Bosch and New Testament Models of Mission

Accessed from http://www.docstoc.com/docs/113900366/David-Bosch

Introduction 

This post aims at introducing a book which has been described as ‘the most comprehensive and thorough study of the Christian mission done in this generation, if not this century.’ Its author, David Bosch, died tragically in a car accident in 1992 but he remains a colossus in the field of missiology.  Bosch was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa but for the majority of his ministry was associated with the anti-apartheid movement.  His doctorate was in New Testament, not Missiology, and this gave his work a rare depth.  If you had to rehearse just one fact about his life to convey his importance as a missiologist it would be that he was equally esteemed by both the World Council of Churches and those who were in the upper echelons of the world evangelical establishment.  He was, in that sense, a bridge builder connecting different traditions.  

 

The key concept underlying Transforming Mission 

 

To understand David Bosch and to make sense of this massive work of scholarship one must grasp the basic concept undergirding the entire book.  When the Bible talks about time or time periods it has generally only two in mind. ‘This present evil age’ and the age to come involving heaven and eternity.  Nonetheless,  there is general agreement among historians,  philosophers and even bible scholars that within what the bible calls ‘this present age’ there are discernable time periods that are so distinct from one another that we can’t but refer to them as ages or epochs. 

 

So for example, from around the fifth century to the fifteenth century CE we have a period that everyone knows as the Middle Ages.  Historians called it the Middle Ages (incidentally, no-one in the Middle Ages called it that!) because they knew that it was a time period before two other ages that came before and after it.  Prior to the Middle Ages we had a period of time known as antiquity populated by the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians et al, who helped establish civilization.   

 

Before that era one had the time period known as pre-history which we know relatively little about.  Can you think of the name given to the period which came after the Middle Ages? The answer to this question is modernity and I would like you to stop reading at this point and write down what you believe to be the defining characteristics of modernity.  What was it that made the Modern world different from the Medieval world? 

 

Can I invite you at this point to reflect on the brief list of characteristics which I have identified as marking the modern world: 

 

• The Enlightenment.  
• Rationalism.  
• The rise of science.  
• Confidence in humanity’s ability to discover truth.  
• A certain colonial attitude on the part of the West.  
• Disbelief in the supernatural.  

 

Do you agree? If so, to what degree and for how long has Ireland been affected by modernity? 

 

Historical paradigms and church history 

 

Hans Küng accessed at uitgeverijtenhave.nl

A vital point to underscore is that each of these ages or epochs in history had their own particular worldview or way of processing reality which affected everything they thought and did.  They saw life from a certain vantage point given to them by their culture.  However,  there was nothing absolutely fixed or permanent about any historical epoch. At certain points in history there would be a movement or shift from one epoch to another.  For example,  from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages to modernity, and dare I say it, modernity to postmodernity.  These shifts in worldview, paradigm shifts(!) were perfectly mirrored in the realm of theology according to Hans Kung,  a scholar whom Bosch bases some of his thinking upon.  Antiquity (which included the early centuries of Christendom) was dominated by the Eastern Orthodox paradigm. The Middle Ages were the perfect fit for the Roman Catholic paradigm.   The period of time known to us as modernity was split by Kung and Bosch into two paradigms,  the Protestant Reformation one (which still had elements of the old Roman Catholic paradigm) and the Enlightenment paradigm. 

 

Now before stealing too much of my thunder from subsequent posts, I need to give you two further points of orientation. The paradigm in which mission takes place will not only colour the general outlook of people but it will affect the way mission is done.  Further posts will elaborate on that point. Secondly, it is Bosch’s contention that we are going through a major paradigm shift right now from Enlightenment culture to postmodern culture in which the way people experience and think about the world is fundamentally changing.  Indeed the goal of missiology today is to re-imagine and reformulate the way church does mission so that it is relevant to this new cultural paradigm.  That’s the thrust of Bosch’s work and it will become clearer as the weeks progress and you get familiar with this text book.  For this post, however, we are going to engage with the most fundamental and normative paradigm for mission, the New Testament paradigm. 

 

The New Testament as a missionary document 

 

Of course, it is impossible to say anything about the New Testament as a missionary document without asking what the Old Testament might have contributed in advance to New Testament assumptions about mission. Bosch identifies three marked ways in which the Old Testament provided some essential starting points for New Testament mission. 

• God involves himself in history at any time of his choosing and is not limited by the seasonal cycle or venues of worship or rites. 
• Revelation is frequently about what God is promising to do for people at a later stage in history, not simply what religious acts he expects people to do for him today 
• God’s work in history is about creating a single nation who will have a special type of service as his representatives among the nations. 

 

When we move from the OT to the person of Jesus himself, there are some striking qualities to Jesus’ ministry that really stand out. Jesus was part of the Jewish prophetic tradition but there were significant ways in which he was different. All the rest of the Jewish religious movements of the day saw themselves as defining the faithful remnant (the true believers, if you like) and building walls around to keep it from being polluted and lost. Even John’s baptism was a boundary between the ordinary Jew and the true Jew who would be saved by the Messiah. 

 

Jesus, by contrast, acted as if he thought his mission was to all Israel rather than to a little subset defined by religious boundary markers. His fraternizing with the likes of Zacchaeus indicated that outcasts were welcome in the movement that he was establishing.  Thus when we explore Jesus’ ministry and its impact on the early church we should not be surprised that a very radical missionary outlook emerges. 

 

Jesus and the early church’s missionary outlook 
 

Accessed at sol2611.wordpress.com

                

 

1. The reign or Kingdom of God has arrived in the person of Jesus and no longer functions as merely a future hope. This news electrified his hearers. 

2. The torah or the law is no longer the centre of  gravity of religious faith. The defining mark of the reign of God arriving in Jesus does not point towards God’s requirements as the Torah did. Rather it is love that startlingly reaches out beyond Israel and treats people as more important than the Torah’s regulations.    

3. Jesus reigns over his followers; he does not merely teach them as a rabbi. 

4. Jesus’ mission had revolutionary implications when taken into the Roman Empire by his followers.  While on the surface it did not seem political, ‘[i]t rejected all (Greek and Roman) gods and in doing this demolished the metaphysical foundations of prevailing political theories … Christians confessed Jesus as Lord of all lords – the most revolutionary political demonstration imaginable in the Roman Empire of the first centuries of the Christian era.’ (p.48) 

5. The church established as the result of the mission was a sociological innovation, indeed, sociological miracle. The combination of Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, rich and poor, cultured and uncultured into one community was ‘a sociological impossibility.’ (p. 48 citing Hoekendijk) 

 

After Bosch has given this general overview of Jesus’ impact on the early church he identifies what he thinks are the three central NT models of mission deriving from Matthew, Luke and Paul. You will need to read these sections yourselves but I will attempt to give a brief summary in this post. 

 

Matthew: Mission as disciple-making 

 

Bosch sums up Matthew’s model, which comes from the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20 as ‘Disciple Making.’ Bosch’s unique angle on this crucial passage is that he believes it can be easily abused in that people can take their own definition of mission and simply slot it in as the interpretation of this passage. What you need to do, claims Bosch, is interpret Matthew’s words against the background of the gospel as a whole to make sense of it.   

 

The people Matthew wrote to were Jewish Christians who had moved out of Judea into a Gentile setting probably following the destruction of Jerusalem and they were facing what you could only call an identity crisis. Who are we? Are we really Jewish? What are we doing outside our homeland? Do we have a mission to our fellow Jews? Do we have a mission to the Gentiles? The whole of the Gospel as well as the great commission is Matthew’s attempt to answer those kinds of questions. 

 

The answers which he comes up with are exciting answers.  When he cites Jesus as saying, ‘Go and make disciples of all nations,’ he is making clear to them that their mission is to Jews and Gentiles alike.  It is a message for all. They would encounter both Jews and Gentiles in their new situation and the commission reiterated that the gospel was addressed to both these groups. From a Jewish perspective this was a staggering re-definition of who were the objects of God’s love and concern.  The dawning of the Kingdom had extended the definition of the chosen people to include the outsiders.  

 

The great commission itself must be seen as an empowerment to this community as opposed to a mere obligation. ‘All authority has been given to me’ reminds them that Jesus rules, that his Kingdom is a reality, and that it is that which drives them into mission.  It is a real Kingdom which really transforms lives that is the impetus behind the command that Matthew sets down. 

 

What are they to do? What are they to make?  It is disciples.  Taking Matthew’s situation seriously, the words ‘teaching them to obey’ has little to do with either indoctrination or academic instruction. It is more to do with what we would mean today by ‘shaping’ (i.e. spiritual formation).  ‘Shaping them to obey all that I have commanded.’  Indeed, this obedience is much more to do with them coming to terms with the Kingdom, the fact that Jesus really does reign, than compliance to a set of rules. That is Matthew’s concept of mission. 

 

A final question to ponder 

 

How would you define the process and outcome of ‘making disciples’? 

 

Luke: Transcending class and ethnicity 

 

Bosch defines Luke’s model as ‘Transcending Class and Ethnicity.’  The pivotal passage is Luke 4:18-19. 

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”  (Luke 4:18-19) 

 

Although there is only one mission in the NT, that one mission (like a multi-faceted diamond) looks quite different when viewed from different angles. We have briefly touched on Matthew’s model and we will now turn to Luke and  Paul in a later post to appreciate other dimensions of the complex reality of mission. 

 

Luke 14:16-21 has often been used by some theologians to justify the idea that mission is primarily to do with social transformation and Bosch bids us be wary of too reductionist an approach. 

 

In Luke 4 Jesus reads Isa 61 to his hometown synagogue and stuns them by announcing that Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in their hearing.  However, before they even come to terms with that shock, Jesus implies that the Messianic wonders would somehow take place without God taking vengeance on the enemies of Israel as expected. (Jesus quit reading the text in the middle of a verse, omitting the phrase they all knew by heart and cherished, ‘…and the day of vengeance of our God.’   

 

On the contrary,  in this messianic kingdom God would bless the outsiders, possibly even in preference to his own people. (Lk 4:23-27) The crowd were not happy and almost kill Jesus for implying such things. Bosch sees this widening in God’s mercy as a key theme of Luke. 

The good news is that God’s vengeance on the nations has been suspended while God goes on an all-out mission of gracious forgiveness, inviting outsiders to seats of honour at the Messianic banquet table. (Bosch p.108) 

 

As a gospel writer, Luke has his listeners in mind and in this case it is a Gentile writer (Luke) addressing a primarily Gentile audience who are facing questions of identity in the way that Matthew’s Jewish community were.  They wanted to know, ‘Who are we really?’  ‘How do we relate to the Jewish past which wasn’t part of our history?’  ‘Is Christianity a new religion?’ ‘How do we relate to the earthly Jesus who is receding into the past?’ His Gospel and Acts go some distance in answering those questions. 

 

What is the church? 

 

A multi-ethnic and socially diverse (rich and poor) body of people come into being because God has suspended his judgement on the nations and sent his redeemer to Israel. It stands out uniquely among the nations because of the way it transcends class and ethnic identity.  Indeed, one might say that every key aspect of Luke’s missiology has a boundary transcending effect.  Stan Nussbaum in his excellent companion book to Transforming Mission explains how class and ethnicity are levelled by the gospel:  

 

• There is only one Messiah for all the nations (Acts 1:8)  
• Repentance and forgiveness are the same route to the same salvation regardless of ethnicity or class (Luke 24:47) 
• The Holy Spirit is poured out the same way on young and old, male and female, Jew and Gentile (Acts 2:17-18; 10:44-45) 
• The coming messianic banquet (Luke 13:28-30) may be the greatest leveller of all, where people of all classes and nations sit down to eat and celebrate together. With this feast as the envisioned end of mission and history, the familiar human dividing lines of class and race are transcended. They simply cannot mean very much anymore. 

 

The implication of all of this is that the existence of a boundary transcending group is evidence to the world of something life-changing in their midst. How could the creation of these new world-defying communities be possible. The answer for Luke is Jesus, the Holy Spirit and forgiveness. 

 

How is the church related to the Jews? 

 

Luke could have been tempted to air-brush the Jews out of his story in order not to offend Gentiles.  What Luke does, however, is stress the continuity between the Jews of the previous era and the multi-ethnic church of the new era. For Luke, ‘the Messiah is the hinge who connects the Gentile door to the Jewish doorframe’ (Nussbaum) and that special relationship cannot simply be ignored or passed over. 

 

How was the Church related to Jesus? 

 

That was another concern that Luke was addressing, especially as the historical figure of Jesus was continually receding from sight. His answer, as Acts demonstrates, is that the Holy Spirit is our ever-present dynamic connection with the risen and ascended Lord Jesus. The same Spirit who propelled Jesus’ mission was also their guiding and driving force. For Luke, mission is entirely dependent on the Spirit. 

 

The one remaining boundary 

 

Nussbaum’s apt summary of this issue is a fitting way to end this discussion of Luke’s model of mission. It illustrates the vital tension between the inclusiveness of Luke’s missionary model and the radical challenge inherent in it. The glad tidings about Christ and his boundary-destroying ministry is for everyone but there always remains the possibility that individuals will not avail of its benefits. This does not diminish the church’s call to live in radical, inclusive openness but neither does it guarantee a positive and universal eschatological outcome for all-comers. 

We might presumee that if all boundaries are extended, all humanity is now included in God’s multi-ethnic, multi-class people and all are at peace with God. At last we can quit talking about God’s judgment and quit talking in terms of ‘saved’ and ‘lost.’ But such a view cuts the nerve out of Luke’s idea of mission. There can be no doubt that salvation and the attendant ideas of repentance and forgiveness of sins, are central to Luke’s two volume work. 

 

How can Luke, the boundary transcender, still insist on a strict boundary between repentant and unrepentant, forgiven and unforgiven, saved and lost. How can a writer so full of mercy and grace also record so many instances of people who were not forgiven (eg rich young ruler and Elymas the sorceror, Acts 13:8-11) 

 

This makes sense if we realise the gospel of Jesus does not mean that all boundaries are gone. It means that only one boundary is left with any meaning – the boundary between those who reorient themselves to face and welcome the Messiah and those who choose not to. But the meaning of even this last boundary is different from the meaning of all other ethnic and class boundaries. Those inside the Messiah boundary are not to defend it but to cross it in mission. They are not to use the boundary to keep outsiders out. Rather they are to go out across the boundary and bring in as many as they can. (Luke 14:21-23) 

 

A final question to ponder 

 

Suppose you explain to a non-believing friend Luke’s view of the church as a community that transcends social and ethnic divisions.  The friend observes: ‘But the churches |I know are divided along social, ethnic and sectarian lines. How is this possible? Don’t they read Luke and Acts?’  What would you say to your friend? (Adapted from Nussbaum,  A Reader’s Guide to Transforming Mission, p.31)