It's Monday and time for another installment of "Monday is for Missiology." Long time readers of the blog are familiar with my Meanings of Missional series, but for those who have missed it here is where the conversation unfolded on the blog.

Meanings of Missional

The Meanings of Missional: Part 1
Where we ease into the word, missional. Where did the term come from, and do we really need it today?

The Meanings of Missional: Part 2
Where we begin to look at the relationship between the words mission, missions, and missional.

The Meanings of Missional: Part 3
Where we consider the sentness of the church as fundamental to the word "missional."

The Meanings of Missional: Part 4
Where we look at the role of the church and evangelism in the missio Dei.

The Meanings of Missional: Part 5
Where we consider the need to be God's missionary people, with a biblical definition of mission, focused on the missio dei.

Monday is for Missiology: The Eschatological Dimension of the Missional Church

Monday is for Missiology: The Church, the Kingdom, and the Mission

As I've said before, I believe it is very important to look at theological and historical roots of the missional conversation if we want to frame the current discussion with integrity. If we don't, we could easily make some of the same mistakes that caused the leftward trajectory in a theological direction during the missio Dei movement in the mid- and late-20th century. We want to be faithful to the Scriptures as well as good students of history.

Today we will look at a couple of caveats regarding the eschatological language (the coming Kingdom is "already and not yet") of mission.

Caveats

Citing German Lutheran theologian Ernst Käsemann, Bosch raises some points of caution regarding the language of the church as "sign or sacrament." Käsemann believed that this kind of vocabulary might muddy the distinction between Christ and the church. To call the church a "sign" may obscure that the only genuine sign of the church is the cross of Christ. Concerns like these inspired the World Council of Churches at the Faith and Order meeting in Louvain, Belgium in 1971 to clarify: "The church...is a sign. But it is also no more than a sign." Further, they said, words like sacrament are not attributes the church confers to itself: "God himself has chosen the [church] to be in Christ the sign or sacrament of the unity of his kingdom." Bosch summarizes these points by saying, "When the church, in its mission, risks referring to itself as sacrament, sign, or instrument of salvation, it is therefore not holding up itself as a model to be emulated. Its members are not proclaiming, 'Come to us!' but 'Let us follow him.'"

Additionally, it is of the utmost importance to evade the common dueling extremes:

1) the extreme eschatologicalization of mission, and

2) the extreme historicization of mission.

First, an obsession with "end times" can paralyze mission. Walter Freytag strongly criticized missionaries and mission agencies that appeared to welcome the corrosion of society as a sure indication of the imminence of the Second Coming (parousia). M.A.C. Warren also notes that Freytag warned that the stress on the waiting for the "not yet" could "easily lead to 'quietism'...," making the church "guilty of the sin of temerity...[and] timidity." Bosch continues:

A fixation on the parousia...simply means that we are evading our responsibilities in the here and now. Submitting to Christ as Savior is inseparable from submitting to him as Lord in our personal lives but also political and economic systems in the corporate life of society.

On the other hand, a fixation on an entirely "this-worldly" understanding of the eschatological character of mission is equally dangerous. The threat lies in the abandonment of any idea of the uniqueness of the church and instead concentrates on what happens in the world outside the church. The incarnation becomes the representation of the world-historical salvation process that emerges gradually through cultural, moral, social, political, and even revolutionary illumination.

The attraction to an over-historicized eschatology seems to arise when individuals become impatient with the "slowness" of the kingdom coming and in turn, take control and redefine the kingdom, seeking to build it with newer techniques, while continuing to use the name of Christ to endorse their programs and social endeavors. "Mission" merely becomes shorthand for the fulfillment of societal responsibilities.

Bosch is quick to say that the problem with this paradigm is that in becoming the "arbiters of what action is appropriate," God's reign always passes sovereign judgment over the pinnacle of our ideals and often goes against the grain of history, overcoming our diminution of the gospel to mere ethics. He continues: "We will never realize our blueprint for a societal and political order that will match the will and rule of God...[T]he future holds the primacy. The ultimate triumph remains uniquely God's gift."

So, where do you think we are erring today? And how can we avoid the reactionary pendulum swing from one extreme to the other?