Mission Shaped by Promise

Lutheran Missiology Confronts the Challenge of Religious Pluralism

Kaariainen

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896623
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Utilizing resources from Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition, this study offers an understanding of the gospel as promise as key to addressing the challenge of relating the missio Dei to a generous, constructive approach toward the religious other. In its construction of a Lutheran missiology, it retrieves and reappropriates four resources from the Lutheran tradition: the gospel as promise, the law/gospel distinction, a theology of grace as promise of mercy fulfilled, and a theology of the cross utilizing the hiddenness of God. The law of God as accusing yet webbing humanity to its Creator; the gospel as the comforting promise of mercy; and the hiddenness of God as mystifying form the overarching framework within which the Lutheran missiology presented here seeks to engage the religious other by dialectically relating gospel proclamation and dialogue. Such a view of mission shaped by promise offers the paradox of God being both revealed and hidden in the cross as a distinctive contribution to an interreligious dialogue centered on the ambiguity and hiddenness of God.

1

The Gospel as Promise of God

Not all words are created equal. Some are more important than others. The Christian tradition has been decisively shaped by, while also bequeathing us, many important words, words without which it would be unrecognizable: salvation, reconciliation, law, Gospel, covenant, sin, grace, trust, mission, and witness, to name but a few. In considering more specifically the topic and task of the church’s “mission,” a dazzling array of words is likewise used to describe what Christian mission is or should strive to be: proclamation, evangelism, common witness, missio Dei, liberation, work for peace and justice, prophetic dialogue, inculturation, contextualization, etc.1 Such an abundance of definitions of mission led Stephen Neill to comment incisively, “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.”2 Analogously, the same concern could be expressed regarding the nature of the Christian Gospel itself: If everything is Gospel, nothing is Gospel.

A fundamental Lutheran conviction is that, in the Christian lexicon, not all words are created equal. Some are more important than others. Thoughtful Christians throughout the ages have always emphasized certain words as more essential and centrally illuminative than others for Christian identity. While the consensus regarding which words are central, and on what grounds, has shifted throughout Christian history, the history of the Christian tradition could arguably be viewed as a struggle over this very question. Being ever mindful of the twin dangers of inflation and reductionism, of either overloading Christian terms with more weight than they were meant to bear, thus inflating them to the point of losing meaning, or reducing a given term too narrowly to a one-dimensional meaning, the Christian church cannot help but engage in the perilous venture of identifying which words are central to understanding the Church’s identity and mission if it is both to remain faithful to its tradition and relevantly engage the wider culture. This task, fraught with pitfalls, is inevitable. Since all Christians take the canonical Scriptures as authoritative, as the Word of God (in some sense), Scripture is a natural place to ground this task. Which words of Scripture are most essential, most centrally illuminative, which words serve as a roadmap, helping clarify the multitude of other words and the overall sense of Scripture?

This project will demonstrate how, for confessional Lutheran theology, “Gospel” and “mission” are essential to Christian self-identity and vocation, and that “promise” is a fruitful vehicle for relating the two, since the nature of both the Gospel and Christian mission are grounded in the promises of God. A study of Luther and the Lutheran Confessions shows that they are convinced that the category of promise is the best means by which to illumine, not only the nature of the Gospel, ensuring fidelity to the Christian tradition, but also for understanding and directing Christian mission as the Church seeks to relevantly engage the world. In other words: the notion of “promise” not only holds faithfulness with the Christian tradition and relevant contemporary engagement in mission together, but it is able to do so precisely because “promise” illuminates a fundamental dimension of both the Gospel and Christian mission. I will argue and substantiate these three claims: 1) For Luther and the Lutheran Confessions, the Gospel is a promise; 2) The nature of the Gospel should shape/direct the nature of mission; 3) Therefore, promise should be a central category in defining and understanding mission. I will seek to analyze the significance and various theological implications of these basic convictions. In subsequent chapters I will explore how the Gospel as promissio Dei relates to and clarifies the mission of the Church.

Martin Luther, in positing the Gospel as fundamentally a promise of God, understood that such a claim had momentous implications for the entire theological enterprise. As Luther put it in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church: “For God does not deal, nor has he ever dealt, with us except through the word of promise. We, in turn, cannot deal with God except through faith in the word of his promise . . . These two, promise and faith, must necessarily go together.”3 In such memorable words, Luther placed the theme of the promise of God at the center of the theological agenda, inviting further exploration of the issues at stake in understanding the Gospel as promissio Dei. This quote also underlines the fiduciary character of faith, the radically personal nature of God’s relationship with humanity as one of promise and trust, and the very nature of the Gospel as promise. For Luther, Gospel as promissio became the lens through which he read the entire Bible, “including the story of creation, which Luther understood as a promise . . . ‘what he [God] promises, that he certainly does.’”4 While many other themes—such as Christian freedom, justification by grace through faith, simul iustus et peccator, and a theology of the cross, to name but a few—are also important in Luther’s thought and Lutheran theology, I wish to argue for and demonstrate how the category of promissio Dei is the most compelling, unifying touchstone around which all the other themes in Luther’s theology coalesce. In other words: while “Luther’s theology is too lively and too complex to be summarized by a single concept,”5 the category of promissio Dei serves as a heuristic device, illuminating what is distinctive and missiologically creative in Luther’s thought and the Lutheran Confessions. Rather than oversimplifying or being reductionistic, a clear emphasis on the promissio Dei achieves the very opposite: it opens up new insights into and possibilities for applying Luther’s thought, especially missiologically, which were previously overlooked or underappreciated.

What are the significant issues at stake in positing the Gospel as promise? Viewing the Gospel as the promise of God unifies and clarifies six important topics, laying the groundwork for constructing a Lutheran missiology: the relational matrix created by the promissory Word of God, the nature of God, human nature, pastoral issues related to lived Christian experience, the nature of faith, and the law-Gospel distinction or hermeneutic. I will now briefly introduce these issues, before delving into them in greater detail later. First, the trustworthy character of God is grounded in God’s faithfulness to His promises. Secondly, the nature of faith is fundamentally trust in God’s promises. Thirdly, humans are fundamentally trusting creatures, with faith as trust constituting an inevitable feature of human life. Fourthly, the Gospel as promise is most clearly understood when it is contrasted in dialectical tension with the demands of the divine law. The law/Gospel distinction is intrinsic, rather than peripheral, to understanding the Gospel as promise. Fifthly, in order for humans to fully and freely trust in God’s faithfulness to God’s promises, it is imperative that their consciences be comforted. This happens when the benefits of Christ are fully utilized. It is precisely the law/Gospel distinction which assists in such usage and application of the benefits of Christ. In other words: because the theme of promise captures the core nature of the Gospel, it has far-reaching implications for Christian faith and mission. Since the Word of God as God’s promissory, creative speech is foundational for understanding the rest of my argument, we now turn to examine this topic, and the related topic of promise as a “linguistic rule” for Gospel talk, before returning to clarify the five other significant issues.

Preliminary Matters

The Word of God: God’s Speech Creates Relational Reality

A confessional Lutheran reading of the creation narratives of Genesis chapters 1 and 2 views God’s speech as, not only creative, but also creating an inevitably relational matrix with humanity. Not only does creation come into existence through God’s creative speech, but God’s speech directed toward humanity, comprised of command and promise, sets forth the subsequent trajectory of the divine-human rel...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: In Search of a Lutheran Missional Hermeneutic
• Chapter 1: The Gospel as Promise of God
• Chapter 2: A Paradigm of Grace as Promise of Mercy Fulfilled
• Chapter 3: A Paradigm of Grace as Nature Fulfilled
• Chapter 4: A Missional Paradigm of Grace as Nature Fulfilled
• Chapter 5: Missio Shaped by Promissio
• Chapter 6: Proclamation and Interreligious Dialogue
• Bibliography