SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer

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      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 though Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope, its theory was so unsettling that it was placed on the index of forbidden works. But a rubicon had been crossed: in the West a shift began to take place in the way we view ourselves and our world, a paradigm shift from an ancient to a modern outlook.

      Kuhn mentions another example, the shift from a Newtonian picture of the world (which talks about particles and forces and positions and times) to the world of quantum theory (which talks about probabilities, measurements, mixtures of particles and waves) and relativity theory (where there is no fixed space or time). Such a shift of understanding was revolutionary and brought about a whole new way of seeing our place in the universe, one that has often been described as ‘relativism’.

      In 1984 David Tracy and Hans Küng adopted the use of the idea of paradigm shifts to explain the evolving nature of the Church’s theology and self-understanding over the centuries (see Paradigm Shifts in Theology, 1984, English trans. T & T Clark, 1989). In Küng’s voluminous book of 1994, Christianity: Its Essence and History (English trans. 1995), he put this theory to work by mapping out Christian history and theology into six basic periods, each with its own paradigm. The movement from one to the next was a revolutionary jump in the whole ‘world-view’ or theological system of the Christian community, a paradigm shift for the Church. (See Walls 1996, ch. 2, for a similar and concise overview of Christian history which gives greater recognition to the role of cultures in changing paradigms.)

      At the start of his book Küng provided an illuminating diagrammatic summary of what was to follow, and this is reproduced in an amended form as a reference point for our own survey. The diagram makes a number of key points: