Revisiting Christian Mission
Today there are many in the church that still affirm and strive to live in accordance with a definition of Christian mission that inspires them to risk friendships for the sake of bringing Christ to the lost through the Church. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was once counted among their number. Such people site readily the Great Commission in which Jesus calls the church to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and [to teach] them to obey everything [that he] commanded.”[1] This totalitarian vision supposes that the world would be a better place if everyone were Christian, for to be sure all of the world’s problems have been brought on by non-Christians.
Many have rethought this and as Wilfred Cantwell Smith reports, “Much of the Church now recognizes that its former attitude to other religious communities was wrong.”[2] After all, as John Hick is want to ask, if Christianity is “God’s own religion in a sense in which no other religion can be […] Ought there be more evidence [of this] in Christian lives than in the lives of others.”[3] For those who have called this view of Christian mission into question, such evidence is sorely lacking. Are we to just drop mission all together? What of the Great Commission? One can’t ignore that Jesus calls his followers to spread the Gospel. What is more, the pre-Easter Jesus sent the disciples out on a mission to spread the Gospel as well, thus we can’t dismiss this facet of Christianity as being simply a post-Easter anomaly. If the mission of the Church isn’t to convert the world to the Christian Church, what could it be?
As I attempt to resolve this question, I believe that M. Thomas Thangaraj offers a compelling possibility for us to consider. He argues that there is a distinction between the mission of Jesus and the mission of his disciples; that “what the church is doing today is enacting the mission of the disciples of Jesus rather than the mission of Jesus himself.”[4] At some point during the post-Easter transition, the mission of Jesus, which was to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom, became subordinate to the mission of the disciples, which was to spread the Gospel of Jesus and the Church. Thangaraj rightly contends that as a result of this shift, “Jesus is no longer merely the […] initiator of mission, but he becomes the central content of the mission.”[5] Furthermore, as a result he says that, now “the announcer of the good news […] is the good news [and] thus mission becomes a matter of discipleship.”[6]
With this, we find Thangaraj offering a corrective articulation of what the mission of the Church and likewise the Gospel message of Jesus was intended to be. If he is correct, and I believe he is, the Gospel was never meant to be about Jesus as a dying and resurrecting God-man who satisfies the debt of the world’s sins owed to God.[7] Indeed, I would argue that this picture is made more compelling when we take into account the great lengths to which the Gospel narratives go to illustrate that the disciples didn’t understand the Gospel message of the pre-Easter Jesus until after his death. Furthermore, if the Gospel was really about the satisfactory nature of the post-Easter Jesus’ death on the cross, one wonders what the disciples were supposed to have been preaching when the pre-Easter Jesus sent them on mission. It is imperative that the Church reclaim its original mission—the mission of Jesus.
It is my contention that the mission of Jesus as the proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God was itself a corrective to the cultural degradation of the Values of Radical Kenotic Love, due to the universal adoption of the opposing Values of Individualism/Independence. Jesus’ ministry was a response to the egregious and systemic injustice that he was subjected to, as a first century Palestinian Jew, living in the power minority, under hostile occupational oppression. He offered a new vision that contradicted this socio-political structure.
[1] Matthew 28.19-20
[2] John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (edts.), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1987), 54.
[3] Dan Cohn-Sherbok (edt.). Interfaith Theology; A Reader, (Oxford: Oneworld Pulblishing, 2001), 108.
[4] M. Thomas Thangaraj, The Common Task; A Theology of Christian Mission, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 135.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The meaning of the cross in Christianity has been internally contested since the tradition began. The popular understanding of this event, which interprets it as satisfaction for the sins of the world, is by no means the only one. In future posts, I will present a more in-depth exploration of the meaning of the cross, complete with a historical analysis of its doctrinal development.
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