Reading the Bible Missionally

Michael Goheen

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781467445689
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

  Academy of Parish Clergy’s Top Ten Books for Parish Ministry Insights from a noteworthy convergence of top scholars in biblical studies and missiology Over the past half century, it has become clear that  mission  is a central theme in the Bible's narrative and, moreover, is central to the very identity of the church. This book significantly widens and deepens the emerging conversation on missional hermeneutics. Essays from top biblical and missiological scholars discuss reading the Scriptures missionally, using mission as a key interpretive lens. Five introductory chapters probe various elements of a missional hermeneutic, followed by sections on the Old and New Testaments that include chapters on two books from each to illustrate what a missional reading of them looks like. Essays in two concluding sections draw out the implications of a missional reading of Scripture for preaching and for theological education. CONTRIBUTORS Craig G. Bartholomew
Richard Bauckham
Carl J. Bosma
Tim J. Davy
Dean Flemming
John R. Franke
Mark Glanville
Michael W. Goheen
Joel B. Green
Darrell L. Guder
George R. Hunsberger
Timothy M. Sheridan
Christopher J. H. Wright
N. T. Wright

A Missional Hermeneutic

CHAPTER 1

A History and Introduction to a Missional Reading of the Bible

Michael W. Goheen

This book will probe a missional reading of Scripture and demonstrate the importance and fruitfulness of encountering the text in this way. This kind of missional hermeneutic has been gaining ground in missiological circles for over a half century. But it remains relatively uncommon to see biblical scholarship take seriously the insights of missiology. As one New Testament scholar sympathetic to a missional hermeneutic puts it: “Biblical scholars have yet to be persuaded that mission can and should serve as a fundamental rubric for biblical interpretation.”¹ Many biblical scholars go on about their business paying little attention to this insight of their missiological colleagues: that mission is a central category in the Bible that needs to be taken seriously if our interpretation is to be faithful.

Biblical Scholarship and Mission—Not Yet Persuaded

Why are so many biblical scholars not yet persuaded of the importance of mission for interpreting Scripture? The following reasons became evident to me as I participated, often as the token missiologist, in various meetings with biblical scholars.² It seems that the first fundamental problem is confusion about what the word “mission” means. For centuries, the word was used to describe the intentional efforts of the church to spread the Christian faith among unbelievers. This might have meant evangelistic efforts at home but more often it referred to cross-cultural activities to establish a witnessing presence in places where there had been none. There was some movement in the mid-twentieth century toward a broader understanding of mission that moved beyond evangelism and cross-cultural missions and included deeds of justice and mercy.³ But these too were “missional” in the sense of being intentional activities on the part of the church to spread the gospel beyond its walls.

Massive changes in theological reflection on mission developed in the middle part of the twentieth century and culminated in the description of the missio Dei as a framework for mission. But these developments seem to be little known among biblical scholars. And as long as “mission” means intentional efforts at spreading the Christian faith by word or deed, certainly it cannot be a central rubric for interpreting Scripture—especially not the Old Testament. “Mission” so defined may be a very important task for the church to engage in, or merely a leftover relic from past colonial times: either way, it can hardly merit serious consideration as a basis for biblical hermeneutics.

A second problem flows from the first: missiology is often not taken seriously as an academic discipline because it is considered limited to the practical issues of outreach, the “how to” of evangelism and cross-cultural mission. In theological institutions enslaved to the theoria-praxis dichotomy of the Enlightenment, mission is considered to be divorced from the complex rigors of the more theoretical theological disciplines. “The ‘practical’ American,” laments Harvie Conn, “has placed missions in ‘practical theology.’ The basic ‘four great theological disciplines’ remain OT study, NT research, church history, and doctrine. And missions maintains its toolshed appearance behind the ‘stately mansions’ of theology.”⁴

Missiologists, too, have contributed to the caricature—and this is the third problem. It is not uncommon for missiologists simply to accept their relegation to the back benches: to teach the practical side of outreach and to refuse to engage the theological curriculum at a deep level. But more problematically, when missiologists sometimes use Scripture to construct a biblical and theological foundation for mission, their use of the biblical text is often considered naïve. There are at least two ways this happens.

The first concerns the historical conditioning of the biblical text, the seeming gulf between the ancient text and the contemporary situation. Biblical scholars oriented to the spirit of the Enlightenment, which separated the subject and object of knowledge, insist on an uncommitted approach to Scripture. This produces a distancing effect by which the text becomes a strange object to be examined and dissected rather than one to be heard and obeyed. Consequently, many biblical scholars employ a historical-critical method as a bridge to cross over the great gulf fixed between the ancient text and today. Rarely do they make the journey back, and so they are reticent to draw any kind of direct connection between this alien text and the present.

Missiologists rightly react against this distancing, but in seeking the contemporary relevance of biblical texts they frequently fail to respect the cultural distance, and so read their own missional concerns back into the biblical text. They dismiss the rigorous methodological approach of biblical scholars. This can make them vulnerable to simplistic applications of the biblical text to the contemporary missionary setting. This lack of attention to hermeneutical rigor certainly will not impress biblical scholars—especially those who remain uncritically immersed in the Enlightenment worldview.

Further, biblical scholars stress the tremendous literary, theological, and semantic diversity of the scriptural record. To get hold of such variety, study of the Bible can become an increasingly specialized set of sciences in which biblical scholarship becomes focused on increasingly narrow fields of competence. Frustrated with this fragmentation and specialization, and lamenting its debilitating impact on the church, missiologists tend to overlook this rich diversity and may reduce their biblical foundation for mission to a single word, idea, or text as the unifying hermeneutical lens through which to see Scripture. A failure on the part of missiologists to respect the diversity of Scripture will not draw biblical scholars to the insights of missiology.

A final problem affects not just biblical scholars but the whole church in Western culture. Our Christendom and Enlightenment heritage has clouded our missional consciousness. Our missional identity has been suppressed, and so nonmissional assumptions inevitably influence biblical scholarship. There is, of course, no such thing as methodological neutrality. We carry our assumptions about the world into our reading and they largely determine what we see. To the degree that biblical scholars have not recognized their missional located situation, as Scripture presents it, they will not have eyes to see the centrality of mission in Scripture. In an article written almost forty years ago, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza diagnoses the problem precisely: “Exegetical inquiry often depends upon the theological and cultural presuppositions with which it approaches its texts. Historical scholarship therefore judges the past from the perspective of its own concepts and values. Since for various reasons religious propaganda, mission, and apologetics are not very fashionable topics in the contemporary religious scene, these issues have also been widely neglected in New Testament scholarship.”⁵ For these reasons, mission has not been recognized as a crucial rubric for biblical interpretation.

Hopeful Signs for the Development of a Missional Hermeneutic

The historical neglect of mission in biblical scholarship cannot but have a negative effect on theological education and on the local congregation. Is there any hope that things might change? In fact, there are hopeful signs of late, and I will consider four such signs here.

The Changing Situation of the Church in Western Culture and in the World

Perhaps the most important factor that may help to stimulate a missional reading of Scripture is the changing setting of the church in Western culture. The influence of the gospel and the Christian faith on Western culture continues to decline, and the church is losing its former place of influence. The Western church finds itself increasingly in a situation that can only be characterized as missionary: it has become a culturally disenfranchised church in a neo-pagan culture. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say (since, of course, the church is always situated in a missional setting) that our missional context has changed. It is now more obvious and harder to ignore.

The church in the non-Western part of the world, moreover, has experienced spectacular growth and now dwarfs the church in the West both in terms of numbers and vitality. The church in the southern hemisphere does not have a Christendom heritage and so has always been more aware of its missional situation. So it is much more deeply attuned to the centrality of mission to the Christian faith. The sheer size of the non-Western church means that it is inevitable that their voices will be heard sooner or later. This will bring a growing challenge to the Western church.

Together, then, the expanding awareness of our newly discovered missional setting and the decisive shift of the center of gravity in the church to the global south are leading to a “raised consciousness of mission” in the Western church.⁶ This new situation has the potential to reopen our missional categories when reading Scripture. I have witnessed on more than one occasion, in the case of biblical scholars, a missional reading of Scripture arise out of extended contact with the third world church or from a missional engagement with their own culture in a local church setting.

Growing Convergence on a New Understanding of Mission

A second hopeful sign is that the twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of a new biblical and theological framework for mission that has garnered widespread recognition. This new view of mission embraces much more than outreach activities, and it has serious implications for the interpretation of Scripture. As this continues to be the subject of reflection in various theological traditions, its presence will be felt in biblical studies.

A colonial framework shaped the church’s view of mission well into the twentieth century, generating an introverted life in the local congregation. The following assumptions were widespread: (1) mission is a task for parachurch organizations while the church has only a pastoral role; (2) the world is divided into the Christian West (home base) and the non-Christian non-West (mission field); (3) mission takes place on the non-Western mission field; and (4) there is no need for mission in the West, since it is already Christian: the only necessary outreach effort is the evangelism of individuals, and there is little need for a prophetic challenge to what is considered to be a Christian culture.

Clearly these assumptions had to fall away if there was to be a fresh understanding of mission. And this is what happened in the early and middle part of the twentieth century in missiological discussion. The church in the non-Western part of the world began to grow and mature. In Western culture, the growth of demonic ideologies, two world wars, and unspeakable atrocities during the twentieth century signaled that the secular West was far from Christian. Colonialism collapsed, and uncertainty pervaded the Western missionary enterprise. The church in the West weakened as its numbers dwindled, and its life was deeply compromised by the powerful idols of Western culture.

The meetings of the global missionary body, the International Missionary Council, tell the story of theological reflection on mission. As one traces the results of these meetings it is clear that all the twentieth-century assumptions about mission were gradually dismantled. The question that faced the church in the early 1950s was: What new framework could replace the obsolete colonial one? The 1952 meeting of the International Missionary Council in Willingen, Germany, was a turning point, because there a new framework for mission emerged that would dominate mission thinking to the present. Lesslie Newbigin observes that “subsequent history has shown that Willingen was in fact one of the most significant in the series of world missionary conferences.”⁷

The most important legacy of Willingen was the new concept of God’s mission. Mission has its source in the love of the Father who sent his Son to reconcile all things to himself. The Son sent the Spirit to gather his church together and empower it to participate in his mission. This church is sent by Jesus to continue his mission, and this sending defines its very nature.

Our mission thus begins with the mission of the triune God. But this Trinitarian mission must be understood in the narrative context of the biblical story. The Scriptures tell the story of God’s work to restore the entire creation, and a people from all nations, from the debilitating impact of human rebellion. God chose a people to play a role in this mission. This means that mission is more than simple activity: it is an identity that comes from the role that God’s covenant people are called to play in the biblical story. Mission, then, is not merely a set of outreach activities: it defines the very being of God’s people. To say that their missional identity comes from the role they are...