SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer

and cultures do not stand still but are continually evolving and developing through time, sometimes in dramatic ways. They are formed by shifting currents of social and cultural change, so that the way the Church participates in mission in one culture and at one time will need to be different from the way it participates in mission in another culture at a different time.

      The five Galilean principles provide general guidance about the nature of this participation but they do not provide detailed guidance about its expression within different cultures and regions, among people of different languages and customs and peculiarities. For that kind of guidance it is necessary to visit the currents and cross-currents of human history, where Church, culture and kingdom interact in different ways at different times. Through the study of this changing interrelationship it will be possible to get to know the specific ways the Christian community has participated and does participate in the missio Dei. As Bosch writes,

      the Christian faith is a historical faith. God communicates his revelation to people through human beings and through events, not by means of abstract propositions. This is another way of saying that the biblical faith, both Old and New Testament, is ‘incarnational’, the reality of God entering human affairs. (Bosch 1991, p. 181)

      The study of the history of this participation and communication is the subject of the next and central section of this Studyguide.

Discussion questions Are there other important mission principles within Jesus’ Galilean ministry? In what order would you place them and why? Which episodes from the Gospels especially exemplify them?

      Further reading

      Bauckham, Richard (2003), Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World, Paternoster

      Bosch, David J. (1991), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Orbis

      Brueggemann, Walter (2001), The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd edition, Fortress Press

      Clark, David (2005), Breaking the Mould of Christendom: Kingdom Community, Diaconal Church and the Liberation of the Laity, SCM Press

      Gillingham, S. E. (1998), One Bible, Many Voices, SPCK

      Hooker, Morna D. (1991), The Gospel according to St Mark, A & C Black

      Hooker, Morna D. (1997), The Signs of a Prophet: The Prophetic Actions of Jesus, SCM Press

      Jenkins, Timothy (1999), Religion in English Everyday Life, Berghahn

      Knitter, Paul (1996), Jesus and the Other Names: Christian Mission and Global Responsibility, Orbis

      Myers, C. (1988), Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Orbis

      Powell, Mark Allan (1999), The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ, Lion

      Senior, D., and C. Stuhlmueller (1983), The Biblical Foundation of Mission, Orbis

      Stanton, Graham (1989), The Gospels and Jesus, Oxford University Press

      Wright, N. T. (1996), Jesus and the Victory of God, SPCK

      Part 2. Types and Expressions

      World is crazier and more of it than we think,

      Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

      A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

      The drunkenness of things being various

      (Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’)

      Introduction

      Christian history presents a confusing interchange of movements, people and ideas: on the one hand, the great institutions of Christendom, such as the papacy, the Orthodox patriarchates and the European monarchies stand over and dominate that history at many points; on the other hand, the mavericks and mystics of the Christian tradition, such as Antony of Egypt, Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, show a completely different, subversive and equally influential side to the story. When we ask, as we must now do, how Christian mission has been expressed over the centuries we are therefore asking a question that cannot be answered in a simple and straightforward way. It is a question about the whole complex and involved way the Christian tradition has developed through its institutions, people and ideas and also through its encounter with different cultures and contexts. Christian history bears ample witness to the truth of Louis MacNeice’s verse of ‘things being various’. Clearly some sifting and summarizing of that history is going to be necessary.

      To begin to do this we can recall a conclusion from the last section, that the Church is only one among three players, as it were, the others being the social and cultural world in which it lives, and the inaugurated kingdom of God (which was defined as the participative and saving movement of the Trinitarian God within that world). When looking at Christian history it will therefore be important to trace the ways in which the Church has related to these other two players. This is the crucial three-way relationship which determines the essential nature of mission.

      In the following survey, then, the point will not be to describe the history of Christian mission in chronological order with every key personality and movement given space in the narrative (see Neill 1964, Comby 1996, and Yates 2004 for comprehensive and accessible examples of this approach). Instead it will be to uncover the changing relationship between the three players of world, kingdom and Church. It will be to identify different stages in that relationship and examine each in turn even though some were more short-lived than others. Well-known figures and movements will need to be mentioned in so far as they contributed to the development of that relationship, but not otherwise. So, for example, Martin Luther will need to figure prominently, because he was instrumental in breaking the close identification of church and kingdom in late medieval Catholicism. Under his influence many came to see a profound distinction between the visible Church, which belonged among the kingdoms of this world, and God’s kingdom, which somehow transcended this world, and this distinction fundamentally changed the nature of mission. John Calvin, on the other hand, while very influential as a theologian, inherited Luther’s thinking on this point and mostly worked within it: for this reason he will not need to receive equal attention.

      Hans Küng has provided a comprehensive and widely used overview of the terrain, employing a theory of paradigms and paradigm shifts as an interpretative tool. In the following chapters his paradigms will be employed, with each one introduced and explained and, with the help of David J. Bosch, their different approaches to mission drawn out. Also as the discussion proceeds each approach will be compared with the mission of Christ (as described above), seeing how far it embodied the Galilean principles, so that it can be compared and assessed for use within mission today.

      Paradigms and paradigm shifts in the history of Christianity

      Thomas S. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edn 1970) classically defined a paradigm as ‘an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community. It is an entire world-view.’ N. T. Wright elucidates this in a helpful way: ‘Worldviews are the lenses through which a society looks at the world, the grid upon which are plotted the multiple experiences of life.’ He continues by saying that world-views may be studied through certain features such as ‘characteristic stories; fundamental symbols; habitual praxis; and a set of questions and answers (who are we? where are we? what’s wrong? what’s the solution? and what time is it?)’ (Wright 1996, p. 138).

      A paradigm shift takes place when there is a leap from one world-view to another which allows the world to be explained and interpreted in a whole new way. A powerful example was the Copernican revolution, when Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) established that the universe did not revolve around the earth (with humankind at its centre), as in Greek astronomy, but that the earth revolved around the sun. Humankind was no longer at the centre of things, in an ordered and static world: the universe was altogether a larger and more mysterious thing, with humanity on a ball of rock floating around within it. It became something that more than ever called out for investigation.

      Even