In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic: “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”
Here is Part I of my effort.
My statement of mission is this: The mission of God is to be God for the world God created. God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit. The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.
I. God, Creation, and “Mission”
When we speak of God having a “mission,” our capacity for analogical speech stretches to the breaking point.[1] “Mission” is a term with military connotations, which implies a discrete task assigned by a superior authority (a “principal”) to be carried out by an agent on the principal’s behalf. The agent typically is trained and equipped by the principal for the particular mission assigned. The principal typically is itself subject to some higher authority, which sets the parameters for the sort of mission the principal may assign to the agent.
A U.S. Marine, for example, might be assigned a mission to provide covering fire for members of his squad. The Marine squad together might be engaged in a mission to locate and destroy a hideout used by terrorist insurgents in Afganistan. The squad’s mission, ideally, will be tied to the overall U.S. mission in Afganistan, which in turn, ideally, will be situated within the national mission to secure the citizenry against terrorism and to spread democracy abroad. The “mission” of the U.S. as a nation derives from the contingent historical circumstances that led to the founding and development of the nation and the creation of its Constitution and other legal and cultural norms.
We cannot ultimately speak the same way about God because there are no contingent circumstances that led to God’s being. God simply is (and, in theological terms, is simply).[2] God’s “mission,” then, must in some sense equate with God’s a priori “being.” Thus, the first part of my statement of the mission Dei is the verb “to be.” God’s “mission” flows from His being. In Trinitarian terms, the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.[3]
This aspect of the mission of God is expressed beautifully in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”[4] What is this “beginning?” It is not the “beginning” of the life of God. The Word “was” in the beginning the preexistent agent of creation. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”[5]
God’s creative activity, then, did involve agency. The Logos was “with” God and all things were made “through” the Logos. The Logos, therefore, acted on God’s behalf, as God’s agent. Thus, my statement of the mission Dei refers to the “world God created.” God’s “mission” involves creation.
Yet there was no imperative for the Divine Logos to create. No lack or crisis prompted God to call the universe into being, and no part of the universe came into being except by the action of the Logos. And in contrast to our usual use of the term “mission,” the “mission” of creation given to the Son by the Father is not greater than the agent. A soldier might be required to sacrifice himself to advance his mission, because the mission is greater than any individual soldier. Christ, in contrast, “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”[6] The universe is contingent on God’s creative and sustaining action exercised by the Son, but God is not contingent on the universe.[7] There is reciprocity between God and the agency of the Logos in the dynamic of creation: all things were created not only “by [the Logos]” but also “for him.”[8]
God’s “mission” of creation, then, is not something delegated from one ontologically independent entity to another. The relationship of the Father and the Son is one of mutuality and coinherence.[9] The analogy of “mission” with respect to creation and God’s Triune life ultimately breaks over the fact of coinherence. In this sense, creation is not God’s “mission.” Creation is the extension of the Divine life through the agency of the Logos (“in him was life“) into that which is other than God.[10] As David Bently Hart puts it, “God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty.”[11]
This theme is developed by Jurgen Moltmann in his creative and challenging book God in Creation. Moltmann draws from Luther’s theology of the cross, which for Moltmann “expresses the conviction that the creation and sustaining of the world are not simply works of the almighty God, but that in them God gives himself and communicates himself, and is thus himself present in his works.”[12] God’s act of creation is also a kenotic act of self-limitation, because “out of his infinite possibilities [for creation] God realizes this particular one, and renounces all others.”[13] Moreover, because creation flows from God’s perichoretic life, creation “proceeds from God’s love, and this love respects the own, personal existence of all things, and the freedom of the human beings who have been created.”[14]
Creation, then, was never a static, Platonic abstraction of “perfection.” Creation was from the beginning an “open system” with potentiality for development towards an eschatological future.[15] Eschatology is understood from the perspective of the original creation and what has gone wrong, but at the same time creation must be understood from the perspective of the eschatological future and ongoing participation of creation in the life of God.[16]
[1] Because God is wholly “other,” all theology works only by analogy. See, e.g., Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Broadman & Holman 1994), at p. 11 (“[t]heological systems do not provide a replica, a ‘scale model’ of reality. Their propositions are not univocal. Hence, no one system can claim to be an exact verbal reproduction of the nature of God or of the human person and the world in relation to God. Rather, the theologian seeks to invoke an understanding of reality by setting forth through an analogous model realities which may be mysterious, even ineffable.”).
[2] For a discussion of the “simplicity” of God, and some problems with that notion in Augustinian theology, see Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford Univ. Press 1997), at pp. 111-114. Jensen seeks to ground divine “simplicity” in mutuality rather than in indistinguishability. Id. at 113.
[3] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule,” see Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Fortress Press 2004), at pp. 55-71.
[4] John 1:1-2 (NIV).
[5] John 1:3 (NIV).
[6] Col. 1:17.
[7] See Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (T&T Clark 2005); See also Jurgen Molmann, God in Creation (Fortress Press 2003), at p. 38.
[8] Col. 1:16 (NIV).
[9] See, e.g., Jenson, supra Note 2; see also Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, supra Note 4, at p. 155 (stating that “[t]he Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy.”).
[10] John 1:4.
[11] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans 2003).
[12] God in Creation, at pp. 60-67.
[13] Ibid., at p. 61.
[14] Ibid., at p. 63.
[15] Ibid., “Creation as an Open System,” at pp. 34-40. This view of creation resonates with some early Patristic sources, particularly Athanasius and Ireneaus. See Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God (online version available at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.c.htm); Gustav Wingren, Man and Incarnation: A Study of the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus (Wipf & Stock 2004).
[16] Ibid., at p. 34. Moltmann extends his understanding of creation and kenosis to God’s self-limitation of His own attributes, including His omnipotence and omniscience. According to Moltmann, “God doesn’t know everything in advance because he doesn’t will to know everything in advance. He waits for the response of those he has created, and lets their future come.” Ibid. at 64. At this point I will part ways with Moltmann. God can “limit” His omnipotence in the sense that He does not always do everything He is capable of doing. For example, God could destroy the world in judgment in this instant, yet He refrains, because He “is patient with [us], not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9.) But it seems to me that God cannot limit His omniscience without ceasing to be God. If an omniscient being voluntarily ceases to know all things, then that being no longer possesses the attribute of omniscience. Some open theists address this a different way, by arguing that the future is simply unknowable, because the “future” does not yet exist. See, e.g., The Open Theism Information Site, http://www.opentheism.info/ (stating that “God could have known every event of the future had God decided to create a fully determined universe. However, in our view God decided to create beings with indeterministic freedom which implies that God chose to create a universe in which the future is not entirely knowable, even for God. For many open theists the ‘future’ is not a present reality-it does not exist-and God knows reality as it is.”). This view ultimately is unappealing to me for several reasons, in particular that an “eschatological” view of creation (which I find greatly resonant), it seems to me, requires a proleptically realized future that is in some sense already an ontological reality. Therefore, if pressed, I would opt for some version of supralapsarianism in order to “reconcile” God’s sovereignty with the “openness” of creation to God’s eschatological future.