As before, I am looking at Stephen Spencer’s studyguide Christian Mission.
Enlightenment Modern Mission
This
approach to mission is concerned as much about the physical and mental
conditions in which people live as their spiritual lives. It is rooted in what
Küng calls the Enlightenment Modern paradigm, itself formed by key ideas of the
eighteenth century Enlightenment in European culture. It was a hugely influential approach to
mission in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to a
construction of schools, hospitals and other educational and medical work all
around the world and also propelling Christian laity and clergy into the
forefront of social reform in the West. With Christian contributions to the
founding of the welfare state in Britain, this mission type arguably reached
the height of its influence.
In some ways
the Protestant Reformation provided a seedbed of the Enlightenment Modern
paradigm. This was through its theology of the two kingdoms and the way this
brought about an increasing separation of civil and spiritual realms. The
Church was to be concerned with the latter, while the state and civil society
were concerned with the former. On political, social, economic and even moral
questions the Church was gradually sidelined: its concern was to be the things
of Heaven rather than of Earth. This resulted in the Church losing control of
scientific endeavour and the post-Reformation period in Europe saw the
blossoming of scientific exploration across the continent. In this paradigm,
the Kingdom lies in the future but is being realized through human progress.
Jesus is present among us as the pioneer of of a new humanity which is
gradually coming about.
Bosch,
writing in Transforming Mission,
provides a helpful summary of key features within this new way of thinking:
· It was pre-eminently the Age of
Reason, where reason was seen to belong not only to believers but to all
people.
· It operated within the subject-object scheme, in which nature
ceased to be “creation” and was no longer peoples’ teacher but the object of
their analysis.
· It eliminated purpose from science, introducing direct causality as the clue to
understanding reality.
· It believed in the notion of progress with exploration of the world
as well as science opening up new possibilities for human living, convincing
many that humanity had the ability and the will to remake the world in its own
image.
· Scientific knowledge was regarded as factual, value-free and neutral, and as really the only kind of
knowledge that counts.
· All problems were in principle solvable, though it would take time to solve
them.
· Human beings are now emancipated, autonomous individuals.
Taken
together, these ideas represent a revolution in European thought: the Age of
Reason saw an increasing turn away from supernatural revelation as the source
of truth and an increasing suspicion of medieval thought as stifling.
The
Enlightenment also saw the rise of historical consciousness developing out of a
critical study of history, including the Bible.
There were
political consequences too. The rise of individualism implied the rise of
democratic ideals and the overthrow of the medieval monarchies. The two most
significant examples were the American War of Independence and the French
Revolution.
Scientific
understanding led to the development of newer technologies and commercial
expansion overseas followed in the nineteenth century, which carried European
culture, philosophy and education to many points around the globe. The Age of
Reason became the Age of Empire, which harnessed technology and
industrialisation for the scramble for global domination by the European
powers.
The
Enlightenment belief in progress, and especially in European culture’s progress
within science, technology, philosophy and politics, had a major influence on a
new type of mission within churches. Progress suggested the imminent
this-worldly global triumph of Christianity. Some believed that the entire
world would soon be converted to Christianity or that Christianity was an
irresistible power in the process of reforming the world, eradicating poverty,
and restoring justice for all. The spread of Christian knowledge would suffice
in achieving these aims. The philosopher Leibnitz described the Church’s task
in the world as the propagation of Christianity through science or knowledge.
The advance of the honour of God was equated with the good of mankind.
The
increasing provision of education became one of the most significant by the churches in nineteenth century Britain
and God’s Kingdom would become increasingly aligned with the culture and civilization
of the West.
The second
half of the twentieth century has also seen this type of mission promoted in
various parts of the worldwide Church, though in different ways. For instance,
in The World Council of Churches report The
Church for Others (1967), the particular role in the mission of God was
seen as pointing to God at work in
history, to discover what he is doing, to catch up with it and to get involved
ourselves: for God’s primary relationship is to the World and it is the world
that must be allowed to provide the agenda for the churches.
The Roman
Catholic world also embraced this kind of socially and historically rooted
outlook. The initial impetus came from the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes, which, in rousing
language called on the Church to turn outwards to the world in which it lived.
This led to the Bishops of Latin America responding to that call with
solidarity and applying it to their own context. As the Bishops opened their
vision and hearts to the peoples’ struggle for justice they initiated the
Liberation Theology movement.
A different
and influential example is the 1985 C of E report Faith in the City, a
response to inner-city riots which made it clear that both church and nation
needed to take anew look at the most deprived areas in the larger cities and
the recent growth of poverty. This was fiercely attacked by the Conservative
government of Mrs. Thatcher.
Mission within Postmodernity
The roots of
this new theological paradigm partly lie in the collapse of Enlightenment
aspirations. The Age of Reason became the colonial age of empire in which
European powers harnessed technology and industrialisation for the scramble for
global domination. The next step along this road was war between the competing
European powers which many see as the outcome of the Enlightenment era. These
desperate events included the Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on
Japanese cities and for many these events undermined the belief in the existence
of human progress based on reason and technology. While the work of church
schools, hospitals and political involvement undoubtedly improved the physical wellbeing
of many people, such work had not resolved or begun to resolve the ultimate
issues and questions of the reign of God.
A second key
development during this period has been mass immigration into western societies
from the Indian sub-continent, Africa, the West Indies and central Asia which
resulted in the rise of pluralist societies in Europe with different religions,
cultures, languages and customs rubbing shoulders with each other in the larger
European cities. This has included not just the arrival of other faith groups but
also Pentecostalist forms of Christianity.
In the latter
part of the twentieth century these two developments gave rise to a new way of
relativistic thinking in Western culture - at least in the urban centres. This
is often referred to as “postmodernism” and has led some commentators to
describe the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first
century as the start of a new postmodern era, contributed to by writers such as
Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud and many others, who claimed to provide
systems of political, religious or cultural ideas.
In tandem
with these traumatic social and cultural events there has been an unfolding
theological revolution. Karl Barth led a revolt against the way of thinking
which had seen religion as concerned with the cultivation of people’s spiritual
faculties and which believed that humanity might achieve union with the divine
by gradually leading itself to God.
Christ’s
revelation is primary for Barth: everything else must be seen in the light of
that. The discipline of theology must have Christ’s life, death and
resurrection - or “The Christ Event” - as he called it as the beginning, the
middle and the end. Theology consists in tracing the significance of this event
for every aspect of life. Christ, the Word of God, reveals the truth of all
things. Barth’s theology does not begin with general and abstract philosophical
arguments about the “ground of being” or “the feeling of absolute dependence”
as nineteenth century theologians tended to do. He begins with God as revealed
by Christ in his birth, death and resurrection: he addresses the doctrine of
God and brings the doctrine of the Trinity to the centre stage because he sees
the nature of God as defined by the interrelations of the Son, the Holy Spirit
and the Father. Even when Barth explores the doctrine of Creation he relates it
to Christ. He describes God’s work in creating the world as being about setting
in place the right conditions for the revelation of his Son.
Barth was
first misunderstood and rejected, especially in Britain and North America: his
theology was labelled a “neo-orthodoxy” and dismissed as reactionary but now he
is recognised as a pioneer of an approach to theology which is no longer
dependent on philosophy or the study of history and has found its authority in
transcendent revelation: the Word of God as found in the Christ Event. The
Kingdom of God comes as His gracious gift, as a transcendent reality breaking
into the corruption and failures of human life.
Barth was
the key figure behind the coining of the phrase missio Dei as a summary of mission’s dependence on the initiative
and substance of God himself. Mission was not to be seen as one of humanities
building projects, carried forward by its own strength and reason, but as a divine
movement in which the church was privileged to participate.
One of Barth’s
students, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, who
resisted the Nazis and was put to death by them, has been described as the
architect of a new way of understanding the mission of the church. He believed
that the Christian community was the concrete presence of Christ in the world
and needed to be valued and nurtured as such. He also saw that the Christian
life, if taken seriously, is no easy matter. He opposed what he called the
offering of cheap grace by the established churches to their members. In his
book, The Cost of Discipleship, he
described the costly nature of following Christ, a way of service rather than
domination. His writings, and particularly his Letters and Papers from Prison, help to articulate a theology of
mission implicit in the witness of his life.
Man is challenged to participate in
the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world. He must therefore plunge
himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its
ungodliness with a veneer of religion and trying to transfigure it….It is not
some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the
suffering of God in the life of the world…. The church is only her true self
when she exists for humanity. (Letters and Papers from Prison)
Christian
mission, then, is about the church laying aside its own power and becoming open
and vulnerable to the world, giving itself to serving the needs of others,
locating itself where they live and, only then, finally, seeking to communicate
the meaning of the gospel: Christian mission is all about witness out of a prior
vulnerability.
This
open-ended approach to mission has been expressed in an increasing number of
places in the latter part of the twentieth century, especially as migration has
resulted in people of different faiths increasingly living side by side and
churches have had to enter into dialogue with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs,
Buddhists and others. This has taken place at every level, though not usually
under the label of “mission”. Dialogue is the norm and necessary manner of
every form of Christian mission, as well as every aspect of it, whether one
speaks of simple presence and witness or direct proclamation. Any sense of
mission not permeated by such a dialogical spirit would go against the demands
of true humanity and against the teaching of the gospel. (Bevans and
Schroeder: Constants in Context: A Theology
of Mission for Today.)
As Bosch
affirms, We do not have all the answers
and are prepared to live within the framework of penultimate knowledge, that we
regard our involvement in dialogue and mission as an adventure, are prepared to
take risks and are anticipating surprises as the Spirit guides us into fuller
understanding. (Transforming
Mission)
Gibbs and
Bolger, writing in Emerging Churches:
Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Culture, conducted extensive
research into the Emerging Churches movement in Britain and the U.S. They
identified patterns most prevalent in churches that take postmodern culture
seriously. The three core practices are;
· Identifying with the life of Jesus,
including welcoming the outcast, hosting the stranger and challenging the
political authorities by creating an alternative community.
· Transforming secular space in the
same way that postmodernity calls into question the separation of sacred and
secular.
· Living as a community within all
realms of the life of their members, not just within a Sunday morning meeting.
This strong
sense of the missio Dei has led some
leaders to renounce traditional evangelism altogether. We do not do evangelism or have mission. The Holy Spirit is the
evangelist, and the mission belongs to God. What we do is simply live our lives
publicly as a community in the way of Jesus Christ, and when people enquire as
to why we live this way, we share with them an account of the hope within us….
Taking care of the sick and needy creates all the evangelism we need. (Gibbs
and Bolger)
