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THE WITNESS OF GOD

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

A Problem of God

In 1933, Emil Brunner attributed the surging theological interest in analogia entis, natural theology and a so-called point of contact, to Western culture's emerging missionary context. A corrosive secularism and nascent paganism now grew within Christendom's ruins. The church needed to confront these competing accounts of the nature of human history with her own message. Therein lay the problem. However one might define that complex amalgam, Christendom's demise meant the collapse of a long-established connection between the Christian confession and the life of wider society. The mechanisms of the church's response were no longer clear, meaning, lest she fall prey to a "dangerous Chinese Wall mentality," the church had a vital apologetic task of reestablishing a connection with the world.

In Brunner's estimation, reference to missionary methodology provided a solution. With the central question one of the "relationship between the 'natural human' and the word of God," the church had to locate the "point of contact" between the two. This "common imminent possibility" rests in the sense of guilt shared by all human beings, which itself results from God's general revelation in creation and through the law. To quote Brunner, "[W]hoever thinks as a missionary understands the central significance of this contact — stimulating judgment and penitence — with the double revelation in creation." Mission, in particular, appreciates this position because its very purpose consists of working for this encounter with revelation. The proclamation of the gospel is itself "dependent" on this contact: as it makes humans aware of their fallen condition, so it renders the proclamation of Christ understandable. This gave a positive shape to the church's task. She had to identify those elements within a culture that might be cultivated as positive values fulfilled by the gospel and those that direct the human away from the gospel and thus require disciplining.

Karl Barth's infamous objection made clear that such practical affirmations were not theologically benign. Decisive consequences follow for the doctrine of God. To propose that an independent knowledge of God was both possible and necessary for the relationship between God and humans located the constitution of that relationship external to God himself. This had the pernicious consequence of cleaving God's being from his act. His "being" became generally available to humans apart from his particular act of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. The "criterion of all truth" in the relationship between God and humans was not found in God himself but in the being in which both God and humans participate. Barth's alternative formulation held that God is who he is in his act. "The essence of God which is seen in His revealed name is His being and therefore His act as Father, Son and Holy Spirit." No human action sets the conditions necessary to God's acting; God alone makes himself known.

Not everyone found this response satisfactory. While many admired the aesthetic of Barth's dogmatic system, it seemingly provided insufficient resources to address the practical challenges besetting the church. Brunner differentiated his own position from Barth's with this statement: "Barth thinks as a churchman for the church; I think rather as a missionary." This distinction affords an important insight into the nature of the problem. The question of the church's relationship with the world is properly a missionary one. Yet, when it is depicted as a necessary middle point between the church and the world, mission functions as the bridge between the two. In that it prepares the ground for the church's own proper task — the proclamation of the word — mission exists at some distance from the church. It becomes possible, or even normative, to develop theological formulations in particular service to the church without actually engaging the world. This includes sophisticated treatments of divine ontology. The necessities of the church's witness seemingly develop in some contest with the doctrine of God, for dogmatic reference to God's being does not of itself address the nature of the connection between the church and the world.

A simple contention frames this work: the problem of the church's relationship to the world is consequent on treating God's own mission into the world as a second step alongside who he is in himself. With God's movement into his economy ancillary to his being, so the church's own corresponding missionary relationship with the world is ancillary to her being. Some general point of contact external to the church becomes necessary for the task of witness, supplying a positive account of the church's acting in relationship to the world and rendering that witness "intelligible." Mission, as one step removed from the life of the church, facilitates this point of contact both by clearing sufficient cultural space and by replicating the communal structures basic to the church's actual witness. In other words, this dichotomy between church and mission underlies the problem of the church's relationship with the world. No simple focus on the practical issues solves this problem, for the cleavage of church from mission derives from the cleavage of God's being in his relationship to the world. Specifically, the fullness of God's being is presented without material reference or perhaps even in antithesis to his movement into his economy. The witness of God is, as Barth suggests, "a problem of God," for it is a question of how in anticipation his being in and for himself includes human existence with him. Only in correspondence to God's overcoming of the gap between himself and the world does the church live in her connection with the world.

Missio Dei: The Problem of God in Answer to the Problem of Church and Mission

This book investigates this problem of God through one of the key developments within the theology of mission: missio Dei. I use "God's mission" because it recognizes that the question of the church's connection with the world can only be answered by who God is in and for himself. Mission is justified because God is a missionary God. As it works its way out, however, this key theological move seemingly only reinforces the dichotomy between church and mission. It does so because, while the problem presents itself as an issue of the relationship between the church and the world, it is contingent on an account of God's own life whereby his movement into the world is a second step alongside his eternal being. In other words, missio Dei theology illustrates well that the cleavage of church from mission derives from a cleavage within God's own life.

Early in the twentieth century, many legitimate criticisms were being issued against the missionary enterprise. World War I and the loss of the claimed spiritual authority of Western civilization, the maturation of the so-called "younger" churches, the West's own encounter with secularism and pluralism, the fierce reactions to colonialism, the growth of indigenous nationalist movements and related resistance of the non-Christian religions to Christian expansion — all challenged the right of cross-cultural missions to exist. Against these criticisms, missio Dei supplied a theological redoubt for the missionary act by placing it within the Trinitarian being of God. This established a critical distance between "mission" and every contingent human form. Following David Bosch's now standard treatment, "mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God." The Father sent his Son and Spirit into the world, and this act reveals his "sending" being. He remains active today in reconciling the world to himself and sends his community to participate in this mission. As Libertus Hoedemaker suggests, with missio Dei, mission became not "the defense, extension, and expansion of 'the church' or 'Christianity' but participation in the world-relatedness of God himself, in which all historical forms are merely instrumental." The concept allowed theorists to acknowledge the legitimate charges laid against mission, while supplying an inviolate justification for the task itself.

For Bosch, the importance of this "decisive shift," as illustrated by its being "embraced by virtually all Christian persuasions," cannot be doubted. However, such exuberance is just one side of the story. Commentators describe the concept as, at once, "pivotal" and "confused." Reference to the doctrine of the Trinity establishes a requisite formal framework, but "God's mission" fails to draw on this doctrine for its material substance. The resulting vacuity renders missio Dei an elastic concept capable of accommodating an ever-expanding range of meanings. For Wolfgang Günther, missio Dei functions as a "container term, which is filled differently depending upon each individual author." Tormod Engelsviken regards any consensus the term might supply as "more one of terminology than theological substance." Wilhelm Richebächer illustrates the problem when he observes that missio Dei is used by some to "justify the Christocentric definition of all the mission of the church as distinct from religious propaganda, and by others to do just the opposite, i.e., to propound a deity that bears witness to itself in other religions and thereby counters the absolute claims of Christianity."

With such vacillation, in Günther's estimation, the phrase missio Dei "blurs more than it clarifies, and thus needs either to be more precisely defined or dropped altogether." Jacques Matthey has called for "a 'moratorium', or at least for the greatest restraint, in the use of classical Missio Dei terminology." Missio Dei is basic to a theological understanding of mission and dysfunctional to the point of being rejected by those within the field supported by this foundation. What underlies this paradox?

With missio Dei, the term "mission," rather than being depicted in flat phenomenological terms, received theological definition. No less a theological authority than Schleiermacher once described mission as "only the pious longing of the stranger for home, the endeavor to carry one's fatherland with one and everywhere to intuit its laws and customs, its higher, more beautiful life." In critical contrast to this dominant assumption, "mission" refers not to the geographical expansion of the Christian faith from the West to the non-Christian world, but to its dogmatic origins, to the activity of the Father in sending his Son and Spirit. God himself has acted and continues to act in redemptive mission. This, for Bosch, is missio Dei's strength. "Our mission has no life of its own: only in the hands of the sending God can it truly be called mission." Mission is not something the church does, dependent on ecclesiastical management and developed according to some notion of the efficient use of resources. It is justified by neither human capacity nor historical accident. Wilhelm Anderson, summarizing the basic thrust, says that "the Church is not the place of origin and goal of the missionary enterprise: the missionary enterprise is the historical happening which embraces the Church and takes it up into its service." Missions would continue because, while provisional, they originate in — and are sustained by — God's own acting in calling the world to himself. When compared with the phenomenological underpinnings of missions that were normative at the dawn of the twentieth century, missio Dei is, in truth, pivotal.

Without any link to a specific act, however, "mission" soon expanded to encompass the entire horizon of divine and human history. Following Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, missio Dei is "the very mission of God in creation, redemption and continual sanctification." Every act of God, since God is by nature missionary, is properly described as mission. Mission, when it did not reduce to a vague involvement within the sociopolitical sphere, very soon became a distilled image of the church's general direction within history, with the effect, for Hoedemaker, of providing "theological legitimation to the ecumenical emphasis on the church." Mission was reduced to the being of the church in her mundane operation of word and sacrament, and via an ever-increasing assortment of other practices internal to the church herself. Anything the church did could now be classified as mission. With this, as Stephen Neill famously said, "If everything is mission, nothing is mission." Vsevolod Spiller, for example, makes the following oft-quoted assertion: "Church as such is mission." This, on the one hand, is an important Orthodox corrective against the prevailing Protestant reduction of mission to a specialist function undertaken apart from the central life of the congregation. The church is mission because the task belongs to the whole community. On the other hand, Spiller's statement is predicated on a definite understanding of the nature of the church. To continue with Spiller, while mission in its "widest and deepest sense" is the church, "it cannot, in our view, contain the raison d'être of the Church." Accenting mission would erode the "meta-historical pre-establishing of the Church before all ages." The being of the church belongs to eternity, while mission refers to the attitude of this church in a world destined to pass away. The church "is" mission as she is "sacramentally" responsible for the transition between the reconciliation she shares with God and the estrangement from God experienced in the world. Therefore, Engelsviken suggests that "the church has not only a witnessing or participating function in what God is doing in the world, but it has a sacramental or instrumental function, in that the mission of God is carried out in and through the church as its primary focus." This relative justification juxtaposes the missionary act to some more fundamental being of the church, thereby disqualifying it as essential to Christian life and piety.

Missio Dei is a trope. It satisfies an instinct that missionary witness properly belongs to the life of the church without offering any concrete determination of that act. On the fiftieth anniversary of the concept's supposed inception, Matthey made the following sober judgment: "[R]eference to missio Dei did not really solve any of the major missiological challenges which shook Protestants from the beginning of the last century." It provided a necessary critical distance between the missionary act and the colonialist project, but it failed to supply that act any alternative form. According to Günther, "with the impending threat of all missions being ejected from the collapsing colonial empires, the missio Dei formula came as a relief: 'God's mission, not ours'!" Yet, in that this theological justification seemingly obviated the many legitimate criticisms issued against missionary method, the formula "made it possible very quickly to get on with 'business as usual'." Missio Dei did provide some space for those convinced by the postcolonialist critique to define mission away in terms of church practices such as the Eucharist and in general political involvement. For those organizations that continued with the cross-cultural act, little actually changed by way of practices. As Bosch suggests, "many of the old images live on, almost unchallenged." They did so because, with missio Dei, they had now received some form of divine validation.

Despite his concerns, Matthey continues that "if we were to lose the reference to missio Dei, we would again put the sole responsibility for mission on human shoulders and thereby risk, missiologically speaking, believing that salvation is gained by our own achievements." If mission were only a human activity, reliant on the range of human capacities, then it is untrue and an impediment to the proclamation of the gospel. Bosch supports this conclusion: "The recognition that mission is God's mission represents a crucial breakthrough in respect of the preceding centuries. It is inconceivable that we could again revert to a narrow, ecclesiocentric view of mission." There's the rub. The Copernican turn of missio Dei is not something from which the Christian community can depart. Any other conception of the ground, motive, and goal of mission apart from missio Dei's Trinitarian location risks investing authority in historical accident and human capacity.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE WITNESS OF GOD by John G. Flett Copyright © 2010 by John G. Flett. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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