Through A Glass Darkly

Well, I have some thoughts on some of the reading I have been doing in The Shaping of Things To Come. I haven’t intended to do a review of the book, chapter by chapter, but that seems to be the way its going. I will still file these in the Missional section because I am not sure how long my interest will last with the book.

So, chapter three is entitled, The Incarnational Approach. If I had a dollar for every time someone used the word incarnational, I could probably fund my 401K for the year. Here goes.

1. Incarnation as governing “prism” for mission

“For us Incarnation is an absolutely fundamental doctrine, not just as an irreducible part of the Christian confession, but also as a theological prism through which we view our entire missional task in the world.” (p.35)

I don’t like “theological prisms” or meta-contexts or all-controlling themes (or whatever else they may be called). I don’t trust them. I have never found any that fit the data completely. There is always something that sneaks its little head out of the box. Everything doesn’t fit. Viewing the “entire missional task in the world” through the prism of incarnation is just another such failing attempt…at least in my humble opinion. Is incarnation helpful in understanding mission? Absolutely. Is it very important in understanding mission? Probably. Is it the only valid way to view mission? No. What about viewing the mission of the church as war (2Corinthians 10:1-5)? What about viewing the church’s mission as the priestly duty of sacrifice (Romans 15:15-16)? What about viewing the church’s mission as farming (1Corinthians 3:5-9)? Am I missing the point? Could incarnation be the over-arching theme through which we ought to view these pictures of mission? Is our role as priest any less “real” or “important” than our being Christ’s “body” and incarnating his gospel? John Frame has a wonderful quote in relation to this issue,

“When a theologian says that we must ’see everything in relation to x (a central doctrine)’ or that we must ‘never theologize in abstraction from x,’ he is using highly ambiguous expressions, and he is in danger of making a great many methodological errors. He is also in theological danger–the danger of adopting something less than the whole of Scripture as his final authority” (The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. 1987, p. 194).

2. Christology as governing all theology

“It has been noted that in the light of the New Testament, the remarkable truth is not so much that Jesus is Godlike, but rather that God is actually Christlike. (God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all). In the light of the New Testament revelation, all who would wish to know who God is and what he is like, need look no further than the person of Jesus (John 1:18; 14:9). From now on, all true perspectives of God must pass through the very particular lens of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. To say this more technically, all theology must now be understood through Christology. The genius of this aspect of New Testament revelation is that in Jesus God provides for us the basis of all imitation for all genuine knowing, all true loving, and all authentic following of God. This, too, will have massive implications on the church’s life and mission.” (p. 37)

Another governing “lens” for us to look through. How do you disagree with this? It’s like you are saying something bad about Jesus. But I do disagree with this and still don’t think I am saying something bad about Jesus but rather honoring the word of God in its totality. This statement really falls into the same category as the one before. However, there is something obviously correct about Jesus’ revelation of the Father…that I do not deny. He is the full and final revelation of God (Hebrews 1:11ff). However, to take that concept and say that all “theology” must now be seen through Christology can narrow things a bit too much. Let me explain. The problem is not in the way we come to know God, that is clearly done “in Christ.” The problem is rather found in the way we define Christology. As Frame has argued, scripture is “perspectivally related” which is just to say that we can look at things from many different lenses. I can view all theology through Chrstology, but I can also view all theology through Ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) or any number of ologies. Each perspective illuminates different qualities of the truth. There is no question that the main purpose of redemptive history is the reconciliation of all things in Christ (Eph 1:10), but we must remember Paul says that after Christ has destroyed all his enemies, he will hand the kingdom back to the Father that God may be all in all (1Corinthians 15:28).

The importance of these two points that Frost and Hirsch make is that they build their entire missional structure based upon a particular (and in my mind, seriously truncated) “interpretation” of incarnation as the “enfleshing” of God in a specific culture. They then draw all kinds of conclusions about how the church must “enflesh” the gospel in their culture. They then describe what that might look like in all the thousands of subcultures that exist in the west.

So to summarize, I believe that these two “master contexts” proposed by Frost and Hirsch restrict the shape of mission as it is actually revealed in the bible. I hope to show this is true by comparing specific texts in the new testament with the examples given in the book. But before I do that, I want to address their views of Jesus, the Church and cultural identification as well as their views on attractional vs. missional ministry. In addressing those two issues, I will begin to show how the use of “master contexts” or controlling lenses or prisms, actually ignores important themes captured in the biblical texts.