason, “communication” in the above definition must be understood to include both word and deed, both speech and action. Communication of the gospel in this sense leads to an understanding of the Christian missionary task which includes the following facets.

Kerygma. The deepest need of human beings is for liberation from the devastations of sin and guilt, the fears of mortality, and the deep anxiety of death. Mission’s task is to proclaim the good news of forgiveness and absolution, of new life which begins now and continues beyond the grave with Christ in

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the new Jerusalem. In light of this most profound human exigency, we would be grossly inhuman and unpardonably treasonous if, as ambassadors of God’s glorious kingdom of liberation, we failed to name the name of the King, if we neglected to urge men and women to accept and give allegiance to the Crucified and Risen One.

Koinonia. People also need to be set free from the chains of loneliness and alienation, from the purposelessness and meaninglessness of their lives. This also is a clear and pressing task for Christian mission. We must tell people that in Christ all walls of division have been broken down. We must invite them to the new communion and fellowship of those who have committed themselves to the King and the service of his kingdom, and who live in joyful anticipation of this and its final appearing.

Diakonia. The pressing individual physical and material wants of huge numbers of people must also be at the center of missionary concern. Jesus saw in the multitudes around him the sick and diseased, the blind and the halt, the poor and the needy, the dumb and the deaf, the hungry and the thirsty; and he looked with compassion on them, giving them bread, healing, liberation. Surely the bearers of the gospel of liberation may do no less in carrying out their missionary task.

The struggle for justice. Hundreds of millions of people in our day are enslaved within the stifling confines of unjust economic, social, political, and cultural structures. As we learn in no uncertain terms from the scriptural prophetic tradition, injustice and exploitation are a form of unrighteousness and sin that is particularly offensive to God. His wrath about this form of evil knows no bounds; injustice is the most profound perversion of his intent for his creation, the most banefully wicked denial of the designs of his kingdom. The gospel of that kingdom applies as directly to these macrostrucural enslavements as it does to any other form of human bondage.

On that account, the search and struggle for liberation at this level also belongs directly and indissolubly to the Christian missionary task. We must witness to the demands and promises of Christ’s kingdom before the rulers and governors of this age, at the seats of earthly power; in the palaces of kings

and dictators; the headquarters of generals; in the chambers of legislators and judges; in the boardrooms of industry, commerce, and finance; in the halls of education and learning.

All four of these aspects belong directly and fully to the missionary task of the congregations of Jesus Christ. We cannot a priori answer the question of which comes first. Whether any of them should take precedence is a purely hermeneutical question; fixing priorities depends entirely on analysis and understanding of the context in which mission takes place.

Moreover, as Harvie Conn reminds us when he speaks of the “hermeneutical obligations of the gospel,” this determination of the character of the missionary situation is a duty constrained on us by the gospel, for it wishes above all to be communicated (Conn 1977:90-120). And communication requires not only comprehension of the text, but also apprehension of the context.

Jerald D. Gort, associate professor, department of missiology, Free University of Amsterdam, has contributed articles to the International Review of Mission and edited the Festschrift, Zending op Weg Naar de Tockomst, presented to Professor Johannes Verkuyl on the occasion of his retirement in the fall of 1978. He has also written Anonymous Christianity and Other Recent Roman Catholic Contributions to Theologia Religionum.

References CitedConn, Harvie M.

1977 “Contextualization: Where Do We Begin?” in Evangelicals and Liberation. C. E. Armerding (ed.). Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.

Klooster, Fred H.1979 “The Uniqueness of Reformed Theology: A

Preliminary Attempt at Description.” Calvin Theological Journal 14:32-54.

Verkuyl, Johannes1973 Theology of Transformation, or Towards a Political

Theology. J. D. Gort (trans.). Johannesburg: The Christian Institute of Southern Africa.

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“Book Review of The Open Secret ” by Craig Bartholomew

Review written by Craig Bartholomew, Cheltenham, November 1995.

If you’re not aware of Lesslie Newbigin’s writings, you really are missing out. A minister of the United Reformed Church in the UK, Newbigin, a graduate of Cambridge University, was for some 30 years a missionary in India. There he was constantly challenged about the way in which the gospel encounters Indian culture. Upon returning to England Newbigin was challenged about how the gospel encounters western culture of the sort found in the UK. Through various circumstances Newbigin found himself confronted with the question, “How can one find a perspective on one’s own culture?” “I had asked for a Christian approach to contemporary western liberal capitalism, in fact to the culture of which I was a part and by which I had been formed. Could there be an Archimedean point, so to speak, from which one could look critically at one’s own intellectual and spiritual formation?” (Newbigin, 1993:250, 251). The answer lay in the development of a Christian mind, and since then Newbigin has published a number of books about the way in which the gospel encounters western society, which, as Newbigin says, is the most urgent contemporary mission field (1995:10). The Open Secret is the deposit of a lecture series that Newbigin delivered for four years to Christians preparing for mission work. It is not intended to be an academic work and combines a lucid style (typically Newbigin) with a lack of academic footnotes. And yet, also typically Newbigin, one is intensely aware that the clearly ordered text is undergirded by comprehensive and creative Christian scholarship and first hand experience of the main mission debates of this century.

This is not a lightweight text, but it IS clear, relevant, accessible scholarship of the best sort. We need more of this type of text! Newbigin rejoices over the growing recognition that mission is more and more seen as central to the identity of the church. However there is much debate over what this mission entails. Newbigin’s aim in this text is to place the debate about mission in a biblical perspective. In the 192 pages you will find most of the major issues in contemporary missiology dealt with: how to understand secularisation, mission and sociopolitical involvement, liberation theology, church growth, other religions and so on. What makes this book so exciting is its integrally Christian, reformationally (many of us would say!) worldviewish starting point. It is extraordinary just how strong and conscious this

starting point is. The first few chapters which set out the theological foundations of mission are full of quotes like the following:

The Christian mission is thus to act out in the whole life of the whole world the confession that Jesus is Lord of all (17).

Every proposal to seek authorization elsewhere than in the gospel itself must lead us astray (18).

The Bible, then, is covered with God’s purpose of blessing for all the nations. It is concerned with the completion of God’s purpose in the creation of the world and of man within the world. It is not, to put it crudely, concerned with offering a way of escape for the redeemed soul out of history, but with the action of God to bring history to its true end (33, 34).

I have spoken of mission as the proclaiming of God’s kingship over all human history and over the whole cosmos. Mission is concerned with nothing less than the completion of all that God has begun to do in the creation of the world and humankind. Its concern is not sectional but total and universal (56).

Newbigin sets out from a comprehensive vision of Christ’s Lordship, and this shapes his entire missiology. One of the effects of such an approach is that it enables one to get at the nuances of mission and contemporary debates in incisive and balanced ways. You will have to read the book for all the examples of this. When one discovers the comprehensive Lordship of Christ (a Christian worldview) one realises that such a holistic perspective reshapes one’s thinking on all sorts of areas, but sadly, we often haven’t the time or texts available to help us work through that process of reformation. The Open Secret is a wonderful example of such reshaping, and if mission is half as central to a Christian theology as Newbigin thinks it is (I agree), then working through the reshaping at this point will be helpful for one’s understanding of the Bible, history (see chapter 4 on “The Gospel and World History”), the relationship between evangelism and justice (see chapter 8, “Mission as Action for God’s Justice”), a Christian approach to

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other religions and the problem of pluralism (see chapter 10, “The Gospel Among the Religions”), and many other areas.

And it is important to note that in the process Newbigin does not become less orthodox or Christian but more so. Newbigin’s Christocentric approach leads to a stronger and not lesser commitment to evangelism, as indeed it should. And his approach takes the authority of Scripture seriously in a foundational way; Scripture is continuously and thoughtfully referred to. In his chapter on “Mission as Action for God’s Justice”, for example, he outlines in a very useful page how Romans 8 presents the unity of the Christian hope, embracing the private and public life of the human person (106, 107). Newbigin rightly focuses the authority of Scripture in terms of its mediating a personal relationship with Christ, but I do not think (if I may be allowed one small criticism) this is necessarily in conflict with an evangelical afffirmation of a propositional aspect to Scripture, as Newbigin suggests.

In my view The Open Secret is a classic; it is one of those books that must be read and read widely. It would be superb, for example, for a CWN group with

members representing a range of disciplines to work through. And one desperately wishes that theologians would prescribe this early on to their students, and that ministers would work through it with their leaders and laity. Newbigin starts The Open Secret with the words, “Christ is the light of the nations,” and he ends the book as follows:

The mystery of the gospel is not entrusted to the church to be buried in the ground. It is entrusted to the church to be risked in the change and interchange of the spiritual commerce of humanity. It belongs not to the church but to the one who is both head of the church and head of the cosmos. It is within his power and grace to bring to its full completion that long hidden purpose, the secret of which has been entrusted to the church in order that it may become the open manifestation of the truth to all nations (189).

Newbigin’s missiology is utterly Christocentric, and so it ought to be!

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The Three-Arena Nature of Missiology: A Bibliography – C. Van Engen

The three-arena nature of missiology is not original with me. A number of others, particularly those who deal with contextualization from a missiological perspective have highlighted something similar. See, for example:

Steve Bevans. Models of Contextual Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992; reprinted and expanded 2002..

Jose Miguez-Bonino. Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. Phil.: Fortress, 1975.

Mark Branson and Rene Padilla, edits. Conflict and Contexts: Hermeneutics in the Americas. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1986.

Shoki Coe, “Contextualizing Theology” in Mission Trends No. 3, Gerald Anderson and Thomas Stransky, edits. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1976.

Harvie Conn. “Contextualization: A New Dimension for Cross-Cultural Hermeneutic” Evangelical Missions Quarterly XIV: 1 (January, 1978) 39-46

__________. Eternal Word and Changing Worlds: Theology, Anthropology and Mission in Trialogue. G.R.: Zondervan, 1984.

__________. “A Contextual Theology of Mission for the City”, in The Good News of the Kingdom, Charles Van Engen, Dean Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993, 96-106.

__________. “Urban Mission”, in Toward the 21st Century in Christian Mission, James Phillips and Robert Coote, edits. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1993, 318-337

Robert Coote and John Stott, edits. Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1980.

William A. Dyrness. Learning About Theology from the Third World. G.R.: Zondervan, 1990.

Bruce Fleming. The Contextualization of Theology. Pasadena: WCL, 1980.Dean S. Gilliland, “New Testament Contextualization: Continuity and Particularity in

Paul’s Theology, in edit. The Word Among Us: Contextualizing Theology for Mission Today. Waco: Word, 1989, 52-73.

Arthur Glasser. “Help from an Unexpected Quarter or, The Old Testament and Contextualization,” Missiology VII: 4 (Oct., 1979), 401-410.

Stanley J. Grenz. Revisioning Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21rst Century. Downers Grove: IVP, 1993, 83.

David Hesselgrave and Edward Romen. Contextualization: Meanings, Methods, and Models. G.R.: Baker, 1989.

Paul Hiebert. “Conversion, Culture and Cognitive Categories”, Gospel in Context I.3 (July, 1978), 24-29.

__________. “Critical Contextualization” International Bulletin of Missionary Research XI: 3 (July, 1987) 104-111.

__________. “Evangelism, Church, and Kingdom”, in The Good News of the Kingdom. Charles Van Engen, Dean Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993, 153-161.

Donald Jacobs. “Contextualization in Mission”, in Toward the 21st Century in Christian Mission, James Phillips and Robert Coote, edits. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1993, 235-244.

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Charles Kraft. Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979.

__________. Communication Theory for Christian Witness. Nashville: Abingdon, 1983.Charles Kraft and Tom Wisely, edits. Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity. Pasadena:

WCL, 1979.Louis Luzbetak. The Church and Cultures. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988.Eugene Nida. Message and Mission. N.Y.: Harper, 1960.Lamin Sanneh. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Marykoll:

Orbis, 1989.Robert Schreiter. Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985.Daniel Shaw. Transculturation: The Cultural Factor in Translation and Other

Communication Tasks. Pasadena: WCL, 1988.Wilbert Shenk, edit. The Transfiguration of Mission: Biblical, Theological & Historical

Foundations. Scottdale: Herald, 1993, 153-177.Tite Tiénou, “Forming Indigenous Theologies,” in: James M. Phillips and Robert T.

Coote, edits. Toward the Twenty-First Century in Christian Mission. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1993, 249-250.

Alan Tippett. Introduction to Missiology. Pasadena: WCL, 1987.Charles Van Engen. God’s Missionary People. G.R.: Baker, 1991.Charles Van Engen, Dean S. Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits. The Good News of the

Kingdom. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993.

(Leonardo Boff, Orlando Costas, David Bosch, Johannes Verkuyl, John V. Taylor, Donald McGavran, Max Warren, Lesslie Newbigin, James Scherer, Gerald Anderson, Carl Braaten, Howard Snyder, Jürgen Moltmann, among others, also utilize a three-arena approach in their theology and missiology, though they may not speak of all three at once in the same place.)

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“THE GOSPEL STORY: MISSION OF, IN, AND ON THE WAY”By: Charles Van Engen210

Introduction Theology of Mission was established as a discipline in 1961by Gerald Anderson.1 Within that larger enterprise, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first endowed chair specifically in Biblical Theology of Mission in the history of missiology. So it seems appropriate that I offer you a brief description of the discipline and reflect on how it relates to theological, psychological, and missiological education at Fuller.

I define Biblical Theology of Mission as a multi-disciplinary field that reads the Bible with missiological eyes and, based on that reading, continually re-examines, re-evaluates and re-directs the Church’s participation in God’s mission in God’s world.

My thesis is that Biblical Theology of Mission (1) must be centered in Jesus Christ, -- mission OF THE WAY; (2) happens among the peoples and cultures of our world -- mission IN THE WAY; and (3) moves forward over time in the faith-pilgrimage of God’s People, as they anticipate Christ’s present and coming Kingdom -- mission ON THE WAY.

Since this is a chair in BIBLICAL Theology of Mission, I would like to locate our reflection this morning in Luke chapter 9. Earlier, in Luke 4, Jesus draws from Isaiah to define His Messianic mission as preaching the good news to the poor, declaring freedom for the prisoners, and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor. Following this, in Luke 9 Jesus describes the mission of His disciples: mission OF the Way, IN the way, and ON he way. So you see, this is not nearly as confusing as one of my usual class lectures! There are three sections, and each section has two parts!

First, The Gospel Story is Mission OF the Way: Our mission is centered in JESUS CHRIST, who is The Way.

The most important issue in Lk. 9 is the matter of who Jesus is. As the chapter opens, Jesus sends out the 12 and they cause such an uproar that Herod thinks Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life. “Who is this?” he asks. Upon their return, Jesus asks the disciples who the crowds say he is, and Peter confesses S(You are) the Christ of God.” Later Jesus is transfigured and the divine voice says, “This is my Son whom I have chosen; listen o him.” Then in 10:1 Jesus sends the 702 on the Gentile mission.3 The point is unmistakeable. The mission of the disciples derives from Jesus’ mission. Jesus is THE WAY.4

Our mission is none other, no more nor less, than participation in Jesus’ mission. To say it negatively, when it is not Christ’s mission, it may be colonial expansion, church extension, proselytism, or social services -- but it is not mission. Our mission is biblical mission only when it is centered in Jesus Christ. Our mission is OF the Way. Art Glasser has said, “The gospel has at its heart the affirmation that Jesus Christ alone is Lord and that he offers to enter the lives of all who come to him in repentance and faith.5 This is basic for Dr. Glasser. The other day Art said to me, “You tell them that when the suggestion was made to name it a chair in Theology of Mission, I said NO! It must be Biblical Theology of Mission.” This is especially important to Art because of what he terms, “the tragedy of World War II and the terrible failure of the churches in Germany during the Hitlerite period....” As Glasser said, “The successors of Gustav Warneck (the father of modern missiology) during the 1930’s (in Germany) Warneck’s successors were full of theology, but it was racist, intermixing culture and faith in the notion of culture- protestantism....They allowed themselves to be seduced by Hitler, says Glasser. And when the Jewish people were later uprooted from German towns and cities to be shipped to the death camps, the evangelicals had nothing to say. Hence my insistence with (Karl) Barth that leaving BIBLICAL out of the 210 Este artículo es el manuscrito de la ponencia de Dr. Carlos Van Engen en el Arthur F. Glasser Chair of Biblical Theology of Mission en la

Escuela de Misiones de Seminario Teológico Fuller, publicado subsecuentemente en Charles Van Engen, Nancy Thomas and Robert Gallagher, edits. Footprints of God: A Narrative Theology of Mission. Monrovia: MARC World Vision, 1999, pp. xvii-xxviii.

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enterprise produces futility.”6At this point missiology needs theology. 7 The missiologist needs theology’s tools of the biblical

languages and biblical studies, understanding of the ancient biblical cultures, and the history of the church’s reading of Scripture down through the centuries. Theology can help missiologists avoid the pitfalls and theological dead-ends that the church has learned to recognize.8 This is what David Bosch called, “critical hermeneutics.” 9

In a similar way, missiology needs Christian psychology to help the missiologist better understand what happens when persons confess their faith and dedicate their lives to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Precisely what is going on in the transformation of the psycho-emotional and relational reality of persons when people come to faith in Jesus Christ? What is happening psychologically when a missionary crosses cultures, learns a new language, internalizes entirely new ways of thinking, and expresses faith in new categories?

Last September I was at Tokyo Christian University. After a morning chapel, a young Japanese woman came up to tell me her story. Two years before she had wanted to become a Christian, but her parents would not let her convert. So she made arrangements for an international study leave in Australia, where she promptly began attending church and accepted Jesus Christ. With tears in her eyes and pain in her voice, she told me how it had been several months now since she had returned to Japan, and her parents were adamantly opposed to her being a Christian. “They are afraid I’ll never marry,” she told me. But then, her eyes glistening, she says to me, “But I have met Jesus and I know He is God -- my Savior -- He loves me and I love Him. I would not trade that for the world! I want to serve Jesus and evangelize Japan -- including my parents.” This young woman understood that her mission is mission OF the Way, her mission flows from her discipleship in following Jesus, the Way.

Secondly, The Gospel story is mission IN THE WAY : Our mission happens among the peoples and cultures of our world.

The Gospel story is mission in the street. When we join Jesus as His disciples, He takes us by the hand and leads us to the cities and into the valleys among the people, in compassionate search for their transformation. In Luke 9:6, Luke points out that the CROWDS are following Jesus, seeking to hear his teaching and receive his healing. In verse 15 Jesus and his disciples feed the people. Later, although Peter wants to stay up on the mountain of transfiguration, Jesus descends to encounter again the “crowd” (verses 37,38) -- and to heal a man’s only child. This incarnational identification with the poor, sick, powerless and oppressed, is the heart of Jesus’ mission. Disciples of Jesus choose to exist for the sake of the orld.10

Orlando Costas spoke of our meeting “Christ Outside the Gate.”11 Only as we walk in the here-and-now of suffering humanity can we truly be encountered by Jesus Christ. John Mackay spoke of the difference of perspective between THE BALCONY, and THE ROAD. “By the Balcony,” Mackay wrote, “I do not mean the gallery o a Spanish home. There the family may gather of an evening to gaze spectator-wise upon the street beneath, or at the sunset or the stars beyond. The Balcony thus conceived is a classical standpoint, and so the symbol of the perfect spectator, for whom life and the universe are permanent objects of study and contemplation....By the Road I mean the place where life is tensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, where choices are made and decisions are carried out. It is the place of action, of pilgrimage,...where concern I never absent from the wayfarer’s heart.12

A couple weeks ago, we received a letter from Sue Scheenstra, Reformed Church in America missionary in Daba, Kenya. They were visiting a nearby town and Sue writes, “About 10:00 PM we were ready to head home when Jare, the father of the 4-month-old treated earlier for pneumonia, came up trembling. He said, ‘I think my little girl is dying, can you come.’ Carolyn and I walked with Jare toward his home. He said, ‘She was rolling her eyes back in her head and not responding when I left -- I don’t know if she’ll be alive when we get there.’ I asked if I could pray with him as we walked through the darkness, under the brilliant stars toward his home. I prayed for a miracle of healing in Jesus’ name. There was silence. I felt convicted to say more as I wondered what it meant to Jare to have me pray in Jesus’ name. I explained to him that the Bible teaches that anything we ask of the Father in Jesus’ name will be heard, and that prayer is honored because of Jesus. We were nearing the hut and we could hear coughing, so she was still alive. As we walked in we were surprised to see her looking pretty good; awake, alert and with just slightly labored breathing. The mother started right in explaining that she has

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been so bad, but had dramatically improved over the last 15 minutes or so. Jare was thrilled and I began an immediate prayer, praising God for revealing the power of Jesus. I explained about our prayer to the mother. Both she and Jare were silent....and so more seeds are planted.”13 This is MISSION IN THE WAY! Theology needs missiology in order to find its grounding in the way. To do theology in a detached, supposedly “objective” manner (from the Balcony) is to contribute to the death of the Church.14 As Johannes Blauw said,“There is no other church than the church sent into the world, and there is no other mission than that of the church of Christ.”15

If the local congregation of disciples of Jesus is in fact what Lesslie Newbigin has termed “the hermeneutic of the Gospel”16 for the world, then theological education must first and foremost be missionally-directed, and contextually-located. Ministry formation needs to be formation IN AND FOR MISSION. In Karl Barth’s words, it means “being for the world.”17

Theological education without mission may be a professional finishing school or an entry-way to graduate school, or a department of religious studies -- but it is NOT formation for the manifold ministries of Christ and His Church among people, in the world.

Biblical Theology of Mission reminds us that Christian psychology should seek not merely HUMANIZATION but rather, conversion to a NEW humanity in Jesus Christ. Christian psychology needs missiology to remember that its ultimate purpose ust be missiological in its essence, seeking conversion and transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the church, offered to the world. Biblical Theology of Mission is unapologetically CONTEXTUAL.

Thirdly, The Gospel story is mission ON THE WAY:Mission moves forward over time in the faith-pilgrimage of God’s People as they anticipate Christ’s present and coming Kingdom.

When we join Jesus our Lord IN the way, we discover that we are in the presence of the King, we are now part of His rule that is ON THE WAY to the present and coming Kingdom of God.

Mission-on-the-Way is at the heart of Luke 9. This chapter is narrative theology at its best, set in the context of a journey on the way to Jerusalem. Chapter 9 begins with Jesus sending the twelve to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom and heal. Later, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem by way of a town in Samaria. Then in verse 57 they are walking along the road, when Jesus says, “Follow me....No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the service of the Kingdom of God.” (9:59,62) The Kingdom of God is mentioned 5 times in this chapter.

You see, Jesus was ON THE WAY not only to Jerusalem, but to the cross, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. In Acts, the journey will continue through Jesus’ disciples who will go on to Asia, Rome, and throughout the then-known world. Following Acts, the Church would extend the knowledge of the King until, today, the church covers the entire globe, speaks more languages, represents more cultures, and has more resources than anyone ever imagined.

This Kingdom perspective has been one of Arthur Glasser’s major contributions to missiology. Glasser gave his textbook that we use here at Fuller the title, Kingdom and Mission.18 Drawing from the works of George Ladd, Herman Ridderbos, Oscar Cullmann and others, Glasser’s Kingdom-of-God paradigm has done at least four things for missiology.

First, the Kingdom of God concept broadens missiological reflection beyond a predominantly individualized and vertical understanding of salvation to a wholistic view of the interaction of church and world.

Second, Art’s Kingdom missiology breaks the impasse between evangelism and social action that has plagued Evangelicals. Third, Kingdom-of-God missiology creates the possibility of new conversation among Evangelicals, representatives of the conciliar movement, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Pentecostals, and Charismatics.

Fourth, Glasser’s own personal pilgrimage made him deeply aware of the social and political implications of the Kingdom of God that challenges all governments, all forms of racism, all social structures that would seek to deify themselves. Missiology needs Biblical Theology of Mission to keep it from becoming mission studies, or a technical skills center, or a location for inter-faith dialogue, or a meeting place for global churchly conversation. Glasser says, “There is but one acid test that should be applied to all activities that claim to represent obedience in mission. Do they or do they not produce disciples of Jesus Christ?”19 Here Glasser was echoing Donald McGavran’s conviction on which

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McGavran founded Fuller’s School of World Mission. McGavran understood mission “as an enterprise devoted to proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ, and to persuading men and women to become his disciples and responsible members of his church.”20 McGavran believed this was the basis on whichministry formation should be evaluated.21

Biblical Theology of Mission is a servant to missiology, theology and psychology as all three are profoundly affected by the question of PURPOSE -- that is, by the reality of the KINGDOM OF GOD. Kingdom mission is pilgrim mission. As Johannes Verkuyl said,

Missiology may never become a substitute for action and participation....If study does not lead to participation, whether at home or abroad, missiology has lost her humble calling...Any good missiology is also a missiologia viatorum --"pilgrim missiology" (1978,6,18).

This means the church exists for mission, “In the Power of the Spirit” (using Jürgen Moltmann’s phrase 22). It means that everything the church does must intentionally be directed in mission toward the world, on the way to the present and coming Kingdom. I first learned about mission OF, IN and ON the way from Pedro Odilón. ((Someone in one of my classes yesterday reminded me of Pedro.))

Pedro was one of my students during our first few years in the extension seminary in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. Pedro had only been a Christian for a couple of years when he began studying with us. For health reasons, Pedro was constantly on medication, which caused drowsiness, so he slept through most of his classes! He would do his work at home, but would sleep through the intensive courses. We estimated it took about 35 seconds for him to fall asleep!

The Director (Jorge Lopez) and I were thinking about asking him to stop coming. One morning early I got up, ready for a very full day looking after the coffee ranch, the conference center, and several building projects. I had my long list of tasks to be done that day for the Kingdom! There was a knock on our front door. It was Pedro!

“Pedro,” I exclaimed. “What a surprise to see you! But, Pedro, classes don’t start again for another month!”

“Hermano Carlos, I’m not here for class. I came to get you. Over a year ago, you agreed to go with me TODAY and speak to people of my town about the Gospel.” Well, I had my long list of very important things to be done that day -- and somehow going with Pedro had not gotten on the list!

But mission is, after all, OF THE WAY -- it belongs to Jesus. Somehow the Holy Spirit enabled me to recognize that I needed to follow Jesus’ mission that day, not my own LONG LIST of tasks.

“OK,” I mumbled, “I’ll try to go with you.” “But the old Jeep doesn’t work -- I’ll have to fix it before I can go. By 10 that morning the Jeep was ready and we set out. Now here begins my odyssey of mission IN THE WAY! The Jeep was an old tin box. It is about 110 degrees in the shade! We must drive about two hours on a black-top road. We leave the blacktop and begin a four-hour climb up a two-track. Huge boulders -- like going up stairs! And Pedro? Pedro was sound asleep!

We arrive at Pedro’s town:“Oh, we’re here!” he says, waking up. “Now, hermano Carlos, you rest. Everyone is out in the

coffee trees right now. I’ll call you a little later -- and Pedro disappears.AND I HAVE IN MY SHIRT POCKET, THE LIST OF JOBS FOR THE DAY!It’s my turn to sleep. About 7 that evening, Pedro calls me to go and eat in the traditional Mexican

kitchen -- the open fire, the “comal,” the black beans, chicken, tortillas, thick coffee. Delicious! I’m just done eating when Pedro comes back again.

“It’s time,” he says. “Please come with me.”We go to the largest house in the town. We enter the living room -- and there, standing wall-to-

wall are about 200 people! They have all become christians in the last two years through the witness of Pedro Odilon.

“They want to know about the Bible, and about Jesus Christ.” Pedro says.For the next several hours, I have the privilege of teaching the Bible to these new Christians!

HERE IS MISSION ON THE WAY! By now it’s after midnight! Everyone goes home, and Pedro says to me,

“We can drive home now.” We climb our way down that same road. Early the next morning Pedro and I finally get back to my home.

Jean asks, “How did it go?”I shake my head -- “UNBELIEVABLE!”

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In those 24 hours, because of Pedro Odilón, I had experienced what I’m trying to share with you today: MISSION OF THE WAY, MISSION IN THE WAY, and MISSION ON THE WAY.

During the next several years Pedro planted four more churches up in those mountains. Pedro taught me a lesson that has stayed with me for over 20 years that I’ve been in theological education. Many of us who teach in seminaries and universities are sometimes tempted to forget that the real action lies where church members witness among people concerning the Kingdom of God. Studies about Jesus are not the same as being personally encountered by Jesus. We need to heed Hendrikus Berkhof’s warning, “There is a very real danger that (theologians) immerse (themselves) in christology and pneumatology, for example, in order not to be confronted with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”23 By the same token, mission studies should not be confused with actually crossing barriers in missional action among people with a view to their coming to faith in Jesus Christ. We must avoid becoming overly church- centric, academy-focused, or professionally-oriented. As disciples of Jesus, we walk with Him IN the way, ON the way to the present and coming Kingdom of God.

A number of significant challenges face us in Biblical Theology of Mission ON THE WAY. But time will not allow me to develop these today. Let me just list some of them, if only in an illustrative way. Into the next century, Biblical Theology of Mission will involve at least:

Reaffirming the Church’s motivation for mission, as that is declining in the West and is rising in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Re-examining the relation of Bible and mission as churches in many cultures all together read the same Bible and serve the same Lord.

Re-thinking the Church’s role in nation-building as life seems to get cheaper and more precarious all over the world, especially in cities.

Re-evaluating the way Christians all over the world in the world church partner together for world evangelization.

Re-conceptualizing Christian response to the resurgence of world religions and folk religious movements.

Renewing the invaluable and essential contribution that women have made in missiological action, reflection and theory.

And Re-focusing the ministry of church members and local congregations toward mission in God’s world.24

ConclusionBiblical Theology of Mission, then, needs to be biblically-informed, contextually-appropriate, and

Kingdom-directed missional action. The intimate connection of reflection with action is essential for missiology. And action-reflection together must be critiqued, encompassed and directed by the already/not yet Kingdom of God.

The story of God’s dealings with humankind is not finished. In a profound sense, the Acts of the Holy Spirit in mission through the Church to the world are still going on -- until Jesus Christ comes again. Biblical Theology of the Mission can help us explore more deeply the wonderful mystery, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “that through the Gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.” (Eph. 3:6) The narrative continues in this interim time between Christ’s ascension and His return. The Gospel story calls for Biblical Theology of Mission to be centered in Jesus Christ (mission OF the Way), to happen among the peoples and cultures of our world (misson IN the way), and to move forward over time as God’s People continue to anticipate Christ’s present and coming Kingdom (mission ON the way). This is the story of God’s mission – and we must continue to be part of that story!

_______________________________1 Twenty-five years ago, in A Concise Dictionary of the Christian World Mission, Gerald Anderson defined

theology of mission as an enterprise that is “concerned with the basic presuppositions and underlying principles that determine, from the standpoint of the Christian faith, the motives, message, methods, strategy and goals of the Christian world mission.” (Stephen Neill, Gerald H. Anderson and John Goodwin, eds., London: Lutterworth, 1971, 594)

2 I follow Art Glasser here in opting for 70, rather than 72 as the number sent. The number 70 is remeniscent of the number of elders who served Moses (Num 6:11,16,17); the number of the Sanhedren who

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served Jewry in the New Testament times, and now the number of those who serve Jesus the Messiah.

3 The entire chapter has to do with mission, beginning with Jesus’ sending the 12 on their first missionary journey. Then chapter 10 begins with Jesus’ sending the 70. As the 12 are sent to the towns and villages of Galilee at the end of Jesus’ Galilean ministry, so the 70 are sent ahead of Jesus to “every town and place where he was about to go” (10:1), This marks the beginning of the Gentile mission by the disciples of Jesus, a matter to which Jesus alludes when he says in 10:13, “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! (towns in Galilee) For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon (Gentile towns in Phoenicia, north of Galilee), they would have repented long ago....But it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you.”

4 John would later record Jesus’ words, “I am the way, the truth and the lif.” (Jn. 14:6). And in acts, the disciples would come to be known as those who belonged to “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:14).

5 Arthur Glasser, “Missiology” in Walter A. Elwell, edit. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology G.R.: Baker, 1984, 726. In another place Glasser says, “In recent years evangelicals have become increasingly concerned to become more comprehensively biblical in their understanding and performance of the Christian mission....They are determined as never before to keep his redemptive work central, for by his substitutionary death and bodily resurrection he alone provides access for sinful human beings into the presence and fellowship of God.” (Arthur Glasser, “Foreword to the American Edition,” to Roger Hedlund. The Mission of the Church in the World. G.R.: Baker;, 1985, 9).

6 Taken from notes given to me personally by Art Glasser in consultation about this address, May 3, 1996. In that conversation, Glasser pointed to a favorite work of his, Karl Barth The German Church Conflict: Ecumenical Studies in History. Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1965. Echoeing the “Sola Scriptura” of the Protestant Reformation Karl Barth wrote in The German Church Conflict, “Where the Word of God is once again simply heard and preached, there is the holy Church....There are innumerable non-theologians in Germany even today who understand all this very well and who rightly wait for the theologians also finally to understand it better.” (pg 22) “In terms of this book,” Barth wrote, “a confession of faith would definitely have to begin with the avowal that God, that Jesus Christ, is the “Lord of history” (and not the Third Reich).” (pg 30) And again, “The Word of God wonderfully sustains those who are ready to be sustained by it.” (pg 51) “As long and as far as a Church is a confessing Church, it will be destroyed neither by cunning nor by force, neither with powerful propaganda nor with police truncheons.” (pg 59) (Taken from notes given to me personally by Art Glasser in consultation about this address May 3, 1996.)

7 Biblical Theology of Mission is THEOLOGY because fundamentallyit involves reflection about God. It seeks to understand God's mission, God's intentions and purposes in the world, God's use of human instruments, and God’s working through God’s People in God’s world -- especially in and through Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel and the Head of the Church. Within the larger enterprise of Theology of Mission, Biblical Theology of Mission looks to Scripture for the basis on which to question, define, guide, and evaluate the missionary enterprise. This is what David Bosch called, "critical hermeneutics." (David Bosch. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991, 23-24.)

8 Missiologists need to stay close to Jesus their Lord, bothpersonally and spiritually -- as well as intellectually and theoretically. The Bible is quite clear in its warnings about true and false prophets (as for example in Num. 11:24-30; 12:6-8; Deut. 13:1-5; 18:14-22; 23:4-5; I. Sam. 3:7, 21; 10:5-7; Ezek. 13:1-9; in Paul’s injunctions about not accepting a “different gospel” other than the one of the grace of Jesus Christ, Gal. 1:6; and also in 2 Pet. 2:15; Jude 1. Amidst multiple cultures around the world, the missiologist must be concerned about TRUTH, not merely tolerance. Without a center in Jesus Christ, multiculturalism and globalism become balkanaization, isolation and meaningless plurality. Only in Jesus the Lord may the Church today and tomorrow find its true mission and purpose. “The entire theme of ministry in the New Testament is bound to the person of Jesus Christ as the decisive eschatological event of God’s reconciling Word,” says Carl Braaten. “Christ alone is the unity in, with, and under the pluriformity of ministries that arose in primitive Christianity. Ministry is Christocentric in all the New Testament writings....If there is any authority in the church, that authority can be non other than Jesus Christ, as the authority is mediated through those whom he commissioned to be his ambassadors.” (Carl Braaten. The Apostolic Imperative: The Nature and Aim of the Church’s

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Mission and Ministry. Minn.: Augsburg, 1985, 123-124.)9 David Bosch. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis,

1991.23-24.10 So Jesus is recorded by Matthew as saying, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least

of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matt 25:40).11 Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988.12 John Mackay. A Preface to Christian Theology N.Y: Macmillan, 1943, 27-30.13 Letter from Roger and Sue Scheenstra to Jill Fredricks: Easter Sunday, 1996.14 In the words of John Stott, “The church cannot be understood rightly except in a perspective which is at once

missionary and eschatological.” (John Stott, One People. Downers Grove: IVP, 1971, 17).15 Johannes Blauw. The Missionary Nature of the Church. G.R.:Eerdmans, 1962, 121.16 Lesslie Newbigin. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. G.R.:Eerdmans, 1989, 222.17 Van Engen 1991, 74-76; Karl Barth 1958, vol 4.3.2, 762-63.18 Pasadena: FTS, 1989.19 Arthur F. Glasser, “What is ‘Mission’ Today? Two Views,” in Mission Trends No. 1. Gerald H. Anderson and

Thomas F. Stransky, edits. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1974, 8.20 Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth. G.R.: Eerdmans,1990, 23-24, emphasis is his.21 Donald McGavran, “Are Seminaries Shortchanging Evangelism?” Missions Tomorrow (Spring/Summer, 1989,

22-26). This article is excerpted from D. McGavran. Effective Evangelism: A Theological Mandate (Phillipsburgh, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1988.

22 Jürgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit. N.Y.:Harper & Row, 1977.23 Hendrikus Berkhof. Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics.John Vriend, trans., G.R.: Eerdmans, 1985, 17.24 Motivation for Mission. Lately, there has been a dramatic decrease in the percentage of money and

energy that congregations in North America devote to world evangelization. Paul McKaughan, of the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA) has stated, “I feel that without massive reordering of the U.S. missionary enterprise and a dynamic movement of the Spirit of God renewing His church in the U.S., the structures and industry which we represent will in the not too distant future, appear analogous to an abandoned ship buried by the tides on a sandy seashore with only their weather beaten ribs as visible testimony to far better and more useful days.” This means that we need renewal in terms of spirituality and mission as well.Bible and Mission.

Hermeneutics will continue to call for our attention, especially now that this involves a world church representing hundreds of cultures, reading together the Bible, each with different glasses -- but all seeking to follow the same Jesus.

The Church’s Role in Nation-Building. How can the church stand unequivocally for the sanctity of human life? This calls for careful biblical re-thinking concerning the “powers,” be they politics and economics, the unseen world of the demonic, or tribalism, ethnocentrism or racism. This matter is especially urgent in the cities of our world.

The World Church. Over 60% of world Christianity is now to be found in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and there are now as many full-time cross-cultural missionaries being sent from there as from Europe and North America. How do we partner with Christians from many contexts, learning fromtheir unique perspectives and participating TOGETHER in Jesus’ mission?

Other Religions. Everywhere in the world the Church is now one faith in a marketplace of multiple religious affiliations. Biblical Theology of Mission will need to wrestle more deeply than it has with its response to other religions.

Women in Mission. The beginning of mission-sending in North America, and the origins of many churches in the 2/3rds world, was intimately tied to the missionary vision and commitment of women. In North America, much of this was lost after the 1930s. Biblical Theology of Mission could be immeasurably enriched through the contribution of women.

The Mission of the Local Congregation. In this postmodern world, the Church must begin to think globally and act locally. The mission of the local congregation in every place needs to be clarified. We must see the local church as itself a primary agent of mission.

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3The New Covenant: Mission Theology in Context

By: Charles Van Engen211

The thesis of this chapter is that the covenant of grace in the Old and New Testaments provides clues for our understanding how God’s revealed hiddenness may be expressed in new ways that are always different from, yet always in continuity with, all past moments of God’s self-disclosure throughout human history. This in turn offers us a new epistemological paradigm of contextualization that can inform both the content and the method of critical theologizing in this new century.

The misfit of the gospel with human cultures has been a perennial problem faced by the church in its mission. The apostle Paul referred to God’s hidden self-disclosure both in terms of the created order and in relation to God’s special revelation in Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:20; 11:33-34). Revealed hiddenness—this is the paradox of divine self-disclosure in human consciousness and the most difficult part of contextualization theory.212 The very fact that we know God only through faith should tell us that we do not know all there is to know about God. In fact, we see only as through a mirror, darkly (I Cor. 13:12). Texts like Job 36:26; Psalm 139:6; Acts 14:16-17; Romans 11:25, 33-336; I. Cor. 2:7; Eph. 3:3; Col. 1:15, 26; I Tim. 1:17; 3:16; and Rev. 10:7 emphasize the mystery and unknowability of God. Many theologians have affirmed this basic characteristic of God’s revelation.213 So the first contextualization of the gospel communication then, involves the mystery of God’s self-revelation in human cultures (Van Engen: 1996, 71-72)..

A second and more complex sense of the misfit of the Gospel with human cultures is the mismatch that came as a result of the Christian missionary movement.214 As the gospel crossed cultural barriers over several centuries, the faith assertions of Christendom did not seem to fit the new cultures encountered with the Gospel. So a progression of attempted solutions were suggested, with an accompanying succession of words like “persuasion,” “Christianization,” “compellere,” “accommodation,” adaptation,” “fulfillment,” “syncretism,” “indigenization,” “transformation,” “enculturation,” and “dialogue.”215 A recent word, “contextualization,” involves some difficult theological issues like incarnation, revelation, truth, divine-human interaction, and the shape of corporate religious experience. Contextualization takes seriously the difference between Gospel and culture, and accepts the fact that “the gospel always stands in divine judgement on human culture” (Hiebert 1979a:63).

A. Models of ContextualizationContextualization theory has generated a number of models for explaining how the Gospel may take shape

in various cultural contexts. Krikor Haleblian, for example, pointed out the difference between a "translation model" of contextualization exemplified by Charles Kraft's work, and the "semiotic model" developed by Robert Schreiter.216 Stephen Bevans described six distinct models of contextual theology: the anthropological, translation, praxis, synthetic, semiotic, and transcendental.217 David Hesselgrave spoke of the impact of contextualization on, "the translation of the Scriptures, the interpretation of the Scriptures, the communication of the gospel, the instruction of believers, the incarnation of truth in the individual and corporate lives of the believers, and the

211 Este artículo es el manuscrito pre-publicación de lo que llegó a ser el capítulo 3, “The New Covenant: Mission Theology in Context,” en Charles Van Engen Mission on the Way: Issues in Mission Theology. G.R.: Baker, 1996, pp. 71-89.

212 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol II, 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1957) 184. Barth devotes an entire paragraph (Par. 27) of this volume to the discussion of the knowledge of God. Barth divides this in two parts: the "terminus a quo" (from which our knowledge proceeds by the grace of God's self-revelation to us) and the "terminus ad quem" (to which our knowledge conduces to faith in the hidden God). Ibid, pp. 179-254). It is important to compare this section of Barth's Dogmatics with Vols. I,2 Par. 17; IV, 1, pp. 483ff; and IV, 3, pp. 135-165.

213 See, e.g., Louis Berkhof. Reformed Dogmatics. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1932) Part I, Section I, Chapter II; G.C. Berkouwer. General Revelation (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1955, pp. 285-332); Emil Brunner. The Christian Doctrine of God (Phil: Westminster, 1949, pp. 117-136); and Hendrikus Berkhof. Christian Faith (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1979), 41-56, and 61-65

214 Richard Niebuhr highlighted this matter in his famous book Christ and Culture (1951). Charles Kraft took a major step forward beyond Niebuhr in Christianity in Culture (1979).

215 Each of these words represents a particular approach to relating the Gospel to a new culture. Each also entails a particular understanding of God’s self-disclosure in the midst of human cultures and the ability or inability of those cultures to “know” God in the context of their own cultural forms.

216 Cf. Krikor Haleblian, "The Problem of Contextualization," Missiology (XI: 1, Jan., 1983) 95-111. See also K. Haleblian, "Evaluation of Existing Models of Contextualization," in his Contextualization and French Structuralism: A Method to Delineate the Deep Structure of the Gospel (unpubl. Ph. D. Diss., School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1982) 34-50. Cf. Dean S. Gilliland and Evertt W. Huffard, "The Word Became Flesh:" A Reader in Contextualization (unpublished reader, Pasadena, Fuller Theological Seminary, n.d.) 84-90. Haleblian is primarily referring to Charles Kraft, Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective (N.Y.: Orbis,1979), and Robert Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (N.Y: Orbis, 1985).

217 Stephen Bevans, "Models of Contextual Theology," Missiology, (XIII:2, April, 1985), 185-202.

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systematization of the Christian faith (theologizing)."218 For the purposes of this essay, we could distinguish four major models of "contextualization," based on their primary purposes: communication, cultural relevance, socio-economic change, and inter-faith dialogue.219

1 . Contextualization as Communication The first approach to incarnational contextualization arose with the advent of Practical Anthropology and

involved a combination of linguistics, translation, and communication theory (Wonderly, Smalley, Luzbetak, Mayers, Nida, Loewen, Kraft, etc.).220 Contextualization viewed as a process of communication assumed that the communicators knew and understood the "message," but may not have known or fully understood either the receptors or the means by which the receptors might comprehend the same message.221 The communicational approach to contextualization, then, came to involve an attempt to translate the Gospel so completely and thoroughly that "dynamic equivalence" might be achieved.222 As Louis Luzbetak pointed out, the communicational model was particularly important when the Gospel was first taking root in a new culture.223 Communicational contextualization demonstrated a serious and careful cultural sensitivity in relation to the receptors, while also seeking to be true to the sender's understanding of the Gospel.

2. Contextualization as Cultural RelevanceThe second model of incarnational contextualization had to do with the cultural relevance of the Church

once the Gospel had taken root in foreign soil. It was a primary concern of Shoki Coe and others involved in the Theological Education Fund. The matter of cultural relevance was also central to Robert Schreiter's "triple dialectic" between Gospel, Church, and local culture. Schreiter's approach sought to affirm the Gospel in radically new forms and social functions by, "constructing local theologies."224 The broad range of theological positions possible within this cultural relevance model was brought out by Bong Rin Ro who spoke of four types of contextualization in Asia: "syncretism, accommodation, situation theology, and biblically-oriented Asian theology."225

3 . Contextualization as Liberation Liberation Theology in Latin America was an example of a third type of incarnational contextualization,

but in this case the relevance of the Gospel was spelled out primarily in terms of socio-political and economic categories.226 The hermeneutical questions were different from those found in the other two models, but even here 218 David Hesselgrave, "Contextualization and Revelational Epistemology," in: Earl D. Radmacher and Robert D. Preus, edits. Hermeneutics,

Inerrancy, and the Bible. (G.R.: Zondervan, 1984) 694. Hesselgrave went on to discuss at length four "epistemic pre-understandings," or models of "revelational epistemology:" the "demythologization" of Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, the "dynamic-equivalence" of Charles Kraft, the "providential preservation" of Edward Hills, and the "relational centers" of Bruce Nicholls.

219 An excellent review of the literature involving the various models within the incarnational approach may be found in, Harvie Conn, "Contextualization: Where Do We Go From Here?" in: Carl E. Armerding, edit. Evangelicals and Liberation (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1977) 90-119.

220 A handy compilation of some of these early writings may be found in William Smalley, edit. Readings in Missionary Anthropology II (Pasadena: WCL, 1978).

221 In a recent discussion concerning contextualization, David Hesselgrave basis his own perspective on the communication model, but feels that Charles Kraft goes too far. Hesselgrave suggests an "apostolic contextualization" which goes further than Bruce Nicholl's strictly verbal forms, but leaves the basic biblical message intact. Cf. David Hesselgrave. Today's Choices for Tomorrow's Mission: An Evangelical Perspective on Trends and Issues in Missions, (G.R.: Zondervan, 1988) 161. Note the predominance of communication theory, communicational language, and linguistic/translation issues in the Willowbank Report and the accompanying papers in Robert T. Coote and John Stott, edits. Down To Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1980). Further background may be found in Eugene Nida. Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith (N.Y: Harper & Bros., 1960) pp. 33-61; Don McCurry, "Cross-Cultural Models of Muslim Evangelism," Missiology (IV:3, July, 1976) 268-269; and Bruce Nicholls, "Theological Education and Evangelization," in: J.D. Douglas, edit. Let the Earth Hear His Voice (Minn.: World Wide Pub., 1975) 634-645. The Lausanne movement also defined contextualization in strongly communicational terms. (See J.D. Douglas, Ibid, pp 1226-1227.) Bruce Fleming distinguished between the "supracultural," the "transcultural," and the "cultural" aspects of the Gospel contextualization in, The Contextualization of Theology. (Pasadena: WCL, 1980) 73.

222 Cf. James O. Buswell, "Contextualization: Theory, Tradition, and Method," in: David J. Hesselgrave, edit. Theology and Mission (G.R.: Baker, 1978) 87-111.

223 Louis Luzbetak, "Signs of Progress in Contextual Methodology," Verbum 22: 39-57. (Reproduced also in Dean Gilliland and Evertt Huffard, edits. The Word Became Flesh: A Reader in Contextualization. Pasadena: Fuller Theological Seminary, n.d.)

224 Cf. Robert J. Schreiter. Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985).225 Bong Rin Ro, "Contextualization: Asian Theology," in: Bong Rin Ro and Ruth Eshenaur, edits. The Bible and Theology in Asian Contexts:

An Evangelical Perspective on Asian Theology (Taiwan: Asia Theological Association, 1984), 63-77.226 The imposition of Spanish, Portuguese, and (to a lesser extent) French cultures upon a myriad of local cultures has created a multitude of

cultural layers mixed into the warp and woof of Latin American society, creating a context where other issues like power-sharing, economic equity and social justice become crucial for bringing about change in Latin America.

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the basic Gospel was assumed to be understood. The economic, social, and political realities of the "context," however, called for new "texts" to be examined, new affirmations made, and new Kingdom ethics lived out.227

Louis Luzbetak summarizes these three models of incarnational contextualization by affirming, One cannot deny that considerable progress has been made in contextual methodology in

recent years. The most common form of contextualization, that of the liberation theologians, has begun to temper its rhetoric, refine its concepts, and more clearly and explicitly indicate its methodology... Some form of translation seems necessary particularly in beginning a local church -- and here Kraft provides many useful insights. On the other hand, once the seed is sown, the new plant must be watered and cultivated so that it might grow and thrive -- and here Schreiter provides us with an invaluable tool, a triple dialectic between the Gospel, the Church, and the local culture. In a word, contextualization is by no means a kind of missiological fad but a definite direction of great and lasting promise.228

4. Contextualization as Inter-Faith DialogueA fourth model arises out of the phenomenology of experiential faith and the common search for the holy,

basing its theology primarily on the concepts of creation and humanity. This model of contextualization developed in relation to inter-faith dialogue as it spilled over into "contextualization." Here the Christian faith was viewed as one of the world's religions standing beside other world religions. In the context of cultures where Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions found their acceptance, Christians were to compare their experiences of "faith" with those of people of other faiths. In an increasingly pluralistic world many sought, rightly, to demonstrate their acceptance of radically diverse cultural forms. But the growing awareness of cultural diversity sometimes contributed to the acceptance of religious relativity as well. Some years ago W.A. Visser t'Hooft commented on this issue.

The weakness of this position lies in the fact that it deals with religion as an element of culture...But none of the religions which are relevant for the world situation today considers itself as simply an expression of culture. Every one of them claims that it proclaims truth which transcends any culture and which is fundamentally independent from cultural developments, because it is not man-made but God-given truth...To transform the struggle between the religions concerning the ultimate truth of God into an inter-cultural debate concerning values is to leave out the central issue at stake...To think of Christianity as an expression of Western civilization is as much out of date as the colonial conceptions with which such thinking was associated.229

The relativizing of faith as a product of the diversity of cultures is an idea with a long history. In our century this perspective received its major impetus from William Hocking and the Laymen's Foreign Missions Enquiry entitled, Re-Thinking Missions.230 The report set Christianity alongside other religions as cultural expressions of a particular society. The "Comparative Religions" movement which sprang from this viewpoint became a major force in many colleges, universities and some seminaries, and in some instances may have become a substitute for courses in mission and world evangelization.231 More recently W. Cantwell Smith, Paul Knitter, John Cobb, John Hick and Raimundo Pannikker are among those following a similar path, although seeking major refinements and redefinitions to the thinking of the 1930's.232 The recent use of the word "ecumenical" in World

227 A recent example of a sociological-economic contextualization of the Gospel in the North American context may be found in Lowell Noble, Socio-Theology (Michigan: self-published, 1987).

228 Louis Luzbetak, "Signs of Progress," p. 53.229 W.A. Visser t'Hooft, No Other Name (London: SCM, 1963) 85-86. Visser t'Hooft's subsequent discussion of "Christian Universalism" in the

volume is very helpful at this point. See pp. 96-103.230 See, e.g. Stephen Neill. A History of Christian Missions (N.Y: Penguin, 1964) 455-456; David Bosch. Witness to the World (London:

Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1980) 161-164; and Gerald H. Anderson, "American Protestants in Pursuit of Mission: 1886-1986," International Bulletin of Missionary Research (12:3, July, 1988) 106-108.

231 Observation made by Dana Robert in "Teaching Mission at Boston University," presentation made to the Association of Professors of Mission, Chicago, 1988.

232 See, e.g., Paul Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitude Toward the World Religions . (N.Y.: Orbis, 1985); and John Hick and Paul Knitter, edits. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987). In a review of the latter work Carl Braaten states, "The essence of this pluralistic theology is not as new as these authors imagine. None of the leading ideas -- relativism, mystery, justice -- as the core of the religious enterprise is new." (Review , International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 12:3, July, 1988, 136.) An enlightening discussion of this matter can be found in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, (XXIV:1, Winter, 1987). Cf. J. Verkuyl, "Contra de Twee Kernthesen van Knitter's Theologia Religionum," Wereld en Zending (1986/2) 113-120.

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Council of Churches circles to mean Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists worshipping together, each in their own way, is another example of religious relativity.233

5. Contextualization as Knowing God in Context Is it time for the contextualization debate to move further in the process of understanding the Gospel in

culture? Might there not be another major model from which to understand the task of contextualization? 234 The remainder of this essay will examine the biblical theology of covenant as a model for knowing God in multiple cultural contexts. The need to consider a new model of contextualization springs from an awareness of the new reality of the world Church. It is an acknowledged fact that the "center of gravity" of the world church has shifted to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fact has called us to a reorientation of mission not only in numerical, strategic, and organizational terms, but also in relation to doing contextual theology. We now have Christians from a multitude of cultures reading the Scriptures, reflecting on God's revelation, and seeking to know God in their own context. James Scherer recently observed that,

While the matter of cultural adaptation or inculturation is happily a virtual non-issue, further research is necessary to clarify how the understanding of the gospel is affected by receptor cultures, not merely in the linguistic transmission of the gospel message but in the actual understanding of the gospel and its appropriation within a given culture. We need to study more about how the gospel is understood in diverse cultural contexts, thereby increasing our understanding of the richness of God's revelation.235

On the opposite side of the coin, some Westerners like Lesslie Newbigin are beginning to call for a radical reexamination of Biblical faith without all of the layers of Western cultural assumptions that cloud Western understanding of God, the Gospel, Jesus Christ, and Christian faith. There is a growing realization that all theologies are local theologies.236 Maybe it is time to look again at the matter of the "square peg in a round hole" -- but now from the standpoint of knowing God in context.

B. The New Covenant, a Biblical Model for Knowing God in ContextNowhere is the mystery of the Gospel for the Gentiles more poignantly expressed than in the conceptual

framework of a biblical theology of the covenant. I will not deal here with the extensive and complicated aspects of biblical theology of the covenant. Nor am I looking at "covenantal theology" as it was developed in the Reformed tradition over a couple of centuries after the Protestant Reformation. Rather, I am interested in using the newer methods of exegesis which examine the text as it has been received, viewing it as a narrative articulation of the theological perspectives of the People of God throughout the centuries. My major concern is the covenantal perspective as a possible paradigm for knowing God's hidden revelation in diverse contexts.

Harvie Conn is among those who have called for a covenantal perspective as a new theological center for a contextual hermeneutic (See, e.g., Conn 1978; Glasser 1979b: 403-409; Archer 1979; and Lind 1982).

Emerging from the debate (surrounding evangelical hermeneutics) is an evangelical call to see theology as the discipled (not simply disciplined) reflection/action of "knowing God," theology as the conscientization of hermeneutic, radically transforming reflection, the transformation of the believer into conformity to the image of God in his culture.This process may be called contextual hermeneutic, the covenant conscientization of the whole people of God to the hermeneutical obligations of the gospel in their culture...The core of this contextual hermeneutic is the recovery of the covenant dimension of doing theology -- a dimension modelled most beautifully by John Calvin's expository method, of theologia pietatis...(Conn 1978:43; See also Conn 1984: 229-234; Hohensee 1980: 131-145).Covenant refers to the actions of God in history which reveal the eternal God's hiddenness in relationship

with His people through time and space. But this presents a real problem, as Martin Noth has explained. “In the biblical witness we deal with a revelation of God which has occurred within history while, after all, God cannot be limited to history and time”(Noth 1963:77).

To soften the dialectic between God's eternality and humanity's temporalness, Noth speaks of Israel's 233 The efforts of people like Phil Parshall, Johannes Verkuyl, Kenneth Cragg, and J. Dudley Woodberry in relation to Islam, for example,

represent approaches which differ markedly from those of others like W. Cantwell Smith, Paul Knitter and John Hick. 234 Harvie Conn first alluded to this concept in, "Contextualization: A New Dimension for Cross-Cultural Hermeneutic," EMQ (14:1, Jan., 1978)

39-46. He further refined these observations in Eternal Word and Changing Worlds (G.R: Zondervan, 1984) 211-260.235 James Scherer. Gospel, Church and Kingdom: Comparative Studies in World Mission Theology (Minn.: Augsburg, 1987) 239-240.236 See, e.g., Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1986.) Ten years earlier Jacob

Loewen had called attention to the, "blindness (of the cross-cultural missionary) to the problems produced by the missionary's own culture." Cf. Jacob Loewen, "Evangelism and Culture," in: Rene Padilla, edit. The New Face of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: IVP, 1976) 181.

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continual, "re-presentation," the constant re-enactment, and re-participation of the People of God in both past and future events where God had broken into history in relationship with God's People.

As in all history, so this history is especially involved in the tension between the course of time and the presence of God which is not bound by time, between the "mediateness" and the "immediateness" of God, of which Karl Barth speaks in discussing God's unending creations. "Re-presentation" is founded on this -- that God and his action are always present, while man in his inevitable temporality cannot grasp this present-ness except by "re-presenting" the action of God over and over again in his worship. (Noth 1963:85)

The Covenant: Same Meaning, Many FormsIn the covenant we find a historically-conditioned (or better, a historically-contextualized) relationship

between an eternally-present God and a temporally-specific humanity. The historicity of the covenantal forms also means a tremendous variety of cultural, political and social contexts in which the covenant may be found. Thus in the covenant we have essentially the same relationship at all times and in all places, and yet one which takes on radically different forms in each time and place. Referring to this relationship as "the covenant of grace," Herman Bavinck (1956:274-276) emphasized its eternal sameness.

The covenant of grace is everywhere and at all times one in essence, but always manifests itself in new forms and goes through differing dispensations... God remains the first and the last in all the dispensations of the covenant of grace, whether of Noah, Abraham, Israel, or the New Testament church. Promise, gift, grace, are and remain the content of it...The one great, all-inclusive promise of the covenant of grace is: "I will be your God, and the God of thy people." A single straight line runs from the mother-promise of Gen. 3:15 to the apostolic blessing of 2 Cor. 13:13...It is always the same Gospel (Rom. 1:2 & Gal. 3:8), the same Christ (John 14:6 & Acts 4:12), the same faith (Acts 15:11 & Rom 4: 11), and always confers the same benefits of forgiveness and eternal life (Acts 10:43 & Rom 4:3).237

Bible scholars like Norman Gottwald, (1979:95),238 Lucien Cerfaux, (1959:31-39),239 and Gerhard von Rad (1962, 1:129-133)240 have emphasized the continuity of the covenant concept throughout Israel's history. Although we may not subsume the great diversity of Scriptural perspectives as tightly within the covenant concept as W. Eichrodt (1961:1967) did, it is impossible to understand the continuity and meaning of God's revelation to humanity apart from the concept of the covenant. In its most fundamental and essential meaning, the covenant could be stated, "I will be your God, and you shall be my people."241 This timeless, relationship was expressed in various epoches in strikingly similar structural forms.

1. There is recitation of God's mighty acts.2. The Word of God spells out the covenantal relationship.3. Promises are associated with the covenantal relationship.4. Worship and Sacrifice are carried out by the people.5. YHWH gives a physical sign or symbol of the covenant.37

Grace, revelation, law, cultic practice, communal self-identity, corporate response, and the meaning and goal of YHWH's acts in history are all incorporated and given meaning in this covenantal relationship. As John Kromminga said it, quoting from W. van der Merwe, "The covenant is to be understood as that relationship between God and creature, ordained in eternity, instituted in history and directed to consummation" (Dekker 1985:1).

And yet we are all aware of the radically-distinct contexts in which this timeless relationship has been expressed. This incredible diversity can be illustrated by summarizing the covenant in at least six contextual manifestations.

1. Adam: The Covenant and the ultimate victory over evil (Gen. 3:9-21)2. Noah: The Covenant and the preservation of all living things(Gen. 6:17-22; 9:1-17)3. Abraham: The Covenant and the election of Abraham's seed for the sake of the nations (Gen 12; 15; 17 --

237 For a recent similar perspective see Klooster 1988:150.238 Gottwald point to Exod. 19:3-8; 24:1-11; 34:2-28; Deut. 26:16-19; and Josh. 24 as examples of “theophanic and covenant texts [which were]

included as sources for premonarchic Israel because they contain reflection of how the relations between Yahweh and Israel were conceived in early times” (1979:57). See also Gottwald 1959:102-144; and Newsome 1984:40-43, 57, 120-123, 210.

239 See also Jocz 1968: 283. Fred Klooster 1988:149, calls the covenant “basically an oathbound promissory relation.” See also Watson 1986.240 Von Rad points to Deut. 26:5-10 as an examle of the historical summaries which articulate this unified-covenant perspective. See also Patrick

1987.241 Compare, e.g., Gen 17; Exod 19, 24, 29, 34; Lev. 26; Josh. 24; I Sam. 12; 2 Sam. 23:4; Ps 89; Jer. 31; 2 Cor 6; and Rev. 21.

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We must also include here the "re-presentation" of that covenantal relationship in both an inherited and a personal way with Isaac: Gen 26:3-5; and with Jacob: Gen 28:13-15)

4. Moses: The Covenant and the law, a nation formed(Ex. 2:24, 19:4-6; 20:1-17; 24: 1-10; 25: 10-22; 31:16-17; 32; 34: 1-10; 40: 18-38; Lev. 26: 6-12; Deut. 9:15; Num. 14. In Ex. 32 and Num. 14, God offers to make from Moses "a great nation," each time specifically in reference to promises made earlier to Abraham.(With Joshua, the covenant is related to the possession of the promised land, but intimately connected with Moses and the Exodus. Cf. Deut. 29:1-29; 30:1-20; Josh. 5; 24)

5. David: The Covenant and the Davidic reign -- a kingdom (I Chr. 16: 15-17; 17: 1-27; parallels in II Sam. 7:1-29; 23:5; Ps. 89:34-37; 105:8; 111:5; 106:45; Isa. 42:6; 55:3; 59:21; II Kings 1-12)

6. Jesus Christ: The Covenant and the Holy Spirit, redemption wrought once-for-all, the Church, the Kingdom come and coming (Isaiah 54:10; 55:3; Jer. 4:3-4; 31:31;32:36-40 Ezeq. 34:24; Mt. 3:11,16; 26:28; Mr. 14:24; Lk 22:20; I Cor. 11:25; Acts 3:25-26; II Cor. 3:6; Heb. 7:22; 8:6,8; 9:15, 19-20, 10:12,24,29; 13:20; Rom. 11:27; Gal. 3:6 Heb. 13:20-21)39

The Covenant: Same Meaning, Fuller KnowledgeThus we see the continuity of the covenantal relationship of God with God's children at all times and in all

contexts. But there is also something wonderfully progressive about this history which forces us to accept the fact of the incompleteness of that which Adam, Noah, or Abraham, or Moses, or David knew of God's nature and revealed will. Precisely because we see the "continuity" of progressive revelation, we also see the deeper, fuller, and more complete self-revelation of God down through history. This seems to be the intention of the writer of Hebrews when he says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe” (Heb. 1:1-2).

Whether it was an understanding of God's nature, God's redemptive activity, God's providential care of the world, God's love for all the nations, or God's ultimate plan for the whole of creation -- in each manifestation of the covenant there was something more deeply revealed, something more fully understood. Here is the crux of the matter. Within a fundamental sameness of the relationship, each subsequent historical-cultural-political context revealed something more concerning God's nature and relationship with His People.

The Covenant: a Series of Hermeneutical Circles Forming a SpiralOne way we may comprehend the dialectic is by viewing covenantal revelation as a series of hermeneutical

circles which together form a hermeneutical spiral through time. (Cf. Osborne 1991.) The concept of the "hermeneutical circle" is not new, but has received a renewed emphasis in the praxeological theology of Latin American theologians of liberation. (e.g., Segundo 1976:8; Míguez-Bonino 1975). The methodology is also proving helpful to many who are not Latin American theologians (Bosch 1983:493, 496).

With regard to our knowledge of God, the covenant gives us an opportunity to understand how each hermeneutical circle served in each context to reveal something deeper and fuller about God’s nature. Paul referred to this as "the mystery made known to me by revelation" (Eph 3:3). What could have been more discontinuous, more mysterious for Paul than the salvation of the Gentiles? Yet precisely in radically new historical contexts (through Jesus Christ, after Pentecost, in the church, and by the spread of the Gospel throughout the Gentile world) Paul saw God’s revelatory purposes taking on deeper and fuller meaning. God's intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to” the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:10-11 NIV.)

The various historically contextualized manifestations of the covenant can be represented as a "hermeneutical spiral," through which over time the eternal God becomes progressively more completely known to God's People (See Figure 7 below).

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C1 C2 C3 C4 C6

C1

C2

C3

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C5

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Figure 1: The Covenant as a Hermeneutical Spiral

Of course, God's self-revelation never really gets beyond the most basic issue of God's triumph over evil (Adam), and God's election of a people for service as a blessing to all; the nations (Abram) (see I Peter 2). God's law is never abrogated, nor are the promises of David's eternal reign ever annulled. And yet in each new context something deeper and fuller is revealed. Paul’s statement that as in Adam all died, so in Christ, all will be made alive. (Rom. 5:12-21), exemplified this discontinuous continuity.

The Revelational Contextualization of the CovenantOnce we have seen God's covenantal revelation as a continuous progression through time, we need to go

back and look at it contextually. Not only is there an increased deepening and fullness across time, but in each context where the covenant is manifested, it is shaped precisely for that particular context.

The Covenant as Historical ContextualizationConsider the first humans, created in God's image, living in perfection in Eden, with the possibility of

disobeying their creator. The particular contextual question has to do with their continued obedience and the possibility of evil entering the world. With their fall, the question becomes even more urgent -- will evil triumph over God's good? The covenantal formula in Gen. 3:15 clearly speaks to this issue, though the promise is darkened by the result of Adam and Eve's sin, with dire consequences for them and their children.

In the case of Noah the context deals with the increasing sinfulness of humanity chronicled in Genesis 4-6. Such was the distance of the created ones from their creator that God, was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, 'I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth -- men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air -- for I am grieved that I have made them (Gen. 6:6-7). Here the contextual question has to do with the continued existence of all living things, including humanity whose sin has tainted all creation. God's revelation in this context contains all the basic elements of the covenantal formula (recitation, command, promises, worship/sacrifice, and a sign), and conveys a specific knowledge of God in a particular context.

The contextualization of God's covenantal revelation can be described in similar terms in relation to Moses, David, and Jesus Christ. The particularity of each context contributed to something deeper and fuller being known about God's hiddenness, precisely because the context called forth a degree and content of revelation hitherto unknown.

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Development from Covenant to New CovenantThe combination of the particularity of the revelational contexts and the action of God over time seems to

be the background of the biblical theology of the “new covenant,” articulate in the prophets and later in the New Testament. This development of the covenant idea is linked to the terminology in the Septuagint (Kittel and Friedrich 1964-76, 2:126-127).

As we move from the perspectives of Isaiah and Jeremiah through the intertestamental period into the age of the New Testament we see an intricate interweaving of two concepts of the covenant: kainos and neos. And precisely in the interconnection of these two concepts we may find an approach to epistemological contextualization which both preserves the continuity of God's revelation and deepens the knowledge of God's hiddenness as revealed in each new context.

The "Neos" Covenant and discontinuity

Of the two most common words for "new" since the classical period, namely, neos and kainos, the former signifies"what was not there before," "what has only just arisen or appeared," the latter, "what is new and distinctive" as compared with other things. Neos is new in time and origin, i.e., young, with a suggestion of immaturity or of lack of respect for the old. Kainos is what is new in nature, different from the usual, impressive, better than the old, superior in value or attraction...43

Neos represents the idea of radical discontinuity which we normally associate with the English concept of "new." But it is quite rare in the New Testament. (Cf. Mt 9:17; Lk. 5:39; I Cor 5:7; Eph. 4:23; Col. 3:10; and Heb. 12:24.)44 In each case the emphasis is on a complete break with the past, something totally disjunctive in kind from that which went before. Only in Hebrews 12:24 is the term used specifically concerning the covenant.49

In the New Testament there is in fact a radical break between the "law and the prophets" and the complete, unique revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Paul emphasizes this radical discontinuity when he speaks of the "covenant" in legal terms like a marriage pact between two parties which then is cancelled upon the death of one party (Rom. 6:1-7:6). The same disjunction is emphasized by Paul in II Cor. 3:6-18, contrasting the former (written) covenant with the new covenant (of the Spirit).45 Earl Ellis spoke of this discontinuity in terms of the "typological" use which the New Testament writers made of the Old Testament, marking the consummation of the "Old" covenant in Jesus Christ.

New Testament typology is thoroughly christological in its focus. Jesus is the "prophet like Moses" (Acts 3:22ff) who in his passion brings the old covenant to its proper goal and end ("Rom 10:4; Heb. 10:9ff) and establishes a new covenant (Lk. 22:20,29). As the messianic "son of David", i.e. "son of God," he is the recipient of the promises, titles and ascriptions given to the Davidic kings.

Because the new covenant consummated by Jesus' death is the occasion of the new creation initiated by his resurrection, covenant typology may be combined with creation typology: as the "eschatological Adam" and the "Son of Man," i.e. "Son of Adam," Jesus stands at the head of a new order of creation that may be compared and contrasted with the present one.46

The uniqueness of the Christ-event has a two-pronged significance for contextualization. In terms of the past it affirms the radically different nature of the "new" age inaugurated in Jesus Christ, the age of the Spirit, the Church, grace through faith, and a "circumcision of the heart." But this discontinuity also impacts the future. The sequence of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus Christ in fact stops with Jesus Christ, for there is nothing more to be fulfilled, or added, or completed. In terms of the contextualization of the Gospel we may never go beyond the Christ-event, we may never add to it "another Gospel" (in Paul's terminology), or to take away from it the completeness found in Jesus Christ. To do so is anathema. (Rev. 22:18-19). This forces us to look again at the covenant.

43 43 Ibid, vol. III, 447.44 44 There are other texts where the term means, "young, younger," and do not relate to this discussion.45 45 Cf. G. Kittel. op. cit., vol. IV, 896-901.46 46 E. Earle Ellis. Prophecy and Hermeneutics in Early Christianity (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1978) 166-167. Cf. also Norman Gottwald. A Light

to the Nations, 370ff; and Geerhardus Vos. op. cit. 23-26; A.A. van Ruler. The Christian Church and the Old Testament (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1971) 75ff.

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The "Kainos" Covenant andContinuityThe predominant idea of "new" in the New Testament is represented by "kainos," and speaks of continuity

in the midst of change. (See Mk. 16:17; Lk 22:20; Jn. 13:34; Rom 6:4; I Cor. 11:25; II Cor. 3:6; 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Eph. 4:24; Heb. 8:8; 9:15; II Pet. 3:13; I Jn. 2:8; Rev. 2:17; 3:12; 21:1.)47

Jesus used this concept in the context of His farewell speech.48 In reference to the coming of a radically different age, Jesus issued a "new" (kainos) commandment: to love (Jn. 13:34). But this was not really new. The disciples of Jesus understood agape as simply an enrichment of that love which had been enjoined upon the People of God from very early times. Love for neighbor "is found already in the Old Testament (Lev. 19:18; Prov. 20:22; 24:29). In fact, love for God and for neighbor is the summary of the law (Mk. 12:29)."49 C.H. Dodd, in reference to John's teaching on love, pointed to the matter of continuity.

The entire process of man's salvation is set in motion by the love of God for the world (Jn 3:16). The love of God is expressed in action by the Son whom He sent. The Father loves the Son, and the Son responds in obedience (3:35; 5:19-20). That is why the words and deeds of Jesus are the words and deeds of the Father (14:11, 24). Hence it is with the eternal love of God that Christ loves His own and loves them to the end (13:1).50

But Jesus called it a "kainos," commandment. "The commandment is new," says C.K. Barrett, "in that it corresponds to the command that regulates the relation between Jesus and the Father (Jn. 10:18; 12:49ff; 15:10); the love of the disciples for one another is not merely edifying, it reveals the Father and the Son."51 This is the revolutionary factor being injected by Jesus. "His followers are to reproduce, in their mutual love, the love which the Father showed in sending the Son, the love which the Son showed in laying down his life."52 This ancient command to love is now given to those followers who will live "between the times," after Jesus' going and before Jesus coming again. It is the same concept as that found in Deuteronomy, but now fuller, deeper, and more significantly revelatory of God's nature and will than ever before. It is a "kainos" commandment giving living expression to the "kainos" covenant, sealed in Jesus' shed blood, and signified in the cup of communion (Lk. 22:20, I Cor 11:25).

The covenant is always the same, but it faces ever- new contexts. This perspective has been referred to as "the pilgrim principle." Andrew Walls, therefore, correctly adds to the need for recognizing the "indigenizing" principle the equally necessary "pilgrim" principle. "

Along with the indigenizing principle which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principle, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed, in East and West, ancient time or modern, which could absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system...

47 47 Cf. G. Kittel, vol. II, 130-132, and vol III, 447-454.48 48 Cf. Hendrikus Berkhof. Christian Faith. 302-303.49 49 Cf. New Testament Commentary vol. II (G.R.: Baker, 1954) 253; and C.K. Barrett. The Gospel According to St. John (Phil:

Westminster, 1955) 451.50 50 C.H. Dodd. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1953) 405.51 51 op. cit. 452.52 52 C.H. Dodd, op. cit. 405.

Figure 2: The Covenant in a Series of Differing Biblical Contexts

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A real danger exists, therefore, of over-contextualizing the gospel, of letting it become subservient to a group's interests and ideological predilections. This is certainly no imaginary fear in the case of third world Christianity. But neither is it for us.53

The "pilgrim principle" means that, although in each context there is something deeper and fuller revealed, yet that is only in relation and in continuity with what has gone before. Senior and Stuhlmueller emphasized this with regard to the "new" covenant in Hebrews.54 Richard de Ridder pointed to the impact of this "new" covenant concept on our understanding of Great Commission in Matt. 28:18-20.55

This constantly deepening perspective of the "new covenant" in pilgrim continuity with the old might be represented as a series of contexts labeled Adam, Noah, Abram, Moses, David and Jesus, as follows.

Figure3: A Series of Covenantal Relations in Context

To this representation we could add the covenantal revelation of God in each context (1c, 2c, 3c, 4c, 5c and 6c in Figure 2 above). We might then understand the kainos covenant in Jesus Christ to be related to the earlier context by a quasi-mathematical formula depicting a relationship that is not additive or cumulative, but that entails a deepening understanding and a greater fulfillment of that which was always there previously (see Figure 3 below). What appears below the line qualifies and gives meaning to what is above the line. That which is above the line is (1) revelation given at a particular time in a specific context and (2) a function, extension, deepening, and fulfillment of what appears below the line. Taken together, they represent the totality of God’s revealed hiddenness in the fullness of time; they have, as Hebrews 1:2 says, been completed in Jesus Christ “in these last days.”

53 53 David Bosch, "An Emerging Paradigm for Mission," 501. Bosch is quoting from Andrew Walls, "The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture," Faith and Thought (108:1-2) 45.

54 54 Cf. Donald Senior and Carroll Stuhlmueller. The Biblical Foundations of Mission. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983) 20-21.55 55 R. De Ridder. Discipling the Nations. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1971) 176-179.

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C. The New Covenant, A Model of Contextualization TodayNow we can return to our original problem. The "square peg" of God's revelation does not fit well within

the "round holes" of today's cultures either. Clearly if in each culture we force the Gospel to take on radically different content in the sense of "neos," we are being unfaithful to the continuity of God's revelation in Jesus Christ.56 On the other hand, to force the "round holes" of our world cultures to configure themselves to a specific understanding of the Gospel will violate the uniqueness and richness of the contexts in which God wishes to be known.57 And yet God can only be known in the here-and-now of our historically- and culturally- conditioned existence. As Roger Haight has said,

All knowledge of God is knowledge that is mediated through the world. There is no immediate knowledge of God precisely because God is transcendent and other than the world while all human knowledge, like freedom itself, is bound to and mediated through the world. Even what appears to be "direct" experience or knowledge of God is really a mediated immediacy because it cannot be had apart from the existence of human freedom in the world and its determination by the world and society...Revelation has always been considered by Christians as the word of God. But that word of God must "appear" in human consciousness to be heard.58

In the midst of such a complex dialectic, it seems that the concept of the "kainos" covenant holds the most fruitful possibility for a gospel that is both revelationally continual and contextually relevant.

1. New Suggestions for Old ProblemsA "kainos" understanding of covenantal revelation may help us avoid some of the common pitfalls faced by

contextualization. It may get us beyond what Paul Hiebert has called "uncritical contextualization,"59 and begin recognizing that questions of truth are important and legitimate responses to unacceptable religious relativity. As Harvie Conn has said, "A covenantal dimension will underline that divine truth is radically transforming faithfulness in word and deed to God's faithfulness.60

The "kainos" understanding of the covenant will provide a continuity with the history of revelation which protects the Church in all contexts from syncretism. As Saphir Athyal,61 Gleason Archer,62 and Bruce Nicholls63 have rightly pointed out, syncretistic mixing of God's truth with human falsehood has been one of the major dangers of contextualization. The "kainos" understanding of the covenant creates a major touchstone whereby God's

56 56 David Hesselgrave issued a recent warning against such "aberrant contextualization," in, Today's Choices for Tomorrow's Mission (G.R.: Zondervan, 1988) 153-158.

57 57 Cf. Jacob Loewen, "Which God do Missionaries Preach?" Missiology (XIV: 1, Jan, 1986) 3-19. See also Harold Netland, "Toward Contextualized Apologetics," Missiology (XVI: 3, July,; 1988) 289-303.

58 58 Roger Haight. An Alternative Vision: An Interpretation of Liberation Theology. (N.Y.: Paulist, 1985) 8-9, 56. John V. Taylor has highlighted the effects in Africa of missionary teaching about a transcendent God who is not in the here-and-now of African experience, in, The Primal Vision: Christian Presence and African Religion (London: SCM, 1963) 75-84.

59 59 Cf. Paul Hiebert, "Critical Contextualization," 108.60 60 Harvie Conn. Eternal Word and Changing Worlds (G.R.: Zondervan, 1984) 210.61 61 Saphir Athyal, "The Uniqueness and Universality of Christ," in: R. Padilla, edit. The New Face of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: IVP,

1976) 51-66.62 62 Cf. Gleason Archer, "Contextualization: Some Implications for Life and Witness in the Old Testament," 202.63 63 Cf. Bruce Nicholls, "Towards a Theology of Gospel and Culture," in: Stott & Coote, edits. Down to Earth (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1980) 49-62.

Figure 4: The Covenant as Revelation in Jesus Christ

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revelation in each culture, though contextually-relevant, can be revelationally consistent with that which has previously been known about God.

Such a touchstone will result in healthy contextualization. In Charles Taber's words, As converts together study and obey the Scriptures, and as their testimony begins to penetrate the broader context, it is indeed the aim of contextualization to promote the transformation of human beings and their societies, cultures, and structures, not in the image of a western church or society, but into a locally appropriate, locally revolutionary representation of the Kingdom of God in embryo, as a sign of the Kingdom yet to come.64

It is in the "kainos" sense that Harvie Conn can say, "Every command of Christ through the Scripture is also de facto a command to contextualize."65 This method of contextualization derives from what Conn earlier called, "covenant witness."

In terms of hermeneutic, this divine pattern of covenant speaking forbids us from isolating covenant witness from covenant life. It does not permit a split between thought and action, truth and practice. Covenant witness affirms the divine word given and calls the creature to covenant life before the Creator in the world of history and its cultures. Unconditional submission to covenant remains the responsibility of covenant man in context.66

2. New Contributions in Changing ContextsWe have seen that the kainos understanding of the covenant involves a continuity with a basic "core" of

Biblical revelation which is dynamically and contextually relevant to the multiple contexts of today's world. In the midst of cultural diversity, the People of God are guided by the never-changing covenant of God, "I will be your God, and you shall be my people -- now, in a totally new context." However, this also means that the "kainos" covenant takes on deeper and fuller, and sometimes quite unexpected, content which was not there before. This calls for theologians in each culture to accept a most difficult task, as Daniel von Allmen has outlined.

It will be seen that the prime quality required of a theologian is careful attention to the living expression of the Church's faith, coupled with a sharp eye for detecting in that expression of the faith both where the promising efforts are to be found and where its fatal tendencies and "heretical inclinations might be.67

Charles Taber suggested that the "criteria for theology" in this endeavor would include being, "biblical, transcendent, Christological, prophetic, dialogical (with the community and the world), open-ended, and subject to the Holy Spirit."68

There is a sense, therefore, in which "kainos" covenantal contextualization would not allow us to speak of "theologies." If by "theology," we mean the knowledge of God in context, we would do better to speak of God's self-revelation in the culturally-conditioned here-and-now through a covenantal relationship with His People. However, if by "theology," we mean the knowledge of God in context, we must also allow the revelation of God's self-disclosure in each new context to influence all other understandings, all other "theology" arising in other times and cultures.

Clearly we are dependent on the Holy Spirit here. During His farewell discourse, Jesus emphasized the didactic role of the "Spirit of truth." "The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and will remind you of everything I have said to you." (Jn. 14:17,26) Again, there is a clear unity of the truth, it is the truth of Jesus Christ, and it will not be a "neos" truth. It will be a "kainos" truth which is both continuous with previous revelation and discontinuous in its radical contextualization.3. New Methodology for an Unchanging Gospel

So down through the history of the Church, beginning in Acts, we find a development of the knowledge of God, resembling what we saw earlier. We can see the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church throughout the Church's history, developing a deeper understanding of all previous knowledge of God. We could, for example, represent the

64 64 Charles Taber, "Contextualization, Indigenization and/or Transformation," in: Don McCurry, edit. The Gospel and Islam: a 1978 Compendium (Monrovia, MARC, 1979) 150.

65 65 Harvie Conn,"Contextualization: Where Do We Go From Here?" in, Evangelicals & Liberation (N.J.: Pres. and Ref. Publ, 1977) 44.66 66 Harvie Conn, "Contextualization: A New Dimension for Cross-Cultural Hermeneutic," 43.67 67 Daniel von Allmen, "The Birth of Theology," in: Kraft & Wisely, edits. Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity (Pasadena: WCL, 1979) 335;

reprinted from: IRM (LXIV: 253, Jan., 1975) 37-55.68 68 Charles Taber, "The Limits of Indigenization in Theology," in: Kraft & Wisely, op. cit., 388-397.

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early Jewish-Christian community as "M", and subsequent contexts (Greek, Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Medieval European Synthesis, Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution,) as "N,O,P,Q,R, and S," respectively. The covenantal self-disclosure of God in each of these contexts could then be represented by Mc, Nc, Oc, Pc, Qc, Rc, and Sc, as follows.

Figure 5: A Series of Historical Contexts

These various contexts, however, are not independent of each other. Over time, each is related to the others in a "hermeneutical spiral," as can be seen below.69

Figure6: The Historical Development of Dogma

But it is also important to see the relationship of this spiral to the previous one, as seen in the covenant formula by which we depicted the "kainos" perspective (Figure 4 above). The knowledge of God in ever-changing contexts throughout the history of the Church must at once recognize the closure of the canon of Scripture, and the ever-new inspiration, guidance, and teaching of the Holy Spirit. This relationship is depicted in Figure 6 below. formula.

69 69 The concept of the "hermeneutical circle" as it works out to a "hermeneutical spiral" of deepening understanding has been mentioned by Rene Padilla, "Hermeneutics and Culture: A Theological Perspective," in: Stott & Coote, edits. Down to Earth (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1980) 76. This was reprinted in Rene Padilla, edit. Mission Between the Times (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1985) 83ff. Edward Schellebeeckx has worked with the idea as well. Cf., e.g., Robert Schreiter, edit. Eward Schellebeeckx: The Schillebeeckx Reader (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1987) 104ff.

Mc Sc

SRc

RQc

QPc

POc

ONc

NM

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Figure 7: A deepening Understanding of Revelation

What appears above the right-hand line is an extension, a deepening, and fulfillment, a greater understanding, of that which was revealed in the quotient, which in turn is the completed but not fully comprehended revelation of God from Adam to Jesus Christ (below the "/"). Notice that this understanding of "kainos" contextualization down through history is not a cumulative affair. We do not stack up new opinions in an endless addition of theological thought. Nor are we dealing with knowledge of God that is essentially different from, or in contradiction to, or in substitution of, that which has gone before (that would be subtraction). What we have here is more like a picture, taken by a Polaroid camera, which needs time and light to be developed. The picture is already recorded, but to see it takes time and study. Each context is understood with reference to (divided by) all other revelation which has gone before. Here we are able to preserve the uniqueness of God's self-disclosure in a particular context and affirm its "kainos" relationship to God's self-disclosure of the same covenantal relationship in early contexts.

Now we are in the Twentieth Century, we are in a new situation with relation to the world Church, and we deal with a multitude of contexts in which we struggle to know God. We could represent the covenantal knowledge of God in the contexts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe by Ic, IIc, IIIc, IVc, Vc, VIc, as in Figure 7 below.

Figure 8: A Series of New Cultural Contexts

The "kainos" knowledge of God in context, then, would be related to all that has gone before by means of the following formula: It is clear that we need to avoid reinventing the wheel theologically. Our present contextual theology is neither an addition to, nor a subtraction from historical theology. Rather, it is divided by (as a function of) that which has gone before. And historical theology has itself developed as a reflection upon, a deepened understanding of, and an extension of God's unique covenantal self-revelation in Scripture, fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

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Figure 9: A Developing Contextual Theology

Yet we must also affirm the special nature of God's self-disclosure in each new context. There is something unique and in that sense "discontinuous" about the radically different cultures, languages, and peoples which form the new contexts of God's covenantal self-revelation. Thus, the top level of the above formula allows us to ask new questions, develop deeper understanding, and gather surprising new insights which are especially and uniquely relevant to those contexts. But notice that the entire world Church is at the same level, and each context is related to the others not by a "+" sign, but by a "/", meaning that we are also accountable one to the other in learning from each other God's nature and will for all of God's People. A good example of this methodology is P.J. Robinson's missiological treatment of the Belhar Confession, where "knowing God" in the South African context calls the entire world Church to ask "kainos" new questions about themselves, their faith, their Scriptures, and their obedience to God.70

Conclusion: God's New Covenant in New ContextsPaul Meyerink and I began to discover that his translation of the Scriptures involved a difficult exercise in

contextualization precisely because of the mystery of God's hidden self-disclosure in diverse human cultures. And yet we found hope in the covenantal model which Scripture affords for knowing God in context. Although the "square peg" of God's self-disclosure does not fit well in the "round holes" of a multitude of human contexts, yet by God's Spirit His nature and will are in fact revealed to, and through faith perceived by, human consciousness. And this mystery drew Paul and me closer to the Tzeltal Christians who were struggling with the same contextual questions as we were. Together the Tzeltal Christians and Paul and I discovered that in spite of cultural diversity, we needed to

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. (For) there is one body and one Spirit.. one Lord, one faith, one baptism, on God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Eph. 4:3-6).

Maybe by working together as one Church we can come to know God in context through the model of covenantal revelation. Based on a "kainos" perspective of the covenant, we may be able to enter a new era of contextualization. In this new age of the world Church, the "kainos" covenant may open the way for us to know God's revealed hiddenness. As Morris Inch stated in Doing Theology Across Cultures,

God's revelation lies at the heart of our theological endeavor. There are not, strictly speaking, many truths, but one truth viewed from differing perspectives. Christianity is not capable of radical reinterpretation: rather, it is one faith communicated to all (humanity). Ignoring the

70 70 P. J. Robinson, "The 1982 Belhar Confession in Missionary Perspective," in: G.D. Cloete and D.J. Smit, edits. A Moment of Truth (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1984) 42ff. The growing number of church "confessions" being elaborated by churches around the world constitute a very positive sign that the "kainos" type of contextualization is beginning to find a place.

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common heritage in the Christian fellowship is as grievous an error as failing to appreciate its rich diversity.71

As the Gospel continues to take root in new cultures, and God's People grow in their covenantal relationship to God in those contexts, a broader, fuller, and deeper understanding of God's revelation will be given to the world Church. In the end we may come to appreciate what Augustine of Hippo (354-430), in his conflict with the Donatists, affirmed: that the truth is that which everyone, everywhere always has believed about the Gospel. (Pelikan 1971, 1:292-307; Bettenson 1970: 240; Schaff 1974, 1:391).

71 71 (G.R.: Baker, 1982) 16.

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A Culinary Disaster Launches the Gentile Mission: Acts 10: 1-18By: Charles Van Engen

Prepublication edition of chapter for Acts of the Apostles. Heritg/Gallager eds.Forthcoming from Orbis Books

Thesis: The mission of God to the Gentiles in Acts is launched on the foundation of the word-deed narrative theology that flows from God’s sending of the Holy Spirit to the household of Cornelius through the ministry of a converted Peter.

IntroductionMany of us in cross-cultural missionary service and ministry activity have had moments – at the time, often

seemingly insignificant moments – that over the years become important threads in the tapestry of who we are and how we do ministry. I experienced such a moment early in my missionary career in Southern Mexico. When I read the story of Peter’s conversion in Acts 10, a particular transforming moment in my life comes back to refresh and challenge me.

In 1973 my wife, Jean, and I were sent to Chiapas, Mexico as missionaries of the Reformed Church in America to serve the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico. Recently arrived in our new missionary context, we had much to learn. Thankfully, there were church members and pastors who took an interest in teaching us. One of them was Rev. Genaro Mendez.

Years before, Genaro had studied in the Bible school with my father and mother. In the early 1970s, Genaro was pastoring a large church that also had some sixteen smaller worshipping groups spread over a sixty-mile radius. Some of these were quite distant, up in the Sierra Madre mountain range, accessible only by horseback.

In 1974, Genaro invited me to join him in visiting all sixteen of his church’s congregations during the Christmas season, taking along a movie of the Christmas story. This would be an excellent introduction for me to his church, his ministry, and the contexts of his church’s mission outreach throughout the area. One of the congregations we would visit was “11 de Abril” (11th of April). In that area many small villages and towns in the remote mountains use dates as the name of their town. The date-as-a-name commemorates the exact day that the town was chartered by the governor of the state. At that time, “11 de Abril” was located at the end of a 3-hour horseback ride up a steep, winding, narrow mountain trail along the edge of a deep precipice, during which the traveler rose nearly 3000 feet. The jumpiness of the horse I was given, the stirrups being too short for my long legs, and my own inexperience in riding these kinds of mountain trails combined to make me as nervous as my horse. Having a light plant and a movie projector tied on top of pack animals to be pulled along with us made the journey seem even more challenging.

The next three hours would be unforgettable. When the horse was climbing up the trail, jumping over rocks and tree-roots, I would nearly fall off the back of the horse because of the short stirrups. Then we would come to a ravine or small water-fall and as the horse would slide down-hill, I could barely keep from falling off over the horse’s head into the mud. Seldom have I been so relieved to get to my destination – and off the back of that horse – as I was that day.

We arrived at “11 de Abril” in the mid-afternoon. Pastor Genaro and I were invited to enjoy an excellent meal with the leading citizen of the small town. After a time of rest, we set up all the equipment for the evening worship. A long time of singing, showing the sixteen-millimeter film of the Christmas Story, Genaro’s preaching, more singing, and spiritual counseling after the worship took over five hours. By this time, it was around midnight.

After packing up all the equipment, I was approached by a short, elderly woman who said that I was to sleep in her house that night. I’ll call her Eunice. At her invitation, I accompanied her to a small, one-room lodging. The walls were made of bamboo, with newspaper tacked on the inside to stop the cold air from blowing through the house. At one end was a small table and two chairs. The house had a dirt floor. A sheet was hung to divide the eating area from the sleeping area. The woman, a widow – one of the first believers in this town – showed me the short, narrow bed and thin blanket that was where she normally slept.

“Here is your bed,” Eunice said with joy and a sense of pride. “I will sleep over with my daughter’s family tonight. The leaders of the congregation chose to give me the honor of having you sleep in my house. Tomorrow early, before you leave, I will bring your breakfast. Sleep well – and thank you for honoring me by sleeping in my home.”

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I did not sleep well. The bed was made of rope strung inside a wooden frame. Besides being too short and narrow, the rope suspension scratched through my clothing. The blanket was too thin for the cool mountain air that blew through the house, despite the newspaper. By sunrise, I was grateful to hear the dogs barking and have a rooster crow right next to my head outside my newspaper wall. But the Holy Spirit’s work on me was still not complete.

Eunice came early to give me breakfast. There were corn tortillas, some black beans, some hot, very thick black coffee – and an egg placed on a small metal plate. The egg was still in its shell. In fact the egg was still uncooked. It had probably been laid by one of the woman’s chickens the day before. Next to the metal plate was a large nail. I had been given an egg for breakfast: literally. The custom of the area was to use the nail to poke a small hole in one end of the egg. Having poked a larger hole at the other end of the egg, one was to suck out and swallow the contents of the egg in one gulp. I was glad for the coffee after swallowing the raw egg.

Having survived the breakfast that sister Eunice had given me that morning, I met Genaro by the corral. “Last night you slept in the house of a saint,” Genaro told me. “Did you sleep well?”

I mumbled a gruff reply. “Don’t undervalue or underestimate that woman of God,” Genaro told me, as I got up on that nervous horse to

sit in the saddle with the short stirrups, wondering what the trip down the mountain would be like. Just then Eunice came up. As I was already in the saddle, she could hardly reach me to shake my hand. I

reached down to say good-bye. But instead of shaking my hand, sister Eunice handed me something. It was an egg, wrapped up in a dried cornhusk. I was to hold the two ends of the cornhusk together and the egg would dangle about 6 inches below in the fold of the cornhusk.

“I don’t have anything else to give you as a parting gift to thank you for coming,” Eunice said with a wide smile. “My hen laid this egg just this morning, so it is fresh. Please take it for your breakfast tomorrow. And give my love to your wife.”

What was I going to say? I was already up on my jumpy horse. I had no other place to put the egg where it would not get broken. So Genaro and I said farewell and began our trek down the mountain. And then my suffering began. Holding that egg in its cornhusk wrapping with one hand, it became a very real challenge for me not to fall off that horse: over its head while going down-hill, off the back end while going up-hill. For the next three hours I held that egg in the air, trying not to break it. The situation seemed to be a new form of torture.

As I made my way down the mountain, trying desperately to stay on that horse, it seemed that every few minutes I would hear the echo of pastor Genaro’s words.

“Don’t undervalue or despise that woman of God.” Or, in the words of Acts 10, “You will not call unclean what I have called clean.”

Several hours later I walked into my home and Jean asked me how the trip had been. “Unbelievable!” was all I could think to say as I handed her the cornhusk with the egg inside. It was still intact.

And I went directly to my desk to re-read Acts 10.The Importance:

We must not underestimate the importance that Luke and the early Church ascribed to the episode recorded in Acts 10. In total, this episode, with the three explanatory retellings as to its theological and missiological significance, comprise 74 verses in Acts. By contrast, Luke’s narrative of the first Pentecost experience in Acts 2 involves only 46 verses – and is not retold. Even Stephen’s sermon and its surrounding narrative – the longest sermon in Acts – covers only 61 verses. 242

In addition to the amount of space that Luke devotes to this episode, its importance for Luke is also signaled in at least three other striking ways. First, this episode is written in an Old Testament style of the record of the acts of God. It apparently took an act of God for the first Jewish Christians to be willing to accept the Gentile converts over the objections of the judaizer faction.243 With Peter as the representative of the Jewish Church, this change was so radical it can properly be called a conversion, a turning. Thus, it would seem appropriate to talk of the story of Acts 10 as the story of Peter’s conversion – or at least the third in a series of conversions in the life of Peter. 244 For the

242 See Marshall 181.243 See Marshall 181.244 Peter’s spiritual pilgrimage seems to have involved a whole series of 3-time repetitions, as seen below.

Following that pattern, his faith development can be seen to involve a three-part conversion as recorded in Matthew 16:13-20; John 21:15:17 with Acts 1:4-8, 2:1-4, 14; and Acts 10:9-16. We might think of Peter’s three-fold conversion as given below. In this case, the episode in Acts 10 could be considered the crowning, fulfilling, completing episode in Peter’s spiritual formation.

I. CONVERSION TO JESUS THE CHRIST AS HIS MESSIAH AND LORD :

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early Jewish Church, the Holy Spirit’s coming to Cornelius and his household constituted a radical transforming moment, a major paradigm shift.

Secondly, the episode was understood to have clear theological and missiological significance for the life and mission of those early Christians. The meaning of the episode is clearly stated and often repeated: the Gospel is for both Jews and Gentiles (9:15; 10:34, 36, 45, 47; 11:1, 15, 17, 18; 13:47-48; 14:27). Peter’s report to the church leaders in Jerusalem in chapter 11 and the decision of the Jerusalem Council in chapter 15 are focused in this episode in chapter 10. Peter’s vision and the coming of the Holy Spirit to the household of Cornelius created a new reality for the Jewish Christians. If the Gospel of Jesus Christ was for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, then the nature of the Church and its mission were something radically new. From this episode the entire Gentile mission flows. This includes Paul’s ministry described in the rest of the Book of Acts, the continuing Gentile mission of Barnabas and John Mark (15:40), the worldwide ministries of other disciples and the early Church, and the worldwide expansion of a multi-lingual and multi-cultural, global Church of Jesus Christ as we know it today.

Thirdly, Luke interweaves the telling and re-telling of this episode as one of the major threads that draws together the longer narrative from 9:32 to 15:35. This unified narrative includes Peter’s story in Joppa (that began with his going to Samaria in 9:14-17, where he witnessed the Samaritan

Pentecost – 9:17); 245

the detailed telling of the story of the angel’s being sent by God to Cornelius, Peter’s vision, and then Peter’s experience of the Holy Spirit’s coming upon Cornelius and his household (10:1-48);

Peter’s reporting of the episode to the Christians in Judea (11:1-18); reference to the predominantly Gentile church in Antioch (11:19-30; 12:25); the continuation of Peter’s story in his escape from prison in Jerusalem (12:1-24); the Antioch church’s involvement in sending Paul and Barnabas on their first Gentile mission (13:1-14:27); and the decision of the Jerusalem Council to accept Gentile believers in their midst, including the letter whose

content is repeated twice – a decision based on what God had done in sending the Holy Spirit upon Cornelius and his household. 246

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is? Who do you say that I am?” Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Matt. 16:16

II. CONVERSION TO THE CHURCH AS CHRIST’S SHEEP, THE BODY OF CHRIST: “Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep.” John 21:15-17

III. CONVERSION TO THE WORLD FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED: “What God has cleansed, do not consider unholy.” Acts 10:15

THE THREE-FOLD NATURE OF PETER'S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

3 Disciples (including Peter) make up the inner circle (and are present at the transfiguration and Getsemani).3 Persons are present at the Transfiguration, with Peter calling for:3 “Tabernacles” for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.3 Times Jesus prays in Getsemani during Passion Week.3 Times Jesus finds Peter sleeping that night in Getsemani.3 Times the rooster crows.3 Times Peter denies Jesus.3 Times Peter asserts his love for Jesus.3 Times Jesus commissions Peter: "Feed my sheep."3 Times Jesus appears to Peter after the resurrection. (Jn.21:14)3 Meals related to Peter's faith: Last Supper, Breakfast on the Beach, and in the vision in Joppa.3 Sermons of Peter's are recorded in Acts 2, 3, 10.3 Times Peter is arrested and imprisoned: Acts 4, 5, 12.3 People are sent by Cornelius to fetch Peter: Acts 10:7.3 Times Peter is told to “kill and eat” the unclean Acts 10:16, 11:10.3 Times Peter participates in the coming of the Holy Spirit: in the Upper Room, in Samaria, and with

Cornelius.245 See Bruce 180-184.246 With reference to the importance of this narrative in the framework of the book of Acts, see Marshall, 180; Wagner, 68; and LaSor 151.

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The Focus Acts 10 appears to be focused on the life of Peter – it is part of Peter’s life story (9:32 to 12:24). It is not

fundamentally a story about Cornelius. The radical transformation and conversion here is ascribed to Peter, not to Cornelius.

The chapter begins by presenting Cornelius, a devout family man, a God-fearing Gentile (10:2, 22) who “gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly” (10:2). True to Luke’s common narrative form of describing angelic appearances, like when Gabriel appeared to Zechariah and to Mary (Lk 1:11-20; 1:26-38), Luke tells us how God sends an angel to Cornelius to tell him to send for Peter (10:5, 22, 31; 11:13).

Yet Peter is the one who is emotionally-charged and initially unwilling to follow God’s initiative. “I replied,” Peter says, “ ‘Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth’ ” (11:8).247 In the story, Peter presents himself as the one who needs changing. Reference to this change of perspective can be found at least five times throughout the narrative. “But God has shown me...” (10:28); “I now realize...” (10:34); “God...accepts (people) from every nation who fear him...” (10:35); “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized?” (10:47); “Who was I to think that I could oppose God?” (11: 17). The Discourse-Level Narrative Structure

Modern-day writers are not the only ones who have known how to use the “meanwhile back at the ranch” device for good story-telling. Luke uses it masterfully in this part of Acts. In 8:14-25 Peter is sent to Samaria by the apostles in Jerusalem. There he witnesses the Samaritan Pentecost, the Holy Spirit coming upon the Samaritans. In 8:25 he and John return to Jerusalem, “preaching the gospel in many Samaritan villages” on the way. At this point Luke inserts the story of Philip and the Ethiopian (8:26-40) and recounts the manner of Saul’s conversion (9:1-31)).

Luke returns to Peter’s story in 9:32, with Peter being drawn closer and closer to Joppa. “As Peter traveled about the country he went to visit the saints in Lydda,” where he heals Aeneas the paralytic (9:32). In Joppa, Tabitha (Dorcas) dies, the poor set up an outcry over her death, God hears their prayers, the believers in Joppa send two men to get Peter. Peter then accompanies them to Joppa and raises Tabitha from the dead (9:32-42). Peter stays in Joppa at the home of a tanner named Simon (9:43). One half of the stage is set.

While Peter is in Joppa, God speaks to Cornelius in Caesarea (10:1). Located 30 miles from Joppa, Caesarea was named in honor of Augustus Caesar and was the headquarters of the Roman occupation forces. It is 3:00 PM in Cornelius’ house. As the curtain rises on this next major scenario, we see Cornelius the Gentile centurion experiencing a vision in which he sees an angel who blesses him and tells him he needs to send for Simon Peter who is at the tanner’s house by the sea. Cornelius, a “God-fearer,” 248 obeys, sending two servants and a soldier to Joppa. The second half of the stage is now set. 249

The next day about noon, while the three messengers are approaching Joppa (“meanwhile back at the ranch”), the second act of the play takes place while Peter is up on the roof of the tanner’s house. While he is praying, he experiences a trance. After Peter’s vision, “while Peter was still thinking about the vision, (and the messengers are at the door of the tanner’s house) the Spirit said to (Peter), ‘Simon, three men are looking for you’” (10:19). Peter invites them in to stay the night, an unacceptable association for a Jew.

On what would then be the third day of the story, Peter goes to Caesarea with the three men. When Peter gets there, he finds a large group of people gathered at Cornelius’ house for Peter to arrive. At their request, Peter begins to preach one of his three sermons recorded in Acts. And, amazingly, “while Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message.” The new Gentile believers are baptized and Peter is asked to stay with them for several more days.

Meanwhile, “the apostles and brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God” (11:1). So Peter finds it necessary to go up to Jerusalem and explain the situation. Once there, he re-tells the entire episode in great detail, stressing that this is something God has done through the Holy Spirit, and not something that Peter had sought.

This story then leads naturally to Luke’s description of the scattering of the Jerusalem church due to the persecution there, the development of the church in Antioch, and the sending of the offering from Antioch to Jerusalem. “About this time” (12:1) Herod arrests Peter, Peter experiences the miraculous escape from prison at the hands of yet another angel, and Herod is judged by God and dies (12:1-24).\

247 Compare the parallels to this vociferous bravado of Peter’s in, for example, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” – Mt 26:35, 33; Mk. 14:31; Lk 22:33; and “You shall never wash my feet” Jn. 13:8. See Knowling 254.

248 See Packer 82; Tannehill 133; Wagner 68; LaSor 152-153. For a parallel of Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ encounter with a centurion, see Lk 7:1-10; Marshall 182; Knowling 251.

249 Luke’s recounting of Ananias’s vision in which he is sent to bring new sight to Paul has many parallels to Cornelius being told by the angel to send for Peter in Joppa. See Acts 9:10-12; Calvin 415; Lenski 395.

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About the same time, Barnabas and Saul return to Antioch where the Holy Spirit has been raising up a new cadre of leaders. And “while they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit” directs the believers in Antioch to set apart Barnabas and Saul for what would become the first of several journeys throughout the Roman world (13:2). The Gentile mission outreach is thus launched. What a story! Are all these events simply coincidences? Clearly Luke is seeking to describe a well-orchestrated, carefully-designed chain of events that only God could have carried out.The Heart of the Story

Now let’s return to the beginning of the story. Like a bell-curve, Luke’s narrative slowly builds to a major climactic moment after which there flows a rather long series of implications and consequences that will extend to the end of the book of Acts. The very peak of the mountain top is this:

“While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God” (10:44-46).

This is the moment that becomes the hermeneutical, theological, and missiological key to the eventual acceptance by the Jewish Christians of Gentile Christians in their midst.250 Peter’s vision on the rooftop of the tanner’s house is the springboard from which the Gentile mission will be launched.

A number of commentators mention the fact that Luke tells us that Peter stays at the home of Simon the tanner, someone whose occupation of curing the hides of dead animals would be considered unclean for a Jew.251 Yet it seems to me that we miss the pathos and humor of the story if we neglect the smells implied in the story. Luke seems to go to great lengths to give us all the necessary details of a wonderfully humorous story: and additional details can easily be assumed, knowing the cultural and historical context of the story. Peter is in Joppa (9:43). Peter is at the house of a tanner (9:43). It is reasonable to assume that the tanner has his business in his house, as that was very common at that time, in

that culture. It is 12:00 noon (10:9). It is the Middle East, on the coast of the Mediterranean, the sun is burning. Peter goes up the roof: we can assume it was one of the standard flat roofs of the area (10:9). Peter is hungry, wanting something to eat: notice parallel with Jesus in Luke 4: 2 (10:10). The meal is being prepared (10:10).Now I would invite the reader to imagine the scene. God is going to get to Peter, the large, burly fisherman, not through his head or his heart but through his stomach. Anyone who has been in a tannery will know what I am talking about. I don’t think there is a worse smell than that of a tannery. There would be a number of large vats containing different kinds and concentrations of acids. The animal hides are allowed to soak and ferment in the vats in order to remove the hair and cure the leather.

So you and I can picture Peter. He is up on the roof at mid-day, the sun is beating down on him, he is hungry, and up from the inner courtyard of the house is wafting the terrible stench of a tannery! It does make us smile! And just at this point he has a vision! God has quite a sense of humor. In the vision, God lowers a large sheet with things to eat and offers them to this starving man. Here is food from heaven (10:11; 11:10). Except that in the sheet are “four-footed animals, reptiles and birds” (10:12). Peter is being offered a mixture of what for a Jew would be clean and unclean foods. 252 Then to add insult to injury, Peter hears the divine voice speaking to him. 253 God tells him to “Kill and eat” (10:13).

Peter is incensed at this seeming temptation.“Surely not, Lord.” he exclaims.But, remember, he is hungry – and he is smelling the stench of the tannery rising in the noon-time heat of the

day up to the roof where Peter is sitting, hungry. Peter’s stomach is turning over in revulsion at the unclean animals. He has been taught all his life to despise them. Now he is being told by God to kill and eat them. Even more disconcerting is the fact that the divine voice repeats this gastronomical horror three times (10:16). 254 This is such a stomach-turning experience that Peter will remember later that it happened to him three times (11:10).

250 See LaSor 158; Tannehill 137.251 See Ogilvie 180; Knowling 249, 252; Calvin 404; Stott 184; Lenski 387; Pierson 90.252 See Lev 11: 2-8. 43; Calvin 419; Bruce 218; C. P. Wagner 76; Lenski 397.253 See Calvin 421; Marshall 184; Lenski 397, 399; Stott 187; Packer 79; Wagner 84. This parallels the divine voice speaking to Saul in 9:4. 254 Calvin 423; Bruce 218; Lenski 399; Packer 83; LaSor 155-158.

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“I have never eaten anything impure or unclean!” Peter exclaims, echoing his earlier vociferous self-justifications.

“Do not call anything impure that God has made clean,” comes the reply. And just as Jesus had earlier asked Peter three times “Do you love me?” (Jn 21: 15-19); so now Peter must be told three times, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (11:9). Would Peter have remembered Jesus’ words?

Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean’....Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into the heart but into his stomach, and then out of the body (Mk 7:15; 18-19 NIV). 255

The Implications of the Story“While Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision, the men sent by Cornelius found out

where Simon’s house was and stopped at the gate. They called out, asking if Simon who was known as Peter was staying there. While Peter was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, ‘Simon, three men are looking for you. So get up and go downstairs. Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them.’ Peter went down and said to the men, ‘I’m the one you’re looking for’.... Then Peter invited the men into the house to be his guests” (10:17-23).

In constructing his narrative at this point, Luke makes it very clear that the vision has profound theological significance. 256 The vision is itself the theological explanation – the “word,” if you will – that will provide the revelatory foundation for the “deed” that will soon occur, the coming of the Holy Spirit to Cornelius and all Gentiles. That Luke clearly sees it in this way is evident in how closely he associates the coming of the three Gentile messengers with Peter’s wondering about the meaning of the vision.

Peter also closely associates the vision with its missiological meaning when he re-tells the story in Acts 11:5-17. “So,” he concludes, “if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?” (11:17) Later, Peter will tell the Jerusalem Council, “God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith” (15:7-9).

So Peter’s vision is an integral part of the God’s action and the work of the Holy Spirit in moving the Jewish Church to be willing to accept the Gentile mission. 257 F. F. Bruce calls Acts 10 the “test case” of the Gospel being also for the Gentiles.258

“I now realize,” Peter exclaims, “how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right” (10:34-35). And the Holy Spirit confirmed Peter’s discovery by coming once again in the Gentile Pentecost (10:44-46). 259 “Peter interprets the experience as a unified story with divine purpose.” 260 Jesus Christ is Lord of all -- Jews and Gentiles alike (10:36). 261

ConclusionReading Luke’s story in Acts 10 opened my eyes to understand more fully my experience with Eunice. “Do not

despise what I have called clean” was God’s message for me as well. As I held that cornhusk with the egg inside all the way down that mountain, I had many rather unpleasant thoughts about the widow who had given it to me. But our Lord would say, “You will not call unclean what I have called clean.”

Some weeks later I saw Genaro again at a gathering of pastors. He had the gall of telling the story of the egg-in-the-cornhusk to those gathered. They nearly died laughing at me. The mirth having subsided, Genaro said again to me, “Do not undervalue or despise that wonderful woman of God.”

Then Genaro began to tell us about the elderly widow in whose house I had slept. Eunice and her husband had been the first believers in the area. Having become Christians, they began sharing their faith with their family members and with the people of their town. Because the area was so remote and a pastor’s visit was so seldom, Eunice and her husband became the Bible teachers and functioning shepherds of the new flock. After her husband

255 See also Mt 15:11; I Ti. 4:3-5. 256 Tannehill ((128) mentions E. Haenchen in Acts, along with Richard Pervo Profit with Delight as criticizing Luke for a kind of naive approach

to God’s guidance as evidenced in the narrative of Luke 10-11. Tannehill is right in stating that “The story of Peter and Cornelius...is considerably more subtle in tracing the process of discerning the divine will than Haenchen recognizes” (128).

257 See Ogilvie 182-183; Calvin 419; Stott 187-189; Bruce 222-223; Lenski 408-409, 413; Packer 84; Wagner 83.258 Bruce 215.259 See Blaiklock 97; Wagner 81.260 Tannehill 145.261 See Tannehill 139.

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died, this woman had continued guiding, teaching, preaching, and essentially pastoring that congregation. Through her efforts, the “11 de Abril” congregation had been able to start two other congregations in towns further up the mountain. This woman was the spiritual mother of several hundred believers.

“Whom God values...”I have learned to see people with new eyes: God’s eyes. May we all learn to gladly and freely accept, love

and value those whom the Holy Spirit calls to be part of Christ’s Church.BibliographyBlaiklock, E.M.

1959 Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: The Acts of the Apostles. G.R.: Eerdmans.Bruce, F.F.

1983 The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Book of Acts. G.R.: Eerdmans.Calvin, John.

1979 Commentary on The Acts of the Apostles. G.R.: Baker.Fernando, Ajith

1998 The NIV Application Commentary: Acts. G.R.: Zondervan.Haenchen, Ernst

1971 The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. Translated by Bernard Noble and Gerald Shinn, Phil.: Westminster.

Knowling, R.J.1970 The Knowling Greek Testament: The Acts of the Apostles, W. Robertson Nicoll, edit. G.R.: Eerdmans.

La Sor, William Sanford1972 Layman’s Bible Commentary: Church Alive, Acts. Glendale: Regal.

Lenski, R. C. H.1934 The Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles. Columbus, Lutheran Book Concern.

Marshall, I. Howard1980 Tyndale New Testament Comentaries: Acts. G.R.: Eerdmans.

Ogilvie, Lloyd J.1983 The Communicator’s Commentary: Acts. Waco: Word.

Packer, J. W.1966 Acts of the Apostles. London: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Pervo, Richard I.1987 Profit with Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles. Phil.: Fortress.

Pierson, Paul1982 A Bible Commentary for Laymen: Themes from Acts: Ventura: Regal.

Stott, John. R. W.1990 The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church & and World. Downers Grove: IVP.

Tannehill, Robert C.1990 The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation, Vol 2: The Acts of the Apostles.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press.Wagner, C. Peter

1995 Living the Word: The Acts of the Holy Spirit Series, Acts Nine Through Fifteen. Ventura: Regal.

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Five Perspectives of Contextually Appropriate Mission Theologyby: Charles Van Engen

ThesisThe search for an “appropriate Christianity” involves the development of a contextually appropriate mission theology that includes elements of at least five different perspectives of contextualization.

IntroductionElsewhere in this volume Charles Kraft has challenged us to search for “appropriate Christianity,”

by which he means, “a Christian expression…that is appropriate to the Scriptures, on the one hand and appropriate to the people in a given culture, on the other.” Although such a desire is not new, the recent convergence of a number of perspectives and tools of contextualization offers us a series of steps which may further our search for “appropriate Christianity” in specific contexts. In this chapter, I will summarize five perspectives of contextualization that have developed over the past several centuries of missionary activity. I have called them communication, indigenization, translatability, local theologies and epistemology. In a subsequent chapter, I will offer in outline form a possible methodology for constructing an appropriate contextualized mission theology.

Appropriate Contextualization as CommunicationAttempts to construct a contextual theology appropriate to both the Scriptures and to a new

receptor culture can be traced as far back as the work of Orthodox missionaries to the Slavic peoples, Cyril (826-869) and Methodius (815-885), and early Roman Catholic missionaries like the Jesuits Robert de Nobili (1577-1656) in India and Matteo Ricci (1552-1620) in China (See Moreau 2000: 694 and 834). Beginning with William Carey (1761-1834) whenever Protestant missionaries have encountered a new culture and a new language, like their Orthodox and Roman Catholic counterparts, they have been concerned with communicating the message of the Gospel to their receptors in languages and forms acceptable and understandable to the new receptors.

David Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen emphasized the communicational aspect of contextualization.

From this point of view [drawing from Eugene Nida’s three-culture model (Nida 1960)], Christian contextualization can be thought of as the attempt to communicate the message of the person, works, Word, and will of God in a way that is faithful to God’s revelation, especially as it is put forth in the teachings of Holy Scripture, and that is meaningful to respondents in their respective cultural and existential contexts. Contextualization is both verbal and nonverbal and has to do with theologizing; Bible translation, interpretation, and application; incarnational lifestyle; evangelism; Christian instruction; church planting and growth; church organization; worship style – indeed with all of those activities involved in carrying out the Great Commission. (Hesselgrave and Rommen 1989: 200).

Even today contextualization as communication continues to be important. It means that the Gospel communicator must not only learn the language and culture of the receptor but must also become so steeped in the thought-patterns and deep-level meanings of the receptor as to begin to think and reflect within the receptor’s worldview. Thus the Christian missionary who wishes to communicate cross-culturally must learn to do what Charles Kraft has termed “receptor-oriented communication” (Kraft 1983, 1991) which also means “communicating Jesus’ way” (Kraft 1999). We must never lose sight nor underestimate the importance of this most fundamental aspect of contextualization. As the Christian cross-cultural missionary communicates the Gospel, faithfulness to the message is paramount.

What I have called a “communication” perspective Stephen Bevans has termed the “translation model” of contextual theology.

Of the six models we will be considering in this book, the translation model of contextual theology is probably the most commonly employed and usually the one that most people think of when they think of doing theology in context….Practitioners of the


translation model also point out that it is possibly the oldest way to take the context of theologizing seriously and that it is found within the Bible itself….In many ways, every model of contextual theology is a model of translation. There is always a content to be adapted or accommodated to a particular culture. What makes this particular model specifically a translation model, however, is its insistence on the message of the gospel as an unchanging message….If there is a key presupposition of the translation model, it is that the essential message of Christianity is supracultural or supracontextual. Practitioners of this model speak of a “gospel core” (Haleblian 1983:101-102)….In any case, what is very clear in the minds of people who employ the translation model is that an essential, supracultural message can be separated from a contextually bound mode of expression…Another presupposition of the translation model [is] that of the ancillary or subordinate role of context in the contextualization process. Experience, culture, social location, and social change, of course, are acknowledged as important, but they are never as important as the supracultural, “never changing” gospel message (Bevans 2002: 37-41).

The view of contextualization as communication (or accommodation, or adaptation – whatever word or model one chooses to work with) has had at least one significant weakness. The common assumption has been that the Christian missionary or group of Christians in mission knew and understood all that needed to be known and understood about the Gospel they were wanting to communicate. In this perspective, the Gospel communicators did not need to concern themselves about the extent to which their own culture had syncretized, obscured and possibly contradicted the Gospel. The Gospel communicators did not believe that they themselves needed to learn anything new about the Gospel. Rather, the major methodological task involved a movement from Christians of one cultural context communicating a culturally appropriate Gospel to persons in a new context who had not yet heard or no longer could hear the message of the Bible.

As Paul Hiebert rightly pointed out, once this perspective was mixed with an attitude of superiority on the part of Western culture (especially during the era of colonialism) it became essentially a “noncontextual” approach. “This stance,” Hiebert wrote, “was essentially monocultural and monoreligious. Truth was seen as supracultural. Everything had to be seen from the perspective of Western civilization and Christianity, which had shown themselves to be technologically, historically and intellectually superior to other cultures; and so those [receptor] cultures could be discounted as ‘uncivilized.’ The missionary’s culture was ‘good,’ ‘advanced,’ and ‘normative.’ Other cultures were ‘bad,’ ‘backward,’ and ‘distorted.’ Christianity was true, other religions were false” (Hiebert 1984: 290-291). Communication was deemed to be important, but the content of the message being communicated went unexamined because the missionary communicators assumed they knew and understood all there was to know and understand about the Gospel they were communicating.

As converts were won throughout the world, new Christians speaking a host of new languages were gathered into churches. This led to a second important perspective on contextualization: indigenization.

Appropriate Contextualization as IndigenizationWilbert Shenk considers the concept of the indigenous church to be “the great theoretical

breakthrough of the nineteenth century.”From its earliest days the modern missionary movement was marked by multiple

perspectives. On the one hand, mission promoters frequently depicted the task to be done as a fairly simple process of presenting the Christian message in a straightforward manner to peoples sunk in darkness and despair, peoples who consequently would respond gladly and quickly. On the other side was the growing group of missionaries in the field who knew firsthand how complicated the process was. As foreigners they had to master a strange language – often before it was written – and try to understand a highly intricate culture with quite another worldview. Learning the new language and culture were requisite to any effective communication of the Christian message. As the complexity of the task became more apparent, mission theorists moved through several stages as they sought to conceptualize the task.

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The great theoretical breakthrough in missions thought in the nineteenth century was identification of the indigenous church as the goal of mission. Other theoretical and policy developments were largely embroidering on this basic theme (Shenk 1999: 75).

In his article in the Evangelical Dictionary of World Mission, John Mark Terry says, “The term ‘indigenous’ comes from biology and indicates a plant or animal native to an area. Missiologists adopted the word and used it to refer to churches that reflect the cultural distinctives of their ethnolinguistic group. The missionary effort to establish indigenous churches is an effort to plant churches that fit naturally into their environment and to avoid planting churches that replicate Western patterns” (Moreau, Netland and Van Engen, edits. 2000:483).

In God’s Missionary People I summarized what I called then the “Seven Stages of Emerging within Missionary Congregations.”

[When we study mission history, we see] at least seven stages in the emerging of a local and national missionary church – stages that have been repeated time and again in church-planting situations. We might summarize the development of the church in a given context in this way:1. Pioneer evangelism leads to the conversion of a number of people.2. Initial church gatherings are led by elders and deacons, along with preachers from

outside the infant body.3. Leadership training programs [select], train, and commission indigenouis pastors,

supervisors and other ministry leaders.4. Regional organizations of Christian groups develop structures, committees, youth

programs, women’s societies, and regional assemblies.5. National organization, supervision of regions, and relationships with other national

churches begin to form.6. Specialized ministries grow inside and outside the church, with boards, budgets,

plans, finances, buildings, and programs.7. Indigenous missionaries are sent by the daughter church for local, national, and

international mission in the world, beginning the pattern all over again. (Van Engen 1999: 43-44)

These seven steps reflect the development of a new group of disciples of Jesus Christ toward becoming an indigenous church that naturally fits and reflects its local context.

As mission churches (1910’s and 1920’2) became known as younger churches (1930’2 and 1940’s) and then as national churches (1950’s and 1960’s), the concept of the indigenous church underwent significant development. British Henry Venn (1796-1873) and American Rufus Anderson (1796-1880) used the word to stress the sustainability of a new group of believers in a new culture. In the late 19th century, indigeneity was predominantly used as an administrative and organizational concept. For a new church to sustain itself apart from external missionary assistance, it needed to become self-supporting financially, self-governing organizationally and self-propagating evangelistically. Fifty years later John Nevius (1829-1893) and Roland Allen (1868-1947) expanded and deepened the concept of indigeneity of the new churches, stressing issues of Bible study, leadership formation, the spontaneous work of the Holy Spirit, the ministry of the members through the exercise of their spiritual gifts, and the creation of church structures that could sustain themselves without outside dependence. Building on all four of these, Mel Hodges (1909-1986), American missionary administrator with the Assemblies of God, called for the planting and growth of The Indigenous Church (1953), an emphasis that became one of the cornerstones of McGavran’s mission theory and of the Church Growth Movement.

Indigeneity had to do with the fit between the forms and life of a church and its surrounding context. In Verdict Theology in Missionary Theory (1969), Alan Tippett (1911-1988) expanded the concept of indigeneity to include self-image, self-functioning, self-determining, self-supporting, self-propagating and self-giving. This was further expanded and deepened by Charles Kraft in Christianity in Culture (1979) to include the concept of “dynamic equivalence churchness” (Kraft 1979 in loco). As the churches in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania grew and matured, the concept of indigeneity led to a third perspective of contextualization: translatability.

Appropriate Contextualization as Translatability

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A third perspective of contextualization emphasizes the incarnational nature of the Gospel as being infinitely translatable into any and all human cultures – a faith-relationship with God that can be woven into the fabric of any and all worldviews. The Gospel of Jesus Christ can be incarnated, given shape, lived out, in any cultural context – it is infinitely universalizable.

The perspective of appropriate contextualization as translatability draws heavily from the concept of the incarnation so dominant in the Gospel of John. John tells us that “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling (tabernacled) among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14 NIV)

In Christianity in Africa, Kwame Bediako discusses the “translatability” of the faith. “Andrew Walls,” Bediako writes, “has taught us to recognize the Christian religion as “culturally infinitely translatable” (Walls 1981:39). “Translatability is also another way of saying universality. Hence the translatability of the Christian religion signifies its fundamental relevance and accessibility to persons in any culture within which the Christian faith is transmitted and assimilated” (Bediako 1995: 109).

The “translatability” of the Christian Gospel and Christian Church entails something broader, deeper and more pervasive than mere communication of a message. This perspective stresses the fact that the Gospel can take on new forms and shapes as it is born in new contexts. Gospel and Church are not foreign plants that have been slightly modified to be able to grow in foreign soil. Rather, this Gospel is a new hybrid seed with new and different characteristics that allow it to sprout, grow and flourish in a new climate. Marc Spindler, along with other Roman Catholic missiologists, has called this “inculturation.”

[Inculturation] implies that in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places the new churches can and should understand and express the Christian faith in terms of their respective cultures. Even more, it means that the gospel itself receives its shape in the total culture of the people among whom the church is planted an in the nation of which the church is essentially an integral part. Successful inculturation may be said to occur when the gospel and the church no longer seem to be foreign imports but are claimed in general as the property of the people (Spindler 1995: 139-140).

Lamin Sanneh speaks of “mission as translation,” a process that creates what Sanneh terms the “vernacular credibility” of the Gospel as it takes new shapes in new cultural settings. It is important to listen to Sanneh at this point.

Mission as translation makes the bold, fundamental assertion that the recipient culture is the authentic destination of God’s salvific promise and, as a consequence, has an honored place under “the kindness of God,” with the attendant safeguards against cultural absolutism….Mission as translation affirms the missio Dei as the hidden force for its work. It is the missio Dei that allowed translation to enlarge the boundaries of the proclamation. (31)

Needless to say, Christian mission did not adhere consistently to the rule of translation, but translation in itself implies far-reaching implications that are worth considering, whatever may be the position of particular missions toward it….Translation is profoundly related to the original conception of the gospel: God, who has not linguistic favorites, has determined that we should all hear the Good News “in ouir own native tongue.” Mission as cultural diffusion conflicts with the gospel in this regard, and historically we can document the problems, challenges, and prospects that that attended Christian expansion across cultures under the consistent rule of translation…. (174)

Where mission failed to achieve a vernacular credibility it has called forth and deserved every criticism it received, then or in retrospect. Ethnographers and other scholars who have criticized mission for its foreign nature have in a backhanded way conceded the principle that Christianity and vernacular credibility are related. (175)

Vernacular translation begins with the effort to equip the gospel with terms of familiarity, and that process brings the missionary enterprise into the context of field experience….There is a radical pluralism implied in vernacular translation wherein all languages and cultures are, in principle, equal in expressing the word of God… Two general ideas stem from this analysis. First is the inclusive principle whereby no culture is excluded from the Christian dispensation or even judged solely or ultimately by Western cultural criteria. Second is the ethical principle of change as a check to cultural self-absolutization….This introduces in mission the logos concept wherein any and all

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languages may confidently be adopted for God’s word (Sanneh1993: 31, 174-175, 208-209. See also Kwame Bediako’s reflection on Sanneh’s proposal in Bediako 1995: 119-123.).

In 1985, René Padilla offered three important observations concerning this incarnational view of intercultural communication.

The consciousness of the critical role that culture plays in communication is of special importance for the intercultural communication of the gospel. There are at least three reasons for this.

1. The incarnation is a basic element in the gospel. Since the Word became man, the only possible communication of the gospel is that in which the gospel becomes incarnate in culture in order to put itself within the reach of man as a cultural being…

2. Without a translation that goes beyond the words to break into the raw material of life in the receiving culture, the gospel is a fantasy. The gospel involves the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord of the totality of the universe and of human existence. If this proclamation is not directed to specifid needs and problems of the hearers, how can they experience the Lordship of Christ in their concrete situation? To contextualize the gospel is so to translate it that the Lordship of Jesus Chrsit is not an abstrace principle or a mere doctrine but the determining factor of life in all its dimensions and the basic criterion in relation to which all the cultural values that form the very substance of human life are evaluated….

3. In order for the gospel to receive an intelligent response, either positive or negative, there must be effective communication, communication that takes into consideration the point of contact between the message and the culture of the hearers. There can be no true evangelization unless the gospel confronts cultural values and thought patterns (Padilla 1985: 2-93).

This element of “translatability” or “universalizability” that Bekiako, Walls, Sanneh, Padilla, and others have emphasized means that there is a deepening, widening, filling, and enriching the way Christian live out the Gospel in their context. Ever since Luke listed his “table of nations” in Acts 2, mentioning those who “heard the Gospel in their own language” (Acts 2:6,8.11), the truth of the universally-appropriate nature of the Incarnation has been evident throughout mission history. The Gospel is by its very nature native to every culture on earth. All humans were created by the same God, Creator of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Whether one speaks of Natural Theology, General Revelation, Common Grace, Prevenient Grace, “redemptive analogies” (Don Richardson 2000: 812-813), or the lights of God’s revelation dispersed amidst all cultures, the implication is the same (though recognizing the profound theological differences between these concepts in many other respects). Together they point to a most fundamental fact: all humans are created by the same God; all are addressed equally by Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh; and the Holy Spirit enables all to hear the Gospel in their own language. “For God so loved the [entire] world…” (Jn. 3:16). God speaks and understands all languages. Listen again to Lamin Sanneh.

Christian life is indelibly marked with the stamp of culture, and faithful stewardship includes uttering the prophetic word in culture, and sometimes even against it….in [the apostle Paul’s] view God’s purposes are mediated through particular cultural streams.

The mission of the church applied this insight by recognizing all cultures, and the languages in which they are embodied, as lawful in God’s eyes, making it possible to render God’s word into other languages. Even if in practice Christians wished to stop the translation process, claiming their form of it as final and exclusive, they have not been able to suppress it for all time. It is this phenomenon that the concept of translatability tries to represent….Translatability ensures that the challenge at the heart of the Christian enterprise is…kept alive in all cultural contexts….(Sanneh 1993: 47-48)

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This being so, Christians must grapple with the profound implications of the fact that the Christian faith is internally compatible, consistent and coherent with – and can be fully and naturally expressed in -- every culture. A realization of the translatability of the Gospel moves contextual mission theology beyond indigenization to incarnation. The example of the Church in Africa may be helpful at this point. Together with other two-thirds world theologians, Kwame Bediako and John Mbiti have described the struggle to deepen and broaden the African understanding of the Gospel. Bediako’s summary of Mbiti’s views are instructive.

Mbiti was early to deplore the lack of sufficient and positive engagement by Western missions with African cultural and religious values. He saw the result of this in an African church which had “come of age evangelistically, but not theologically:” “a church without theology, without theologians and without theological concern” as he was writing in 1967 and 1969.

Mbiti, however, soon came to make a distinction between “Christianity” which “results from the encounter of the Gospel with any given local society” and so is always indigenous and culture-bound, on the one hand, and the Gospel, which is “God-given, eternal, and does not change” on the other. In 1970 he wrote: “We can add nothing to the Gospel, for this is an eternal gift of God; but Christianity is always a beggar seeking food and drink, cover and shelter from the cultures it encounters in its never-ending journeys and wanderings” (Bediako is quoting Mbiti 1970: 438.)

Mbiti rejected the notion of indigenizing Christianity as such on African soil. Bediako cites Mbiti as saying, “To speak of ‘indigenizing Christianiy’ is to give the impression that Christianity is a ready-made commodity which has to be transplanted to a local area. Of course, this has been the assumption followed by many missionaries and local theologians. I do not accept it any more” (Mbiti 1979: 68).

In contrast, the Gospel is to be seen as “translatable,” taking on fully African deep-level meanings in addition to surface-level cultural forms. “For Mbiti therefore,” Bediako writes, “the Gospel is genuinely at home in Africa, is capable of being apprehended by Africans at the specific level of their religious experience, and in fact has been so received through the missionary transmission of it….The theological principle we see operating in Mbiti’s thought is that of translatability – the capacity of the essential impulses of the Christian religion to be transmitted and assimilated in a different culture so that these impulses create dynamically equivalent responses in the course of such a transmission. Given this principle, it is possible to say that the earlier concern to seek an “indigenization” of Christianity in Africa, as though one were dealing with an essentially “Western” and “foreign” religion was, in effect, misguided because the task was conceived as the correlation of two entities thought to be unrelated….The achievement meant here is not to be measured in terms of Western missionary transmission, but rather by African assimilation of the Faith….It was therefore misguided to assume that African converts to Christianity assimilated the missionary message in Western terms rather than in terms of their own African religious understanding and background” (Bediako 1995: 118-119).

Appropriate Contextualization as Local TheologizingThus far we have surveyed three perspectives of contextualization broadly conceived:

communication, indigenization, and translatability. Together these three deal generally with a one-way movement of Gospel proclamation in word and deed: a movement from those who know God and believe they understand the Gospel to those who do not know, have never heard, or no longer can hear of God’s love for them. We have looked at appropriate contextualization in a broad and general sense as involving the search for what elsewhere in this volume Charles Kraft has termed, “appropriate Christianity: a Christian expression of the faith that is appropriate to the Scriptures, on the one hand, and appropriate to the people in a given culture, on the other.”

In his dictionary article in the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Dean Gilliland discussed how one might define contextualization understood broadly.

There is no single or broadly accepted definition of contextualization. The goal of contextualization perhaps best defines what it is. That goal is to enable, insofar as it is humanly possible, an understanding of what it means that Jesus Christ the Word, is authentically experienced in each and every human situation….Contextualization in mission is an effort made by a particular church to experience the gospel for its own life in light of the Word of God (2000:225).

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In the rest of this chapter I will survey two additional perspectives of appropriate contextualization that have arisen in missiological reflection during the past thirty years: local theologizing and epistemology. In contrast to the previous three perspectives we have examined, these last two involve an intentional two-way conversation between church and Gospel on the one hand and the contextual reality, on the other. Based on these five perspectives, I will proceed in a subsequent chapter to offer a method of mission theologizing whereby the method itself may be constructed to be appropriate both to Scripture and to the people of a context, yielding over time an appropriate understanding of God’s revelation in order that people in a given culture may respond and be transformed by the Gospel (in truth, allegiance and power).

I have entitled this section “local theologizing” as a way to cut through today’s confusion surrounding the term contextualization. In this section I am dealing with what many have called contextualization in a narrow sense: that is, as having to do with humanization, with the impact of socio-political, economic, cultural, and other forces in a context on the task of doing theology in that context.

Contextualization as the development of local theologies was originally catalyzed by the publication, in 1972, of Ministry in Context on the part of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches and is associated with the writings of Shoki Coe in particular (See, e.g., Coe 1976; Norman Thomas, edit. 1995: 175-176; and Stephen Bevans 2002: 153 nn 45 and 46.)

Ashish Chrispal of Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India, explains his view of contextualization (conceived as doing theology in context).

The historical world situation is not merely an exterior condition for the church’s mission: rather it ought to be incorporated as a constitutive element into her understanding of mission, her aims and objectives. Like her Lord, the church-in-mission must take sides for life and against death; for justice and against oppression. Thus mission as contextualization is an affirmation that God had turned toward the world….Contextualization implies all that is involved in the familiar term indigenization which relates to traditional cultural values, but goes beyond it to take into account very seriously the contemporary factors in cultural change. It deals with the contemporary socio-economic, political issues of class-caste struggles, power politics, riches and poverty, bribery and corruption, privileges and oppression – all factors that constitute society and the relationship between one community and another. (Chrispal 1995: 1,3).

Contextualization in this more technical sense of the word involves theologizing as an action rather than theology as a received composite of affirmations: thus the common use of the word theologizing as a verbal form rather than theology as a noun. Tite Tiénou explains.

The term “contextualization” entered missiological literature in 1972 through the report of the Third Mandate of the Theological Education Fund.....At that time, Shoki Coe was director of the Theological Education Fund, an agency sponsored by the World Council of Churches and administered under the auspices of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. According to Coe, indigenization is a static concept since it “tends to be used in the sense of responding to the Gospel in terms of traditional culture” whereas contextualization is “more dynamic....open to change and...future-oriented. (Coe 1976: 20,21)

The word “contextualization” was therefore chosen with the specific purpose of conveying the idea that theology can never be permanently developed. Everywhere and in every culture Christians must be engaged in an ongoing process of relating the gospel to cultures that are constantly changing. As long as the world endues, this process continues. For many people contextualization, not indigenization, is the term that best describes this never-ending process (Tiénou 1993: 247).

This dynamic process called contextualization draws from all aspects of human experience in a local context and fosters a conversation between the reality of the context and the church’s understanding of the Gospel. “Contextualization,” writes Andrew Kirk, “ recognizes the reciprocal influence of culture and socio-economic life. In relating Gospel to culture, therefore, it tends to take a more critical (or prophetic) stance towards culture.” (Kirk 1999: 91. See Van Engen1989: 97 nn 18, 19.).

The perspective of contextualization as local theologizing represents a constantly-changing reciprocal interaction between church and context. It is a process of local reflection that begins with an

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analysis of the historical situation, proceeds to a re-reading of Scripture which in turn leads to interactive theological reflection concerning the context: an act of theologizing that propels the Christian to active engagement with the cultural, socio-economic, and political issues extant in the context. Within this view of contextualization as local theologizing there is a wide spectrum of diverse viewpoints from a nearly total secularization of the process at one end to a heavy emphasis on the transformation of the church at the other end.

Contextualization in this narrow and more technical sense involves not only theologizing as an active process, but also expands the scope of the sources of one’s theological reflection to include all appropriate aspects of human experience. This dynamic process of interaction with all aspects of the context was highlighted recently by R. Yesurathnam, professor of Systematic Theology in the Church of South India.

The term contextualization includes all that is implied in indigenization or inculturation, but seeks also to include the realities of contemporary, secularity, technology, and the struggle for human justice....Contextualization both extends and corrects the older terminology. While indigenization tends to focus on the purely cultural dimension of human experience, contextualization broadens the understanding of culture to include social, political, and economic questions. In this way, culture is understood in more dynamic and flexible ways, and is seen not as closed and self-contained, but as open and able to be enriched by an encounter with other cultures and movements (R. Yesurathnam 2000:53).

Stephen Bevans highlighted the countercultural and dialogical aspects of local engagement in contextualization.

Contextualization points to the fact that theology needs to interact and dialogue not only with traditional cultural value, but with social change, new ethnic identities, and the conflicts that are present as the contemporary phenomenon of globalization encounters the various peoples of the world.

Contextualization, then, [is] the preferred term to describe the theology that takes human experience, social location, culture, and cultural change seriously…(Bevans 2002:27).,

Roman Catholic theologians and missiologists have called this process an effort in “constructing local theologies.” Nearly twenty years ago, in Constructing Local Theologies (1985) Robert Schreiter surveyed the contributions of what he called the “Translation Models,” the “Adaptation Models” and the “Contextual Models” for such a construction. Schreiter’s thinking on the subject has been furthered by the work of his colleague at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Stephen Bevans, in Models of Contextual Theology (1992, rev. 2002). In the 2002 edition, Bevans presented six models of contextual theology: what he called the Translation, Anthropological, Praxis, Synthetic, Transcendental, and Countercultural. Bevans prefaced his survey with an observation about the sources and location of contextual theology.

Contextual theology’s addition of culture and social change to the traditional loci of scripture and tradition already marks a revolution in theological method over against traditional ways of doing theology….Both poles – human experience and the Christian tradition – are to be read together dialectically. In addition to this basic shift in theological method, a number of other methodological issues have emerged. When human experience, world events, culture, and cultural change are taken as loci theologici, one can ask whether theology is always to be done formally or discursively. What, in other words, is the form that theology should take? As theology becomes more of a reflection on ordinary human life in the light of the Christian tradition, one might ask whether ordinary men and women might not, after all, be the best people to theologize (Bevans 2002: 16-17).

Recently Clemens Sedmak of the University of Salzburg, Austria brought together many of the emphases that Schreiter’s call for Constructing Local Theologies has in common with Bevans’ challenge to effectively utilize Models of Contextual Theology. In Doing Local Theology: A Guide for Artisans of a New Humanity, Sedmak offers a number of theses. Among them, he affirms that, “Theology is done locally. In order to be honest to the local circumstances theology has to be done as local theology, as theology that

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takes the particular situation seriously. Local theology can be done with basic theological means. It can be done by the people, and it is done with the people…Local theologies recognize that theology takes shape within a particular context. Theologies are developed in response to and within a particular social situation. Understanding the social situation is a necessary condition for understanding the genesis and validity of particular theologies....Theology that tries to do justice to its place in culture and history is contextual. Contextualization literally means, ‘weaving together’....Theology is always done within a concrete local social structure that provides rich resources for constructing local theologies and for developing a local identity as a theologian. The social, historical, cultural, and political context has an impact on the role of the theologian and his or her place in the context.” (Sedmak 2002: 8,95-96).

Dirkie Smit, Professor of Systematic Theology at the Universities of Western Cape and Stellenbosch, points out that, “Contextual theologies....have underlined the fact that all theology, all thinking and speaking about God, is contextual, is influenced by the contexts in which the believers live, including the so-called traditional theology of Western Christianity in all its forms” (Smit1994:44. See also Mortimer Arias2001: 64.)

From a Protestant Evangelical standpoint, Stanley Grenz echoes the importance of correlating (he draws the term from Paul Tillich here) the existential human questions posed by the context and the revelatory answers found in the Bible. “The commitment to contextualization...,” Grenz writes, “entails an implicit rejection of the older evangelical conception of theology as the construction of truth on the basis of the Bible alone. No longer can the theologian focus merely on Scripture as the one complete theological norm. Instead, the process of contextualization requires a movement between two poles – the Bible as the source of truth and the culture as the source of the categories through which the theologian expresses biblical truth.... Contextualization demands that the theologian take seriously the thought-forms and mindset of the culture in which theologizing transpires, in order to explicate the eternal truths of the Scriptures in language that is understandable to contemporary people” (Grenz1993: 90; see Wilbert Shenk 1999: 77).

Appropriate Contextualization as EpistemologyA fifth perspective of contextualization has to do with an epistemological process of

hermeneutical examination and critique of the context and its implications for a missional understanding of the Gospel in that specific context. In the 2002 revised and expanded edition of Models of Contextual Theology, Stephen Bevans added a model he called the “countercultural model” of contextualization.

What this model realizes more than any other model is how some contexts are simply antithetical to the gospel and need to be challenged by the gospel’s liberating and healing power...The countercultural model draws on rich and ample sources in scripture and tradition....More than any other model,...it recognizes that the gospel represents an all-emcompassing, radically alternate worldview that differs profoundly from human experiences of the world and the culture that humans create. Particularly in contexts that exude a “culture of death,” in contexts in which the gospel seems irrelevant or easily ignored, or in those in which the gospel has become “a stained glass version” of a particular worldview, this model can prove to be a powerful way by which the gospel is able to be communicated with new freshness and genuine engagement (2002: 118). 262

Appropriate contextualization as an epistemological approach to contextualization emphasizes the sense that in each new context, in each new cultural setting, followers of Jesus Christ have an opportunity to learn something about God they had not previously known. Christian knowledge about God is seen as cumulative, enhanced, deepened, broadened and expanded as the Gospel takes new shape in each new culture. This was my thesis in “The New Covenent: Knowing God in Context” (1989, reprinted in 1996: 71-89).

In 1979, Bruce Nicholls suggested a distinction between what he called existential contextualization (the type common to World Council of Churches circles) and dogmatic contextualization (one that begins with the biblical text as ultimately the only rule of faith and practice). (See Nicholls 1979: 24; Donald Stults 1989: 151; and Chrispal 1995: 5). When contextualization is viewed as an epistemological endeavor in numerous contexts, as a process that searches for a deepening and broadening understanding of God in particular contexts, it does not fit easily into either of Nicholl’s

262 Bevans is quoting from Douglas John Hall, “Ecclesia Crucis: The Theologic of Christian Awkwardness,” in George R. Hunsberger and Craig van Gelder, edits. The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America . G.R.: Eerdmans, 1996, 199.

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categories. Appropriate contextualization as epistemology accepts the contextual (and existential) reality as itself a significant component of its theological (and dogmatic) reflection in which Christians broaden and deepen their understanding and participation in God’s mission in a given context.

In his dictionary entry on “Contextualization,” Dean Gilliland summarized six models of contextualization: the Critical, Semiotic, Synthetic, Transcendental and Translation models. “The strength of contextualization,” wrote Gilliland “is that if properly carried out, it brings ordinary Christian believers into what is often called the theological process.… The objective of contextualization is to bring data from the whole of life to real people and search the Scriptures for a meaningful application of the Word (who) “dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The missiological significance for contextualization is that all nations must understand the Word as clearly and as accurately as did Jesus’ own people in his day” (Gilliland 2002: 227). A dozen years earlier, Gilliland had suggested four questions that are of paramount consideration in the task of constructing a contextually appropriate theology:

1. What is the (culture-specific, contextual) general background?2. What are the presenting problems?3. What theological questions arise?4. What appropriate directions should the theology (and missiology) take? ( Gilliland 1989b: 52)

Theologians and missiologists the world over are now more than ever aware that about two-thirds of all world Christianity is now in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. Christianity is no longer a Western religion. This should not surprise us, since the Christian Church did not begin as a Western religion: it began as a Middle Eastern, North African and central Asian religious expression of faith in Jesus Christ. Today there are Christian believers in every political nation and among every major culture, though there yet remain many unreached people groups.

Beginning with Shoki Coe and others related to the WCC’s Theological Education Fund initiative, around 1972, the question became one of deriving an understanding of the Gospel that was appropriate to the culture wherever that might be – especially in terms of rejecting the formulations from the West and constructing new understandings that would be more appropriate to Africa, Asia, or Latin America. This epistemological perspective of appropriate mission theology received additional impetus after 1976 when “twenty-two theologians from Africa, Asia, Latin America and representatives of minority groups in North America founded the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania...By 2002 EATWOT’s membership had grown to over 700 members...(John Mbiti 2003, forthcoming). The conferences, papers and published books flowing from EATWOT during the past twenty-five years have provided strong support for an epistemological approach to doing contextually appropriate theology, especially in and from the two-thirds world.

“Contextualization,” writes J. Andrew Kirk, “recognizes the reciprocal influence of culture and socio-economic life. In relating Gospel to culture, therefore, it tends to take a more critical (or prophetic) stance toward culture. The concept….is intended to be taken seriously as a theological method which entails particular ideological commitments to transform situations of social injustice, political alienation and the abuse of human rights. José Miguez Bonino speaks of ‘raising up the historical situation to the theological level’ and of ‘theological reflection in the concrete praxis....The inflexible will to act from the historical situation, analysed by means of socio-political instruments and adopted in a theological option, identifies….the starting point of the theological task.’” 263

David Bosch highlighted the importance of this epistemological element in contextualization.Contextual theologies claim that they constitute an epistemological break when

compared with traditional theologies. Whereas, at least since the time of Constantine, theology was conducted from above as an elitist enterprise…its main source was philosophy, and its main interlocutor the educated non-believe, contextual theology is theology from below, “from the underside of history,” its main source (apart from Scripture and tradition) is the social sciences, and its main interlocutor the poor or the culturally marginalized…. Equally important in the new epistemology is the emphasis on the priority of praxis. (1991: 423).

Bosch goes on to mention five characteristics of this epistemological approach to contextualization:

263 J. Andrew Kirk 1999: 91. Kirk is quoting from Miguez Bonino 1971: 405-407; cited also in Norman Thomas 1995: 174 and David Bosch 1991: 425.

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First, there is a profound suspicion that not only Western science and Western philosophy, but also Western theology….were actually designed to serve the interests of the West, more particularly to legitimize “the world as it now exists.”….

Second, the new epistemology refuses to endorse the idea of the world as as static object which only has to be explained….

Third, (there is) an emphasis on commitment as “the first act of theology” (quoting Torres and Fabella 1978: 269)….

Fourth, in this paradigm the theologian can no longer be “a lonely bird on the rooftop (K. Barth 1933: 40), who surveys and evaluates this world and its agony; he or she can only theologize credibly if it is done with those who suffer.

Fifth, then, the emphasis is on doing theology. The universal claim of the hermeneutic of language has been challenged by a hermeneutic of the deed, since doing is more important than knowing or speaking (1991: 424-425)….From praxis or experience the hermeneutic circulation proceeds to reflection as a second…act of theology. The traditional sequence, in which theoria is elevated over praxis, is here turned upside down. This does not, of course, imply a rejection of theoria. Ideally, there should be a dialectical relationship between theory and praxis….”Orthopraxis and orthodoxy need one another, and each is adversely affected with sight is lost of the other” (Gutierrez 1988: xxxiv).

Bosch cautions us regarding the “ambiguities of contextualization,” a discomfort which I would share. Bosch affirms that “There can be no doubt that the contextualization project is essentially legitimate, given the situation in which many contextual theologians find themselves....Still, some ambiguities remain, particularly insofar as there is a tendency in contextual theology to overreact (and) to make a clean break with the past and deny continuity with one’s theological and ecclesial ancestry” (1991:425-426). Bosch registers his concerns by offering six affirmations that serve to link contextualization with theology and mission:

1. Mission as contextualization is an affirmation that God has turned toward the world…(It is not necessary to dichotomize our God-ward faith relationship from our commitment and involvement in the world. cve)

2. Mission as contextualization involves the construction of a variety of “local theologies…” (But a too-expansive multiplication – or atomization -- of “theologies” has profoundly negative implications for relativizing the oneness of the Christian Church’s faith in the same Gospel. cve)

3. There is not only the danger of relativism, where each context forges its own theology, tailor-made for that specific context, but also the danger of absolutism of contextualism….

4. We have to look at this entire issue from yet another angle, that of “reading the signs of the times”; an expression that has invaded contemporary ecclesiastical language….

5. In spite of the undeniably crucial nature and role of the context, then, it is not to be taken as the sole and basic authority for theological reflection….

6. Stackhouse has argued that we are distorting the entire contextualization debate if we interpret it only as a problem of the relationship between praxis and theory….264

7. The best models of contextual theology succeed in holding together in creative tension theoria, praxis and poiesis – or, if one wishes, faith, hope and love. This is another way of defining the missionary nature of the Christian faith, which seeks to combine the three dimensions.(Bosch 1991: 426-432).

Bosch concludes these remarks by saying, “It goes without saying that not every manifestation of contextual theology is guilty of any or all of the overreaction discussed above. Still, they all remain a constant danger to every (legitimate) attempt at allowing the context to determine the nature and content of theology for that context” (1991: 432).

However, with the center of gravity having shifted from the North to the South, from the West to the East, mission in the Twenty-first Century will be from everywhere to everywhere. And all aspects of

264 Bosch cites Max Stackhouse 1988: 85.

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the reality of each particular context will – and must – have an impact on the content and the method of mission theology in each place. As Andrew Kirk has pointed out, true theology will be – must be – missiological.

My thesis is that it is impossible to conceive of theology apart from mission. All true theology is, by definition, missionary theology, for it has as its object the study of the way of a God who is by nature missionary and a foundation text written by and for missionaries….Theology should not be pursued as a set of isolated disciplines. It assumes a model of cross-cultural communication, for its subject matter both stand over against culture and relates closely to it. Therefore, it must be interdisciplinary and interactive.” (Andrew Kirk 1997: 50-51.)

“There can be no theology without mission – or, to put it another way, no theology which is not misionary” (Andrew Kirk 1999: 11).

In the words of David Bosch,Just as the church ceases to be church if it is not missionary, theology ceases to

be theology if it loses its missionary character. The crucial question, then, is not simply or only or largely what church is or what mission is; it is also what theology is and is about. We are in need of a missiological agenda for theology rather than just a theological agenda for mission; for theology, rightly understood, has not reason to exist other than critically to accompany the mission Dei. So mission should be “the theme of all theology” (Gensichen 1971:250)….It is not a case of theology occupying itself with the missionary enterprise as and when it seems to it appropriate to do so; it is rather a case of mission being that subject with which theology is to deal. For theology it is a matter of life and death that it should be in direct contact with mission and the missionary enterprise” (David Bosch 1991: 494).

Although he probably would not share the economic and political viewpoints of some of the authors mentioned above, the epistemological slant of the methodology being suggested appears similar to the concept of “critical contextualization” developed by Paul Hiebert (Hiebert 1984). Hiebert called for a “critical contextualization” involving an interactive process that takes the Bible seriously and also interacts constructively with the context.

Critical contextualization does not operate from a monocultural perspective. Nor is it premised upon the pluralism of incommensurable cultures. It seeks to find metacultural and metatheological frameworks that enable people in one culture to understand messages and ritual practices from another culture with a minimum of distortion. It is based on a critical realist epistemology that sees all human knowledge as a combination of objective and subjective elements, and as partial but increasingly closer approximations of truth. It takes both historical and cultural contexts seriously. And it sees the relationship between form and meaning in symbols such as words and rituals, ranging all the way from an equation of the two to simply arbitrary associations between them. Finally, it sees contextualization as an ongoing process in which the church must constantly engage itself, a process that can lead us to a better understanding of what the Lordship of Christ and the kingdom of God on earth are about (Paul Hiebert 1984: 295).

ConclusionSo what is the next step? I believe the next step involves a search for a methodology in

contextual mission theology that simultaneously affirms the universality of the Gospel and the particularity of its incarnation in specific times and places. We need a methodology in mission theology that takes the Scriptures and the Church’s historical reflection on them seriously – and at the same time locates it in the environment of the context and the faith pilgrimage of the persons in that context. This is a methodology that, with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, asks over and over again Gilliland’s four questions we mentioned earlier – and then proceeds to discover what God’s mission entails in that place at that particular time.

In this chapter, I have summarized five perspectives of appropriate contextualization that build on each other: communication, indigenization, translatability, local theologies, and epistemology. In the next chapter, I will offer a method of mission theologizing whereby the method itself may be constructed to be

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appropriate both to Scripture and to the people of a context, yielding over time an appropriate understanding of God’s revelation in order that people in a given culture may respond and be transformed by the Gospel (in truth, allegiance and power).

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Glasser, Arthur “Help from an Unexpected Quarter or, The Old Testament and Contextualization,” Missiology VII: 4 (Oct., 1979), 401-410.

Grenz. Stanley J. 1993 Revisioning Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21rst Century. Downers Grove: IVP, 83.

Hesselgrave,David and Edward Romen. Contextualization: Meanings, Methods, and Models. G.R.: Baker, 1989.

Hiebert, Paul1978 “Conversion, Culture and Cognitive Categories”, Gospel in Context I:3 (July), 24-29.1984 “Critical Contextualization,” Missiology XII:3 (July 1), 287-296; reprinted in International

Bulletin of Missionary Research XI:3 (July 1), 1987, pp 104-111.1993 “Evangelism, Church, and Kingdom”, in The Good News of the Kingdom. Charles Van

Engen, Dean Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits. Maryknoll: Orbis, 153-161.Jacobs, Donald

1993 “Contextualization in Mission”, in Toward the 21st Century in Christian Mission, James Phillips and Robert Coote, edits. G.R.: Eerdmans, 235-244.

Kraft, Charles1979 Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural

Perspective. Maryknoll: Orbis. 1983 Communication Theory for Christian Witness. Nashville: Abingdon; reprinted .

Kraft,Charles and Tom Wisely, edits1979 Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity. Pasadena: WCL.

Luzbetak, Louis

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1988 The Church and Cultures. Maryknoll: Orbis.Nida, Eugene

1960 Message and Mission. N.Y.: Harper.Rosin, H. H.

1972 “Missio Dei” An Examination of the Origin, Contents and Function of the Term in Protestant Missiological Discussion. Leiden: Interuniversity Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research.

Sanneh, Lamin1989 Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Marykoll: Orbis, 1989.

Schreiter, Robert1985 Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985.

Shaw, Daniel1988 Transculturation: The Cultural Factor in Translation and Other Communication Tasks.

Pasadena: WCL.Shenk, Wilbert R., edit.

1993 The Transfiguration of Mission: Biblical, Theological & Historical Foundations. Scottdale: Herald.

Shenk, Wilbert R.1999 Changing Frontiers of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Snyder, Howard A., edit.2001 Global Good News: Mission in a New Context. Nashville: Abingdon.

Thomas, Norman E., edit.1995 Classic Texts in Mission & World Christianity. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Tippett ,Alan1987 Introduction to Missiology. Pasadena: WCL.

Van Engen,Charles1991 God’s Missionary People. G.R.: Baker.

Van Engen, Charles, Dean Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits. 1993 The Good News of the Kingdom, Maryknoll: Orbis.

Van Rheenen, Gailyn\2003 “The Missional Helix: Example of Church Planting” Monthly Missiological Reflection # 26

[email protected]; see also www.missiology.org.

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mailto:[email protected]

Knowing God in Context: Critical Contextualization, Critical Hermeneutics, Critical Theologizing

by: Charles Van Engen

ThesisThe worldwide church’s center of gravity has shifted both in terms of the numbers of Christians and in relation to the appropriate content, categories, agents and methodologies for doing contextual theology. Building on Paul Hiebert’s concept of “critical contextualization” and David Bosch’s idea of “critical hermeneutics,” the author draws from Paul’s thought in Galatians and suggests a way forward that acknowledges differences and affirms commonalities in a trinitarian process of “critical contextual theologizing ”that seeks to KNOW GOD IN CONTEXT in a manner that is simultaneously local and global.INTRODUCTION

My cousin David is a tall six-foot-six, lanky slow-speaking Dutch pastor: a man of few words. I remember the astounding transformation I saw in David after more than thirty years in pastoral ministry. For many years, David had been pastoring a struggling center-city church on the East Coast of the United States. Trying not to be discouraged, my cousin worked very hard to be a faithful steward and shepherd of the flock with which he had been entrusted. Toward the end of his long pastoral career I began to notice that he was less than enthusiastic about his calling.

For several years I did not see David. Then one day I was at a gathering in New Jersey and David invited me for lunch at his home. When I saw him I could hardly believe it was the same person. He was almost bouncing as he walked, he talked nearly non-stop in the car on the way to his home, and his enthusiasm and energy levels were contagious. I was amazed. Over lunch I popped the question.

“David, what has happened to you,” I asked him. “You don’t seem to be the same person I knew some years ago!” David’s wife was grinning, “He isn’t the same. Tell him, David.”David smiled down at me and said with force and conviction, “After more than thirty years in the ministry, I have

finally discovered what I am supposed to be doing in ministry.”I could hardly wait for what would come next.“Chuck,” David said, “I have discovered that as a pastor I AM SUPPOSED TO HELP PEOPLE KNOW GOD:

NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS.”“Chuck, for years I have been working hard to meet the budgets, maintain the buildings, administrate programs,

prepare and preach sermons, call on the sick and elderly, attend our denominational gatherings, and supervise staff. I have just discovered that these are not the essence of what I am supposed to be doing as a pastor. As a pastor, I am supposed to help people know God. And since I discovered this, I can hardly wait to wake up each morning and begin a new day helping my people know God!”

After making his phenomenal discovery David enrolled in an extended course in Christian spirituality. He rearranged his daily schedule to include several hours of meditation, Bible study and prayer. By the time I saw him he was teaching courses on spirituality at a local seminary. And subsequent to my conversation with him, David became the prayer coordinator for his denomination. The transformation was astounding to see. David had discovered the essence of his ministry: he was supposed to help people know God.

In this essay I would like to suggest that for us to DO THEOLOGY IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD we need to re-discover our fundamental calling: that we are supposed to help people know God in context. One way to frame the question might be the following.

HOW DO WE REMAIN FAITHFUL TO GOD’S COMPLETE AND FINAL REVELATION IN THE OLDER AND NEWER TESTAMENTS AND ALSO BE PROCLAMATIONALLY RELEVANT AND MISSIOLOGICALLY APPROPRIATE IN OUR UNDERSTANDING AND COMMUNICATION OF GOD’S INTENDED REVELATION IN MULTIPLE CULTURES AROUND THE GLOBE TODAY?


In pursuit of this question, I will draw from Paul Hiebert’s concept of “critical contextualization,” and from David Bosch’s idea of “critical hermeneutics”and suggest an outline of what I am calling, “critical theologizing in context.” To do this, I would invite the reader to reflect with me on three aspects of critical theologizing::

A. The Need for Critical Theologizing: One Church, Many Members (e. g., Ephesians 4) B. The Basis of Critical Theologizing: One Scripture, Many Readings (e.g., Matthew 5-7)C. A Way Forward in Critical Theologizing: One Theology, Many Perspectives (e.g., Gal. 3-6)

These three aspects of “Critical Theologizing” flow from the fact that theology is not merely a list of propositions, confessional statements, or dogmas. Christian theology is not mere content. Today more than ever doing theology in context involves a dynamic global/local process of knowing God in multiple contexts.

A. THE NEED FOR CRITICAL THEOLOGIZING: ONE CHURCH, MANY MEMBERS (EPHESIANS 4) We live in a new world. Acts 1:8 is now a reality. The Church of Jesus Christ, numbering more than 1.5 billion are

now literally witnesses of Jesus Christ everywhere in their Jerusalems, Judeas, Samarias and their ends of the earth. We are all aware that the center of gravity of the Christian Church has shifted from North to South, from West to East. This shift does not only impact the numbers of Christians in the world, the languages they speak, and the locations where they may be found. This shift also means that mission-sending is now polycentric: cross-cultural missions send their missionaries from everywhere to everywhere. Some estimate that a larger number of cross-cultural missionaries are being sent and supported today by the churches and missions in Africa, Asia and Latin America than the total of those sent and supported from Europe and North America. For example, in Paul Hiebert’s beloved India alone there are over 400 Protestant mission agencies sending and supporting over 4000 cross-cultural missionaries within and beyond the borders of India.

But the shift in the center of gravity of today’s Christian churches and missions also means that the center of gravity of doing theology has shifted. Doing theology is no longer the mono-centric and mostly mono-cultural enterprise of the Christian Church in Western Europe or North America. The Christian Church of the 21st Century registers a monumental shift with regard to the appropriate agendas, categories, agents, methodologies, worldview assumptions, types of rationality, perspectives, and modes of articulation that influence the doing of mission theology around the globe. Critical theologizing is now a global/local activity.

As Christians, we all read the same Bible. My starting point is the assumption that the sixty-six canonical books of the Bible are God’s final and complete revelation, the Christian Church’s only infallible rule of faith and practice. And I believe the foundational core essence of the Gospel is to confess with the mouth and believe in the heart, a proclamation in word and deed, that “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Rom 10:9-13; I Jn. 4:1-3).

FIGURE 1: Jesus Christ is Lord

This, however, makes the task before us even more complex and difficult. Here is the question: How shall we go about doing mission theology that grounds our reflection in the reading of the same Bible and yet also interfaces appropriately with a multiplicity of radically different contexts locally and globally?

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As a first aspect, I would suggest that our present need to do “critical theologizing” on a global scale stems from the fact that we are now a world church composed of many members globally. We are one church. In Ephesians, Paul’s primary letter dealing with a missional ecclesiology, Paul writes, “There is one body and one Spirit, as there is also one hope held out in God’s call to you; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6 NIV).

The Christian Church does not confess “holy catholic churches,” or “families of God” or “bodies of Christ” or “New Israels.” In the biblical view of the church the plural only refers to geographical location of churches, not existential being of the Church. In its essence there is only one Church. In Ephesians ekklesia applears only in the singular....

As Karl Barth has put it, we cannot justify, spiritually or biblically, “the existence of a plurality of churches genuinely separated...and mutually excluding one another internally and therefore externally. A plurality of churches in this sense means a plurality of lords, a plurality of spirits, a plurality of gods.”(Van Engen 1991: 49; quoting from Karl Barth 1958: 675)

Yet we are also many members. Paul affirms the Church’s oneness as a preamble to describing the pluriformity of the gifts of the Spirit that are each a part of the one Body. “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it....It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service (eis ergon diakonias), so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:7-13 NIV). So there is one Church that is one Body, but there are many members, many charisms, many ministries given for the Church’s mission in the world. This pluriformity and polycentricity of the one church necessitates our learning to do critical theologizing that is itself simultaneously local and global.

We seem to still miss the implications of this dialectical tension of diversity-within-unity for doing theology in a globalizing world. Let me point out two illustrative implications of this new reality.

1. Both theology and theologies

Doing theology in a globalizing world will necessarily entail theologizing that affirms both the oneness of the Church and the multiplicity of gifts that make up that global/local Body of Christ. For we will be led astray if we affirm only one or the other of these twin truths. Unfortunately, down through the centuries the Church has in fact accepted only one or the other of them. On the one hand, since Constantine the Christian Church has tended to do its theology from a predominantly mono-centric and mono-cultural perspective. For example, the Medieval Synthesis was just that: the articulation of a set of theological dogmas that were assumed to be universally true for everyone, everywhere, always. This produced the concept of “theology” as a singular noun understood to be the systematic aggregate of a set of unchanging propositions. We might diagram this viewpoint as seen below.

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FIGURE 2:Western European Theology

This monocentric view of doing theology dominated not only the Roman and Eastern churches, but the various branches of Protestantism after the Reformation as well. And this perspective also permeated Protestant missions in their theologizing for over 150 years during the time of colonial missions, that Paul Hiebert called, “The Era of Noncontextualization” in his article, “Critical Contextualization.” (See, e.g., Hiebert 1994: 76-81.)

In reaction to the hegemony of the Western church over the doing of theology, theologians from Africa, Asia and Latin America have affirmed a polycentric perspective of theologizing. This view provided the impetus for the first Protestant use of the concept of “contextualization." The multiform and polycentric nature of the process of doing theology was emphasized by Shoki Coe and stressed through the publication in 1972 of Ministry in Context on the part of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches in particular (See, e.g., Coe 1976; Norman Thomas, edit. 1995: 175-176; and Stephen Bevans 2002: 153 nn 45 and 46.).

Tite Tiénou has described it thus. “The word ‘contextualization’ was...chosen with the specific purpose of conveying the idea that theology can never be permanently developed. Everywhere and in every culture Christians must be engaged in an ongoing process of relating the gospel to cultures that are constantly changing. As long as the world endures, this process continues. For many people contextualization, not indigenization, is the term that best describes this never-ending process” (Tiénou 1993: 247; See, e.g., Kirk 1999: 91; and C. Van Engen 1989: 97 nn 18, 19.).

The perspective of contextualization as local theologizing represents a constantly-changing reciprocal interaction between church and context. It is a process of local reflection that begins with an analysis of the historical situation, proceeds to a re-reading of Scripture which in turn leads to interactive theological reflection concerning the context: an act of theologizing that propels the Christian to active engagement with the cultural, socio-economic, and political issues extant in the context. Within this view of contextualization as local theologizing there is a wide spectrum of diverse viewpoints from a nearly total secularization of the process at one end of the spectrum to a heavy emphasis on the transformation of the church at the other end.

Some Roman Catholic theologians and missiologists have called this process “inculturation, an effort in “constructing local theologies.” Nearly twenty years ago, in Constructing Local Theologies (1985) Robert Schreiter surveyed the contributions of what he called the “Translation Models,” the “Adaptation Models” and the “Contextual Models” for such a construction. Schreiter’s thinking on the subject has been furthered by the work of his colleague at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Stephen Bevans, in Models of Contextual Theology (1992, rev. 2002). In the 2002 edition, Bevans presented six models of contextual theology: what he called the Translation, Anthropological, Praxis, Synthetic, Transcendental, and Countercultural. Bevans prefaced his survey with an observation about the sources and location of contextual theology.

Contextual theology’s addition of culture and social change to the traditional loci of scripture and tradition already marks a revolution in theological method over against traditional ways of doing theology….Both poles – human experience and the Christian tradition – are to be read together dialectically (Bevans 2002: 16-17).265

265 Steve Bevans and Roger Schroeder have done us all a wonderful service in compiling many of the biblical, historical and theological issues the Church has faced as it has sought to preserve the Constants in Context in the midst of tremendous changes during the past twenty centuries. See Bevans and Schroeder 2004.

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Recently Clemens Sedmak of the University of Salzburg, Austria brought together many of the emphases that Schreiter’s call for Constructing Local Theologies has in common with Bevans’ challenge to effectively utilize Models of Contextual Theology. In Doing Local Theology: A Guide for Artisans of a New Humanity, Sedmak affirms that, “Theology is done locally. In order to be honest to the local circumstances theology has to be done as local theology, as theology that takes the particular situation seriously. Local theology can be done with basic theological means. It can be done by the people, and it is done with the people…Local theologies recognize that theology takes shape within a particular context. Theologies are developed in response to and within a particular social situation. Understanding the social situation is a necessary condition for understanding the genesis and validity of particular theologies....The social, historical, cultural, and political context has an impact on the role of the theologian and his or her place in the context.” (Sedmak 2002: 8,95-96).

Dirkie Smit, Professor of Systematic Theology at the Universities of Western Cape and Stellenbosch, points out that, “Contextual theologies....have underlined the fact that all theology, all thinking and speaking about God, is contextual, is influenced by the contexts in which the believers live, including the so-called traditional theology of Western Christianity in all its forms” (Smit 1994:44. See also Mortimer Arias 2001: 64.)

From a Protestant Evangelical standpoint, Stanley Grenz echoes the importance of correlating (he draws the term from Paul Tillich) the existential human questions posed by the context and the revelatory answers found in the Bible. “The commitment to contextualization...,” Grenz writes,

entails an implicit rejection of the older evangelical conception of theology as the construction of truth on the basis of the Bible alone. No longer can the theologian focus merely on Scripture as the one complete theological norm. Instead, the process of contextualization requires a movement between two poles – the Bible as the source of truth and the culture as the source of the categories through which the theologian expresses biblical truth....Contextualization demands that the theologian take seriously the thought-forms and mindset of the culture in which theologizing transpires, in order to explicate the eternal truths of the Scriptures in language that is understandable to contemporary people” (Grenz 1993: 90; see Wilbert Shenk 1999: 77).Locating the theological task in the local context implies an epistemological approach to critical theologizing: it

questions what we do and do not know about God in the local situation. This epistemological perspective of contextual theology received added impetus after 1976 when “twenty-two theologians from Africa, Asia, Latin America and representatives of minority groups in North America founded the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania...By 2002 EATWOT’s membership had grown to over 700 members...(John Mbiti 2003:91). The conferences, papers and published books flowing from EATWOT during the past twenty-five years have provided strong support for an epistemological approach to doing contextually appropriate theology, especially in and from the two-thirds world.

“Contextualization,” writes J. Andrew Kirk, “recognizes the reciprocal influence of culture and socio-economic life. In relating Gospel to culture, therefore, it tends to take a more critical (or prophetic) stance toward culture. The concept...is intended to be taken seriously as a theological method which entails particular ideological commitments to transform situations of social injustice, political alienation and the abuse of human rights. 266 So the multiplicity of contexts and worldviews representing a diversity of cultural assumptions and agendas that

constitute the world church today makes it necessary to speak in the plural, to talk of “local theologies.” We might diagram this view of doing theology in context as follows.

266 J. Andrew Kirk 1999: 91. Kirk quotes from Miguez Bonino 1971: 405-407; cited also in Norman Thomas 1995: 174 and David Bosch 1991: 425. See also David Bosch 1991:423.

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Eastern andWestern EuropeanContexts

North AmericanContexts

Asian/Contexts

Latin-AmericanContexts

AfricanContexts

OtherContexts

Your

Contexts

Bible

Middle-Eastern Contexts


FIGURE 3 Local Theologies

But let me repeat here the complementary truth: there is only ONE Church of Jesus Christ. Our dilemma is that neither of these two options alone is acceptable. To view the doing of theology as the construction of one monolithic “theology” superimposed on all Christians everywhere violates the truth that God’s revelation took place “at many times and in various ways” (Heb. 1:1) and has always been received within the categories of specific cultural contexts. As David Bosch said it, “Interpreting a text is not only a literary exercise; it is also a social, economic, and political exercise. Our entire context comes into play when we interpret a biblical text. One therefore has to concede that all theology (or sociology, political theory, etc.) is, by its very nature, contextual” (1991:428).

On the other hand, the atomization of a plurality of local “theologies” violates the oneness of the Church, the unity of the Holy Spirit, the singularity of the Gospel, and the unity of all Christians who read the same Bible. (See David Bosch 1991: 427.) Thus, neither monolithic uniformity nor atomized pluriformity are satisfactory approaches to doing theology in a globalizing world today. So the challenge before us in the 21st Century is to find a way to know God in context, that is, we must learn to do critical theologizing globally/locally through reading the same Bible in the midst of multiple cultures. We might diagram this dialectical tension as follows.

FIGURE 4 The World Church

2. Both Communicational and Epistemological Re-Contextualization

The global shift in the center of gravity of the Christian Church worldwide offers a second implication that profoundly impacts the way we do theology in the 21st Century. In addition to our seeking to reconcile “one theology–

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many theologies” we also must consider how we shall go about re-contextualizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in situations where there are multiple Christian groups involved in theologizing, where there are multiple generations of believers, and where one may find a growing nominalism and secularization of the Church and its theology.

Our new situation in this century entails a new understanding of contextualization itself. As noted above, at first, contextualization referred to the doing of theology in local contexts, bringing all the various cultural and contextual issues to bear upon the process of contextualization. However, by the late 1970’s and 1980’s Protestant Evangelicals had redirected the term to point to a way of communicating the Gospel in a meaningful way so that it would make sense to the receptor. We began to understand that it is the receptor who ascribes meaning to any communication (Cf. Charles Kraft 1983, 1991; and 1999b).

Thus in 1989 David Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen defined contextualization this way.

Christian contextualization can be thought of as the attempt to communicate the message of the person, works, Word, and will of God in a way that is faithful to God’s revelation, especially as it is put forth in the teachings of Holy Scripture, and that is meaningful to respondents in their respective cultural and existential contexts. Contextualization is both verbal and nonverbal and has to do with theologizing; Bible translation, interpretation, and applications; incarnational lifestyle; evangelism; Christian instruction; church planting and growth; church organization; worship style – indeed with all of those activities involved in carrying out the Great Commission (1989:200).267

The Western Protestant Evangelical approach to contextualization, then, was to put contextualization at the service of Gospel communication, as seen in the diagram below.

FIGURE 5 The Communication Model of Contextualization

Various communicational approaches to contextualization assumed that the Gospel message being communicated was known and understood by the Christian Critical Contextualizers and they were offering it to non-Christians who did not know the Gospel. This was a simple one-way communication process. The communicational models have dominated the Western Protestant Evangelical view of cross-cultural missionary enterprise for the past several decades. And there are many places in the world where communicational models of contextualization continue to be needed (Cf., e.g., Don Richardson 2000).

But the world of this new century has undergone radical changes that significantly alter our approach to contextualization, changes that call for an epistemological approach of “critical theologizing” in addition to the communicational view. I have space here to mention only two changes that call for us to move from a predominantly communicational perspective to an epistemological approach to contextualization.

267 I don’t have space here to mention the various ways in which folks have attempted to categorize the various “models” of contextualization. See, e.g., Steve Bevans 2002; David Bosch 1991:420-432; Ashish Chrispal 1995; Bruce Fleming 1980; Dean Gilliland 1989a; 2002; Krikor Haleblian 1983; Donald Jacobs 1993:235-244; Jan Jongeneel 1997: 6-9; 130-134; Andrew Kirk 1999; Bruce Nicholls 1979; Robert Schreiter 1985-6-16; Clemens Sedmak 2002; Max Stackhouse 1988; Charles Taber 1983; Tite Tiénou 1993:235-252; Charles Van Engen 1989; 2004a; and Darrell Whiteman 1997.

CONTEXTUALIZATIONThe Communicator contextualizes the message so it may be understandable and acceptable to the Receptor.

THE COMMUNICATORThe Gospel conforms to the Communicator ’s understanding of God’s revelation as that is seen in the Bible by the Communicator.

THE RECEPTORThe meaning of the Gospel message is understood by the Receptor in relation to the Receptor’s context, community, and worldview.

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A Multiplicity of Churches Seeking to Know God in Their Contexts

First, with one quarter of the earth’s population claiming to be Christian in some fashion, and with two-thirds of that Christian population to be found in the South and East of the globe, the process of contextualization must also include an epistemological effort. That is, contextualization now involves some Christian churches sharing with other Christian churches the way they, in their context, read the Bible and understand the Gospel (Cf., e.g., Peter Phan 2003). Christians from everywhere need to share with other Christians everywhere how they are coming to know God in context. Each step forward, each “translation” (cf. Lamin Sanneh 1993:31; Andrew Walls 2002: 72-81) of the Gospel offers the possibility of discovering something about God as revealed in the Bible that noone had previously seen. “As the gospel continues to take root in new cultures, and God’s people grow in their covenantal relationship to God in those contexts, a broader, fuller, and deeper understanding of God’s revelation will be given to the world church” (C. Van Engen 1996:88-89).

This is what Andrew Walls has called “the Ephesian moment,” drawing from a historical and cross-cultural reading of Ephesians. “The Ephesian moment, then, brings a church [to be] more culturally diverse than it has ever been before; potentially, therefore, nearer to that “full stature of Christ” [Eph 4:13] that belongs to his summing up of humanity. The Ephesian moment also announces a church of the poor...The Ephesian question at the Ephesian moment is whether or not the church in all its diversity will demonstrate its unity by the interactive participation of all its culture-specific segments, the interactive participation that is to be expected in a functioning body (2002:81).

Tite Tiénou suggests that,Accepting difference [in contextual theological formulations] raises [an]

important issue related to the formation of indigenous theologies, namely the polycentric nature of Christianity. If we believe that Christians from other cultures can enrich our faith or help us correct our mistakes, we are in effect saying that Christianity is not permanently wedded to any human culture. Put another way, the acceptance of difference means that the Christian faith can be at home in any culture. Consequently Christianity has as many centers as the number of cultures of its adherents (1993: 248-259).But this deepening, broadening, enriching of our understanding of God’s revelation in the Bible is only possible if

there is an ongoing conversation between the local congregations and churches and the church globally by way of a mutually-enriching process of “critical theologizing.”

The Second, Third and Fourth Generations Seeking to Know God in Their ContextsA second factor calling for an epistemological approach to contextualization in this new situation of ecclesial

diversity has to do with the second, third and fourth generations of believers in each location. In most of the cases where contextualization was seen as a communicational process the intent was for Christians to communicate their understanding of the Gospel in culturally-appropriate ways to those who are not yet Christian. This involved an initial contextualization or indigenization of the Gospel message.

But the world has changed. Now one can go to almost any country in the world and find the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the first Christian believers. In other words, in addition to considering the meaning of the Gospel for the first-generation converts (the Abrahams and Sarahs of the world), it is also imperative that we reflect on the meaning of the Gospel for their children: the Isaacs and the Rebeccas, the Jacobs and the Rachels around the world. This involves a RE-CONTEXTUALIZATION, a re-reading of Scripture in the midst of a new and changed reality being faced by the second, third and fourth generations of Christians. Without such an intentional re-contextualization, without a careful re-reading of the Gospel in a changed context, without a process of critical theologizing in that context, it is highly probable that the children and grandchildren of the church will become Christian In Name Only (Eddie Gibbs1994:17-38) and eventually either mix pre-Christian concepts with their inherited Christian ideas, or become post-Christian non-believers.

The present search by many in the West to articulate the faith in a fashion that will be understandable and acceptable to postmoderns is an example of this kind of re-contextualization. Such re-contextualization necessitates an epistemological model of contextualization that is deeper, broader, higher and farther-reaching than a communicational model would be. Re-contextualization closely follows a pattern common to the Old Testament where the periodic renewal of the Covenant on the part of Israel involved essentially a re-contextualization of the Covenant for a new time and place in the life of Israel.

To re-contextualize the Gospel in a changed context calls for the Christians in that context to participate in an emic process that Paul Hiebert called “critical contextualization” with its four steps: (1) exegesis of the culture, (2) exegesis of Scripture and the hermeneutical bridge, (3) a critical response to past customs, and (4) the corporate discovery

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of new contextualized practices (Hiebert 1994: 88-91). Parenthetically, I would add a fifth step to Hiebert’s four steps mentioned above. I believe on a global/local scale, as process of critical contextualization is possible only if the members of the one Body are willing to do their theologizing in a relational and worshipful manner that Hiebert called “centered-set” thinking, as illustrated in Figure 6, below.268 I believe that, although we need propositions that state truths that are faithful to God’s revelation in the Bible, propositionally-imprisoned “bounded-set” thinking will be counter-productive to a process of critical theologizing.

FIGURE 6 Centered-Set Theologizing

B. The Basis of Critical Theologizing: One Scripture, Many Readings (e.g., Matthew 5-7)

268 In Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues, Hiebert develops the “characteristics of centered sets.” “First, Hiebert says, “a centered set is created be defining the center or reference point and the relationship of things to that center.

Things related to the center belong to the set, and those not related to the center do not....Second, while centered sets are not created by drawing boundaries, they do have sharp boundaries that separate things inside the set

from those outside it -- between things related to or moving toward the center and those that are not. Centered sets are well-formed, just like bounded sets. They are formed by defining the center and any relationships to it. The boundary then emerges automatically. Things related to the center naturally separate themselves from things that are not....

Third, there are two variables intrinsic to centered sets. The first is membership. All members of a set are full members and share fully in its functions. There are not second-class members. The second variable is distance from the centere. Some things are far from the center and others near to it, but all are moving toward it.....

Fourth, centered sets have two types of change inherent in their structure. The first has to to with entry into or exit from the set. Things headed away from the center can turn and move toward it....The second type of change has to do with movement toward or away from the center. Distant members can move toward the center, and those near can slide back while still hearded toward it.” Hiebert goes on to demonstrate that “Hebrew Culture” was structured as a centered set, based on relationships, especially in terms of a covenantal relationship of the people of Israel to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Hiebert then asks, “What happens to our concept of Christian if we define it in centered-set terms? First, Christians would be defined as followers of the Jesus Christ of the Bible, as those who make him the center or Lord of their lives....Second, there would be a clear separation between Christians and non-Christians, between those who are followers of Jesus and those who are not. The emphasis, however, would be on exhorting people to follow Christ, rather than on excluding others to preserve the purity of the set....Third, there would be a recognition of variation among Christians....Fourth, two important types of change would be recognized in centered-set thought. First, there is conversion, entering or leaving the set....The second change is movement toward the center, or growth in a relationship. A Christian is not a finished product the moment he or she is converted. Conversion, therefore, is a definite event followed by an ongoing process. Sanctification is not a separate activity, but a process of justification continued throughout life.” Hiebert then proceeds to look at the Church as a centered set and missions as a centered set, following the four characteristics he mentioned earlier. (1994, 123-131 emphasis is Hiebert’s).

Paul Hiebert’s idea of “centered-set” is especially important as a hermeneutical guide to our reading of Scripture in evangelical mission theology. It provides a means by which we can be firmly and tightly anchored in truth in Jesus Christ, yet simultaneously open to differing worldviews, different cultural glasses with which we read the Scriptures, all within the same world Church comprised of the disciples of the one Center, Jesus Christ.

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Having seen something of the need for critical theologizing globally and locally we can proceed to consider as a second aspect the basis on which we might do “critical theologizing” in this new century. On what basis can we remain faithful to God’s revelation in the Older and Newer Testaments and also be proclamationally relevant and missiologically appropriate in the midst of multiple cultures today? Our basis for doing “critical theologizing” may be found in the way the Bible itself contextualizes God’s revelation over time in the midst of radically different contexts. The Bible itself may offer us a methodology for doing global/local critical theologizing in a globalizing world, to know God in multiple contexts. Over the past several years I have come to appreciate more and more deeply the ways in which the Bible itself can guide our process of doing theology. In this section I will summarize David Bosch’s concept of “critical hermeneutics” and then I will briefly describe two ways in which the Bible itself might teach us how to do “critical theologizing.”

The biblical revelation was just that: God’s direct revelation under special inspiration by the Holy Spirit. I consider the canon of Scripture closed. There is no further revelation that may be placed at the same level of importance or authenticity as that which is given to us in the canonical Scriptures. And all theologizing must be grounded in those Scriptures. I follow the Protestant Reformers of the Sixteenth Century in anchoring their theological task in the Reformation concept of “sola scriptura.” The canon is closed, yet our interpretation of the meaning of the Scriptures continues to develop and be shaped under the illumination of the Holy Spirit. There is an on-going process whereby the Church reflects and learns over time. Thus further on in this essay I will refer to Anthony Thiselton, Grant Osborne and others who call for a “hermeneutical spiral” that interfaces the Bible with the multiple contexts in which the Church finds itself today.

Although we recognize a difference between revelation and illumination, and although we hold to a closed canon, and though we follow and learn from the biblical text itself, we cannot simply superimpose the exact same perspectives or content of the biblical text upon our contexts today. This was David Bosch’s point in emphasizing what he called, “critical hermeneutics.”

We cannot, with integrity, reflect on what mission might mean today unless we turn to the Jesus of the New Testament, since our mission is “moored to Jesus’ person and ministry” (Hahn 1984: 269).

[But] to affirm this is not to say that all we have to do is to establish what mission meant for Jesus and the early church and then define our missionary practice in the same terms, as though the whole problem can be solved by way of a direct application of Scripture. To do this would be to succumb to “the temptation of concordism, which equates the social groups and forces within first-century Palestine with those of our own time” (G. Gutierrez, in Echegaray 1984:xi)....

Even where the socio-cultural gap between today’s communities and those of the first Christians is narrow, it is there, and it should be respected. A historico-critical study may help us to comprehend what mission was for Paul and Mark and John but it will not immediately tell us what we must think about mission in our own concrete situation....

The approach called for requires an interaction between the self-definitions of early Christian authors and actors and the self-definitions of today’s believers who wish to be inspired and guided by those early witnesses....We are now in need of going beyond sociological analysis (of the biblical text alone) to an approach which may be termed critical hermeneutics....The bias of critical hermeneutics...is toward a view from the inside–in other words, toward inquiring into the self-definitions of those with whom we wish to enter into dialogue. Indeed, self-definition becomes a key concept in this approach....

The critical hermeneutical approach goes beyond the (historically-interesting) quest of making explicit early Christian self-definitions, however. It desires to encourage dialogue between those self-definitions and all subsequent ones, including those of ourselves and our contemporaries...Its aim is that those self-definitions be extended, criticized, or challenged...The challenge to the study of mission may be described (in the words of van Engelen 1975:310) as relating the always-relevant Jesus event of twenty centuries ago to the future of God’s promised reign by means of meaningful initiatives for the here and now (1991:22-24).It may be possible for us to learn something about “critical hermeneutics” and “critical theologizing” if we

observe the sometimes-astounding ways in which the Bible exemplifies a re-reading of prior revelation. I need only mention examples:

John the Baptists’s affirmation in John 1, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29, 30)

Jesus’s re-reading of the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount where six times he contrasts the “self-definitions” given in the Older Testament with his own self-definitions, saying “You heard it said....but I tell you.”

The Gospel of John’s re-reading of the concept of “life” in the Older Testament and applying it to Jesus the Messiah who is Life itself (compare, e.g., Deut 30:19-20 with Jn. 3:36; 5:40; 6:68; 11:25; 20:31)

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“As God’s people, we have been given the choice between life and death —between blessings andcursings. And God’s desire is that we would choose life –real life –for ourselves and for our children! Let us choose to love the Lord our God, to obey him and to commit ourselves to him. For only God is our source of life”

--Deut. 30:19-20

“Whoever believes in the son has eternal life...” –Jn. 3:36“You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” --Jn 5:40

“I am the bread of life.”–Jn. 6:35“You have the words of eternal life.”

–Jn. 6:68“I have come that they may have life, and

have it to the full.” -- Jn. 10:10 “I am the resurrection and the life.” -- Jn. 11:25

“These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” –Jn. 20:31

FIGURE 7: “Life” in Deuteronomy and John

The Decalogue in the New TestamentYou shall have no other gods before me. Mt 6:24

You shall make no graven image. Acts 19:23-26; Col. 3:2

You will not take the name of the

Lord in vain. Mt. 5:33

Remember the Sabbath Day to

keep it holy. Lk. 6:5

Honor your father and your mother. Mt. 15:4; Eph. 6:2

You shall not kill. Mt. 5:21

You shall not commit adultery. Mt. 5:27

You shall not steal. Mt. 19:18

You shall not bear false witness. Mt. 19:18

You shall not covet. Rom. 7:7; Rom. 13:8

FIGURE 8: The Decalogue in the Newer Testament


The Newer Testament’s way of affirming the continuing validity of the Decalogue, while at the same time re-conceptualizing within the framework of God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ (compare Exodus 20 with Mt. 6:24; Acts 19:23-26 and Col. 3:2; Mt. 5:33; Lk. 6:5; Mt. 15:4 and Eph. 6:2; Mt. 5:21; Mt. 5:27; Mt. 19:18; Rom 7:7 and Rom. 13:8).

A “critical hermeneutical” approach to prior revelation can be appreciated in the way the Newer Testament re-reads the Older. In Figure 6 below, the interaction of surface-level and deep-level meanings in the perspectives of the People of God in the Older and Newer Testaments are represented as triangle, where the surface-level meanings are more distant from each other and the deep-level meanings are closer. The writers of the Newer Testament seemed to realize that God’s revelation never comes to human beings in a vacuum. God’s revelation is always apprehended, understood, appropriated and lived out by humans in their cultural contexts, by means of their worldview categories.269 More about this later on in this essay.

269 In the first annual Louis J. Luzbetak Lecture on Mission and Culture, José de Mesa spoke of “Inculturation as Pilgrimage,” stressing the role of culture in human experience and in understanding of God’s revelation. “Perhaps [a] primary aim of inculturation or contextualization is to facilitate the Christian experience of God within and through the instrumentality of the culture.” (De Mesa 2000:18).

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The Newer Testament’s Reading of the Older Testament

Deep-level cultural themes and meanings

Surface-level cultural symbols, manifestations and meanings

Distance

Proximity

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FIGURE 9: The Newer Testament’s Reading of the Older Testament


Over the past fifty years, in Protestant Evangelical circles there has been a growing awareness and acceptance of the essential role that culture and worldview play as the pathways of human understanding of God’s revelation.270 Protestant Evangelicals have learned from folks whose names have become household names in Evangelical circles: Eugene Nida, Mary Douglas, William Smalley, William Wonderly, William Reyburn, John Beekman, Alan Tippett, Charles Kraft, Jacob Loewen, Clifford Geertz, Paul Hiebert, Charles Taber, Darrell Whiteman, Marvin Mayers, Peter Berger, John V. Taylor, Harvie Conn, among many others. 271

Critical theologizing will examine carefully and critically the meaning of the Gospel not only across different cultures globally (critical contextualization), but also the meaning of the Gospel within the worldview categories of each specific cultural context (critical hermeneutics). Critical theologizing will draw from both critical contextualization globally and critical hermeneutics locally in order to know God in context. Let me offer two ways in which the Bible can teach us how to do this: (1) God’s covenant of grace over time; and (2) a four-horizon approach to critical theologizing.

1. God’s Covenant of Grace272

Nowhere is the mystery of the Gospel for the Gentiles more poignantly expressed than in the conceptual framework of a biblical theology of the covenant. I cannot deal here with the extensive and complicated aspects of biblical theology of the covenant. Nor am I looking at "covenantal theology" as it was developed in the Reformed tradition over a couple of centuries after the Protestant Reformation. Rather, my concern here is the covenantal perspective as a possible paradigm for knowing God in diverse contexts.273

In the covenant we find a historically-conditioned (or better, a historically-contextualized) relationship between an eternally-present God and a temporally-specific humanity. The historicity of the covenantal forms also means a tremendous variety of cultural, political and social contexts in which the covenant may be found. Thus in the covenant we have essentially the same relationship at all times and in all places, and yet one which takes on radically different forms in each time and place. 270 , As I write I have before me the latest issue of the Occasional Bulletin of the Evangelical Missiological Society. The lead article, written by Chris

Sadowitz is, “Recognizing World View and its Relationship to Real Gospel Presentation and Understanding” [in the context of Japan] (volume 17; number 3, Spring, 2004).

271 Darrell Whiteman give a very helpful summary of the history of the relationship of “Anthropology and Mission” at the Third Annual Louis Luzbetak Lecture on Mission and Culture in May, 2003. See Whiteman 2003.

272 This segment is adapted from Charles Van Engen 1996:71-89.273 Harvie Conn is among those who have called for a covenantal perspective as a new theological center for a contextual hermeneutic (See, e.g., Conn

1978:43; Conn 1984:229-234; Hohensee 1980:131-145; Glasser 1979b: 403-409; Archer 1979; Lind 1982).

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In its most fundamental and essential meaning, the covenant could be stated, “I will be your God, you shall be my people, and I will dwell in your midst.”274 This timeless relationship was expressed in various epochs in strikingly similar structural forms.

1. There is recitation of God’s mighty acts.2. The Word of God spells out the covenantal relationship.3. Promises are associated with the covenantal relationship.4. Worship and Sacrifice are carried out by the people.5. YHWH gives a physical sign or symbol of the covenant.275

Grace, revelation, law, cultic practice, communal self-identity, corporate response, and the meaning and goal of YHWH’s acts in history are all incorporated and given meaning in this covenantal relationship.276 Yet we are all aware of the radically-distinct contexts in which this timeless relationship has been expressed. The incredible diversity of contexts – and thus the multiplicity of surface-level forms through which the covenant of grace is expressed over time in the Bible can be illustrated by summarizing the way the covenant appears in at least the following six contextual manifestations.

1. Adam: The Covenant and the ultimate victory over evil (Gen. 3:9-21)2. Noah: The Covenant and the preservation of all living things(Gen. 6:17-22; 9:1-17)3. Abraham: The Covenant and the election of Abraham’s seed for the sake of the nations (Gen

12; 15; 17 – We must also include here the “re-presentation” of that covenantal relationship in both an inherited and a personal way with Isaac: Gen 26:3-5; and with Jacob: Gen 28:13-15)

4. Moses: The Covenant and the law, a nation formed (Ex. 2:24, 19:4-6; 20:1-17; 24: 1-10; 25: 10-22; 31:16-17; 32; 34: 1-10; 40: 18-38; Lev. 26: 6-12; Deut. 9:15; Num. 14. In Ex. 32 and Num. 14, God offers to make from Moses “a great nation,” specifically in reference to promises made earlier to Abraham. (With Joshua, the covenant is related to the possession of the promised land and intimately connected with Moses and the Exodus. Cf. Deut. 29:1-29; 30:1-20; Josh. 5; 24.)

5. David: The Covenant and the Davidic reign – a kingdom (I Chr. 16: 15-17; 17: 1-27; parallels in II Sam. 7:1-29; 23:5; Ps. 89:34-37; 105:8; 111:5; 106:45; Isa. 42:6; 55:3; 59:21; II Kings 1-12)

6. Jesus Christ: The Covenant and the Holy Spirit, redemption wrought once-for-all, the Church, the Kingdom come and coming (Isaiah 54:10; 55:3; Jer. 4:3-4; 31:31;32:36-40 Ezeq. 34:24; Mt. 3:11,16; 26:28; Mr. 14:24; Lk 22:20; I Cor. 11:25; Acts 3:25-26; II Cor. 3:6; Heb. 7:22; 8:6,8; 9:15, 19-20, 10:12,24,29; 13:20; Rom. 11:27; Gal. 3:6 Heb. 13:20-21)

If we were to view this covenantal revelation as a series of hermeneutical circles, the covenant could offer us an opportunity to understand how each hermeneutical circle served in each context to reveal something deeper and fuller about God’s covenantal relationship (Cx). Taken together, the various historically contextualized manifestations of the covenant (the several circles seen below in Figure 7) could be represented as a “hermeneutical spiral,” over time through with the eternal God becomes progressively more completely known to God’s People. (Cf. Osborne 1991.)

274 Compare, e.g., Gen 17; Exod 19, 24, 29, 34; Lev. 26; Josh. 24; I Sam. 12; 2 Sam. 23:4; Ps 89; Jer. 31; 2 Cor 6; and Rev. 21.275 For the details concerning the structural forms of the covenant see Van Engen 1981: 123-124; Hayes 1979: 195-197, 303-304.276 Cf. Dekker 1985:1

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C1 C2 C3 C4 C6C5

FIGURE 10: The Covenant of Grace Throughout Salvation History

C1

C2 C4

C5C3

C6


From a perspective of the continuity of the covenant and maybe working all together as one church, we can come to know God in context through the model of covenantal revelation over time. This might enable us to enter a new era of contextualization. In this new century of the world church’s life, the covenant – always the same in its meaning, always different in its form -- may open the way for us to know God’s revealed hiddenness. As the Gospel continues to take root in new cultures, and God’s People grow in their covenantal relationship to God in those contexts, a broader, fuller, and deeper understanding of God’s revelation will be given to the world Church.

2. A Four-Horizons Approach to Critical Theologizing277

Secondly, and similar to the spiral of the progressive revelation of the covenant of grace, the Bible may also teach us how to do critical theologizing through what I have called a “four horizons approach.” By using the concept of “horizons,” I mean to emphasize the differing worldviews represented in various contexts. There seem to be four horizons, or perspectives, of meaning that inform the Christian’s understanding and communication of what God has said in the Bible: (A) God’s context-specific intended meaning in revelation found in the Older Testament; (B) God’s revealed intended meaning in the Newer Testament that involves a new understanding of the Old Testament;; (C) the critical theologian’s re-reading of the Bible that gives a new understanding of God in the critical theologian’s context; and (D) the contemporary receptors’ understanding of God in their context, based on their listening to (C) and re-reading (A) and (B). We might build a “four-horizon” approach through a series of steps.

Step OneWe begin with the recognition of two complementary facts about the human race: that all humans have much in

common and yet human cultures demonstrate a phenomenal degree of diversity. Common humanity: cultural diversity. These two complementary characteristics of humanity, when applied to matters of culture, linguistics, communication and critical theologizing are the basis for our recognition that there is a great deal of difference between surface-level structures

277 The material in the section is adapted from Shaw and Van Engen 2003, 80-92.

C3 C5

C6

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of meaning (including cultural symbols and manifestations), and deep-level structures of meaning (including cultural themes and metaphors). See Figure 11, below.

The surface level structures in a culture are quite distinct from those of another culture. People living in different cultures handle pregnancy, birth, rites of passage, and death differently. They handle spiritual understanding in a wide variety of ways. The economic, social, political, and linguistic structures are all immensely different: they differ radically in the surface-level structures that point to deeper meanings.

On the other hand, linguists and anthropologists tell us that human deep-level structures of meaning are actually quite close across cultures. They reflect pan-human cultural themes that are shared by people the world over. We believe this is related to being created in the image of God and to sharing a common humanity. This is why Scripture is communicable in all human languages and relevant for all peoples. It reflects in human contexts messages about God the Creator of all. The Holy Spirit is at work enabling human beings in every context to understand what the God who created them intends for them. So Scripture provides a connecting point in continuity with all of humanity, extending back to creation in Adam and Eve and forward to the culmination of all human history in the New Jerusalem.

Yet we must also take into account the fact that the deep-level structures are closely related to the surface-level structures and vice-versa, since the surface-level meanings derive from, and give shape to, the deep-level worldview of people in a culture. Thus, although we need to differentiate between the deep level and the surface-level, they are dynamically and intimately interconnected. Each affects the other. Thus in the following diagrams the reader will note that I will use triangles to denote the ‘horizons,’ with each ‘horizon’ representing the interconnected constellation of meanings that draw from both the surface- and deep-level structures.

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Step Two

The second step in the process of building a four-horizon hermeneutic includes recognition of the divine origin of the text of Scripture. We encounter God’s intention in the text of Scripture, while at the same time recognizing that God’s message to humanity has always been conveyed through humans, in the midst of differing human cultures.

This involves us in the matter of the discontinuity and continuity of God’s revelation. The diagram in Figure 9 is meant to show the movement of time from left to right: from past, through the present, on the way to the future. And as time progresses, there is discontinuity as God’s message takes on differing surface-level symbols among different cultures in the midst of very different worldviews. The arrows in the diagram are important. They represent progressive revelation and, post-Scripture, the historical development of the church’s understanding of God’s revelation.

Yet there is also continuity, as attested in the biblical text itself. For example, the phrase, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” (Ex 3:6) presupposes just such continuity. Throughout the Scriptures, it is the same God who speaks: from Genesis to Revelation. The content of the Scriptures themselves purport to be cumulative, building one on another, thus assuming continuity. We add to this the Bible’s Christological affirmations regarding Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, coupled with the continuity of the Holy Spirit throughout.

All of these indicators point to a unity and continuity of the text – predominantly in terms of the deep-level themes, metaphors and meanings – shaped and expressed through ever-changing and ever-different surface-structure cultural symbols. Thus God’s revelation in Scripture appears to involve continuous discontinuity over time.

Step ThreeThe third step recognizes the interrelation of surface- and deep-level meanings (depicted in Figure13 as triangles)

each representing a “horizon” of constellations of meanings in a specific context in which God’s revelation occurs. Imagine with me that we are on a large ship in the middle of the ocean. We look out from the ship and see nothing but water. If we look as far distant as possible on a clear day, we may see the slight curving of a line far away in the distance. This is the curvature of the earth. And where the water of the ocean seems to meet the sky, we see this curving line as a

Holy Spirit, Text of Scripture, Covenant, People of GodJesus the Messiah, the Resurrected Lord, the Alpha & Omega

Discontinuity: Differing cultures, worldviews, history

FuturePast

Surface-level symbols and manifestations

Continuity: Similarity of Deep-level structures and cultural themes

The Intention of the Self-Revealing GodCreator, Covenant Father, the “I AM”

Present

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horizon. But imagine that some days later we look out from the prow of the ship and we see a large, dark mass rising up above the curved line of the water. We recognize that we are nearing land. Some hours later we look out and we notice that the ship is beginning to approach land where we can see buildings at the foot of the mountains. Finally, we are close enough to see that there is a seaport, there are docks, other ships, warehouses, hotels, restaurants, and people.

Now in each of these four views we perceived a horizon. Each horizon was different. All four horizons were true. All four were incomplete. And the four did not contradict each other. Yet the object of our interest, the data we considered important, the way we reacted to the sight, the perspective from which we observed what we saw differed markedly among the four horizons.

This is the case with our approach to critical theologizing, as shown in Figure 10. The reader should notice that we have drawn four horizons by using triangles. Here the triangles are a graphic attempt to demonstrate the interconnected constellation of meaning that involves both the surface and the deep-levels of each horizon. We conceptualize these horizons as (A) the Older Testament; (B) the Newer Testament; (C) the Critical Theologizers; and (D) the Receptors. Within each horizon there are a variety of contexts, each with its own perspective and understanding. Clearly God’s word must fit a multiplicity of diverse contexts that, despite their individual discontinuity, express commonality of origin and relationship to God. (See Figure 13, below.)

FIGURE 13: Four Horizons of Critical Theologizing, Step Three

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Step Four

At this point it is important for us to recognize that the Newer Testament reflects a careful re-reading of the Older Testament because of the coming of Jesus Christ. The birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, appearances, and ascension of Jesus necessitated a radical re-reading and re-conceptualization of the Older Testament on the part of the disciples of Jesus, of Paul, and the early church. And once again it is important to recognize that at the surface-level there is a greater distance between the horizons of the two testaments, while at the deep-level there is greater proximity in their meanings.

FIGURE 14: Four Horizons of Critical Theologizing, Step Four

The Newer Testament’s Reading of the Older Testament


Surface-level cultural symbols, manifestations and meanings

Distance

Proximity

A B

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The Self-Revealing God Creator, Covenant Father, the “I AM”

Jesus the Messiah, Resurrected Lord, Alpha & Omega

Deep-level cultural themes & meanings

Surface-level cultural symbols, manifestations & meanings

Older Testament

C

DNewer Testament

Criti

cal T

heol

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rs

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Past Future

Continuity:Holy Spirit, Text of Scripture, Covenant, People of God

DistanceDiscontinuity

Dist a

nce Dist ance

Proximity

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B

The Bible

Canonical Scriptures

H O R I Z O N S

FIGURE 15: Four Horizons of Critical Theologizing, Step Five


Step FiveFifthly, we need to recognize that the four ‘horizons’ are not all of the same order. In Figure 15

horizons (A) and (B) are qualitatively different from horizons (C) and (D), due to the uniqueness of God’s revelation as found in the canon. As Evangelical Protestants, we are not willing to open the canon. We know the Newer Testament (horizon B) represents a distinct set of horizons as compared with the Older Testament (horizon A). Yet (A) and (B) together as the Bible, comprise the canonical Scriptures that are normative for us, our only rule of faith and practice. Horizons C and D represent an ongoing process of critical theologizing as the Gospel is re-read and re-contextualized in new contexts over time.

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Step SixWe can view the hermeneutical process as a progression of four movements. In Figure 16 below,

the four movements can be presented as involving an interaction between horizon C and horizons A and B; and between horizon D (the Receptors) and horizon C (the Critical Theologizers) each in their particular re-reading of Horizons A (the Older Testament) and B (the Newer Testament). Following the pattern of the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old Testament, the Critical Theologizers in horizon C approach the text at the surface level of symbols expressed in the discourse-level semantic flow of the text. Let me briefly describe a four-movement process of interaction between horizon C and horizons A and B.

The reader should note that with reference to either the Critical Theologizers or the Receptors, as they interact with another of the horizons, they can do so either emically (self-examination as to their own ways of knowing God) or etically (examining the ways those in the other triangle are expressing the way they know God. I believe this is what David Bosch meant when he spoke of the interaction between the various self-definitions or paradigms evident in the process of critical hermeneutics.Movement 1 (C: 1 to 2):

In this first movement we read the text at face value as a context-specific communication of God’s self-disclosure. Here Critical Contextualizers are aware of the historical, cultural, and worldview distance between themselves and the world of the text of Scripture being read. However, as Critical Contextualizers interact with the text and are immersed in the thought-world of the text, they begin to participate in the second movement.

Movement 2 (C: 2 to 3): The second movement requires a consideration of all the contexts (human, social, cultural, historical) in which God’s self-revelation took place and from which the text emerged. As Critical Contextualizers are immersed in the biblical thought-world of A and B, they delve deeper into the meanings that are being conveyed by the text as related to both the divine and the human authors’ intentions in a particular time and place.

Movement 3 (C: 3 to 4): The third movement begins the process of relating the deep-level structures of meaning in the text with comparable (and relatively close) deep-level structures of meaning in the communicator’s thought-world. An example of this would be Jesus’ commandment regarding agape, self-giving love. Drawing from the thought-world of Deuteronomy whose surface-level structures were distant from those of Jesus’ day, Jesus brings to bear in his own world the deep-level meaning regarding self-giving love that is committed to the welfare of the other. Yet the deep-level injunction is nearly the same in all the horizons: God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ transforms the disciples of Jesus into persons who live out their lives in self-giving love for others. “By this will all people know that you are my disciples: if you love one another” (Jn. 3:35). This is true for all time and for all cultures, yet this truth is to be lived out at the surface-level in very different ways in diverse cultural settings.

Movement 4 (C: 4 to 1): The fourth movement allows the deep level structures of meaning to be transferred into the Critical Contextualizers’ context to transform the surface-level symbols and manifestations in accord with that new understanding of the gospel.

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Step Seven

The final step involves a process of critical hermeneutics between the Critical Contextualizers and the Receptors. Here the four movements outlined above begin all over again when the Contextualizers seek to make relevant in the context of the new Receptors the way the Contextualizers have begin to know God. Notice that the direction of the movements is the same, because we take into consideration the fact that meaning is ascribed by the Receptors, not by the Critical Contextualizers. Thus the movement begins with the Receptors (D) and not the Critical Contextualizers. As shown in Figure 16 above, when the Critical Contextualizers begin to interact with the new Receptors, they will seek to listen and learn how the Receptors in the new context understand not only their own world, but how they are re-reading the Bible and coming to know God in their own horizon. Here there is once again a hermeneutical spiraling of the interaction between the Receptors-in-context, the Critical Contextualizers-in-context, and eventually with the text-in-context. The progression should be clear. Knowing God sets up a process that leads to an appreciation of the horizons in which God has communicated and in which God continues to interact with human beings through the work of the Holy Spirit.

There will come a time when the Receptors will themselves become Critical Contextualizers and the process will continue in a spiraling action to interaction of text, context, and faith community under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit, as shown in Figure 17 below.


Jesus the Messiah, Resurrected Lord, Alpha and Omega

Deep-level structures and cultural themes

Surface-level cultural symbols and manifestations

Old Testament

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D

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mun

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Continuity: Holy Spirit, Text of Scripture, Covenant, Faith Community

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FIGURE 17: The Spiraling Process of Global/Local Critical Contextualization

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Today, this “4-horizon” approach to critical theologizing means that the same Bible is being read, interpreted and understood in multiple ways by one-and-a-half billion Christians around the world speaking many languages and deriving deep-level understanding of the Gospel in the midst of global pluralism. The same God, the same Lord, the same Holy Spirit call the church to re-read the same Bible in infinitely different contexts, languages and worldviews. We are part of a worldwide hermeneutical community gaining new and deeper understanding about God as the Scriptures are allowed to impact ever-new cultural contexts. Here is the wonder of the infinitely communicable gospel of Jesus Christ.

As represented in Figure 18, on a global scale, we all together, equally, read the text. The whole world church becomes a hermeneutical community. The entire Christian church as a hermeneutical community is involved in proclaiming everything it has understood about God to many different peoples in many new contexts (Mt. 28:20)

FIGURE 18:The Global/Local Hermeneutical Community

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Because of human commonality in the midst of phenomenal cultural diversity, critical theologizers have the privilege of learning from their receptors; receiving new insights through illumination by the Holy Spirit about the meaning of God’s revelation in the Bible. Because every context predisposes the people in it to perceive the text in a particular way, each can learn from others and gain new appreciation for what God intended that human beings understand about God in their midst. Each new understanding in turn will enrich the appreciation that others may have of the mighty works that God has done. If God intended all people whom God created to be in relationship with him, how can they know a God of whom they have never heard? And how can they hear, unless someone tells them (Rom. 10:14)? Humans can only know God in the particular context of their horizon. The gospel is understood always in a specific cultural matrix. God uses language and culture in unique ways in each particular time and place. In the final section of this essay I will draw from Paul’s perspective in Galatians and suggest a way forward in critical theologizing that entails one theology amidst many perspectives. There is one Bible, but many readings. 278

C. A Possible Way Forward: One Theology, Many Perspectives (Galatians)We might summarize the first two parts of this essay by means of two complementary observations about critical

theologizing. In the first part of this essay we considered the fact that there is one Church, yet there are many churches. And in the second part we considered the fact that there is one Bible, yet there are many readings. Building on these observations, we could recognize two couplets both involving strong dialectical tensions:

1. All local theologizing is to be critiqued by the world church AND all global theologizing is to be informed, shaped, and critiqued by local churches.

2. All universal truths about God can only be lived out by a particular people and by specific congregations locally AND the local congregation derives its meaning as it is the local manifestation, the local concrete expression of the universal Church of Jesus Christ.

This second observation also implies an important role for narrative theology because what the Church knows about God can only expressed through the acted-out narratives of the lives of persons and congregations. Jesus said as much. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love....This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn. 15:9-13)

So once again we need to ask the question: How co we remain faithful to God’s complete and final revelation in the Older and Newer Testaments and also be proclamationally relevant and missiologically appropriate in our understanding and communication of God’s intended revelation in multiple cultures around the globe today? Let’s turn to the Apostle Paul for help. Paul, the master contextualizer par excellence, affirmed,

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews….To those not having the law I became like one not having the law…so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” (I Cor. 9:19-22 NIV)

Yet earlier in the same passage in I Corinthians Paul also said, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (I Cor 9:16 NIV)

And in Galatians Paul wrote,“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – which is no gospel at all…As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned?” (Gal. 1:6-7, 9 NIV)

How do we walk between these two seemingly contradictory views? How do we maintain the dialectical tension between them without losing either faithfulness to the revelation or contextual appropriateness in our communication? How do Christians and Christian churches from different contexts representing such diverse horizons listen and learn from each other in order to know the same God better each in their own contexts? I believe Paul gives us an indication of a way forward in critical theologizing in the way he develops his thought in Galatians 3 through 6. Here I am re-reading Galatians not from the point of view of law-and-grace (though certainly that is a major theme) but rather from the standpoint of Paul’s thought as a critical contextual theologian. And I think the principle he offers us in Galatians is this: affirm

278 Robert McAfee Brown helped many of us to begin to see the Bible with new eyes in Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes 1984.

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commonalities and acknowledge differences in a trinitarian process of theological reflection. Let me offer the reader a brief outline.

1. God the Father: Common Humanness, Diverse CulturesHaving made his case that Jews and Gentiles alike are “justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus

Christ,” (Gal. 2:16) Paul proceeds to offer a trinitarian viewpoint that can hold in tension twin truths: one Gospel (1:6-9), many perspectives. And the first stone in this trinitarian foundation has to do with God the Father. So Paul harks back to Genesis and speaks of God’s choosing of Abraham and his descendants who are chosen precisely so that in them “all the Gentiles” will be blessed.

“Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed” (3:6-9).

Paul is drawing our attention to the first twelve chapters of Genesis where two complementary facts are spelled out. On the one hand, Genesis affirms three times that God created all humans. All humanity descends from Adam and Eve, all humanity descends from Noah, all humanity derives from Babel. Thus, all the “nations” in the Genesis account are described in the “table of nations” of Genesis 10: “From these (clans of Noah’s sons) the nations spread out over the earth after the flood” (Gen 10:32 NIV). So all humans are cousins, descended from the same family, all are created by the same God.

Yet in the same breath Paul reminds his readers also that Abraham is specially chosen so that in him and in his descendants all the “ethne,” all the “nations” will be blessed. Because the complementary truth of the story in Genesis is that this same God who created all humans is also the one who in judgment and mercy by divine intervention confused the languages at Babel and thus created the multiplicity of cultures in the world. The phenomenal diversity of languages and cultures around the world is also attributed to the direct work of this same God of all who wishes to bless all the nations through the instrumentality of Abraham. Thus, following Paul’s logic, on the basis of creation, we can simultaneously affirm commonalities and acknowledge differences.

2. God the Son: Common Faith, Diverse Faith StoriesPaul now takes the second step in developing his trinitarian viewpoint that can hold in tension the twin truths: one

Gospel (1:6-9), many perspectives. And this second stone in Paul’s trinitarian foundation had to do with God the Son, Jesus Christ.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with

affirm commonalitiesAcknowledge differences,

Common humanness, diverse culturesGOD THE

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Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise....But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God....(Gal. 3:25-4:4-6 NRSV)Paul wants to shout from the rooftops that in Christ the dividing wall is broken, a new humanity has been created,

and all peoples of all cultures are brought together to become members of the same family (cf. Ephesians 2:11-3:19). In fact, in Christ, even the Gentiles become “offspring of Abraham!” In Jesus Christ, all peoples from all cultures (Jews and Gentiles alike) can call God “Abba!”

Yet in the midst of asserting this almost unbelievable truth, Paul also makes reference to the ways in which Paul’s hearers and their society subdivided and separated humans in terms of culture, socio-economics and gender. So Paul recognizes that there are differences between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. But in spite of such differences, all are brought together and created into a new family, the offspring of Abraham. Thus, on the basis of salvation in Jesus Christ, we can simultaneously affirm commonalities and acknowledge differences.

3. God the Holy Spirit: Common Fruit, Diverse GiftsPaul goes on to take the third and final step in developing his trinitarian viewpoint that can hold in tension the twin

truths: one Gospel (1:6-9), many perspectives. And this third stone in Paul’s trinitarian foundation had to do with God the Holy Spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another....Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give

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diverse faith stories, expressions, styles

Common faith;

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up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith....(5:22-6:15 NRSV)

The Holy Spirit comes to all believers in Jesus Christ without any distinction. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit is given to all equally. In Ephesians Paul will say, “There is “one body and one Spirit just as you were called in one hope, one Lord, one faith” (Eph. 4:4-5). Thus, in Acts 2, at Pentecost, the many tongues of flame came from one fire. All together receive the same fruit of the Holy Spirit and are one “family of faith.” (In Ephesians and I Corinthians Paul uses the analogy of the one Body to demonstrate this unity.)

Yet even here while affirming the unity of the Church in the one Holy Spirit Paul interjects the concept of multiplicity and diversity. “All must test their own work....All must carry their own loads....Let us (each) work for the good of all.” (6:4,5,10). Paul alludes to a problem that the readers of Galatians have: “competing against one another, envying one another” (Gal. 5:26 NRSV). So Paul wants his readers to recognize the differences that exist between believers. Thus, following Paul’s logic, on the basis of the Holy Spirit’s creation of one Church, we can simultaneously affirm commonalities and acknowledge differences.

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diverse gifts, diverse ministriesCommon vision, common fruit of the Spirit;

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So how do we manage to hold in dialectical tension the twin truths of one theology, many perspectives? I believe Paul would answer by pointing to Jesus Christ. In the final analysis critical theologizing ultimately must be centered in the cross and resurrection of our Lord. Only there is it possible to have a “new creation” in which we learn to simultaneously acknowledge differences and affirm commonalities.

May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! (Galatians 3:6-9; 25-29; 4:4-6; 5:13-15; 22-26; 6:7-10; 14-15 NRSV)

Conclusion

In this essay I have suggested that the covenant of grace in the Older and Newer Testaments provides clues for our understanding how God’s revealed hiddenness may be expressed in new ways that are always different from, yet always in continuity with, all past moments of God’s self-disclosure throughout human history. This in turn offers us a new epistemological paradigm that can inform both the content and the method of critical theologizing in this new century.

The misfit of the gospel with human cultures has been a perennial problem faced by the church in its mission. The apostle Paul referred to God’s hidden self-disclosure both in terms of the created order and in relation to God’s special revelation in Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:20; 11:33-34). Revealed hiddenness—this is the paradox of divine self-disclosure in human consciousness and the most difficult part of contextualization theory.279 The very fact that we know God only through faith should tell us that we do not know all there is to know about God. In fact, we see only as through a mirror, darkly (I Cor. 13:12). Texts like Job 36:26; Psalm 139:6; Acts 14:16-17; Romans 11:25, 33-336; I. Cor. 2:7; Eph. 3:3; Col. 1:15, 26; I Tim. 1:17; 3:16; and Rev. 10:7 emphasize the mystery and unknowability of God. Many theologians have affirmed this basic characteristic of God’s revelation.280 So the first contextualization of the gospel communication then, involves the mystery of God’s self-revelation in human cultures (Van Engen: 1996, 71-72)..

A second and more complex sense of the misfit of the Gospel with human cultures is the mismatch that came as a result of the Christian missionary movement.281 As the gospel crossed cultural barriers over several centuries, the faith assertions of Christendom did not seem to fit the new cultures encountered with the Gospel. So a progression of attempted solutions were suggested, with an accompanying succession of words like “persuasion,” “Christianization,” “compellere,” “accommodation,” adaptation,” “fulfillment,” “syncretism,” “indigenization,” “transformation,” “enculturation,” and “dialogue.”282

279 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol II, 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1957) 184. Barth devotes an entire paragraph (Par. 27) of this volume to the discussion of the knowledge of God. Barth divides this in two parts: the "terminus a quo" (from which our knowledge proceeds by the grace of God's self-revelation to us) and the "terminus ad quem" (to which our knowledge conduces to faith in the hidden God). Ibid, pp. 179-254). It is important to compare this section of Barth's Dogmatics with Vols. I,2 Par. 17; IV, 1, pp. 483ff; and IV, 3, pp. 135-165.

280 See, e.g., Louis Berkhof. Reformed Dogmatics. (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1932) Part I, Section I, Chapter II; G.C. Berkouwer. General Revelation (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1955, pp. 285-332); Emil Brunner. The Christian Doctrine of God (Phil: Westminster, 1949, pp. 117-136); and Hendrikus Berkhof. Christian Faith (G.R.: Eerdmans, 1979), 41-56, and 61-65

281 Richard Niebuhr highlighted this matter in his famous book Christ and Culture (1951). Charles Kraft took a major step forward beyond Niebuhr in Christianity in Culture (1979).

282 Each of these words represents a particular approach to relating the Gospel to a new culture. Each also entails a particular understanding of God’s self-disclosure in the midst of human cultures and the ability or inability of those cultures to “know” God in the context of their own cultural forms.

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A rather recent word, “contextualization,” involves some difficult theological issues like incarnation, revelation, truth, divine-human interaction, and the shape of corporate religious experience. Contextualization takes seriously the difference between Gospel and culture, and accepts the fact that “the gospel always stands in divine judgment on human culture” (Hiebert 1979a:63). However, in this essay I have suggest that we need to go beyond the initial emphases of contextualization and develop ways in which we may re-contextualize the Gospel in always new local and global contexts. In order to do this we need to engage in critical contextualization (a la Hiebert), in critical hermeneutics (a la Bosch) and in critical theologizing in a global/local process of knowing God in context.

In 1985, Paul Hiebert commented on the relation of gospel and culture.First, the gospel must be distinguished from all human cultures. It is divine revelation, not

human speculation. Since it belongs to no one culture, it can be adequately expressed in all of them....Second, although the gospel is distinct from human cultures, it must always be expressed in cultural forms. Humans cannot receive it apart from their languages, symbols, and rituals. The gospel must become incarnate in cultural forms if the people are to hear and believe....Not only are all cultures capable of expressing the heart of the gospel, but each also brings to light certain salient features of the gospel that have remained less visible or even hidden in other cultures....Third, the gospel calls all cultures to change. Just as Christ’s life was a condemnation of our sinfulness, so the kingdom of God stands in judgment of all cultures....A truly indigenous theology must not only affirm the positive values of the culture in which it is being formulated, but it must also challenge those aspects which express the demonic and dehumanizing forces of evil....All Christians and all churches must continually wrestle with the questions of what is the gospel and what is culture – and what is the relationship between them. If we fail to do so, we are in danger of losing the gospel truths (1985:53-56).So the task of critical theologizing involves a dialectical tension: the Gospel can only be known within cultural

frameworks, yet the Gospel is always distinct from, sometimes affirming of, and often prophetically critical of, all human cultures. These dialectical tensions call for us to begin our critical theologizing from an epistemological framework rather than a communicational one.

Thus, in order to do theology in a globalizing world we could begin from the following presuppositions: (1) that ALL cultures are sinful and fallen and cloud ALL human understanding of God’s revelation; (2) that ALL cultures have some degree of General Revelation or Prevenient Grace whereby certain aspects

of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ may be clearly understood;(3) that ALL Christian revelation must necessarily be incarnated into a culture in order for it to be

understood (it is to be “infinitely translatable” – Lamin Sanneh); (4) that ALL understanding of the Gospel in ALL cultures is partial (we “see as through a glass darkly” – I

Cor. 13); (5) that NO one Christian understanding of the Gospel has a complete grasp of the “essence” God’s

revelation in Jesus Christ; that “contextualization” or (inculturation) is not a goal but rather an epistemological process of seeking to know God in context.

I am beginning to think that my cousin David’s idea was right not only for his pastoral ministry but also for doing theology in a globalizing world. Maybe in the final analysis our job as critical mission theologians is basically to help people know God: nothing more, nothing less.

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Sadowitz, Chris2004 “Recognizing World View and its Relationship to Real Gospel Presentation and Understanding,” Occaional

Bulletin, Evangelical Missiological Society (XVII:2, Spring) 1-4.Sanneh, Lamin

1993 Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Marykoll: Orbis, 1989.Saracco, Norberto.

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1987 Gospel, Church, & Kingdom: Comparative Studies in World Mission Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg.1993 “Church, Kingdom and Missio Dei,” in Van Engen, Gilliland and Pierson, edits. 1993, 82-88.

Schreiter, Robert1985 Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985.

Scott, Waldron.1980 Bring Forth Justice: A Contemporary Perspective on Mission. G.R.: Eerdmans.

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1999 Changing Frontiers of Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis.Smit, Dirkie,

1994 “The Self-Disclosure of God,” in John De Gruchy and C. Villa-Vicencio, edits. 1994, 42-54.Snyder, Howard A., edit.

2001 Global Good News: Mission in a New Context. Nashville: Abingdon.Spindler, Marc R.

1995 “The Biblical Grounding and Orientation of Mission,” in Verstraelen, Camps, Hoedemaker and Spindler, edits. 1995, 123-156.

Stackhouse, Max1988 Apologia: Contextualization, Globalization, and Mission in Theological Education. G.R.: Eerdmans.

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1987 Introduction to Missiology. Pasadena: WCL.Torres, S. and V. Fabella, edits.

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Appropriate Christianity, Pasadena, WCL, forthcoming. Van Engen, Charles, Dean Gilliland and Paul Pierson, edits.

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2004 “The Missional Helix: Example of Church Planting” Monthly Missiological Reflection # 26 [email protected]; see also www.missiology.org.

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CHAPTER FOUR 283 THEOLOGICALLY APPROPRIATE COMMUNICATION

Theological assumptions about the text of Scripture and hermeneutical approaches to the text influence the communicator’s reading of the Bible and understanding of God’s intent. A constructive way to interrelate the various perspectives about God’s intention is to envision a simultaneous encounter of four ‘horizons.’

Sam and Helen Hofman spent a lifetime (over 30 years) in southern Mexico, immersing themselves in the culture and worldview of the Tzeltal Mayan peoples of the highlands of the state of Chiapas. Toward the end of their time among the Tzeltal people, they were asked to lead a team of Tzeltal pastors to do a revision of the Tzeltal Bible translation.

In the middle of this project, Sam wrote,Yesterday I spent all day working on the translation of the word ‘wisdom’ in Proverbs. It had previously been translated sbijil o’tanil, ‘wisdom-heart.’ But the translation committee changed most [of the occurrences of the word ‘wisdom’] to sbijil c’op, ‘wisdom-word.’ That fits better when it refers to a spoken proverb and good advice, but it does not cover the deeper meaning of the word ‘wisdom’ in Proverbs where it includes faith in God, obedience to God’s commands, and making discerning decisions—which is wisdom-heart. Then there is a third Tzeltal word, sbijil jol, ‘wisdom-head,’, which means intelligence and learning. So yesterday I went through Proverbs and decided which of the three Tzeltal words fit each verse best. It now goes back to the committee for their OK.

Wisdom is one of the key theological concepts in Proverbs having to do with a person’s faith relationship to God—both in terms of understanding and in the way that is lived out in life. By way of example, Brown (2000) identifies (among other uses throughout the Old Testament) the following types of meaning for the word in Proverbs:

Wise in the administration of affairs (Prov. 20:26 Shrewd, crafty, cunning (Prov. 30:25) Wise in one’s own eyes (Prov. 3:7; 26:5, 12, 16; 28:11) Prudent (Prov. 16:14; 11:29; 29:8,9,11) Wise, ethically and religiously (Prov. 10:8; 16:21; 10:1; 15:20; 13:1; 23:24; 25:12) Wise learner (Prov. 14:15;17:28; 12:15; 1:5; 18:15; 21:11; 10:14; 15:31; 9:8,9) Wise teacher, a sage (Prov. 15:7; 12:18; 15:2; 16:23; 13:14; 13:20) The wise are prosperous (Prov. 21:20; 14:3; 3:35; 14:24; 24:5) The wise one is a blessing to others (Prov. 11:30; 21:22; 15:12)

Notice that most of these varied ‘meanings’ of wisdom in Proverbs are almost all derived from an interpretation of the author’s intent in the semantic flow of the text. And in English we must create whole phrases to describe the meanings.

On the other hand, Sam Hofman discovered that the Tzeltal language was more precise than Sam’s English. And the receptors noticed that the semantic flow of the concepts influenced the intended meaning of the word ‘wisdom’ in Proverbs.

“How did you decide which Tzeltal term to use?” I asked.284

Sam responded, “I found that I had to use all three terms. Following a contextual reading of the text, I found I had to select the most appropriate reading of the text – whatever fit best. What kind of wisdom was the text trying to talk about? I had to give this careful thought, because the Tzeltal was linguistically more precise than my own English worldview and language.”

Clearly, wisdom also varies greatly within the New Testament and in comparison with the Old Testament. Thus, in relation to this concept, Sam discovered that he had to work with all four ‘horizons’ that we will describe in this chapter.

283 El siguiente artí culo es el manuscrito pre-publicación de lo que llegó a ser el Capítulo 4 de R. Daniel Shaw and Charles Van Engen. Communicating God’s Word in a Complex World: God’s Truth or Hocus Pocus N.Y.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pp 67-100.

284 1. Telephone conversation by Chuck with Sam Hofman, July 12, 2002.


A Hermeneutical Approach to the BibleGrant Osborne defined hermeneutics as “that science which delineates principles or methods for

interpreting an individual author’s meaning (1991:5).” In his work, New Testament Exegesis, Gordon Fee describes how he sees the difference between exegesis and hermeneutics.

The term “exegesis” is used… in a consciously limited sense to refer to the historical investigation into the meaning of the biblical text. Exegesis, therefore, answers the questions, What did the biblical author mean? It has to do with what he said (the content itself) and why he said it at any given point (the literary context). Furthermore, exegesis is primarily concerned with intentionality: What did the author intend his original readers to understand?

Historically, the broader term for the science of interpretation which included exegesis, was hermeneutics....Hermeneutics has come to focus more on meaning as an existential reality, that is, what these ancient sacred texts mean for us. (Fee 1993:27).In terms of a hermeneutical approach to the Bible, some scholars feel that because the text is buried in

an ancient context of which we know very little today, we cannot elucidate the original meaning and so are confined to establishing only what the text means today in our present, varied contexts. On the other hand, Osborne, among many others, argues, as we would, “that the original meaning is a legitimate, even necessary, concern and that hermeneutics encompasses both what it meant (then) and what it means (now)” (1991:5).

Kaiser and Silva built on this to explain that in examining a passage of the Bible, “The question about the meaning of (a) passage can be considered at various levels” (1994:20). They mention the following eight levels:

1. The linguistic level: a translation from the original languages of Scripture.2. The historical setting (culture, geography, etc.).3. The teaching of the passage for today’s reader.4. The historicity of the narrative.5. The literary setting in which the narrative takes place.6. The broader canonical context: how does the passage relate to the whole canon?7. The history of interpretation: how has this passage been understood throughout the history of

the church?8. The present significance of the passage (Kaiser and Silva 1994: 20-22).

To this we would add two more:9. The cultural worldview of the text as compared to the worldview of the communicator.10. The meaning and significance of the text for the hearers of the communicator’s message in the

hearers’ worldview.Traditionally, hermeneutics has involved the examination of, and reflection upon, the dynamic

interrelationship of at least these three elements as shown in Figure 4:1:

FIGURE 4:1The Three Traditional Elements of the Hermeneutical Question:

Author, text, CommunicatorThe Author The Text The Communicator

In chapter 1 we made a case for the fact that the Bible has a divine Source as well as human authors. Thus, Kaiser and Silva affirm that, “Because the Bible purports to be a word from God, the task of locating meaning is not finished until one apprehends the purpose, scope, or reason (indeed, the theology) for which that text was written” (1994: 34). With specific reference to the Old Testament, Robert Hubbard states:

A method that takes the text at face value, transcendent claims and all, may be the more truly objective one since it leaves all options open, even the possibility of supernatural activity in history. In actual fact, read straightforwardly, the Bible does present God as very much involved directly in the day-to-day world. Only a method that reckons with the OT’s “faith” dimensions can be truly “historical exegesis” – that is, one that does full justice to all levels of meaning present in the text (R. Hubbard et al 1992:35).

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The Author The TextThe CommunicatorThe ReceptorContextContextContextContextCommunityCommunityCommunityCommunityWorldviewWorldviewWorldviewWorldview


Thus our hermeneutical task must include an awareness of God’s intention. We need to add a component to our diagram (see Figure 4:2).

FIGURE 4:2The God’s Intended Meaning

Kaiser and Silva emphasize the need to include the receptor in the communication mix.There is no doubt that the great contribution of our [20th] century to the hermeneutical debate will be our concern for the reader and for the contemporary application and significance that a past meaning has for today. One must be careful, however, to follow the lead of authorial intention and to make clear any connection seen between a principle in a text and modern-day circumstances. Focusing on the significance of a text should never lead to proposing a new meaning of the text that is not actually taught in Scripture. To do otherwise is to risk the loss of authority, for such inferences would have no part in the written nature of the text and thus would not be authoritative for us today....As Hirsh has pointed out, the basis for validating the meaning of any passage can only be located in the meaning (i.e., the sense) that the author intended (1994:44-45).

From a missiological, and communicational perspective, an additional component that is crucial for our hermeneutical universe involves an awareness of the meaning that the receptor ascribes to the communication, based on the receptor’s context, community and worldview, as shown in Figure 4:3:

FIGURE 4:3Four Elements of Gospel Communication:

Author, Text, Communicator and Receptor

The Brief Overview of Modern Hermeneutics Beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), whom Osborne calls “the father of modern

hermeneutics,” (Osborne 1991:368) and followed by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the crux of the discussion has dealt with what part of the hermeneutical continuum (author, or text, or interpreter) should be emphasized. While Schleiermacher and Dilthey emphasized an author-centered hermeneutic (broadly-speaking), Hans-Georg Gadamer led others in emphasizing the text, speaking of a “fusion of horizons” between that of the text

The Author The Text The Communicator

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and that of the interpreter. “Thus both language and text are autonomous entities with a life of their own.” (Osborne 1991:369)285

Around the middle of the last century there was a convergence of interest in bringing attention to the receptor rather than just the author. This convergence included the French structuralists, a growing interest in semiotics, and the works of the poststructuralists, followed by the advocates of reader-response hermeneutics moving toward deconstruction. Together all this pushed the conversation toward the receptor end of the continuum, advocating a near eclipsing of the text in the subjectivity of the reader. Osborne concludes, “On the basis first of phenomenology and then of structuralism, the emphasis has shifted further and further from any (possibility of affirming authorial intent) to stress first on pre-understanding and then on an ontological displacement of original meaning by the reader’s encounter with the text. This has culminated in reader-response criticism, in which the reader recreates his own text, and in deconstruction, in which reader and text are [both] deconstructed” (Osborne 1991: 385-386).

Fortunately, there have been moderating voices calling for a reexamination of the importance of both the authorial intent and the autonomy of the text. While there have been a plethora of voices discussing the implications of this thrust,286 we have found Grant Osborne and Anthony Thiselton, most helpful for the purposes of this book. Both are interested in preserving authorial intent, while at the same time affirming the impact that the reader’s cultural horizon has on the reader’s comprehension of the text. This led Thiselton to develop the concept of The Two Horizons (1980) and Osborn to offer the idea of The Hermeneutical Spiral (1991). We will build on both of these contemporary theoreticians.

So then, what does it mean for us to investigate the meaning of a particular passage in the Bible? Kaiser and Silva suggest that “Before continuing directly our search for the Bible’s meaning, we need to look more carefully at the very word meaning itself....Different senses of this word are intimately connected with several other key concepts of hermeneutics, including those of referent, sense, intention, and significance.” (1994:34)

For us, exegesis relates to working with what the author said, the actual words, phrases, paragraphs, and on through to the entire semantic discourse. Hermeneutics is an examination of the presuppositions (cultural, methodological, communicational, and theological) that influence the interpretation of the meaning however it may be applied, irrespective of the forms it may take. The word hermeneutics is now being used in several different ways, so we need to briefly present the different approaches to ‘hermeneutics’ in order to establish what we intend by using the word.

Different Kinds of HermeneuticsFor the purpose of clarification we will briefly describe five different kinds of ‘hermeneutics.’ At the outset

let us be clear: hermeneutics is always a contextual issue. But there are major differences in the way hermeneutical questions have been associated with matters of contextualization.Reading the Signs of the Times

One way the word ‘hermeneutics’ has been used in the recent past is to speak about reading the present historical moment, seeking to understand the significance and meaning of various elements in that context as they apply to God’s work in the world—and subsequently drawing out conclusions as to how the Church may participate in what God is doing in the world.

Within the World Council of Churches, from the 1950s on, hermeneutics came to mean a reading of the signs of the times in history. This approach involved both an historical process and analysis of the present context. It meant discerning what God was doing in history and joining that. Deeply impacted by J. C. Hoekendijk’s profound post-World War II pessimism about the church, this perspective brought about a change in the mission order, from God-church-world to God-world-church. What mattered, according to Hoekendijk, was the presence of shalom.

World and kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived of as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts; it is the world which has been reconciled (2 Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John 16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38) – the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the kingdom (Hoekendijk 1952:333)Hoekendijk wanted the Kingdom of God, shalom, and service in the world to replace the church as the

central locus of mission and evangelization. Hoekendijk’s emphasis also gave strength to a growing 2852. For excellent summaries of these developments in philosophical and linguistic approaches to hermeneutics, see Osborne (1991:365-396);

Thiselton (1980:326-356); Kaiser and Silva (1994 chapters 12-13); and Mueller-Vollmer (1989:1-53). For a theological reflection on these developments, see Otto Weber (1981:308-345).

2863. In this vein, Osborne mentions Paul Ricoeur, David Tracy, Brevard Childs and James Sanders. Also David Kelsey and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein are important as is the work of E.D. Hirsch who “separates ‘meaning’ (the act of comprehending a text on the basis of the whole semantic field) and ‘significance’ (the act of inserting that meaning into different contexts, such as modern culture)” (Osborne 1991:393).

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awareness of the possible role the churches might play in socioeconomic and political liberation. Once the church became aware of what God was doing in the world (through a hermeneutic of the present historical, economic, and socio-political situation), the church was called to begin to act in ways that would support this ‘mission’ of God. In other words, if there was any role for the church at all, it was to be a utilitarian one. The church could be accepted if it was willing to become an appropriate instrument, a useful tool, in bringing about revolutionary change. This utilitarian ecclesiology was particularly strong in Latin American theologies of liberation’ (Van Engen 1996:155).

This perspective has strongly influenced the missiological directions of the World Council of Churches from the gathering of the International Missionary Council in Willingen in 1952, to the Canberra gathering of the Seventh Assembly of the WCC in 1991. The centerpiece of this viewpoint is a specific approach to carrying out a ‘hermeneutic’ of the present historical moment. This approach is problematic for evangelical missiology. Such a perspective seeks to equate biblical contexts with present-day contexts—what God is doing in the world in the here and now is superimposed on what God has already done in the biblical context, e.g. liberating people from oppression. Following this approach the Bible ends up taking a back seat to contemporary socio-political issues, and the church is devalued as merely one of several possible agents of social change. This ‘hermeneutic’ lays heavy stress on the contemporary readers of the text, downplaying the matter of God’s intention.The Hermeneutical Circle

For the past forty years, Latin Americans have been at the forefront of a second type of ‘hermeneutics.’ This has to do with the ‘hermeneutical circle’ as it was re-articulated and re-interpreted by people like Juan-Luis Segundo (1976), among others.287 The hermeneutical circle of Latin American Liberation Theology spearheaded an intentional process whereby one’s contextual hermeneutic moved toward a commitment to the preferential option for the poor, which in turn opened one’s eyes to re-read the meaning of Scripture for today’s situation (a hermeneutics of significance). This provides new lenses through which one can again re-read the context of ministry.

Segundo began with the present context of a people’s reality and developed four decisive steps: (1) a people’s plausibility structure (to use Peter Berger’s term) leads to a particular agenda or question; (2) a people’s agenda, question, or existential concern provides an approach to the text; (3) understanding the text from the point of view of the people’s agenda provides a particular application back to the context; and (4) that application leads to a new agenda or question that can be implemented in the context, which starts the cycle over again. This process leads to a circular structure where present context informs the meaning of the text and maintains the entire circular flow—hence the term ‘hermeneutical circle’

In Segundo’s methodology, certain ideas (Segundo calls them “ideologies”) emerge out of a particular context examined by an interpreter with eyes that involve a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’288 These concepts are, then, a reflection of the interpreters’ perspective, a hermeneutic of that situation that forces questions about the metaphors used by the people in those circumstances. Based on the new insights into the context gained in such a re-examination, the interpreters should then re-read the Scriptures. As the interpreters re-read the Scriptures, they see things they did not see before because they are now asking new questions that reflect a new understanding derived from the new context. Drawing from the new insights the interpreters have gained from Scripture, they encounter anew their context with new insight derived from their new reading of Scripture. Figure 4:4 presents a diagram of this process.

2874. See, for example, Clodovis Boff (1987:63-66; 132-153); Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff (1987:32-35); Guillermo Cook (1985:104-126); Severino Croatto (1987:36-65); Samuel Escobar (1987:172-179); Dean Ferm (1986:25-26); Ismael Garcia (1987:12-16, 28); Gustavo Gutierrez (1974:13); Roger Haight (1985:46-59); Jose Miguez Bonino (1975:90-104); C Rene Padilla (1985:83-91); Robert Schreiter (1986:75-94); Juan Luis Segundo (1976:7-38); Gordon Spykman et al (1988:228-230); Jon Sobrino (1984: 1-38); and Raul Vidales (1979:48-51).

2885. In Segundo’s thought there are four decisive moments or factors influencing the hermeneutical circle:1) There is our way of experiencing reality that leads us to ideological suspicion. (Mannheim’s three elements are involved in Segundo’s

understanding of this first stage: (a) a concrete evaluational experience of theology; (b) an act of the will on the part of the theologian with respect to his/her theology; (c) a direction in treating new problems that derives from this act of the will.

2) There is the application of our ideological suspicion to the whole ideological superstructure in general and to theology in particular.3) There comes a new way of experiencing theological reality that leds us to exegetical suspicion, that is, the suspicion that the prevailing

interpretation of the Bible has not taken important pieces of data into account.4) We have our new hermeneutic, that is, our new way of interpreting the fountainhead of our faith (i.e., Scripture) with the new elements

at our disposal. (Segundo 1976: 7-38).

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FIGURE 4:4Segundo’s Hermeneutical Circle

Following this structure, some theologians have used the term ‘exegeting the context’ to signify a paradigm of perception of reality (which is not quite the same thing as was meant by the World Council of Churches). This process is extremely important for mission in the city. What the city looks like, its symbols and metaphors, must be interpreted. What are the root metaphors for urban peoples? If the root metaphor of city is ‘chaos,’ for example, it reflects lack of structure, and ultimately loneliness in a crowd—meaninglessness. In contrast, if the root metaphor is ‘order,’ the emphasis shifts to issues of power, law and order, and supporting and defending the powerful. If, on the other hand, the root metaphor is ‘harmony,’ the approach to the city radically changes once again.289 Each of these metaphors has implications for missiology—transforming chaos into meaning, order into interaction and harmony with the Creator himself. The hermeneutical circle seeks to build a dynamic interactivity between the contemporary context and the text of Scripture. 290

The Local Congregation as a Hermeneutic of the GospelLesslie Newbigin used the word ‘hermeneutic’ in a completely different way that placed the congregation

in the center as the interpreter of the gospel for the world (Newbigin 1989). This ecclesiological approach provides a model for the world to read the gospel through the instrumentality of a congregation. In John 14 Jesus says, “by this shall all people know that you are my disciples, in that you love one another.” All people will ‘read’ the congregation and in the congregation they will find meaning. What is love? How is it manifest? The meaning of love will have different symbols and relationships for people of different congregations, resulting in diverse ‘readings.’ When interpreting John 14, the expression of the gospel is the community of disciples or believers. Newbigin says:

The primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation....The only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it....This community will have, I think, the following six characteristics.

2896. This is the thesis of Fletcher Tink’s Ph. D. dissertation (1994)2907. Van Engen applied this methodology to a missiological hermeneutic related to mission in the city. See Van Engen (1994: 241-270); Van

Engen (1996b 90-104).

-- Juan Luis Segundo 1976:7-38

CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY(Suspicion)

A New Encounter with the Context

Scripture

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•It will be a community of praise.•It will be a community of truth.•It will be a community that does not live for itself.•It will be a community...sustained in the exercise of the priesthood in the world.•It will be a community of mutual responsibility.•It will be a community of hope (Lesslie Newbigin 1989: 227-233).

Hermeneutics as a Re-presentation of Biblical MeaningIn traditional theology, there is a progression from personal Bible reading, to Bible study, and then to

exegesis, and further to biblical theology. Exegesis works with the technical structure of the text: the words and the grammar. It seeks to establish the text from which meaning can be ascertained—exegesis accounts for what the words say—not what they mean. Synthesis increases through the progression from Bible reading to exegesis. Hendrikus Berkhof (1985) maintains theologians cannot do systematic theology unless they start by simply reading the Bible. Sometimes dogmaticians fail to do that. Exegesis is the product of understanding the words, hermeneutics accounts for the next step in the progression.

There is, then, a distinction between hermeneutics and exegesis. Propositional proclamation is at the exegesis level: what the words say. Yet we also know that the narrative is as revelatory as the words (Osborne 1991:149ff.). Together they create a word/deed combination that conveys both surface-level structure and deep-level meaning. The deed makes the word relevant, transformational and concrete. The word explains the meaning, significance and purpose of the deed. We must not work with the text only in terms of structures. We must move to hermeneutic in terms of both the original context and present day contexts, including the circumstances of the communicators.

Hermeneutics draws us toward a deeper understanding of God’s communication with the world. Once we start working with full text, we are at a hermeneutical level that calls for theological understanding and response to the meaning, which then forces us to go back and re-read once again the text in light of what went before, and what comes after as we discussed in chapter 1. So we need to ask about deep-level meanings, that is, we need an approach that takes the text seriously and builds a theology out of it that is both true to the author’s intent and still takes the contemporary context seriously. In short, we need to do biblical theology.

A Biblical and Theological HermeneuticThe final approach we wish to emphasize involves an investigation of the authorial intent, what we

understand the divine and human authors of the text itself to be saying in specific biblical contexts. Therefore we approach the text exegetically in order to be theological.291 Properly done, this progression leads to a hermeneutical exploration of the context of God’s revelation. In this process the emphasis is not so much on what it says (exegesis) but rather on what it means (hermeneutics). Traditional exegesis tries to get at the original meaning in terms of the author’s intent. However, every message enters into a context that in some measure shapes the meaning. Therefore, exegesis becomes a progressive search for surface-level manifestations of the text, the forms that were necessary in order to convey the meaning as the authors of the Old and New Testaments (what we will shortly define as horizons A and B) intended. In contrast, hermeneutics is always context-sensitive and searches for the deep-structure meanings. Since every message is communicated in a context, the focus is primarily on the implications of the set of circumstances within which the text was presented. This understanding allows communicators to project the message of the text into new contexts: their own and that of a people receiving God’s word (horizons C and D, as we will explain shortly).

If this is true, questions must be asked pertaining to the nature of the source contexts involving the variety of differing cultural situations found in the Bible. Similarly, the communicators’ context and its impact on how they understand Scripture, and the receptors’ context in which the message will be understood must be taken seriously. The communicators’ task is to understand the original intent as discerned in the text and to pass that on to the receptors without inserting overly intrusive personal assumptions that emerge from cultural, ecclesiastical, and theological biases. Theologically appropriate communication is interested in meaning at every level, in every horizon.

From a hermeneutical encounter with particular passages, we attempt to discern the original theological intention of a biblical author. That author, in turn, must be considered not in isolation but in relation to the rest of the Bible. It is not acceptable for pastors or translators to take a book and preach from it or translate it in isolation from the rest of the Bible, failing to associate the material with the original intent of the writer and with the rest of biblical revelation. This broader kind of association requires an understanding of the sweep of biblical history as each book has its place in the context of both a particular time and place and as a part of a

2919. See Karl Barth (1958, I. 2, p. 466). This is mentioned also by Otto Weber (1981:310).

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whole within the canon as accepted by those who held to the canonical criteria we presented in chapter 2. This is why references to other parts of the Bible within a particular text are so vital to the message of

the author. In the author’s time, these served to verify the authenticity of a particular writing as it related to the whole. A book of the Bible can never be fully understood in isolation. Arthur Glasser warns us strongly that the work we do as an expression of contextualization today, must reflect a disciplined effort to submit to the whole word of God. Otherwise, we become like the false prophets in the Bible whose efforts reflected distortions of truth and destructive deviations from God’s central concerns. (Glasser 1989.) This, of course, takes seriously the whole concept of discourse analysis which we will develop in subsequent chapters.

An example of this broader hermeneutical approach can be found in Luke’s two-volume work in the New Testament. The full meaning of Luke’s message cannot be adequately grasped without the communicator working with Old Testament prophecy, Old Testament theology of history and the Old Testament conjunction of word and deed in God’s actions. Unless we understand the original intent of the prophets we have no way to see how Luke, guided by the Holy Spirit, utilized those texts for the benefit of his listeners. We have no way to appreciate how Luke used those prophecies throughout the Luke-Acts corpus if we fail to exegete them in their own context first.

Similarly, an understanding of Mark as the memoirs of Peter is seriously lacking unless a person appreciates Peter’s story and spiritual pilgrimage in conjunction with his writing in I and II Peter. Without that, the book of Mark cannot be fully understood.

There is no such thing as a stand-alone text, isolated from communication. We cannot preach one book of the Bible by itself treating it as a self-contained entity in isolation from the rest of the Bible. The author or authors of each book of the Bible clearly had other parts of revelation in mind when they wrote (see Figure 2:1 for an example from II Peter. If this is true for whole books, how much more important it is when considering isolated passages. We must avoid proof-texting. Each part of Scripture must be seen in its broader socio-linguistic and theological context.

Based on this process of theological hermeneutics, we take the next step to consider the meaning that others have seen in the text down through the history of the church. How do those ideas ‘translate’ in terms of the life of Christian people—the church? This question relates to the historical development of dogma that we noted in chapter 3. How do those ideas interact with other ideas to develop a theology? How do those ideas relate to the societies in which Christians now reside? How do those ideas direct the church in interfacing with the world around it? The answers to those questions add to our understanding of the meaning of specific texts in particular and of Scripture in general. This moves the discussion of a wider hermeneutical arena that includes all the contexts in which the gospel finds itself. Hence as we presented in chapter 2, we must consider the nature of the source text and then (as developed in chapter 3) connect the text in relation to the context of the receptors, both ancient and contemporary.

This process was evident in Hosea’s handling of God’s proclamation to the People of Israel. Peter’s preaching to the crowd on the day of Pentecost serves as another example. Peter exegeted a text from the prophet Joel and applied it to the specific issues faced by the Pentecost crowd. Peter was convinced he was being faithful to the text and yet he developed meaning that had a new impact on his audience—and three thousand people were added to the church that day. A further example comes from the concept of Jesus as the Lamb of God. See Appendix 1 for an extended discussion of the biblical and theological development this concept provides as a demonstration of a biblical and theological hermeneutic. Furthermore, we applied this dynamic to present-day audiences in the Samo and Mayan contexts. Sam Hofman discovered new understanding of ‘wisdom’ because of his Tzeltal translation experience. These examples bring us to an appreciation of the need to focus on the communicability of the message, a key concept that pervades this book. The meaning being communicated must be the same as the meaning in the source text. But that meaning comes in a totally different package because it is a totally different time and place. We must now apply our hermeneutical approach to the development of theologically appropriate communication.

The Hermeneutical SpiralIn this book we have emphasized the re-presentation (making present again in the here-and-now) of the

intended meaning of God’s self-revelation in a variety of contexts. As we read Scripture, it is possible to seek out root metaphors that serve to conceptualize both the biblical contexts and the present context. Development of the Spiral Concept

Segundo developed a hermeneutical circle based on reality in terms of the new questions that emerge from both the biblical and the contemporary contexts. These new questions and new insights, in turn, provide a rationale for new action. Segundo was trying to allow for progressive development in theological

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investigation. As a post-Vatican II Roman Catholic, his thesis was grounded in the possibility of the historical development of dogma. There emerges a new way of experiencing theological reality because reality is now seen with new eyes (Segundo 1985).

Orlando Costas (1976) developed a praxeological approach based on a hermeneutical spiral. He began with the context of the poor in Latin America. Having interacted with them he felt their pain in the context of economic, social and political oppression. Steeped in this perspective he re-read Scripture. In doing this he ‘discovered’ the place of the poor in Scripture: “the poor you have with you always” (Mat 26:11). Once he re-read Scripture, he discerned the preferential option that God has for the poor. This moved him to solidarity with the oppressed that stimulated a further re-reading of the Bible. Theologically, great care must be taken here. As one progresses along the spiral, it is easy to lose sight of the centrality of God’s self-disclosure in the text. But the process does provide a model for connecting present-day contexts with Scriptural contexts where similar themes are evident, a spiraling that may contribute to new theological development in contemporary contexts.

Grant Osborne also presents the idea of hermeneutics as a spiral structured to incorporate ever-broader contexts that lead from the text to the initial receptors of the text. He then continued to expand from that source to impact contemporary receptors who interpret the meaning with respect to their own context (1991: 323-326). Osborne recognized the need for the entire process to be grounded in the text, not primarily in the context. Here is where the Evangelical appreciation of inspiration informs and shapes the interpretation of Scripture and the theology that flows from it. The primary source must be the first author, God, who through the thought-forms and context-specific actions and worldviews of human authors communicates with human beings in a particular time and place for a particular purpose. Once this perspective is understood, the message from above can be applied to any context. Because of the particularity of each context, a reexamination of the text is necessary in order to enable communicators to appreciate anew how the Bible speaks to people everywhere down through the ages in always new circumstances that give expanded meaning to the old, old story.

We suggest taking this process one step further to better understand both the biblical text and the socio-linguistic contexts in which we communicate the gospel, in order to make a missiological impact. Drawing from Segundo’s circle and Costas’ and Osborne’s idea of spiral, we can identify the text of Scripture as that which ultimately points to Jesus Christ. If we then connect the text with contemporary cultural contexts we begin a conversation between the text and the context, a dialogue that informs our understanding of each. By so doing we move from old (text) to new (context), shaping our understanding of the old while at the same time moving understanding forward for our day.

We caution here that we do not intend this to be read as theology either ‘from above’ or ‘from below.’ What we see in the spiral is culture on the one hand and revelation on the other, and each informs the other. As we go deeper, we draw new water from the same revelational well. Each swing of the spiral brings new understanding of both the text and the context. It gives a bigger picture of an awesome God and a greater appreciation for God’s creation. This sets up a kind of spiral as represented in Figure 4:5.

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FIGURE 4:5The Hermeneutical Spiral

Incarnational identification with the receptors: receptor-oriented communication

Contexutalizing movement of the communicators from their understanding of God’s message to encounter the people and culture they seek to address with the Gospel

New missiological perspectives in new understanding of the receptors

A new perception of the signifi-cance of the Gospel in a particular context

A new under-standing of God’s mission

“Knowing God” in a new context

Human Level

THE HERMENEUTICAL SPIRAL

Divine LevelGod’s intent, God’s message, God’s mission (missio Dei)

Discovery of new faith dimensions through a re-reading of Scripture

A new view of the Gospel in the midst of a missional church sent into new contexts

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Missional Intent of the SpiralThe spiraling process of missiological hermeneutics begins with missional intention. The purpose is

gospel proclamation through crossing barriers. Like Jesus, gospel communicators ‘go down,’ as they enter the context. We have long called this ‘incarnational mission.’ It leads to identification with the receptor. Kraft called this ‘receptor-oriented communication’ (Kraft 1979:147). This first step leads to a discovery of new faith dimensions as it forces us to re-read Scripture, based on what we have learned from the context. This leads to a new missiological perspective of the understanding of the receptors. It creates a new solidarity between communicators and receptors. They step forward incarnationally, leading to further receptor-oriented communication and a new re-reading of the text. This creates a new perception of what the church (the community of faith) is to be about in a particular context. This leads to a missiological reading of the text, including a new understand of God’s mission and thus a new appreciation of the reality in which God’s mission takes place. This in turn leads to a new understanding of the dynamics of an on going hermeneutic. This spiraling progresses through text, context, and missional proclamation to reach a hurting world that desperately needs the reconciliation found in Christ in order to become the People of God.

Another way to look at this is to work with the semantic flow of the text and think of worldview themes as pathways of the spiraling between text and context. This is the externalization of a movement that is still centered in the text. We cannot get away from the words and the grammar. We need to deal with them. The text remains text. Yet we must also consider the semantic structures which draw heavily from the context. Socio-cultural and linguistic constraints helped shape the text in the first place, and will also impact what people in the contemporary context understand. If, in the text, the gospel communicator discovers deep human root metaphors, these may provide pathways to let that truth explode outward to shine from the text through narrative, through biblical theology, through new questions, to the present context. This in turn sends us back to re-read the text with the new context in mind (now we are spiraling). In so doing, we are still being faithful to the text. Yet we have deepened our understanding of what is happening in the hermeneutic of the interaction of text and context. Thus we gain new insight, new perspective, in keeping with our original definition for hermeneutics.

We have now moved beyond the hermeneutical circle. We are not superimposing the agendas of the context on the text. Rather, following Osborne, we bring the text to a context. We do this, however, mindful of the issues in the context, seeking similar contexts in the Bible. By interacting with the issues, we seek to bring God into the situation—God did this before and God will do it again, thus illuminating God’s People concerning God’s will for them. What has God said about the issues at hand? What are the contextually appropriate root metaphors? We can search the Bible to see where similar metaphors appear and re-present them (make them present-tense once again) in the new context. We find where God, in fact, had something to say about the issues facing people in today’s world and allow the biblical text to speak to people in their circumstances.

However, we must also keep in mind that the receptors of our gospel presentation perceive the Bible’s meanings through their own understanding of reality, their worldview, and the contextual glasses with which they read the text. The text does not change, but the local interpretation of it does change. The resulting theology flows from the interaction of their perception of reality and the intent of the text. Hence, proclaiming a message or translating Bible passages that reflect, to a large degree, the issues or circumstances that people bring to their understanding of the text is a valuable exercise, enabling them to get it right. Through this process communicators gain new information, a new understanding of Scripture. Such new perception comes as the fruit of the hermeneutical spiral we have been developing. Another way to describe this hermeneutical process is to view it as the interaction of four horizons.

The Four Horizons As Missiological HermeneuticsDrawing from Friedrick Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl before him, Hans-Georg Gadamer, professor of

philosophy at Heidelberg from 1949 to 1968, suggested the notion of ‘horizons’ as a way of describing and relating (a) a person’s perspective within a particular context of history and (b) the text that arises out of a past historical context that person may be studying. Gadamer’s work was a way of moving beyond the historicism of European (especially German) thought of the nineteenth century. Gadamer, however, proceeded to make the case that such historical studies involve a ‘fusion of horizons’ that bring together the reader’s present horizon and the horizon of the text as the reader studies the past historical context (See Mueller-Vollmer 1989, 269-273). Jürgen Habermas critiqued Gadamer from the point of view of what Habermas called “the ontological construction of hermeneutical consciousness,” since it would appear that Gadamer’s two ‘horizons’ get melded and confused (cf. Mueller-Vollmer 1989, 294-319).

Avoiding Gadamer’s unfruitful “fusion of horizons,” Thiselton proposed the dynamic interaction of two

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horizons, keeping the two horizons (the biblical text and the interpreter-in-context) separate but interactive. Both are affirmed, both exist in their own right, and both affect the other: “The goal of biblical hermeneutics is to bring about an active and meaningful engagement between the interpreter and text, in such a way that the interpreter’s own horizon is reshaped and enlarged” (Thiselton 1980:xix).

Grant Osborne summarizes Thiselton’s viewpoint:Thiselton finds four levels at which the “illusion of textual objectivism” becomes

apparent. (1) Hermeneutically, the phenomenon of preunderstanding exerts great influence in the interpretive act. This subjective element cannot be denied. (2) Linguistically, communication demands a point of contact between the sender and the recipient of a message, and this distinction provides a major barrier to recovering a text’s meaning. The differing situations of the hearers remove any possibility of a purely objective interpretation. (3) These problems are magnified at the level of literary communication, where other factors such as narrative-time, plot development, characterization and dialogue enter the picture.... (4) Philosophically, meaning is never context-free but is based on a large list of unconscious assumptions between sender and receiver. When these connecting links are not present, “literal meaning” becomes extremely difficult if not impossible, for meaning can never be context-free” (1991, 386).

Subsequently Osborne drew heavily from Thiselton in developing what he called, “the hermeneutical spiral of biblical interpretation” (1991). Osborne’s spiral goes beyond the ‘two-horizon’ perspective and recognizes that there is a dynamic, continuing, constantly-changing interaction of text, community, and context through time in relation to meaning. Osborne (1991, 366-415) gives a helpful overview of the issues of meaning as they relate to the problem of the relation of author-text-reader. In this book we have depended on Osborne’s work at a number of points.

Borrowing from Thiselton, D.A. Carson pointed out that: Any Christian[s] who witness cross-culturally must concern [themselves] not only with two horizons, but also with three. [They] must attempt to fuse [their] own horizon of understanding with the horizon of the text; and having done that, attempt to bridge the gap between [their] own horizon of understanding, as it has been informed and instructed by the text, and the horizon of understanding of the person or people to whom [they] minister (Carson 1984a: 17).

This sounds very much like the gospel communication problem we have address throughout this book. Here we wish to expand the horizon concept a step further and suggest four horizons. By ‘horizon,’ we

intend to emphasize the differing worldviews represented in the various contexts, rather than an epistemological perspective as, Gadamer did. There seem to be four horizons, or perspectives, of meaning that inform the Christian’s understanding of what God has said: (A) God’s context-specific intended meaning in revelation found in the Old Testament, (B) God’s revealed intended meaning in the New Testament that involves a new understanding of the Old Testament, (C) the gospel communicator, and (D) the contemporary receptors. In the next series of diagrams we will build the ‘four-horizon’ approach through a series of steps. The ‘four-horizon’ approach will provide the springboard for the remainder of this book.

Step OneWe begin, then, with the recognition of two complementary facts about the human race: that all humans

have much in common and yet human cultures demonstrate a phenomenal degree of diversity. Common humanity: cultural diversity. As we will see in subsequent chapters, these two complementary characteristics of humanity, when applied to matters of culture, linguistics, and communication are the basis for our recognition that there is a great deal of difference between surface-level structures of meaning (including cultural symbols and manifestations), and deep-level structures of meaning (including cultural themes and metaphors).

We must also take into account the fact that the deep-level structures are closely related to the surface-level structures and vice-versa, since the surface-level meanings derive from, and give shape to, the deep-level worldview of people in a culture. Thus, although we need to differentiate between the deep level and the surface-level, they are dynamically and intimately interconnected. Each affects the other. The surface level structures in a culture are quite distinct from those of another culture. People living in different cultures handle pregnancy, birth, rites of passage, and death differently. They handle spiritual understanding in a wide variety of ways. The economic, social, political, and linguistic structures are all immensely different: they differ radically in the surface-level structures that point to deeper meanings. Thus in the following diagrams the

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reader will note that we use triangles to denote the ‘horizons’ with each ‘horizon’ representing the interconnected constellation of meanings that draw from both the surface- and deep-level structures.

Linguists and anthropologists tell us that human deep-level structures of meaning are actually quite close across cultures. They reflect pan-human cultural themes that are shared by people the world over. We believe this is related to being created in the image of God and to sharing a common humanity. This is why Scripture is communicable in all human languages and relevant for all peoples. It reflects in human contexts messages about God the Creator of all. The Holy Spirit is at work enabling human beings in every context to understand what the God who created them intends for them. So Scripture provides a connecting point, continuity with all of humanity, extending back to creation in Adam and Eve and forward to the culmination of all human history in the New Jerusalem. God interacts in the midst of God’s People today, just as he did in biblical times. The biblical narrative unfolds the story of God’s presence through time and space, serving as an example of what God can do in any other context.

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FIGURE 4:6

All the languages, families, tribes, peoples

Common humanity

FuturePast

Surface-level cultural symbols and manifestations & meanings


The Intention of the Self-Revealing GodCreator, Covenant Father, the “I AM”

The Four Horizons of a Missiological Hermeneutics: Step One

Present

Cultural Diversity

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Step TwoThe second step in the process of building a four-horizon hermeneutic includes recognition of the divine

origin of the text of Scripture. As we emphasized in chapter 2, we approach the Bible as a text that has dual authorship: divine and human. So we want to encounter God’s intention in the text, while at the same time recognize that God’s message to humanity has always been conveyed through humans, in the midst of differing human cultures.

This involves us in the matter of the discontinuity and continuity of God’s revelation. The diagram in Figure 4:7 is meant to show the movement of time from left to right: from past, through the present, on the way to the future. And as time progresses, there is discontinuity as God’s message takes on differing surface-level symbols among different cultures in the midst of very different worldviews. The arrows in the diagram are important. They represent progressive revelation and, post-Scripture, the historical development of the church’s understanding of God’s revelation.

Yet there is also continuity, as attested in the biblical text itself. The phrase, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” (Ex 3:6) presupposes continuity. Throughout the Scriptures, it is the same God who speaks: from Genesis to Revelation. The content of the Scriptures themselves purport to be cumulative, building one on another, thus assuming continuity. We add to this the Bible’s Christological affirmations regarding Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, coupled with the continuity of the Holy Spirit throughout.

All of these indicators point to a unity and continuity of the text – predominantly in terms of the deep-level themes, metaphors and meanings – shaped and expressed through ever-changing and ever-different surface-structure cultural symbols. Thus God’s revelation in Scripture appears to involve continuous discontinuity over time.

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Present

FIGURE 4:7The Four Horizons of a Missiological Hermeneutics: Step Two

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Step ThreeThe third step calls for a recognition of all the ‘horizons’ in which God’s revelation occurs. Imagine with

us that we are on a large ship in the middle of the ocean. We look out from the ship and see nothing but water. If we look as far distant as possible on a clear day, we may see the slight curving of a line far away in the distance. This is the curvature of the earth. And where the water of the ocean seems to meet the sky, we see this curving line as a horizon. But imagine that some days later we look out from the prow of the ship and we see a large, dark mass rising up above the curved line of the water. We recognize that we are nearing land. A few hours later we look out and we notice that the ship is beginning to approach land where we can see buildings at the foot of the mountains. Another hour or two brings us close enough to see that there is a seaport, there are docks, other ships, warehouses, hotels, restaurants, and people.

Now in each of these four views we perceived a horizon. Each horizon was different. All four horizons were true. And the four did not contradict each other. Yet the object of our interest, the data we considered important, the way we reacted to the sight, the perspective from which we observed what we saw differed markedly among the four horizons.

This is the case with our approach to biblical hermeneutics, as shown in Figure 4:8. The reader should notice that we have drawn four horizons by using triangles. Here the triangles are a graphic attempt to demonstrate the interconnected constellation of meaning that involves both the surface and the deep-levels of each horizon. We conceptualize these horizons as (A) the Old Testament; (B) the New Testament; (C) the Communicators; and (D) the Receptors. Within each horizon there are a variety of contexts, each with its own perspective and understanding, as we demonstrated in chapter 3 when we spoke of the Bible as a tapestry. Clearly God’s word must fit a multiplicity of diverse contexts that, despite their individual discontinuity, express commonality of origin and relationship to God.

In Figure 4:8, the four horizons are in the middle of the diagram and are shaped by elements from below and from above. At the upper, wider end of the triangles, the reader will see what we call surface-level structures composed of the symbols and variety of phenomena through which the deep-level structures (the lower part of the diagram) are expressed in a culture. The triangles represent the interfacing of both deep- and surface-level structures.

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FIGURE 4:8The Four Horizons of a Missiological Hermeneutics: Step Three


Jesus the Messiah, Resurrected Lord, Alpha & OmegaDeep-level structrues and cultural themes


Old Testament

A

B C

D

New Testament Com

mun

icato

rs

Receptors

Past Future

Continuity:

DistanceDiscontinuity:

H O R I Z O N S

Proximity

Present


Jesus the Messiah, Resurrected Lord, Alpha & OmegaDeep-level structrues and cultural themes


Old Testament

A

B C

D

New Testament Com

mun

icato

rs

Receptors

Past Future

Continuity:

DistanceDiscontinuity:

H O R I Z O N S

Proximity

Present

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Step FourAt this point in the development of our model, we need to recognize that the four ‘horizons’ are not all of

the same order. In Figure 4:9 horizons (A) and (B) are qualitatively different from horizons (C) and (D), due to the special-ness of God’s revelation, as found in the canon. As we noted in chapter 2, as Evangelical Protestants, we are not willing to open the canon. We know the New Testament (horizon B) represents a distinct set of horizons as compared with the Old Testament (horizon A). Yet (A) and (B) together as the Bible, comprise the canonical Scriptures that are normative for us, our only rule of faith and practice. We dealt with this extensively in the first two chapters of this book. Horizons C and D represent the process necessary to ensure appropriate communication regardless of where or when a message originates and who responds. This leads us to the final step.

FIGURE 4:9The Four Horizons of a Missiological Hermeneutics: Step Four





Old Testament

C

DNew Testament Co

mm

unic

ator

s Receptors

Past Future

Continuity:Holy Spirit, Text of Scripture, Covenant, Faith Community


Dist a

nce Dist ance

ProximityA

B

The Bible

Present





Old Testament

C

DNew Testament Co

mm

unic

ator

s Receptors

Past Future

Continuity:Holy Spirit, Text of Scripture, Covenant, Faith Community


Dist a

nce Dist ance

ProximityA

B

The Bible

A

B

The Bible

Present

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Step FiveWe can view the hermeneutical process as a progression of four movements. In Figure 4:10 the four

movements can be presented as involving an interaction between horizon C and horizons A and B. Following the pattern of the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old Testament, the communicator in horizon C approaches the text at the surface level of symbols expressed in the discourse-level semantic flow of the text. Movement 1 (C: 1 to 2): In this first movement we read the text at face value as a context-specific communication of God’s self-disclosure. Here communicators are aware of the historical, cultural, and worldview distance between themselves and the world of the text of Scripture being read. However, as communicators interact with the text and are immersed in the thought-world of the text, they begin to participate in the second movement.Movement 2 (C: 2 to 3): The second movement requires a consideration of all the contexts (human, social, cultural, historical) in which God’s self-revelation took place and from which the text emerged. As communicators are immersed in the biblical thought-world of A and B, they delve deeper into the meanings that are being conveyed by the text as related to both the divine and the human authors’ intentions in a particular time and place.Movement 3 (C: 3 to 4): The third movement begins the process of relating the deep-level structures of meaning in the text with comparable (and relatively close) deep-level structures of meaning in the communicator’s thought-world. An example of this would be Jesus’ commandment regarding agape, self-giving love. Drawing from the thought-world of Deuteronomy whose surface-level structures were distant from those of Jesus’ day, Jesus brings to bear in his own world the deep-level meaning regarding self-giving love that is committed to the welfare of the other. This deep-level structure would take quite different shape at the surface-level in Jesus’ day–as it also would in our own day. Yet the deep-level injunction is nearly the same in all the horizons: God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ transforms the disciples of Jesus into persons who live out their lives in self-giving love for others. “By this will all people know that you are my disciples: if you love one another” (Jn. 3:35). This is true for all time and for all cultures, yet this truth is to be lived out at the surface-level in very different ways in diverse cultural settings. Movement 4 (C: 4 to 1): The fourth movement allows the deep level structures of meaning to be transferred into the communicator’s context to transform the surface-level symbols and manifestations in accord with that new understanding of the gospel. Missional Movement between Horizons C and D

How, then, do we go about the process of interpretation and missional communication? These four movements begin all over again when the communicator seeks to make that meaning relevant in the context of new receptors. However, the direction of the movements differs, since they begin with the receptor (D) and not the communicator. As shown in Figure 4:10, there is a specific relation between horizon and horizon C. As gospel communicators begin to interact with the new receptors, they will seek to listen and learn how the new people in the context understand their world. Here there is once again a hermeneutical spiraling of the interaction between the receptors-in-context, the communicator-in-context, and eventually with the text-in-context. The progression should be clear. Knowing God sets up a process that leads to an appreciation of the horizons in which God has communicated and in which God continues to interact with human beings through the work of the Holy Spirit.

When we get to the new receptors, the direction of the arrows in Figure 4:10 is significant. If communicators are receptor-oriented, their starting point involves an encounter with the receptors’ surface-level structures. Once communicators have begun to understand the new receptors’ horizon, at least at a surface-level, the communicator may participate in the second movement. By seeking to associate the receptors’ questions with deep-level structural meanings, communicators enable receptors to move toward an understanding of horizons A and B with reference to the theme, metaphor, question or issue at hand. The new context of horizon D forces communicators from horizon C to reexamine their own reading of the biblical horizons A and B. That helps to restate or re-create the root metaphor or issue being examined. This second movement begins in the surface-level and moves to a deep-level examination of the perspectives and root metaphors that can then be presented as new metaphors in a different context. Our human commonality allows for this to happen meaningfully.

From the perspectives of their own horizon, gospel communicators cannot understand the questions of others (including both Scripture and the receptor context) without relating them to their own experience, to their own symbolic systems and their own understanding of reality. Given an understanding of their issues, they can then go to the text. The text comes to the present context and brings new understanding. By following through from text to context and back again, we encourage the historical development of dogma. This is a

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product of the continuity of revelation. It is presenting the same God, the same covenant, and the same community of faith. Yet always this is known and understood in new ways, in new contexts. Everyone knows God in context.

As this deep-level reflection progresses, communicators begin to draw inferences as to what may be the deep-level structural meanings in the receptor’s horizon related to the issue at hand. This is the third movement (D: 3 to 4). Hopefully, the third and the fourth movements will involve a shared conversation between communicators and receptors. Hopefully communicators will avoid simply filtering biblical knowledge to receptors who need to appreciate the text for themselves. Once the communicators and the receptors participate in such a conversation, they will begin to discern the fourth movement (D: 4 to 1) whereby the deep-level structural meanings discovered in the third movement are given new expression in the surface-level meanings of the receptor culture.

To some degree the process outlined here must take into consideration the historical discontinuity of each context. Yet in each new context there is a restatement of the same divine revelation. And there is an ongoing illumination as a result of that restatement. Thus Christians from other cultures and contexts can inform us as to how their new contexts have provided them with new understanding of the text. The gospel communicator will need to continually ask new questions. Jesus himself said, “Unless I go away, the Comforter will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you....When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth...he will testify about me” (Jn. 16:7; 15:26).

The process we have illustrated from the point of view of the communicator’s horizon can be shifted to the horizon of new receptors. This shifts the focus but the process remains the same. Members of the new church seek God’s intended meaning. They bring their questions to the text of Scripture and they test their understanding of that revelation within their plausibility structures. They do not need to relay on what communicators tell them, they can go to the text and benefit from what communicators already know. Here is the infinite communicability of God’s word in process. The receptors can also listen to God. They can also tell others what they hear.

Thus the process begins again, drawing new understanding from each of the previous horizons. The Old Testament perspectives are interpreted through the viewpoint of the New Testament. The New Testament authors draw the ancient Hebrew texts into conversation with Greek- and Latin-speaking Roman contexts. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are then re-read by gospel communicators who seek to pass the meanings on to their receptors. Over time, the receptors become themselves gospel communicators. And today new groups of receptors hear God speak and marvel that they too are included in a plan that extends back to a time before the foundation of the earth.

A Biblical Example of Four-Horizon HermeneuticsLuke 4:21–30 illustrates how the Gospel writer applied the four horizons to his missional communication.

This is a critical passage in that it captures the whole semantic structure of Luke’s text. It is the primary place where Luke presents Jesus’ mission. So we are interested in both the theological and missional implications of the passage. After Jesus’ reading of Isaiah, Luke tells us that the people were amazed at what they heard—they were awe struck. Then Jesus began his homily. “A prophet has no honor in his own country” he said (4:24). He continued by briefly mentioning two stories they all knew: Elijah’s interaction with the widow in Zarapheth, and the healing of Naaman the leper.

At the conclusion of this brief sermon Luke tells us that the people dragged Jesus out of the synagogue and were ready to throw him off the cliff. What changed their view of him in those brief minutes? Reference back to the texts that Jesus cites gives a clue. Jesus emphasized that there were many widows in Israel, but Elisha went to a foreigner; there were many lepers in Israel, but a foreign general was singled out for healing. Jesus was saying that the recipient of God’s grace and the agents of God’s mission are sometimes people on the periphery. In fact, in

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the cases that Jesus cites, they were not Israelites at all. For the ethno-centric Jews of first-century Palestine, this was unacceptable. At the beginning of the story the folks in Nazareth were ready to have their favorite local son tell them how great they were. They opened their arms to him. But then Jesus told them he came for the outcasts and the foreigners. The reflection on the stories reinforced Jesus’ reading from Isaiah and the people of Nazareth understood exactly what Jesus was saying to them. So much so, that they were ready to stone him.

With this background we can now apply the horizons model. In this passage, Luke proceeds with his narrative by recounting Jesus’ interaction with the people of Nazareth and their response to his talking about Naaman the leper. This requires the analysis of two texts: Luke 4 and II Kings 5, each with a different context. The surface difference between Nazareth and where the Naaman story took place is great: different locations (hill country vs. the Jordan River), different times (at least 600 years separate the two), different languages (Aramaic vs. Hebrew), and different cultures (classic peasant Hebrew and Syrian city-state societies vs. Hellenized Greco-Roman Palestine). Yet, the matter of being marginalized or oppressed (the little girl who was taken captive by Naaman; the poor widow of Zarephath) is exactly the root metaphor of Israel under the domination of Rome. In fact the people of Nazareth could easily put themselves into the story. All Jesus had to do was mention the Old Testament stories and the people understood he was speaking about deep-level meanings related to power and belonging, marginality and ostracism; of lepers, and foreigners, and strangers. Those deep themes of Israel are all in the story. They are part of the text. The people of Nazareth tried to kill Jesus because they knew exactly what he is saying, and they did not like it.

Knowing both the Old Testament and the contemporary contexts, Luke tells the story in order to bring out the juxtaposition. He says that Jesus said, “during Elijah’s time there were many widows in Israel…and during Elisha’s time there were many lepers…” and the implication is that there are many widows and lepers here, now, in Nazareth, in the first-Century. Jesus picked up on this and essentially was affirming that the ones chosen as recipients and agents of God’s mission would be outsiders, the estranged and the marginalized. Later, Luke would show how Jesus was frequently accused of spending time with the poor and the fringe elements of the society (tax collectors and sinners) rather than acting like a rabbi and frequenting holy places (Lk. 15:1). Luke acts as a translator here, not only between Old and New Testament contexts but also between these and his audience. 292

Now we can move to the next horizon (C), the communicator. What Luke did for his audience gospel communicators must do for theirs today: proclaim previous revelation to new audiences. Gospel communicators cannot do this without a thorough knowledge of the receptor context. People living in colonized places of the world, especially the oppressed, will understand this much better than people who have not felt this pain. The marginalized peoples of the world understand metaphors of oppression and may receive the message more readily than those who do not. What are the root meanings?

We must be careful here. We do not want to disconnect the deep structures from the surface structures so completely that the deeper meanings become merely metaphorical or allegorical. The canonical flow of the text must reveal the root meanings. The text takes the lead. We cannot go in the opposite direction. We cannot ask, “Given a metaphor what text will buttress it?” Instead, we must let the text encase the root metaphor and then let that metaphor speak to us as well as to our receptors.

Various contexts reveal different metaphors about oppression. Yet each expresses the same deep-level meanings in differing forms. The root metaphor speaks to them all. Regardless of the circumstances, Jesus cared about all people. When Jesus told his hometown crowd that what they heard in the Isaiah passage had been fulfilled in their presence, they were in awe. But when he told them that he had come to minister to the oppressed and excluded, they were ready to push him off the cliff. Translating that emotion and symbolism is essential for this proclamation to be understood in a present-day context.

Furthermore, communicating the missiological implications of this passage in the overall context of Luke’s writings is essential for appropriate communication of the gospel. Jesus sends some crucial signals here about his mission—“to the Jew first but also to the Greek.” Outsiders, even non-Jews through all time and space are included—God so loved the world. And it is this world that makes up the fourth horizon: the contemporary, the disenfranchised, the marginal, the poor, and the refugees.

The Four Horizons as a Hermeneutical Process

292. Luke, was probably a Hellenized Jew, a God-fearer, and therefore reflects the Greek perspective but understands at a profoundly deep level the Hebrew worldview. The way he writes, his humor, how he organizes his work are all Hebrew and he draws heavily on the Old Testament. In Luke 4, he presents Jesus in an Aramaic, hometown context interacting with the Hebrew background, specifically the prophets.

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Now, where does this leave gospel communicators today? If Luke can do what he did with the Old Testament text in his context, can we do it too? We must make a distinction between revelation and illumination. We dare not say we are under revelation. Even the apostle Paul was careful on this matter, making a point of mentioning when he was writing on his own, apart from divine revelation. Yet the same text and the same Holy Spirit illumines our minds to understand the Scriptures.

The Sixteenth-Century Reformation affirmed the priesthood of all believers. The Reformers rightly stressed that all people who believe in Jesus can go back and check to see if the reading of Scripture is correct. Thus the community of faith is to carry out gospel communication. We need the Holy Spirit in the midst of the faith community. All Christians around the whole world, representing many cultures, need to consult with each other as to what they understand when they read the Scriptures. They need to work in concert, all together drawing out the meaning of the text.

Today this means that the same Bible is being read, interpreted and understood in multiple ways by one-and-a-half billion Christians around the world who speak many languages and derive deep-level understanding in the midst of global pluralism. The same God, the same Lord, the same Holy Spirit call the church to re-read the same Bible in infinitely different contexts, languages and worldviews. We are part of a worldwide hermeneutical community gaining new and deeper understanding about God as the Scriptures are allowed to impact ever-new cultural contexts. Here is the wonder of the infinitely communicable gospel of Jesus Christ.

As represented in Figure 4:11, on a global scale, we all together, equally, read the text. The whole world church becomes a hermeneutical community. The whole Christian church as a hermeneutical community is involved in proclamation as mission: proclaiming everything we have understood about God to people in many new contexts (Mt. 28:20)

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The Global Hermeneutical CommunityFIGURE 4:11

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When we consider what God did as God spoke in Holy Scripture, it is truly marvelous in our eyes. We start from God’s view of creation as God sought to communicate through it—the creator talking with the creatures including the crown jewel, human beings, created in God’s image. Communication, the Word, not only produced creative acts but also served as the means of on-going interaction. God spoke in the midst of God’s People. God spoke to Abraham who pulled up stakes and went looking for a land that God would show him. God talked to Moses and a rag tag crowd of refugees gradually became a nation. And so it went through the Bible. God proclaimed his intent to and for humans. Gradually, as we continue reading, a pattern emerges: the covenant, a root metaphor that characterizes relationship through the communication process. “I will be your God, you will be my people and I will dwell in your midst.”

As communicators who desire to declare God’s word in a pluralist world, we face the challenge of understanding what God said on the one hand and how to communicate it in present-day contexts on the other. We have shown that it requires a host of skills and wisdom drawn from a variety of disciplines that have not traditionally been considered part of the communication task. This complexity, however, can best be understood as a dynamic interaction of horizons. At minimum, there are four horizons that convey the meaning of the message. Above it all is the supra-cultural God, the source, the originator of the whole process. God, in turn, spoke to people in particular contexts. So we must analyze the contexts into which God originally communicated his intention. The context of the communicator impacts the assumptions made and the meaning given to the message by the communicator. And the context of the new receptors with their particular experiences of life and their understanding of the world shapes the way they hear God speak to them. The role of the trinity in the process (revelation, incarnation, and illumination) provides a guide for today’s communicators as they seek to present unchanging truth in a changing world. Herein lies the value of seeing the historical development of dogma as a process of discovering an increasingly deeper understanding of the gospel as new information from particular contexts brings new perspectives to ancient texts.

God also took note of the contexts into which God communicated and made appropriate adjustments to them. If God did that, so must those who seek today to proclaim God’s word to others. This conversation continually expands as new receptors hear and respond to the biblical message and provide a new perspective, a different horizon that Christians have not seen before. This is the view given in Revelation chapter 7 where every nation, tongue and people are represented. Each adds their perspective and collectively they give praise and honor to our Savior and Lord.

Drawing from Thiselton’s horizons model, and given the theoretical focus of this book on theological, communicational and cultural issues, we have presented the four horizons in an effort to create a new appreciation for mission. New understandings are now possible because of the expansion of the Church in our day. What Christians have seen and heard they should make available to others so they too may know God in the fullness of truth as revealed across time and space. And Because of human commonality and yet incredible cultural diversity, gospel communicators have the privilege of learning from their receptors; receiving new insights about the sense of an ancient text. Because every context predisposes the people in it to perceive the text in a particular way, each can learn from others and gain new appreciation for what God intended that human beings understand about God in their midst. Each new understanding in turn will enrich the appreciation that others may have of the mighty works that God has done. Sam Hofman learned new things about wisdom from the Tzeltals who, in their turn, benefited greatly from Sam’s contribution to their understanding about the wisdom of God.

If God intended all people whom God created to be in relationship with him, how can they “have faith in the Lord and ask him to save them if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear, unless someone tells them?” (Rom. 10:14) The message will be manifest always in a particular context. The gospel is understood always in a specific cultural matrix. God uses language and culture in unique ways in each particular time and place. So the issues involved in developing a communicationally and culturally appropriate proclamation require our attention in the next two chapters.

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Revista Iglesia y Misión N°2Nota 1

Dimensiones del crecimientointegralde la IglesiaOrlando E. CostasEXISTE HOY EN DIA un extraordinario interés entre congregaciones ydenominaciones de todo tipo y color por el crecimiento de la iglesia. Sean tradicionalmenteconservadoras o progresistas, sea que representen al protestantismo histórico, independienteo pentecostal, sean ortodoxas o católicas, todas parecieran reflejar, por una variedad derazones, una intensa preocupación por este problema, Y le llamo “problema” porque es unapreocupación suscitada, en gran parte, por el creciente fenómeno de descristianización quese nota en las llamadas tierras cristianas.En Alemania Occidental, por ejemplo, se dice que el 95% de la población está formalmentevinculada con la iglesia, pero sólo el 5% asiste a ella. En EE.UU. la asistencia a cultos religiososhabía menguado de un 49%, en 1958, a un 40% en 1979. Y en Chile, que en 1967 se decíaque tenía el porcentaje más alto de crecimiento protestante en América Latina, con una tasade 6.6% por año, el censo de 1970 registró un descenso del 4% a un promedio anual de solo2.2% para toda la década de 1960. Por su parte la Iglesia Católica Romana ha reconocidoque pese a que en América Latina la mayoría de habitantes dicen que son católicos, sólo unaminoría lo es en realidad.Esta situación ha causado pánico entre muchos líderes eclesiásticos en Europa y lasAméricas. En consecuencia, se ha lanzado una avalancha de estudios para determinar las

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causas del problema y encontrar soluciones viables. En EE.UU. se han fundado nuevasinstituciones dedicadas al estudio y promoción del crecimiento de la iglesia. En Europa, tantolas iglesias establecidas como las iglesias libres, preocupadísimas por el problema, estánefectuando no sólo estudios sino talleres de capacitación evangelistica. Algunas están, incluso,invitando a evangelistas de renombre en Africa y América a celebrar campañas deevangelización en las principales ciudades. En América Latina se notan en algunos lugaresestudios, cursillos y campañas sobre crecimiento de la iglesia, todo lo cual no deja de presentarun desafío a todos los cristianos que de una u otra forma se sienten responsables por comunicarel evangelio a toda criatura.En efecto, la situación descrita nos convoca a reflexionar detenidamente sobre el fenómenodel crecimiento y las formas que éste toma en la iglesia. Y esto porque se corre el riesgo, poruna parte, de caer en simplismos sobre el crecimiento de la iglesia, y por otra, porque sin unaadecuada comprensión de qué es en sí el crecimiento y c6mo se da en la vida, no se puedeentender su naturaleza y dinámica en la iglesia ni detectar sus desbarajustes. Por ello,comenzaremos con una breve nota sobre el crecimiento como fenómeno vital.EL CRECIMIENTO COMO FENÓMENO VITALEl término “crecimiento” es en sí dinámico: sugiere movilidad. Donde hay crecimiento hayincremento, desarrollo, expansión, agrandamiento. Donde hay crecimiento se da también lamutación, la transformación, la renovación y la creatividad. Por contraste, donde no haycrecimiento la vida se estanca y deteriora, prevalece la inercia, la pereza, el estatismo.El crecimiento es a la vez relativo. Su significado exacto sólo puede entenderse a la luz desu contexto. Decir que algo está creciendo no significa nada a menos que se explique cómoestá creciendo. Hay distintos tipos de crecimiento: demográfico, biológico, emocional,psicológico, intelectual, cultural, económico, social, institucional. Hay también diferentescalidades de crecimiento: positivo o negativo, enriquecedor o dañino, saludable o infeccioso.El crecimiento es un fenómeno complejo. Ocurre a distintos niveles y de diferentes maneras.Es multidimensional. Por consiguiente, no se puede abstraer de su contexto ni evaluarseaisladamente. Para poder apreciarse su dinámica es necesario un análisis de conjunto detodas sus dimensiones, niveles y expresiones.El crecimiento sólo puede tener lugar allí donde existe la vida; los objetos inanimados nopueden experimentar el crecimiento, La vida es un proceso, y puesto que un organismo esesencialmente un cuerpo vivo o una estructura diseñada para continuar el proceso de la vida,un organismo que no crece está en realidad muerto.La muerte de un organismo puede ocurrir a diversos niveles, a distintos intervalos y através de una o más de sus dimensiones. El proceso vital puede detenerse en un nivel perocontinuar en otro, o puede estancarse en una dimensión y sobredesarrollarse en otra. Seacual fuere el caso, el hecho es que una de las características fundamentales de un organismoes la interacción constante de sus partes. El estancamiento del proceso vital en cualquierade ellas y a cualquiera de sus niveles de acción traería, tarde o temprano, consecuenciasmortales para ese organismo.EL CRECIMIENTO COMO DEFORMACIÓN HISTÓRICAEste hecho hace imprescindible el reconocimiento de que no todo crecimiento es auténticoni conveniente. No todo crecimiento es saludable para un organismo. Hay tal cosa como uncrecimiento deformado, que contribuye eventualmente a la muerte de un organismo.Consideremos algunos ejemplos.El caso del cáncerEl cáncer es un crecimiento desordenado de las células del cuerpo. Produce una rupturaen la división normal de las células, limitada por los requisitos del cuerpo para el crecimientoy separación de los tejidos, El cáncer es producido por células anormales que se multiplican,empujan a un lado e invaden otros órganos del cuerpo, interfiriendo y destruyendo las funcionesnormales del mismo.El caso de la tierraAlgo semejante ocurre con la tierra. No soy jardinero ni nada que se parezca, pero para mifue muy interesante observar, hace algunos años, cómo a la par de la grama que sembramosen el jardín de nuestra casa iba creciendo una yerba mala. Mientras la grama no echara

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raíces, no podríamos sacar esa yerba. A medida que pasaban los días, la yerba mala ibacreciendo y cubriendo la grama. El hecho que estuviéramos en tiempo de sequía no afectabaen nada este proceso, porque la yerba mala se nutría del agua que regábamos en la grama,creciendo así a expensas de ésta. Así, pues, lo que crecía era lo que no convenía, y lo que síconvenía que creciera no crecía.El caso del consumerismoEste fenómeno se observa también en la llamada sociedad de consumo. En este tipo desociedad, que caracteriza la mayoría de países de nuestro hemisferio, la producción no re-sponde a necesidades reales, sino falsas, creadas para el consumo. Se cae en un círculovicioso: producci6n para el consumo y consumo para la producción. En tal sociedad se da uncrecimiento econ6mico deformado. Surge un estilo de vida consumerista. En palabras deRené Padilla, “se trabaja para ganar dinero, se gana dinero para comprar cosas y se compracosas para encontrar en ellas valores”.1

Una sociedad no puede gozar de verdadera salud cuando vive del y para el consumo, yaque los seres humanos no son meros consumidores. Han sido dotados de capacidadescreadoras y diseñados para vivir en comunión con sus semejantes y en relación armoniosacon la naturaleza circundante. Necesitan producir para satisfacer sus propias necesidades ylas de sus semejantes sin violentar y destruir los recursos naturales de la tierra. La producciónhumana es fundamental para la buena marcha de una sociedad. Pero la fabricación de objetosde consumo que no responden a verdaderas necesidades, que no fomentan el progresointegral de la sociedad, y que además destruyen el ambiente, es una deformación de laproducción humana. Esta se da sólo cuando se crean bienes que satisfacen necesidadesreales, benefician al mayor número de ciudadanos y enriquecen la vida en general.La producción consumerista es un desbarajuste cuyas consecuencias son harto conocidas:intensificación de las diferencias de clase, anomia social, ansiedad espiritual, alienación cul-tural, crímenes, drogadicción, prostitución, corrupción pública, y otras tantas. De ahí que unasociedad de consumo no pueda resistir el desmoronamiento. El consumerismo terminaráconsumiéndola. Porque fomenta un crecimiento económico deformado que alcanza a ciertosespacios de la vida y nunca llega a otros, estimula el progreso en ciertos sectores de lasociedad y lo detiene en otras y, sobre todo, satisface necesidades falsas y deja insatisfechaslas necesidades reales de todo ser humano.Todo organismo crece, pero no todo crecimiento es saludable para ese organismo. En lahistoria de cada organismo existe siempre el peligro de la deformación, $o que puede conducira la destrucción del mismo. Por ello, al considerar el crecimiento de cualquier organismo esimportante notar cómo trabajan sus respectivas partes, las formas que toma y los niveles enque se da el proceso de expansión dentro de ese organismo.EL CRECIMIENTO COMO COMPLEJIDAD ECLESIALLo dicho se aplica especialmente a la iglesia. Como un organismo vital, la iglesia estáconstreñida a crecer. Su crecimiento es parte y parcela de su vida. Dejar de crecer seria dejarde existir. Pero corre también el riesgo de la deformación, que podría asociarse con elcrecimiento del cáncer, la yerba mala o la producción consumerista.Hablar del crecimiento de la iglesia es referirse a un fenómeno complejo. En tanto procesovital, el crecimiento de la iglesia debe verse coma un fenómeno corporativo o, como lo hadicho Alan R. Tippett, “un cuerpo en crecimiento, un cuerpo de partes discretas perointeractuantes”. El crecimiento de este cuerpo se realiza en diversos niveles y varias2

dimensiones. Esto quiere decir que para comprender su densidad y complejidad es necesariotener una idea clarea de los diversos niveles en que ocurre y las dimensiones del proceso ensi.¿Cómo crece la iglesia? ¿En qué sentido, y por qué, debemos anticipar su crecimiento?¿Cuáles serían las consecuencias prácticas de una visión clara del mismo para la vida ymisión de la iglesia? Toda reflexión seria sobre el crecimiento de la iglesia debería respondera estas preguntas. En esta oportunidad nos abocaremos a la primera.Preguntar cómo crece la iglesia es presuponer un análisis empírico de situaciones concretas.Por la observación, la medición y la comparación del crecimiento de iglesias concretas se

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puede describir cómo se da este fenómeno en la práctica, Sucede, sin embargo, que parapoder hacer un análisis de tal envergadura se necesitan ciertos criterios teóricos, puesto quetoda acción humana responde a una visión de la vida. EI ser humano no sólo existe sino quepiensa, reflexiona. De ahí que toda empresa humana lleve implícita ciertos postulados teóricos.La iglesia, en tanto organismo humano, no s61o existe sino que reflexiona sobre si misma ysu razón de ser. Su expansión no se da por accidente ni como un mero reflejo sociológico,sino de conformidad con la visión que tiene de su propia naturaleza y misión en el mundo.Esta visión se deriva, fundamentalmente, de las creencias que forman el conjunto de su fe.Esa fe define la naturaleza de la iglesia, a partir de la cual se puede describir las formasnaturales que toma su crecimiento.La iglesia como creación de DiosPreguntar cómo crece la iglesia implica examinar en primera instancia su naturaleza divina,ya que ella es, ante todo, obra de Dios. Dado que el Dios bíblico se presenta como Padre,Hijo y Espíritu, la iglesia deriva su naturaleza de esta realidad trinitaria.La iglesia es el pueblo de Dios. Es un ente compuesto de elementos discordantes,convocados por el Padre para dar testimonio de su amor en el mundo. Es un pueblo enformación, marchando por la historia hasta llegar a su plenitud en la consumación de lostiempos. De ahí que sea pueblo no sólo escogido y apartado, sino disperso y enviado parareproducirse en todas la culturas, entre todos los pueblos y a través de todas las esferas dela vida.La iglesia es, además, el cuerpo de Cristo, integrado por muchos miembros, que interactúanentre sí y desempeñan funciones diversas. Lo que la cabeza es para el cuerpo, es Cristopara la iglesia: el cerebro que dirige su movimiento, balancea su postura, envía y recibemensajes de sus diferentes partes, haciendo posible el aprendizaje, la memoria y elpensamiento; en fin, controla el proceso de su vida.La iglesia es también la comunidad del Espíritu. Como tal, ha sido engendrada por sugracia y apartada para el servicio por su fuego purificador, que la ha hecho un compañerismode pecadores regenerados y santificados. El Espíritu Santo es el sistema nervioso que haceeficaz el señorío de Cristo sobre su cuerpo; la preserva y sostiene por su poder. De ahí quesea su morada, el lugar donde se hace más visible su presencia en el mundo y donde seposibilita el encuentro entre Dios y la humanidad. Sin el Espíritu, la iglesia se muere; sin laiglesia, es imposible la continuidad de la misión de Jesucristo.La iglesia debe crecer en conformidad con su naturaleza divina. Como comunidad delEspíritu, debe crecer en santidad y comunión. Como cuerpo de Cristo, debe crecer enapostolicidad (misión) y unidad. Como pueblo de Dios, debe crecer en fidelidad al obrar deDios en la historia y en la celebración de sus hechos maravillosos. Ese imperativo se desprendede un indicativo: el hecho de que la iglesia, entendida teo16gicamente, no es ni un accidentehistórico ni un producto humano, sino expresión de la voluntad de Dios y fruto de su obra. Deahí que la primera palabra en cuanto al crecimiento de la iglesia debe ser teológica. Undistintivo de la iglesia es, pues, su crecimiento en la calidad de su existencia como creacióndel Dios trino.La iglesia como comunidad de fePero la iglesia no es un robot divino. Está compuesta de hombres, mujeres y niños detodos los sectores de la vida quienes han respondido al llamado de Dios en Jesucristo por elpoder del Espíritu. Es la compañía de los obedientes, los que han oído el llamado del evangelio,se han arrepentido de sus pecados y han entregado sus vidas a Dios mediante la fe enJesucristo. Una característica fundamental de la iglesia es el hecho de que oye la Palabra yresponde en fe a su mensaje. Ser iglesia es vivir en comunión con Dios y la hermandad delos creyentes, ser embajadora de Cristo en la proclamación del evangelio por toda la tierra,estar sujeta a las enseñanzas y al juicio de la Palabra de Dios y servir desinteresadamente ala humanidad en el amor del evangelio.Ello se desprende del hecho de que la fe – la confianza en el Hijo de Dios como elcumplimiento de sus promesas, el Salvador del mundo y la revelación de la palabra creadorade Dios – no es estática. No está enterrada en el pasado de un acto único, válido parasiempre, sino que es un proceso continuo de confianza en Dios. La iglesia no es sólo unacomunidad de personas que confían en Dios, sino también una comunidad de hacedores de

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su voluntad. Es una comunidad de fe en crecimiento. Todavía no ha llegado a su plenitudnumérica u orgánica. Necesita cada vez más sabiduría y entendimiento de la Palabra deDios. Su servicio no es lo que podría y debía ser. En fin, vive en la continua necesidad de“crecer en todo” (Ef. 4.15),El crecimiento integral de la iglesiaSi el crecimiento es un proceso multidimensional, si la iglesia es una realidad dinámica ycompleja y si crece como creación divina y comunidad de fe, entonces se hace necesaria unateoría integral de su crecimiento. Por lo tanto, proponemos la siguiente definición de crecimientode la iglesia: “Es un proceso de expansión integral y normal que se puede y debe esperar dela oída y misión de la iglesia como comunidad del Espíritu, cuerpo de Cristo y pueblo deDios.”Es un proceso de expansión normal porque, como un organismo vital, la iglesia estácapacitada para crecer normal y consistentemente. Y es un proceso integral porque debemanifestarse en todos los niveles (las bases y el liderazgo, los grupos informales y formales,la congregación y la denominación, agencias ecuménicas, paraeclesiásticas ydenominacionales) y en todas las dimensiones.UN MODELO DE CRECIMIENTO INTEGRALPara hacer dicha definición operable, se necesita la elaboración de un modelo de crecimientointegral. Un modelo es una estructura o mecanismo familiar que sirve de analogía parainterpretar un fenómeno natural. Los modelos son usados para desarrollar o modificar teorías,o para hacerlas más inteligibles,El siguiente modelo intenta hacer justicia a la idea de una iglesia que desea crecer en todonivel y en toda dimensión. Toma como punto de partida el hecho teológico de la iglesia comocreación divina y comunidad de hombres, mujeres y niños inmersos en un peregrinaje de fe,en comunión los unos con los otros, proclamando el evangelio, respondiendo a la Palabra deDios y sirviendo en amor a la humanidad. De ahí que relacione las cualidades que la iglesiaderiva de su naturaleza divina con las dimensiones que se desprenden de su vida y misióncomo comunidad de fe.Cualidades del crecimientoDado que se trata del crecimiento de la iglesia, el criterio fundamental de evaluación debeser teológico. De ahí que aquellas cualidades que emanan de su naturaleza divina comocomunidad del Espíritu, cuerpo de Cristo y pueblo de Dios sean en el propuesto modelo lasvariables de control, los factores contra los cuales se juzga la calidad del crecimiento, o, enotras palabras, los principios de criticidad teológica.De la antedicha naturaleza trinitaria se derivan tres cualidades o principios distintivos decrecimiento eclesial integral: espiritualidad, encarnación y fidelidad. La espiritualidad tieneque ver con la presencia y operación dinámica del Espíritu Santo en el crecimiento de laiglesia: si el crecimiento responde a la inspiración y motivación del Espíritu y refleja susfrutos. Por encarnaci6n se entiende el arraigo histórico de Jesucristo en el dolor y las afliccionesde la humanidad y su impacto en el proceso de crecimiento de la iglesia. En otras palabras,¿hasta qué punto la iglesia está experimentando un crecimiento que refleja la comprensión,el compromiso y la presencia de Cristo entre las multitudes desamparadas y dispersas? Porúltimo, la fidelidad tiene que ver con la coherencia entre la acción de la iglesia y los propósitosde Dios para su pueblo. Puesto de otra forma, ¿en qué medida responde el crecimiento queestá experimentando la iglesia a las acciones de Dios en la Biblia y sus designios en lahistoria?Dimensiones del crecimientoLas anteriores cualidades se correlacionan en el modelo con cuatro dimensiones que sedesprenden de la realidad de la iglesia como comunidad de fe. Dado que la iglesia es unacomunidad en camino hacia el reino de Dios, atenta a la Palabra de Dios, que vive en lacomunión de sus miembros y está al servicio de la humanidad, su crecimiento debe apuntaren cuatro direcciones: hacia la reproducción de sus miembros, el desarrollo de su vida orgánica,la profundización en la reflexión de la fe y el servicio eficaz en el mundo. Es así como hablamosde cuatro dimensiones: numérica, orgánica, conceptual y diaconalPor crecimiento numérico entendemos la reproducción que experimenta el pueblo de Dios

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al proclamar el evangelio y llamar a hombres y mujeres al arrepentimiento de sus pecados ya la fe en Jesucristo como Señor y Salvador de sus vidas; al incorporar a los que respondenafirmativamente a una comunidad local de creyentes; y al insertarlos en la lucha del reino deDios contra las huestes del mal. Esta dimensión es parte fundamental del ser de la iglesia.Necesita nuevos tejidos para mantenerse viva. De ahí la necesidad de una continuareproducción celular. Además, como pueblo en marcha no podrá llegar a su meta hasta quetoda la humanidad haya tenido una oportunidad razonable de escuchar y responder alevangelio.Designamos crecimiento orgánico al desarrollo interno de la comunidad de fe. Tiene quever con el sistema de relaciones entre los miembros: su forma de gobierno, su estructurafinanciera, su liderazgo, el tipo de actividades en que invierte su tiempo y recursos, y sucelebración cultural. Como un organismo vital, la iglesia no puede contentarse con la merareproducción de sus células. Tiene que preocuparse por el buen funcionamiento de todas laspartes que conforman sus sistema de vida. Estas tienen que ser fortalecidas, cuidadas,estimuladas y bien coordinadas para que el cuerpo pueda funcionar adecuadamente, paraque la labor reproductiva no sea desperdiciada y pueda llegar a su meta final.Por crecimiento conceptual nos referimos a la expansión en la inteligencia de la fe: el gradode conciencia que la comunidad eclesial tiene respecto a su existencia y razón de ser, sucompresión de la fe cristiana, su conocimiento de la fuente de esa fe (las Escrituras), suinteracción con la historia de esa fe y su comprensión del mundo que la rodea. Esta dimensiónda a la iglesia firmeza intelectual para enfrentarse a todo viento de doctrina, y capacidadcrítica para evitar la fosilización y garantizar la creatividad evangelizadora, orgánica y ética.Finalmente, entendemos por crecimiento diaconal la intensidad del servicio que la iglesiarinde al mundo como muestra concreta del amor redentor de Dios. Esta dimensión abarca elimpacto que tiene el ministerio reconciliador de la iglesia en el mundo; el grado de participaciónen la vida, conflictos, temores y esperanzas de la sociedad; la medida en que su servicioayuda a aliviar el dolor humano y a transformar las condiciones sociales que han condenadoa millones de hombres, mujeres y niños a la pobreza. Sin esta dimensión la iglesia pierde suautenticidad y credibilidad, puesto que sólo en la medida en que logre dar visibilidad yconcreción a su vocación de amor y servicio puede esperar ser escuchada y respetada.Cada una de estas dimensiones tiene que ver con diferentes aspectos de la vida y misiónde la iglesia. La dimensión numérica tiene que ver con la vida y los conflictos personales demultitudes de hombres y mujeres que viven alienados de Dios, de sí mismos y de su prójimo,sin amor, paz ni esperanza, en necesidad de reconciliación e incorporación al pueblo queDios está formando en toda la faz de la tierra. Son los millones cuya condición espiritualdesafía constantemente a la iglesia y de quienes se considera deudora por causa del evangelio.La dimensión orgánica tiene que ver con cuestiones de cultura y contextualización, formacióny mayordomía, comunión y celebración. Nos confronta con la necesidad que tiene la iglesiade ser una comunidad autóctona, criolla, que forma a sus miembros, administra su tiempo,

CualidadesdelCrecimiento

Dimensiones del Crecimiento

Numérico Orgánico Conceptual Diaconal

Espiritual

Encarnacional

Fidelidad

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talentos y recursos, fomenta la comunión de los fieles entre si y con su Dios, y celebra su feen el lenguaje del pueblo del que es parte, incorporando críticamente sus símbolos, creacionesy valores, e identificándose con su situación histórica y social.La dimensión conceptual abarca la esfera lógica y la sicosocial de la vida. Acentúa lanecesidad que tiene la iglesia de pensar la fe crítica y reverentemente, al calor de la Palabray la oración, y de evaluar honesta y concienzudamente, a la luz de la fe y la realidad concreta,las imágenes que se ha forjado de sí misma, de su misión y de su mundo.Por su parte, la dimensión diaconal está relacionada con el aspecto ético de la iglesia y sumisión. Tiene que ver con su papel como comunidad al servicio de los otros y su consecuenteinvolucramiento en los problemas y las luchas colectivas y estructurales de la sociedad.En el modelo en discusión se busca correlacionar las referidas cualidades (o principioscríticos) con las mencionadas dimensiones del crecimiento, Así, por ejemplo, al analizar ladimensión numérica no sólo se busca determinar cuántas personas están siendo alcanzadascon el evangelio, cuántas están siendo incorporadas a la iglesia por conversión y bautismo,por confirmación o transferencia, y cuántas están siendo atraídas a sus actividades, Ademásde la cuantificación de esta información, se procura evaluar el nivel de espiritualidad,encarnaci6n y fidelidad de la iglesia en el proceso de crecimiento (o decadencia) y las razonesdetrás de éste. Lo mismo ocurre con la dimensión orgánica: no sólo se trata de identificar lasvariaciones a lo largo de un período razonable en cuanto a contribuciones financieras, númeroy distribución de líderes, tipo de programas, y clase de experiencias litúrgicas y convivenciales,sino también se procura identificar el nivel de espiritualidad, encarnación y fidelidad,observando la intensidad de la vida cultural y comunitaria, la vida devocional y la participaciónpersonal de los miembros en las actividades de la iglesia. En la dimensión conceptual sebusca identificar la variación entre el conocimiento bíblico, eclesial y teológico de los creyentes,según su edad en la fe, y el conjunto de creencias de la iglesia (local o denominacional), y larelación entre conocimiento y práctica de la fe, para llegar a una apreciación del nivel deespiritualidad, encarnaci6n y fidelidad de la teología que profesa la iglesia. Finalmente, en ladimensión diaconal se trata de identificar los cambios en el servicio de la iglesia al mundo(examinando el número y tipo de actividades diaconales a lo largo de un período razonable),evaluar la eficacia de su servicio liberador y reconciliador a la luz de los resultados concretosy la reflexión bíblica, teológica y social critica (qué cambios produjo y cómo se justifican a laluz de la Escritura), y medir la intensidad del involucramiento de la iglesia en la sociedad (pormedio de encuestas al azar en la comunidad, para determinar la imagen que tienen los

vecinos, y en la congregación, para descubrir el nivel de participación social de la membresía).La recopilación de esa documentación hace posible una evaluación de conjunto sobre laespiritualidad, encarnación y fidelidad diaconal de la iglesia.La correlación entre cualidades y dimensiones del crecimiento puede ilustrarse gráficamentemediante el cuadro en esta página.Se puede decir que la iglesia crece integralmente cuando recibe nuevos miembros, seexpande internamente, profundiza sus conocimientos de la fe y sirve al mundo. Pero crececualitativamente cuando refleja en cada dimensión espiritualidad, encarnación y fidelidad. Elcrecimiento numérico por sí solo se convierte en obesidad; el orgánico, en burocracia; elconceptual, en abstracción teórica; y el diaconal, en activismo social. Y las cuatro dimensionescarecen de integridad teo16gica si no son motivados y saturados por la presencia del Espíritu,si no se desprenden de la encarnación eficaz del cuerpo de Cristo en las angustias y doloresde la humanidad, y si no se muestran fieles a los designios y la acción de Dios en la historiadel mundo en general y de su pueblo en particular. Sólo integrando las antedichas dimensionesy correlacionándolas con las referidas cualidades se puede hablar de un crecimiento normal,y por tanto, saludable para la iglesia y su misi6n en el mundo.NOTAS1. “Spiritual Conflict,” The New Face of Evangelicalism, ed. C. René Padilla, Hodder R Stoughton,

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Londres, 1976, p. 209.2. Alan R. Tippett, “A Resume of Church Growth Theology and Current Debate,” trabajo inéditopresentado ante el Foro de la Facultad del Seminario Teo16gico Fuller (Pasadena, California) el 16 demarzo de 1981. Copia a mimeógrafo, p. 3.

Orlando E. Costas, es Profesor de Misionología y Director de Estudios Hispanos de “Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary” de Filadelfia, EE UU. Es autor de varios libros, entre ellos Compromiso y Misión, publicado por Editoral Caribe.

BIBLIOGRAFÍACook, Guillermo, Profundidad en la evangelización, Publicaciones INDEF, San José, Costa Rica,1975.Costas, Orlando, The Church and Its Mission, Tyndale Press, Wheaton (Illinois), 1974; Compromiso ymisión, Editorial Caribe, San José, Costa Rica, 1979; “Church Growth as a Multidimensional Phenom-enon: Some Lessons from Chile.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 5:1 (enter), 28.Gerber, Virgilio, Manual para evangelismo y crecimiento de la iglesia, trad. Pablo Pérez, EditorialLibertador, Maracaibo, 1973.Kammerdiener, Donald R., El crecimiento de la iglesia: ¿qué es y cómo lograrlo?, Casa Bautista dePublicaciones, El Paso (Texas), 1975.McGavran, Donald A., y Wayne Weld, Principios del crecimiento de la iglesia, Editorial Moody, Chi-cago; Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, El Paso (Texas), 1972.Marikawa, Jitsuo, Biblical Dimensions of Church Growth, Judson Press, Valley Forge (Pennsylvania),1980.Owens, Owen, Growing Churches for a New Age, Judson Press, Valley Forge (Pennsylvania), 1981.Padilla, C. René, El evangelio hoy, Ediciones Certeza, Buenos Aires, 1975.Wagner, C. Peter, Your Church Can Grow, Regal Books, Glendale (California), 1976. Versi6n castellana:Editorial Vida, Miami.Fundación Kairós ...al Servicio del Reino de Dios y su JusticiaOrlando E. Costas, es Profesor de Misionología y Director deEstudios Hispanos de “Eastern Baptist Theological Seminario”de Filadelfia, EE.UU. Es autor de varios libros, entre ellosCompromiso y misión, publicado por Editorial Caribe.

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Revista Iglesia y Misión N°4Nota 1

Crecimiento integral y palabra de DiosOrlando E. CostasEN UN ARTÍCULO previo (ver MISIÓN No. 2, pp. 8-14) planteamos la importancia ycomplejidad del crecimiento de la iglesia, así como su posible deformación. Propusimos,además, un modelo de crecimiento integral basado en el hecho teológico de la iglesia comocreación de Dios y comunidad de personas de fe. El mismo exige la correlación de trescualidades que la iglesia deriva de su naturaleza divina con cuatro dimensiones que sedesprenden de su vida y misión. Cuando la iglesia posee esas cualidades en cada dimensiónde su desarrollo, entonces se da un crecimiento saludable.En esta oportunidad queremos explorar detenidamente el sentido bíblico y la fundamentaciónteológica de tal crecimiento eclesial. Si en el artículo anterior nos preguntábamos cómo crecela iglesia, en éste nos preguntaremos en qué sentido, y por qué, debemos anticipar sucrecimiento integral. Para ello tendremos que acudir a la revelación en su fuente escrita, laBiblia, y razonar a partir de su mensaje, puesto que la fe cristiana se fundamenta en la Palabrade Dios, la que entendemos como el proceso por medio del cual Dios se da a conocer ytransmite su voluntad a la humanidad. La Biblia es el registro fidedigno de ese proceso; no sólonos dice cómo se comunica Dios con hombres, mujeres y niños, sino qué es lo que les dice. Deahí la necesidad de examinar más detenidamente como la Biblia entiende el crecimiento inte-gral de la iglesia y explicar teológicamente, a partir de su mensaje, por qué se debe esperar elmismo como consecuencia de su vida en misión.VISIÓN BIBLÍCA DEL CRECIMIENTO INTEGRAL DE LA IGLESIAEn un artículo de autoexamen crítico, el conocido misionólogo y fenomenólogo de la religión,Raimundo Panikkar, ha sugerido la categoría de crecimiento como básica para una correctacomprensión de todo fenómeno religioso. Dice Panikkar que “ la religión está esencialmenteinclinada hacia el futuro...En la vida de la religión, así como en la vida de una persona, en lointelectual, así como en otras esferas, [si] no hay crecimiento hay deterioro: parar significaestancamiento y muerte” (1973: 135).Esta visión de la religión concuerda con el carácter dinámico de la religión de Israel. Ya lo

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vemos en el pacto abrahámico que (por lo menos en el orden del canon) aparece comopresupuesto del estatuto formal de la religión israelita. El llamado de Abraham, ¿qué es sinouna respuesta de amor al juicio de las naciones, la promesa de una nueva humanidad a partirde la “ simiente” de Abraham (Gn. 12.1-3; 10-11)? ¿Qué es la constitución de Israel comopueblo dedicado a la religión de Yahveh (pacto sinaítico), sino un signo de su reino universal yun llamado a la proclamación de ese reino entre las naciones (Ex. 19.3-6)? ¿Qué significa laliturgia del templo jerosolimitano, que confiesa a Yahveh como Señor y anuncia su salvación,sino que su reino está por encima de los reinos de la tierra y que su salvación se extiende atodas las naciones? (Cf., p.ej., Sal. 97; Is. 40-55; Zac. 8.23). ¿Qué significa la afirmación deDios como creador del cielo y de la tierra (Gn. 1-9), sino que Dios es el autor de la vida yreclama la obediencia de todos los pueblos, habiéndoseles revelado (Sal. 19.1 7) y habiéndolosincluido en su plan de salvación (Sal. 86.9)? ¿Cuál es el sentido de las historias de Naamán,Rut y Jonás, sino que el Dios de Israel es también el Dios de las naciones y quiere incorporarlasen la nueva humanidad? (Cf. Sundkler: 1 l-17; Blauw 15-54; Rowley: passim; Costas 1973:19-33).Ciertamente esta visión veterotestamentaria de difusión y expansión misional llega a travésde múltiples vías y tiene mayormente un carácter centrípeto. Tanto en los profetas como en lossalmos se presenta a las naciones acudiendo al Monte de Sión porque allí, en el monte santo,se congregarán para rendir culto al Dios de Israel. La visión crece, sin embargo, hasta abordaren el centrifuguismo que se hace evidente en el Nuevo Testamento, donde el énfasis recae enel cruce de fronteras socioculturales. El Antiguo Testamento pone en claro que el Dios de Israelno es un Dios tribal sino el creador y sustentador del mundo; que Israel no es un fin sino uninstrumento misional; que el reino de Dios, que es un hecho universal, no es reconocido portodos los pueblos; que la esperanza de salvación tiene un alcance universal. De ahí que serequiera el testimonio y el anuncio de Israel antes las naciones (Is. 42.6-7; 43.10-12; 49.6; 52.7-10; 61.1-2) y se prevea una expansión futura del conocimiento de Yahveh sin fronteras ni limites(cf. entre otros, Is. 11.9; 40-55; 60-66; Dt. 7.14).Esta visión es clarificada y concretada en el Nuevo Testamento. Este proclama la presenciadel reino en la historia: “ he aquí el reino de Dios está entre vosotros” (Lc. 17.21). La expectativamesiánica de la manifestación salvífica del señorío de Dios sobre toda la creación se hacerealidad en Jesús de Nazaret. Jesús no sólo anuncia la proximidad del reino (Mr. 1.15), sinoque lo personifica (Jn. 1; Lc. 7.22-27). Jesús proclama la liberación de la creación de su estadode esclavitud y cautividad, la restauración de la humanidad y el cosmos a su vocación; unanueva creación. De ahí que asocie su misión con aquellos que dan la mayor evidencia de latragedia del pecado; los pobres, los cautivos, los ciegos y los oprimidos. A todos estos Jesúsproclama con palabras y signos el año de jubileo: la liberación de la historia (cf. Lc. 4.18-19).EL CRECIMIENTO INTEGRAL EN LA IGLESIA PRIMITIVAEl reino que Jesús proclama y personifica es, pues, un nuevo orden de vida que irrumpesobre el presente (Pannenberg: 53-54). De ello da testimonio la nueva comunidad formadaalrededor de Jesús: una comunidad de amor, justicia y paz (cf. Costas 1975:122-129). Laformación de tal comunidad supera las deficiencias de Israel por lo menos en tres aspectos: (1)Se fundamenta en una nueva alianza caracterizada por la iniciativa divina del perdón de lospecados e inaugurada en el sacrificio de Cristo en la cruz (cf. p.ej., Mt. 26.28; 2 Co. 3.6; Ro.11.27; He. 8.10-12; 9.15s; 1 Jn. 5.20). (2) Consiste tanto de judíos como de gentiles; en otraspalabras, se trata de una comunidad intensa y extensamente universal (cf., p.ej., Mt. 28.19ss.;Hch. 1.8; 10; Gá. 3.28; Ef. 2.14ss.), mientras que la universalidad en Israel era implícita e intensa.(3) Es el resultado, signo e instrumento de un movimiento salvífico que parte de la cruz – delsiervo crucificado – y se extiende, por el poder del Señor resucitado hecho presente por elEspíritu, en la proclamación del perdón de los pecados (Lc. 24.46-49) a todos los confines dela tierra, De ahí que la iglesia sea concebida como pueblo del camino, llamada a encontrarsecon Jesús “ fuera del campamento” , llevando “ su vituperio” y formando comunidad en eldesierto (He. 13.13s.). Su meta última es Jesús (He. 12.1-2) y la manifestación plena y definitivade su reino (Tito 2.13). Pero en su peregrinaje (He. 13.14) ha de experimentar un proceso deexpansión y crecimiento que es, a la vez, resultado de su labor y señal de la presencia del reinoque viene y que ella espera.

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Ciertamente se trata de un don de Dios (1 Co. 3.7; Hch. 2.47). Pero es un don que ha deesperarse como primicias del futuro y evidencia del poder del Espíritu. Ello surge de lasnumerosas referencias a lo largo del Nuevo Testamento que directa o indirectamente, implícitao explícitamente transmiten la imagen de crecimiento (cf. Tippett: 12ss.).Tomemos, por ejemplo, la vida y ministerio de Jesús en relación a los cuales abundan lasmetáforas de crecimiento. Según los Evangelios, Jesús llama a los discípulos a seguirlo parahacerlos instrumentos de la gracia salvadora (Mr. 1.17). Compara el reino de los cielos con unared que al lanzarse al mar recoge peces de todas clases (Mt. 13.47, 48). El mundo es una miesblanca para la siega (Jn. 4.35). Sus discípulos deben pedirle a Dios que envíe obreros a sumies (Mt. 9.38; Lc. 10.2), y Él los manda a que vayan a recoger la cosecha (Mt. 10.1-5). Jesússe ve a sí mismo como la vida, y a los que ha llamado, como pámpanos (Jn. 15.5, 8). Porconsiguiente, ellos han de dar fruto. Este fruto se concibe como su servicio para el reino. Sirvenal reino obedeciendo el mandato del Rey y reclutando gente “ por las plazas y los caminos”para el gran banquete que se aproxima (Lc. 14.21-24), penetrando con la luz del mundo a loslugares más oscuros (Mt. 5.16; Jn. 8.12; 9.5).Jesús considera el crecimiento de la nueva comunidad no sólo en sentido cuantitativo, sinocomo el almacenamiento de la cosecha, la interacción fructífera entre Él y la comunidad, y laincorporación de los que se arrepienten y creen a la vida del reino. El reino, dice Él, “ es comouna semilla de mostaza” (Mt. 13.31). Crece orgánicamente, de una semilla pequeñísima a unárbol enorme. Aunque debe enfrentar la resistencia (la semilla cae a veces a la vera del camino,en las piedras, o entre espinas), experimenta un crecimiento saludable cuando cae en buenatierra (Lc. 8.5-8, 11-15; Mt. 13.1-8, 18-23; Mr. 4.1-9, 13-20).Además de las imágenes ligadas a la vida y ministerio de Jesús, el Nuevo Testamento presentaotras imágenes de crecimiento integral de la iglesia, sobre todo en las epístolas paulinas,Tomemos, por ejemplo, el concepto paulina de la iglesia como un edificio que va creciendopara formar un templo santo (1 Co. 3.9-11; Ef. 2.22), o de la iglesia como una familia, que crecepor el “ Espíritu de hijos” (Ro. 8.15; Ef. 1,5; cf. Ef. 4.14s.). Pedro usa imágenes semejantes.Los cristianos deben crecer hacia la salvación bebiendo la leche espiritual pura (1 P. 2.26).Además, deben edificarse, como piedras vivas, para formar una casa espiritual (1 P. 2.4ss.).Quizás una de las imágenes más fuertes del crecimiento eclesial integral es la que se nossugiere en el Nuevo Testamento con el concepto de administrador, y especialmente con la ideadel colaborador. En 1 Corintios 3.9 y de nuevo en Z Corintios 6.1 Pablo se refiere a los cristianoscomo “ colaboradores de Dios” . En el primer caso, emplea el término para referirse a laiglesia como un campo y un edificio. En el segundo, lo emplea en relación con la obrareconciliadora de Dios. En el capítulo 5 Pablo habla del ministerio de la reconciliación que Diosle ha confiado a la iglesia. Este ministerio, añade, hace del creyente un embajador de Dios.Esta tarea esta implícita en la del “ colaborador” de 6.1: “ Así, pues, nosotros, comocolaboradores suyos, os exhortamos también a que no recibáis en vano la gracia de Dios” .El ser colaborador de Dios es un enorme privilegio, pero también una gran responsabilidad.Es una persona responsable a quien Dios ha hecho un pequeño socio, confiriéndole lasupervisión de su obra, y de quien espera que rinda cuentas responsablemente (cf. 1 Co. 4.2).Esta es la idea que subyace en las parábolas de las minas (Lc. 19.11-28) y de los talentos(Mt.25.14-30); y en las figuras del viñador (Lc. 13.6-9), los pescadores de hombres (Mt.4.19 lossegadores (Jn. 4.35) y los sirvientes del banquete (Mt. 22.8-10), A esta idea de un socioresponsable se vinculan las imágenes paulinas del soldado (Ef. 6.11-18; 2 Ti. 2.3,4), el atleta (2Ti. 2.5), y el labrador (2 Ti. 2.6); y el concepto de Pedro respecto al pastoreo (1 P. 5.2-4; cf. Jn.21,15-17).Tras la idea del colaborador se halla no sólo el concepto de la responsabilidad, sino tambiénde los recursos. Dios no nos confía una tarea sin darnos los recursos necesarios para cumplirla.Tanto en la parábola de las minas como en la de los talentos se advierte la importancia deinvertir fielmente los recursos que Dios pone a nuestra disposición para el avance del reino.Pablo habla de los dones que se dan a la iglesia “ en orden a las funciones del ministerio, paraedificación del cuerpo de Cristo” (Ef. 4.11, 12). Podemos dar por sentado que si Dios ve a suscolaboradores como labradores, constructores, soldados, pescadores, administradores,segadores y pastores, con toda seguridad proporcionará los recursos que hemos de necesitaren la expansión del reino bajo la guía de su Espíritu.

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Además de las imágenes mencionadas, el Nuevo Testamento provee numerosos ejemplosde una misión que conduce al crecimiento integral de la comunidad de fe. Estos ejemplosponen de manifiesto que la expansión de la comunidad debe esperarse como resultado delcomunicar las buenas nuevas del reino.El primer ejemplo es el propio ministerio de Jesús. Marcos conecta su primer sermón (enGalilea) con la vocación de Simón, Andrés, Santiago y Juan (Mr, 1.14-20). Jesús anda predicandoel evangelio y a la vez formando una comunidad de discípulos (Mr. 3.13ss.). Los entrena (Mr.13.13, 14; Mt. 5.1; Lc. 6.12ss.; Jn. 6.3), los manda a predicar con autoridad y a expulsar demonios(Mr. 3,14, 15), y finalmente los envía hasta los confines de la tierra a hacer discípulos “ a todaslas naciones” (Mt. 28.19).Nótese que la formación de su comunidad, que sin duda tiene en cuenta la expansión numérica,se limita a unos cuantos. Al final de su ministerio, Jesús tenía sólo 120 seguidores (Hch. 1.15),pero había habido crecimiento. Crecían en conocimiento, como lo revelan los epílogos de losEvangelios de Lucas y Juan (cf. Lc. 24.13ss.; Jn. 20.30-21.25).Crecían en su estructura interna,1como lo enseña Hechos 1, y en su participación en el ministerio hacia el mundo, como parecenindicarlo los hechos milagrosos que fueron autorizados a realizar (Mr. 6,7-13) (p.ej. las curaciones,la alimentación de los cinco mil, etc.) y las palabras de Jesús (p.ej. las parábolas del BuenSamaritano y del Juicio de las Naciones).Un segundo ejemplo de la misión que conduce al crecimiento integral de la comunidad, ycorolario de esto, es el caso de la acción del Espíritu Santo en la primitiva congregación deJerusalén. Esta fue la comunidad que creció a partir del ministerio directo de nuestro Señor. Dehecho, es aquí donde podemos apreciar la interrelación de las diferentes dimensiones delcrecimiento. Si bien el crecimiento numérico fue algo lento en la primera comunidad, y a pesarde la impresión de que el crecimiento en conocimiento hubiera tomado ventaja sobre el númerode personas que ingresaban a la compañía de los creyentes, se nos dice que en un solo día3.000 personas abrazaron la fe, fueron bautizadas, e incorporadas a la iglesia (cf, Hch. 2.41). Apartir de entonces el crecimiento numérico continuó día tras día: “Y el Señor añadía cada día ala iglesia los que habían de ser salvos” (Hch, 2.47b). Pero la expansión iba acompañada delcrecimiento en la enseñanza apostólica, la vida en común, el culto, y el servicio (Hch. 2.42-45).Desde luego, es imposible comprender la formidable expansión de la primitiva iglesia deJerusalén aparte de la presencia del Espíritu Santo. Jesús les había ordenado a los discípulospermanecer en Jerusalén hasta que viniera el Espíritu (Hch. 1.4, 8). Fue, pues, la acción delEspíritu por medio de los apóstoles que produjo ese fantástico crecimiento.No obstante la experiencia de Pentecostés, y a pesar de que Jesús había dicho que encuanto recibieran la promesa del Espíritu se volverían testigos suyos en Jerusalén, Judea,Samaria y hasta los confines de la tierra (Hch. 1.8), la congregación de Jerusalén permanecióen la ciudad capital, aparentemente sin mayor interés en extender su testimonio a las regionesde más allá. El Espíritu tuvo que luchar con ella haciendo que la murmuración de los miembrosde habla griega de la iglesia condujera a la elección de los siete que servirían como diáconos,y moviendo a uno de ellos, Esteban, a predicar el evangelio entre los judíos que se habíanasentado en Jerusalén provenientes de otros lugares del mundo. Permitió entonces que lapredicación de Esteban terminará en una tremenda persecución, y se sirvió de la huida devarios miembros de la iglesia desde Jerusalén para difundir el evangelio en Judea, Galilea ySamaria (Hch. 9.31). Después del llamado de Saulo en el camino a Damasco, el Espíritu actuósobre Pedro por medio de Cornelio y luego se sirvió de Pedro para convencer a la renuentecongregación de Jerusalén acerca del propósito universal de Dios. Hacia el final de Hechos 11se informa de un núcleo de creyentes en Antioquia y probablemente en Fenicia y Chipre (Hch.11.19). Especialmente en Antioquia prosperó sobremanera la Palabra, tanto que Bernabé yPablo fueron enviados por el Espíritu, mediante la iglesia, para ministrar el evangelio al mundogentil (Hch. 13.2).La acción del Espíritu en la primitiva congregación de Jerusalén condujo a la misión, y lamisión produjo crecimiento en la iglesia y de la iglesia. Conforme la iglesia fue creciendocomenzó a experimentar esa misma acción cada vez más expansiva de la iglesia de Jerusalén.La misión llevó así al crecimiento de la iglesia, y la expansión de la iglesia dio origen a un

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movimiento misionero mayor y más profundo.Sobrepasados límites de este artículo el recordar cómo Pablo y sus colegas fueron deAntioquía a Chipre y al sur de Asia Menor, regresaron a Jerusalén, pasaron luego a Europa, denuevo a Jerusalén y finalmente a Roma predicando el evangelio, discipulando a los querespondían, mediante la predicación, visitas periódicas, cartas pastorales, y el envío de emisarioscomo Timoteo y Tito. Baste con señalar que la misión paulina marca en la comunidad primitivael clímax de la formidable expansión que Jesús había comenzado con sus discípulos. De ahíque el Espíritu, como la fuerza motriz de la misión de Cristo, se moviera y actuara soberanamentetanto en la congregación de Jerusalén como en los esfuerzos misioneros de Pablo. La presenciadel Espíritu se manifestaba especialmente en la conversión de hombres y mujeres al Dios trino,su incorporación a la iglesia mediante el bautismo y su participación en su vida y misión.Asimismo, se mostraba en el crecimiento en la fe de la comunidad de fieles y en el servicio deamor a sus semejantes.EL CARÁCTER MULTIDIMENSIONAL DEL CRECIMIENTOLa noción de crecimiento es, pues, básica a la experiencia y expectativa misional de losprimeros cristianos, de Jesús y del Antiguo Testamento. Es igualmente fundamental el caráctermultidimensional de dicho crecimiento. Lo numérico es apenas una de las diferentesdimensiones del proceso de expansión misional. Ciertamente es una dimensión esencial queno permite reducciones de ninguna clase. La misión de Dios tiene que ver con la salvación delos pueblos. El evangelio está orientado hacia los muchos. La fe cristiana tiene una proyecciónuniversal; no es una fe particularista ni provincialista. Busca extenderse a todos los confines dela tierra porque proclama un mensaje de buenas nuevas para toda la humanidad. Como bienha dicho la Iglesia Evangélica Metodista de Bolivia; “todo ser humano que viene a este mundo...[Tiene] el derecho de conocer a Jesucristo y su evangelio liberador”. La iglesia es deudora detodo “hombre o mujer, [de] todo niño que viene a la existencia” por cuanto el evangelio “no esuna propiedad, es una mayordomía” (IEMB: 2).Pero, precisamente, por cuanto el evangelio es una “mayordomía”, no puede reducirse a unactivismo evangelístico. El evangelio requiere reflexión, comunión, encarnación.La iglesia es llamada no sólo a proclamar el misterio de Dios en Cristo (Ef. 4.7), sino acomprender su “anchura y... longitud, [su] altura y... profundidad...” (Ef. 3.18) hasta que llegue“a la unidad de la fe y del conocimiento pleno del Hijo de Dios, el estado de hombre perfecto, ala madurez de la plenitud de Cristo” (Ef. 4.13). Es decir, necesita pensar la fe que le da origeny la sustenta, acompañando y profundizando cada vez más su actualización en la historia. Deahí que el contenido de esa fe (Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo, hombre y pecado, historia y salvación,reino e iglesia, palabra, tradición y futuro) necesite ser continuamente analizado, interpretado ytraducido a las categorías que emanan de la realidad histórico-social de la iglesia, al calor de laPalabra revelada y la iluminación del Espíritu.Que este “crecimiento reflexivo” o conceptual es parte intrínseca de la misión se hace evidenteen la visión de la iglesia como comunidad peregrina y discipuladora, enviada a bautizar a lasnaciones en nombre del Dios trino y a enseñarles a observar los mandamientos de Cristo (Mt.28.18-19). Se hace también claro en la práctica misional paulina (cf. “ el misterio [de] Cristo... alcual...anunciamos, amonestando e instruyendo...” Col, 1.27, 28), y en la experiencia misionalde la comunidad primitiva de Jerusalén (Hch. 2.42). En otras palabras, si bien es cierto que lo2numérico no admite reducción, es igualmente cierto que lo reflexivo no puede ser relegado a unplano secundario en la vida de la iglesia, desligado de la misión ni dejado en las manos de unaminoría privilegiada (los teólogos). La iglesia toda es llamada a crecer en el conocimiento de lafe. Su reflexión es parte y parcela de su obediencia misional.3Tampoco puede menospreciarse el carácter misional del desarrollo orgánico de la comunidadde fe. Si algo hace claro el libro de los Hechos y las epístolas del Nuevo Testamento es que elreino toma forma en el sistema de relaciones que produce el llamado a la fe y el arrepentimiento.La celebración litúrgica, la disciplina interna, la mayordomía, la formación de líderes – todos losaspectos de la vida interna de la iglesia – no son elementos extraños a la misión, sino parteesencial e indispensable de la misma. La evidencia y objetivo del crecimiento en la fe se halla

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en la participación de todo el cuerpo en la misión. Asimismo, el anuncio del reino conlleva unainvitación a participar ya de la vida del reino en la experiencia comunicaría de la fe. Sin unacomunidad vibrante que respalde el anuncio y reciba a los llama-dos, lo numérico se convierteen una mera producción consumerista.De ahí también la importancia vital del servicio de amor. Sin vidas comprometidas hasta loúltimo con Cristo en el servicio al prójimo, la obediencia misional de la iglesia carece deautenticidad. Porque en la misión no se trata simplemente de ir a las naciones y discipularlas,ni meramente de establecer congregaciones que celebran el evangelio y reflexionan sobre susignificado. Antes bien, se trata de “salir a Cristo fuera del campamento llevando su vituperio”en el servicio del mundo (He. 13.13-16). Ello exige un cuestionamiento y una evaluaci6n con-tinua de la presencia cristiana en el mundo. Sin un crecimiento en la eficacia de la participaciónde la iglesia en los problemas y las luchas personales y colectivas, estructurales e históricas dela sociedad, la labor evangelizadora, el desarrollo orgánico y la reflexión de la iglesia seconvierten en reducciones de la misión. Porque, como bien ha dicho José Míguez Bonino: “Lamisión... no es un mero conjunto de actos sino la manifestación de una nueva realidad, la nuevavida que se ofrece y se comunica en Cristo...” (1975:85).EL CRECIMIENTO COMO FUNDAMENTO TEOLÓGICOLa Biblia pone el crecimiento integral del pueblo de Dios en el centro mismo de la misión.Esto hay que afirmarlo claramente, a la luz de la crítica que hace más de treinta años hiciera elfinado misionólogo holandés, J. C. Hoekendijk, a la idea del crecimiento como meta de lamisión de la iglesia. De acuerdo con Hoekendijk, la misión no se realiza por la extensión de laiglesia, por su multiplicación, sino por la manifestación de la paz mesiánica, la shalóm que seproclama en el corazón del evangelio (kerigma), se vive en la comunión (koinonía) y se demuestraen el servicio (diaconía) (1964:25). Esta crítica, que ha sido reiterada de una u otra forma porcolegas latino-americanos como Adolfo Ham (1977:284), René Padilla (1975: 159), Juan LuisSegundo (1975: 233ss.; 1973:53ss.) y Gustavo Gutiérrez (1972:193ss.), va dirigida a aquellosque han definido el crecimiento de la iglesia básicamente en términos numéricos, llegandoprácticamente a hacer de la evangelización un proceso de iglesificación en línea con la ideologíade la cristiandad, según la cual la iglesia establecida es el centro de la sociedad (cf. McGavran,1969:32; 1972:59). La crítica es, por tanto, válida en tanto cuestiona una evidente mutilacióndel concepto bíblico de la misión, una deformación del crecimiento de la iglesia y unaevangelización que perpetúa la ideología de cristiandad.Cabría preguntar, sin embargo, sobre el papel que ocupa la iglesia en la misión de Dios, ¿Esla iglesia, como argumenta Hoekendijk (1964: 42), un “ acontecimiento” pasajero en lamanifestación del reino de Dios? ¿Es su origen y crecimiento parte del objetivo mismo de lamisión o un fruto inesperado, una de las muchas “ sorpresas” del obrar de Dios en la historia?¿Debemos esperar que la iglesia crezca, anticipar su crecimiento como una señal de lapresencia y revelación futura del reino mesiánico y considerar su expansión como criterio paramedir nuestra fidelidad misionera? ¿O debemos concebir el crecimiento de la iglesia como undon que debe ser recibido con alabanza y gratitud pero no esperado? En otras palabras, ¿es lareferencia a lo último y definitivo del reino de Dios todo lo que hay que decir en torno a la metade la misión de Dios, o podemos hablar de una (o más) meta(s) penúltima(s) y provisional(es)que podemos anticipar para el aquí y ahora, que verifica(n) nuestra fidelidad misional y da(n)testimonio de la realidad presente del reino venidero?Nuestra respuesta a estos interrogantes es que el material bíblico .introducido hasta aquídemuestra que la iglesia no es ni un mero acontecimiento ni la meta última de la misión deDios, pero si una comunidad visible, llamada a “crecer en todo” hasta llegar a “la plenitud deCristo” (Ef. 3.15, 13). Consecuentemente, su crecimiento integral es una señal y una metapenúltima, o provisional, de la misión de Dios. Ello hace del crecimiento de la iglesia unfundamento teológico. Como tal, debe ser no sólo anticipado, sino aceptado como criterioevaluativo para la práctica misional de la iglesia. Hay varias razones teológicas que justificanesta aseveración.Respuesta obediente al amar del PadreEn primer lugar, el crecimiento integral de la iglesia, como hemos dicho, no se da por cuentapropia. Es provocado por Dios mismo. La iglesia surge como resultado del amor inagotable e

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incesante del Padre, que busca, cual pastor desesperado, las ovejas perdidas de su redil paraconducirlas al redil; que desciende hasta las regiones extremas para liberar a una creacióncautiva; que crea un nuevo pueblo de los escombros de una raza humana corrompida (por elpecado) como primicias de una nueva creación. La invitación a formar parte de ese pueblo nose origina, por lo tanto, en el corazón humano, sino en el corazón de Dios. Ni tampoco se llevaa cabo por la astucia y persuasión humanas, sino por el poder de Dios: “Ninguno puede venir amí, si el Padre que me envió no lo trajere”, dijo Jesús Gn. 6:44). Luego, la iglesia no es sóloprimicias de la nueva creación, sino instrumento del Padre en la difusión de su amor.Fruto de ese amor redentor, la iglesia ha sido constituida en comunidad, o (en lenguaje delNuevo Testamento) “familia de Dios”. Sus miembros no son individuos y extraños, sino hermanose hijos de un mismo Padre. De ahí que sean convocados a crecer en la gracia que les dioorigen y en la práctica del amor fraterno. Ello es necesario, por una parte, porque la iglesia noes un producto acabado sino una familia en formación, en la que sus miembros van aprendiendoa relacionarse responsablemente. Es necesario, por otra parte, porque es en la acción fraternadonde se vive la nueva humanidad que el Padre está creando. La iglesia no es so1o primicias,sino paradigma de esa nueva raza.La iglesia crece en tanto pueblo y comunidad como respuesta al amor de Dios. Esecrecimiento se profundiza en la comprensión de “la anchura, la longitud, la profundidad y laaltura” del amor que el Padre ha revelado en su hijo Jesucristo (Ef. 3.18-19). En la reflexiónsobre el misterio del amor divino, la iglesia va descubriendo el sentido profundo, la magnitud yla urgencia de su participación en la misión de Dios y de la vivencia de su amor. Lejos dedesviarla de la práctica y difusión de ese amor, la reflexión teológica la incentiva, la inquieta y ladesafía a una evangelización más fidedigna y a una experiencia comunitaria más madura.El amor que se difunde en la evangelización, que se vive en la comunidad eclesial y que seprofundiza en la reflexión teológica, se encarna en el servicio desinteresado al prójimo y en lalucha por la justicia. En el contexto de la fe cristiana, el amor sin la justicia carece de sentido.Este hecho es subrayado a lo largo de la revelación bíblica, desde los profetas hasta losapóstoles. El amor a la misericordia y el hacer justicia están inseparablemente vinculados conla humillación delante de Dios, dice Miqueas 6.8. No puede haber entrega a Dios sin amor, y nopuede haber amor sin justicia. La justicia es la otra cara del amor, así como la diaconía (servicio)es el correlato de la koinonía (comunión) y la encarnación el fundamento de la proclamaciónkerygmática. Amor sin justicia es sentimiento abstracto; comunidad sin servicio no es nadamás que un ghetto evasivo; y proclamación sin encarnación es como el “metal que resuena” (1Co. 13.1). Luego el crecimiento diaconal de la iglesia es también respuesta obediente al amordel Padre.Verificación histórica de la fe en el HijoEn segundo lugar, el crecimiento integral de la iglesia es un fundamento teológico porqueverifica históricamente la fe en el Hijo de Dios. La iglesia en crecimiento no sólo proclama labuena nueva de salvación, sino que es paradigma de esa salvación en tanto está formándosecon hombres y mujeres que están siendo liberados, por la fe en Cristo, del poder de la muertey el pecado y están dando testimonio de esa liberación en las situaciones concretas del diariovivir, La iglesia en crecimiento no sólo se extiende como el grano de mostaza por todos loscontornos de la tierra, en todas las cultura y a través de todos los sectores de la sociedad, sinoque da muestras, por su liderazgo, mayordomía, organización y culto, de ser una comunidadautóctona y santa, peregrina y encarnada. El crecimiento integral de la iglesia garantiza lacontinuidad histórica de la comunidad que Cristo fundó en tanto produce congregaciones queescuchan y viven su palabra, observan fielmente sus sacramentos y ponen en práctica susignificado. Verifica, por lo demás, la fe en Cristo en la medida en que la iglesia es capacitadapara reconocer e interpretar los signos históricos del reino, o sea, aquellos acontecimientosseculares que esclarecen y manifiestan características fundamentales del nuevo orden de vidaintroducido por Jesucristo. (Por ejemplo, iniciativas de paz entre las naciones, la defensa delos derechos humanos y la lucha en contra de la pobreza, el racismo, el colonialismo, el ma-chismo y la contaminación atmosférica serían en nuestros días signos del reino, porqueesclarecen el sentido de la paz, el amor y la justicia que caracterizan al nuevo ardían de vidaque anuncia el evangelio.)La fe cristiana se basa en el hecho de que Cristo se encarnó, murió y resucitó para la salvación

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del mundo, por su resurrección fue investido de toda autoridad en el cielo y en la tierra y por esaautoridad entregó a sus seguidores la tarea de hacer discípulos a todas las naciones y pro-metió acompañarles hasta el fin del mundo. Si esa fe implica que la iglesia no es un accidentehistórico sino la continuidad de la comunidad que Jesucristo fundó y la realización delmandamiento que Él dejó, y si el reino que Él proclamó no se agota en la esperanza del másallá sino que es un orden de vida que irrumpe sobre el presente, luego el crecimiento de laiglesia, en el sentido que lo hemos definido, verifica históricamente la fe en Jesucristo, el Hijode Dios.Celebración de la esperanza mediante el EspírituEl crecimiento integral de la iglesia debe ser considerado parte funda-mental de la estructurateológica de la fe cristiana, en tercer lugar, porque por su crecimiento la iglesia celebra laesperanza. ¿Cuál esperanza? La esperanza de la reunión última y definitiva del pueblo deDios, congregado de “ toda nación, razas, pueblos y lengua” (Ap. 7.9; 15.2-5). El crecimientonumérico de la iglesia es una celebración del cumplimiento final de esta promesa; indica que lagran siega que la Biblia contempla para el fin de los tiempos ya ha comenzado. El crecimientoorgánico indica que ya ha comenzado la integración y coordinación perfecta de todas las partesdel cuerpo. El crecimiento conceptual celebra el momento cuando la iglesia conocerá a plenitudcomo es conocida (1 Co. 13. 12). El crecimiento diaconal celebra la consumación del reino, eldía cuando se realice a plenitud la promesa de una nueva tierra donde mora el amor, la justiciay la paz; da testimonio de que ese nuevo mundo ya ha comenzado y que se anticipa su revelaciónfinal. En fin, el crecimiento integral de la iglesia celebra la participación plena de toda la iglesiaen el servicio del reino.Esa esperanza se mantiene viva por obra del Espíritu Santo. E1 Espíritu, que hace a la iglesia“nacer a una esperanza viva, por la resurrección de Jesucristo de los muertos” (1 P. 2.3) y lasella para el día de la redención (Ef., 1, 14), también intercede por ella “con gemidos indecibles”,ayudándole a anticipar el día de la redención (Ro. 8.26, 22). La iglesia crece por su poder (Hch.1.8).¿En qué sentido, y por qué, se puede y debe, entonces, anticipar el crecimiento de la iglesia?A la luz de la Palabra, podemos decir que debemos anticipar el crecimiento de la iglesia comometa penúltima de la misión de Dios porque éste es un tema central en la visión bíblica de lamisión, refleja la experiencia de la comunidad fundada por Jesús y continuada por el EspírituSanto a través del ministerio de los apóstoles, y es parte fundamental de la estructura trinitariade la teología cristiana (ya que responde al amor del Padre, verifica la fe en el Hijo y celebra laesperanza mediante el Espíritu). La salvedad que hemos hecho respecto a esta afirmación, sinembargo, es que no es cualquier tipo de crecimiento eclesial el que puede anticiparse comometa de la misión de Dios, sino aquel que muestra fidelidad a la obra de Dios, encarna lapresencia redentora de Cristo en la historia y es motivado por la experiencia del Espíritu.Asimismo, tal crecimiento será integral en la medida en que sea multidimensional. Sólo cuandose reproduce el pueblo de Dios por la fe en Jesucristo, se fortalece la vida interna de su cuerpo,se profundiza la reflexión sobre la Palabra y se encarna la presencia del Espíritu en la accióndiaconal de la comunidad de creyentes se puede hablar del crecimiento de la iglesia como unverdadero anticipo de la manifestación definitiva del reino de Dios y meta provisional de suemisión en el mundo.NOTASl. El Evangelio de Juan, especialmente, revela el crecimiento que los discípulos experimentan en loque atañe a la comprensión de su fe. Nótese, por ejemplo, los dos paréntesis que aparecen en el libropara explicar que, aunque los discípulos no entendieron el significado de un acontecimiento o de unapalabra en un momento inicial, lo entendieron después de la resurrección (cf. Jn. 2.22; 12.16). Nótesetambién la referencia al Espíritu Santo como maestro y testigo Gn. 14.26; 15.26; 16.7, 13).2. La insistencia de McGavran en cuanto a dividir la gran comisión (o proceso de cristianización) endos etapas, una relacionada con la acción evangelizadora (discipular) y la otra con la enseñanza(perfeccionar) carece de fundamento. Cf. Costas 1974: 142ss.; Yoder: 41-43.3. Juan E. Stam ha subrayado este imperativo en su artículo “ Teología: ¿irresponsabilidad de quién?”Dice muy acertadamente: “Como todo ser pensante filosofa de alguna manera, también todo cristianoteologiza de alguna manera – consciente o inconscientemente, coherente o incoherentemente,responsablemente o sin asumir la responsabilidad de su misión y su apostolado. Pero como cristiano,

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entiende de alguna manera su fe, y la pertinencia de esa fe para el mundo que le rodea. Esperfectamente obvio que esta tarea no puede relegarse a una élite de expertos. El laico, muchasveces más que el teólogo, está inserto en esa realidad histórica que le reclama en cada momento uncompromiso donde una y otra vez se pondrá a prueba la autenticidad y la profundidad de su fe”(1977:2).

Orlando E. Costas, es Profesor de Misionología y Director de Estudios Hispanos de “Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary” de Filadelfia, EE UU. Es autor de varios libros, entre ellos Compromiso y Misión, publicado por Editoral Caribe.

BIBLIOGRAFÍABlauw, Johannes, The Missionary Nature of the Church, Lutterworth, Londres, 1967.Costas, Orlando E., ed., Hacia una teología de la evangelización, La Aurora, Buenos Aires, 1973.Costas, Orlando E., El protestantismo en América Latina hoy, Publicaciones INDEF, San José, CostaRica, 1975.Costas, Orlando E., The Church and its Mission; A Shattering Critique from the Third World, TyndaleHouse Publishers, Wheaton (Illinois), 1974.Gutiérrez, Gustavo, Teología de la liberación, Ediciones Sígueme, Salamanca, 1972.Ham, Adolfo, “Evangelism in the Socialist Society of Cuba” , International Review of Missions, LXVI:263 (July), 1977.Hoekendijk, J. C., The Church inside Out, Westminster, Philadelphia, 1964.Iglesia Evangélica Metodista en Bolivia, “Evangelización hoy en América Latina: Tesis boliviana” ,Boletín Teológico, No. 11 (julio), 1975.Míguez Bonino, José, “El reino de Dios y la historia”, El reino de Dios y América Latina hoy, C. RenéPadilla, ed., Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, El Paso (Texas), 1975.McGavran, Donald A., “Essential Evangel-ism”, Eye of the Storm: The Great Debate in Mission, D. A.McGavran, ed., Word, Waco (Texas), 1973.McGavran, Donald A„Understanding Church Growth, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids (Michigan), 1969. Véasetambién la nueva edición (revisada y ampliada) de esta obra publicada por la misma editorial en 1980.Padilla, C. René, El Evangelio hoy, Ediciones Certeza, Buenos Aires, 1975.Panikkar, Raymond, “The Category of Growth in Comparative Religion: A Critical Self-Examination” ,Harvard Theo-logical Review, No. 66, 1973.Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Theology and the Kingdom, Westminster Press, Filadelfia, 1969.Rowley, H. H., The Missionary Message of the Old Testament, The Carey Press, Londres, 1955.Segundo, Juan Luis, Masas y minorías en la dialéctica divina de la liberación, La Aurora, BuenosAires, 1973.Segundo, Juan Luis, La liberación de la teología, Carlos Lohlé, Buenos Aires, 1975.Stam, Juan E., "Teología: ¿irresponsabilidad de quién?”, Excelsior, tercera sección (22 de agosto),1977.Sundkler, Bengt, The World of Mission, Lutterworth, Londres, 1965.Tippett, Alan R., Church Growth and the Word of God, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids (Michigan), 1970.Yoder, John H., “Church Growth Issues in Theological Perspective”, The Challenge of Church Growth:A Symposium, Wilbert R. Shenk, ed., Institute of Mennonite Studies, Elkhart (Indiana), 1973.Fundación Kairós ...al Servicio del Reino de Dios y su JusticiaOrlando Costas es Profesor de Misionología y Director de EstudiosHispanos del Eastern Baptist Theological Seminario. Filadelfia.EE.UU.

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