N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope

I'm cruising through N. T. Wright's recent book, Surprised by Hope, (on my mother's ipad--don't get me started) marking quotes. Part of Wright's thesis in this book, close to the work in my dissertation, is that our truncated views of salvation also truncate our understandings of mission. I read Wright's stuff about hope and I think, "amen." But it dawned on me as I read that some of what he's saying many Christians would find shocking. Do these shock you?

"It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about "going to heaven when you die" and not a lot about a postmortem hell either."

"The wonderful description in Rev 4 and 5 of the 24 elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the lamb, beside the sea of glass, is not, despite Charles Wesley's great hymns, a picture of the last day, with all the redeemed in heaven at last. It is a picture of present reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life."

Wright finds troubling the view of the future in these classic hymn lryics.

"Till in the ocean of thy love
We lost ourselves in heaven above."

"Heaven's morning breaks and earth's vain shadows flee..."

He writes, "Some of the hymns in the revivalist and charismatic traditions slip easy into the mistake, cognate as we shall see with misleading views of the "second coming," of suggesting that Jesus will return to take his people away from earth and "home" to heaven. Thus declares that wonderful hymn, "How Great Thou Art," in its final stanza, declares:
              When Christ shall come, with shout of acclimation,
               And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
The second line might better read, "And heal this world, what joy shall fill my heart."

Wright points out that in the climactic scene in Revelation, the saints are not taken up into heaven, but the new Jerusalem comes down to earth. Moreover, he suggests that our preoccupation with heaven as a home owes much to a spiritualizing tendency (Platonic?) that simply doesn't appear in the NT, and with consequences.

"English evangelicals gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society (such as we find with Wilberforce in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) about the same time that they gave up believing robustly in the resurrection and settled for a disembodied heaven instead."

"Much Christian and sub-Christian tradition has assumed that we do all indeed have souls that need saving, and that the soul, if saved, will be the part of us that goes to heaven when we die. All this, however, finds minimal support in the New Testament, including the teaching of Jesus, where the word soul, though rare, reflects ...what we would call the whole person..."

"Resurrection meant bodies. We cannot emphasize this enough, not least because much modern writing continues, most misleadingly, to use the word as a synonym for life after death in the popular sense."

"The early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world."

"Only in the late second century, a good 150 years after the time of Jesus, do we find people using the word resurrection to mean something quite different than what it meant in Judaism and early Christianity, namely (what people came to believe later), a spiritual experience in the present leading to a disembodied hope in the future."

Enough? To be fair to Wright, I've lifted these out of context. The blows are likely easier to take in context, Still, he does mess with most of our understandings of the future, but only because he thinks there's something more promising in the biblical understanding. So, read the book to get the full picture.

p.s., for those of view looking for an alternative to marcus borg, et al, this is a good place to go.

What's Better Than Jesus?

It's weird how your brain gets trapped around a way of seeing things. In my long unraveling, which I think might be an appropriate way to think about life, I am now spinning around the notion of how Christo-dominant my theology has been. Now, Christo-dominant means Christ-dominant ("el nino" means "the nino"), and that would seem to be a good thing. He is, after all, the image of the invisible God... No one comes to the Father except by the Son....I want to know nothing except Christ and him crucified...

I know the verses and I am not running from them at all. In fact, in my unraveling they have gained significance even while that significance has changed.

And for an initial warrant for this little excursion at the edge of our imagination, I would simply point out that Jesus signaled realities greater than himself as well. In John's gospel, Jesus reminds us over and over again that he has been sent to do the will of one who is greater than himself. More, he tells his disciples that it is better for him to leave them so that the Spirit might come. Jesus even expects that greater things will actually be accomplished by his followers.

My hunch is that if we had similar discourses from the Father and Spirit they would sound much the same. "It is better for you that I send you my Son," the Father might say. And we can definitely imagine the Spirit saying, "My job is not to seek my own glory, but to glorify the Father and the Son." Back to this in a moment.

I think I would also say that Jesus thinks the Kingdom of God is greater than himself. Jesus is the Messiah, the One upon whom the Spirit rests, and, therefore, the rightful one to announce the coming of the new age. He is irreplacably the inaugurator of the Kingdom of God. More, he embodies the reign of God, his life a living demonstration of the reign and rule of God so that when we follow Jesus we know we are treading on the path of the Kingdom.

Still, Jesus does not proclaim himself. His proclamation is not of the fact of the incarnation. He doesn't say, "Repent, God has become flesh!" And he is coy about his identity in various ways in the different gospels (John, being the exception here). Jesus comes proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom of God. And in relation to that Kingdom, his earthly ministry is limited. Jesus does not finally establish the Kingdom of God on earth, and his mission is limited in some way to the lost house of Israel. Something greater is still on its way. Evidently, the final realization of the Kingdom of God among humankind requires more actors than just Jesus.

Now I could spend several paragraphs qualifying these last few, offering all kinds of caveats. I will simply stipulate here to all the verses talking about the full-sufficiency of Jesus. I don't think this mitigates against my larger point. And what is my larger point? I was afraid you might ask me that. Remember, I am unraveling.

But for starters, let's go back to the Gospel of John. The drama of abundant life played out in John is not simply an interaction between "Jesus and me." There is a larger drama on display, a story of Father, Son, and Spirit in which none of the divine persons is sufficient alone. There is always a greater than, a someone else, a something more to come. There is always room, always possibility, always abundance. This openness to the other in God is so important for overcoming views of life that are primarily closed, sorted into categories of us and them around narratives of inevitability. This is one of the gains of a Trinitarian imagination, of learning to think of God as three persons.

This is particularly important in mission theology. Many have laid the imperialistic tendencies of Western mission at the feet of a disproportionately large Christology. The work of Christ is finished. The church is the possessor of this finished work. Mission is taking Christ to the nations. It's a closed story. This is sometimes contrasted with a mission grounded more in pneumatology, that is in a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit blows where it wills and always precedes the church in the world. A robust doctrine of the Spirit is also often accompanied by a more vibrant eschatology, the future breaking in fresh ways into the present. This is an open story.

Now, obviously good Christology should yield good pneumatology, eschatology, and vice versa. I am arguing not for one or the other, but an open imagination informed by a dynamic view of the Trinity.

Gospel and Cultures, 2

In the last post I ended with the question, "What does it mean to define a relationship in terms of news?" This question followed the observation that for the earliest Christians, gospel was a mode of engagement with the world. It is significant that they chose the word "gospel" to define in primary ways their relationship with the world around them. What is it that Christians offer the world? News. Good news.

James Brownson, a New Testament scholar, was the one who started me thinking down this road. Brownson, in Speaking the Truth in Love, talks about the significance of choosing gospel, a fairly secular term, over other more typically religious words readily available for Christian use. Words like law, or instruction, or mystery, or truth. Christians use these words, but not in the same way that other religions use them, and certainly not with the broad significance of the word gospel. These words establish different types of relationships. They have different modes of relating and create different social realities. If this is the case, then it stands to reason that gospel would also form a different kind of cultural engagement.

Truth, for instance, tends to manage itself in certain ways. It tends to be argumentative (in a good sense). It is interested in nailing things down with precision. It seeks norms and justifications. The common mode of relating is teaching. Experts rule.

Or take mystery. Mystery is for the initiated. It is unveiled for the enlightened, and it typically requires some sort of secret process to decode. You have to get inside the walls to figure out what it is all about. (A modernist version of this might be scientology).

The category of news has some places of overlap, but is very different in others. News is public. While it typically is about something new, this new thing is for all, not just for the initiated. And its primary mode is witness, not teaching. It is concerned with the eventfulness of situations, not just the universal principles. News cares about truthfulness, but in terms of the authenticity of the source, less in terms related to certain indubitable ideas or notions.

News is related to events. Something happened or is happening or is going to happen. It is not about getting certain ideas in place in an argument. I like the way that Amos Wilder describes early Christian speech. "It is naïve, it is not studied; it is extempore and directed to the occasion, it is not calculated to serve some future hour. This utterance is dynamic, actual, immediate, reckless of posterity; not coded for catechists or repeaters" (Early Christian Rhetoric, 12-13). It is news.

This news is related to what God is doing in the world, and in particular what he is accomplishing in and through Jesus and the Spirit. For the NT writers, the advent of God in Jesus and the Spirit signals a turning of the ages. The old ordering of things is judged and found wanting; a new ordering rooted in God's future salvation is appearing. This appearing is always in a sense a new thing. The gospel is not simply that God did something in the past that matters to us today. The gospel is ongoing news of an emerging new creation. Jesus is risen and his reign established. The Spirit is active. This is always newsworthy in an ongoing way.

Staying in this mode (gospel) requires certain practices and perspectives. It requires certain aesthetic or journalistic instincts. It requires participation in the ongoing eventfulness of the gospel, which we will turn our attention to in future posts.

This is first order business for a faith that believes in an active God. This is not to say that there isn't need to nail down things propositionally from time to time, or unlock a few mysteries along the way, or clarify moral or ethical standards. But these are not the primary ways the first Christians sought to define their relationship with the culture as a whole. And that's a pretty big deal.

Gospel and Cultures

There are few conversations in Christian theological circles these days more full of energy than the one concerning gospel and cultures. There are many reasons for this, some external and some internal to the dynamics of the Christian experience. Some of the energy is simply around defining terms. For instance, what do we mean by culture, or as you'll see in my use, cultures. Several, notably Kathryn Tanner, have traced the shift in the meaning of this word. It once referred only to the achievement of a particular society, or more precisely, the achievement of a certain class. Only some were cultured, namely the elite.

Now we refer to culture as a whole way of life, as a web of significance, as something in which all of us participate and find a common life. In fact, culture is no longer simply something we achieve or produce. It precedes us, shaping our identities to a large extent through language, convention, rituals, and images.

One more shift, one under way in my opinion, is to see culture less as a spatial category, and more in temporal terms. Culture precedes us because it is moving, like a stream, which means it is also eluding us in some ways. We can no longer speak of it as something fixed. It is less a continent to explore and map (spatial), but more a stream to navigate (temporal). And because it is moving and not fixed, we also recognize that culture(s) is both plural and specific. Some have stopped using the word culture at all, preferring cultural. We can say something is cultural without nailing something down as the culture. Others talk about cultural flows, a variety of streams in which we find ourselves. No matter how you speak of it, notions of culture are still being explored.

This is an important conversation for Christianity because of its unique relationship through the centuries to cultures. Christianity has proved fairly nimble in crossing cultural boundaries. Imagine, for instance, the boundary crossing impulse in telling the story of Jesus in a language other than the one he spoke. Islam and Judaism, generally speaking, are much more wed to a particular cultural expression rooted in a particular language. Christians are eager to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible and do not require adherents to read the Bible in its original language. This is a pretty big deal.

It is also striking to me that the New Testament is comprised of documents representing a season of transition in the life of the people of God. It is a missionary literature propelled by the impulse that there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. This universalizing tendency in Christianity has to take into account every culture it encounters.

There is much to say here, and perhaps over time we can say more. But what I think is still largely lacking in the contemporary conversation is a rigorous discussion of gospel.

I often hear people say that the gospel is a constant, but the tactics, methods, or modes that we use are cultural. The gospel, here, is a fixed content. Like spatial understandings of culture, it is a fixed container. The way to make the gospel relevant is to give it a contemporary facelift, communicate it in ways that are meaningful to a particular culture. The relationship is kernel and husk. The gospel is the kernel, the seed that never changes. The husks are the cultural elements that can be peeled away. They are temporary, simply a matter of expediency. Relevance here is using movies or U2 concert footage to make the gospel more culturally accessible.

This is to be preferred to a view of gospel that overidentifies everything we do as the gospel. Some churches won't change at all because they think of everything as fixed. They think of Christianity in spatial terms. It can be identified completely and finally through certain characteristics, or marks of the church, that are immutable.

The problems here are numerous. Most critique from a theological perspective focuses on the naive understanding of the relationship between content and form. How we do something is just as much content as what we say. Form is meaning, and the adoption of cultural forms is a risk, perhaps inevitable, that threatens the particular formfulness of Christianity.

I appreciate this critique and have said things like this before. But I am coming to think that the greater problem in a kernel-husk view of gospel and culture is that it always makes the world a secondary concern to church. The church has the kernel, the world the husks. The world is only valuable as an illustration. The church can settle the gospel and its own identity beforehand in some kind of pure form, without any engagment with the world. This tempts theology to think of its task as settling certain topics related to certain notions of God (primarily owing to a substantialist ontology, i.e. spatial), rather than tracking the leading of a living God in the world he loves (more temporal?).

So, I want to see if there might be a similar gain for the term gospel to the one that delivered notions of culture from a fixed, spatial understanding.

And gospel is the place to start, I believe, for this reason. It is the term coined by the early Christians to indicate the mode of relationship they had with others. What does it mean to define a relationship in terms of news? In distinction to law or instruction or mystery or even truth? This is a vitally important question.

God, World, Church

This story is becoming increasingly familiar to me. A church spends a lot of time focusing on its identity. It does this primarily in relation to certain beliefs or ideas. These get shaped into a mission or vision statement, perhaps even a strategic plan if the church is really aggressive. The idea is that if identity can be established before hand, then action will follow. Great theory. It seldom works.

It seldom works for a lot of reasons. The biggest of these reasons, and perhaps the source of all the rest, is that identity discovery is a complex matter requiring more than just self-reflection. We don't know who we are fully before we act. And we don't know who we are fully apart from our life with others.

When we think of identity as something we settle before mission, then the world ends up being only the place where we deliver the things that have already been decided. The world becomes an extension of our project, a target of our good intentions, a passive recipient of a benevolent patron. Often, we define our identities over/against the world, and when we offer them our already determined lives we find them less than impressed. We are often irrelevant to their lives.

The great thing about the missional church movement from my perspective is that is insists that the church only understands its life as a church in mission, as a church in relation to others. Some who write about the missional church still want to define the church's identity before engagement with the world. They talk about the church's essence as something that comes before mission. The church is and then the church does.

But if our identity is truly an identity in God's mission, then we cannot know who we are, not completely, apart from a real life engagement with God's world. We discover who we are in relation to others.

This view of mission makes more sense in relation to a particular view of God. If God is just a set of enduring characteristics, an essence, or enduring substance that is unchangeable or unaddressable, then there is no need to consider the other in terms of our identity or mission. This, however, is not the biblical view of God.

In our last post, we noted that the Cappadocians (you remember them, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his other brother Gregory Nanzianzus, well only the first was his actual brother) held together the three persons of the Trinity as one by defining personhood in relation to otherness. We find our personhood only in relation, in this case God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Cappadocians, however, still wanted to protect the Father from the otherness of the world. God is known primarily only in the inner relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the world participates in God only through the Son. The otherness of the world tells us nothing of who God is as a person.

Recent theologians, however, have taken the Cappadocians view of personhood and tied it to the biblical narrative in a way that brings the world back into view. We don't know who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, apart from a fallen, suffering world. God's identity as Father, Son, and Spirit is only fully revealed in the concrete circumstances of the world, and in particular in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We know God as Father, Son, and Spirit only through God's suffering participation in, with, and for the world. Our identity, as well as God's, cannot be defined in essential categories, but only in suffering participation with the world.

God, World, Church, 3

What accounts for some of our practices in church? For instance, what accounts for various practices of communion? In congregations of my ecclesial tradition we typically pass trays down rows and urge people to turn inward, to reflect on the meaning of the death of Jesus for them personally. This is not the way churches have always practiced the Lord's Supper. We read no description of this kind of practice anywhere in the literature of early Christianity? What accounts for this practice?

Several things would have to be answered to get a question like this. Our practices bear many meanings and not all of them are readily accessible. But at the very least there would be issues related to what we think of God and what it means to be human, and in turn what it means to be saved.

I've been making the point that in the Western theological tradition, God tends to be thought of as a single subject with three different roles (creator, redeemer, sustainer). Personhood is related to the acting subject. This not only applies to God, but also to humans. I am a self-contained individual. I count as a person because I am a self. Salvation, therefore, is primarily an encounter between Jesus and the self. It happens to me, in me, as a self-contained individual. It makes sense, in light of this, to practice "table" as a private experience with individual portions and inward thoughts.

This applies to more than just communion. This kind of individualism accounts for much of what we experience in worship. I often hear prayers or calls to worship that invite us to put the cares of the world aside so that we can focus on God, as if we could understand God apart from the cares of the world. I have invited students to observe worship to determine the "horizon" of the congregation's awareness. What is it that the worship service is aiming at? What horizon accounts for its practices, its language, etc. It becomes pretty clear for them that our practices cannot be understood primarily in relation to the world, or to a community, but in relation to individuals and most directly to their inner lives.

This is not wrong, in and of itself. It is, however, limited. And ultimately, if it is the primary imagination of the congregation, it makes otherness a problem. And I think this is rooted in part by our understanding of God.

This is not, however, the only way that God and humanity have been conceived in the Christian tradition. As we noted before, the Eastern church emphasized the thre persons of the Trinity. They had to account for God's unity in some way that did not diminish the three persons. They did this, in part, by redefining what it truly meant to be a person. We are not persons as individuals. We are persons only in relation to an other. Personhood is not defined primarily by individuality, but precisely in our recognition and engagement of the other. We understand personhood more completely when we imagine God as three.

Eastern theological notions have recently gained more currency in ecumenical discussion in large part because our understandings of personhood are changing in the Western philsophical tradition. Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am," has been expanded. There is no, "I think," apart from the recognition of an other. There is no "I" apart from a "Thou." Our identities are inescapably social. Ricouer, Levinas, Volf and others have written powerfully about our obligation to the other on the path toward personhood. It is not surprising, in light of this, that the Trinity has come more into focus in Christian theology. And social understandings of the Trinity have changed the way I think about what happens at church.

But here's the bigger payoff in my book. When we see God this way, the world becomes something other than the target at the end of the church's strategic interests. The church cannot know its true identity apart from its koinonia, its sharing participation, with the world. More, it is in God's love for the world that we truly see the nature of God, the love of the truly other. God's participation with the world, not just the church, is necessary for us to see God as a person, for his righteousness to be revealed. This kind of imagination about God would radically change our practices related to mission.

OK, I've gotten some of the big pieces out there, though in an overly simplified way. Let me see if I can break it down over the ext few weeks. Some of you have confessed eye glaze when you read this kind of stuff. I'll only invite you to love me as an other and I'll try to love you as a reader better as I unpack this.

God, World, Church, 2

All of us have an imagination related to God, church, and world. That is, we have imagined a world that accounts for the relationships between these three realities and this imagination authorizes any number of practices. Paul Ricouer (a moment of genuine respect at the mention of his name) sees the imagination as a productive human capacity that mediates the relationship between beliefs and practices. And people like Graham Ward and Charles Taylor argue that this imagination is a social thing. It is something that communities share, a repertory of sorts, that makes us competent in a common life.

The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.

So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.

One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.

Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.

All that to say...

Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.

Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.

These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.

The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.

At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.

I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.

It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).

In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.

What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.

To Perform the World Beyond the Reach of Pharaoh

On of the benefits of sojourning at a seminary is that you get to hear the guys who write the books. Today, my favorite author on matters pertaining to Scripture (particularly the Old Testament) is on campus. Walter Brueggemann just spoke on Exodus at a conference on Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World. WB never disappoints, and so I have a little theology geek buzz going.

I'll just mention one point that WB made today that presses some on what I've been blogging about of late. WB sees the decalogue (10 commandments) as counter commandments, standing in contrast to Pharaoh's commandments about production, bricks, and straw in Exodus 5. Against the insatiable culture of slave production under Pharaoh's control, the way of YHWH provides a coventantal neighborliness that allows acts of kindness toward others.

In the middle of this wonderful exposition of Scripture, Brueggemann made comments about God and the world. He was taught in seminary, he told us, that if you begin theology with God's initiative you're likely doing good theology (I was taught the same thing). Problem is, he said, the biblical writers weren't clued in to this little theological key. Brueggemann refers to the middle part of Exodus as the narrative of departure and noted today that it is human initiative that pushes the story along. Pharaoah produces a cry through oppression, Israel cries out againts Pharaoh's reach, and God responds to the cry of Israel.

The initiative of the Exodus is located in the cry of the slaves that move beyond Pharaoh's reach. The cry is the refusal of a dehumanizing way of life built around insatiable production. The one who is other than Pharaoh (the holy one of Israel), hears Israel's cry and calls them into the performance of a counter story.

I simply want to point out here that creation is active in the drama of redepmtion. The story of God-world is not just a story of God's initiative. God is moved by human initiative. This is not to say that humans can provide their own deliverance, or that God is not an initiator. It is to say that God's relationship with creation is ust that--a relationship. The world is not simply a passive recipient of God's irresistable plan. The world is a real participant in the drama of redemption.

This dynamic view of God suffers with the negotiations made by early Christian apologists with a Greek thinking world. Stan Grenz, and others, refer to the theology that emerges in this period as onto-theology. That is, thinking about God that is rooted in a certain notion of being, namely a substantialist perspective that divides the world into subjects and objects. And in this world, God only works if God is impassable, that is not affected by the world. God is a persisting subject--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In Trinitarian thought, great pains were made to shield the Father from the suffering of the Son.

We still live with much of this today. With regard to mission, we have used passages like Matthew 28 and the biblical language of sending to support a substantialist notion of God. God sends the Son, sends the Spirit (a point of contention between East and West), sends the church. The world is simply an object. The church simply an obedient instrument of God, on the side of God in a series of sendings. The result is a strategic view of mission rooted in a paternalism, often resulting in a heavy-handed imperialism or ethnocentrism parading as the kingdom of God.

The biblical story is not one of an impassable God, a persisting Subject, but of a God who is revealed in relation to human cries, whether of the cries of slaves in Egypt, or of the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.

WB always raises the spectre of an unmanagable God who if faithful, consistent, precisely in response to human suffering. This, I believe, is the necessary starting place for "Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World."