American pastors, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert have
joined forces to deliver an excellent book on the task of mission. The burden of
the book is to seek to define the mission of the church more tightly than it often
has been lately. The word ‘mission’ is ambiguous and that has recently
become more so with the addition of words and phrases like ‘missional’ and ‘missio Dei’ to our vocabulary. When the local betting shop has a mission
statement (I don’t know that it does but I’d be prepared to...no, forget it)
then mission can mean anything at all. And these days it usually does. So this
book is a welcome contribution to the discussion.
David Bosch’s hugely influential Transforming Mission: Paradigm
Shifts in Theology of Mission reaches its climax with a chapter in which he
discusses 13 ‘elements of an emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’. In the
end, mission is all these things (quest for justice, common witness,
inculturation and liberation, as well as evangelism, contextualization and
theology, for instance). He cannot tie his understanding of mission down any
more than that. You may think I am childish to desire something tidier but I do
think it is possible and that is what DeYoung and Gilbert do so well.
They do this by the careful exegesis of a number of
key biblical passages, critiquing as they do so the position of Chris
Wright in The Mission of God.
Wright asserts that Genesis 12:1-3 should be taken as ‘the Great Commission’
with its two imperatives to ‘go’ and ‘be a blessing’. DeYoung and Gilbert call
that into question by quoting Wright himself that “‘when two imperatives occur
together the second may sometimes express either the expected result or the
intended purpose of carrying out the first imperative’ (ibid.: 201)” (31). So
the command to Abram is to ‘go’ so that
he may be a blessing.
The authors argue against an incarnational reading of
Israel’s role, i.e. that the role of Israel as a kingdom of priests (Exod
19:5-6) is not to be a blessing to
the nations: “The image of a royal priesthood in the Old Testament and in the
New Testament suggests holiness and privilege, not incarnational presence”
(35). Wright doesn’t actually use the language of incarnation but the notion is
there so the point stands I think.
Luke 4:16-21, argue DeYoung and Gilbert, is not primarily
about material poverty – this is demonstrated by an exegesis of Isaiah 61:1-2
and throughout Luke. Rather, they agree with Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien in their
Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: ABiblical Theology of Mission, that “‘the poor to whom the good news
is announced are ... “the dispossessed, the excluded” who were forced to depend
upon God’” (39), a position that, interestingly, Bosch also argues (1991:104).
In a nutshell, DeYoung and Gilbert are arguing, against
Wright (2010: 26), that the mission of God is not the mission of the church: “One of the biggest missteps in
much of the newer mission literature is an assumption that whatever God is
doing in the world, this too is our task” (41). The mission of the church, they
argue, is summarized in the Great Commission passages (Matt 28:16-20; Mark
13:10; 14:9; Luke 24:44-49; Acts 1:8).
The authors survey the synoptic Great Commission passages
and that of Acts and then tackle the most controversial Gospel text, that of
John 20:21 and the significance of Jesus’ mission as a model for our own. They
conclude, against Stott, that “the mission of Jesus is not service broadly
conceived, but the proclamation of
the gospel through teaching, the corroboration
of the gospel through signs and wonders, and the accomplishment of the gospel in death and resurrection” (57,
emphasis in the original).
The authors conclude this lengthy and well argued chapter with
their definition of the mission of the church: The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by
declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering
these disciples into churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his
commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father (62, emphasis
in the original).
After a helpful survey of the biblical
narrative in four acts—creation, fall, redemption and consummation—the authors
seek to handle hot issues in mission theology and practice by examining the
meaning of key terms in missiological writing: the kingdom of God, social
justice and shalom.
In discussing the significance of the kingdom of God they
distinguish between two ways the word gospel is used in the Bible, a
‘zoom-lens’ way (they mean telephoto-lens), and a ‘wide-angle lens’ way. The
former is the gospel of the cross; the latter is the gospel of the kingdom.
They are one and the second necessarily includes the first.
On ‘social justice’ they distinguish between a
‘constrained’ view and an ‘unconstrained’ view of justice and opt for the
former (181). In arguing for an acceptance of the concept of ‘moral proximity’,
they accept that this is difficult with modern communications bring the world’s
disaster areas into our living rooms (184-85). I am a bit uneasy by the
authors’ uncritical acceptance of free-market capitalism: “No enlightened ruler
or board or administration can possibly manage millions of people with as much
knowledge as the market can” (191). I ask whether we should talk at all about
the market ‘managing’ anything. The market, after all, is a network of institutions,
a phenomenon of global culture that has been created by people. It is people
who manage, make decisions, trade, cheat, defraud and resist all the above. No
inanimate cultural phenomenon can do that. So the market is a human
construction that allows the exchange of goods and services; it doesn’t manage
anything.
DeYoung and Gilbert then tackle the great biblical word, shalom,
looking at Jeremiah 29 and then at the cultural mandate. In the latter they
draw heavily and profitably on Greg Beale’s work on the Garden of Eden as a
temple (The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God). The cultural
mandate cannot be the same today as it was for Adam because of the fall. Adam’s
failed mandate is picked up not by us but by the second Adam, who succeeds
where the first Adam failed. There is both continuity and discontinuity between
the old earth and the new one. But shalom is not the mission of the church as
that is the mission of the Lord Jesus to whom our mission bears witness.
For the most part I think this is a very well written book
that tackles the subject in a biblically informed and carefully argued manner. The
book is spoiled a bit, however, by an apparent naivety with regard to global
economics and a seeming reluctance to suggest that followers of Christ should
examine their lifestyle in the light of global realities. That is a minor
weakness, though, and shouldn’t put people off from reading it and working out
how it should affect the way we are involved in mission today. I will be using
it as a set text in one of my modules. Kevin DeYoung has just followed it up with a blog post taking their argument further - http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2013/08/27/goal-missions-work-missionaries/?comments#comments.
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