David Bosch Quotes

If the Church is ‘in Christ,’ she is involved in mission. Her whole existence then has a missionary character. Her conduct as well as her words will convince the unbelievers and put their ignorance and stupidity to silence.

Evidently, then, a not-so-subtle shift had occurred in the original love motive; compassion and solidarity had been replaced by pity and condescension.

16. Because of this, evangelism cannot be divorced from the preaching and practicing of justice. This is the flaw in the view according to which evangelism is given absolute priority over social involvement, or where evangelism is separated from justice, even if it is maintained that, together with social justice, it constitutes “mission.

The mission of the Christian community in Acts is a mission of salvation, as was the work of Jesus (cf Senior and Stuhlmueller 1983:273). Salvation involves the reversal of all the evil consequences of sin, against both God and neighbor. It does not have only a “vertical” dimension.

Scripture without experience was empty, and experience without Scripture blind

In spite of its theological importance, however, the church is always and only a preliminary community, en route to its self-surrender unto the kingdom of God. Paul never develops an ecclesiology which can be divorced from christology and eschatology (Beker 1980:303f; 1984:67). The church is a community of hope which groans and labors for the redemption of the world and for its own consummation (cf Beker 1984:69). It is only the beginning of the new age.

If rich Christians today would only practice solidarity with poor Christians—let alone the billions of poor people who are not Christians—this in itself would be a powerful missionary testimony and a modern-day fulfillment of Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth.

Strictly speaking one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.... This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church's essential nature and its empirical condition.... That there were so many centuries of crisis-free existence for the Church was therefore an abnormality... And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church. David Bosch, Transforming Mission

…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. This is not opting for agnosticism, but for humility. It is, however, a bold humility—or a humble boldness. We know only in part, but we do know. And we believe that the faith we profess is both true and just, and should be proclaimed. We do this, however, not as judges or lawyers, but as witnesses; not as soldiers, but as envoys of peace; not as high-pressure salespersons, but as ambassadors of the Servant Lord.

Fifth, then, the emphasis is on doing theology. The universal claim of the hermeneutic of language has to be challenged by a hermeneutic of the deed, since doing is more important than knowing or speaking. In the Scriptures it is the doers who are blessed (cf Míguez Bonino 1975:27–41). There is, in fact, “no knowledge except in action itself, in the process of transforming the world through participation in history” (:88). Last, these priorities are

It is, however, above everything else, idolatry that Paul deems reprehensible. Idols are fabrications of the perverted human mind (cf Rom 1:23, 25), and yet, in spite of the fact that they are human creations, they take control of people, who are “led astray to dumb idols” (1 Cor 12:2) and are “in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods,” slaves of “weak and beggarly elemental spirits” (Gal 4:9f). Their being in bondage to idols is therefore due not to ignorance (as the Stoics would argue) but to willfulness.

All along, however—and this is the fifth characteristic of the Enlightenment—it was contended that scientific knowledge was factual, value-free, and neutral. What makes a belief true, says Bertrand Russell (1970:75), “is a fact, and this fact does not…in any way involve the mind of the person who has the belief” (:75). A belief is true when there is a corresponding fact and false when there is no such corresponding fact (:78f). Facts have a life of their own, independent of the observer. They are “objectively” true.

Even so, little separation between the soteriological and the humanitarian motifs was in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missionaries persisted in the pre-Enlightenment tradition of the indissoluble unity of “evangelization” and “humanization” (cf van der Linde 1973), of “service to the soul” and “service to the body” (Nergaard 1988:34–40), of proclaiming the gospel and spreading a “beneficent civilization” (Rennstich 1982a, 1982b). For Blumhardt of the Basel Mission this clearly included “reparation for injustice committed by Europeans, so that to some extent the thousand bleeding wounds could be healed which were caused by the Europeans since centuries through their most dirty greediness and most cruel deceitfulness” (quoted by Rennstich 1982a:95; cf 1982b:546). And Henry Venn, famous General Secretary of the British CMS, urged missionaries to take their stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the tyranny of the system and the morally and physically threatened masses of the people to whom they went (cf Rennstich 1982b:545).

The death and resurrection of Christ mark the incursion of the future new age into the present old age (cf de Boer 1989:187, note 17; Duff 1989:285-289). This event signifies the inauguration and the anticipation of the coming triumph of God, the overture to it, and its guarantee. It is a decisive sign, which determines the character of all future signs and indeed of the Christian hope itself. Paul can therefore designate Christ as the “first fruits” of the final resurrection of the dead, or the “first-born among many brethren” (1 Cor 15:20, 23; Rom 8:29). The resurrection of Christ necessarily points to the future glory of God and its completion.

Under the influence of the Greek spirit ideas and principles were considered to be prior to and more important than their “application.” Such an application was both a second and a secondary step and served to confirm and legitimize the idea or principle, which was understood to be both suprahistorical and supracultural. Churches arrogated to themselves the right to determine what the “objective” truth of the Bible was and to direct the application of this timeless truth to the everyday life of believers. With the advent of the Enlightenment this approach received a new lease of life. In the Kantian paradigm, for instance, “pure” or “theoretical” reason was superior to “practical reason.

If monks had only been ascetic and eccentric in their behavior, however, they would not have won the devotion and admiration of the people in the way they did. Thus, secondly, their exemplary lifestyle made a profound impact, particularly on the peasants. Their conduct was epitomized in the words of the Celtic monk Columban (543–615), “He who says he believes in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked, poor and humble and always preaching the truth” (quoted in Baker 1970:28). The monks were poor, and they worked incredibly hard; they plowed, hedged, drained morasses, cleared away forests, did carpentry, thatched, and built roads and bridges. “They found a swamp, a moor, a thicket, a rock, and they made an Eden in the wilderness” (Newman 1970:398). Even secular historians acknowledge that the agricultural restoration of the largest part of Europe has to be attributed to them (:399). Through their disciplined and tireless labor they turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions. More important, through their sanctifying work and poverty they lifted the hearts of the poor and neglected peasants and inspired them while at the same time revolutionizing the order of social values which had dominated the empire's slave-owning society (cf Dawson 1950:56f).

In the gospel the hosting of Jesus was equivalent to the hosting of salvation (Lk 19:9) (cf LaVerdiere and Thompson 1976:592). It is not essentially different in Acts, since salvation is in his name only. Salvation is liberation from all bondage as well as new life in Christ. The missionaries witness as people who know that life and death depend on their testimony. Therefore, in spite of all appreciation they may have for the religious life of Gentiles (cf Acts 17:22f), they continue to insist on repentance and conversion. Their urgency certainly has to do with the way they view those “outside Christ”: to turn one's back on one's past is tantamount to turning from “darkness to light” (Acts 22:18; cf also the title of Gaventa 1986). Much is at stake and the witnesses cannot possibly be indifferent about the destiny of others. They therefore do not offer the invitation to join their community in a spirit of “take it or leave it” (cf Zingg 1973:209; Kremer 1982:162). Even so, personal conversion is not a goal in itself. To interpret the work of the church as the “winning of souls” is to make conversion into a final product, which flatly contradicts Luke's understanding of the purpose of mission (Gaventa 1986:150-152). Conversion does not pertain merely to an individual's act of conviction and commitment; it moves the individual believer into the community of believers and involves a real—even a radical—change in the life of the believer, which carries with it moral responsibilities that distinguish Christians from “outsiders” while at the same time stressing their obligation to those “outsiders” (cf Malherbe 1987:49).

5. With Scheffler (1988:57-108), one could say that, for Luke, salvation actually had six dimensions: economic, social, political, physical, psychological, and spiritual. Luke seemed to pay special attention to the first of these. We may thus detect a major element in Luke's missionary paradigm in what he writes about the new relationship between rich and poor. There are, at this point, parallels between Matthew and Luke; the difference is that, whereas Matthew emphasized justice in general, Luke seemed to have a peculiar interest in eco nomic justice.

He did this in the teeth of the ideological defense mechanisms of the privileged, who only too frequently convince themselves that Jesus was more interested in the “correct attitude” toward wealth than in its possession and use. These mechanisms then allow free range to the privileged's unsatiable urge to move upward, socially and economically, and to pursue a hedonistic lifestyle devoid of an ethic that exalts values like self-sacrifice, restraint, and solidarity. But where self-centered sentiments reign supreme, the rich cannot claim to be involved in mission and cannot be in continuity with the Lukan Jesus and church.

Our missionary involvement may be very successful in other respects, but if we fail here, we stand guilty before the Lord of mission. Peace-making, I therefore suggest, is a major ingredient of Luke's missionary paradigm. The message that there is no room for vengeance in the heart of the follower of Jesus permeates both the gospel and Acts. It culminates in the account of Jesus praying for his crucifiers (Lk 23:34), which is echoed in the prayer of the dying Stephen (Acts 7:60).

Luke's church may be said to have a bipolar orientation, “inward” and “outward” (cf Flender 1967:166; LaVerdiere and Thompson 1976:590). First, it is a community which devotes itself “to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Teaching refers not so much (as it does in Matthew) to the contents of Jesus’ preaching as to the resurrection event; fellowship refers to the new community in which barriers have been overcome; the breaking of bread refers to the eucharistic life of the community and is experienced as continuing the meals with Jesus reported in the gospel; and the prayer life of Jesus, a prominent feature in Luke's gospel, is extended into the church. All this is accomplished in the power of the Spirit: “The Church is the place where the exalted one manifests his presence and where the Holy Spirit creates anew” (Flender 1967:166).

Early in Acts, Luke reports the arrest of Peter and John and their questioning by the rulers. Luke characterizes their defense as “bold.” As a matter of fact, in Acts boldness (parresia) almost always manifests itself in the context of adversity (cf Gaventa 1982:417-420). When the believers gather together after Peter and John have been threatened by the Sanhedrin, they do not pray that their adversaries be struck down (as John and James did with reference to the Samaritans who had refused them hospitality—cf Lk 9:54); instead, they pray for boldness (Acts 4:27-30; cf Gaventa 1982:418).

William Frazier suggests that, on this point, Luke's writings have a significance far beyond the first-century church (1987:46). He refers, in this regard, to the Roman Catholic ritual that usually crowns the sending ceremony of missionary communities, where the new missionaries are equipped with cross or crucifix. Frazier continues: Somewhere beneath the layers of meaning that have attached themselves to this practice from the days of Francis Xavier to our own is the simple truth enunciated by Justin and Tertullian: the way faithful Christians die is the most contagious aspect of what being a Christian means. The missionary cross or crucifix is no mere ornament depicting Christianity in general. Rather, it is a vigorous commentary on what gives the gospel its universal appeal. Those who receive it possess not only a symbol of their mission but a handbook on how to carry it out (1987:46).

Samaritans were worse than Gentiles (cf Hengel 1983b:56). This attitude was due, to a large degree, to the Samaritan defilement of the Jewish temple and the killing of a company of Jewish pilgrims by Samaritans (for details, cf Ford 1984:83-86).

Luke's entire understanding of the Christian mission: it is the fulfillment of scriptural promises; it only becomes possible after the death and resurrection of the Messiah of Israel; its central thrust is the message of repentance and forgiveness; it is intended for “all nations”; it is to begin “from Jerusalem”; it is to be executed by “witnesses”; and it will be accomplished in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Luke relates three instances of Jesus having been invited to meals in the houses of Pharisees. He omits controversial passages (such as Mk 7:1-20), which might have been experienced as unpleasant by Jews. He does not apply the parable of the tenants to the chief priests and the Pharisees, as Matthew does. In his passion narrative the crowd does not cry out, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Mt 27:25); instead, Luke mentions that “a great multitude of the people” mourned and lamented over Jesus (23:27). Only Luke has the Crucified pray, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (23:34), and it is highly unlikely that he intends to suggest that Jesus is praying only for his Roman executioners. Actually, Luke frequently emphasizes that the Jewish authorities did what they did out of ignorance (cf Acts 3:17; 13:27).

He is, for instance, the only evangelist who has John the Baptist spell out in practical terms what it means to “bear fruits that befit repentance” (3:8), and he does this in terms of economic relations (3:10-14).

He is, for instance, the only evangelist who has John the Baptist spell out in practical terms what it means to “bear fruits that befit repentance” (3:8), and he does this in terms of economic relations (3:10-14). The term ptochos (“poor”) occurs ten times in Luke, compared to five times each in Mark and Matthew.4 Not only the word ptochos, but also other terms referring to want and need abound in Luke. The same is true of terms referring to wealth, such as plousios (“rich”) and hyparchonta (“possessions”) (cf Bergquist 1986:4f). “If we did not have Luke,” comments Schottroff and Stegemann (1986:67), “we would probably have lost an important, if not the most important, part of the earliest Christian tradition and its intense preoccupation with the figure and message of Jesus as the hope of the poor.” Mazamisa (1987:99) summarizes, [Luke's] concern is with the social issues he writes about: with the demons and evil forces in first century society which deprived women, men and children of dignity and selfhood, of sight and voice and bread, and sought to control their lives for private gain; with the people's own selfishness and servility; and with the promises and possibilities of the poor and the outcasts.

Plousios (“rich”) is, like ptochos, a comprehensive term. The rich are primarily those who are greedy, who exploit the poor, who are so bent on making money that they do not even allow themselves the time to accept an invitation to a banquet (Lk 14:18f), who do not notice the Lazarus at their gate (16:20), who conduct a hedonistic lifestyle but are nonetheless (or, rather, because of this) choked by cares about those very riches (8:I4). They are, at the same time, slaves and worshipers of Mammon (cf D'Sa 1988:172-175).

So Luke “wants the rich and respected to be reconciled to the message and way of life of Jesus and the disciples; he wants to motivate them to a conversion that is in keeping with the social message of Jesus” (Schottroff and Stegemann 1986:91; cf D'Sa 1988:175-177).

The problems facing the wealthy in the post-Easter community are thus obviously not different from those facing the rich who encountered Jesus. Zacchaeus and Barnabas become paradigms of what Luke expects of wealthy Christians.

The attitude the wealthy should adopt toward the destitute is explicated in more detail in other Lukan sayings. Particularly illuminating is the Lukan redaction of some material from Q, included in Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain (6:30-35a), and which differs at decisive points from the Matthean redaction: Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men should do to you, do so to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them…And if you lend to those from who you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. The whole passage is shot through with references to what the conduct of the rich ought to be toward the poor (cf Albertz 1983:202f; Schottroff and Stegemann 1986:112-116). What is particularly remarkable is that the Matthean love of enemies is now interpreted as love toward those who do not repay their debts!

From the parable of the good Samaritan we know that the neighbor is the one in need who makes a demand on me and whom I dare not leave by the roadside. In economic terms, it means that the rich members of Luke's community are challenged to give up a significant portion of their wealth, and also to perform specific unpleasant actions, such as the issuing of risky loans and the cancelling of debts. All this is, of course, also Jubilee language—the idea of the Jubilee indeed permeates Luke's gospel.

Luke's “ethic of economics” also finds expression in the idea of almsgiving. Apart from Matthew 6:1-4 the term eleemosyne (almsgiving) occurs in the New Testament only in the Lukan writings (Lk 11:41; 12:33; Acts 3:2, 3, 10; 9:36; 10:2, 4, 31; 24:17). In addition, whereas almsgiving was, at the time, usually understood as charity directed to fellow-believers, whether Jews or Christians, Luke understands it as also directed to outsiders (cf Schottroff and Stegemann 1986:109).

Today, of course, charity is a bad word in many circles and often seen as the very antithesis of justice. In the Old Testament and Judaism it was different (:116), as it still is in Islam. Almsgiving is not something that subverts justice and structural change; rather, it is an expression of justice and stands in its service. In the Old Testament the two concepts are often synonyms. Almsgiving (eleemosyne) is, furthermore, an expression of having mercy (eleos).

Both the poor and the rich need salvation. At the same time, each person has his or her specific sinfulness and enslavement. The patterns of enslavement differ, which means that the specific sinfulness of the rich is different from that of the poor. Therefore, in Luke's gospel, the rich are tested on the ground of their wealth, whereas others are tested on loyalty toward their family, their people, their culture, and their work (Lk 9:59-61) (Nissen 1984:175). This means that the poor are sinners like everyone else, because ultimately sinfulness is rooted in the human heart.

In their being converted to God, rich and poor are converted toward each other.

Seen from this perspective, Luke-Acts becomes a paean of praise to the incomparable grace of God, lavished upon sinners. The thrust of this can only be grasped, and then only partially, if we see it against the background of the understanding of God at the time: omnipotent, terrifying, and inscrutable. He is not to be understood as a pleasant and innocuous God, who is always prepared to forgive even more than people are prone to sin (in the sense of Voltaire's contemptuous remark, “Pardonner, c'est son métier,” “to forgive is, after all, his profession”; cf Schweizer 1971;146). It is precisely as the omnipotent and inscrutable that he forgives—for the sake of Jesus. The initiative, throughout, remains God's (cf Wilckens 1963:183). And it manifests itself in ways that make no sense to the human mind. The prodigal son becomes the recipient of unfathomable and undeserved kindness; sinners are not only sought and accepted but receive honor, responsibility, and authority (Ford 1484:77). God answers the prayer of the tax-collector, not—as Jesus’ listeners have anticipated—that of the Pharisee. Salvation comes to a chief tax-collector, of all people, but only after Jesus has taken the initiative and invited himself to the house of Zacchaeus. A Samaritan—the most unlikely candidate imaginable-—performs an extraordinary deed of compassion. A contemptible criminal receives pardon and the promise of paradise in the hour of death, without any possibility of making restitution for his wicked deeds. The crucifiers of the innocent man from Nazareth hear him pray for forgiveness for what they are doing to him. And in Acts despised Samaritans and idol-worshiping Gentiles receive pardon and are incorporated into Israel, with whom they form the one people of God. What Jeremias said with reference to Jesus’ word that the tax-collector, rather than the Pharisee, went home “justified” (Lk 18:14), can be said about all the examples referred to above: “Such a conclusion must have utterly overwhelmed (Jesus’) hearers. It was beyond the capacity of any of them to imagine. What fault had the Pharisee committed, and what had the publican done by way of reparation?” (quoted in Ford 1984:75). The Jesus Luke introduces to his readers is somebody who brings the outsider, the stranger, and the enemy home and gives him and her, to the chagrin of the “righteous,” a place of honor at the banquet in the reign of God.

These circumstances have prompted B. Violet and particularly Joachim Jeremias to suggest that the key to the entire enigma of interpreting the Nazareth episode should be looked for in the dramatic way in which the reading from Isaiah 61 is terminated just before the reference to the day of vengeance and the portrayal of the hoped-for reversal—for which the entire congregation must have been waiting. Jesus does the unimaginable by omitting this (cf Jeremias 1958:4146).

The same happens in Luke 7:22f (par Mt 11:5f). In his reply to John the Baptist Jesus again, as he did in 4:18f, “splices” different passages from Isaiah (in this case Is 35:5f, 29:18f, and 61:1). All three of these passages contain, in one form or another, references to divine vengeance (35:4; 29:20; 61:2), but again Jesus omits any references to it. This can hardly be unintentional, moreso because of the added remark, “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Lk 7:23). In other words: Blessed is everyone who does not take offense at the fact that the era of salvation differs from what he or she has expected, that God's compassion on the poor, the outcast and the stranger—even on Israel's enemies—has superseded divine vengeance!

Luke writes his two-volume work in the wake of the devastation of the Jewish War, in which the political hopes of the Zealots were crushed; many of his readers lived in a war-torn country, occupied by foreign troops who often took advantage of the population; violence and banditry have been their meat and drink for many a year (cf Ford 1984:1-12). They have, in a real sense, reaped the whirlwind. And now Luke presents them with a challenge: Jesus and his powerful message of nonviolent resistance and, above all; of loving one's enemy in word and deed. The peace that comes with Jesus is not won through weapons, but through love, forgiveness, and acceptance of one's enemies into the covenant community (:136). “Everyone who believes in him” is welcome—this is the astonishing discovery that Peter makes in his encounter with Cornelius (Acts 10:43). The Lukan Jesus turns his back on the in-group exegesis of his contemporaries by challenging their “ethic of election” (cf Nissen 1984:75f). From the Nazareth episode onward, Luke has his eye on the Christian church, where there is room for rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, even oppressor and oppressed (cf Schottroff and Stegemann 1986:37; Sundermeier 1986:72)—which does not, of course, suggest that conditions should remain what they are. This may also help to explain the fact

During the entire preceding period mission was the responsibility of bishops or, more generally, a task taken upon themselves by monastic communities (to which I shall return)—one did not become a missionary on the basis of ecclesiastical authorization but “under the urge of the Holy Spirit,” or (as Francis of Assisi formulated it in chapter 12 of his Rule) “on the basis of divine inspiration.” All this had now changed, first by granting Spain and Portugal the right of patronage, secondly by the creation of Propaganda Fide. “The privilege of evangelizing the newly-discovered lands (became) the exclusive monopoly of the Roman See” (Geffré 1982:479). The

Pelagius, who was active in Rome at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, took a decidedly optimistic view of human nature and of the human capacity to attain perfection. While God gets the ultimate credit for having made us so that we are capable of doing what we should, “we have the power of accomplishing every good thing by action, speech and thought.” Humanity did not need redemption, only inspiration. This meant that Pelagius did not regard Christ as Savior who died for the sins of humankind, but as master and model whom we are called to emulate.

To this Augustine responded with the doctrines of original sin and of predestination. The image of God, impaired by human sin and weakness, could not—as Clement, Origen, and other Greek theologians had taught—be restored by means of a drawn-out, upward pedagogical process culminating in theosis; rather, the terrible reality of total human depravity demanded a radical conversion experience and an encounter with the irresistible grace of God in Christ.

There is, however, also a more negative side to his stance: authority and holiness were regarded as adhering in the institutional church whether or not these moral and theological qualities were in evidence.

monasticism possessed extraordinary resilience and recuperative power. Ninety-nine out of a hundred monasteries could be burnt down and the monks killed or driven out, writes Dawson, and yet the whole tradition could be reconstituted from the one survivor, and the desolate sites could be repeopled by fresh supplies of monks who would take up again the broken tradition, following the same rule, singing the same liturgy, reading the same books and thinking the same thoughts as their predecessors (1950:72; cf Newman 1970:410f).

The monks knew that things took time, that instant gratification and a quick-fix mentality were an illusion, and that an effort begun in one generation had to be carried on by generations yet to come, for theirs was a “spirituality of the long haul” and not of instant success (Henry 1987:279f). Coupled with this was their refusal to write off the world as a lost cause or to propose neat, no-loose-ends answers to the problems of life, but rather to rebuild promptly, patiently, and cheerfully, “as if it were by some law of nature that the restoration came” (Newman 1970:411).6

Benedict (480–547) also put a greater emphasis on the Christian life as being in the service of magnifying God's name. Manual labor was as much religious ministry as prayer, and everything came under the heading U.I.O.G.D.: Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus (“That in all things God may be glorified”).

To please God alone” (soli Deo placere) was the ardent desire of this remarkable man, who lived in God velut naturaliter, “as it were naturally” (:214, 215). The “ascent to God” evolved in twelve successive “degrees of humility” (on these, cf Heufelder 1983:51–150), and the purpose of his Rule (as formulated by Benedict himself in chapter 7) was to help the monk arrive at that love of God which, being perfect, casts out fear; whereby he shall begin to keep, without labor, and as it were naturally and by custom, all those precepts which he had hitherto observed through fear: no longer through dread of hell, but for the love of Christ, and of a good habit and a delight in virtue.

Augustine had rediscovered Paul for the fifth century; Luther rediscovered him for the sixteenth.

We may not reduce Luther's entire theology to this one “discovery.” In the years 1513 to 1519 he made a whole series of theological breakthroughs. Still, his reinterpretation of Romans 1:16f remained foundational and the cornerstone or focus of his entire life and theology (:175). He could never again stop marvelling at the fact that God had accepted him, poor and wretched human being that he was, mercifully and gratuitously. The last words he scribbled on his deathbed were, “We are only beggars; that is true.

It would be erroneous to argue that the Reformation broke with the medieval Catholic paradigm in every respect. Some elements of Protestantism were in fact a continuation, even if in a new form, of what typified the Catholic model also.

Our views are always only interpretations of what we consider to be divine revelation, not divine revelation itself (and these interpretations are profoundly shaped by our self-understandings).

Zinzendorf's motto was “Wherever at the moment there is most to do for the Saviour, that is our home” (quoted in Warneck 1906:59).

Surveying the great variety of ways in which Western cultural norms were, implicitly or explicitly, imposed upon converts in other parts of the world, it is of some significance to note that both liberals and conservatives shared the assumption that Christianity was the only basis for a healthy civilization; this was a form of consensus so fundamental that it operated mainly on an unconscious, presup-positional level (Hutchison 1982:174).

For the Puritans, culture was subsumed under religion; now, under the sway of the Enlightenment, culture really had become the dominant entity and religion one of its expressions (cf van den Berg 1956:61). The question now asked by liberal and conservative alike, and one that was really unthinkable before the Enlightenment, was this: Must one educate and civilize before evangelism can be effective, or should one concentrate on evangelism, confident that civilization will follow (cf Hutchison 1987:12)?

The first theologian of the era of Lutheran orthodoxy who grappled with the issue of mission was Philip Nicolai (1556-1608) (cf Hess 1962:passim). He is indeed exceptionally important for our theme, not least since, as a transitional figure, his theology reveals the differences between earlier and later orthodoxy. His views on mission—which, in a more extreme form, were to become typical of orthodoxy—were developed especially in his Commentarius de regno Christi, published in 1597.

It was Nicolai's positive and optimistic disposition which enabled him to judge the Roman Catholic overseas missionary enterprise as benevolently as he did. Any traces of optimism were, however, soon expunged from orthodoxy. It was almost as if pastors and theologians feared that the world might improve.

It was this dynamic and comprehensive understanding of the reign of God in which salvation and well-being, soul and body, conversion and development were not to be divorced one from the other—which Ziegenbalg and Plütschau took with them to India. To give one example, before their arrival schools were the prerogative only of Brahmins, and even then only for boys; the missionaries founded schools for members of the other castes and for girls as well. Equally important: in these schools no pressure to become a Christian was brought to bear on anybody and in some instances even non-Christian teachers were appointed (Gensichen 1975a:164-170).

In the seventeenth century, however, “religion” came to mean “a system of beliefs and practices.” The word could now also be used in the plural, and the Christian faith became just one among several “religions.” In essence, it was considered to be the same as any other. Its superiority over other religions was, at best, relative. This fundamental levelling of all religions also meant that the church's traditional vocabulary lost its theological content. To give one example, in its secularized form sin was perceived exclusively in moralistic terms; it referred to transgressing or failing to obey instructions. The inherent sinfulness of human nature was denied, and a remarkably optimistic view of humanity as essentially good was propagated; since evil had no inherent power over them, people would “naturally” do the right thing if left to themselves (cf Braaten 1977:18; Gründel 1983:105).

Perhaps the optimism of the Enlightenment's philosophy of progress is the element more clearly recognizable in modern theology and the contemporary church than any of the elements listed so far. The idea of the imminent this-worldly global triumph of Christianity is a recent phenomenon and intimately related to the modern spirit. Sometimes it manifested itself as the belief that the entire world would soon be converted to the Christian faith; at other times Christianity was regarded as an irresistible power in the process of reforming the world, eradicating poverty, and restoring justice for all.

The God of the Old Testament and primitive Christianity came to be identified with the general idea of God of Greek metaphysics; God is referred to as Supreme Being, substance, principle, unmoved mover. Ontology (God's being) became more important than history (God's deeds) (cf van der Aalst 1974:110f). It became more important to reflect on what God is in himself than to consider the relationship in which people stand to God. Behind all of this lies the notion that the abstract idea is more real than the historical.

Stackhouse has argued that we are distorting the entire contextualization debate if we interpret it only as a problem of the relationship between praxis and theory. We also need the dimension of poiesis, which he defines as the “imaginative creation or representation of evocative images” (1988:85; cf 104). People do not only need truth (theory) and justice (praxis); they also need beauty, the rich resources of symbol, piety, worship, love, awe, and mystery. Only too often, in the tug-of-war between the priority of truth and the priority of justice, this dimension gets lost.

Our theologies are partial, and they are culturally and socially biased. They may never claim to be absolutes. Yet this does not make them relativistic, as though one suggests that in theology—since we really cannot ever know “absolutely”—anything goes. It is true that we see only in part, but we do see (Hiebert 1985a:9).

It was only to be expected that the nationalistic spirit would, in due time, be absorbed into missionary ideology, and Christians of a specific nation would develop the conviction that they had an exceptional role to play in the advancement of the kingdom of God through the missionary enterprise.

For Thomas Aquinas theology was still scientia argumentativa (“reasoned science”); for Luther this was an impossible approach. God was no longer to be regarded as God in himself (Gott an sich); he was God for me, for us, the God who, for the sake of Christ, had justified us by grace (cf Beinert 1983:207f; Pfürtner 1984:174f).

Premillennialist churches and agencies were run in the same businesslike manner as those of their arch-rivals, the proponents of the social gospel; nobody saw any incongruence in preaching withdrawal from the world while at the same time managing the church as if it were a secular corporation. Everybody worshiped at the shrine of the cult of efficiency (cf Moorhead 1984:75; see also the penetrating study of Knapp 1977 on the relationship between mission [whether ecumenical or evangelical] and modernization).

opposition to Rome the Reformers emphasized that all initiative unto salvation lay with God alone. This conviction lies at the root of Luther's teaching on justification through faith, by grace, and of Calvin's doctrine of predestination. Luther and Calvin did not, however, interpret the emphasis on God's initiative in any rigid way; God's action did not militate against human responsibility, which was upheld very forcefully. Orthodoxy tended to give up the creative tension between the two and to put all the emphasis on God's sovereignty and initiative.

The situation in the church became so lamentable, particularly in the eyes of Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), that the focus was no longer on the conviction that Christ and his reign would be triumphant, but on the fearful question whether Christ, when he returned, would find any faith on earth. This question destroyed all possibility of joyfully witnessing to Christ (cf Beyreuther 1961:38).

In Pietism the formally correct, cold, and cerebral faith of orthodoxy gave way to a warm and devout union with Christ. Concepts such as repentance, conversion, the new birth, and sanctification received new meaning. A disciplined life rather than sound doctrine, subjective experience of the individual rather than ecclesiastical authority, practice rather than theory—these were the hallmarks of the new movement.

In the coming of Jesus and in raising him from the dead, God's eschatological act has already been inaugurated. It is, however, as yet incomplete. Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation signify just the beginning of the universal fulfillment still to come, of which the Spirit is a pledge. Only another future intervention by God will wipe out the contradictions of the present.

The Law has provided the Jews with a “charter of national privilege” (N. T. Wright, quoted by Moo 1987:294; cf also Beker 1980:335f, 344; Zeller 1982:177f). It is this inherently divisive quality of the Law that Paul rejects.

even if we may argue that the Hellenization of the faith went too far, we should be reminded of the fact that the church resisted not only the extreme Semiticization of Christianity by the Ebionites, Montanists, and others, but also extreme Hellenization. The “heretics” were often repudiated precisely because they were more hellenistic than the “orthodox” (:188).

A basic argument of this book has been that, from the very beginning, the missionary message of the Christian church incarnated itself in the life and world of those who had embraced it. It is, however, only fairly recently that this essentially contextual nature of the faith has been recognized. For many centuries every deviation from what any group declared to be the orthodox faith was viewed in terms of heterodoxy, even heresy. This was the case particularly after the Christian church became established in the Roman Empire. Arianism, Donatism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and numerous similar movements were all regarded as doctrinally heterodox and their adherents excommunicated, persecuted, or banned. The role of cultural, political, and social factors in the genesis of such movements was not recognized.

Last, these priorities are worked out in contextual theology by means of a hermeneutical circle (or, better, circulation) (cf Segundo l976:7–38). The circulation begins with experience, with praxis, which, in the case of most people in the Third World or those on the periphery of power in the First World and the Second World, is an experience of marginalization.

Gort (1980b:52, 58) affirms that, in the Reformed position, theology and ethics belong together. Ethics is the hands and feet and face of theology, and theology the vital organs, the soul of ethics. Such a position, of course, has tremendous consequences for our understanding of mission. In this model, liberation and black theologies become “a challenge to mission” (cf the title of Kritzinger 1988).

This does not preclude God's love for the non-poor. In their case, however, a different kind of conversion is called for, which would include admitting complicity in the oppression of the poor and a turning from the idols of money, race, and self-interest (cf Kritzinger 1988:274–297). This is needed, not only because they have been acting unethically, but because they have, through their “pseudoinnocence” (Boesak) actually denied themselves access to knowledge.

The point is that medieval Christians responded to the challenges they faced in the only way that made sense to them. The interiorization and the ecclesiasticization of salvation, as we identified these processes in Augustine, became vehicles of authentic evangelization and avenues along which the gospel entered Europe and made sense to the European mind. In similar manner the missionary wars, direct or indirect, and the entire project of Western colonization of the rest of the world were—in spite of all the horrors that went with them and even if we, today, find them totally incomprehensible and indefensible—expressions of a genuine concern for others, as Christians understood their responsibility in those years.

Theocratic ideals and the notion of the glory of God can only operate within the context of a theology deeply conscious of the unity of life and the royal dominion of Christ over every sphere of life (van den Berg 1956:185). The Enlightenment put humans rather than God in the center; all of reality had to be reshaped according to human dreams and schemes. Even in Christian circles human needs and aspirations, although originally couched in purely religious terms, began to take precedence over God's glory.

Though the missionaries viewed both themselves and those they considered pagans as “children of wrath,” this was not where they put the emphasis; the primary accent, rather, was on the fact that all people were, first of all, objects of God's love and therefore worthy of being saved. John Wesley, in particular, was very conscious of the fact that God was above all a God of mercy.

The problem was that the advocates of mission were blind to their own ethnocentrism. They confused their middle-class ideals and values with the tenets of Christianity. Their views about morality, respectability, order, efficiency, individualism, professionalism, work, and technological progress, having been baptized long before, were without compunction exported to the ends of the earth. They were, therefore, predisposed not to appreciate the cultures of the people to whom they went—the unity of living and learning; the interdependence between individual, community, culture, and industry; the profundity of folk wisdom; the proprieties of traditional societies—all these were swept aside by a mentality shaped by the Enlightenment which tended to turn people into objects, reshaping the entire world into the image of the West, separating humans from nature and from one another, and “developing” them according to Western standards and suppositions (cf Sundermeier 1986:72–82).

Premillennialists tended to have an even more melancholy view of nonChristians than had prevailed among their predecessors; sometimes this view was applied even to those who professed to be Christians but clearly had a different understanding of the gospel. All reality was, in essentially Manichean categories, divided into neat antitheses: good and evil, the saved and the lost, the true and the false (cf Marsden 1980:211). “In this dichotomized worldview, ambiguity was rare” (:225). Conversion was a crisis experience, a transfer from absolute darkness to absolute light. The millions on their way to perdition should therefore be snatched from the jaws of hell as soon as possible. Missionary motivation shifted gradually from emphasizing the depth of God's love to concentrating on the imminence and horror of divine judgment.

The emphasis on the subjective dimension of salvation could promote the idea of the worth of the individual—a most important gain over against the Middle Ages in which the individual was often sacrificed for the sake of the whole. At the same time an overemphasis on the individual could estrange him or her from the group and destroy awareness of the fact that a human being is by definition a being-in-community.

was, in part, his dislike of controversy that made Moody concentrate on personal rather than structural sins in his evangelistic sermons. He stressed sins involving only the victims themselves and members of their families: the theater and other “worldly amusements” such as dancing, disregard of the Sabbath, Sunday newspapers, Free Masonry, drunkenness, the use of “narcotic poisons” (mainly tobacco), divorce, the “lusts of the body,” and the like. All these together made up a rather stereotyped set of notorious vices, thoroughly familiar to revivalist audiences (cf Marsden 1980:31–37, 66).

The assumption here is that the “great missionary century” (the nineteenth) had a correct understanding of mission; this definition is imposed on the Reformers, who then have to be judged guilty for not having subscribed to it (Holl 1928; Holsten 1953; cf also Gensichen 1960 and 1961, and Scherer 1987). Would it not be more appropriate, asks Holsten (1953:1f), to summons the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise—victim of Humanism, Pietism, and Enlightenment, and child of the modern mind—before the tribunal of the Reformation and then declare it guilty of perverting the missionary idea?

Curiously, however, the separation from the world propagated by Moody and other premillennialists was not a radically outward separation (as it was, for instance, in the Anabaptist tradition) but rather (only) inward. There was no appeal to people to “abandon most of the standards of respectable American middle-class way of life. It was to these standards, in fact, that people were to be converted” (Marsden 1980:38). The values the revivalists espoused, albeit unintentionally, were those of middle-class American culture: materialism, capitalism, patriotism, respectability (:32, 49, 207).

Prior to the Wittenberg “Opinion,” and following Nicolai, the great Jena theologian Johann Gerhard (1582-1637) also supplied proof of the fact that all nations had long before been reached with the gospel: the ancient Mexicans received Christianity from the Ethiopians, an unknown missionary had gone to Brazil, the Peruvians, Brahmins, and others must also have been evangelized centuries ago, since their religions reveal Christian elements, etc (cf Warneck 1906:28-31). If these nations were still pagan, in spite of having been evangelized at one time or another, there could be one explanation only—their heedlessness and ingratitude. Those who were still not Christians thus had no excuse and should not be given a second chance.

The emphasis on predestination leads to active involvement in mission; the elect of God cannot remain inactive.

What distinguishes our culture from all cultures that have preceded it, then, is that it is in its public philosophy, atheist (cf Newbigin 1986:54, 65).

The proclamation of the reign of God does not introduce a new creed or cult but is the announcement of an event in history, an event to which people are challenged to respond by repenting and believing.

The Apologists, in particular, had to combat a rabid fatalism and they did this by insisting very strongly on free will, repentance, reward, and punishment (cf Lampe 1957: 32).

Looking back, from our vantage-point today, on this entire development, we may wish to condemn it unconditionally. How could the Christian church have allowed itself to become so compromised over against the state? We might, however, do well to take note of Lesslie Newbigin's thoughts on the subject: Much has been written about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme. But could any other choice have been made? When the ancient classical world…ran out of spiritual fuel and turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together, should the church have refused the appeal and washed its hands of responsibility for the political order?…It is easy to see with hindsight how quickly the church fell into the temptation of worldly power. It is easy to point…to the glaring contradiction between the Jesus of the Gospels and his followers occupying the seats of power and wealth. And yet we have to ask, would God's purpose…have been better served if the church had refused all political responsibility? (1986:100f).

In light of this, it is really impossible to regard the crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries as “missionary wars,” even if many ordinary Christians saw them in this light.

It is therefore simply not true, as Ernst Langhans claimed in 1864, that “Protestant missions have launched no protest against the rapaciousness of the colonial powers and have remained silent in the face of the malevolence perpetrated by the conquerors” (quoted in Blanke 1966:136—my translation).

The Protestant preoccupation with right doctrine soon meant that every group which seceded from the main body had to validate its action by maintaining that it alone, and none of the others, adhered strictly to the “right preaching of the gospel.” The Reformational descriptions of the church thus ended up accentuating differences rather than similarities. Christians were taught to look divisively at other Christians.

There was undoubtedly a certain narrowness about Pietism, particularly insofar as it tended to be very prescriptive about the way individuals should become true believers. I am referring in particular to Pietism's insistence on the need for a so-called Busskampf, a fierce, inward, penitential struggle. The movement has to be praised, however, for having broken with the practice of merely formal church membership and with the superficiality of conversion that characterized much of contemporary Roman Catholic mission work (cf Warneck 1906:53, 57).

By the third decade of the eighteenth century, however, the theological climate of Pietism slowly began to change. Subtle distinctions were now being made between the “civic” and the “religious” sphere and, according to the directives from Copenhagen and Halle, the missionaries were to concern themselves only with the latter (Gensichen 1975a:170-176). The importance of this change could hardly be overestimated. It marked the beginning of the shift from early to later Pietism, with its proclivity toward escapism and its construction of an absolute dualism between the sacred and the profane.

From the seventeenth century on, however, science has been avowedly non-teleological. It cannot answer the question by whom and for what purpose the universe came into being (cf Newbigin 1986:14); it is not even interested in the question. Instead, it operates on the assumption of a simple, mechanistic, billiard-ball-type causality. The cause determines the effect. The effect thus becomes explicable, if not predictable. Modern science tends to be completely deterministic, since unchanging and mathematically stable laws guarantee the desired outcome. All that is needed, is complete knowledge of these laws of cause and effect.

Of course, injustice had been perpetrated in the pre-En-lightenment period also, and yet, as Guardini (1950:39) argues, people then had a bad conscience about it. Now, in true Machiavellian style, expediency became more important than morality, and people could exploit others with impunity. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) propounded a theory of the state which declared it to be the absolute lord and judge of human life, a theory which would, in the end, lead to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag Archipelago.

The new word, “mission,” is historically linked indissolubly with the colonial era and with the idea of a magisterial commissioning. The term presupposes an established church in Europe which dispatched delegates to convert overseas peoples and was as such an attendant phenomenon of European expansion. The church was understood as a legal institution which had the right to entrust its “mission” to secular powers and to a corps of “specialists”—priests or religious. “Mission” meant the activities by which the Western ecclesiastical system was extended into the rest of the world. The “missionary” was irrevocably tied to an institution in Europe, from which he or she derived the mandate and power to confer salvation on those who accept certain tenets of the faith.