SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Christian tradition with different cultures through history: it shows how Christianity has been translated from one cultural setting to another in sometimes surprising and radical ways through different eras.

      Mission within the paradigms

      In Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (1991), Bosch used Küng’s framework as the basis of his own survey of the history of Christian mission, employing it to make sense of the different ways mission has been understood and practised. Bosch draws on the views of key theologians, official church pronouncements and the ways missionary work was carried out, to present concise and perceptive portraits of mission in different eras. While he does not cover every period with equal thoroughness his book gives what is generally regarded as the most comprehensive overview to be published in the last two decades. (See Transforming Mission, pp. 181–9 for a full explanation of his approach.)

      A recent book by Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (2004) must also be mentioned. This supplements Bosch’s book with extensive treatment of movements and missionaries not described by Bosch, especially within Roman Catholic mission around the world from the Middle Ages to the modern era. It is a mine of information and insight and complements the Protestant emphasis of Bosch’s book. (See also Yates 1994 for a more detailed presentation of twentieth-century mission theology.)

      Building on Bosch’s presentation, though, we can go one stage further and isolate the distinctive type of mission found within each paradigm. The category of ‘type’, as mentioned on p. vii of this book, was first used of religious subjects by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. A type is a genuine if stylized representation of an authentic theological tradition (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, p. 11). At the start of the twentieth century, as we saw, Troeltsch developed what has become a classic typology of religious organizations with his distinction between a ‘church’ type and ‘sect’ type. Other writers, mostly notably H. Richard Niebuhr, have adopted and developed this approach. Niebuhr presented five types of relationship between Christianity and wider culture (Niebuhr 1951). Most recently, Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward have analysed and described different forms of theological reflection by employing their own helpful typology (Graham, Walton and Ward 2005, especially pp. 11–12). This book seeks to do the same for mission. Within each paradigm it identifies the distinctive feature of its mission, a feature that sums up the way in which the outreach of the institutional Church or individual Christians related to the other two key ‘players’ of (first) the social and cultural world in which it lived and (second) the coming kingdom of God. The chapters do this through comparing each paradigm with the others and identifying a phrase, such as ‘establishing Christendom’ or ‘building the kingdom on earth’, which employs key missional concepts from that paradigm in an epigrammatic way. Using the historical overviews of Küng and Bosch, then, the following chapters identify six such types of mission, types which have influenced the practice of mission down the centuries. This will enable us to locate contemporary practices in relation to the received traditions of the paradigms.

      It should be added that the choice of examples for each type, examples which are indicative and exemplary of their development, reflects the Western provenance of this book. It is written within a Western setting for a mainly Western audience. If it was being written within the global South the choice of examples would to some extent be different. Also, in the same way that the book is not a survey of mission history neither is it a presentation of all mission theology. Bosch attempted to provide such a survey, especially in his presentation of twentieth-century mission theology in the massive penultimate chapter of Transforming Mission (which he optimistically entitled ‘The emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’). This Studyguide does not attempt to do the same thing: instead it concentrates on six fundamental types and expressions of mission, believing that these lie behind much of that mission history and theology.

Discussion questions Are there some significant omissions from Küng’s list of paradigms (Figure 1)? What are the weaknesses of this kind of way of gaining an overview of Christian history, and what are its strengths?

      Further reading

      Bevans, Stephen B., and Roger P. Schroeder (2004), Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today, Orbis

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

      Comby, Jean (1996), How to Understand the History of Christian Mission, SCM Press

      Graham, Elaine, Heather Walton and Frances Ward (2005), Theological Reflection: Methods, SCM Press

      Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press

      Küng, Hans (1995), Christianity: Its Essence and History, SCM Press

      Küng, Hans, and David Tracy, eds. (1989), Paradigm Shifts in Theology, T & T Clark

      Neill, Stephen (1964), A History of Christian Missions, Penguin

      Niebuhr, H. Richard (1951), Christ and Culture, Harper & Row

      Walls, Andrew F. (1996), The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Orbis

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

      Yates, Timothy (1994), Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press

      Yates, Timothy (2004), The Expansion of Christianity, Lion

      5. Filling the Ark Apostolic Mission

      There is a fresco from third-century Carthage in which the church is pictured as Noah’s ark, riding the waves of destruction. A dove is shown flying from the ark in search of land (Frend 1984, p. 337). It is a simple but powerful image, suggesting that the Church is a place of safety and security which is able to ride the waves of lawlessness and chaos engulfing the world outside. It encourages believers to seek out and then find safety within the confines of the Christian community, only going out to rescue others by bringing them into its protective custody. Such an image does not encourage the Church to try to change the wider society, only to rescue individuals out of its swirling waters before the end.

      Such an image is a stylized representation of a certain approach to mission, an approach that has its origins in certain texts from the earliest period of the Church’s life. To understand this approach, the first of the six historic types located within the Christian paradigms identified by Küng and Bosch, it is necessary to understand the underlying world-view of the first Christians.

      Background: Jewish Christianity (c.40–100 ad)

      The first Christians were Jews. They came to faith within the Jewish world-view of the time. For many Palestinian Jews this was a world-view dominated by eschatology: they believed the end of the age was near, a time of war, destruction and catastrophe with a promise of salvation for the people of Israel. For many the book of Daniel summed up what they believed: ‘At the time of the end . . . there shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.’ (Daniel 11.40–12.1) There would be deliverance for the people of Israel in these end-times:

      But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. (12.1–3)

      Many Palestinian Jews СКАЧАТЬ