Bible in Mission

Pauline Hoggarth

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781908355423
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343324
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"The Bible is alive – it has hands and grabs hold of me, it has feet and runs after me". Thus spoke Martin Luther, as cited by Knud Jørgensen in a quotation that summarizes the deeper meaning of this book. To the authors of Bible in Mission, the Bible is the book of life, and mission is life in the Word. This core reality cutsacross the diversity of contexts and hermeneutical strategies represented in these essays. The authors are committed to the boundary-crossings that characterize contemporary mission – and each sees the Bible as foundational to the missio Dei, to God's work in the world.

From the Foreword by Dana L. Robert, Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission, Boston University School of Theology

SECTION ONE

THE BIBLE IN MISSION IN THE WORLD AND IN THE CHURCH

BIBLE AND MISSION: THE MODERN/POSTMODERN WESTERN CONTEXT

Richard Bauckham

To characterize the culture of the contemporary West is no easy task. In the late twentieth century it was commonly said that western society was in transition from a ‘modern’ to a ‘postmodern’ worldview (though some preferred the term ‘late modern’). But key characteristics of modernity continue to play an important role, especially in the dominant political and economic discourse, alongside the postmodern cultural current that continues to influence both popular and ‘high’ culture. The younger they are, the more the average person’s outlook on life can be characterized as postmodern. But it may be that we are witnessing, not a transition from modernity to postmodernity, but an emerging culture that mixes features of each. At any rate, we have currently to reckon with features generally considered modern and features generally considered postmodern, coexisting to varying degrees according to generation and region. With reference to this last factor, for example, the USA remains a more modern culture than western Europe.

Metanarratives

The metanarrative of progress

A defining characteristic of modernity, since the European Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, has been its metanarrative of progress. This was first called a ‘metanarrative’ or ‘grand narrative’ by French postmodernist philosophers, among whom Jean-François Lyotard famously defined the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives.’¹ He was thinking primarily of the various versions of Enlightenment progressivism. But the concept of a metanarrative, defined in a somewhat more general sense, provides a useful way of comparing religious or secular worldviews, especially those that provide a framework of meaning for life by telling a story about the world. Broadly western metanarratives, including those of Marxism, Islam, Christianity and secular humanism, include some account of where human history is heading.

The overriding idea that has made the modern world is that the extension of knowledge and the application of human reason are able to shape the world and human society in a process of constant improvement of the human condition. History is a great march of human reason towards utopia. Progress is conceived as somehow inevitable, a law of history, though one that requires all the best efforts of human reason to implement it. Progress can be expected to occur in a gradual process of incremental reform, as in liberal democratic versions of the idea, or in a dialectical way, requiring revolution, as in Marxism.

The enormous optimism of modernity derived from its confidence that human reason can master both the natural world and human history, so as to direct history in a progressive direction: towards the greatest human good. The extraordinary achievements of science and technology in the nineteenth century made it the heyday of unqualified faith in progress, but education, bringing enlightenment to the masses, was also a great focus of hope. The progress of reason would make life better in every respect. At the beginning of the twentieth century, intellectuals and politicians confidently expected the abolition of war in the foreseeable future. Against that background, the First World War, which was unprecedented in its cost to human life, was for many deeply disillusioning. The horrors of Nazism and Stalinism dispelled for many the confident expectation that civilization is succeeding barbarism. After all, the Holocaust was not merely atrocious, but a specifically modern sort of atrocity, accomplished with modern technology and modern organizational efficiency. It was also a European act of atrocity, which, along with the exposure of the acts of atrocity committed elsewhere in the world by European powers in the heyday of empires, undermined the previous century’s belief that Europe was in the vanguard of progress, exporting enlightenment to the rest of the world.

It might seem that such refutations by history should have been mortal blows to the idea of progress, but so essential is it to the modern West’s sense of meaning, that it has bounced back. It may be widely admitted that progress is not an entirely inevitable, unilinear process. Setbacks and relapses are possible, but they are still evaluated as such, still measured against progress as the norm. In the politics of the United Kingdom, the words ‘modernizing’ and ‘progressive’ (as opposed to reactionary) are necessary buzzwords even for the elite of the Conservative party. The duty of government is to improve everything. Above all, in the late twentieth century a constantly improving standard of living, funded by economic growth, came to be the confident expectation of people across the whole social spectrum. In a period of unprecedented affluence, the idea of progress, implicit in all economic and political discourse, took especially the form of an expectation of unending economic growth, an expectation that no other society in history has entertained. The financial crisis of 2008 provoked some questioning of the axiom and mechanisms of constant growth, but without major effect.

Although the economic aspect of progress is currently dominant, we should also notice that in western culture there is a strong sense of moral superiority over the past. It is focused on equality (especially equal rights for women and gay people) and on tolerance of diversity and of people’s right to lead their private lives as they choose. Western society is constantly reminding itself that, judged by these standards, it has made huge progress since the 1960s. At the time of the papal election in 2013, the burden of secular comment in the media was that the Catholic Church needs a pope who will ‘modernize’ in these respects.

Postmodern relativism in ethics (see below) does not seem able to dislodge these key symbols of moral progress. Perhaps because they represent success stories for western societies, they seem to trump what might be regarded here as signs of moral decline, such as increasing poverty, the decline in charitable giving and volunteering in community service, or the sexualisation of children. A major weakness of the idea of progress is that its credibility depends on telling a selective story that favours the beneficiaries of change over the victims. (This is not, of course, a reason for Christians to neglect those moral concerns that contemporary society prioritizes; it merely implies that they should also be alert to moral concerns that contemporary society neglects.)

One recent version of the idea of progress is the neo-liberal economic project of globalization, which advocates the unrestricted operation of free market capitalism and free trade. To its critics this is the latest version of western imperialism, an ideology that, under cover of a claim to benefit the world, increases the prosperity of the rich at the expense of the poor. Moreover, just as the old imperialism was combined with cultural imperialism (since the superiority of western culture was axiomatic for the nineteenth-century idea of progress), so economic globalization is accompanied by the Americanization of the world. Dependent for its success on consumerism in both the West and the developing nations, globalization exports the kind of cultural goods that the American dream makes irresistibly attractive to the rest of the world.

Economic globalization, especially in its American version, can also be seen as promoting liberal democracy along with free market capitalism. The claim is that the two go necessarily together. (Examples as different as Singapore and Russia would seem to contradict this claim.) In this form economic globalization is an idealistic goal, the contemporary version of the myth of America as a messianic nation with a mission to benefit the world. Some of the cultural differences between the USA and Europe are understandable in this light. The loss of their empires by the European powers (including Britain) in the twentieth century was accompanied by a weakening of the notion of European cultural superiority. In the same period the USA was not losing but gaining an empire, and saw itself as victor in the Cold War, i.e. in the ideological battle between conflicting narratives of emancipation (the Marxist and the liberal democratic), in both of which notions of political and economic freedom were closely related. In this light it is not surprising that American culture remains more modern (as opposed to postmodern) than Europe, more wedded to the idea of progress and the values of the Enlightenment (as enshrined in the constitution), more idealistic and optimistic about itself and its role in the world.

Close to the heart of the modern idea of progress was the scientific-technological project of mastering nature and adapting it to human benefit. It was conceived as a kind of liberation of humanity from the constraints of nature. The actual achievements of modern science, not just its vastly increased understanding of the material world but the fact that this knowledge has been put to so much tangible human advantage, are undoubtedly the major evidence of progress. But such progress has come to seem much more ambivalent in the light of the ecological crisis. Many people in western societies are more aware that the unintended and unforeseen consequences of reaching for mastery of nature can turn out to be disastrous, while it no longer seems so obvious that there is a single, indisputably beneficial direction for technological advance to take. Nonetheless, science retains great prestige.

The obvious success of science leads some to the view that science is the only sort of real knowledge. In the so-called ‘new atheism’ the scientific understanding of the world is represented as superseding a religious worldview. Religious beliefs are merely primitive ways of attempting to explain what science now explains in a properly rational way. The progress of reason should therefore lead to religion becoming obsolete. If religion has actually been making a comeback, as some observers claim, ardent secularists are all the more anxious to oppose it in the name of progress.

The postmodernist critique of the modern metanarratives

For modernity the metanarrative of progress is a way of salvation, the route to solving the problems of human life. For postmodernists (and for the time being I refer to intellectual people who deliberately adopt a postmodern approach) metanarratives are the problem. We need to be liberated from them, because all such grand projections of universal truth and meaning are oppressive. This charge has two aspects. The first is that a metanarrative is a deceptive ideology, disguising military domination or economic exploitation with the claim to be in the vanguard of history, advancing the cause of humanity at large. Such a critique can be devastating to ideologies of empire and globalization.

However, the second way in which metanarratives are considered oppressive is more far-reaching. It holds that all claims to universal truth are necessarily oppressive, because they amount to imposing someone’s truth on others. To live within a metanarrative is to be given certain goals and values as though they were the only valid ones. We have to be liberated from metanarratives in order to choose our own goals and values for ourselves. We must and can make our own meanings, without regarding them as uniquely valid. As Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s song puts it, ‘Any dream will do.’

This form of relativism has permeated western culture. It takes popular form in such common expressions as ‘Everyone has the right to their own opinion’ and in the frequently expressed dislike of religion because it tells people what they must believe and what they should do. Actually most people who readily express such views also endorse at least some of the certainties of Enlightenment progress. They would probably not support the teaching of creationism in schools as a valid alternative to Darwinism. They would almost certainly not support the right of paedophiles to pursue their preferred sexual practices. In a society subject to a variety of cultural influences such inconsistency is not surprising.

Another rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1: The Bible in Mission in the World and in the Church
• Section 2: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Edinburgh 2010 Common Call
• Bibliography
• Index
• List of Contributors
• Back Cover