Christianity Encountering World Religions (Encountering Mission)

The Practice of Mission in the Twenty-first Century

Muck, Terry C., Adeney, Frances S., Moreau, A. Scott

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441205261
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The current religious climate poses unique challenges to those engaged in mission. Thus the authors of this book propose a new, yet very biblical, model for interacting with people of other faiths. They term this model giftive mission, as it is based on the metaphor of free gift. We bear the greatest gift possible--the gospel message. Adopting this perspective not only has the potential for greater missionary success but also enables us to more closely imitate God's gracious activity in the world. The core of the book explores eleven practices that characterize giftive mission. Each practice is illustrated through the story of a figure from mission history who embodied that practice. Further discussion shows how to incorporate these practices in specific mission settings.

PART 1

Context, Text, and Pre-texts

What resources do we have for answering the fundamental question: What is a Christian’s responsibility to people of other religious traditions? We cannot just make up answers that seem to make sense. As Christians, we need to ground our answers in something that goes beyond human opinion.

One of the “givens” of answering this question is the world context in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Like all historical contexts, our time and place is unique. There has never been—and never will be again—a time exactly like this. Context is so important because any given context determines the problems we face. It would not be hard to make a list of the problems Christians face these days: Muslim jihadists, Asian religious competition from Hindus and Buddhists, the creeping rot of materialism in Western Christianity itself; these issues have become all too familiar, and each of them raises the fundamental question of this book: what should Christians do about other religions?

Of course, our primary resource for answering the questions set by our context is the Bible, a text that Christians the world over regard as sacred and holy. The Bible is not exactly an answer book. It was written at a time when the fundamental questions were somewhat different from those we face today, and it is obvious that the answers in the Bible were aimed at slightly different targets—at Osirian mystery religions, at first-century gnosticism, at Roman warlords. That does not mean that the Bible loses its place of primacy for us, however. We must interpret to arrive at longed-for answers, but the biblical text is the final guidance, the first and last resort for the Christian in any context. We go to it first for wisdom, and we go to it last to check our theories and strategies against what the text says.

The development of those theories and strategies depends on how we shape the issues our cultures present to us. They depend on the presuppositions our theologies steer us toward. They depend on very basic things like the personalities of the decision makers and how those subjective elements work together for God’s glory. These pre-texts, the values and thought forms we bring to our reading of the biblical text, may seem like minor things when compared with the mighty acts of God in history—and in the focus of the big picture, they are. But we don’t always see the big picture very clearly, and we have even less chance of seeing it if we neglect to factor in the unique gifts and desires we bring to the table of interpretation and understanding.

So to answer our question, we must begin by understanding the context, text, and pre-texts that inform and influence us all in one way or another. Once we have accomplished that task, we can move on to the work at hand.

1

Context

The World of Religion Today

Christianity has always been in contact with the world’s other religions. The earliest Christians wanted to distinguish their faith from Judaism. Roman Christians in the first century both fought against and borrowed from the mystery religions of the day. Gnosticism of one sort or another seems to have prompted several of the apostle Paul’s letters to the young churches he planted in Asia Minor. As Christianity spread throughout the Greek and Roman world, contact with Buddhism in the East, Islam in the Middle East, and indigenous religions such as the Celtic faith and other pagan belief systems in central and western Europe always led to vigorous Christian mission efforts among adherents of these other religions (Neill 1986). In one sense, Christianity has always existed in a religiously plural context.

Yet the religiously plural context in which Christianity exists today differs markedly from that of our forebearers. Radical changes in the political, economic, and cultural configuration of the world’s nations make interreligious interchanges today different in both quality and quantity. Christianity engages the world’s religions on a playing field leveled by a global economic market, relative religious freedom, and a communications network that makes the whole world a virtual neighborhood. In most places today, Christianity not only confronts the world’s religions, but it also coexists with them. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Confucians are no longer strangers in our midst but residents in our neighborhoods—and, increasingly, we reside in their neighborhoods (Muck 1992).

SIDEBAR 1.1

HOW TO UTILIZE THE CONTEXT IN MISSION

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IDENTIFY BOTH THE GOSPEL AND CULTURE.	DETERMINE THE FORM OF MISSION.	ACT, KNOWING THAT MISSION IS ROOTED IN COMMUNITY.
Giving: Do not take the gospel “out there” but determine how the gospel and culture enter into conversation in our own lives. Receiving: Hear the gospel in a new way in each culture by asking how the culture can become a mission to us as the church. Loving: Follow Christ in radical love. Hearing: See each context as a chance to hear the gospel again for the first time.	If people are hungry, give bread. If people are sick, offer healing. If people are despairing, bring comfort. If people are confused about the meaning of life, speak words of salvation.	Needed change can be fostered by allowing a fresh relationship with Christ to show the way in new situations. Surrendering the old may be necessary to let new life be born in the church. Find new directions for mission in painful or divisive experiences. Imagine the Holy Spirit as the presence and power of God in the community.

These changes in the world’s religious configuration are the occasion for this book. Both the context and the goal of Christian missions vis-à-vis the world’s religions have either changed or been modified in important ways. Three idea clusters define this new mission context: we exist in an increasingly free marketplace of religious ideas; we do missions in a nexus of competing evangelisms resulting in what we might call reflexive evangelism; and the mode of Christian interchanges with other religions is to both compete and cooperate with them.

FREE MARKETPLACE OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS

An extraordinarily powerful and pervasive metaphor consumes our thinking and behaving these days. It is the metaphor of the marketplace. The marketplace is not just a metaphor in a literary sense, a helpful way of describing a complex idea (although it is that). The marketplace metaphor is a reality in every sense of the word and influences human interactions from the macro level of international politics to the micro level of interpersonal relationships. We literally think of the world as a huge shopping bazaar, and we act as if everything in our lives runs according to the “laws” of buying and selling.

So pervasive is the dominance of marketplace thinking that one could say the world is run by an ideology of economism, and the marketplace is the central metaphor of this ideology. Economism influences every aspect of our lives, including the way we look at the interactions among the world’s religions. Religions have become commodities like any other, and religious people behave more like consumers than congregants. We buy a religion—and continue to purchase it—if it works for us. If it doesn’t meet our expectations, we choose another religious or denominational product.

Marketplace Dynamics

This religious bazaar has been created by three influential dynamics: globalization, freedom of religion, and negative tolerance of religious ideas. Each of these dynamics has important implications for the way the world’s religions interact with one another and the way Christian missionaries do their work.

Globalization has many definitions, but it usually refers to the idea that most of the world participates in a global culture (among others) connected by better and better worldwide communications, an increasingly interdependent economic system, a common way of thinking patterned on the scientific method, and a growing championing of democratic pluralisms as the default political form, a politics that relies on some form of capitalism as the economic system.

In the face of these dynamics, religion also becomes globalized. Although the development of a common world religion is unlikely, a common religious form is emerging that makes many aspects of the various religions less distinct. Religions now look more alike. As politics and economics become homogenized, the role religion plays in those cultures also becomes homogenized. No matter what the difference in the teachings of religions, people in our globalized culture increasingly look to their religions to be the meaning makers in ever more secularized cultures. Christians in America look to their religion to make sense out of senseless school shootings and other acts of gratuitous violence. Buddhists in Sri Lanka look to their religion to provide some sense of meaning amid a civil unrest that has consumed their country’s energies for several decades. Religious people everywhere look to their religions to make sense of dilemmas in their world.

Globalization makes the generic category of “religion” a viable one for the first time in history. In the past, the abstract category of “religion” never made sense to people for whom religion could mean only one thing: Christianity if you lived in the United States or Western Europe, Islam if you lived in most countries of the Middle East, Hinduism if you lived in India, a particular tribal religion if you were a member of a particular tribe, and so forth. With globalization, however, has come a pluralism of religions within each and every culture, and the general category of religion has taken on a descriptive meaning that makes sense. One can be religious, but religious in many ways, even within a single culture.

Freedom of religion is the concept that has made this globalization of religion possible. Without freedom of religion, a free marketplace of religious ideas would not work, and a global category called “religion” would be meaningless. Historically, people have insisted that everyone around them share their religion and have fought to the death to make it so. It has only been in the past two hundred–plus years that this has changed (except in isolated instances), and it changed with a novel concept promulgated by the framers of the United States Constitution. The authors of the Constitution were fresh from the wars of religion in Europe (intra-Christian wars, actually) and were seeking a way to inoculate their new nation-state against similar interreligious battles. They rightly ascertained that the problem was not with religious belief alone but with the volatile mix of religion and political power: whenever a religion gained political power, it usually used that power to impose its beliefs on others. Separate the passion of religion from the power of politics, and peace would reign—so thought the framers of the Constitution. They acted on this belief by writing the First Amendment to the Constitution, which says, “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

SIDEBAR 1.2

FREEDOM OF RELIGION: SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, HUMAN RIGHTS

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Freedom of religion is mandated by three of the most important documents for American Christians: the Bible, the United States Constitution, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Each document gives a different rationale for freedom of religion.

Bible: Psalm 2:1–2, 4–5: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. . . . The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. Then he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, ‘I have installed my King on Zion, my holy hill.’”

The rationale here is that God is the ultimate power in the universe, not nations, not individuals. Because God is sovereign and made individuals free to choose God (Gen. 1:27), no state power can usurp that freedom by demanding religious uniformity.

United States Constitution: The First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The rationale here is realpolitik. The separation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Context, Text, and Pre-texts
• Part 2: Practices: Beyond Competition and Cooperation
• Part 3: Method: How Do We Do It?
• Part 4: Giftive Mission
• Appendix: Biblical Interreligious Encounters
• Bibliography
• Index