What About Jesus!?

As I was going to and fro on the blogosphere, I found a video interview with Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert. They were exploring the question “What is the mission of the Church?”

For those unfamiliar with the above names, they are leaders in the “young, restless, and reformed” movement that’s making its way to a heated Bible Study on Romans near you.

Without going into the nitty gritty of everything said – which would be both boring and unfair – there is a statement by Gilbert that brought to mind N.T. Wright’s critique from yesterday’s post. Gilbert says,

You can take a good thing, which is certainly commanded of us in Scripture, which is to do good deeds of all kinds – love your neighbour, care for the poor – good things, and you can take those and get them wrapped up and twisted up around the wrong theological themes – gospel, kingdom, shalom.

Correct me if I’m reading this wrongly, but Greg Gilbert appears to be saying that to connect good deeds with the gospel or the kingdom is to connect them with the wrong theological theme.

But…but…what about Jesus!? If what Gilbert says is true then of course we’re going to be confused by the question ‘why did Jesus live?’ This, after all, is the Jesus who said “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

You cannot take the Gospels seriously and conclude that good deeds and the kingdom/gospel are in separate theological categories. The kingdom of God is where God’s will is done. And what is God’s will? What does he desire? “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before your God.” In short, do good. The gospel that Jesus proclaimed was the reality that God’s will was being done, and thus the kingdom was at hand. Was "the gospel" the proclamation or was "the gospel" the deeds? Yes!

What about Paul? What gospel did he hold fast to? Basically the same one: Through the man Jesus, God’s will was done. In him, especially in his death and resurrection, the purposes of God are fulfilled.

The irony lost on some in the Reformed camp is that because of the cross, gospel and good deeds are beautifully interwoven, for what is the gospel if it is not the announcement of the greatest of deeds?

How, then, does all of this relate to the Church’s good deeds? Contrary to what Gilbert suggests, our good deeds find their greatest motivation and significance when they are wrapped around themes (or realities) like gospel and kingdom. The event of the cross becomes a lens through which all of life is seen. And the life that we now live is joined, by faith, to the life of the resurrected, crucified Jesus. We are united with the one we proclaim.

To use one of Gilbert's examples, the command in Scripture to “love your neighbour” is thus wrapped up with the gospel, for we are called to love as Jesus loved. The “good news”, the “story” of Jesus, shapes our present stories.

DeYoung later mentions “The Great Commission” as being what the church is all about – i.e. the proclamation of the gospel is the mission of the church. But to perform an act of rhetorical jujitsu, the Great Commission is precisely concerned with connecting gospel and good deeds. Jesus commissions his disciples to teach the nations everything he commanded. To “make disciples” isn’t to make good students of abstract atonement theology: it is to make doers of the word - embodiers of the message. Paul had a shorthand way of making disciples – “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

Finally, regarding DeYoung’s remark about there being no New Testament interest in “transforming the whole world”, what else can taking the commands of Jesus to the nations do but call for a complete transformation? What else does the book of Acts show but a small band of passionate Jews turning the "world upside down"?

The distinction is perhaps unwarranted, but the gospel is not the thing. The formation of a new community in Christ is the thing. The gospel is the power that effects the (trans)formation.

Missio Dei - #11: It's Climax Is Christ

The previous post in this series was left unresolved. In fact, each of the posts dealing with the realities we encounter in Scripture were left unresolved. We have looked at the reality of this God, YHWH, the Holy One of Israel. We have looked at the reality of this story, a story of creation, rebellion and restoration. We have looked at the reality of this people, the nation of Israel chosen by God to be blessed and to be a blessing.

All three of these realities are intertwined. God has chosen Israel to bring the story to a climax, and so bring glory to God's name and blessing to creation. As mentioned before, this is what Tom Wright calls God's-single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world. But Israel could not be all that YHWH called them to be. The name of YHWH was being blasphemed on account of them, and the story was looking hopeless. There is where the apostle Paul might say, "But God..."

But God's purposes would not go unfulfilled. The reality of God, story, and people would all come to a climax in Jesus of Nazareth.

"He is the image of the invisible God." What YHWH was and did throughout the Old Testament, Jesus of Nazareth was and did in the New. He was Emmanuel, God with us, putting human flesh on the Divine. We encounter the reality of God only through Jesus.

The reality of this story is also found in Jesus. As my former teacher likes to say, Our story became His story so that His story could become our story. On the cross He took upon Himself the story of the world, and secured for the world a new story - His story of victory over death and perfect fellowship with God and with one another. His resurrection is the first fruits of this new story and the guarantee that God's good purposes will be brought to completion. Through Jesus, restoration is at hand.

In Jesus, God has constituted a people for Himself. Our union with Christ makes us a part of a community of people called and empowered by God to be conformed to the image of His Son. The reality of this people finds its origins in the faith of Abraham, but finds its fulfillment in the seed of Abraham, which is Jesus. This is why Paul can say in Galatians 3 that,

in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

What has all of this got to do with mission?

We began this discussion on reality by examining the nature of biblical authority. Does mission exist because the Bible commands it in passages such as the Great Commission? Perhaps, but there is a deeper authority at work than the simple, "The Bible says it, I do it", a deeper authority which is actually expressed right before the command to go and make disciples. Jesus says to His disciples, "All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me." We must not think of this as Jesus merely saying that all authority to command has been given to Him, therefore do what I say or else. His authority rests in the realities He incarnates - the reality of God, God's story, and God's people. It is an authority which authorises His followers, which frees His followers and which empowers His followers to participate in missio Dei.

Mission begins not with an imperative but with grace. The mission of God does not flow from the power of His command, but from the power of His love. It is to this, and not to a lifeless text, that we respond.

Missio Dei - #10: It's Israel

We've been delving into the nature of biblical authority in the last few posts, discovering along the way that the Bible is our authority for mission not only in the sense that it contains commands along those lines, but because reading it is an encounter with reality - the reality of a personal, purposeful God, and the reality of a story which we are all caught up in, from the least of us to the greatest.

I noted before that there are three specific realities dealt with in Wright's book, with the third of those being:

The Reality of This People

I think this reality is the one we most struggle with. We can accept that the Old Testament is about God, we can accept that there is a grand narrative casting its shadow over the pages, but what we perhaps don't often think of is that it is a collection of texts almost exclusively dealing with a quite specific group of people - Hebrews. We perhaps have a tendency to strip the characters we read about of their national identity, so that Abraham, David, Solomon, Moses, Elijah et al. become generic Bible figures as opposed to historical persons from Israel. And we do this to our detriment.

Wright says that,

Ancient Israel, with their distinctive view of their own election, history and relationship to their God, YHWH, is a historical reality of enormous significance to the history of the rest of humanity.

"Christianity appeals to history; to history it must go" said George Caird, and like it or not, the history of Christianity is wrapped up in ancient Israel and their role in the story. Israelites were a people of the story, careful to remember its past events, and anticipating its future. They were a community of memory and of hope.

Their memory was of YHWH and what He had done for His chosen people. They spoke of His glory and salvation, and remembered His deliverance of them out of Egypt in the yearly Passover celebrations. Well says Wright that YHWH was known through what He had done. Abtract theology and philosophy was not how Israel came to know the one true God. They came to know Him because He reached down into history and secured for them a miraculous salvation, as promised by Moses in one of my favourite Bible verses:

Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be still.

Their hope is something less talked about, but something which rears its head in Israel's origins and explains why God chose them in the first place. YHWH's promise to Abraham was not simply that He would bless the children of Israel, but that through Abraham's seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. As Wright succinctly puts it, Israel existed for the sake of the nations. And so while they were specially chosen by God and were uniquely privileged in their experience of God's covenantal love, this was not so that they could boast in their favoured status with God to the surrounding countries, but so that they could act as a light to their neighbours and "declare His [YHWH's] glory to the nations". (As in aside, how might this effect the way we read the word "elect" and its cognates in the New Testament? Perhaps with more of a missional thrust?).

Through this people missio Dei was to be accomplished. Abraham's seed would be the one to bring God's blessing to all the nations of the world. The history of Israel as a nation is both a foretaste and a guarantee of the glorious future, and yet this people's story is one of seemingly constant rebellion and covenant breaking. What N.T. Wright calls "God's-single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world" was seemingly being hampered by a stiff-necked people. What to do?

Missio Dei - #9: It's A Story

Last time out I meant to talk about the three realities to which the Bible bears witness, those three being the reality of this God, this story, and this people. I only touched on the first of the three, so to the next one I shall now turn.

The Reality of This Story

The Bible tells a story. How often to we think of that? Moreover, it tells the story, in which all other mini-stories find themselves. The Bible isn't exhaustive in its telling of the story, but it places all of creation into a grand narrative. And so when we read Scripture, we are tapping into a story which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story with heroes and villains, climaxes and low-points, joy and suffering, all of which form a part of human history.

But more than the Bible being a record of human history, it is a glimpse into the mind of the storyteller, who alone can tell us what it is all about. The story is based on a worldview -- Jehovah's worldview -- and explains the way things are, why they are so, and what they ultimately will be. Therefore in the Bible we find answers to our deepest questions: Where are we? Who are we? What's gone wrong? What is the solution?

Where are we? We are on planet earth, which is part of the good creation of the living, personal God known as YHWH.

Who are we? We are unique creatures - unique because we are made in the image of God, and thus have spiritual and moral capacities, and consequently, responsibilities.

What's gone wrong? In wanting to be gods, we have broken our communion with the one true God. We have distanced ourselves from Him, and we now portray distorted images of our Creator, choosing to live life with a "clear conscience" by exchanging reality for unreality, thus suppressing the truth.

What is the solution? The problem is distance from God, so the solution must be nearness. We cannot and do not want to get near to God ourselves, and so God has promised to get near to us. He chose Israel to be His instrument for righting the wrongs of creation, and He has acted throughout history to bring this promise to fulfillment and consummation.

Our lives are caught up in this story. How do we know? Because we are caught up in this reality which the Bible confronts us with. The reality of broken creatures living lives as if YHWH doesn't exist. Christians and non-Christians alike are capable of this, but in our clearer moments we know that something is awry. The deepest parts of our being point to the reality of Scripture's story and Scripture's God, but at the point we are faced with a decision, not unlike this one: the blue pill or the red pill, the truth of the lie.

People say that Christianity is a crutch, or it is the opiate for the masses. I say they are mistaken (then again, I would). Christianity deals with (or at least should deal with) reality as it truly is, with all of its brokenness and sin. It is not the escape to a happier world, but the participation in the renewal of the one we have, the participation in missio Dei. This is the metanarrative disclosed in God's Word to us; this is the driving force behind mission; this is reality.

Missio Dei - #8: It's YHWH

The last post from the hit series Missio Dei dealt with biblical authority, concluding that the Bible's authority lies in its presentation of reality. What realities are rendered to us in the Bible? Wright lists three:

- The reality of this God
- The reality of this story
- The reality this people

Elaboration required.

The Reality of This God

I wrote previously about the word "God". It's a word that can mean anything, depending on who you are. Even when two people talk about the God of the Bible, they can be talking about a seemingly completely different person, or at least talking about Him in one or two contradictory ways.

We must be clear that when we talk about the God of the Bible, and when we say that Scripture renders to us the reality of God, the God in question is a person, with a name. That may sound simple, but its reality is the most profound thing imaginable. I think too often we lose sight of the personhood of God, and everything which that entails. God revealed Himself to Moses as a person, calling Himself "I AM". Jesus called Him "Abba", an Aramaic term for which the English equivalent would be "Dad" or "Pa", depending on where you are from. Scripture speaks of a Person; one, whole Person - the Hebrews knew Him as YHWH, the Holy One of Israel, and the early Jewish Christians knew Him as God our Father.

One important thing to remember is that it is this God's reality which gives Scripture its authority, simply because it is this God's reality which gives Scripture its existence. God exists apart from the Bible, but He has chosen to make Himself known to different people at different times in different ways, the details of which are recorded for us in the Old and New Testaments. The charge of circular reasoning can surely be made here: The Bible renders to us the reality of God, and the reality of God renders to us the Bible. I make no objection to this charge. The only thing I can say is that if YHWH is God (or if anyone is God for that matter), then "circular reasoning" must be employed, otherwise the claim to deity is false.

The problem people have with the relationship between God and the Bible is that is is treated as equivalent to my relationship with my passport. I am Declan Kelly. How do I prove to someone that I'm Declan Kelly? Well, I show them my passport which I received from an authority greater than myself - the government. I do not show them a document written by my own hand to verify that I am who I say I am. I don't have the authority to get away with that. But God does. In fact He must, or He is no God at all. For who else has the authority to speak about God other than God Himself? Unlike you or me, God, by definition, cannot be authorised by a higher power. Therefore to expect anything but circular reasoning when it comes to God and the Bible is unreasonable. The Bible is an authority on God because God is the authority behind the Bible.

With that tangent out of the way, so what if we encounter the reality of God in Scripture? Well,

If the God YHWH, who is rendered to us in these texts, is really God, then that reality (or rather His reality) authorises a range of responses as appropriate, legitimate and indeed imperative. These include not only the response of worship, but also of ethical living in accordance with this God's own character and will, and a missional orientation that commits my own life story into the grand story of God's purpose for the nations and for creation. Mission flows from the reality of this God - the biblical God. Or to put it another way: mission is authorised by the reality of this God.

The question is, have Christians substituted the reality of this God who speaks to us through His Word and is present among us by His Spirit for the reality of a set of doctrines about God, or a set of rules to live by? When we take the former approach to Scripture, our mission flows from missio Dei as we participate in what this God -- whose purposeful reality springs from the pages of Scripture -- is up to. When we take the latter approach, mission is something we do because the Bible tells us so; it's our response to a text.

We must learn to see the realities to which the Bible bears witness, and none is more important than the reality that YHWH is God.

Missio Dei - #7: It's Reality

The majority of this series thus far has been focused on setting up a missional hermeneutic of the Bible (i.e. a way of reading and interpreting the Bible with the mission of God as a framework), as opposed to finding a biblical basis for mission. One of the distinctions between the two can be summed up by the word "authority". A biblical basis for mission hones in on texts that state a missionary imperative -- the Great Commission for example -- and with the Bible as our authority we must conclude that mission is expected of us. However, a missional reading of the Bible "explores the nature of biblical authority itself in relation to mission". It goes deeper than the "The Bible says it, I gotta believe it/do it" approach to authority. Much deeper.

When we think of the word "authority", what is the first image or thought that pops into our heads? Most likely it is some kind of military image, where the commands of a general are obeyed. We equate authority with the right to command, the right to give specific orders and expect them to be done. When we bring this idea of authority to Scripture, we make it a book of commands that we are expected to follow. The problem with this, as Wright points out, is that the bulk of the Bible is not command.

The Bible is much more laden with narrative, poetry, song, prophecy, letters, apocalyptic literature etc. This being so, what then is the nature of biblical authority? The relative lack of imperatives means it cannot simply be the authority to command, and so our understanding of authority must go beyond the usual military model and into something much more fundamental; the most fundamental thing of all in fact - reality.

The created order provides a useful analogy for this kind of authority. Think of gravity as an authority. It is something immensely freeing, allowing us to travel the globe by foot or by car or by boat. Gravity authorizes us to walk to the shop, to sleep in our beds. However, it also sets limits to that freedom. Jump off of a skyscraper and you will feel the deadly effects of the authority of gravity. Its reality dictates that you will not survive. To expect to fly through the air is to be ignorant of reality, and so while there is great liberty because of gravity, there is also a line that can be crossed.

Our reading of the Scriptures is an engagement with reality. Wright says that,

The authority of the Bible is that it brings us into contact with reality - primarily the reality of God Himself whose authority stands behind even that of creation.

This is how the poetry and song of the Bible are authoritative; not in the sense of giving us commands to obey, but in the sense of opening our eyes to what is real. When you read the Bible, you are not escaping into the realm of fantasy. Reading about a man coming back from the dead might suggest as much, but it shouldn't. If you believe in one creation, then a new creation in which the dead rise cannot be beyond the realms of possibility. In fact I would say it is as probable as the existence of planet earth. Not something that happens every day of course, but...

We must avoid reading the Bible with a sort of dualism that says in effect, "Here I am in reality. I need a bit of outside information from the Bible to help me cope or to tell me what to do". We must read Scripture as a text which tells it as it really is. It is a text not detached from our reality, but revealing of our reality. Its authority lies in the fact that the God who defines reality has spoken an acted in human history, and the Bible tells of His words and deeds. This also ties in with the essence of salvation. God's plan is not to remove us from this reality and place us in heaven. God's plan is to restore reality, which is where we are at right now. He has begun to do this, He has acted definitively to do this, and He will bring His plan to completion.

I asked before if there would be Christianity without the New Testament. The short answer is an emphatic yes. Why? Because of the reality of the resurrection. Peter didn't have a New Testament when he became a Christian. That which He acknowledged as supremely authoritative was not a text; it was a person - Jesus the Messiah, who redefined reality and to whom all authority was given.

And so, to repeat, our reading of the Bible is an engagement with reality. This relates to missio Dei in the sense that "our authority for mission flows from the Bible because the Bible reveals the reality on which our mission is based". Wright has three realities in mind here, which will be discussed next time.

Missio Dei - #6: It's the Source

Much of what has been written thus far in this ground-breaking series has to do with the nature of the Bible and how we read it. In our shaping a missional hermeneutic, the argument is not that the certain biblical texts provide a basis for mission, but rather that the Bible in itself is a product of mission. Well says Wright that,

...the whole canon of Scripture is a missional phenomenon in that sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God toward His creation and us, human beings in God's own image, but wayward and wanton.

In short, the Bible finds its origins in God and His mission to redeem creation. With no missio Dei there would be no Bible. Is the reverse true? With no Bible there would be no missio Dei? Or with no Bible there would be no Christianity? Something to think about...

And so a missional reading of the Bible is not forcing something foreign into the equation. Rather such a reading of the Bible is reading it for the same purpose as it was written. Why is it you and I can have Bibles in our possession? What is the source of these sacred texts? The source is a God on a mission. Abandon this perspective and you rip the heart out of Scripture. Keep it and the Bible is a book with divine origins telling of divine purpose. As Charles R. Taber writes,

The very existence of the Bible is incontrovertible evidence of the God who refused to forsake His rebellious creation, who refused to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to His original design for it...The very existence of such a collection of writings testifies to a God who breaks through to human beings, who disclosed Himself to them, who will not leave them unilluminated in their darkness...who takes the initiative in re-establishing broken relationships with us.

To sum up, the Bible is evidence that God won't leave us alone.

The upshot of this is that our theologies must have the reality of God doing things at the centre. I think too often we settle for a God who just sits on a cosmic throne doing, well, nothing. This is not the God presented in the Bible; the God who feeds the ravens, causes rain to fall and the sun to rise. And if He is so involved in the lives of birds, how much more is He involved in our own lives? I'm sure some of us can say with Jacob, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it".

We must remember that what we call the New Testament was born out of God doing something, namely coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead for our justification. The NT isn't merely the result of a few Jews theologizing for the sake of it. At the heart of their theology -- which was written to churches -- was the mission of God as witnessed in Jesus. This is why I. Howard Marshall can say that New Testament theology is missionary theology. It is a collection of writings by people who took Luke 24 to heart - Jesus is the fulfilment of the mission of God, and so we must proclaim Him as such to as many people as possible.

It is these truths that shape a missional hermeneutic. As Wright so wonderfully puts it, such a reading of Scripture "proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation".

Missio Dei - #5: It's Interested

On our quest for a missional hermeneutic we have so far avoided the "proof-texting" pitfall and the "cultural snobbery" pitfall. The Bible is more than a book which merely validates and authenticates our own activities or which only makes sense in a Western (aka the "right") context.

Despite the search for a context-less reading of Scripture, we must admit that who we are, where we are, and how we have been raised affects how we read the Bible. We cannot approach the Bible completely objectively. Nor should we want to. Our uniqueness as readers allows God to speak truth to different people in different ways. One of Jesus' most famous parables illustrates this point well. We can read the story of The Lost Son and identify with the run-away rebel, or we can read it and identify with the indignant older brother. Whom we identify with is a reflection of our own contexts. We bring ourselves to the table, and we allow Scripture to shape us as the Spirit sees fit. The Spirit may tell us to return to our Father, or to get back in the house and enjoy the party!

As a result of our contextual readings, we must also admit that we are "interested" readers. The question is, what are we interested in? There are many different interests which act as frameworks for reading Scripture -- feminist, racial, health and wealth -- some of which lead to good, some of which lead to disaster. To read the Bible with the mission of God as a framework is also an "interested" hermeneutic. But it is a hermeneutic interested in the interests of God -- a God who is committed to reclaiming a people for Himself and making His name known throughout the earth.

To read and understand the message of Scripture with this in mind doesn't destroy all of our own interests. William Wilberforce comes to mind. One wouldn't say to him, "Forget about liberating African's from oppression, William. The Bible isn't about that. You're supposed to read it with a missional hermeneutic, not a liberationist hermeneutic." Rather, as Wright puts it, a missional reading of the Bible "subsumes liberationist readings into itself". Wright asks,

Where does the passion for justice and liberation that breathes in these various theologies come from if not from the biblical revelation of the God who battles with injustice, oppression and bondage throughout history right to the eschaton? Where else but from the God who triumphed climactically over all such wickedness and evil (human, historic, and cosmic) in the cross and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ? Where else, in other words, but from the mission of God?

To most Christians the fact that the mission of God subsumes this kind of liberation is obvious. But where do we begin to exclude certain interested theologies? Can the Bible mean all things to all people, leading ultimately to it meaning nothing to anyone? Postmodernism affirms such relativism, rejecting as it does any kind of grand narrative that explains everything. In such a climate missio Dei is whatever we want it to be, depending on our particular needs (or what we think our needs are). While the inclusion of all of our unique contexts must be accepted, this relativism which is rampant in (if not the cornerstone of) postmodernity needs to be rejected in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here is where objective truth is found; objective truth which is relevant to all people in all contexts. It is objective because it points to a new, ultimate reality which began with the resurrected Jesus. It is relevant because it is the reality of a new creation available to everyone right now.

Missio Dei - #4: It Includes Multiple Contexts

So where were we on this rip-roaring adventure through The Mission of God by Chris Wright that has everybody talking? Well, last time out we were searching for a "missional hermeneutic", and decided that lumping a whole load of texts that speak of "missions" together was not the best approach to interpreting the Bible with mission in mind. This is a dangerous approach to Scripture reading in general, and should be avoided at all costs. We must let the Author of the Bible speak to us holistically, rather than simply listening to the bits we like and screaming "la la la" over the bits we don't like and that don't fit into our purposes.

There is another pitfall to be avoided, which may be called contextual or cultural snobbery. Wright informs us that the landscape of mission has changed dramatically - "The whole centre of gravity of world Christianity has moved south". As such, much of Christian mission is carried out by people from India, Latin America and so forth. The upshot of this shift is that these people from outside of the Western world have a different context in which they read the Bible. They are bringing different traditions, different lifestyles to the table, and so they don't read the Bible with the same eyes as those of us who have been reared in the West. Wright says that,

...a missional hermeneutic must include at least this recognition - the multiplicity of perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the biblical texts.

This variety is to be embraced, because these different readers can open our Western eyes to things that have gone previously unseen. The Bible was not written for one specific group of people. We in the West do not possess the best context in which to read and interpret Scripture, meaning everyone else has to fall in line with us. Of course we can't change our context, but we can certainly be open to the insights of readers from different cultures. This again is part of what it means to read the Bible holistically.

Of course we do not go to the extreme where one postmodern thinker has gone, claiming that there is no such thing as texts, only readers. Ultimately, it should not be the reader who shapes the text of Scripture, but the text which shapes the reader. The Bible was written by various people in different ages and situations, it is read by a myriad of people all over the world, but there is coherency in the midst of this diversity. James Brownson says that the gospel is the framework where all of this diversity takes place. From Genesis to Revelation, God is unveiling the gospel message. This again goes back to the words Jesus in Luke 24, where He taught us all how to read and interpret the Word of God - in the light of who Jesus is, what He has done, and what He wants to do through us.

The Bible is about God, and God is One. He is a big One, however. You or I don't have all the answers. We only know in part. But we can sharpen one another's knowledge as we allow those from all the nations of the earth to share with us their understanding of the One True God in light of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah. The Church should be a place of diversity, where Jew, Greek, Irish, Indian are accepted and heard. Therefore when we read the Bible with missio Dei as a framework, we must remember that this is a cosmic mission. It is a mission that includes cultures far removed from our own. Therein lies the challenge, but there also lies the excitement - to be part of something much bigger than yourself.

Missio Dei - #3: It's Holistic

So far in the series, a missional hermeneutic -- a way of interpreting the Bible with the mission of God as a framework -- has been argued for, but without a solid argument in place. Thus the first step in Wright's book is to search for a missional hermeneutic. Such a hermeneutic goes beyond simply finding biblical justification for "missions". It is of course important to know that what we are doing falls in line with Biblical teaching, but the purpose in question here is much grander and knitting together all of the passages perceived as relevant to missionary work.

Wright even points to a danger in such an approach to Scripture. Instead of letting it speak as it wants to speak, we come to it with something we want to prove, and we collect the texts that confirm our preconceptions. Thus, "the Bible is turned into a mine from which we extract our gems - "missionary texts". We only have to look at an extreme case study such as Westboro Baptist Church to see that this way of reading and interpreting the Bible is fraught with danger. As a Church we are not charged with taking one or multiple texts and running with them, forgetting the rest of the biblical revelation of who God is and what He is about. As Dave Bosch writes,

What is decisive for the Church today is not some 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.

The hypothesis of Chris Wright is that missio Dei is the essence of the message of Scripture. Now of course the mission of God is not just one thing. It is a multi-faceted framework, which encorporates God's past, present, and future action. "Essence" may suggest something narrow, but the truth is that the mission of God as the essence of Scripture is a framework as broad as God Himself. If the Bible is about God -- and I strongly contend that it is -- then our reading of it needs to take into account as much of the revelation of God as we can know. We must understand the Bible in the light of a God who is a whole being, lest we end up with a pseudo-god who simply "hates fags", or a god who knows nothing of holiness.

So the first step to finding a missional hermeneutic is treating the Bible -- and ultimately, God -- as one. After all, this view of God is the primary creed of our ancestors of the faith, expressed in the Shema:

Hear O Isreal, the LORD our God, the LORD is One.

Proof-texting -- using individual texts to support a doctrinal position or behavioural pattern -- is not enough. Mission goes much deeper than that, and it is far broader than something we do in repsonse to what the Bible says. Far broader.

Missio Dei - #2: It's About Jesus

Wright says that "mission is what the Bible is all about". Like I said previously, I can agree with this for the most part. The Bible is about God, His character and His deeds, with the two being intimately connected (as all our characters and deeds are). We may denote God's deeds -- past, present, and future -- as His mission, so yes, mission is what the Bible is all about. However, where does Jesus of Nazareth fit into this? As Christians we were taught by Jesus Himself to read Scripture christocentrically, so how do a missional reading of the Bible and a christological reading of the Bible relate to one another?

Luke 24 has the answers.

Then He (Jesus) said to them, "These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with 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, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. - Lk. 24:44-48

The call to a messianic or christocentric reading of Scripture is obvious here - "...everything written about Me..." However, there is a second and equally important lens through which to read the Bible, and that is the work of Christ as it fits definitively into the mission of God. Jesus is saying that if you read Scripture in light of Me, you will find that it is about Me and what I have done, and you will also see that it is about taking the message about Me to all the nations.

In other words, a christocentric reading of Scripture and a missional reading of Scripture are basically two sides of the same coin. There is also a sort of paradox, whereby the death and resurrection of Jesus is the fulfillment of the mission of God, but also the catalyst. Most Christians get the fulfilment part, but fail to grasp the catalyst part, which is actually the part we are useful for - the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations. Wright says that,

The full meaning of recognising Jesus as Messiah...lies in recognising also His role in relation to God's mission for Israel for the blessing of the nations.

And so the Bible is not just full of proof-texts about Jesus, but full of God's intentions to bless all the nations and thus bring glory to His name. Thus when we read the Bible we ask:

What is it saying about 1) the person of God and 2) the purposes of God?

Our answers should be found in Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, and God's chosen Servant through whom He would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth. This, in a nutshell, is missio Dei.

Does it make good sense to read the Bible from this missional perspective? Does this hermeneutic do justice to Scripture? These are the questions answered in the next couple of chapters.

Missio Dei - #1: It's About God

Anyone who has followed this blog for the past couple of months will be aware of my interest in the narrative that is found in the Bible, or perhaps the narrative that the Bible finds itself in. Well, as a cultivation of that interest I decided to add The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's grand narrative to my books-to-get list. I planned to order it off Amazon, but as I performed my almost weekly peruse of the Aisling bookshop here in Galway I saw Christopher J.H. Wright's hefty book sitting snug on the top shelf. The price tag was irrelevant: I was buying this book right now, and economical sense was not going to stop me.

Anyway, now that I have this book, I'm going to do something different with it. Yes, I'm still going to read it, but I'm also going to write about it as I read it. Not so much a book review, but more reflections on what I'm reading. It's a big book so this could take a while, but I have a good feeling that this will be both interesting for you the reader of this blog and beneficial for me the reader of this book. I'll keep the posts as short as possible, and only dwell on areas that demand prolonged dwelling.

Now, to set the stage...

What is this book? Is it a biblical theology of mission, or a missional reading of the Bible? Wright says that it is both, but probably more the latter. The fact that is more the latter excites me.

You see once again the question, "What is the Bible?" or "What is the Bible all about?" comes into play. Often we as Christians see it as some kind of independent authority, the world's instruction manual. The Bible tells us how things are supposed to work; how should human beings interact with one another?; what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?; what is the correct code of behaviour? We have our various questions, and the Bible provides authoritative answers to those questions.

Relating this to mission, the Bible is also used as a basis for why mission exists. We derive our theology of mission from words of Scripture such as "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations..." In short, it is clear that the Bible tells us to do mission work, therefore we should do mission work. End of story.

However, I think such an approach to Scripture misses the crucial point that the Bible is caught up in something bigger than itself. The Bible is an indispensable book for many reasons, but the main reason is that it is a signpost to a greater authority, a greater reality. It is a book that is part of a big story - a story about its Author's character and deeds - and Wright argues that it should be read and interpreted with this story (the mission of God) as a framework.

We all have our different frameworks for interpreting the Bible - we can have a 'how does this benefit me?' framework, a feminist framework, an informational framework where we just want to know as much as possible about the Bible. Wright argues for a missional framework (or hermeneutic).

At first this sounds very people-centred. "Mission is what we do" is the assumption. This assumption is true to a certain degree. Mission is indeed something we do, but it is only something we do as participants in God's grand mission of which the Bible speaks. Wright says that "the whole Bible is itself a "missional" phenomenon" and that it is "the product of a witness to the ultimate mission of God". He goes on to write that

Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about."

I wrote in a previous post that the Bible is about God. It's about who God is, and what He has done, is doing, and will do. It's about His person and His purposes, with the two being absolutely inseparable. The mission of God has to do with the purposes of God which flow from His person, and so to say that mission is what it's all about is not a stretch in my view provided we know whose mission we are talking about.

"The Bible presents to us a portrait of God that is unquestionably purposeful." So often we get caught up in our own purposes to the point where we will even hurt others in order to achieve them. Our individual purposes, our own little kingdoms that we rule over, are the highest authority. We answer to our desires, be they good or bad. The Bible portrays a God who is purposeful, and whose purposes are good and right and true. Wright's book aims to seek out those purposes, and to help us read the Bible with missio Dei -- the mission of God -- as the controlling narrative.

I'm excited about what lies ahead.