The Mission of God

Chris Wright has written a magisterial work on biblical theology – and from a missional perspective.  His full title is:  The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Any danger that a Christ Centered Trinitarian theology might fade into a reductionistic christomonism is warded off by a faithfully Trinitarian focus, and the organic way in which God’s mission in Christ becomes the focus of YHWH’s redemptive self-revelation.  Such a balance is enriched by this thoroughly canonical and missional treatment of biblical theology. 

Christian theology is at its core both mission and ethics.  Along the way Wright wisely treats the ethical nature of God’s mission (see his earlier work on OT ethics).  Surely this book will become a mainstay in missional theology. 

Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, and the Future of Theology

The current interest in postmodernism, the emerging church, and the question of truth [as important as these issues are] should not distract the church from the larger task of actually doing and living theology.  We must be about the constructive task of reading and living the gospel for our own moment. 

A work that I have found helpful toward this end, but which seems to have been largely neglected, is Jens Zimmermann's  Recovering Theological Hermeneutics.  The subtitle is An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation.  Given my interest in a Christ centered Trinitarian theology, the title alone had my undivided attention.  The book was not disappointing. 

He concludes, "Complemented by the doctrine of the Trinity, incarnational theology offers an ontology that places being-in-community at the heart of reality and gives ethical transcendence definite contours in the divine kenotic and redemptive events of cross and resurrection" (p. 318).   Here is meat to chew on.

The community and ethical focus resonates with me:  "Selfhood is understood as person in relation, a subjectivity that neither begins with, nor is defined as, solitary, independent consciousness but is brought to life by the call of the other….I have argued that this call is possible only as the electing call of God in Christ, by which we gain an identity that is sustained not by us but by concrete hermeneutical appropriation in community through word and sacrament" (319).  This naturally needs careful unpacking and that is what the book is all about.  I trust this wets the appetite.

The Fundamental Christian Story

Richard B. Hays has written a thoughtful and insightful book entitled The Moral Vision of the New Testament.  On p. 153 he gives the following summary of the story which ostensibly provides the unity of the NT.  In my view, it is on target, and does what I have been asking my theology students to do:  express the Christian worldview in 200 words or less.  Hays does it in the following 89 (!)words:

The God of Israel, the creator of the world, has acted (astoundingly) to rescue a lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus; the full scope of that rescue is not yet apparent, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news, the church.  While awaiting the grand conclusion of the story, the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is called to reenact the loving obedience of Jesus Christ and thus to serve as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes for the world.