Back in May, one of my profs suggested that I read a few books on the more recent trends in missiology before resuming campus ministry in Montreal. I took him up on the challenge and have been working my way through a number of books written from scholars and ministry practitioners from within the contemporary "missional movement". Although I would never have chosen to read these books on my own, they have really challenged and stimulated my thinking about missions and evangelism. I was also fascinated to discover that these contemporary discussions about mission have been fueled by the 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Barth has been a personal interest of mine for the past couple years even though I strongly disagree with him on a number of points (ie. his doctrine of Scripture and his Christological reworking of the doctrine of election). In my own opinion, its unfortunate that so many North American Evangelicals have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by either ignoring Barth altogether or by writing him off as a liberal wolf in sheep's clothing. In spite of Barth's cool reception in America, he has been enormously influential among the Evangelical community worldwide.
Barth, who was trained in the classical Liberal tradition, turned the theological world upside down with the publication of his commentary on Romans just after WWI. Fed up with the anthropomorphic theology coming from Schleiermacher and 19th century higher critics, he reasserted in no uncertain terms the transcendence of God - ie. the fact that God is "wholly other". Barth agreed with the conclusions of the German anthropologist (and atheist) Ludwig Feuerbach who saw the God of the Liberals as nothing more than the outward projection of man's inward nature. For Feuerbach, the God of the Liberals was man and man was God. Barth was determined to distance himself from the humanistic theology described by Feuerbach and to chart a new course in a conservative direction. This theological movement has come to be labeled as "Neo-Orthodoxy" although the mature Barth openly described his theology as 'Evangelical'. As his career progressed and his theology matured, Barth vigourously opposed all forms of natural or general revelation and insisted above all that we cannot know God apart from His Word - the second person of the Trinity. This is the central theme of all of Barth's writing and the key to understanding him- "Who and what God is in truth, and who and what humanity, we have not to explore and construct by roving freely far and near, but to read it where the truth about both dwells, in the fullness of their union, their covenant, that fullness which manifests itself in Jesus Christ." ('The Humanity of God') To boil down the essence of Barth's theology in a single sentence: If you want to know who God is and what He is like, look no further than Jesus Christ, the living Word of God.
So what in the world does this have to do with mission?? Well, the mission of Jesus during His earthly ministry gives us insight into the nature of the Triune God ad intra (from within Himself). To state the matter more formally, we need to begin with the 'economic Trinity' as revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ and work backward to the 'ontological Trinity'. Mission, in this paradigm, is not simply an activity God wants the Church to do, but it is more fundamentally a description of who He is in His very nature or essence. The God of the Bible was, is and always will be a 'missionary God'. For most of Church history "missions" has been thought of as a subset of ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church). Most of us in the Evangelical community still think of mission this way, viz. as a task to be completed by the Church rather than as an attribute of God Himself. Contemporary Evangelical missiologists following in the footsteps of Barth are challenging this paradigm by placing "missions" within a distinctly Trinitarian framework. This is a radical shift in the way that we conceive of mission: the Church exists because of mission and not the other way around.
So is mission simply a means to an end and a 'temporary necessity' as John Piper has argued in his book Let the Nations be Glad?? In a very popular quotation on missions Piper writes: "Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever." The problem with this quotation according to one Evangelical missiologist I spoke with last week, is that Piper (and Evangelicals like me who like to quote him on this topic) are still treating missions as a "task" to be completed by the Church rather than as part of the essential nature of God.
I'll continue this discussion in my next few posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment