The End of Theology

Shaping Theology for the Sake of Mission

Jason S. Sexton, Paul Weston, Jason S. Sexton, Paul Weston, Jason S. Sexton, Paul Weston

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781506405919
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506405926
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Missiologists and theologians do not often talk to each other, which has resulted in increased ignorance of each others questions and concerns about how to do theology in ways that effectively serve the Churchs mission. Under the auspices of the Tyndale Fellowship Christian Doctrine study group, a colloquium of distinguished scholars and practitioners recently gathered at the University of Cambridge.

This volume, arising out of that symposium, begins hard conversations that have been waiting to happen. Each participant brings a particular perspective to questions about the nature of theology and how it is most meaningfully constructed so as to offer a truly interdisciplinary perspective on theology and mission. It highlights perspectives of contextual theology and systematic theology, as well as missiology and mission studies, world Christianity and historical inquiry, biblical studies and missional hermeneutics, ethnography, pastoral practice, and social justice. It also pays keen attention to matters on the ground with a profound desire to relate questions of evangelical identity including ministry practice and mission to the wider tradition. In short this volume sets out to model the kind of engagement required by both Church and Academy to do theology for mission.

1

Theology and Mission in Dialogue

1

A Missional Approach to Scripture for the Theological Task

Michael W. Goheen

An Opening Excursus on Missional

The title employs the term “missional” as an adjective to describe the way we are to approach Scripture when doing theology. The terminology of “missional” has become pervasive in North America. It is used to describe church, theology, hermeneutic, theological education, and more. We could respond the way one editorial in a British newspaper did when referring to the word “postmodernism”: “The word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.” Of course, a word can be used so much that it becomes banal. However, its ubiquity may also indicate that there is something important that has long been obscured and is now being recovered. I believe this to be the case with the term “missional.”

Darrell Guder is correct when he speaks of the term “missional” as a kind of scaffolding that, at least for some of us employing the term, is holding up our ecclesiology, or theology, our interpretation of Scripture, and our theological education. There would be no need for that scaffolding if those things were already being shaped as they should be by the missio Dei and by a robust understanding of the church’s missional nature. Speaking of theology in particular, Guder says, “If mission were truly the mother of our theology, if our theological disciplines were intentionally conceived and developed as components of the formation of the church for its biblical vocation, we would never need to use the term ‘missional.’”^[1] The trouble is, of course, that it is not, and so this word points us to something important that is missing. Likewise of biblical hermeneutics, Guder says that the “practice of ‘hermeneutics’ should be missional by its very nature. But it clearly is not, and so we must speak of ‘missional hermeneutics,’ propping up the enterprise with this conceptual scaffolding.”^[2]

The problem is that our churchmanship and our theology developed at a time when mission was not a central concern. As Lesslie Newbigin observes, “The period in which our thinking about the Church received its main features was the period in which Christianity had practically ceased to be a missionary religion. . . . It was in this period, when the dimensions of the ends of the earth had ceased to exist as a practical reality in the minds of Christians, that the main patterns of churchmanship were formed.”^[3] Similarly, David Bosch says of the theological curriculum: “A major problem is that the present division of theological subjects was canonized in a period when the church in Europe was completely introverted.”^[4]

And so I will use the word “missional” throughout this chapter as scaffolding that draws attention to the biblical understanding of the nature of the church as it exists for the sake of the world (missional ecclesiology), to the kind of faithful theology whose content is shaped by the mission and whose goal is to equip the church for its vocation (missional theology), and to a kind of faithful biblical interpretation that takes seriously the participation of God’s people in his redemptive mission as a central theme in Scripture (missional hermeneutic). Of course, scaffolding is a temporary structure that supports a building until it can stand on its own. Hopefully, someday, our understanding of church, of theology, of scriptural interpretation, and of theological education will be so suffused with our missional vocation that we no longer need the term. Perhaps, one day, we may even be able to say, as Christopher Wright often does, that to speak of “missional church” (or we might add, theology or hermeneutic) is like saying “female woman”—that’s the only kind there is!

Missional Ecclesiology, Missional Theology, and
Missional Hermeneutic

The theme of this book is the task of theology. And so, before speaking of how to appropriate Scripture for that task, let me offer a brief description of what I believe missional theology to be—that is, how this scaffolding can support the task of theology. This will give us a clue about what a missional approach to Scripture for the theological task should be. Bosch says of theology: “We are in need of a missiological agenda for theology rather than just a theological agenda for mission; for theology rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio Dei.”^[5] Similarly, Harvie Conn says that the “question is not simply, or only, or largely, missions and what it is. The question is also theology and what it does.”^[6] If this is so, then Bosch is correct when he says that “unless we develop a missionary theology, not just a theology of mission, we will not achieve more than merely patch up the church.”^[7] These are all rather bold statements, but I believe them to be correct. So, in line with them, I describe missional theology with the following five features.

Missional theology, in the first place, explores the implications of the church’s missional identity as participants in the missio Dei. The starting point for missional theology is the central theme of mission in the biblical story. The Bible tells one unfolding story of God’s mission to restore the whole creation and entire life of humankind. At the center of God’s work is his election of a people: He works in them and through them for the sake of the world. This covenant people exists to participate in God’s mission, to take up their role in the biblical drama for the sake of the world. Theology accompanies them on their way, taking account of this vocation and equipping them for it.

Theological reflection explores this missional identity, besides, in all areas of the theological curriculum. Traditionally, the theological curriculum has manifested a fourfold division: biblical studies, systematic theology, church history, and practical theology. In all of these areas, the question is pressed: How does the centrality of mission in the biblical story affect the content of these disciplines? How do these disciplines equip the church for its ongoing mission?^[8]

Missional theology, moreover, explores the significance of the missional vocation in all areas of the congregational life of the church. This includes the church’s gathered or institutional life in which our new life in Christ is nurtured for the sake of the world (preaching, prayer, worship, sacraments, pastoral visitation, counseling, fellow-ship, formation, and so on), our new life in the midst of the world (evangelism, mercy and justice, involvement in our neighborhoods, cross-cultural missions, training laity for their callings, living as a contrast community, equipping to understand culture and other religions, and so on), and the structures that enable and equip the nurturing and outward ministries to thrive (leadership, congre-gational, ecumenical, and financial).^[9]

The fourth component of missional theology is that its goal and purpose is to form God’s people to be faithful to their missional calling. Richard Bauckham laments that too often, “the academic guild of biblical scholars” has a “largely self-generated agenda [that] increasingly excludes the church from its context and implied audience.” Biblical scholarship, he insists, must “address the church in its mission to the world” and even make the church in the West, which is now waking up to its mission, not simply its audience, but its primary dialogue partner.^[10] Bauckham’s observation is true not only of biblical studies, but of other theological disciplines as well.

Finally, missional theology rejects the notion of a theologia perennis—a timeless theology valid for all times and places—and is alert to the fact that all theology takes place in a particular historical and cultural context. There is no supra- or meta-cultural theology; there is only theology that reflects on the gospel in a particular context and is directed to the particular needs of a church. While the gospel has universal validity, our particular theologies do not. While particular contextual theologies may well enrich churches in other cultural contexts—in fact, they always will if they are rooted in Scripture since the gospel is universally true—they will be formed by particular historical and cultural traditions in response to the needs of the church in that setting.

There is a danger that since the very nature of theology is contextual reflection, it might become parochial and accommodated to the idolatry of particular cultures. And so missional theology will need the mutually correcting and enriching voices of Christians from other settings: from other cultures, from other historical eras, and from other confessional traditions. But theology will also require the voice of missiology as a particular discipline to offer a critical voice that can act as a gadfly or leaven to call it to its missional vocation.^[11] To quote the striking words of Harvie Conn: “Missiology stands by to interrupt at every significant moment in the theological conversation with the words ‘among the nations.’”^[12]

What is fundamental to these five components of missional theology is the recognition of the missional identity of the church as defined by the role it is called to play in the unfolding story of God’s mission. Indeed, this is the rocket launcher that sends a missional theology into orbit. As one traces the role of God’s people in the biblical story and interprets the various books of the canon in this context, two things emerge. First, the Bible is a record of God’s mission in and through his people. Mission is so central that to ignore it is to miss a very important part of the story the Bible tells. Mission is a hermeneutical key that unlocks the biblical story. Second, the Bible is a product and tool of God’s mission, in and through his people. That is, the various canonical books find their origin in God’s intention to shape and equip a people for his purposes. These are the two dimensions of a missional hermeneutic.

I have now erected a missional scaffolding in a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Theology and Mission in Dialogue
• Assessing the Shape of Theology and Mission in Dialogue
• The Practice of Shaping Theology for Mission
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index