Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John G. Flett is assistant professor of mission theology at Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul, Korea. This is his first book.

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THE WITNESS OF GOD

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface........................................................................ixAcknowledgments................................................................xivAbbreviations..................................................................xvONE: Introduction..............................................................1TWO: The Problem That Is Missio Dei............................................35THREE: German Missions and Dialectical Theology, 1928-1933.....................78FOUR: Tributaries to the IMC Willingen Conference, 1952........................123FIVE: The Missionary Connection................................................163SIX: The Trinity Is a Missionary God...........................................196SEVEN: The Calling of Witness..................................................240EIGHT: Missio Dei Revisited....................................................286BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................299INDEX..........................................................................319

Chapter One

A Problem of God

In 1933, Emil Brunner attributed the surging theological interest in analogia entis, natural theology and a so-called point of contact, to Western culture's emerging missionary context. A corrosive secularism and nascent paganism now grew within Christendom's ruins. The church needed to confront these competing accounts of the nature of human history with her own message. Therein lay the problem. However one might define that complex amalgam, Christendom's demise meant the collapse of a long-established connection between the Christian confession and the life of wider society. The mechanisms of the church's response were no longer clear, meaning, lest she fall prey to a "dangerous Chinese Wall mentality," the church had a vital apologetic task of reestablishing a connection with the world.

In Brunner's estimation, reference to missionary methodology provided a solution. With the central question one of the "relationship between the 'natural human' and the word of God," the church had to locate the "point of contact" between the two. This "common imminent possibility" rests in the sense of guilt shared by all human beings, which itself results from God's general revelation in creation and through the law. To quote Brunner, "[W]hoever thinks as a missionary understands the central significance of this contact — stimulating judgment and penitence — with the double revelation in creation." Mission, in particular, appreciates this position because its very purpose consists of working for this encounter with revelation. The proclamation of the gospel is itself "dependent" on this contact: as it makes humans aware of their fallen condition, so it renders the proclamation of Christ understandable. This gave a positive shape to the church's task. She had to identify those elements within a culture that might be cultivated as positive values fulfilled by the gospel and those that direct the human away from the gospel and thus require disciplining.

Karl Barth's infamous objection made clear that such practical affirmations were not theologically benign. Decisive consequences follow for the doctrine of God. To propose that an independent knowledge of God was both possible and necessary for the relationship between God and humans located the constitution of that relationship external to God himself. This had the pernicious consequence of cleaving God's being from his act. His "being" became generally available to humans apart from his particular act of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. The "criterion of all truth" in the relationship between God and humans was not found in God himself but in the being in which both God and humans participate. Barth's alternative formulation held that God is who he is in his act. "The essence of God which is seen in His revealed name is His being and therefore His act as Father, Son and Holy Spirit." No human action sets the conditions necessary to God's acting; God alone makes himself known.

Not everyone found this response satisfactory. While many admired the aesthetic of Barth's dogmatic system, it seemingly provided insufficient resources to address the practical challenges besetting the church. Brunner differentiated his own position from Barth's with this statement: "Barth thinks as a churchman for the church; I think rather as a missionary." This distinction affords an important insight into the nature of the problem. The question of the church's relationship with the world is properly a missionary one. Yet, when it is depicted as a necessary middle point between the church and the world, mission functions as the bridge between the two. In that it prepares the ground for the church's own proper task — the proclamation of the word — mission exists at some distance from the church. It becomes possible, or even normative, to develop theological formulations in particular service to the church without actually engaging the world. This includes sophisticated treatments of divine ontology. The necessities of the church's witness seemingly develop in some contest with the doctrine of God, for dogmatic reference to God's being does not of itself address the nature of the connection between the church and the world.

A simple contention frames this work: the problem of the church's relationship to the world is consequent on treating God's own mission into the world as a second step alongside who he is in himself. With God's movement into his economy ancillary to his being, so the church's own corresponding missionary relationship with the world is ancillary to her being. Some general point of contact external to the church becomes necessary for the task of witness, supplying a positive account of the church's acting in relationship to the world and rendering that witness "intelligible." Mission, as one step removed from the life of the church, facilitates this point of contact both by clearing sufficient cultural space and by replicating the communal structures basic to the church's actual witness. In other words, this dichotomy between church and mission underlies the problem of the church's relationship with the world. No simple focus on the practical issues solves this problem, for the cleavage of church from mission derives from the cleavage of God's being in his relationship to the world. Specifically, the fullness of God's being is presented without material reference or perhaps even in antithesis to his movement into his economy. The witness of God is, as Barth suggests, "a problem of God," for it is a question of how in anticipation his being in and for himself includes human existence with him. Only in correspondence to God's overcoming of the gap between himself and the world does the church live in her connection with the world.

Missio Dei: The Problem of God in Answer to the Problem of Church and Mission

This book investigates this problem of God through one of the key developments within the theology of mission: missio Dei. I use "God's mission" because it recognizes that the question of the church's connection with the world can only be answered by who God is in and for himself....