mission.

Every once in a while I come across a book that I love.  I have found another one of these books in Lesslie Newbigin’s The Open Secret.  While I have only read the first half so far I have been underlining like crazy and pausing for reflection more than I have in a long time.  Essentially the book is an introduction to the theology of mission- which Newbigin argues needs to be at the core of Christian doctrine- not as a side subject we take as an add-on to the real theology.  It needs to be present because it is who we are.  So far he has framed mission as the proclaiming of God’s kingship over all human history, the presence of God and kingship of Jesus in the church and the previousness of the kingdom.Here are some quotes that are worth a read…

The concern of those who see mission primarily in terms of action for God’s justice in embodied mainly in programs carried on at a supra-congregational level by boards and committees, whether denominational or ecumenical.  The concern of those who see mission primarily in terms of personal conversion is expressed mainly at the level of congregational life.  The effect of this is that each is robbed of its character by its separation from the other.  Christian programs for justice and compassion are severed from their proper roots in the liturgical and sacramental life of the congregation, and so lose their character as signs of the presence of Christ and risk becoming mere crusades fueled by a moralism that can become self-righteous.  And the life of the worshipping congregation, severed from its proper expression in compassionate service to the secular community around it, risks becoming a self-centered existence serving only the need and desires of its members.  -11

What is being communicated here is not the revelation of a timeless truth, namely, that God forgives sin.  It is the giving of a commission to do something that will otherwise remain undone:  to bring the forgiveness of God to actual men and women in their concrete situations in the only way that it can be done so long as we are in the flesh- by the word and act and gesture of another human being” – 84

When we read that God is “infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passion, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute” we recognize that we are in a world different from that of the Bible.  The Bible remains in the world of stories.  Its God, in the famous words of Blaise Pascal, is not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.  The Bible does not tell stories that illustrate something true apart from the story.  The Bible tells a story that is the story, the story of which our human life is apart.  It is not that stories are part of human life, but that human life is part of a story.  It is not that there are stories that illustrate ‘how things are’; it is that we do not begin to understand how things are unless we understand how they were and how they will be.” 83