Engaging the Bible in Mission Theology Scholarship: Scholarship, David Bosch (2)
David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in
Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991).
These are short notes on the mission paradigms that Bosch identifies in Church history, without comment.
Bosch argues that identifying 'paradigms' is a helpful way to understand the history of theology and mission. In this, he is developing the notion of paradigm shifts in theology as argued by Hans Küng ("Was meint Paradigmenwachsel?" in Küng and David Tracy (eds.), Paradigm changes in Theology (NY:
Crossrod, 1984, 1989 ET). Bosch finds six paradigm shifts in 2,000
years of Christian history. He does not believe that one gives way to another so much as one is added to existing paradigms. I will simply present his analysis briefly, noting that this remains one of the major studies in recent times of mission theology and history (even though I have my doubts about the usefulness of a paradigm study of history).
1.
Apocalyptic Paradigm of primitive Christianity
2. Hellenistic Paradigm of
the Patristic Period
a. After Constantine, Church
was made of socially superior, and mission
was to the socially inferior.
b. Christian mission was
understood in terms of truths to communicate more than events describing God's
self-communication.
c. Eastern Orthodox Church lost sense of
urgency, imminence of end, historical (vs. vertical earth and heaven
perspective). Salvation became ascent of
soul to heaven. Good deeds in this world
delivered one from hell. Church in
Eastern Theology moved from a mobile ministry (apostles, prophets, evangelists)
to a settled ministry (bishops, elders, deacons). The Spirit was not so much enabling mission
as building the church in sanctity. Thus
the focus was ecclesial, not missionary (although monks were the primary
vehicle of missions). Missions was
conducted by Nestorian monasticism (as far as China by AD 225), whereas
Egyptian monasticism was missionary. The
patristic and orthodox missionary program was:
1. More compromised to the state than Roman Catholicism
2. Mission is thoroughly church-centred, as church is Kingdom of God
on earth. Church is the aim of mission,
not an instrument for mission. Mission
is not proclaiming ethical truths or principles; it is calling people into
membership of the Christian community in a visible and concrete form (207).
3. Pagans receive God's light through church's liturgy: mission is
centripetal rather than centrifugal, organic rather than organized. The Eucharist is a missionary event.
4. Mission and unity of Church go together: mission must manifest
life and worship of the Church. Great
Schism of 1054 altered mission of Orthodox Church: search for Christian unity.
5. Mission founded on love of God more than justice.
6. Goal of mission is life: doctrine of theosis (cf. 2 Cor. 3.18): union with God (not deification)--a
continuing state of adoration, prayer, thanksgiving, worship, and intercession,
and a meditation and contemplation of the triune God and God's infinite love.
7. Cosmic dimension of new life: all creation is in process of
becoming ekklesia (Church): state,
society, culture, nature are objects of mission.
3. Medieval Roman Catholic
Paradigm
a. Changed context from
Eastern Orthodox: redemption not pedagogical process and taking up into the
divine but an overturning the sin-ridden life through a crisis experience. Theo. not incarnational (origin, preexistence
of Christ) so much as staurological (substitutionary death on cross of Christ).
b. Ecclesiasticization of
Salvation: no salvation outside the church, originally meaning (Cyprian) that
one must disassociate with heretical groups (Donatists), came to mean that one
might crusade against heretics but not infidels (so Aquinas).
c. Mission btwn. church and
state: Augustine's City of God (A.D. 413-427): Rome could be sacked by Goths
(A.D. 410) not because Rome turned from its ancestral gods but because there
are two societies or cities in the world existing side by side. Later R.Cath. identified the city of God with
the Church. Hence the state became the
visible arm enforcing the Christian mission against heretics and pagans. Hence the missionary wars. Monasteries were not intentionally missionary
but in fact permeated by a missionary dimension in 5th to 12th centuries. They were independent from state, unlike in
the East. They were communal, unlike the
indiv. emphasis in the East. Monks were
revered ascetics, lived exemplary lives in poverty and hard work, perpetrated
education and culture, maintained their character despite barbarian invasions,
helped others along the way while on pilgrimage. English monasticism actually had purpose of
missionary work.
4. Protestant
(Reformation) Paradigm
a. Mission was weak not due
to concern but rather emphasis: Luther hoped for foreign mission but his
emphasis was elsewhere:
1. God's work over human effort
2. Preaching over programs
3. Opposed force in mission to pagan world
b. While Catholic nations
were colonizing others, Protestants weren't.
Emphasis was on reforming the church, and energies were expended in
fight with Catholic opposition.
Abandonment of monasticism meant abandonment of strongest form of
missionary activity of medieval church.
Also, Protestants were torn apart by internal strife. Later (1652), Univ. of Wittenberg submitted
opinion that Lutheran church had no missionary calling; the State was to
convert pagans, even through war (Bosch, p. 251).
c. Anabaptists were
missionary, though. Unlike Luther, who
upheld idea of territorially circumscribed parishes with ecclesiastical office
restricted within them (don't wander outside your area into another person's
territory), Anabaptists wandered everywhere, calling for a more radical
reform--a restoring--and a separation of the state from church affairs. Reformers did not see Great Commission
binding, Anabaptists did.
d. Pietists: broke from weak
missionary concern of Reformation in
combining a joy of personal experience of salvation with eagerness to proclaim
gospel to all (so Spener). Nikolaus von
Zinzendorf founded Moravians, a non-institutional, ecumencal missions organization. Early pietists were concerned with service to
soul and body but by 1730's concern was purely religious.
e. Calvinist missions was
more active than Lutheran, in part because of popularity in countries engaged
in colonization (England, Holland, Scotland), but also because they taught that
the Holy Spirit was at work not only in human soul but also in renewing face of
the earth, and Christ the exalted is active on the earth.
5. Modern Enlightenment
Paradigm
a. Movements freeing state
from church
b. Forces of renewal in
church--did not distinguish nominal Christian from pagan, so mission was
expanded. 2 Cor. 5.14: constrained by
Jesus' love was a major new motif, along with earlier concern to bring glory to
God. Saving souls and bettering society
went together in 18th and 19th c.
Conviction that God chose and ordained Western nations to bear Gospel to
world. But in 1870's and after mission
was taken to "bosom of ecclesial Protestantism"; people hoped to
evangelize the world in their generation (America's Student Volunteer Movement). Increasingly, imminent eschatology played
role in missions (with predictions of Christ's return).
c. Liberal Christianity
characterized by following:
1. View that other religions not totally false
2. Mission work meant less preaching and more transformational activities
3. Accent on salvation for life in present world
4. Emphasis in mission shifted from the individual to society. Confidence in social progress in 19th c. led
to social gospel emphasis. By 1917 this
was on the way out and a religious universalism, based on 19th c. romanticism,
replaced it.
d. Many mission societies
started in last 100 yrs.--hence new question, Should mission work be work of
the Church? But denominations, being so
many, are themselves para-church organizations (Bosch, p. 329).
6. Emerging Ecumenical
Paradigm
Enlightenment paradigm is
challenged in society today:
a. Reason is not enough on
which to build one's life--religion, new age movement still around in
scientific society. Science and theology
probe, they do not prove.
b. More holistic view of
world
c. Teleological Dimension
rediscovered: not everything is predictable, a result of some law.
d. Challenge to progress
thinking--important in missions today
1. The application of
technology is not merely a technological matter--influenced by people's social
and religious dispositions.
2. Humans receiving aid as
objects in a network of planning, transfer of commodities, logistic
coordination by development agent is
criticized
3. Power: Western nations
neither would nor could relinquish power and privilege. Liberation theology wrongly assumes good in
people: transfer power and all will be well.
e. Fiduciary framework. One paradigm interprets facts as does
another, but one must choose a fiduciary framework over another.
f. Optimism is now chastened.
g. Toward Interdependence:
Society sees others as unimportant and beliefs as mere opinion. We must reaffirm conviction and commitment,
retrieve togetherness, interdependence, symbiosis.
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