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 II 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.
II. The Fall; or, The Great Turning
In the five or six-act structure of recent narrative theology, the second act is the pathetic crisis of the Fall.[1] As the curtain rises on this second Act, God has created the world as “good,” and has installed human beings, the man and the woman, as his vice-regents over creation, in the “garden” of Eden.[2] The man and the woman appear to have everything they need for fellowship with each other and with God.[3] The man and the woman, however, rebel against God’s command and eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”[4] They are cast out of the garden, the ground and humanity are cursed, and the way back into the garden is barred by angelic beings “and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”[5]
The prefatory hymn of John 1 does not refer directly to this “Fall” event, but simply assumes the current state of “darkness.”[6] Paul, however, connects Adam’s sin to the “death” of all humanity and to the “groaning” of all creation.[7] For Paul, Adam, the sinner, is the prototypical “first” humanity, while Christ, the perfect redeemer, is the prototypical “second” humanity.
The Fall is the lynchpin of classical Augustinian theology. For much of Christian history, it was assumed that this was a “literal” event in human history – that the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in a paradisiacal state from which they “fell.”[8] If the Western Patristic or Scholastic Catholic divines or Reformers were to speak in terms of the “mission of God,” they would have construed it as a mission to restore the paradise lost by Adam’s sin.[9]
By the nineteenth century, however, it had already begun to become evident that the Biblical story of the “Fall” cannot be simply and literally historical. Today, it has become clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the created world, including human beings, developed through an evolutionary process that involved billions of years of struggle and death.[10] Narrative theology, for all its merits, simply sidesteps this problem. What can we make of the dramatic hinge of the “Fall” in a post-scientific age? How should the information we are able to glean about the created world influence the story we tell?
This is an enormous question, which cannot be resolved within the scope of this paper, and probably cannot be definitively resolved at all.[11] I’d like to suggest, however, that the “Fall” cannot be understood as somehow temporarily thwarting God’s original purposes for creation. Rather, the “Fall” represents a misdirection of human will and desire that God had already taken account of when He created the universe, the consequences of which God Himself entered into through the cross.
God evidently designed a dynamic process of physical death and decay into the fabric of the created order as a means of producing life. There is no possibility of the creation we enjoy today without an unimaginably deep history of evolutionary change. And there is no evolutionary change – no possibility of “life” as we know it – without entropy and death. The physical constraints human beings face, therefore, are not the proximate result of “Adam’s” sin, but rather are a necessary function of the created world. In this sense, the creation itself, before humanity comes onto the scene, already bore a “cruciform” shape.[12]
But humans are more than physical beings.[13] Apparently we are the only creatures on the earth who possess the “spiritual” capacity to relate to God, to each other, and to the created world itself, in a manner somehow analogous to the relationality of God.[14] We alone are created in God’s image.[15] The primordial human rebellion against God – the “Fall” – represents our existential experience of the brokenness of this relationality as well as an ontological fissure that somehow transcends the empirically observable universe. We know that in some sense we are unique, that in some sense we are “free,” that in some sense we are made for union with God, each other, and the world. We sense that our lives should reflect the mutuality, coinherence and perichoretic fellowship of God’s Triune life, from which we were born. Yet we each experience the pain and loneliness of desires that are turned in on ourselves and away from God, others and the world. To be left to ourselves, alone, is the heart of what it means to be “fallen.”[16]
If the term “Fall” were not so entrenched, I might prefer a narrative header such as “The Great Turning.” In fact, I think this is consistent with some Eastern Patristic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox thought about sin and the Fall. In On the Incarnation, for example, Ireneaus envisioned pre-Fall Adam as inherently mortal, and Athanasius pictured Adam and the entire pre-lapsarian creation as an infant that needed to grow and develop. [17] Contemporary Orthodox theology likewise understands original sin less as an Augustinian inherited depravity and more as a continuing misdirection of the will.[18]
God created human beings with a capacity to orient their relational capacities towards God, the each other, and the creation. Humans were made to participate in the life of God. But we turned and turn, primordially and individually, in a different direction, inwards, into our selves, and away from God. The “mission” of God is to draw us back towards Himself, back into His life, and thereby to “complete” – in some sense with us and through us as well as in us and upon us – the work and mandate of creation.[19] God accomplishes this mission through His own suffering in the crucifixion of the incarnate Son, in His recreation of all things, begun with the Resurrection of the incarnate Son, and in his final victory over evil and injustice, revealed fully at the Son’s return.[20] In this way, the “mission” of God is a mission “for the world” – the second major phrase in my definition.
[1] See Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Baker Academic 2004), at p. 27.
[2] Gen. 1-2.
[3] This is symbolized beautifully in Gen. 2:25: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
[4] Gen. 2:15-17.
[5] Gen. 3:22-24.
[6] John 1:5.
[7] Romans 5:12-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-26.
[8] See, e.g., Milton’s classic allegory Paradise Lost.
[9] The Eastern tradition does not, in contrast, tend to speak in such terms. See James R. Payton, Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (IVP Academic 2007). In many ways, the Eastern tradition’s notion that humanity has become misdirected and must be directed back towards union with God (“theosis”) informs the re-reading of the Western tradition that I am to some extent attempting in this paper.
[10] For a general discussion of the scientific evidence, see Darrell Falk, Coming to Peace With Science: Bridging the World Between Faith and Biology (InterVarsity Press 2004); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press 2007).
[11] For a discussion of some of the issues, see R.J. Berry and T.A. Noble, Darwin, Creation and the Fall: Theological Challenges (InterVarsity Press 2009).
[12] See George L. Murphy, The Cosmos in Light of the Cross (Continuum 2003).
[13] For a discussion of theological anthropology and the problem of the “mind” or the “soul,” see David W. Opderbeck, A Critically Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul, Social Science Research Network Working Paper, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1594907.
[14] Many animals possess significant capacities for empathy and relationality, but there seems to be something unique about human beings in this regard. See Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Eerdmans 2006).
[15] Gen. 1;2.
[16] I am obviously drawing here on the Barthian and “neo-orthodox” tradition concerning the human condition and the “fall.” See, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Westminster John Knox 1996). At this point in my thinking about this question, however, I would depart from neo-orthodoxy by suggesting that the “Fall” must have been a “real” primordial event. My sense of hermeneutical consistency and the integrity of my broadly Reformed theological outlook seem to require a “historical” fall with ontological consequences of some sort. But perhaps the “flaming sword flashing back and forth” that guards the “garden” represents an epistemological as well as an existential barrier against recovering the history “behind” the Gen. 1-4 narratives. For a preliminary effort to sketch out a “realist” view of the fall that is also scientifically literate, see my essay A Historical Adam? on the BioLogos website, available at http://biologos.org/blog/a-historical-adam/.
[17] See supra Note 15.
[18] See supra Note 25.
[19] This description of the “mission” of God also obviously resonates with Eastern Orthodox theology, particularly with the notion of theosis. See supra Note 25.
[20] I am drawing here from Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993). Bryan Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat also draw heavily on the suffering of God in relation to the mission of God and the praxis of the Church in Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (IVP Academic 2004). The possibility of Divine passibility and suffering, of course, is a controversial one in contemporary theology, as it seems to run afoul of orthodoxy with respect to Divine impassibility and simplicity. See, e.g., Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, at pp. 155-168. At this point in my own reflection and study, I confess that I am not yet fully able to navigate these difficult waters. I do agree with Hart that “[a] God who can become, who can acquire determinations, who has his future as potential and realizes his future through ‘dramatic self-transcendence,’ is not God but a god, a mere supreme being; and regarding the gods, Christianity has always quite properly been identified as atheism.” Ibid., at p. 166. I also like Hart’s manner of turning Divine impassibility into something of awe and beauty: “God’s impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite ‘drama’ of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring — which is his being as God.” Ibid. at p. 167. For this reason, I say that God’s “mission” is to “be” God, and not to “become” God.