Through A Glass Darkly

I was introduced to missional theology and methodology a little under a year ago.  At first glance I dismissed it as a regurgitated form of church growth “homogeneous unit principle” type stuff.  I was told by new adherents that my instincts were misguided. Since that time I have been convinced that my initial instincts were in fact correct. However, I wasn’t quite aware how much of a theological overhaul the missional stuff was seeking to make.  To be sure, there are those practitioners out there who struggle with small churches, no money and little enthusiasm who hope to find their pot of gold at the end of the missional rainbow.  These guys(and gals) are not so much my concern in this post…they deserve their own.  As I began to read past the popularizers of the missional approach to ministry (Driscoll, Stetzer, Roxburgh, McLaren, etc.) to the “theoreticians” of the movement (Newbigen, Bosch, Hiebert, Van Gelder, Franke, etc.) I began to realize that the issues were much deeper than pure methodology.  These guys were calling for a reworking of the entire epistemological structure of theology.  This is no new thing. The problem I was having was that I believed Cornelius Van Til had already destroyed all such presumption in the name of revelation.  What I am saying is that, as I understand Van Til, he seems to have provided the only ground upon which meaning can be “justified.”  I could not understand why there were not any reformed voices pointing to the faulty foundations that the missional theologians were seeking to build their edifice upon.  I am quite aware that there are some scholars who approach something similar to Van Til’s methodology, guys like Bloesch, Oden and other modern day quasi-fideists and also promote some sort of missiological definition of the Church.  So I guess what I am concerned with is not so much the missional approach to ministry (although I would define that very different than the practitioners listed above in that it ought to be shaped “sacramentally” and “doxologically” which is to say that worship and ordained leadership have to be central to the outworking of any missional program…just as Jesus commanded -  Mat 28:18-20) but the epistemological shifting that is taking place.  What has been needed is a thorough presuppositional or transcendental critique of postmodernist epistemological thought.  Well, I have found such a critique.  Mark R. Kreitzer; Assistant Professor of Missions and Biblical Studies, Montreat College, NC, USA has written an article doing just that.  He deals primarily with the epistemology that has undergirded missional thinking (critical realism) and much of theology for quite some time (critical realism is also the epistemological undergirdings of the entire Christian Origins project of N.T. Wright; see The New Testament and the People of God, pp.31-46). Anyway, here is the article.