Chris Wright has put us firmly in his debt with this heavy-weight treatment which is both a biblical theology of mission and missiological biblical hermeneutics. As the blurb shows, the book’s content is organised into four sections, helpfully illustrated in diagrammatic form on page 28. Wright is expounding the simple but all-encompassing thesis that ‘Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.’ (22-3) Whilst as a reviewer I ploughed through the pages at full-tilt, this is almost certainly to my loss, as the individual chapters and sections are important even as stand alone accounts.
Wright’s commendable aim to make the one volume do the all work for the reader sees the inclusion of biblical references in full, which also serves to highlight the centrality of certain key texts to which he returns often. His research is scholarly and conversant with contemporary academic projects but always clear and accessible to the lay reader. It will be no surprise to those familiar with Wright’s theological work that ethics plays an important role in his elaboration of mission. This is particularly strong in his commendation of care of creation, and a hopeful response to the ravages of HIV/AIDS.
There are possible niggles or at least, areas that might have received coverage in a project of this scope but did not find their way in. I was concerned, for example to read of the Bible being ‘a product of God’s mission’ (48 ff.), not so much for fear of the truth therein, but for the unfortunate use of the term ‘product’ which seems to suggest too instrumental a conception of Holy Scripture, too mechanistic or univocal a hermeneutic. This perhaps is explained by a further theological curiosity. There is little explicit pneumatology: the Holy Spirit is given 8 index entries, (admittedly pp. 302, 524 & 528 could have been but are not indexed) 1 of which is a footnote (24), and two are quotations from scripture (354, 525). As a possible consequence, Wright’s commendable concern, to draw attention away from missionary technique qua human action on to the mission of God, nevertheless means that his account of mission becomes curiously voiceless, with no sustained account of Christian speech whether in preaching or otherwise. Whilst his holistic account seeks to explore mission beyond the sterile debate between evangelism and social action, and does so very well, this theological gap in his treatment could be a way of inadvertently opening up this misconceived disconnect, along lines of holistic missional theory followed by a separate move of practical application. The relative theological absence of Pentecost probably points the balance of the book back in favour of a biblical theology of mission (in the traditional sense of a survey of what the bible teaches about mission) rather than being a biblical theology of mission, which in turn shapes and perhaps overdetermines the possibilities of a missiological biblical hermeneutics. I couch these concerns tentatively as I warmly welcome the book, will use it in my own research and teaching, and commend it equally warmly. Buy it, and by doing so contribute to the ministry of the Langham Literature programme.
Reviwed for The Biblical Theology Briefings by Andy Draycott, postgraduate student at Aberdeen University.
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