Mission after Pentecost (Mission in Global Community)

The Witness of the Spirit from Genesis to Revelation

Amos Yong, Sunquist, Scott W., Yong, Amos, Scott W. Sunquist, Amos Yong

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781540961150
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493419920
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

Bringing Pentecostal theology into the Bible and mission conversation, Amos Yong identifies the role of the divine spirit in God's mission to redeem the world. As he works through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, Yong emphasizes the global missiological imperative: "People of all nations reaching out to people of all nations." Sidebars include voices from around the globe who help the author put the biblical text into conversation with twenty-first-century questions, offering the church a fresh understanding of its mission and how to pursue it in the decades to come.

Part 1: Divine Wind and the Old Testament

1
Torah and the Missio Spiritus

The Winds of Creational Mission

Introduction

As we anticipate the divine wind’s wafting and even blustering back and forth in this chapter that covers such references across the first five books of the Bible, known more broadly as the Torah and also as the Pentateuch, it may be difficult to identify any consistent ruahological thread. In order to appreciate the apparently disparate connections across these books, we need to step back and be reminded about the overarching narrative of the Old Testament. This collection of thirty-nine scrolls is ancient Israel’s sacred writings that provide the account of the people’s self-understanding as the chosen people and nation of Yahweh. There are two sides to this election. On the one hand, “election does not cut Israel off from the nations. It situates that people in a relationship with them.”1 On the other hand, by extension, Israel is appointed to be a representative of Yahweh to the nations. So, consistent with other understandings of deities in the ancient world, God exists in a patron-client relationship with Israel: blessing their welfare, land, and work, and receiving their worship and obedience.2 And part of this obedience involves representational witness to other peoples. Yet the reality is that part of the memory of ancient Israel involved self-constitution over against others—for instance, groups like the “Canaanites,” who may never have been a coherent historical people but rather were simply an aggregate of that which was not-Israel (e.g., Hittites earlier, Samaritans later) and whose land was deemed as preserved for Israel by its God.3 From this perspective, we have to respect the narrative arc of these ancient texts while simultaneously reading between the lines, as it were, to discern redemptive—and missiological—threads related to Israel’s vocation in relation to others around them.

The Torah is concerned to establish, at least in part, this priestly character of Israel’s identity, not only with regard to the original moments of the constitution of the Torah’s various parts (which may have extended over centuries), but also vis-à-vis their cumulative reappropriation during and after the exilic period into its final canonical form. The tabernacle, prototypical of the temple to come and consistent with the entire created world understood as the cosmic habitation over which God is enthroned, is not just for the worship of God but also for mediating God’s presence to the world.4 We see this priestly role and responsibility explicitly stated in Exodus: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (19:5–6). Although we will return soon to this text (§1.4), two aspects of such priestly mediation are important for our missiological purposes.

First, God can raise up individual conduits, as the case may be, for such tasks, and here the deity of ancient Israel is no respecter of national or ethnic identity markers. God can choose “insiders” to Israel as he pleases upon whom to blow the divine wind—for instance, Bezalel and Oholiab, or Joseph, or Joshua—even as he can breathe through “outsiders” to the covenant people, like the Pharaoh or Balaam. Missiologically, we have to be attuned to the cosmic compass in order to discern from whence and to where the wind of God comes and goes.

Second, and now stepping “upward” toward the more macro plane, the divine wind comes both generatively, as when the breath enlivened the primordial waters in the creation account, but also destructively, as when, in the second pentateuchal book, the swirling wind drowned the Egyptian army. The divine breath is life-giving on the one hand but life-denying on the other, precipitating the flood (§1.1) and prophesying judgment on even the people of God (§1.5). Both Israel and others are judged and saved in these early books of the Bible.5 The missio spiritus is therefore neither neat and tidy nor one-dimensional. Instead, as the ruahic references in the Torah suggest, the divine breath is creative and redemptive, with the latter occurring in and through, rather than having nothing to do with, devastation and ruin. As we shall see, Israel “as the priestly enclave in a single world empire”6 thereby carries out its mission and witness to others in part through being ruled over and oppressed by them, both aspects of the divine wind’s activities.

Note, though, that here at the beginning of the canon we are establishing our ruahological and missiological foundations. Although Christians have read the Bible historically as a medium of progressive revelation, culminating in Christ and the New Testament, we will want to observe here what our bifocal lens spotlights. Especially in this first chapter, our approach will be thematic, guided bifocally and literarily, attentive first and foremost to the final form of the text, rather than engaged primarily with historical or critical matters (which are as intensely disputed as they are widely disparate). The ground will be laid, perhaps not in terms of explicit ruahological and missiological content—although even here, we can and will be surprised—but in terms of method and hermeneutic. How to read ruahologically and missiologically—theologically, in other words—is just as important at this point; so practicing such readings is part and parcel of the journey on which this first chapter invites us to go.

1.1 Genesis, Part 1—The Life-Giving Spirit: Creation and Fall

The scriptural canon of course begins with these well-known words: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 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. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen. 1:1–3). Although the Christian New Testament clearly stipulates that all things were created through the Son, the Word or Logos of God (John 1:3; Heb. 1:2), these opening words of the Bible indicate that the creative word of God was carried and even spoken through the divine wind or breath (ruah Elohim). If the wind or breath of God is understood also as the spirit of God, then in these ancient words we have a triune—indeed, the broader Christian theological tradition has said: proto-trinitarian—image of the primordial creation: that God fashioned the world through his word and spirit.7 Even if things are not so simple, if we wanted to avoid imposing later understandings on this passage, such conclusions are appropriate certainly from a canonical perspective long before we adopt any later historical vantage point.

What is intimated is that we are invited from such a stance to consider the rest of the biblical drama, the entirety of creation’s fortunes, as it were, from such a ruah-initiated perspective. The intimate presence of the divine breath or spirit in effect concurs with what kick-starts the cosmos. Certainly the movement of God’s spirit either catalyzes or participates in—or both—the formation of creation that fills in or overcomes the void and that carries the divine light that counters or disperses the darkness of the deep. In this sense, then, the creative work of God over six days can also be understood ruahically, as precipitated by the divine spirit’s sweeping over the primeval waters. By extension, it is the spirit’s elemental stirrings that in this respect induce the world’s coming into being and its subsequent history, and this also invites us to consider in ruahological terms not only the divine creation and in its various orders delineated in the first chapter of Genesis but also the divine sustenance of the world, in all its ever-developing complexity.8

But this narrative add...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Expanded Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Divine Wind and the Old Testament
• Part 2: Divine Breath and the Christian Scriptures
• Concluding Late Modern “Prescript”
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover