Missional Hermeneutics

Both Brian Russell of Asbury Orlando and IWU's own Steve Lennox, not to mention the prolific Scot McKnight and the lovely Mission of God by Christopher Wright, have been knocking at the door of my mind on missional thinking. (Steve will have to read on to have any clue what I'm talking about :-) "Missional" is a big buzz word right now. IWU's MDIV has actually named a 6 hour course "Missional Christianity," which includes not only the traditional topic of evangelism, but church "multiplication" (another buzzword) and Christian service, which relates to the growing return of the church to its mission to the poor and needy.

The idea that the church is missional does not seem controversial to me, that one of its principal duties is to go as ambassadors of reconciliation between God and the world in all its aspects (not just spiritual but social, economic, psychological, etc...). But Brian asked me today what I thought about a missional hermeneutic. To my shame I admitted to myself that I just haven't been getting the big picture of the missional movement or how its current flavor might differ from the missions, evangelism, and church growth movements of the past, other than the welcome addition of service.

So I grabbed Wright's Mission of God off the shelf to try to figure out what a missional hermeneutic might be and I think something clicked. Here's what it was:

The thing that, for Christians, pulls the Bible into a single book is not really a creed. Protestants have often had a tendency to reduce the Bible to a set of propositions, which is why we love Paul's letters and sometimes ignore the Gospels. Calvinist evangelical/fundamentalist institutions like Wheaton or Westminster Theological Seminary formulate their identities by way of lists of desicated beliefs. My strong hunch is that these cognitive elements are way more important to belonging at these institutions than personal piety or godliness.

But at least half of the Bible is narrative, and virtually none of the remaining material appears in the form of philosophically absolute propositions. The drive to encapsulate the Bible in propositional form is understandable, but clearly there is a huge gap between any set of such propositions and the biblical texts themselves. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not reject the "rule of faith," by which I understand the basic propositional beliefs held by the consensus of Christians throughout the ages.

But as I think Brian has realized long before me, and as Lennox has been hinting at as he alludes to his forthcoming book on the story of God (that he needs a sabbatical to write, say, Spring of '11), Christians don't join the individual pieces of the Bible together so much by way of propositions. We join the individual, distinct books of the Bible together into an overarching narrative, into God's story. We do this just as the Christians of the ages have.

I looked at this dimension to Hebrews' use of Scripture in a forthcoming chapter in a collection of essays from the 2006 St. Andrews Conference on Hebrews and Theology. Pre-modern use of Scripture both places ourselves as readers in the story of the text while at the same time placing the text in the story of history. So we like the New Testament authors are awaiting the second coming in the same age as they were--we are part of the story in Luke 21. But Genesis is in the overarching story of salvation's history as well.

Most of us do not notice that this overarching story is as much a Christian as a biblical creation. Nothing about Leviticus requires us to consider Hebrews as an appropriate later "chapter" in the story. As Christians, we take cues from the New Testament and the later church on how to situate the books of the Jewish Bible within the story. Paul's understanding of Genesis goes well beyond anything Genesis requires, and most of us read Paul reading Genesis through the eyes of Augustine.

So I think I might now understand what a missional hermeneutic might be--or at least the way in which I might conceptualize and embrace one. Far more than a Christian propositional framework for reading Scripture, the Christian way of reading Scripture reads it as the story of God moving in history, from creation to ultimate redemption. Like most stories, this story has a direction and an appropriate denouement.

God had a reason to create, a purpose for the creation. The driving point of any story is an unfufilled goal or purpose. The story of God in history is the story of God's mission to redeem, to reclaim, to reconcile the world to Himself. The principal moment in the story and the turning point in the mission is the incarnation, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus Christ. The rest is the working out of those events. God's coming to Israel, God's mission in the church are both part of the mission.

A missional hermeneutic is thus a Christian approach to Scripture that reads the individual texts of the Bible as a part of this story.

This is a Christian reading of these texts together. The "Old" Testament texts do not in any way beg to be read in this way, which is why Judaism can have such a drastically different understanding of God's story than Christians do. And key features of the Christian reading of the New Testament come more from the church than from the Bible. The incarnation, for example, seems to play no appreciable role in the soteriology of the New Testament. I included it above because it is essential to the Christian understanding of the story, not because it plays a major role in the New Testament. The same could be said of the virgin birth.

So thanks Brian for the push! I do not think that mission is the only hermeneutical category for a Christian reading of Scripture, but clearly it is one of the most important, perhaps the most important.