Howdy all! Grace & Peace.
I just finished an assignment for class that I felt like posting. It is an integration of theology and mission, which seemed pretty practical to me, and was something I felt a little passionate about. So I think it fits the blog pretty well. It's rather long, so I'll be breaking it up into pieces (probably 3), which I'll post over the next few days.
Ever-Expanding Participation
Christianity's on-going
conversation about the purpose and nature of Mission has come to the forefront
of both the practical and doctrinal minds of the Church, as evidenced by the
recent explosion of the use of the word “missional” in a variety of Christian
contexts.[1] The theological paradigm of Mission is
in flux. Some insist that theology
is unnecessary—it is the practice of
mission, of mercy, of grace that matters.
But what Christians believe and emphasize about God affects how they
view the world, and how Christians view the world determines how they interact
with it. A robust theology that
emphasizes the relational and communal nature of the Triune God, specifically in the act of participation, will
provide a definition of Mission both historical and practical, and it will show
how Mission as a part of the Trinity’s very nature has been active since the
moment of Creation. From this
point must every missional action of the Church be informed.
I. The Theology
“There is nothing more elusive than an
obvious fact.”
In the first account of Creation
found in Genesis, the NRSV translates verse 2 as “the earth was a formless
void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept
over the face of the waters.” That
word “wind” has most often been translated “Spirit of God.” Interestingly, the Greek word
translated Spirit in the New Testament also has the same primary meanings of
“breath” or “wind,” just as the Hebrew does. This linguistic history, and the history of the theology
behind it, gives Christians precedent to tie the doctrine of the Trinity to the
very act of Creation. God the
Father is present as “Elohim,” the Spirit is present and called “wind”—and both
Paul and John depict God the Son as also an agent of Creation:
“Yet for us there is one God, the
Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus
Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8.6 NRSV).
“In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing
came into being.” (John 1.1-3 NRSV)
The whole of Christian memory and
tradition seems to show all three Persons of the Trinity to be active from the
very beginning of Creation; many recent Christian theologians, however, have
missed this very important image.
Study of the Trinity found new life in the 20th century, sparked in part by the
tragedy of the Second World War and the expulsion of missionaries from
now-Communist China, and it sought to redefine Mission by determining how the Triune God acts with Creation as
pictured in the paragraph above.[2] Karl Barth produced an entire
ecclesiology on the notion that God is a God who sends even within God’s Triune
self: God the Father sends God the
Son, who both then send God the Holy Spirit, and the three of them send the
Church into the world.[3] This puts Mission squarely into the
realm of the nature of God. Evidence
of this view is prevalent in Christian writings from Tertullian to Pope John
Paul II.[4] The central passage for this view of
Mission is what became known as the “great commission”:
“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, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded
you. And remember, I am with you
always, to the end of the age’” (Matthew 28.19-20 NRSV).
The word traditionally emphasized
here is “go,” most often with an exclamation point at the end as if it were an
imperative (which it is not, in Greek) that urged disciples to themselves be sent. But, Van Gelder and Zscheile critique a linear emphasis of divine sending by showing how it diminishes the agency of God by making the Church as the primary
agent in Creation.[5] God the Father, in this view, has no direct
agency in salvation, but is only related through the mediators of Christ and
Church, the Body of Christ.
Another
consequence of this restricted view inordinately emphasizes individualism and hierarchy
by focusing more on Jesus than the Trinity itself. Mark Driscoll is a prime example of this movement,
continually espousing “a simple return to Jesus”[6]
as the starting point of Trinitarian theology. It is an approach that is highly attractive in its
simplicity and in how well it fits with modern Western individualistic culture,
but it also distances God the Father from Creation, reduces the agency of God the
Holy Spirit, and makes Mission into a mere discipline garnered from the example
of Jesus as opposed to part of the nature of the Trinity—and therefore part of God's work from the very beginning.[7] So, Christians are taught to emphasize
their individual relationship with the individual Christ, and that the
salvation of the Father comes to the world exclusively through the Church through
the Spirit through the Son.
In
response to this common paradigm of the missio
Dei, the Church should start not from Jesus only but from the Trinity
through an “epistemology of participation.”[8] Returning to Jesus' own words in John 5:
“Very truly I tell you the Son can do
nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the
Father does, the Son does likewise… I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is
just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me”
(vv. 19, 30 NRSV).
Jesus, the Son, testifies here to
being sent by the Father, so this language should not be discounted in
Trinitarian discussion. However,
he explicitly states that he can only do what he sees the Father doing.
Jesus understands that God the Father is continuously active in this
world (not reduced to merely sending), and Jesus’ own will is to follow after
the present actions of the Father.
The Spirit is not to be counted out in this work: Mark’s gospel mentions the Holy Spirit's actions three times in the first twelve verses, culminating in verse 12 by saying,
“And the Spirit
immediately drove him [Jesus] out into the wilderness” (NRSV).
Before Jesus has begun his
ministry, the Spirit is actively leading
Jesus in the wilderness of the world, not merely one sent after Jesus has later ascended into heaven. All Persons
within the Trinity were active at the foundation of the world, were active in
Jesus’ earthly ministry, and continue to be active simultaneously in the world
today.
The
Three Persons do not act separately but with a nature of participation. Jesus did not claim to do any single
thing on his own, but was directed by both the Father and the Spirit. The
participation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit determines how the Persons
interact with each other as One God, and this relational manner can be called
“self-donation.” This theory is
one in which “the self contracts to be expanded by the other, and we enter into
the other’s contracted self in order to increase the other’s plentitude.”[9] Jesus here does give an example to which we can return of the Trinitarian relationship: Jesus empties himself of his own will,
allowing God the Father and God the Holy Spirit to expand their power and will
into that now empty space. This
results in Jesus willingly submitting to each of them, allowing both Father and
Spirit to be glorified; but instead of this ending in a diminishment of the
Son, the Son is filled by the other Persons and eventually brought to greater
glory himself (John 17.1; Romans 6.4).
Each Person in the Trinity repeats this action, making the identity of
each completely determined by the relationship of the communal whole. This
is the love relationship to which the author of 1 John referred by saying that
“God is love” (4.8 NRSV). The
Trinity loves by each Person continually emptying their own self to be filled to
a greater amount by the Others as they each spread out—an ever-expanding love
relationship that is the foundation of Creation.
[1] Craig
Van Gelder & Dwight J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in Perspective:
Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2011), 1.
[2] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in
Theology of Mission—Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Orbis Books,
2011), 379.
[3] Craig Van Gelder and Dwight
J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in
Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation, (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2011), 26.
[4] Stephen B. Bevans and Roger
P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A
Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004), 38, 41.
[5] Van Gelder & Zscheile,
75.
[6] Mark Driscoll, Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard
Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006),
15.
[7] Van Gelder & Zscheile,
80.
[8] Bosch, 371.
[9] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological
Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1996).
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