Theology of Mission

A Believers Church Perspective

John Howard Yoder, Gayle Gerber Koontz, Andy Alexis-Baker

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830871933
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

- 2014 Best Texts of Missiology, from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds BookstoreJohn Howard Yoder, author of The Politics of Jesus (1972), was best known for his writing and teaching on Christian pacifism. The material in Theology of Mission shows he was a profound missiologist as well. Working from a believers or free church perspective, Yoder effortlessly weaves together biblical, theological, practical and interreligious reflections to think about mission beyond Christendom.Along the way he traces the developments in the theology of mission and argues for an understanding of the church that is not merely a corrective but a genuine alternative. The church is missionary by nature, called to bear witness to the coming kingdom, because it serves the missionary God of the Bible "who comes, who takes the initiative, who reaches across whatever it is that separates us."Decades later, these lectures read just as fresh and relevant as if they were written today. As the editors state in their preface, "those who have followed Yoder?s work over the years will find this book to be some of his most striking unpublished material since The Politics of Jesus." Not just a volume for Yoder enthusiasts, Theology of Mission is for anyone who cares about the mission of the church today. It only reinforces Yoder's status as one of the most important and prophetic theologians of the last century.

1

The Prophets

Israel and the Nations

Generally, when interpreters of the Bible look for its “missionary message,” especially in the Old Testament, they identify such a message wherever there is reference to “the nations.” There is implicit reference to the nations whenever Yahweh’s sovereignty is affirmed as reaching beyond God’s care for the Israelites. Genesis 1–11 places all of world history in a context of creation/fall/providence under a sovereign who at the same time is specifically the caring and covenantal Lord who calls Israel.

More directly, the call of Abraham is related to God’s saving purposes for all the nations. Some interpreters have taken this to mean that Abraham was a missionary because he leaves and goes out to receive some promise that is not defined but which has to do with being a blessing to the world. Max Warren, for example, maintains that, “The Apostolic church came into being when God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and bade him go out into a land he did not know and Abraham obeyed. When the grace of God in choosing Abraham was met by the faith of Abraham in accepting the choice, the Church was born.”1 Thus, the meaning of election—being selected out—does not mean a selfish privilege but an assignment to be a mediator or a representative between the electing God and the nations.

A third implicitly missionary dimension of Old Testament faith is the nonexistence or the impotence of the other gods or of idols. Whenever this polemic against idols is proclaimed, there is intrinsically a message to the people serving those gods, even though the context in which we find anti-idolatry literature is the internal discipline of the Israelites.

On quite another level, the prophetic vision of the nations coming to Jerusalem to learn the law has a missionary impact. The most familiar passage is Micah 4:1-4, parallel to Isaiah 2:1-4; but it is found as well in Psalm 46, Ezekiel 28:25-26 and Zechariah 8:20-23. In this vision, Jerusalem is the center of the world, which represents a statement about the world as well as about Jerusalem (Jer 3:17, 16:19). The nations will come to Jerusalem, bringing tribute (Is 18:7). They will recognize Yahweh. They will recognize Israel’s election. They will learn the law (Ps 67), and civilization will be restored. The word for such civilization is peace, which is spelled out in terms of economics: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken” (Mic 4:3-4).2

This restoration may be seen with or without Yahweh’s direct intervention to “judge the nations” in the sense of exercising political sovereignty. It may be envisaged with or without an explicit relationship to the cult or the temple at Jerusalem. There is not such a relationship in most of the above texts. It is not said that there will be Bible reading or circumcision in all of the nations or that there will be no more eating of pigs. Yet the Jews would have to think that the nations would be still better if they not only heard the law and went back and had peace, but if they started doing without pork, observing the Sabbath, bringing sacrifices and observing the law.

A few texts speak directly about the possibility that Yahweh might be known and praised by the nations. Most direct is Psalm 67: “Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth” (Ps 67:3-4).

The songs of the Suffering Servant also have missionary implications.3 In Isaiah 42:1-4 we read that the spirit of Yahweh has been placed upon the Servant and that he shall “bring forth justice to the nations” (Is 42:1). Harold Rowley, a Baptist Old Testament scholar, says this missionary implication follows logically from the dogma of monotheism: If there is only one God, then that God must be God for all people and that the election of a particular human group to know this one true God automatically calls them to become God’s proclaimers.4 He also refers to Isaiah 42:2-3—“He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice”—which is significant for the judgment it expresses on later missionary understandings that the means of this proclamation to bring justice to the Gentiles shall not be ordinary kinds of power.

In Isaiah 49 we read that the Servant’s assignment is not simply “to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel” (Is 49:6) but to be made a light for the Gentiles. Isaiah 50:4-9 adds the element of suffering to this ministry to the Gentiles and then the crowning passage Isaiah 52:13–53:12 adds the element of the Suffering Servant’s vindication when it is seen that his suffering was as a ransom for “many.” Rather than deciding that this passage had to do exclusively with the prophet or with some other person in his time or with some future figure or with a community, all of these elements probably belong. The Servant is perhaps at the same time Israel in its various shades of meaning: a faithful remnant within Israel, a man within that faithful remnant, a man yet to come in the future. In any case, if that is the kind of purpose God has avowed, then Israel’s witness to Yahweh must be one of corporate servanthood for the sake of the Gentiles.

Thus there is justification for the claim that the foreign missionary enterprise is rooted in all of Scripture and not simply in the New Testament. Yet it is more important for our guidance to be clear about the ways in which this Old Testament vision is different from what we mean in modern times by missions.

Israel takes no action toward bringing in the nations. We do have a modest openness on the part of the Israelites to integrate into their number persons of other tribes. The Mosaic legislation provides for the rights of strangers, and the stories of Joshua and Judges support the further elaboration of archeologists and historians who believe that as the Hebrews infiltrated Canaan, many who dwelt already in the land must have joined their family federation.5 More than we realize from the ordinary introductory reading of the story, Israel was made up of a composite population with a nucleus of people who could reach back to the Abraham story. Israel’s identity was built around the Abraham story, but all along they were incorporating other people into that story. Even on the way out of Egypt—when you would think that the group would be made up of only the true descendants of the Hebrews (because who else would want to belong to those people)—there are still a few references to some who do not seem to be fully, ethnically part of the Hebrew group but who simply have tagged along.

Two different terms describe these people. At the beginning of the exodus from Egypt, Exodus 12:38 says, “A mixed crowd also went up with them.” What is a “mixed crowd”? The Hebrew term for this—ʿēreb—only appears twice in the Old Testament. But the other place it occurs is Nehemiah 13:3 where it very obviously means nonethnic people; it means the Samaritans. To the extent that we can compare texts from one book to another or from one period of Hebrew literature to the next, it would seem that this term (with some indication of reaching beyond ethnic identity) was already there.6

There is also another term which makes this same point but less clearly. It would not carry much weight if it were not for the “mixed multitude” reference. “The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at’ ” (Num 11:4-6, italics added). The idea of being unsatisfied with the food came to the Israelites from “the rabble.” Who was the rabble? Maybe it was some of the Israelites. Perhaps not. The text is not clear.

What is clear is that once the Israelite people were established in Palestine, the ultimate makeup of that nation included great numbers of people who were not Abraham’s biological descendants, who were taken into the covenant along the way. This means that although it was not a very strong part of Israel’s self-understanding, it was part of Israel’s lived experience. God’s people add others. God’s people are open to membership.7

But that is not a missionary witness to the nations. Nor is it a witness to the nations when in Isaiah a few prophecies are directed to Cyrus or when in Amos words of condemnation are directed to all the neighbor nations. The literary form of an address to that other nation or ruler does not actually mean that the prophet ever took the message there, and the impact of the message is clearly directed at a Hebrew audience. Jonah took a message to Nineveh, but that was not the proclamation of God’s law. When the Ninevites repented, there is no indication that they began bringing sacrifices to Jerusalem or stopped eating pork. Johannes Blauw makes this point when he says that the attitude toward the Gentiles in the Old Testament is “centripetal”; that although the Israelite’s vision is universal in that it affirmed that there is only one God of the whole world, their universality is not missionary.8

Even if we look at the vision of the nations coming to Jerusalem, which as we saw above is the most dramatic and widely used image, what convinces the nations is Israel’s restoration by an act of Yahweh. The nations are not brought in because missionaries are sent to them either with a Jewish message or with a wider than Jewish message about God’s sovereignty. The part that Israel has to play in fulfilling the promise that the nations will come is simply to wait and keep the law even at the cost of suffering. Harold Rowley represents the typical view that converting Gentiles to Israel’s religious practice is not a strong concern in the Old Testament: “They are not missionaries, seeking to win the nations to the faith of Jehovah, but rather men who are so moved with gratitude to God for all His goodness to them that they can think of no worthier way of acknowledging His goodness than to tell all men about him. . . . But this was born of their sense of what they owe to God, rather than any compassion for the Gentiles.”9 Even when the vision is the most affirmative as in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4, what people come to learn is God’s law for the nations, not the faith of Israel. They do not adopt the cult, temple sacrifice, circumcision or even Sabbath observance: what they do is go home to live in peace.

This Old Testament imagery shows no thought about the lostness of the nations beyond their lack of knowledge of Yahweh. There is in fact considerable room for the affirmation that others than Israelites can know the true God. We find pagan saints in the Old Testament story, non-Israelites who are recognized as somehow having a valid relationship with the true God.10 These are not only righteous people before Abraham, but even after Abraham: Melchizedek, Job and the Queen of Sheba. Melchizedek is striking because through him Abraham brings his tithes (Gen 14:17-24). Jethro is interesting because through him Moses gets some ideas about how to organize the people at Sinai (Ex 18). These righteous outsiders apparently have valid morality. In Malachi 1:11 it appears that they are somehow worshipping the true God: “For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts. But you profane it” (Mal 1:11-12, italics added). Even Israel’s possession of a divinely mandated order of sacrificial worship is not an exclusive privilege.

This idea that other people than the Israelites can know the true God points to something peculiar to the nature of historical faith as distinguished from metaphysical religions. If God’s existence is a matter of metaphysical theory, then the credibility or knowability of that existence should be the same for all, and any limitation of that information to a privileged group of knowers is fortuitous and intrinsically unfair. If to be saved is dependent on metaphysical information or if to be saved is itself a metaphysical state unrelated to particular history, then one has to think about the lostness of everyone ignorant of that special saving information. For a faith community whose nature is historical, the sense in which outsiders are outside is very different. This is a matter needing only to be noticed at this point; we will have to return to it much later in the book.

In summary, the Old Testament neither meditates about the eternal lostness of people who have not heard about Yahweh nor about the destiny of people before Abraham.

Broader Old Testament Themes

So far we have been looking for a missionary thrust in the Old Testament text itself and have noted a narrowing and modesty about what the Old Testament says and does not say about mission compared to some contemporary missionary interpretations. There are some general theological affirmations in the Old Testament that are probably more important for missions than what we have been looking at, ones that reaffirm ideas we have touched along the way. What does the Old Testament message as a whole mean for the missionary imperative?

No other gods. One of the omnipresent themes, noticeable especially in the last half of the Old Testament period, is the struggle of the true God versus false gods. It is said that those gods do not exist. They are not true gods; they are vanities and emptiness. But we still have to fight with them. The prophetic message is not the same thing as a modern cultural enlightenment message, in which we tell people, “The gods are not really there, so you do not have to think about them.” Rather there is a struggle with the power of idolatry, and the struggle is something other than educating people about the fact that these gods do not exist. It is more than that because they have a hold on people. How can something that does not exist have a hold on people?

In the modern context, we think of religion versus nonreligion, theism versus atheism, and people who practice religion versus people who do not practice religion. We think that the missionary task is an apologetic task or the task of convincing people that they need the religious or transcendent dimension, or religious practice. Persuading people that there was a transcendent God was not a problem in the Old Testament. The question was whether they could recognize the difference between the true God and false gods. The issue was the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the Lord of Hosts. For Israel God’s identity was reflected in ethics, community process, politics, family and work. This involved religious practices, but in a narrow sense, that is, in specific ceremonies like temple sacrifices. The real difference was that Israel had a God who had a different name and a different personality than the false gods; people were to live differently in covenant with that God.

Creation and covenant. Another observation from the Old Testament witness has to do with the relation of three concepts: creation, providence and election. The texts affirm God as Creator of the universe. Then there is the course of history, and we speak of God as providence, as Lord of history, as sovereign. Finally there is election. The way the story is told, it happened in this order.

But the way it happened in Israel’s experience was the other way around. First of all there was the event of covenant, and then it was possible to say that the God with whom we are in covenant had been running history. Then it was meaningful to say that God is the sole Creator. This universe did not create itself. As we observe the formation of the Old Testament literature, we can see a moving out from the concrete historical experience of covenant into the less concrete affirmation of providence over all history and creation. Now when we tell the story, the story starts with creation. But the affirmation of creation is not something that stands by itself. It is the confession of the people who first experience covenant and then wrote world history in light of the covenant.

God’s sovereignty. Another general observation about Old Testament theology is the vision of divine sovereignty as continuing not only back to Genesis 1–11, but as encompassing the entire world. Divine sovereignty is expressed through other nations as well as through Israel. God’s governing of history is in some sense in favor of Israel, on Israel’s behalf. Sometimes it is in order to use Israel to bless the nations. But God uses Assyria (Is 10), Cyrus (Is 45), Nebuchadnezzar (Jer 42:11-12) or other emperors for God’s own purposes.

The first task of Israel is to be Israel. Finally, the first task of Israel is to be Israel, to live up to the identity of the covenant.11 That emphasis still may throw light on what we should be doing today. Maybe the first task of the church in mission is to be the church. Abraham’s faith, his readiness to be mobile and the willingness of his followers to be a peculiar people were prior to anything else that God could do with them. Whatever they did later by spinoff, by accident or by further vision, the first thing they were supposed to do was to be faithful. Anything else that they could be used for was dependent on that vision. Distinctness was the first call, not out of pride but out of the awareness of the nature of the God who called.

Numbers 22–24 tells the story of King Balak’s effort to hire a prophet to curse the Israelites. This is part of the prophet Balaam’s message: “How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: John Howard Yoder's Mission Theology
• Yoder’s Introduction to the Topic
• 1. The Prophets: Israel and the Nations
• 2. Jesus’ Public Ministry and the Nations
• 3. The Great Commission and Acts
• 4. The Ministry of Paul in Salvation History
• 5. Other Texts and the New Testament’s Theology of Mission
• 6. Mission and Systematic Theology
• 7. Church Types and Mission: A Radical Reformation Perspective
• 8. Pietist Perspective on Mission
• 9. The Church as Missionary
• 10. The Church as Responsible
• 11. The Church as Local
• 12. The Church as Laity
• 13. Ministry in a Missionary Context
• 14. People Movements and the Free Church
• 15. Salvation Is Historical
• 16. Salvation Is for the World
• 17. Message and Medium: Presence
• 18. Message and Medium: Servanthood
• 19. Theology of Religions: Particularity and Universalism
• 20. Radical Reformation Perspectives on Religion
• 21. Christianity and Other Faiths
• 22. The Missionary Challenge of Non-Non-Christian Faiths
• 23. Judaism as a Non-Non-Christian Faith
• Afterword: As You Go
• Appendix
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Theology of Mission
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press