timjdavy Bible and Mission

Biblical Basis of Mission course – week two

Following on from last week’s introduction to a missional reading of the whole of Scripture, session two of this Biblical Basis of Mission module looked at mission and the Torah.

After a brief overview of Gen. 1-11 we focused on a few key passages:

  • Gen. 12:1-3 – The call/creation of God’s missional people
  • Exod. 19:4-6 – The role of God’s missional people
  • Deut. 10:12-22 – The shape of God’s missional people

I like to mix up-front teaching with small group work so we used some quotations from J. Okoye’s Israel and the Nations: A Mission Theology of the Old Testament (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006) to stimulate discussion. Here are a couple of examples:

“Mission must be experienced by the peoples as blessing” (p.54)

“Exodus 19:5-6 helps us perceive that the life of a people is a vehicle for mission. The effort to be true to the character of God as the Holy One of Israel also manifests God to the world.” (p.66)

We also watched this MTV/Radiohead video on child labour to remind us why these ancient texts still breathe life into the integral missionary task we are called to as the people of God (see my previous post Human trafficking and mission for more on this).

For next week students have two tasks. The first is to read the Encounters journal article, A Kiss of Heaven: Abraham, Global Blessing, and Civil Society, which considers Abraham’s life as a model for mission. The second is to reflect on the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-19a and think about any mission connections.

If you want to join in the conversation, I’ll be tweeting as redcliffeuk at certain points during the lecture using the tag #biblicalbasis.  It will be from 11.10 to 13.00 GMT on Monday. Maybe see you then!

timjdavy Bible and Mission

The multicultural presence of God

We are half way through the first week of term at Redcliffe. Wednesday mornings see the College community coming together for a corporate time of devotions.

Today our new Principal, Rob Hay, delivered part two of his introductory preach. Part one, on Sunday, focused on the foretaste of heaven we see reflected in our community, which is comprised of around 30 different nationalities. Rob read from Rev. 7:9-12 which describes the multiethnic, multilingual multitude assembled and worshipping before the thrown of God.

It reminded me of something I read recently in an article by James Brownson (‘Speaking the Truth in Love’, International Review of Mission, Vol 83, No. 330 (1994), pp.479-504):

“All of humanity is called to glorify God, not by suppressing diversity and particularity, but by sanctifying it. The universal bond of humanity appears not so much in its set of common responses to its creator and sustainer, but rather by humanity’s diverse responses to the singular vision of God disclosed in the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (p.485)

Brownson then suggests that, “a missional hermeneutic begins with the assumption that the mode in which God is present among the faithful is irreducibly multi-cultural.” (p.485) So, he says, no single culture has a monopoly on understanding or describing God. We, the multiethnic Church must try to understand and worship God together, embracing our cultural diversity rather than constantly seeking our common denominators.

So, yes, it is and exciting and extraordinary privilege to be part of this multicultural community called Redcliffe College. But, yes, we are also a gathering of sinners still in need of God’s grace every day. Which is why Rob’s text for today’s talk was Eph. 5:15-21. We need to walk with integrity, forgiving and being forgiven, cultivating thankfulness and seeing God at work in the nitty-gritty of life. This will be the true test of our spirituality this year: will we seek to love one another when the going gets tough?

timjdavy Bible and Mission

Biblical Basis of Mission course – week one

Truth with a MissionToday was the first day of lectures at Redcliffe and I began a six-week course with the first years called, The Biblical Basis of Mission, which is coupled with a six-week course next term on Issues and Trends in Contemporary Mission.

This morning we looked at some foundational stuff using Chris Wright’s introductory material on missional hermeneutics. It’s found in a few different places – Fanning the Flame: Bible, Cross and Mission (edited by P. Gardner et al, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003); Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation (edited by C. Bartholomew et al, Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004); Text and Task: Scripture and Mission (edited by M. Parsons, Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2006); and expanded in Wright’s The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2006) – but the most accessible format is his 2005 Grove booklet, Truth with a Mission: Reading Scripture Missiologically (Cambridge: Grove Books).

The issues we discussed included: the Bible as the story of God’s mission; the Bible’s call to mission; the Bible as the product of mission; the Bible as a tool of mission; mission as the theme of the Bible; the messianic and missional nature of the Bible; the difference between evangelism and mission; mission as first-and-foremost God’s activity; and more!

I love this quote in particular:

It is not so much, as someone has said, that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission is not just something we do (though it certainly includes that). Mission, from the point of view of our human endeavour, means the committed participation of God’s people in the purposes of God for the redemption of the whole creation. (in Truth with a Mission, p. 14)

Next week, Mission and the Torah…

timjdavy Bible and Mission

Outline for Biblical Basis of Mission Course

I am currently preparing for a six-week ‘Biblical Basis of Mission’ module at Redcliffe, which will be available for first year, Professionals in Mission, Across the Cultures, Pick and Mix and day students. This is my course outline:

1. The Biblical Basis of Mission or The Missional Basis of the Bible?
2. Mission and the Torah.
3. Mission and the Prophets.
4. Mission and the Writings; plus the Inter-Testamental Period.
5. Jesus, Mission and the Gospels.
6. Mission and Acts, the Letters and Revelation.

I think it’s really important to look at the methodology of thinking about the Bible and Mission, hence the first session. Redcliffe is one of the UK’s two specialist centres for mission training, so most students are committed to mission in one way or another before they arrive. So this module has to be more than preaching to the choir, or furnishing them with a few affirming proof-texts. Students need to be grasp how the whole Bible relates to God’s mission. They also need to see how the Bible doesn’t just describe mission, but is itself a phenomenon and tool of mission. It also also shapes us as God’s missional people.

The Old Testament features significantly in the course. I see this as an outworking of the fact that mission is a whole-Bible phenomenon. I would love to spend more time on the Gospels especially, but this module functions as a short introduction (students have plenty of other opportunities during the year to go into more depth with both Old and New Testament material). I have followed the Hebrew division of the Old Testament – Torah, Prophets (most of the historical books plus Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) and Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) – out of convenience rather than theological conviction, though this would be an interesting discussion!

The Inter-Testamental Period provides important background to the Gospels. It would be nice to treat Luke-Acts together, so I may still tinker with the final couple of weeks.

If anyone knows of any good video resources, drop me a line…

timjdavy Bible and Mission

Tyndale Bulletin archive

The wonderful people at Tyndale House have put online over 50 years worth of articles from the Tyndale Bulletin archive. This has been a key scholarly resource since its beginnings in 1956 so it is fantastic to have it all (apart from the latest three years) up there for all the world to access. There is no search function as such but you can always look for stuff using Ctrl-f.

Here’s what I found searching for ‘nations’:

Israel and the Nations: An Essay in Biblical Theology
Charles H.H. Scobie

God and His People in the Nation’s History: A Contextualised Reading of Amos 1 & 2
M. Daniel Carroll R.

Eschatology and Ethics: The Future of Israel and the Nations in Romans 15:1-13     
Scott Hafemann

The Destiny of the Nations in Revelation 21:1–22:5: A Reconsideration
Dave Mathewson

‘I Am Against You’: Yahweh’s Judgement on the Nations and its Ancient Near Eastern Context
Simon Sherwin

Malachi 1:11 and the Worship of the Nations in the Old Testament
Miss J. G. Baldwin

Happy hunting!

timjdavy Bible and Mission

The Missionary Genius of the Bible

This is the title of V.F. Storr’s 1924 book on the Bible and mission (London: Hodder & Stoughton). I blogged the other day on R.F. Horton’s The Bible a Missionary Book. Storr saw his volume as following in Horton’s footsteps. Horton had lamented the lack of scholarly interest in the relationship between the Bible and mission before his book. Likewise, Storr felt the need to write his own book because nothing had been done (in English at least) since Horton’s work, which by the then had gone out of print.

Storr begins his book by depicting the changing ways people at that time were understanding the world: increasingly interconnected and dynamic. Those engaged in mission, he says, are not just saving souls, but affecting the development of nations. This changing dynamic asks a crucial question:

“How has it affected our view of the missionary message of the Bible? Missionary work has, of course, always found its main support in the Bible, in the belief, that is, that the Bible contains the record of a divine revelation given to the world, a revelation universal in scope, intended for all men, and therefore to be made available for all men… A great cause needs a great backing; and to match the growing sense of the largeness of missionary enterprise must be an enlargement of the appeal which we make to the Bible. It is, for instance, not enough to quote from Scripture a series of proof-texts in support of missions. The proof-text suspended in mid-air is useless. It must be related to context. It must be shown to stand out from a background which is essentially missionary in colour. We must, in a word, see the revelation in the Bible in its large, bold outlines, in the big sweep of its movement, in its progressive character and unfolding purpose.” (pp.11-12)

I like Storr’s use of langauge; the depiction of a proof-text suspended in mid-air is nicely evocative. But I was particularly struck by his claim that

“A great cause needs a great backing; and to match the growing sense of the largeness of missionary enterprise must be an enlargement of the appeal which we make to the Bible.”

Storr felt his world was becoming increasingly interconnected, which was changing the nature of the church’s mission. In a climate of complexity, his answer was to reflect on what the Bible says and how it says it. This task is ever urgent. I wonder what he would have made of the global village we live in today? I am sure his answer would still be the same.

timjdavy Bible and Mission

Missional hermeneutics 100 years ago

I spent a good chunk of time today reading R.F. Horton’s The Bible A Missionary Book (Second Edition, Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier).

Horton’s take on the mission theme in the Bible is a little different to many of the biblical theologies of mission I’ve been reading of late. Rather than diving into selected texts that provide a ‘biblical basis of mission’ he starts with the premise that the Bible as a whole is a missionary book. The interesting thing is that Horton was writing a century ago, his book being published in 1908.

In some senses, of course, it is a product of its time. There is (to my mind) an overconfidence in the ‘objectivity’ of certain critical methodologies. This relates to his overal methodology but also to details such as the dating of certain texts and how this shapes his view of certain developments in the OT.

He is also rather dismissive of the OT, to the extent that he treats the NT first, with the chapters on the OT as, primarily (but not exclusively), functioning as the precurser to NT mission.

Nevertheless, there is much to chew on. Here are some quotes:

“As the friends of missions have been suspicious of critical scholarship, so scholarship has been too absorbed in its own pursuits to pay express attention to missions. But the two must learn to understand one another, if the missionary cause is to make rapid and solid progress” (p.9)

“of what use is the Bible, if it is not God’s book for man, and of what meaning is the Gospel if it is not God’s message to the world?” (p.10)

“To support the missionary enterprise by the quotation of certain proof-texts is quite inadequate. When we are fumbling among these texts we are in the position of one who cannot see the wood for the trees. The texts appear to be unrelated axioms, and if suspicion is cast upon the correctness or the genuineness of a text, the authority for missions seems to melt away… The first thought, then, is not to enter into a minute examination of certain texts or passages, which may easily be collected from all parts of Scripture, but rather to stand off a little and endeavour to gain a conception of Scripture as a whole, to ask ourselves the question, What is the bearing and the trend of this book?” (pp.23-24, 28)

“There are two ways by which missionary zeal is created and maintained: one, the study of the missionary facts, and the other the study of the Bible as the missionary book. Each method is indispensable. To know the Bible without knowing the efforts which are being made to spread the truth is to miss the most valuable of all commentaries on Scripture; and commentators who ignore the work of missions, as unfortunately many of them do, make of the Bible a hortus siccus, because they lose the sense that it is an organism still living and at work…” (p.187)

“It is in the hope that Bible students may be enabled to intelligently discern the missionary purpose ingrained in the Scriptures, and to feel the enthusiasm which comes from seeing the great purpose of God developed through long ages of history and of religious life, that the foregoing pages have been written.” (p.189)

Having felt very pleased with myself – and not to say proud of Redcliffe’s library 🙂 – that I had stumbled upon what must by now be a very rare book, I Googled it tonight and discovered the whole thing online! According to the website www.archive.org it is out of copyright. It can be read online or downloaded: Read it here

I shall have a closer look at this website in due course and let you know what other Bible and Mission goodies are available.

timjdavy Bible and Mission

International Journal of Frontier Missions archive

International Journal of Frontier MissionsWhile roaming the web this week I came across the online archive for the International Journal of Frontier Missions . This is the journal of the International Society for Frontier Missiology (ISFM) and is published by William Carey International University.

The whole lot is readily available of the web, which is fantastic. The issue I was particularly looking for was volume 13:1 from 1996 on the theme, which featured the following articles:

  • The Great Commission in the Old Testament – Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
  • All the Clans, All the Peoples – Richard Showalter
  • The Supremacy of God Among all the Nations – John Piper
  • Challenging the Church to World Missions – David Hesselgrave
  • Biblical Foundations for Missions: Seven Basic Lessons – Thomas Schirrmacher
  • Seeing the Big Picture – Ralph D. Winter
  • Melchizedek and Abraham Walk Together in World Missions – W. Douglas Smith, Jr.
  • The Biblical Basis and Priority for Frontier Missions – William O’Brien

As well as this specific issue there are loads of other interesting sounding Bible and Mission articles throughout the archive:

  • Relational Bible Storying and Scripture Use in Oral Muslim Contexts – Jack Colgate
  • Re-Contextualization: Restoring the Biblical Message to a Jewish-Israeli Context – Gavriel Gefen
  • Allah in Translations of the Bible – Kenneth J. Thomas
  • Selecting and Using Scripture Portions Effectively in Frontier Missions – Rick Brown
  • Snowflakes: the Common Ground of God’s Wisdom – Rick Leatherwood
  • Comparing Modern-day Alternatives to Biblical Conversion – David F. Wells
  • The Biblical Narrative as Agent for Worldview Change – Don Pederson
  • Chronological Bible Storying to Tribal and Nomadic Peoples – J. O. Terry
  • Genesis Teaches Mayan Believers the Character of God – Cynthia Klatt
  • The Role of the O.T. In Evangelism – Don Pederson
  • A Missionary Hermeneutic – David J. Hesselgrave
  • Biblical Studies and Frontier Missions – Larry Caldwell
  • Reaching Buddhists through Old Testament Wisdom Literature – Keith Carey
  • The Theme of Judgment in Isaiah and the Quran – Carol Wright
  • Old Testament Principles on Reaching the Refugee – Brenda Thompson
  • Paul’s Boast and God’s Glory: Frontier Missions in Romans 15:17-21 – Michael McClymond

Enjoy!

timjdavy Bible and Mission

A missional reading of the book of Ruth

freshexpressionsJohn Scheepers’s fresh expressions blog features a nice reflection on a missional reading of Ruth, building on the work of Darrell Guder.

His starting point is a quote from Guder’s The Continuing Conversion of the Church:

 “Scripture is appropriately read and interpreted as the Spirit-empowered testimony that equips God’s people for their mission…”

What, he wonders, would it look like if we read the book of Ruth this way? He highlights his reading under four headings:

1. God’s mission is universal in scope.

2. God’s mission is particular in execution.

3. God’s mission is integrally linked to covenant faithfulness.

4. God’s mission has an integral call for the care of widows and the vulnerable.

Read the post in full

timjdavy Bible and Mission

Michael Gorman on missional hermeneutics

Gorman-blogMichael J. Gorman is a Professor of Sacred Scripture at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, and is known for books like Elements of Biblical Exegesis, Apostle of the Crucified Lord, and Inhabiting the Cruciform God.

Over the last few weeks he has been blogging on missional hermeneutics, which make interesting reading. Here are some of the questions he suggests a missional reading will ask of a text:

• What does this text say, implicitly or explicitly, about the missio Dei and the missional character of God?
• What does this text reveal about humanity and the world?
• What does this text say about the nature and mission of God’s people in the world, that is, about the church understood as an agent of divine mission rather than as an institution, civic organization, or guardian of Christendom?
• How does this text relate to the larger scriptural witness, in both testaments, to the missio Dei and the mission of God’s people?
• In what concrete ways might we deliberately read this text as God’s call to us as the people of God to participate in the missio Dei to which it bears witness?
• What does this text call us to unlearn and then learn afresh?
• What powers that could deceive, seduce, and harm the world or the church does this text unveil and challenge—or call us to unveil and challenge?
• How does this text call us as God’s people to be both different from and involved in the world?

Here is a link to the ‘missional hermeneutic’ category in Michael Gorman’s blog, Cross Talk