Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

Does Mission Define the Essence of the Church?

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Michael Goheen’s book, A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story insightfully relates the theme of missions to both Israel and the church. Yet at a few points it may be asked if mission ends up overriding other necessary aspects of the church.

For instance: “At its best, ‘missional’ describes not a specific activity of the church but the very essence and identity of the church as it takes up its role in God’s story in the context of its culture and participates in God’s mission to the world” (p. 4).

John Bolt and Richard Muller question the legitimacy of defining the church’s essence in terms of mission:

“In simple language, what we are determines how we can act and what the result of our activity will be. The marks of the church indicate her fundamental identity, and her identity is the basis for the performance of her task. The opposite model, where the doing of a task is posited prior to careful statement of identity, or where identity is defined in terms of a task, can lead and historically has led to disastrous consequences. A redefinition and revision of the church’s task, framed primarily by numerical growth for example, threatens the very essence of the church. After having led converts to a new and different place, we may well discover that this is not a place where the Word is truly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. We have then arrived if not at utopia, at ucclesia, a nonchurch. The point here is that the expression a ‘mission-shaped church’ is vacuous. A church cannot remain church unless it is shaped by a mission that is itself shaped by the church’s essential identity.”

John Bolt and Richard A. Muller, “Does the Church Today Need a New ‘Mission Paradigm’,” Calvin Theological Journal 31, no. 1 (April 1, 1996): 204-205.

Church Conformed to Culture

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Michael Goheen lists and describes a variety of images of the church that are shaped more by the current culture than by Scripture:

  • Church as mall or food court: Malls offer a variety of consumer goods, and similarly food courts offer a number of choices. Likewise the church provides a variety of programs to meet the religious needs of the congregation.
  • Church as community center: Various institutions . . . exist to meet social needs and organize themselves around the hobbies and special interests of their members. In this model the church becomes a hub for its members to meet social needs as the organize around a shared set of beliefs and a shared religious interest. Various programs are conceived for youth, singles, young married couples, and other groups to meet their various social needs.
  • Church as a corporation: Corporations are rationally organized for growth, profit, and the efficient marketing of their product. Often church leadership and organization are oriented toward efficiency rather than pastoral care and missional leadership. They are organized to market the religious goods they can offer.
  • Church as theater: Theaters are places where people are invited to sit back and passively enjoy various kinds of entertainment. Often the way we structure our worship spaces and liturgies makes our ‘worship’ look more like occasions for entertainment.
  • Church as classroom: Educational institutions continue to dominate Western culture. Within a consumer framework, they offer teaching and insight for living. This may well reflect one of the consumer items the church has to offer its constituents through Bible study and teaching.
  • Church as hospital or spa: A hospital is a place of healing, and a spa offers an opportunity for rejuvenation in a stressful world. The church is a place of spiritual healing and rejuvenation.
  • Church as a motivational seminar: In our self-help-oriented world there is no shortage of motivational seminars to help improve various dimensions of our lives. The church can offer these too, from tips on better parenting to ways to improve your marriage.
  • Church as social-service office: The social-services arm of the government exists to take care of the weak, the needy, and the poor. The compassionate church concerned for diaconal mercy in its neighborhood may come to resemble this kind of institution in its care for those in need.
  • Church as campaign headquarters or social advocacy group: A social-advocacy group or political party promotes its particular brand of political economic, or ecological justice. In this mode, the church assumes this role, organizing pressure for a more Christian society.

Goheen recognizes that some, though not all, of these items contain aspects of church ministry that are essential (e.g., teaching). He identifies the problem: “The problem arises when the biblical story and the nature of the church are forgotten; then these activities are shaped by a different story and lose their authentic ecclesial form.”

Michael Goheen, Light to the Nations (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 15-16 (bulleted items quoted verbatim).

Distinct Living within a Particular Cultural Context

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The early church saw itself in light of the concept of "resident aliens" (παροικοι). "The primary sense of paroikoi* is that of a redemptive tension between the church and its cultural context. These early Christians understood themselves to be different from others in their culture, and lived together as an alternative community nourished by an alternative story—the story of the Bible—that was impressed on catechumens in the process of catechism. The entire catechetical process had this pastoral purpose: to empower a distinctive people shaped by the story of the Bible."

*Note 10: "Paroikoi is the Greek world found in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Pet. 2:11) and often early church literature. It carries the sense of both being at home in a place and being a foreigner."

Micahel W. Goheen, A Light to the Nations(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 7.

Allegory and the Church Fathers

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"There is a general failure in antiquity to make a clear distinction between allegorical expression and allegorical interpretation. What we call ‘allegorical interpretation’ in this context normally takes the form of a claim that an author has expressed himself ‘allegorically’ in a given passage. . . . There is never any suggestion that the goal of the commentator is anything but the elucidation of the intention or meaning (διάνοια) of the author. Neither does the interpreter normally feel compelled to justify his claim that the text under consideration ‘says other things than the obvious. His goal is to find the hidden meanings, the correspondence that carry the thrust of the text beyond the explicit. Once he has asserted their existence, he rarely feels the need to provide a theoretical substructure for his claims. If such a substructure is implied, it is often no more than the idea that a prestigious author is incapable of an incoherent or otherwise unacceptable statement, and that an offensive surface is thus a hint that a secondary meaning lurks behind."

Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 20.

Sola Scriptura and Specific Applications

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How does God’s speech in creation relate to his speech in Scripture? In putting such a great emphasis on general revelation, are we not in danger of minimizing special revelation? Do we not thereby compromise the Reformation’s great principle of sola Scriptura?

This is a legitimate concern. . . . The analogy with ‘guidance’ can be helpful. It is certainly true that a preoccupation with ‘the leading of the Spirit’ in determining God’s will for decisions of everyday life can result in an undervaluing of Scripture, but that is not at all a necessary consequence of an emphasis on seeking God’s will in our daily lives. A sound approach to guidance will always stress the primacy and indispensability of Scripture as well as the exercise of ‘sanctified common sense,’ bit it will not thereby downplay the reality of a knowable and specific will of God for our personal lives. In fact, the Scriptures themselves by their insistent teaching of God’s lordship over all of our lives continually drive us to consider questions of guidance. Suppose John, a college senior has to decide whether // to go on to seminary or to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. Scripture does not decide that question for him. Instead it gives him certain indispensable guidelines: he must seek the Lord’s will in all things, he must be a good steward of the gifts God gives him, he must do all to the glory of God, God has a plan for his life and has been guiding him since childhood, he must subordinate his own wishes and desires to God’s, and so on. But these guidelines press him on to a consideration of what God’s will is in this situation, what gifts he has to be a steward of, what is most glorifying to God in this particular case, what God’s plan and guidance have been in his life to this point, what personal preferences must be downplayed, and so on. In considering all these individual questions he must continually check back with Scripture to make sure his bearings are right, but he would be foolish and irresponsible if he let a stray text decide the matter for him without considering available graduate schools, his own talents and temperament, specific historical needs, and so on.

Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 36-37

God is most glorified in us when we are most conformed to His image

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“This is the prime way of honouring God. We do not so glorify God by elevated admirations, or eloquent expressions, or pompous services for him, as when we aspire to a conversing with him with unstained spirits, and live to him in living like him.”
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, 453 cited in Beeke, Puritan Reformed Spirituality, 404.

Dangers of Missional Thinking

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I do not think for a moment that the church should aspire to become irrelevant. There is always a need for Christians to speak the gospel into their own context. Rather, my concern is with the ever present danger of over-contextualizing. Consider what happens to a church that is always trying to appeal to an increasingly post-Christian culture. Almost inevitably, the church itself becomes post- Christian. This is what happened to the liberal church during the twentieth century, and it is what is happening to the evangelical church right now. As James Montgomery Boice has argued, evangelicals are accepting the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, adopting the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods. In theology a revision of evangelical doctrine is now underway that seeks to bring Christianity more in line with postmodern thought. The obvious difficulty is that in a post-Christian culture, a church that tries too hard to be relevant may in the process lose its very identity as the church. Rather than confronting the world the church gets co-opted by. It no longer stands a city on a hill, but sinks to the level of the surrounding culture."

Philip Graham Ryken, City on a Hill: Reclaiming the Biblical Pattern for the Church in the 21st Century (Moody Press, 2003), 22.

Release of Robert Bell’s OTT

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Students of New Testament theology have the benefit of multiple New Testament Theologies written from many perspectives and utilizing many methodologies. Two recent New Testament theologies (Thielman and Marshall) proceed by examining the themes of individual New Testament books.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparable Old Testament theology. Walter Kaiser’s Toward and Old Testament Theology and his more recent The Promise-Plan of God move through the individual books of the Bible, but they do not examine them thematically. The Dallas Seminary compendium, A Biblical Theology of the Old Testament approximates this approach, but it deals with larger corpora: the Pentateuch, the Minor Prophets, etc. Paul Houses’s Old Testament Theology does move through the Old Testament book by book, but he does not examine these books thematically. Bruce Waltke’s acclaimed An Old Testament Theology, has a helpful introductory section, but it is heavy on Genesis and extremely light by the time it reaches the prophets.

Bell’s The Theological Messages of the Old Testament Books provides a thematic study of each of the books of the Old Testament. (The exceptions to this book-by-book approach are Judges and Ruth and the three minor prophets Obadiah, Joel, and Zephaniah. Intriguingly, Bell suggests that Judges-Ruth may have once been one book. Obadiah, Joel and Zephaniah are treated together because they share the common theme “Day of the Lord.”) In general, Bell discusses the structure of the book, he follows this with a thematic analysis, and he concludes with suggestions for pastoral application. He does not hold himself to following the pattern in every case (see explanation on p. 14).

Preceding the individual book theologies, Bell provides the reader with a brief orientation to biblical theology and to the method he employs in this volume. Regarding the nature of biblical theology, he contrasts Vos’s popular view that biblical theology and systematic theology are distinguished only by method with the view that the two disciplines differ in nature. Bell thinks a better approach limits biblical theology to studying what God revealed in Scripture (by which, I understand him to mean the primary messages that God intended each book to convey). Systematic theology, on the other hand, extends to investigating what is true about God using Scripture statements, implications from those statements, natural theology, and historical theology (4-5).

The introduction also reveals the two great advantages that Bell sees in biblical theology. First, biblical theology provides a way for the Christian to find relevance in the Old Testament without resorting to allegory or mere moralizing (1). Bell’s concern for enabling Christians to see the significance of the Old Testament is emphasized by the application sections that conclude each chapter and by two appendices which provide example sermons based on the methodology exhibited in this work. Second, while granting the “legitimacy of systematic theology” (5, n. 15), Bell believes Biblical Theology enables the Christian to see what God explicitly says. In his words, “It is very important for Bible students and pastors to be able to distinguish between what the Bible says and what the theologians have concluded, even when these conclusions may correctly reflect God’s truth” (5-6).

Bell notes that book theologies of the sort he proposes could easily match the dimensions of standard commentaries on those books. His work is therefore a starting point for deeper investigations.

The BJU Campus Store has the book available in the store and at their website. According to the website, books purchased before October 7th will received a signed copy. There is also a live book signing at the Campus Store on October 7 from 11:30 to 1:30.

Disclosure: I am an employee of BJU Press and I received a review copy from the BJU Campus Store.