Month: June 2007

I met a guy in the Green Muse this morning who told me that we are in a spiritual war. He said, “You know, it’s like Dylan said, ‘You gotta serve somebody, serve Satan or the Lord.'” It brought to mind the movie Fight Club, where Tyler (Pitt) says:

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential — God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables;  they’re slaves with white collars. Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit they don’t need. We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’ll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars — but we won’t.

In his soon-to-be-standard on a biblical theology of mission, The Mission of God, Chris Wright helpfully clears the fog surrounding kitsch missional terminology by providing some very clear definitions for mission, missional, missionary. Anyone remotely interested in being missional would benefit greatly by paying attention to Wright’s lucid distinctions.

My recent article on the missional movement attempts to deal with some of the thin-blooded and misconstrued conceptions of what mission, missional, and missionary mean. Wright pegs the meaning of these words with theological acumen and missiological precision with everyday language:

Mission: Our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.

 

Missionary: referring to people who engage in mission, usually in a culture other than their own. It has even more of a flavor of “being sent” than the word mission itself…the term missionary still evokes images of white, Western expatriates among “natives”…[we] ought to know that already the majority of those engaged in crosscultural mission are not Western at all.

 

Missional: Missional is simply an adjective denoting something that is related to or characterized by mission…missional is to the word mission what covenantal is to covenant, or fictional to fiction. We might say that Israel had a missional role in the midst of the nations–implying that they had an identity and role connected to God’s ultimate intention of blessing the nations.

We labor with the exalted Christ, which gives us the authority to proclaim the gospel of freedom. And we labor like the incarnated Christ, which gives us humility and grace to creatively demonstrate and proclaim the love of Christ to fellow sinners in our culture.

Mark Driscoll, Confessions, 43-44

As finite formulators of truth, theologians (anyone who seeks to think God’s thoughts after him) are forced to nurture their understanding of God within a limited span of time. How each theologian uses his or her time is a personal decision. Personal, finite encounters with a three-personed, infinite and omniscient God require humility and faith.

Theologizing requires humility of heart because in order to understand God, we need his help. Exercise of the intellect apart from dependence upon the One ‘from whom are all things’, renders the theologian philosopher, one who seeks wisdom without seeking the wise One. Such contemptuous disrespect for the God of truth characterized St. Augustine’s pre-conversion search for rational certainty. Resistant to the inspiring preaching of Ambrose, Augustine desired certainty for the things he could not see, the kind of certainty that accompanies the equation of 7+3=10.In reflection upon this memory he writes: “By believing I could have been healed so that my mind’s clearer sight would be directed in some way to your truth, which endures forever and is lacking in nothing.”Augustine distilled this realization into the oft quoted phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”

Faith is the flipside of Godward humility and the healing hand for true theology. However, faith in God does not reduce God’s immensity to comprehensibility. More to the point, Colin Gunton writes, “God is incomprehensible in not being graspable; but not incomprehensible in the sense of being entirely beyond our understanding.” As a result, theologians are humbly and delightfully called to plow the fields of Scripture and culture, pressing into God by faith and by reason.