Category Archives: Theology

Genesis and the Human Condition

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Genesis tells the story of the creation from two angles, each one emphasising different aspects of the relationship between God, mankind and creation.

The first story (Genesis 1:26) highlights something about the nature and purpose of human beings. This story says that human beings, all of them, are made in the image of God. On one level, this means that we have the same capacity for freedom of thought, creativity and morals as God himself. Like God we can think for ourselves, we can imagine things that don’t exist and then bring them into existence, and we can make moral and intellectual choices. Being made in God’s image is a real privilege, but that isn’t all there is to it.

Why do people put photographs on Facebook? For most of us the idea isn’t to show off the photograph itself; the point of the photograph is to show off a place or an event. This is what our family reunion looked like; this is me on the beach in Spain and so on. Photographs are images and they exist to demonstrate the reality that lies behind them. God made us in his image, for just that purpose. Our role is to bear God’s image in the world and to demonstrate to the whole of creation how good, wonderful and caring God is. God doesn’t need a Facebook page – his image is all over the earth, every human being shows something about God.

The second creation story, in Genesis chapter 2 adds to our understanding of human beings. In this account, God first creates the man, Adam. He then looks at the man and says ‘it is not good for man to be alone’ before going on to create Eve. In this little story, we see how, at the most basic level, human beings reflect the nature of God. Like God, we are relational beings; we weren’t created to be on our own and God creates a partner for Adam. Like Adam, Eve is human and shares much of his character and form, but there are subtle differences too.

By the way, in writing about Genesis this way, I’m not staking out a position in the endless creation v evolution debate. If that’s something you want to argue about or comment about, there are plenty of blogs to keep you happy!

Credo on the Trinity

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Thanks to Antony Billington for pointing me to the latest edition of Credo Magazine, which is devoted to articles about the Trinity.

‘One of the dangers every church faces is slipping, slowly and quietly and perhaps unknowingly, into a routine where sermons are preached, songs are sung, and the Lord’s Supper is consumed, but all is done without a deep sense and awareness of the Trinity. In other words, if we are not careful our churches, in practice, can look remarkably Unitarian. And such a danger is not limited to the pews of the church. As we leave on Sunday morning and go back into the world, does the gospel we share with our coworker look decisively and explicitly trinitarian in nature? Or when we pray in the privacy of our own home, do the three persons of the Trinity make any difference in how we petition God?’

You can find the magazine here (where you can also download it is a pdf). There is some excellent material here, including articles by the authors of the two best books I read on the Trinity last year: Mike Reeves (The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit) and Stephen Holmes (The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life).

However, while I don’t want to complain about an excellent magazine, there is a glaring lack of any serious discussion of the issue of mission. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, but it’s a shame.

I suspect that this is partly due to the general apathy to the area of mission which typifies much of the Western Church at the moment. In all probability it didn’t even cross the mind of the editorial team to include anything about the issue. I also believe that it reflects something of the confusion about the interaction between our understanding of the Trinity and mission practice. This was discussed in post on Kouyanet last week.

If the editors of Credo want to return to the subject of the Trinity, I’d gladly offer to write something on mission for them!

Meanwhile, don’t let my gripe stop you from reading an excellent magazine.

What do We Mean by The Mission of God?

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A while ago, I wrote a post entitled Missiology is Meaningless which suggested that missiology was too broad a term to be used without qualification. Terms like missiological reflection and missiologically informed are tossed around, but they can mean very different things to different people, depending on their starting point. Lately, I’ve noticed the same thing with the term mission of God and its Latin version missio Dei. People talk about doing things in the light of the mission of God without ever really defining what they mean by the term, despite the fact that mission of God or missio Dei is open to a wide range of interpretations and definitions.

A nearly ubiquitous concept in mission theology today is the phrase missio Dei. The idea of a single mission rooted in God’s nature at the very least stands in heuristic tension with the manifold and often competing ventures launched by churches and other organizations dedicated to missionary outreach. It is customary now to talk about the wide variety of ends to which the term missio Die has been ut since it came into general circulation shortly after the 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council. As we will see, these different applications of the term draw on more than one set of scripture passages, as successive attempts have been made using this or related terms to establish a biblical foundation for the theology of Christian mission. John Flett has closely examined the origins of the term missio Dei. He concludes that the undoubted attractiveness of this formulation in the postcolonial era has obscured its basic incoherence, due to the illusory or nonsubstantial way mission theologians have related this concept to the doctrine of the Trinity.

From Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and prospects of Missiology (American Society of Missiology) by S. H. Skreslet pp. 31,32. Emphasis mine.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with this statement, but I have to admit that the more I see the phrase missio Dei being used without being unpacked, the more I feel that the phrase is losing any useful meaning.

Trinity and Mission: A Reading List

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I’ve just come across an excellent paper via Academia.edu written by my friend Mark Oxbrow of Faith To Share. It is a short review of the literature on the subject of Trinity and Mission and   it looks as though my Amazon wishlist is about to get an awful lot longer. Here is the first paragraph:

By far the most significant advance in missiological discussion during the second half of  the twentieth century was the acceptance within a wide range of theological traditions of  the Missio Dei theology first advanced by Karl Barth and Karl Hartenstein in the 1930s. Reviewing that development at the end of the century Andrew Kirk writes, in his What is Mission? Theological Explorations (1999) “To speak about the Missio Dei is to indicate, without any qualifications, the Missio Trinitatis”. Missio Dei theology, which has its origins in Barth’s essay Die theologie und die Mission in der Gegenwart (1932), (although the terminology was only introduced by Hartenstein two years later) gained wide acceptance after the 1952 International Missionary Council, meeting at Willingen, Germany. That gathering saw the Missio Dei as expressing its desire for a new, postWorld War II and post-colonial, understanding of mission. They saw that that mission is not a programme of the church, but rather an attribute and activity of God, bringing God’s redemption to all creation. From Willingen onwards the study of Trinity and the study of Mission have been almost welded together.

The Trinity and…

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This  excellent series of short videos from Mike Reeves introduces the way in which the concept of God as Trinity needs to effect the whole of our lives. None of the videos are longer than two minutes, so there is no real excuse not to watch them.

If you enjoy these videos, you should probably read Mike’s introductory book on the Trinity: The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit.

Thanks to Dave Bish for posting these videos.

Mission: The Trinity 2

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In my last post in this series, I suggested (not for the first time) that the mission of the Church has its roots in the character of the Triune God. In this post I’d just like to take that concept a little bit further.

One God in Three Persons. God is one and yet he exists in three distinct persons. In other words, God is a God of unity and diversity. The diversity bit is more or less straightforward. The Father is not the Son or the Spirit, and the Son is not the Spirit; the Godhead demonstrates diversity. The unity that we see in the Godhead is not the simple uniformity which comes when there is no variation, but a true unity in which Father, Son and Spirit, three persons are united as one God. This is difficult to get your head round – but it is important. We’ll come back to it in the next post.

Some Thoughts on the Old Testament

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This is a longer post than usual, it is material that I am working up into a paper and I’d value your thoughts on it.

Sometimes, people seem to imply that the only purpose of the Old Testament is to provide the background needed to understand what happens in the New Testament. I think there is a lot more to the story than that…

There are ways in which the Old Testament communicates some issues more clearly than does the New Testament and it is also true that there are certain audiences for whom the Old Testament is far more accessible than the New.

The length of the Old Testament, which renders it such a challenge for translators, in itself communicates something. Through the Old Testament God spends such a long time teaching the nation of Israel that he is a Holy God, concerned for justice and truth in all aspects of life. The New Testament picks up on these themes, but to a much lesser extent and it always assumes background knowledge of the Old Testament.

Much of the teaching of the Old Testament comes through extended narrative which is capable of expressing a great depth of meaning. The story of Hosea, a man married to a serial adulterer is a very powerful explanation of the love of God for his unfaithful people, expressed in the most human of terms. It is hard to read Hosea and not to be moved deeply, it speaks in a way that even John’s great phrase “God is love” does not.

Many of the communities who currently do not have access to a complete Bible relate more closely to the Old Testament than they do to the New.

“Cultural affinities with the biblical world lead African and Asian Christians to a deep affection for the Old Testament as their story, their book. In Africa particularly, Christians have long been excited by the obvious cultural parallels that exist between their own societies and those of the Hebrew Bible.”

Examples of this affection and affinity with the Old Testament could easily be multiplied from the literature, but I will give an example from our own experience. When translating the book of Ruth, we were concerned about the Hebrew term goel rendered “kinsman redeemer” I the NIV. English translations struggle with expressing terms related to levirate marriage because the concept does not exist in our context. We assumed, wrongly, that it would be equally difficult to express the concept in Kouya. However, when we came to explain the issue to our Kouya colleagues, we discover that they use more or less the same system, and the story of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz made perfect sense to them.

Western Christians, conditioned by their cultural milieu, tend to disregard some parts of Scripture. One example would be the genealogies of the Old Testament, the “begats” which are generally regarded as of little interest and only important to specialists in the field. However, in much of Africa and Asia, where special reverence is given to the ancestors and family history, the genealogies are seen to have great importance and relevance. It is absolutely essential that the Bible should provide genealogies of the key figures, especially Jesus.

There is one group in particular for whom the Old Testament often has a special resonance; oral learners. For many Christians around the world, the way they engage with the Bible is not by reading it, but by listening to it as someone else reads out the text. It is well worth remembering that Scripture is addressed to those who have ears to hear!

The choice between reading and listening to a text is not simply a case of preference for one medium over another. Oral learners comprise an estimated two thirds of the world’s population and they process information in a different way to literate learners. Oral learners tend to prefer engaging with information through stories and struggle to follow written modes of communication – even when the written communication is delivered orally (like this lecture)while written learners tend to prefer material which is presented in an argued, propositional format. So, Christians in the West tend to prefer the tightly argued material in Paul’s Epistles, whereas oral learners tend to prefer the Old Testament and Gospel narratives.

Mission and Anthropology

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There are a number of deeply held views and assumptions about cross-cultural mission which don’t always stack up. This post reflects on some of these (again).

Over at Mission Misunderstood, Ernest Goodman has written a superb article entitled the anthropological approach to missions. Now would be a good time to read it, partly because it is an important piece of work, but also because this post won’t make much sense if you don’t.

There are three things that I’d like to highlight from this post; the need for a biblically informed missiology, the issue of people groups and the problem of eschatology. These are all issues that have been raised more than once here at Kouya Chronicle, though, perhaps not as ably as at Missions Misunderstood.

Biblical Missiology

In a sense this is the background to Goodman’s whole article. As Goodman hints good deal of missiological thinking and practice is rooted in the social sciences, rather than in Scripture. Very often the key question asked in mission circles is whether something works or is effective, rather than whether or not it is biblical.

There is, of course, a place for scientific thinking in mission work, but it must be subordinated to biblical thinking and reflection. In one of his books, David Smith points out the interesting paradox that it is those Christian churches and organisations that make the most of their reliance on the Bible who are the most likely to turn to social sciences to inform their mission work.

It is striking that in the comments on Goodman’s article, the only person who disagrees cites no serious Scriptural grounds for his disagreement. One of the underlying problems is that mission leaders tend to be practical souls and often do not have a thorough grounding in theology or biblical studies. Equally, theologians are often isolated from the burly-burly of cross-cultural mission. There is a desperate need for a new generation of missionary-theologians.

People Groups

In a sense, the next two points are illustrations of the first one. Goodman demonstrates that the concept of people groups, as used in much mission literature, doesn’t quite fit with the observed situation around the world and, more importantly, does not fit the biblical record;

While ethnography is helpful to us in missions, it is not strictly biblical. Jesus never mentions the idea of unreached people groups; His emphasis was on those who believed and those who did not. In Acts 1:8, without any mention of ethnolinguistic groups, Jesus further commissions His disciples to be His “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Paul seems to have only two missiological categories for people groups: Jews and Gentiles. This was the radical shift in the New Testament concerning the recipients of the gospel: Christ is the only salvation for people of any ethnicity. Otherwise, there is no evidence that any of the New Testament authors displayed any anthropological savvy in their missiology.

So what about all the mentions of “nations” (ethnos) in the scriptures? You only get “ethnolinguistic people groups” if you’re very selective. It’s true that the Great Commission sends us to make disciples of “all nations,” but that same term is used elsewhere to mean something other than ethnolinguistic people groups. In the Pentecost account in Acts 2, Luke writes that “Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation (ethne) under heaven.” If he actually meant that there were Jews and devout people from every people group, well then the “task” of “reaching” them was accomplished in the first century. If instead he means only that Jerusalem was quite diverse at the time, it presents a problem for this particular understanding of the word.

Of course, there is a value in noting where the Gospel has not been preached, and Bible translators have a special need to be aware of groups who have no Scriptures available to them. However, we have to avoid a simplistic approach which treats people groups a binary items on a checklist. The biblical (and anthropological) picture is not quite so simple.

Eschatology

There’s even a dangerous heresy that springs out of the people group thinking interpretation of Matthew 24:14. Some have come to assert that Christ will not return, indeed cannot come back until this task of reaching every unreached people group is completed. Some have even taken to using this as a motivation for missions- that Jesus is just waiting in the wings, unable to return until we finish the job. This, of course, contradicts verse 36 of that same passage, where Jesus says that no one- not even the Son of Man, knows when He will return.

There are a number of reasons which lie behind this particular misreading of Matthew and, certainly, The issue of anthropology is one of them. The notion that Jesus, a first century Galilean, talking to other first century Galileans, was using terms in the same way as twentieth century anthropologists is stretching credulity a little too far. But once again this highlights the need for good biblical understanding to undergird our missionary strategy.

This particular issue can engender a short term approach to mission thinking that concentrates on listing which people groups are reached (or have some translated Scripture) rather than thinking about our long term call to make disciples (or translate the whole Bible.

However, the greatest danger of an anthropological approach to mission (as it is with other managerial approaches is that it places humanity, and not God at the centre of things.

The greatest danger in the anthropological approach is that it has made missions a problem to be solved rather than our very identity in Christ. Francis Dubose, who coined the word missional, wrote that God is a sending God. We are a sent people. As Christopher Wright reminds us in his book, The Mission of God, the Father was sending long before He sent the Son. It’s His nature. And ours, as His people, is to be sent. There’s no other way to be a follower of Jesus.

So mission will not end when the last of the people groups is reached. We are not sent because of the temporary need in the world (which is indeed great!) because God is a sending God and He is glorified in our obedience. We must recognize that mission is the very nature of God and the basis of our relationship to Him. Mission isn’t a task to be finished, it’s our identity in Christ.

This is the first long blog post that I have written on my iPad. The process has beebread much les smooth than it would have been on my laptop and I apologise if this is reflected in the way tis has turned out.

A Question About Numbers

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Cross-cultural missionaries, such as myself, place a great deal of emphasis on Revelation 7:9.

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

The statement that people from every tribe, people and language (or tribe, tongue and nation in other translations) is a very precious one to people who are involved in bringing God’s Word to the minority groups of the world. It is a huge assurance to know that there will be representatives from every people group in eternity. Or will there?

Lately, I’ve started to have a few doubts about the way in which this verse has been read. I’m not sure of my ground here, so I’ll tread lightly, but let’s ask the question: does this verse really say that there will be people from every ethnolinguistic group in heaven?

The first thing to note is that this passage occurs in the Book of Revelation and belongs to a literary genre called apocalyptic. Apocalyptic literature uses an awful lot of colourful, descriptive language which was never meant to be taken literally. You can get into all sorts of doctrinal and practical confusion if you forget that Revelation is apocalyptic and start taking it literally.

Secondly, John’s description of the crowd is clearly not meant to be taken literally. He says that the crowd could not be counted. Of course it could, if everyone stood still for long enough and someone had the patience, the could have counted the crowd. This is clearly a figurative statement indicating that there were an awful lot of people there! If John starts off by using a deliberate hyperbole, it doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine that the rest of the phrase is not to be taken too literally either.

My third point is a pragmatic one. Nations have been coming and going all through history and many ethnolinguistic groups simply vanished from the map long before the Christian Gospel made it to their part of the world. I’m not sure what would need to happen or how a special case could be made for these groups to get a special dispensation for representation in eternity.

Does it matter if this passage was not intended to be taken literally? Well it would probably mean that a lot of mission publicity material would need to be rewritten! Seriously, I don’t think it should make a great deal of difference because our responsibility to make disciples at home and around the world would not change in the slightest. The Church would still have a call to witness to Christ at home and around the world.

So why ask the question? Because the Bible is important and we have to take reading the Bible seriously, we shouldn’t accept a possibly dodgy reading just because it fits our missionary strategy or we have never thought to question it before.

I’d value your thoughts on the interpretation of this verse in the comments.

The Last Words on the Last Days

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The Internet has become predictably excited about the claim made by Harold Camping that the world will end today (a story we first mentioned two months ago). There are a couple of blog posts that I think are worth highlighting because of the way in which they analyse the whole issue of  ‘the last days’ which so fascinates so many evangelical Christians.

Firstly, Onesimus has some very good things to say about the place of the End Times in the Bible and the life of the Church:

Neither Jesus nor any of the apostles made the sort of deal about the second coming and the end of things as they are the way the Dispensationalists and others like them have.  Jesus and the apostles said it would happen and then spent most of their time discussing it by explaining what would not happen leading up to it.  Since then, Christians have believed it, have looked forward to it, yearned for it. But for Christians, the end times are not the most important thing.  Eschatology wasn’t the most important thing in the New Testament, and it isn’t the most important thing now.  Even if Jesus were expected to arrive in five minutes, eschatology still wouldn’t be the most important thing.

Instead, Christians were given a charge by the Lord Jesus himself that involved loving each other and loving neighbor and loving even enemies, a charge to tell people around the world the good news about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead and about the forgiveness of sins that comes through faith in the crucified and risen Lord, a charge to become the new humanity, the new people of God that becomes the very presence of Jesus in this neighborhood so that when the people around us who do not know God see us, they see Jesus.  From the Lord’s perspective and the perspective of the apostles, we’ve got work to do.  Mr. Camping and his ilk are a sad and devious deception, however sincere they feel themselves to be.  Blessed is the one the Lord finds about his work in his vineyard when he does, like a thief in the night, come again.  Maranatha.

On a different note, Archdruid Eileen make some excellent points about what our attitude should be as we read Revelation:

The Revelation isn’t to give comfort to the people on top. It’s to frighten them.

When you live in the richest country in the world, and your existence is predicated on borrowing such eye-watering amounts of money that you could never pay it all back, and therefore your way of life is dependent upon a legal fiction that your money is somehow worth something – even though it clearly isn’t – the Revelation isn’t to give you comfort and hope for the future. It’s to scare you…

… When you’re clinging on to faith against a repressive ruling order that hates your faith and diminishes your status and silences you with hate and violence and unjust laws – the Revelation was written so you can hope.

Please read both posts in full – they are both absolutely brilliant in their own way.

As for me, I look forward to seeing what God will be doing tomorrow and in the following days as his Gospel goes out into the world and his Kingdom approaches on earth as it is in heaven

Good Stuff Other People Have Said

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I could quite get into this “round-up of the week’s best posts” thing. It is certainly easier than coming up with something creative myself. Here are a few more blog posts that say things that I wish I had said, but which say them better than I would have done.

To me, Three Cups of Tea is a normal breakfast, but in the US it is a humanitarian movement/charity inspired by a book. However, a number of recent exposes seem to indicate that the whole edifice has been built on a rather dodgy foundation. Mark draws some good lessons about the nature of foreign aid and development work from the situation:

Unfortunately Western culture likes things to be simple and straightforward. When people give to charity they like to feel that they have done something significant, so when an organisation promises that your small donation can help to build a school, or give a mosquito net and save a life, this is very attractive. But this simplistic approach to fundraising, awareness raising and volunteer recruitment causes multiple problems:

  • It is demeaning to the people who are being “helped”. If we really think that things are so bad and the solutions are so simple, then people and their governments must be pretty helpless, or ignorant, or bad, not to do anything. Are we really so superior to these ignorant people that a well-intentioned unskilled worker from the West can go and help these governments to solve their problems?
  • It perpetuates bad practice in aid and development. It is easy to build schools, but who will teach in them? Who will train the teachers? What language will the children be taught in? If it is in a minority language, who will develop the curriculum? It is easy to send mosquito nets or t-shirts to Africa, but what about the local traders who will be put out of business when the market is swamped? Where will people buy mosquito nets from in 5 years when you have lost interest and there are no local suppliers any more?

Onesimus obviously finds it as difficult as I do to come up with good ideas for blog posts because he has posted an essay on salvation by one of his students, a Kenyan woman. It really is very, very good.

The most important reminder from my reflection on salvation has been that I am saved for relationship. Every relationship comes with responsibility and this relationship with God is no different. More than anything, it is this understanding that affects what I do and how I choose to live. While it is true that I cannot earn the gift of salvation, it is also true that God cannot work in my life unless I allow him to do so. And understanding that salvation is a relationship means a constant awareness that what I do either draws me closer or farther away from God, and hence calls for vigilance in my walk lest I fall by the wayside. Above all else, it spurs within me the desire to give my very best, my all, to this most important relationship in my life.

I will be teaching some sessions at Redcliffe College soon. I wonder if some of the students there would like to write a blog post for me?

Unsurprisingly, the prolific Beaker Folk have come up with some good stuff this week. (Where do they find the time?) I very much enjoyed Eileen’s debunking of Easter. However, what the Beaker Folk do best are bitter sweet musings with a sting in the tail. Today’s Maundy Musings was asimply beautiful reflection on Judas.

I wouldn’t say he did it for the money.  Annas and Caiaphas may have thought that was all that mattered to him – but when the deed was done the money didn’t matter. Maybe, in the end, Judas didn’t matter much either. Just a cog. Without the betrayal the authorities would still have got Jesus another way. The Cross would still have loomed, the nails would still have bitten, the Devil would still have had what he thought was his day – and he would still have woken up a loser on Sunday morning.

Back to my day job: barely a week goes by without Google telling me that someone somewhere has written an authoritative guide to English Bible translations. These guides always say that there are two types of translation; literal (or word for word) and dynamic (thought for thought). Joel Hofman elegantly points out why this is simply not true and in the process comes out with one of the best pithy blog comments I have ever seen:

Bible translation largely exists in its own insular world, cut off from the realm of translation.

Another commentator adds:

The terminology of Bible translation annoys me somewhat, because in the real world of professional translation, these terms don’t exist. There’s mainly just good translation and bad, with some genres requiring more lexical rigidity than others. Preserving the word order and other idiosyncrasies of the source language is always inadvisable. Language is a vehicle for conveying thought. When your focus becomes preserving syntax instead of thought, you’ve missed the point.

Good challenging stuff for we Bible translator types.

The last thing to mention today is a good overview of the current situation in Ivory Coast from the UN.

The political crisis which paralyzed Côte d’Ivoire came to an end last week, when incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was captured by Alassane Ouattara’s forces. While Gbagbo’s removal was key to ensuring that Côte d’Ivoire didn’t descend into full-scale war and effectively ended the crisis of leadership, it does not signify the end of the humanitarian and economic crisis for the country.

No – the picture at the top does not signify anything (it’s one I took in Prague last year and it fills the space nicely).