Called into the Mission of God

A Missional Reading of Paul's Thessalonian Correspondence

Roji T. George

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781506433653
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506433660
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

In Called into the Mission of God, Roji George argues that Paul's primary interest was neither doctrinal teaching nor the articulation of an anti-imperial discourse. Instead, he contends that amidst the many problems that faced the local Thessalonian community--problems arising out of eschatological fears, ethical difficulties in the community, and persecution from outside groups--Paul brought primarily a missional concern to impart ethical exhortation and eschatological teaching in a political language. The book will be helpful to those theologians, scholars, teachers, and students grappling with the message of Paul in his own time and in ours.

Called into the Mission of God represents an increasing commitment on the part of Fortress Press to support the wide dissemination of the best theological and biblical writing by the best scholars from the Global South.

1

Reading a Text Missionally

In a church context, mission-oriented sermons are preached with the primary intention to encourage a cross-cultural evangelistic activity. The grand motto, “reaching the unreached for Jesus,” inspires such enthusiastic sermons. Jesus’s words, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15 or the Matthean version of the Great Commission in Matt 28:19–20) have been invoked time and again to underline the mandate given to every Christian. In addition, examples of the biblical figures (like Paul and the early apostles) and the sacrificial lives of illustrious missionaries in the past and present centuries are brought alive in words before the congregations as perfect models for all to imitate in fulfilling God’s plan for humanity. Such zeal has led to a stereotypical treatment of the Bible. While the select biblical passages have at times been termed central to Christian faith practices, some others have received a proof text treatment. The Bible is believed to contain pieces of evidences for the mission that justifies our ecclesial plans and programs. Thus, such an approach violates the true understanding of the nature of the Bible by narrowly limiting the idea of mission to select passages alone (e.g., Gen 12:1–4; Isa 6:1–8; Matt 28:18–20; Acts 1:8; Rom 9:16; 10:14).

Even in academic discussions, the dominant interests were to discuss “Biblical Foundations of Mission in the Old and New Testament.” This was especially so in the study of the New Testament, where each book was discussed elucidating its unique contribution to draw a broad picture of mission in the New Testament. However, “in recent decades, a more promising way of relating mission and the Bible has begun to emerge. It seeks to engage in an intentional, self-involved, missional reading of Scripture as a whole.”^[1] According to Flemming, the reasons are fourfold: (i) A growing understanding that mission involves much more than a mere cross-cultural mission. (ii) Interpretation of the Scripture requires greater appreciation of the meaning of the text in its original context. It recognizes the very formative missional environment, the missional nature of the Bible, and the interpretive function of the Bible in the missional formation of the community. (iii) Mission-sensitive majority world voices as conversation partners of those in Western academia increasingly determine the real agenda of theological discourse. (iv) The emergence of a new hermeneutical trend called missional hermeneutics.^[2]

The advantage of undertaking a missional interpretation of the Bible is not just enlisting select biblical passages teaching about the mission of God. Instead, missional interpretation redefines the very nature, origin, and purpose of the composition of the Bible. Then, the mission of God is not just a component of the larger biblical teaching, but also the interpretive lens to unravel the true meaning of the biblical text. It means every major theological theme in the Bible must be read and understood through the missional lens. Thus, a tectonic shift in our missional-theological engagement with Scripture is initiated, which also necessitates a major shift in the understanding of important terms for our further discussion.

1.1. Important terms and definitions

Mission

Traditionally, the term has been widely understood, owing to its Latin root, as “to send.” Biblical scholars have used the two terms “mission” and “sending” as parallel terms for Shalach in Hebrew and apostello in the Greek New Testament and the LXX.^[3] Such an understanding played a greater role in defining the self-consciousness of the church, through the centuries, as God’s chosen community sent out into the world. So, mission entailed a human initiative of undertaking cross-cultural journeys to people in geographical regions unfamiliar to the gospel. In doing this, God is viewed as the prime sender and the task of the one being sent, the church or a missionary, is to save the unsaved. The sent out agent of God functions as God’s obedient servant who is commissioned to be his witness. According to Hedlund, “Mission is a special kind of sending. It is always towards those outside. Mission is beyond the existing Church.”^[4] In the words of John Stott, “‘Mission’ concerns his redeemed people, and what he sends them into the world to do.”^[5] It “describes rather everything the church is sent into the world to do. ‘Mission’ embraces the church’s double vocation of service to be ‘the salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world’. For Christ sends his people into the earth to be its salt, and sends his people into the world to be its light (Matt 5:13–16).”^[6]

In the recent missional readings, biblical scholars have explicitly expressed their dissatisfaction with the narrow application of the term in bearing Christian witness. Though the narrow understanding of “mission” limited to mere “sendness of the church” is not completely rejected, it has been viewed to be insufficient to comprehend the wider significance of the mission. In fact, Bosch opines that “mission remains undefinable; it should never be incarcerated in the narrow confines of our own predilections.”^[7] Wright uses “the term mission in its more general sense of a long-term purpose or goal that is to be achieved through proximate objectives and planned action.”^[8] He defines “mission” saying: “Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.”^[9] In other words, it is not just a God’s chosen individual’s activity to extend salvation to those beyond the reach of God’s saving act “but the vocation of a whole people who play part in God’s salvation on behalf of the whole world.”^[10] In doing so, according to Goheen, the church situates herself in the direction of the biblical narrative, that is, “from the particular to the universal.” Then, God’s election of his people is not an end in itself but a means to bless all the nations.^[11]

Missional

In recent discussions, the term missional is used in “a less technical and broader sense as something characterized by mission and related to the mission of God.”^[12] However, when used as a qualifier of the following referent in a sentence, it assumes a technical nature. For example, when used as a qualifier of “church,” it redefines the term church. On such occasions, the term highlights the mission character of the referent. It is an adjective that “describes not a specific activity of the church but the very essence and identity of the church as it takes up its role in God’s story in the context of its culture and participates in God’s mission to the world.”^[13] For this reason, some scholars like Flemming have preferred to use the term missional over missionary because the latter is often understood in a limited sense underlining a cross-cultural movement with the gospel.^[14]

Church

In the light of the paradigmatic shift in the current missiological studies, the missional redefining of the New Testament ecclesiology is vital. Unlike in the Christendom of the Western church, since 1930, there emerged a greater consensus that “the church must be defined and must act as part of the larger mission of God.”^[15] A missional church may be defined as a community of God formed and fashioned by its participation in the mission of God to redeem, heal, and restore the world marred by human sin. It recognizes itself primarily not as a sending agency but as the one being sent to participate in the continuous activity of God in the world from the beginning to the eschatological end. In short, no aspect of its life and activity is untouched by God’s redemptive mission.^[16] At the foundation of this newer understanding of the theology of mission of God lies the doctrine of the Trinity, which is essential for a right ecclesiology. The true understanding of the church is ultimately rooted in understanding the God of the Bible as a missionary God who sends the church to be Christ’s witness.^[17] No doubt, to speak of a missional church is to speak of the church whose essence and purpose of existence is defined in the light of the mission of God. Even the testimony of the New Testament about the apostles founding the communities of God in the Roman world was “to found missional communities to continue the witness that had brought them into being.”^[18]

Hobbs enumerates twelve important indicators from the working ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Called into the Mission of God
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Reading a Text Missionally
• Locating Thessalonian correspondence in its Missional Context
• Eschatology: A Framework for Missional Theology
• God and His Community in Thessalonica
• The Gospel and Missional Pneumatology
• Imitation: A Pauline Strategy of Discipleship
• Conclusion
• Bibliography