I am going to try and blog my way through Chris Wright’s exceptional book, The Mission of God. This might be a bit ambitious with the semester starting, but I am going to give it a go anyway.
Wright perceives the following terms to be central to his missional hermeneutic.
Mission: The term is typically oriented toward human endeavors of various kinds. Wright defines it as a noun that describes God’s actions. Wright provides the following definition:
Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblicall informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.
Wright also is somewhat dissatisfied with the emphasis on being sent. He claims that it limits the church’s vision and response of and to God’s mission.
Missionary: The term typically refers to the person going on mission. It may be further used as an adjective: “missionary mandate” or “missionary zeal.” It also carries with it the unfortunate caricature of the great missionary movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, namely the white American “correcting” the natives of some non-western country. Wright states that he feels uncomfortable applying missionary to the Old Testament world due to the emphasis on “sending” inherent within the word. He doesn’t believe that the centrifugal ethos of the NT “mission” is absent in the OT, which later he describes as centripetal. Thus, Wright prefers to abdicate the term missionary altogether and embrace the term missional instead (see below).
Missiology/ Missiological: These two terms may be defined as follows:
Missiology is the study of missions. It includes biblical, theological, historical, contemporary, and practical reflection and research. Missiological is the adjective form of Missiology.
Missional: Wright defines the term as follows:
is used as an adjective denoting something that is related to orcharacterized by mission or has the qualities, attributes, or dynamics of mission.
The term fits “mission” as covenantal fits “covenant.” Concerning the missional reading of the Bible, Wright offers two brief but helpful examples:
1. A missional reading of the exodus – this type reading seeks to explore the dynamic significance of the exodus within the larger framework of God’s mission for Israel, the world, and Christian mission today.
2. A missional reading of Israel – seeks to reflect on the identity of ISrael as a light ot the nations, connected to God’s ultimate intention to be a blessing to the “every family of the earth.”
This last point briefly touches on Wright’s earlier discussion on the centripetal nature of the OT. Israel had a missional reason for their existene without being missionary (there is no impetus to “go” or “send” to the nations).
1. How does Wright’s definitions differ practicaly from how people have defined these in the past?
2. What would be some practical implications for these re-defintions at a personal or institutional level?
3. Comment on the idea of a “missional” reading of the Bible. Typically this kind of grid would be, at the least, unfortunate and, at the worst, unforgivable. How does Wright qualify his hermeneutic and how might that help control his external (?) grid?
hmmm. I like the questions. Usually I’m bankrupt of stuff to say on blogs but your questions made it a little easier. So thanks. Let me give them a shot.
1. Wright has provided some helpful clarification on what these words don’t mean. Often we unknowingly have our definitions shaped by the context we are in. I don’t think it is likely to happen (abdicating the word), but I like his thoughts on the word “missionary.” Maybe abdicatation is the wrong response. Clarification would be better. The word “missionary” is (unfortunately) consigned to the “faithful few” who have a special calling of God to be foreign missionaries. Rarely do we hear of our NAMB church planters referred to as missionaries. I recently heard Dr. David Platt’s speak about his dissatisfaction with the fabricated “special calling” for foreign missions. Church members will readily apply a passage like Matthew 11:28 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” to themselves, but then look at Matthew 28:19-20 and say “that’s not my calling.” By having a specific category for missionaries we deemphasize the universal calling of Christians to be disciple-makers. This may not have been the case initially, but we can see it now. Wright’s suggestion comes from observing this inappropriate “selective obedience” but I don’t know if eliminating the word is the answer. Perhaps by continually preaching to believers that they are all missionaries we can re-claim the appropriate definition.
2. A practical implication (of the philosophy behind these re-definitions, not necessarily the definitions themselves) at an institutional and personal level includes: Simply put, more missionaries (sorry, I used the word). It seems strange that only 5% of American Christians sensed a calling to reach the 95% of the world which is on foreign soil. If the mandate is to make disciples of all nations, American Christians have a bizarre method for achieving this. Let’s send the 5% who have sensed a call to the foreign mission field (aka understand the Bible) while the other 95% of us stay here and make sure Americans get discipled. If everyone in the American church understood themself to be a missionary involved in the global mission of God, they would see the gross disproportion and find their place in God’s missional work. I understand the problem behind his distaste of the word “sent,” because the emphasis is not on going somewhere, it is on being who you are supposed to be wherever you are. Being sent can limit the churches vision of God’s work to being solely “over there.” There is always the danger of leaving the ditch you’re in but missing the road and landing in the ditch on the other side.
3. I could be misunderstanding Wright’s “missional” reading of Scripture, but it seems like it is just like a redemptive-historical reading. His two examples sound like he is interpreting the Bible with the history of redemption as his grid. The redemptive storyline is missional in the sense that it is primarily concerned with the mission of God in redeeming for himself a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Maybe I’m just unfamiliar with the problem of reading the Bible in a missional way. I’ve not heard anything about it until this post. I have run across an interesting interpretation of the Pentateuch that I have not heard before. Maybe you can comment on it. I have been listening to Dr. Richard Pratt from Reformed Theological Seminary teach the Pentateuch (free from itunesU). He sees the Pentateuch as written to Israel by Moses in Moab (which is great). He understands Moses to be communicating two specific messages to Israel: Egypt was corrupt and awful and you don’t really want to return there (he sounds much more scholarly than this), and God intended from the very beginning to lead you into the land of Canaan, the promised land. Everything in the Pentateuch seems to point to this: Cain and Abel (agriculturalist=Egypt, shepherd=Israel), the Enoch and Lamech in Cain’s line (named a city after himself, justified murder=Egypt) vs. the Enoch and Lamech in Seth’s line (walked with God and would lead to rest=Israel), and then the two pairs of three sons (Lamech’s 3 sons and Noah’s 3 sons). This is only in the first 5 chapters of Genesis. There are tons of other parallels that I had never seen all throughout the Pentateuch. Is this an appropriate way to read Scripture? It sure seems like it. Obviously we don’t stop there. We read it with the entire, finished revelation of God in Christ in view. I doubt this is the case, but Pratt doesn’t seem to make it abundantly clear that these things are actual history. It sounds more like historical fiction, spoken by Moses to communicate a message to Israel. I don’t believe this is true, but what are your thoughts?
By: Daniel on September 15, 2008
at 9:02 pm