We see in Scripture the reflections of our own prejudice rather than the disturbing message …
The Christian mission is inconceivable without the Christian Scriptures. It is the Bible that supplies the mandate, the inspiration, the direction, and the power for our witness and service in the world. Without the Bible we would have neither the authority nor the inclination to engage in Christian mission. With the Bible, on the other hand, we are stripped of every excuse for opting out of it.
Above all, we need the wholesome wholeness of the biblical perspective. Only the Bible can correct our skewed vision, redress our imbalance, broaden our narrow interests, and liberate us from the petty preoccupations in which we imprison ourselves. Consider the breadth of biblical mission.
First, the Bible relates to the whole world. It is true that Scripture lays much emphasis on God’s covenant of grace, and on his steadfast love for his covenant people. Yet Yahweh, the God of Israel, is no tribal deity like Chemosh, the god of the Moabites, and Milcom, the god of the Ammonites. He is the living God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the Ruler of the nations, and the Lord of history. So even in the Old Testament, in which God’s judgment on the nations is pronounced, the salvation of the nations is also promised. Johannes Blauw was doubtless correct in his book, The Missionary Nature of the Church (1962), that the Old Testament perspective was not so much one of “mission” (Israel going out to win the nations) as of “universalism” (the nations being included one day). He added that a “centripetal missionary consciousness” (the nations flowing to Jerusalem) was replaced by a “centrifugal missionary activity” (the disciples going out to the nations) only after the Resurrection when “all authority” in heaven and on earth was given to the risen Lord Jesus.
Once this biblical emphasis has gripped our minds, we shall find it impossible to stay in our cozy little ecclesiastical nests. The Bible is hostile to narrow parochialism. It flings us out into God’s world. It gives us a new global consciousness.
Secondly, the Bible presents the whole gospel. We must, therefore, allow the Bible to correct our evangelical reductionism. I have two particular tendencies in mind. The first is to keep looking for what is sometimes called “the irreducible minimum of the gospel.” Of course we have a responsibility to make the gospel as simple and straightforward as we can; the Holy Spirit is not the author of muddle and confusion. It is “when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it” that the devil comes and snatches it away (Matt. 13:19). But to simplify the gospel and to reduce it are two different processes. Who wants an “irreducibly minimum gospel” when the apostle Paul declared “the whole counsel of God” and on that account could affirm his innocence of his hearers’ blood (Acts 20:26, 27)? We need to soak our minds in the full biblical gospel from creation to consummation.
Our other tendency is to fix the gospel in terms congenial to our own culture and resist the desire of other Christians to restate the same biblical gospel, but in terms more meaningful to their culture. We have to liberate the gospel from both reductionist and cultural bondage. For it is the gospel itself, the biblical good news in its glorious fulness, which is God’s power for salvation to every believer. To tamper with the gospel either by shrinkage or by overlay is to weaken its saving power.
Thirdly, the Bible summons us to a whole mission. “Holistic” is the popular modern word for this concept, although I confess I have always found the term harsh in sound and ugly in aspect. Yet I guess it is correct in meaning. For if “atomistic” is the tendency to reduce a whole to its parts, “holistic” is the tendency to unite the parts into a whole.
Now there are many possible ways of stating and defending the wholeness of the mission to which God summons us in the Bible. One way derives from his own character (that he is the God of social justice as well as of personal salvation), another comes from the nature of the human beings he has made (that the neighbor we are to love and serve is a physical and social as well as a spiritual person), a third is from the concept of salvation or the kingdom of God (which combines total blessing with total demand, and insists that saving faith always expresses itself in serving love), a fourth arises from the model of Christ’s mission (that he combined words and works in his public ministry, his works embodying his words and his words interpreting his works), and a fifth proceeds from the responsibility of the church (that it is to be the world’s salt and light). Wherever we look, then—at God or Christ, at human beings, salvation, or the church—we see this healthy fusion of soul and body, word and deed, faith and works, witness and service, light and salt, the individual and the community, evangelism and social action. We must not separate what God has joined.
Fourthly, the Bible addresses the whole church, each local manifestation of it and each individual member of it. That the local church is to be a mission community is, according to the New Testament, plain beyond doubt. A good example is the Thessalonian church. Consider the sequence of events Paul outlines in the first chapter of his letter: “our gospel came to you” (v. 5) so that “you received the word” (v. 6), and then “the word of the Lord sounded forth from you” (v. 8). Thus, the gospel came to you, you received it, and you passed it on. In consequence, it came to others, who received it, and passed it on. This is the way God means the good news to spread: from church to church.
Moreover, the gospel “is at work in you believers” (2:13). It changed their lives. They turned from dead idols to serve the living God and to wait for his Son from heaven (1:9, 10). So complete was their transformation that it was not only “the word of the Lord” which sounded forth from them, but the news of their “faith in God” (1:8). They embodied the gospel; Paul assumed that every church member would be involved in this transformation and therefore in this mission.
The whole church taking the whole gospel on a whole mission to the whole world. Nobody can read the Bible and miss this “wholesome wholeness” of the Christian mission in its four dimensions. And yet, some of us manage to do that very thing. Such are our personal and cultural blind spots that we tend to see in Scripture the reflections of our own prejudice rather than the disturbing message of God. It has been so down the Christian centuries, and still is today. The most diligent readers of the Bible are not necessarily the most conscientious doers of its message. We need then to pray, both for ourselves and for others, that God will break through our defensive system in such an irresistible incursion that he causes us to hear, to grasp, and to obey.
John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.
