Tag 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!

Language Culture and the Benefits of Bible Translation

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Three years ago, I wrote a longish blog post (part of a chapter of my unfinished book) which included the following…

Just as each culture brings something new to humanity, so does every language. Each language is capable of expressing some things better than all other languages. Why else to coffee shops sell cafe latte rather than milky coffee? On a deeper note, each language has the ability to express itself in ways that other languages can’t quite manage. There are subtleties of meaning and inference that just can’t quite be transferred from one language to another without losing something. And this is really important, because that means that each language can say things about God and is capable of praising God in ways that other languages can’t quite reach. When God multiplied the languages at Babel, He also gave us the possibility of understanding Him and praising Him in new ways. Babel was a judgement, but at the same time God blessed humanity immeasurably and revealed even more of us to himself.

A recent article in Christianity Today by Jost Zetzsche covers similar ground, but takes things a step further than I did. Jost suggests that the wealth of translations available to us today gives us a breadth of insight that can’t be achieved through reading the text in the original languages.

Every new rendering of God’s Word in a linguistic set of human expression—a language—enriches the worldwide church in her understanding of God, regardless of whether we speak that particular language. Our thinking and imagination are necessarily confined and constrained by our own language and its assumptions. But when we encounter another language—and as it confronts and interacts with the biblical text—it can expand our understanding of God and our world. This is true in our dealings with the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic source texts, yes, but also the more than 2,000 target languages into which the Bible or parts of the Bible have been translated.

Take this example from a number of Chinese Bible translations. We know that God transcends gender, but most languages are limited to grammatical gender expressed in pronouns. In the case of English, this is confined to he, she, and it. Modern Chinese, however, offers another possibility. In modern Chinese, the third-person singular pronoun is always pronounced the same (tā), but it is written differently according to its gender (他 is he, 她 is she, and 它/牠 is it). In each of these characters, the first (or upper) part defines the gender (man, woman, or thing/animal), while the second element gives the clue to its pronunciation.
In 1930, after a full century with dozens of Chinese translations, Bible translator Wang Yuande coined a new “godly” pronoun: 祂. Chinese readers immediately knew how to pronounce it: tā. But they also recognized that the first part of that character, signifying something spiritual, clarified that God has no gender aside from being God. This translation discovery was an aha moment for Chinese believers. But knowing this benefits us as well—even if we don’t understand Chinese—because it expands our comprehension of God’s divine character.

There is no automation in this process. Translation is not a magical act where a unique facet of God is unearthed each time a new translation is published or a language is “conquered.” But as each faith community matures, discoveries like the Chinese divine pronoun can add to our understanding of God. In the case of the Chinese pronoun, it took a maturation process of 100 years and a member of the native church to reach this revelation.

Mission scholar Andrew Walls says similar things in parts of his work and the IVP Dictionary of Mission Theology article on language, linguistics and translation says the following (p. 201)

This means that divine revelation is much larger and richer than the capacity of any finite language to contain it. Consequently when the biblical message is translated into another language, whatever loss is incurred in subtle shades of meaning is always compensated by gains in fresh theological insights.

The implication of all of this is that translation is a part of God’s ongoing self-revelation to humanity and not simply a pragmatic add-on to solve the problem of incomprehension.

Whatever you think of these ideas, you should read the original article in Christianity Today and have your thinking challenged.

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.

Books I’ve Read: Comprehending Mission

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I’m grateful to Simon Cozens for drawing my attention to this book. Following up on Simon’s book recommendations can be an expensive business at times, but in this case, it was well worth it.

Comprehending Mission: (American Society of Missiology) is an outstanding book. If you consider yourself to be a bit of a tiger when it comes to missiology or mission studies, then you simply have to read it. No ifs, no buts.

Subtitled The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and prospects of Missiology, this book gives the best and most comprehensive introduction to the literature of mission studies that I have ever come across and is destined to become a standard text for students of the subject. If you’ve not read Transforming Mission by Bosch yet, then Comprehending Mission shouldn’t be at the top of your reading list – but it should be close.

The six main chapters could each form a basic introduction to their own field and are worth reading on their own merits:

  • Bible and Mission
  • History of Mission
  • Theology, Mission, Culture
  • Christian Mission in a World of Religions
  • The Means of Mission
  • Missionary Vocations

I’ve already quoted from this book a couple of times and I’ll probably slip in a couple of more quotes in the next week or so.

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.

Fault Lines

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I am beginning to fear that the greatest fault line in the Church today lies between those in the West who feel that their theological and exegetical heritage is the only valid one for the church and those in the developing world who are developing their own indigenous theologies as they read the Scriptures faced by very different realities.

Vinoth Ramachandra captures this in a strongly worded post:

A group of North American pastors calling themselves The Gospel Coalition of International Outreach is engaged in what they call “a mission of Theological Famine Relief for the Global Church”. They state on their website: “We are partnering with translators, publishers, and missions networks to provide new access to biblical resources, in digital and physical formats. Our goal is to strengthen thousands of congregations by helping to equip the pastors and elders who are called to shepherd them.”

Sounds loving, until one asks: who decides who is theologically famished and who is not? who selects what “resources” to send the famished? who decides what constitutes “equipping” and who should be doing it? The answer is always the same. A small group of white, well-to-do American or British males. We have experienced such paternalistic, colonial “mission” before- others deciding what is the “Good News” for us, what is “sound doctrine”, which authors to read and whom to avoid, etc. They have exported their theological blind-spots and sectarian rivalries, reproducing carbon-copies of themselves in the global South rather than nurturing real leaders. The learning and theological traffic is all one-way.

Of course, the West still has something to contribute to the growing worldwide Church, but we also have a great deal to learn. The very fact that the church is growing like wildfire in the two thirds world, but is declining in much of its historic heartland should indicate to us that not all in our theological garden is rosy.

This question is explored in more depth in the recent edition of Encounters Magazine which features a longish lecture by me on ‘Reading the Bible With the Global Church‘ along with responses from scholars from four continents. You might enjoy reading it.

Bible Translation and Hope

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Bible translation is a theological act  par exellence. As a (re)enactment of God’s self-revelation and in synergy with it, it can and should be thus ventured in faith, obedience and hope of God’s promise that He wills to continually reveal Himself to all the nations. Thus a translator acts in hope: in hope that is not seeing – there is no automatic guarantee that he or she will be successful and that God’s self-disclosure will necessarily occur through his or her text. It is an Abrahamic kind of hope – based on a faithful promise, but acted out without knowledge of how things will end up (cf. Hebrews 11:8).

From Theology of Translation by 

Women and Leadership in the Church

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The question of the role of women in Church leadership is one which gets a lot of airing both in Christian circles and in the wider press. However, it’s one that we rarely touch on here at Kouyanet. This is mainly because it isn’t an issue which impinges directly onto our areas of interest. However, when I came across this piece by Onesimus, I decided that I had to post a link to it. There are a couple of points of interest: it is written by an Orthodox scholar based in Kenya (though with an evangelical background), but most importantly it takes a slant on the question that I’ve never seen before.

A few thoughts on Church ‘leadership’ as we find it in the New Testament.  First we must understand that ‘leadership’ is not a New Testament word; it’s a modern word.  Leadership implies authority, initiative, direction, management and control.  In many ways, leadership is a power word, and assumes a perspective on the world around us and takes on a certain posture and demands a certain course of action.  Leadership is a man’s word and its context describes a man’s context.  Today churches of all kinds have seminars on ‘leadership’. We give our shepherds three easy steps on being a more effective leader.  So many of our churches are so large that we need our ‘leaders’ to become more effective managers.  All of this is intended to enable our churches to function as effective institutions.  But none of this is found in our New Testament.  In fact, the emphasis throughout, indeed the direct teaching of Jesus himself and the apostles takes us in the exact opposite direction.

Jesus’ followers were to be different.  They were not to be like certain Gentiles, who lived to lord it over people.  Nor were they to be like certain Jews who were keen to maintain the perks of position and power.  Instead, Jesus’ followers were to be different, known for putting the needs of others before their own, known for being like slaves in their readiness to do whatever for whoever was needy, known for being like Jesus himself.  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you.’ (John 13:14-15)  In this Jesus leads by example.  He takes on the posture of a slave, and for those homes too humble for a slave, the posture of a woman.
Immediately after Jesus offers the disciples the bread of his body and the cup of his blood, a quarrel breaks out as to which one of them should be the one in charge over the rest of them. ‘Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.  But you are not to be like that.  Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.  For who is greater, the one is at the table or the one who serves?  Is it not the one who is at the table?  But I am among you as one who serves.’ (Luke 22:25-27)  This is only one of several examples that I could point to where the disciples import their cultural understanding of leadership into what Jesus is calling them to do and be, only to have Jesus present them with an alternative vision of what it means to be his people that is so radical and unexpected that his disciples simply cannot fathom it.
I wish to suggest that it isn’t just the disciples who had trouble fathoming Jesus’ vision for discipleship and for the community of disciples that would be known by his name.  Every generation of Christian church has struggled with the profound temptation to import the surrounding culture’s understanding of leadership and authority into the church.  I want to suggest that when one looks at the historical record, one finds that the Church has repeatedly taken the easier road and abandoned Jesus’ blueprint in favor of the way it’s always been done.  The evidence for this can be seen everywhere throughout the history of the Church to the present day.  At almost every point, the church and her ministers look nothing like what Jesus was talking about and calling his followers to be and do.  The discrepancy is simply shocking.

If you wan’t to know how this is applied to the question of women’s ministry, read the whole article.

Books I have Read: Carnival Kingdom

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I have to declare a slight interest here. I know a number of the authors and editors of this book and they were kind enough to let me have a copy for free.

That being said, I can honestly say that Carnival Kingdom is an excellent book and one which will interest many readers of this blog. Subtitled, Biblical Justice for Global Communities, the book explores why in which the topsy-turvey, first-will-be-last Kingdom of God can and should interact with the world we are living in. This isn’t a comfortable book and calls us to reassess the way in which the Christian faith should impact all aspects of social and political life.

This isn’t a ‘page turner’, you are unlikely to stay up all night wondering what happens in the last chapter, but it does repay careful reading and reflection. The various essays which go to make up the book are through provoking and creatively presented. As with any multi-author book, different sections will appeal to different readers, but there is something here for anyone who is open to being Biblically provoked.

Carnival Kingdom is also available for The Kindle, though it isn’t so easy to make notes in the margin. The book is a product of the Justice Initiative a group that are well worth following; you can find links to their Facebook page and other things here.

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.

Theology of Mission or Missionary Theology

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At the same time, the traditional Western approach to theological education has been widely rejected elsewhere in the world. By now we are all familiar with the critiques developed in South America, but elsewhere around the globe voices are raised against an approach to theology that is perceived to be too academic, too abstract and too remote from the actual tasks of mission and witness in a religiously plural world. Thus, some years back John Mbiti observed that the curricula used in theological seminaries in Africa showed them to be ‘very much out of touch with the realities of African culture and problems’. Mbiti asked,

Have we not enough musical instruments to raise the thunderous sound of the glory of God even unto the heaven of heavens? Have we not enough mouths to sing the rhythms of the Gospel in our tunes until it settles in our bloodstream? Have we not enough hearts in this continent, to contemplate the marvels of the Christian faith? …. Have we not enough intellectuals in this continent to reflect and theologize on the meaning of the Gospel? Have we not enough feet on thjs continent, to carry the Gospel to every corner of this globe?

Mbiti’ s words clearly imply that Christian theology developed in Africa will be inextricably bound up with mission. Indeed, they reflect an awareness that a fundamental shift has occurred by means of which the real centres of spiritual vitality and missionary expansion are now located in the Southern hemisphere. Consciousness of this change is widespread in the Third World, and theologians in Africa, Latin America and Asia increasingly ask whether the churches in the West have yet awoken to the reality of this new era in Christian mission.

This quote comes from A Theology of Mission or a Missionary Theology by David Smith. From the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 13:1 (Spring 1995). The paper is very accessible and rather short (9 A5 pages). I can’t think of a reason why anyone interested in mission or the growth of the Church would not read it. Twenty years after its publication, this paper has proved to be remarkably prescient.

More excellent theological and biblical studies journals are available at BiblicalStudies.org.uk, thanks to the excellent work of Rob Bradshaw.