There have been debates among scholars and historians about whether the early Protestant Reformers were concerned about mission. This current piece of work is not sufficient to judge the extent to which the Reformers’ understanding of mission influenced mission activities of churches in the post-Reformation era. Regardless of how much it did or did not influence church activities, however, it is hard to find any evidence that churches in that era had engaged in mission. Pietists and the Moravians formed the first outward mission movements of Protestant mission. Their contribution toward the modern mission movement is significant. Nevertheless, Bosch (1978, 438)
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points out that ‘in the case of the earliest Protestant missionaries, the Pietists and the Moravians, very little of a real biblical foundation for their missionary enterprises was in evidence’.
William Carey was one of the early missionaries of the modern era who attempted to build a biblical basis for mission. In his day, there was an opinion that ‘because the apostles were extraordinary officers and have no proper successors, and because many things which were right for them to do would be utterly unwarrantable for us, therefore it may not be immediately binding on us to execute the commission’ (Carey, 1972, 8). Carey used the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20) to demonstrate that the command was as valid to him and all Christians as it had been to the apostles. Verkuyl (1978, 24) points out two important contributions of Carey as follows:
One of Carey’s most important contributions is his extensive refutation in section one of the
Enquiry of the thesis defended by the Reformers “that the missionary commission (Matt.
28:16-20) was sufficiently put into execution by what the apostles and others have done...” A second important contribution of Carey is his basing the call to do mission work, not in the lost condition of sinners or in pity for them, but in obedience to the Lord’s command.
Even though Carey’s insistence was a proper response for the people who denied the missional responsibility of Christians for the world in that day, it is hard to say that this view represents a sufficient biblical basis for mission overall. Of course, Carey was not trying to explain the whole biblical basis for mission but only to respond to a specific issue, which was a general misunderstanding in his time. Therefore, taking the Commission as a primary biblical basis for mission without an understanding of the context Carey faced may lead us into a narrow view of mission. Bosch (1984, 17-18) points out the problem as follows:
Subsequent generations of Anglo-Saxon missionaries and missionary spokesmen have, however, tended to miss the point that Carey had invoked the Great Commission in the context of polemics. To them, the Great Commission constituted the major biblical
foundation for mission. This is true, even today, of many conservative evangelicals,
particularly in the United States where they tend to respond to all questions about the justification of mission with a single answer: “The risen Lord has commanded it!” Their scriptural reference, time and again, is Matthew 28:19.
Carey and others chose to defend and support the mission of the church against the argument that there is no evidence of mission in Scripture. Chris Wright (2006, 24) uses the term ‘biblical apologetic for mission’ for that approach. On the one hand, this apologetic has its context and value within that context. On the other hand, it poses the danger of narrowing an understanding of mission because it is dependent only on isolated texts to prove the biblical basis for mission. Bosch uses Carey’s case as an example to point out the problem. He says there are two underlying assumptions in
Carey’s case: that ‘the validity of the missionary mandate can be founded on isolated texts’ and ‘everybody would agree with Carey’s definition of what mission is’ (1978, 439). He continues that the first assumption had been challenged by 19th-century criticism regarding the authenticity of the text as Jesus’ own words, which caused missionary circles to labour to prove its authenticity. The second assumption also has been challenged by the shift of the definition of mission itself. Carey’s definition of mission crosses geographical boundaries to ‘convert heathens’, but it could be redefined as Bosch (1978, 441) suggests, ‘Mission is, in fact, the totality of the task God has sent his Church to do in the world’.1
This kind of so-called ‘proof-text’ or ‘missionary text’ approach, which is ‘to pull a series of proof-texts out of the Old and New Testaments and then to consider the task accomplished’ (Verkuyl, 1978, 90), has been a common one and has created a vision of mission that is narrow and thus distorted. Even though the ‘proof-text’ or ‘missionary text’ approach has its value and contribution in a specific context, as we see in Carey’s case, it is not able to lead us into a portrayal of mission in the Bible as a whole. Furthermore, presumptions about mission would interfere in the process of selecting which texts are seen as foundational, which would eventually lead the users of the approach to a certain biased or narrow concept of mission.
Several scholars have attempted to overcome this problem by reading Scripture in the broader context rather than leaning on those few missional texts. Since mission has been challenged not only for its method but also for its validity in the 20th century, it has become essential to determine whether or not Scripture really talks about mission as a commission from God. J. Blauw (1962, 16-17) insists that a ‘theology of mission’ should ‘be based not only on the narrow strip of some “missionary texts”, but on the whole witness of both the Old Testament and New Testament’. He chooses the first eleven chapters of the Bible as a ‘point of departure’ for Old Testament theology and uses ‘universality’ as ‘the basis for the missionary message of the Old Testament’ (17). He points out that the election of Israel also should be seen in this inclusive perspective, saying, ‘[t]he election of Israel is a matter of divine initiative which has as its goal the recognition of God by all nations over the whole world’ (24). This understanding of Israel naturally connected the cosmic scope of the missional message of the Old
1 International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne (1974) known as Lausanne Congress
declared that ‘[w]orld evangelization requires the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world’ in Article 6 of the Lausanne Covenant (http://www.lausanne.org/en/documents/lausanne- covenant.html).
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Testament, which eventually linked to Christ. We may not say that approaching the Bible with the wider perspective helps us to find more ‘missions’ we already know about in the Old Testament, but it helps us to understand the whole picture of the mission God has initiated.
Verkuyl (1978, 89-90) points out the importance of hermeneutics in examining the biblical foundation for mission, saying, ‘whenever one inquires how the Bible develops its foundation for mission, the matter of how he goes about his search is not unimportant’. He also points out four motifs in the Old Testament, which are universal, rescue and saving, missionary and antagonistic. He insists that these four motifs ‘form the indispensable basis for the New Testament call to the church to engage in worldwide mission work’ (91). Even though he did not use the term ‘missional hermeneutic’, his analysis of the book of Jonah – reviewing eight scenes in it – might be viewed as a missional reading of it.
David Bosch is another scholar who sees the value of an approach that reads Scripture in an integrated way to build a biblical foundation for mission. He (1978, 439) points out the problem of using the Bible as ‘a mine from which “missionary texts” could be extracted’. He also warns about the awkwardness of a hermeneutical approach which tries to find mission-related texts and concepts from isolated Scripture verses. He illustrates the gymnastics that this approach requires (439).
Most of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was undoubtedly ‘particularistic’ and therefore hardly usable as a foundation for a world-wide mission. If, however, we searched carefully and persistently among the rocks and rubble we would find small nuggets of real gold-stories of pagans such as Ruth and Naaman, who accepted the faith of Israel, ‘universalistic’ expressions in the Psalms and in Deutero-Isaiah, encounters between Jews and non-Jews, such as the Roman centurion, etc. Sometimes there are no such clearly visible nuggets of gold; then the ore would have to be melted carefully and the invisible gold meticulously extracted from it via the elaborate processes of exegesis.
His illustration precisely exposes the problem of a traditional approach to exploring the biblical basis for mission. The biblical basis for mission should mean more than gathering isolated texts from Scripture; instead it should mean studying the essence of the message of Scripture. As Bosch (1978, 440) summarizes, ‘What is decisive for the Church today is not the formal agreement between what she is doing and what some isolated biblical texts seem to be saying but rather her relationship with the essence of the message of Scripture’. Instead of referencing those ‘missionary texts’, Bosch (1978, 442-451) proposes four important elements to show the missional significance in both the Old and the New Testament: compassion, history, suffering and conduct. I will discuss elements of a missional hermeneutic in a separate section.
As a conclusion to this section, it is necessary to distinguish these two different approaches. Since the ‘proof-text’ approach has been closely linked with the phrase ‘a biblical basis for mission’ for such a long time, it is better to use a new phrase for the other approach. Chris Wright (2006, 21-22) proposes ‘a missional basis of the Bible’ for this new approach. To read the Bible from a missional perspective, I propose a working definition of mission for this thesis as ‘God expanding the fellowship of the trinity by inviting people to be reconciled and transformed into a worshipping community’.2
Therefore, mission is firstly the mission of God (missio Dei) and mission is secondly we as disciples participate in his mission.