Holiness and the Missio Dei

Andy Johnson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498221610, 9781498221634
• eBook ISBN: 9781498221627
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In Holiness and the Missio Dei, Andy Johnson takes the reader on a biblical journey that explores the question of what holiness or sanctification has to do with God's mission in the world. He refuses to relegate the idea of humans becoming holy to the realm of individual inward piety or legalism, on the one hand, or to the realm of the impossible prior to Christ's return, on the other. Using a missional lens to guide the reader into a theological engagement with Scripture, Johnson argues that God's primary means of making us holy is through our participation in his saving, reconciling mission to bring creation to its intended destiny. As we become and remain part of an ecclesia, we are corporately and personally shaped by the Spirit into the image of the cruciform Son through participation in the missio Dei, and thereby are being restored into the image of the holy God--the imago Dei. This book is written primarily for church leaders, for students, and for academics who are interested in missional readings of Scripture. It will challenge those who read it to re-articulate the church's becoming holy as being inseparably connected to its active participation in God's mission.

Section 1

Old Testament Soundings

1

Genesis 1–11

Holiness and God’s Mission “in the Beginning”

Framing the Biblical Story

We begin by focusing on the question of how Scripture frames the story it tells from Genesis to Revelation.1 Some people read the Bible as though all the important stuff runs from Genesis 3 (where humans fall into sin) to Revelation 20 (John’s vision of the last judgment where humans are judged). They tend to reduce the biblical story to God’s attempt to deal with individuals’ guilt so that when they die and face their own individual “last judgment,” they can go to heaven.2 But this ignores the way the Bible actually begins and ends. The Bible begins with God taking great care to create the physical world as his cosmic sanctuary or temple to become what we might call a “theater of his glory.”3 This is a world he calls “good” over and over at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1. The Bible then ends with Revelation 21–22, with God “making all things new” (21:5). It ends with God’s good creation made new, with creation reaching its intended destiny and flourishing with abundant life. Although creation is “very good” in this first chapter of Genesis (1:31), God does not make it “perfect,”4 in the sense of some sort of static perfection. Rather, God gives humanity a “perfectly balanced and resourced starting point . . . a setting in which human beings, working with and enabled by God, could cause the created order to flourish.”5 In the first two chapters, then, God gives humanity a job to do, a role to play—a mission—from which he never releases us. Hence, from the outset, one important aspect of humanity’s role vis-à-vis God can be summed up in the language and conceptuality of participation in the missio Dei.

This mission goes hand-in-hand with God’s creation of human beings in God’s own image.6 Even though there are real differences between Genesis 1 and 2, when they are read against their ancient Near Eastern background, both essentially portray humanity as, in Middleton’s words, “the authorized cult statue in the cosmic temple, the decisive locus of divine presence on earth, the living image of God in the cosmic sanctuary.”7 In Gen 2:7, the holy God graciously breathes his breath/Spirit/life into humanity—his own previously inert cult statue—thereby enabling humanity to re-present his gracious presence (like priests) in his cosmic temple and to rule over it (like kings) in a way that creation would flourish with well-ordered life (Gen 1:28; 2:15) and reach its intended destiny. Middleton’s elaboration of this is worth quoting at some length:

[W]hereas cult images of the gods are false images, and impotent to boot (Ps 115:4–8), humans are powerful, living images of the one true God, called to manifest God’s presence by their active cultural development of the earth. By our obedient exercise of power, humanity as imago Dei functions like a prism, refracting the pure light of God into a rainbow of cultural activities that scintillate with the creator’s glory throughout the earth. By our faithful representation of God, who is enthroned in the heavens, we extend the presence of the divine king of creation even to the earth, to prepare the earth for God’s full—eschatological—presence, the day when God will fill all things. Then (when God fully indwells the earthly realm) the cosmic temple of creation will have been brought to its intended destiny.8

The best place in the Bible to see a portrait of that intended destiny—creation reaching its full potential and flourishing with abundant life—is Revelation 21–22.9 There God’s garden creation with only two original inhabitants becomes a bustling city bursting with fruitful life with people living in complete harmony with God and each other (21:3). Not only is there no sin, suffering, or death, there is no capacity for these chaotic evil forces to ever re-emerge (21:1).10 All this is because the entirety of the renewed creation will be soaked with God’s unmediated holy, life-giving presence/glory (21:11, 22; 22:3–5; cf. 1 Cor 15:28) making all of it God’s now completed holy temple/sanctuary. “The glory and honor of the nations” (21:24–26), that “rainbow of cultural activities that scintillate with the creator’s glory,”11 are gathered from all over the earth and brought into it. In it redeemed human beings fully represent God’s gracious, life-giving presence/holiness like priests (Rev 22:3)12 and share in his rule over God’s renewed cosmic temple like kings (Rev 22:5). In short, this is not a restoration of the original creation to its original state but, in the words of Bauckham and Hart, “the unrealized promise of the first creation finally achieved.”13 However, even this “new creation” should not be imagined in terms of some sort of unchanging static perfection, but in terms of continuing and unhindered robust flourishing. To slightly modify the words of theologian, Robert Jenson, to fit this context: “[W]hatever blessing we may in a particular context invoke to speak of [creation’s intended destiny], we must imagine a sort of spiral of the granting and pursuit of that blessing.”14 To sum up, when all creation is fruitful and multiplying with abundant life and cultural development, when the holy God is dwelling directly with God’s holy people in a holy place,15 creation will have reached its intended, albeit non-static, destiny.

Taking the Bible’s own framing seriously, then, helps us to see it as the story of God’s mission to bring his creation to its full potential and to do so through the agency of humanity. Along the way, after Genesis 3, God will indeed deal with the sin and guilt of human beings along with its devastating consequences for the rest of the created order. But this “rescue operation” is a sub-plot in the main plot of God’s mission to bring his creation to its intended destiny. Even so, it is a necessary sub-plot that occupies most of the Bible. So it is very important for us to pay some attention to how this sub-plot gets going, the way it develops in the early chapters of Genesis, and what holiness has to do with all of this.

Holiness and the Story’s Sub-Plot

As we saw above, in Genesis 1–2, the holy God graciously creates humanity in God’s own image to re-present his gracious presence in his cosmic temple and to rule over it in a way that would enable all creation to flourish with well-ordered life (Gen 1:28; 2:15) and reach its intended destiny. So that humanity could remain free to accomplish this task, God ordered this good creation with a boundary between every other tree and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humanity was forbidden from eating the fruit from this tree (2:16–17). But you know the story. Even though they had been created in God’s image, they crossed that boundary, refusing to fulfill the charge God had given them, succumbing to the temptation to “be like God” (Gen 3:5).

Before Genesis 3, although creation was not yet perfected so that God’s presence fully saturated every nook and cranny of it, God had been immediately present to his good creation. All of cr...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction and Orientation
• SECTION 1: Old Testament Soundings
• SECTION 2: Relocating Holiness in Jesus
• SECTION 3: Other New Testament Witnesses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography