Issues Facing Missions Today: 40 Naming God in the Face of Suffering and Tribulation

Issues Facing Missions Today: 40 Naming God in the Face of Suffering and Tribulation

Introduction: Islam speaks of the 99 names for God.  Names in many cultures have meaning.  They reveal something about the person—the day of his or her birth, an event, something significant about the child, and so forth.  So, too, our naming of God.  Moses famously asked after God’s name in Exodus 3 and was told by God, ‘I AM has sent you’ (3.14).[1]

The following study concerns naming God in the context of tribulation.  This is a deeply personal concern, but it is also missiological: the revealing of God in an evil world full of suffering and persecution—as the two witnesses prophesying in sackcloth in Revelation 11.  For this study, Revelation 15 and 16 will be the focus texts as they provide significant depth to our understanding as Christians about naming God when there is suffering and evil.  We are not only interested in knowing what to call God.  We are interested in knowing how to name God in tribulation, in the situation of the first readers of this book.  We will also critically engage the theology of the Roman Catholic, postmodern theologian, David Tracy.

I remember a woman from Rwanda's words after the genocide in the 1990's in her country: 'Sometimes things are so bad that one forgets God,' she said.  The book of Revelation is a reminder not to forget God in times of tribulation, persecution, injustice, and unrighteousness.  It is also a book that reveals, uncovering the hiddenness of God in suffering through the revelation of the Lamb.

David Tracy and Naming God

David Tracy, a Roman Catholic theologian, has made it his project to name God.  How shall we name God?  Following Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tracy thinks theology took a bad turn when Thomas Aquinas turned to Exodus 3 to answer this question.  God's revelation to Moses that He was the 'I am who I am' began a trajectory of naming God in terms of 'Being'.  But Western scholars like von Balthasar and Tracy are dusting off a 6th century Middle Platonist theologian of significance in Eastern Orthodoxy, Dionysius the Areopagite, who understood God's names in a hierarchy of possible names, with 'Being' occupying the lowest level.  At the very top of God's names, said Dionysius, God is named 'Good'.  For the Catholic theologian von Balthasar, God is 'Beauty.'

Now, all this rather changes things for theology.  If God is 'Being', then theology focuses on epistemology, on knowing God.  But if God is 'Good', then theology has to attend more to ethics, or if 'Beauty,' theology must attend more to doxology.  How shall we name God?  In a somewhat related way, we might here interject, missiologists also struggle with this question: 'Should we name God using the names for deities already used in a non-Christian religion and culture?'  What difference does this make for theology?  As Christians, we name God through the revelation of Jesus, as we see in Revelation.  Thus, God is named not in some generic way that can just as well be a name in some other religion but in the very concrete person of Jesus.

Tracy takes some further steps in his project of naming God.  He understands these to involve 'Postmodern' theologising.  If Modernity has to do with building solid structures on absolute foundations, Postmodern viewers point out the fragments left unused in such buildings.  'Look at what is left unused, look at the fragments,' they say. Not only so, but Postmodern viewers begin to pick at the foundations of Modernity's structures, begin to fragment them and watch them crumble. If you want an example, think of how Liberation Theology fragmented Catholic theology by shifting the focus from the Magisterium to the Marginalised of society.  God was not in the robes, icons and grand cathedrals of the Church but in the poor and powerless.  Look at the fragments: not God as divine Being but God as the face of the poor.

Tracy sees the incarnation, cross, and Second Coming of Jesus as fragmenting the totalising theology of Christendom.  And he carries this through in exploring two fragmenting names for God: God the 'Hidden One' and God the 'Incomprehensible One'.  Both God's hiddenness and God's incomprehensibility fragment the theology of Modernity with its totalising systems and claims to certainty.  For Tracy, Martin Luther offers a beginning for a theology of God's hiddenness.  There are two senses of God as the 'Hidden One' in Luther: God's revealing Himself in contraries, and God revealing Himself as sheer power. Tracy says,

… most of the time and with great consistency, Luther spells out this position on God's hiddenness through his articulation of his theology of the cross. The heart of Luther's insight into God is, of course, that God's revelation is through hiddenness—that is, that God discloses God's self to sinful humans—sub contrariis—life through death, wisdom through folly, strength through weakness. A hidden God is not merely humble but humiliated—deus incarnatus, deus absconditus. The hidden God is deus crucifixus—the crucified God (Moltmann). That is the God also implicit in much liberation and political theology and implicit, in my opinion, in the recovery of an apocalyptic sense of history itself is found in Luther.

The second sense of God's hiddenness in Luther goes deeper.  Tracy says,

At the very least, this literally awful, ambivalent sense of God's hiddenness can be so overwhelming that God is sometimes experienced as purely frightening, not tender, sometimes even as an impersonal reality—"it"—of sheer power and energy signified by such metaphors, such fragmentary metaphors as abyss, chasm, chaos, horror.

Without understanding God as 'Hidden', the argument goes, we cannot understand God and suffering in the world.  If we understand God in a totalising theology as 'All knowing' and 'All powerful,' then what can we say of God when faced with injustice, plague, famine or suicide bombers?  If we are too rash in making claims about knowing God, His character, His Being, then how can we explain His hiddenness in such tragedy?  The lament psalms speak of God's hiddenness; the wisdom literature of God's incomprehensibility.  But for Tracy, the hiddenness of God is best captured in apocalyptic literature.  Here, faced with injustice, suffering, and even martyrdom, the Church turns from its totalising theological rhetoric to the genre of apocalyptic.  Tracy finds this apocalyptic perspective in the Gospel of Mark, in Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians, but especially in the book of Revelation, itself an apocalyptic work.  A marginalised and oppressed community in the Roman Empire responds to its power with an apocalypse in which the Beast's number of 666 equals 'Nero Caesar', in which Babylon is a code name for Rome, in which Emperor worship and Empire wealth are pictured in terms of beasts and a drunken whore.  But also in the Apocalypse the blood of martyred saints cries out from underneath the altar of sacrifice, "Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" (Rev. 6.10).

Revelation 15 and 16

Ah, but is the book of Revelation really about God's Hiddenness in the way in which Tracy understands this?  Even in this verse (Rev. 6.10), God is named as 'Sovereign Lord, holy and true.'  And the souls under the altar do not resolve their experience of injustice through God's Hiddenness but through His Justice: 'how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?'  This could be discussed in terms of Luther's first sense of God's hiddenness, in contraries, but not in the second sense of God as Abyss, Power, Chaos.  So, let us look more carefully at Revelation's naming of God.

Our focus is Rev. 15 and 16.  As Richard Bauckham notes, Rev. 15 is the culmination of two separate sections in the book.[2]  Chapters 4-11 find their culmination in chapter 15, as do chapters 12-14.  The resolution of both sections is in the opening of the heavenly Temple.  Rev. 11 ends with a revealing of the ark of the covenant in this Temple.  One could easily move directly from the end of ch. 11 to ch. 15.  By multiplying visions and recapitulating themes, John is able to emphasise both delay and inexorable progress towards the end.  The delay of ch. 15 comes with the recapitulation of the heavenly battle with the dragon and the earthly battle with the beast in chs. 12-13.  Ch. 14 pictures the victory of the Lamb upon the earth, and ch. 15 returns to heaven to show the conclusion of the drama: the opening of the tent of witness.  In ch. 13, a beast rises out of the sea, a symbol of chaos, but in ch. 15 the heavenly sea is a sea still as glass--there is no chaos.  In ch. 13 are revealed the two beasts, one from the sea and the other from the land.  In ch. 14 is revealed the Lamb on Mt. Zion.  In ch. 13 there are those who bear the number of the beast, 666.  In ch. 14 there are the 144,000 who bear the number of the lamb and his Father.  These constrasts culminate in ch. 15, with the revelation of the temple of witness.

But what name of God is revealed to these two groups, those following the beast and those following the Lamb?  With the opening of God's Temple is the revelation of God's glory; He is named.  There is no one name for God, but the revelation of God is a revelation of His glory, to which people respond.  His glory fills the Temple so that no one can enter it (15.8).  In ch. 16 there are two contrasting responses to the revelation of God's glory, two very different namings of God.

Positive Responses
Negative
Rev. 15.3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: "Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations!  4 Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed."
16.9 but they cursed the name of God, who had authority over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory.

16.5And I heard the angel of the waters say, "You are just, O Holy One, who are and were, for you have judged these things; 6 because they shed the blood of saints and prophets, you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!" 7 And I heard the altar respond, "Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, your judgments are true and just!"
16. 11 and cursed the God of heaven because of their pains and sores, and they did not repent of their deeds.

Revelation 16:14 These are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty.
16.21they cursed God for the plague of the hail, so fearful was that plague.

The positive namings of God in chapters 15-16 speak of God as Pantokrator--Almighty.  This name is found elsewhere in Revelation.  It is connected with God's control over all things more than an abstract notion of omnipotence.[3]

Revelation 1:8 "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
Revelation 4:8 And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, "Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come."
Revelation 11:17 singing, "We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.
Revelation 15:3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: "Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations!
Revelation 16:7 And I heard the altar respond, "Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, your judgments are true and just!"
Revelation 16:14 These are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty.
Revelation 19:6 Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals, crying out, "Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Revelation 19:15 From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.
Revelation 21:22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.

This name, 'Almighty', is 'El Shaddai' in the Old Testament.  It is the name by which God makes known His justice.  But God's name connected to His revelation of His covenant with Israel is 'YHWH.'  God the Almighty is also the God of the covenant.

Exodus 6:1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh: Indeed, by a mighty hand he will let them go; by a mighty hand he will drive them out of his land." 2 God also spoke to Moses and said to him: "I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name 'The LORD' I did not make myself known to them. 4 I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they resided as aliens. 5 I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are holding as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. 6 Say therefore to the Israelites, 'I am the LORD, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians. 8 I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.'"

Both 'YHWH' and 'El-Shaddai' are revelations of God's glory.  Both are associated with God's covenant with Israel.  But 'YHWH' is the name of deliverance, redemption, salvation, and presence.  It is not spoken, for it is holy and is the name that names God's very glory.  To His enemies, God's glory means judgement.  He is the Lord God Almighty.  In Rev. 15-16, God's enemies see His glory poured out in bowls of wrath upon their wickedness.  They name Him, but with curses.  But to His covenant people, God's glory means presence, dwelling with His people, redeeming them, protecting them, fulfilling His covenant promises to them.

In Rev. 21:22, John says that he saw 'no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.'  The twofold glory of God is His Almighty Justice and His Lamb.  Slowly, inexorably, Revelation moves along to the full revelation of God.  He is named.  As He is named, His hiddenness is removed.  The Apocalypse is not about God's hiddenness but His being revealed in all His glory in the world.  But this glory is terrible to behold for the unrighteous who have not given God the glory.  It is terrible for Sodom, Egypt, Babylon or Rome to behold the revelation of 'El Shaddai', the Lord God Almighty.

But the revelation of God's glory for His covenant people is a revelation of a special name only for His people. Rev. 14.3 speaks of the new song that the 144,000 who follow the Lamb sing:

and they sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the one hundred forty-four thousand who have been redeemed from the earth.

Rev. 15 calls this song the song of Moses.  It is also called the song of the Lamb.  They are the same song, because they are both a song of God's covenant mercies, His judgement, and His redemption.  Only the redeemed can sing it, those who follow God's anointed one. For God's covenant people, God is Almighty to save.  For them, God's glory means His holiness, that there is no one like Him in righteousness and justice.  For them, God's glory means that He is true, faithful to His covenant.  His glory, the depth of His being, is named, not as 'Being.' 'YHWH' in Revelation is the title 'Alpha and Omega' or 'the one who is, who was, and who is to come.'  As Richard Bauckham says, the titles equivalent to YHWH indicate 'not God's eternity in himself apart from the world, but his eternity in relation to the world.’[4] This is seen, he argues, in the alteration of the 'who was, who is, and who is to come' title (1.4; 1.8; 4.8) to 'who is and who was' (11.17; 16.5) in eschatological contexts.  As we will see, this is especially true because in Revelation the full revelation of God's glory is made through the Lamb.

Rev. 15 speaks of God's glory in the Temple, which is the full revelation of God.  The basic meaning of the Hebrew word for 'glory' is 'weightiness', and this seems to me to be a better way to speak of what Tracy is in part trying to say without taking the concept in the wrong direction, as Tracy seems to do.  'Hidden' and 'incomprehensible' are only two possible aspects of 'weightiness.'  There are also 'holy' and 'love', as Tracy elsewhere notes.  In our passage, when the glory of God fills the heavenly Temple, no one can enter.  He is 'wholly other,' 'hidden,' and 'incomprehensible.'  But He is so only in a certain, limited sense.  He is so in His holiness, not as a God of chaos or unpredictability, as Tracy would have it.  In fact, God's hiddenness is a revelation of His character as Holiness.  And His incomprehensible character is not unpredictable but fully predictable in the revelation of Righteousness and Justice.  This holy glory issues forth in ultimate and inevitable judgement on all that is unholy.

We see this in the echo in Rev. 15 of several OT passages where the glory of the Lord fills the Temple. 2 Chr. 7.1-2 says that when the glory of the LORD filled the temple, the priests could not enter the house of the LORD.  The people then worship and give thanks to the LORD by naming God: 'For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever' (v. 3).  In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees the glory of God in the Temple.  The seraphs called to one another 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory'.  But this means for Isaiah that he becomes aware of his own sinfulness before God and that of the people.  In Ezek. 43 and 44, when the glory of the LORD fills the temple, God declares that Israel will no longer defile His holy name.  The glory of the LORD filling the temple means that God's closer presence demands goodness, holiness, righteousness, and where this is not the case, there will be judgement.  In Rev. 15.8, the glory of the LORD fills the Temple so that none can enter the Temple, and out of this glory and presence come seven angels with seven bowls of judgement to pour out on the unholy and unrighteous world.  The apocalyptic depth of God is not the incomprehensible Abyss of Valentinian Gnosticism or David Tracy, but the glory of God, the weight of His goodness, holiness, and righteousness made known.

In Revelation, the apocalyptic naming of God, the making known of His glory, is focused on the revealing of the Lamb, of Christ.  Have you ever wondered why in Revelation there is one throne for God and for the Lamb?  This is a profound statement.  The Lamb is the revelation of God.  Several times a voice from the throne speaks (16.17; 19.5; 21.3).  Two people need two thrones, but the Lamb and God have one throne.  The Lamb has already conquered through dying on the cross.  The glory, the holiness, the Almighty power of God are known through the Lamb who was slain and who reigns from the throne of God.  He has conquered by His sacrifice.  He is already reigning upon the throne of God.  He will come again to Judge the earth.  While still future, the Lamb's coming to bring justice to the earth is no longer part of God's hiddenness, for John has taken us through the open door of heaven to see that it is true.  The Apocalypse, far from being about God's hiddenness, is indeed a revelation of God.  It is the revelation of His glory through the Lamb.

This is why Revelation continuously moves toward worship and why this worship is directed to the LORD and the Lamb.  It is not God's incomprehensibility that takes one beyond reason, beyond a cataphatic (knowledge of God through affirmation) naming of God to an apophatic (knowledge of God through negation) naming and then to an excess of meaning beyond language.  Rather, worship is the proper response when God is rightly named.  It is worship, not God's incomprehensibility or His hiddenness that struggles with rational categories and can, with the Spirit's gifting, lift worshipers into new dimensions of praise.  This is not awe at the edge of a great Abyss, as the Gnostics would have it, but awe at the edge of knowing God.

Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 32 (Song of Moses) and Revelation 15

What is it to name God in contexts of suffering, persecution, injustice, unrighteousness?  This was the question of Moses and the Israelite slaves in Egypt just as it was the question for the first Christians who received the Revelation of John in the 90's A.D.  The purpose of Revelation is to help Christians name God in presence of suffering and persecution at the hands of the Roman Emperor, Domitian.  Let us conclude with a closer comparison of Moses' naming of God in Exodus 34, the song of Moses, and what we find in Revelation.

God's revelation of Himself as YHWH to Moses in Ex. 34.6-7 is as follows:

6 The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation."

The literary techniques of delay and recapitulation in Revelation express God's mercy, grace, and slowness to anger.  God's abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin in Exodus have to do with God's covenant relationship with Israel.  This too is expressed in Revelation with repeated words about the protection of those sealed with the name of the Lamb.  Yet this is not the God of Universalists, for Exodus and Revelation agree that the revelation of God involves judgement--by no means clearing the guilty, as Exodus has it, or pouring out bowls of judgement on all unrighteousness on the earth, as Rev. 16 has it.  In all this, the revelation of God in Exodus and Revelation are agreed.

Where we advance in Revelation beyond Exodus is in focusing this naming of God on the Lamb, on Jesus Christ.  This new dimension allows Christians in contexts of suffering, persecution, injustice and unrighteousness to name the same God of Moses with greater understanding and depth.  The Lamb reveals the hidden glory of God.  This revelation is twofold, a positive revelation of God's covenant mercy and a negative revelation of God's judgement.

First, the revelation of God's grace, slowness to anger, covenant love and faithfulness are revealed in Rev. 5 when the Lamb is revealed:

9 They sing a new song: "You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; 10 you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth."

This is why the Lamb is worshipped:

5.12 "Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!"

The song of Moses reveals the same God of mercy and covenant love.  Now, compassion could be thought to flow from God as El-Shaddai, the Lord God Almighty.  This is logical, although not accurate for either Moses or Revelation.  This is a matter of understanding God in terms of personal power: the one with all power has the freedom to behead or to show compassion and may and will do either as He pleases.  This view of God is one where God functions like some medieval sovereign or Arabic prince, or an African dictator wielding personal power in judgement or mercy.  But for Moses, God's compassion is associated with His covenant faithfulness: it is not out of His power to do as He pleases but out of His being bound in covenant relationship with His people that God pours out His compassion.

In Revelation, God's glory is also seen in covenant love, but it is seen more clearly and fully because of the revelation of the Lamb, who was slaughtered to redeem a people from all peoples.  Here compassion intensifies; covenant is not exclusive but inclusive, and compassion becomes sacrifice.  The Lamb challenges us to understand compassion this way.  A theology for development ministry, e.g., needs to see compassion flow from covenant relationship with a people rather than from the power of resources that can be showered on a needy people.  But a Christian ministry of compassion follows the Lamb further: compassion invites all, and it becomes sacrificial and redemptive.

Revelation also reveals God's judgements through the Lamb.  Rev. 15.3-4 gives the words to the song of Moses and of the Lamb that is sung at the beginning of final judgements with the full coming of God's glory.  This is not a song apart from the Lamb, as though mercy and justice are separated.  The revealing of divine judgements is also the work of the Lamb who was slain for covenant faithfulness and love.

3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: "Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations!  4 Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed."

Here too we see a consistent testimony between the God of Moses and the God of the Lamb as to the identity of God.  The song of Moses in Deut. 32 ends with these words:

43 Praise, O heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods! For he will avenge the blood of his children, and take vengeance on his adversaries; he will repay those who hate him, and cleanse the land for his people.

In Moses' song, judgement does not merely stem from God's Law but also from God's mercy, lovingkindness, and faithfulness in His covenant with Israel.  Judaism was not a legalistic religion but one of covenant faithfulness.  Judgement in our societies often follows directly from Law: the breaking of Law results in punishment.  But Moses' song reveals more about divine judgement: it proceeds from God's goodness and compassion.  This brings a whole new meaning to just judgements: judgement is more than deserved when people not only break God's Law but also spurn His covenant faithfulness.

Yet here again we see a difference between the song of Moses and the Lamb.  For Moses, this kind of justice could only apply to Israel, who reject God's covenant faithfulness.  It leaves open the question of those outside this relationship.  But the song of the Lamb includes all nations, for the mercy that Israel knew in God's covenant with them has been extended to all nations through the blood of the Lamb.  The Lamb has, it is repeatedly made clear in Revelation, redeemed some from every tongue, tribe, people and nation.

It is Jesus, the slaughtered Lamb, who reveals God's compassion and judgements in Revelation.  This naming of God was made known to Moses, but its depth, the full glory of God, is revealed in Revelation.  Far from showing God as hidden or even incomprehensible, the logic of God's character is revealed through the Lamb of Revelation. 

Conclusion

Our challenge as a missional church is to name the God of Moses not just for the covenant people but for the nations and to do so where there is suffering, injustice, unrighteousness, and persecution.  We can only do so by naming God with reference to the Lamb.  In this way, the Song of Moses becomes the Song of the Lamb on our lips, a full revelation of God's glory in both covenant invitation and righteous judgement to all nations.




[1] 'In the history of Western theology and philosophy, no greater change occurred in the naming of God, than when Thomas Aquinas read Exodus 3:14 in the Latin translation of the Deus sum qui sum 'I am who I am', and developed what Etienne Gilson nicely named Thomas's Metaphysics of Exodus 3:14. Thomas thereby insisted that God's principal name was not, as it was for his contemporary Bonaventure and the whole Dionysian thought prior to him, the Good, but Being. That is to say God's principle cataphatic or positive naming was Being, the one Being whose very being it is to be. The one being where there is no distinction between essence and existence for God's very essence is to exist. That is a brilliant metaphysical insight, but it shifts everything theologically' (David Tracy, ‘Form and Fragment: Recovering of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God,’ in Werner Jeanrond Aasulv Lande, eds. The Concept of God in Global Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005).  [Page numbers were taken from a different printing of this text online and therefore pages for quotes in the essay will not be given.]
For Dionysius the Areopagite, God’s hiddenness was in his incomprehensibility.  For Martin Luther, God’s hiddenness was in his revelation through the cross: ‘life revealed in death, wisdom through folly, strength through weakness.’  Tracy notes a second sense of God’s Hiddenness in Luther: ‘At the very least, this literally awful, ambivalent sense of God's hiddenness can be so overwhelming that God is sometimes experienced as purely frightening, not tender, sometimes even as an impersonal reality—"it"—of sheer power and energy signified by such metaphors, such fragmentary metaphors as abyss, chasm, chaos, horror.’
[2] Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation; New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
[3] Ibid., p. 30.
[4] Ibid., 29.

Issues Facing Missions Today: 39.2 ‘The World is Coming to Us’

Issues Facing Missions Today: 39.2 ‘The World is Coming to Us’

The second point for discussion in our imaginary ‘Mission 101’ course (module) is:[1]

Point 2: ‘We really no longer need to go anywhere for mission work: through immigration, the world is coming to ‘us.’’

In the previous post, which challenged the suggestion that there are no mission fields today, the issue of immigration was already raised (and reading on this from Andrew Walls and Timothy Tennent placed on our indicative bibliography for the course).  Two very important points in missions are acknowledged: there is in our day an amazing movement of people to the West, and the West increasingly offers new mission fields for missionaries coming from what used to be mission fields in their own right.  Immigration to the West is an important part of present-day missions (as it was in, say, Augustine’s day!).  Yet there are also problems with the statement as it appears in Point 2 and in many off-handed conversations.

One positive aspect of immigration to the West is that immigrants have often strengthened the Church.  Some would say, e.g., that the most spiritually alive or growing (or both) churches in England are often black churches (whether immigrant churches or ethnic minority churches).  Growth in the Assemblies of God in the northern state of Wisconsin in the U.S. comes not so much from natural multiplication but from Hispanic immigration.  Thus, not all immigration to the West is about non-Christian immigrants.  Nor can we say that the West is Christian, even if Christianity has played a significant role in reshaping the culture of Caucasian tribes and Western nations.

A major error in Point 2 is the idea that, because of immigration, we do not need to go anywhere else for missionary work.  The previous post emphasized the continued importance of geographical strategies in missions.  Another matter is that ‘missions’ is not only a matter of geography.  As the Church Universal’s mission, there are multiple reasons for believers to engage in ministry around the world.  This is not to equate all ministry with mission, but it is to acknowledge that evangelism, Bible translation, church planting, and theological education are not easily discussed with geographical restrictions.  The same might be said for an understanding of mission that involves helping ministries and development work: if this is our understanding of missionary work, then the place for mission is where the need arises.

Another mistake in Point 2 entails getting caught up in the Western media’s presentation of the news.  Immigration to the West has been one of the major news stories of the year (2015).  However, immigration is occurring elsewhere.  For example, immigration to South Africa rarely gets a mention.  Wholly reliable statistics seem impossible to obtain regarding the population of South Africa.  One report in 2000 stated that South Africa is a country of 40 million (however, the census in 2011 had the registered population at 51.7 million) and ‘has between 500,000 and four million unauthorized foreign residents.’[2]  This is not the place to try to sort out conflicting and changing data.  The point is that even working with such statistics, South Africa may have close to 10% of its population composed of illegal immigrants—and another 3% of legal immigrants might be included.[3]  For this and other significant reasons (e.g., the breakdown of law and order, corruption, unemployment, the emigration of highly educated, white citizens, and AIDS), South Africa needs missionaries and other foreign involvement precisely because it has so many immigrants.

According to the Pew Research Center, illegal immigrants in the US in 2014 numbered 11.3 million, or 3.5% of the population.[4] The report further states that half of the illegal immigrants come from Mexico, a predominantly Roman Catholic country (even if many of these are only nominal Christians), and 60% of unauthorized immigrants settled in just six states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois).  Immigrants in 2015 to Europe, on the other hand, are predominantly non-Christian—as is Europe itself.  The International Organization for Immigration estimates that, from January through September, 2015, some 464,000 immigrants have entered Europe.[5]  With a population of just over 743,000,000, this amounts to less than 1% of the population in Europe.  Thus I offer some reflection on this data in order to emphasize the fact that, the more one digs into the statistics, the more one realizes that they point to specific issues facing specific regions and are not, therefore, statistics to guide mission strategy in general:
*Immigration from other African nations to South Africa may have no effect on the percentage of Christians in the country but nevertheless increases the need for missionary activity in the country;
*Immigration from Hispanic countries to the United States may increase the number of persons identifying themselves as ‘Christian’ (many, no doubt, being nominal Christians) and, in some cases, are revitalizing denominations;
*Immigration to the UK is both revitalizing the Church and increasing the numbers of non-Christians;
*The present immigration ‘crisis’ in Europe may be bringing non-Christians to a region of the world that was once shaped by many Christian convictions and values but that has moved very far from those Christian roots.

Several comments arise from this cursory discussion.  First, the West is not the only part of the world dealing with vast numbers of immigrants.  Second, illegal immigration is not from every country but from particular countries—and in the case of the US and South Africa, many of these immigrants are from more ‘Christianized’ countries.  Third, that a part of a population immigrates does not mean that everyone or even a majority of persons are immigrating: there is still a need to reach the countries from which these immigrants came with the Gospel.  Fourth, the West is not Christian.  Of course, no country can be called Christian, but many countries that were profoundly influenced by Christianity in Europe and the Americas are not very Christian any more, in any sense of the term.  Fifth, a related matter to the story of immigration to Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is the remarkable fact that no European country has birth rates high enough (at 2.1 births per woman) to maintain its population at the present numbers.[6]  In the words of George Weigel (Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Roman Catholic ‘Ethics and Public Policy Center’), ‘something has gone dry in the soul’ in Europe that is illustrated by statistics such as this related to the family.[7]  Sixth, if one goal of missions is ‘For every people, an indigenous church’ (so the mission of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship), then merely ministering with immigrants to the West (or South Africa or Australia) is hardly a sufficient strategy for missions.  Nor is a broader understanding of missions that includes social transformation served if the focus shifts in mission activity in the West to engaging immigrants to the exclusion of sending missionaries abroad.

More needs to be said on this issue in terms of the types of ministry that constitute mission activity.  There are still ‘unreached’ areas of the world that need to hear the Gospel.[8]  There are still many languages that lack Holy Scripture—and many languages that could use a new translation.[9]  There are certainly countries where ‘churches’ exist but where they are not ‘healthy’ Christian communities.[10]  Moreover, the Great Commission mission of teaching (teaching disciples and educating persons for ministry) is a task that needs to be carried out in local and regional contexts, not by bringing students from overseas to Western theological colleges.[11]

The movement of peoples in our day is an amazing, front line story.  We regularly hear how the story of immigration is unfolding in Europe and the USA, but the story is also unfolding outside the West.  Immigration trends do call for serious strategizing in Christian missions.  Immigration also allows some countries not typically sending missionaries overseas for economic (or other) reasons to engage in ministry to immigrants in various ways—from handing out a bottle of water to sharing the Gospel verbally (leaving aside what we mean by ‘mission’ for now).  The small Evangelical body of believers in Croatia, e.g., trained in relief aid through the Balkan war in the 1990s, has in the past month been able to mobilize themselves to minister to immigrants streaming through their country to European countries further north and west.  However, none of this provides an argument to diminish the sending of missionaries to foreign countries.  The task remains one of going into all the world, whether we understand our mission to be the Great Commission of making Christian disciples and teaching them the Christian faith or the Great Commandment of loving our neighbours’ as ourselves.




[1] See ‘Issues Facing Missions Today: 36. Missions 101.’
[2] ‘South Africa Amnesties,’ Migration News Vol. 7.1 (Jan. 2000).  Accessed 8 October, 2015: https://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=2015.
[3] ‘Rainbow Immigration,’ South Africa Info (8 October, 2015).  Accessed 8 October, 2015: http://www.southafrica.info/travel/documents/immigration-trends.htm#.Vhb-HvlViko.
[4] ‘5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the U.S.,’ Pew Research Center (July 24, 2015).  Online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/24/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.  About half the illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
[5] Jeanne Park, “Europe’s Migration Crisis,” Council on Foreign Relations (Sept. 23, 2015), accessed 25 October, 2015: http://www.cfr.org/migration/europes-migration-crisis/p32874.
[6] See George Weigel, ‘Eurocentricity, Demographic Winter, and the Synod’ in ‘Letter Number Ten, Letters From the Synod: Reports and Commentary. From Rome and Elsewhere, on the XIV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops,’ First Things (Oct. 9, 2015).  Online at: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/10/letter-number-ten. Not mentioned by Weigel is Russia, which also has a negative population growth.  The US’s population growth rate is 0.7%.  Kuwait’s is the highest at 4.3%.  See the World Bank’s statistics online (accessed October 9, 2015): http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW.  Compare UNICEF’s country statistics: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/.
[7] Ibid.
[8] One attempt to identify people groups without sufficient resources to evangelize their own people, the Joshua Project, places the number at over 6,600.  Accessed 15 October, 2015: http://joshuaproject.net/. Note the demographic work of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity: http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ and the Pew Research Center for religion and public life (with special attention to its ‘Religion’ section): http://www.pewresearch.org/.  
[9] See the statistics of Wycliffe Global Alliance, e.g. at: http://resources.wycliffe.net/statistics/WycliffeGA_stats_2015_FAQs_EN.pdf.  Also see United Bible Society, http://www.unitedbiblesocieties.org/translation/.
[10] By way of example, I might reference one of my own works (with the help of others) that attempted to ‘map’ the convictions, practices, concerns, and so forth of baptist communities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.  The work did not focus on evaluating the health of churches; the focus was on describing the churches through surveys conducted in the early part of this century.  I would hope, though, that this sort of research could help in discussions of 'church health' as much as strengths, needs, and so forth.  See Rollin Grams and Parush R. Parushev, eds., Towards an Understanding of European Baptist Identity: Listening to the Churches in Armenia, Bulgaria, Central Asia, Moldova, North Caucasus, Omsk and Poland (Prague, CZ: International Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006).
[11] On the issue of foreign students training in theological colleges in the West, and the many issues involved, see the excellent article by Jenny McGill, ‘Furthering Christ’s Mission: International Theological Education,’ in Transformation 32.4 (October 2015): 225-239.

Issues Facing Missions Today: 39.1 ‘Missions is not from the West to the Rest?’

Issues Facing Missions Today: 39.1 ‘Missions is not from the West to the Rest?’

Introduction:

In post number 36 of 'Issues Facing Missions Today,' I raised 20 topics for discussion in a hypothetical ‘Missions 101' course (or module).  Dr. Mark Royster tossed me an irresistible bone in a comment on that post: he suggested that I set up an opportunity for discussion around these points, giving me a limit of 500 words for each one.  (I will try to keep things in the neighbourhood of 1,000 words.)  Knowing that much discussion has already taken place around these topics, I’m somewhat reticent to gnaw on these 20 points, but it is also unfair of me to leave things as I posted them earlier.  So, with the caveat that what is said here is incomplete and introductory, I will attempt to offer some commentary to which others might respond with corrections and expansions as they see fit (allowing for some moderation on my part if the need arises).  The goal here is to identify truth in these statements while also separating the truth from error, and my suggestion in blog post #36 was that there is often more error than not in these points as I stated them.

Point 1 stated: ‘Missions is not from the West to the rest.  It is from everywhere to everywhere.  There are no longer ‘mission fields.’’

One hears this constantly these days.  If the point is descriptive, then the first two sentences are accurate and well worth dwelling upon.  I might, then, begin on a positive note.  Already towards the end of the 20th century, people were observing that former ‘mission fields’ were now sending missionaries.  This is part of the story to be told.  The mission agency, SIM, e.g., already had 9 sending countries in the days I served with it, and one of their great success stories in missions, Nigeria, had an established church (ECWA) sending out large numbers of missionaries. 

Yet missionary engagement is part of the nature of the Church itself, and the history of the Church is the history of missions.  Part of ‘Missions 101’ should entail reading a work such as Andrew F. Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith.[1]  In conjunction, students might also read Timothy Tennent’s World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-First Century.[2]

However, an appreciative study of the issues in such works requires certain previous study in the theological curriculum.  I would suggest three prerequisites to Missions 101.  Our course would be Biblical Theology 101, but it must be taught in such a way that students could begin their study of theology not only as Biblical theology but also with an understanding that Biblical theology is missional.  This mission is firstly God’s own revelation of Himself to the world, starting with the calling of Abraham/Israel from the nations for the nations.[3]  In this and other important ways, as some have recently argued, Biblical theology is significantly missional.[4]  Our Missions 101 might also require Church History 101 and 102 as prerequisites, with Church History taught through the lens of the Church’s missionary history and its cross-cultural engagement (a mixed story of good and bad with many lessons to be learned).[5]

This sort of curriculum would help to disentangle muddled thinking that takes the ambiguous second step of ‘Missions is from everywhere to everywhere.’  Yes, missions has been and is part of the history and DNA of the Church and therefore from everywhere to everywhere.  Yet it has been and remains in good measure a purposeful, geographical spread.  That is, we should not confuse the truth in this statement with the notion that there is no benefit to thinking geographically anymore when studying and planning missionary work.  The truth lies between that thinking that disavows the concept of mission fields and those mission-minded churches that focus too much on foreign cultures and places without appreciating missionary mobility in fulfillment of missional goals.

Some of good, geographical thinking in our day entails the reverse story from sending: immigrants from unreached regions of the world are coming to so-called ‘Christian’ countries[6] rather than missionaries going to those regions themselves.  Still, there is room for, by way of example, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship’s mission of ‘For every people, an indigenous church’ and not only its further mission of ‘For every church, a mission vision.’[7]  Ralph Winter may have overstated the meaning of ethnoi (nations) as ‘people groups’ and the Joshua Project may be too focussed on thinking of missions as a particular, geographically definable task, but there remains a geographical, ethnic dimension to mission planning.  The Great Commission (Mt. 28.18-20; cf. Mt. 24.14) remains relevant.

In this regard, there are still ‘mission fields’—places where the Gospel has yet to be preached, where churches have yet to be established, and where self-sustaining, self-propagating, Biblically sound, theologically orthodox churches have yet to grow to maturity.  This is so not only where the Gospel has yet to be preached, Scripture has yet to be translated, clear, Biblical teaching is still desperately needed, and healthy churches are yet to be established.  It is also true in places where established churches have faltered and the shining lampstand of the testimony of Christ has been removed (cf. Rev. 2.5).  This is true as much for the devastated Church in the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, as it is for the formerly orthodox denomination in those countries where the rabid hound of heresy has run wild in the streets.  Indeed, Christianity has gone through three plantings in Africa over its two thousand year history.[8]  It is ripe for replanting in certain European countries.  New mission fields appear all the time.




[1] Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996).  See also Andrew F. Walls and Cathy Ross, eds., Mission in the Twenty-First Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission (London: Maryknoll, 2008).
[2] Timothy Tennent’s World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-First Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2010).  This would expand the reflection on the history of the Church and the theology of mission in Wall’s work.
[3] Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).
[4] An Old Testament and a New Testament theology text needs to be used to make this point.  Taking steps in the right direction, although not thoroughgoing enough from a missions perspective, are: Robin Routledge, Old Testament Theology: A Thematic Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012) and I. Howard Marshall, New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: 2014).  I have been working on this blog in parts of the Why Foreign Missions? section to explore Biblical (yes, the Old Testament too) theology through a studies on the Gospel.  (I am reworking the blogs for publication some day.)  Also helpful are several works by Michael Goheen, such as A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011); Introducing Christian Mission Theology: Scripture, History, and Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Downers Grove, IL: 2014).
[5] Two possible textbooks for Church History 101 might be: Eckhard Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, Vols. 1 and 2 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004) and Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity: Volume I: Beginnings to 1500, Rev. ed. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1975).  Latourette tells the Church’s story largely through the lens of mission.  Church History 102 could continue with Latourette’s 2nd volume, ‘Reformation to the Present’ (1975).  Both courses should include reading from Stephen Neill and Owen Chadwick, A History of Christian Missions, Rev. (Penguin Books, 1990).
[6] Of course, there is no such thing as a ‘Christian country.’
[8] Paul Bowers, ‘Nubian Christianity: The Neglected Heritage,’ Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology iv.1 (1985): pp. 3-23.  Bowers’ primary point is that African Christianity, represented in the Nubian Church, is almost as old as Christianity itself and is not some new import in the past several centuries from the West.  Accessed 8 October, 2015: http://www.theoledafrica.org/othermaterials/files/nubianeglectedheritage.pdf

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