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Christopher J. H. Wright, "The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative" (InterVarsity Press, 2025)
01:03:14
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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B
Hello, I'm Dave Brochek, one of the hosts of New Books in World Christianity. In this episode, I'm privileged to be talking with Dr. Christopher Wright about his book the Mission of God, published by InterVarsity Press in 2025. This is the second edition of this book, which was first published in 2006. The mission of God is a major work in the field of mission studies, also known as missiology, as well as in the field of biblical theology. In this book, Dr. Wright uses a missional hermeneutic to understand the grand narrative of the Bible. You might ask if New Books Network normally features second editions. The answer is not usually, unless there's a compelling reason to do so. I can think of plenty of compelling reasons for this book in the first place. New Books Network did not exist when the first edition of this book was published. Now we do exist, and the new edition gives us an opportunity to introduce the book to new readers. And a lot has happened in the world and in world Christianity since 2006, as well as new publications in the field of mission studies and in biblical studies since the book was first published. When I let some friends know that this interview was coming up, I received replies like the all these from persons who themselves are involved in world Christianity that will be a great interview. Excelente Libro. One of my all time favorites. I used to have our new staff read this book when I was training staff for InterVarsity. I've enjoyed many of his books. Can't wait to hear this one. One of my favorite books on God's mission. These responses are from people who already know the mission of God. I expect that many of them who knew the first edition will be very interested in learning about the updated version. My hope is also that this interview introduces a whole new set of readers to this magisterial work. Dr. Wright is a world Christian. He is a scholar, an author of many books, a teacher, an academic dean and college principal, and a spiritual and strategic leader in several major global endeavors. Those who know him will associate his name with Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India, All Nations Christian College, England, the Lausanne Movement and Langham Partnership. In this stage of life, he's a global ambassador for Langham. Langham Partnership continues the ministry of the late John Stott. So having said that, by way of introduction, Chris, welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Thank you so much, Dave, for that very generous introduction. Thank you.
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B
Well, in my addiction I barely scratched the surface. Would you tell us more about yourself? I know that listeners like to get to know an author.
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C
Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to, Dave. Well, I'm a Belfast boy, grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. That's where the accent comes from, the shreds of a Northern Irish accent, as people might recognize. I was the fourth child of missionary parents. My parents had been missionaries in the Amazon region of Brazil. My dad first went out there in 1926, so we're talking about nearly a century ago, which is amazing. But I was born after the Second World War when they came home. But I always had a kind of missional home background in the sense that it was a Christian home. We went to church and I was very aware of the rest of the world because my dad used to get stamps, letters from people from all over the world, and I would keep the stamps and I was a stamp collector. So I grew up as a child with a fairly Christian background, but with an international flavor as well. After high school I went to Cambridge University in England, first time away from Ireland. Did a degree there in classics, Latin and Greek and all of that, and then shifted over to theology. So my first degree was in theology and then I was a high school teacher for a few years and got married to the lady who is now my wife, still my wife, and Liz in 1970. After a few years of that, I thought it was time to do some further study and decided to do a PhD and for various reasons chose to do that in the field of Old Testament. Old Testament ethics, specifically the ethics of land and family and property and wealth. All the laws of the Old Testament, which are fascinating by the way, if anybody wants to get into those. I did a book called Old Testament Ethics for the People of God on that topic. So that was my Ph.D. and I thought at that time that my future would be in university teaching as a professor of the Bible. But While doing my PhD and serving at a local church in Cambridge, I felt somehow not quite disillusioned, but that the university wasn't really where I wanted to serve. I had great admiration for Christian scholars, for Christians who dedicate their lives to the field of scholarship and university life. I felt more attracted to teaching within a church based context, seminaries or theological institutions where there was a sort of underlying assumption that the Christian faith was true, which was not necessarily the case in some universities. And so that's why I then chose to get ordained in the Church of England. I am an ordained clergyman of the Anglican Church here in the Church of England and then spent several years in parish ministry. So I was preaching and teaching, baptizing and marrying and burying and visiting, did everything that pastors do for a number of years, which were great. That was in the south of England, in a town of Tunbridge at that time. I got to know John Stott back in about 1978. You mentioned him. He was the founder of the ministry that I now work for. But that was much earlier on as a much younger man, as I was just in my 30s and he was in his 50s. And through John Stott and others I ended up teaching in India. So 1983 I think it was, I was invited by the Union Biblical Seminary and I think you mentioned that it's a theological institution in western India in the city of Pune, which is in sort of 2/3 up the left hand side of India if you think of the map. And we went there with our young family. By then we've got four children, four children who are now all grown up and have given us grandchildren. But we went out there in 1980s and so I was professor of Old Testament in UBS for five years, teaching the Old Testament there and very much enjoying living in India in the 1980s in India. Came back from India and ended up for the next 13 years on the staff of All Nations Christian College, which is by American standards a fairly small college, maybe about 150180 students, all committed to some form of cross cultural mission. It was basically a missionary training institution. I was the academic dean there and again teaching Old Testament and then the principal for about eight years. And towards the end of our time there, John Stott, who I mentioned earlier and I kept in touch with him over the years we had developed a friendship. He invited me to consider taking on the leadership of the ministries that he had founded. The Langham Trust for scholarships for PhD study for people from the majority world, Africa, Asia, Latin America, a literature ministry providing books for seminary libraries and then Langham Preaching, which is training in these skills of biblical preaching. Langham, by the way, you mentioned that word. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a street in London, but it's the street in London. Langham Place where John Stott's church was, still is his church. He's now with the Lord of course, but All Souls Church, Langham Place was John Stott's church and so he simply called his ministries after the Langham trust. So in 2000 he invited me to, because at that time he was coming up to his 80th birthday and he thought he ought to retire a bit. And he never really did quite retire. But in 2001 I took over the leadership of the Langham, what's now called the Langham partnership or just langham.org if anybody wants to look up what they do. And so for the last, well, nearly 25 years now, I've been working for the Langham Partnership. As I said, I'm married to my wife Liz. We have four adult children, all living in and around the London area here in the south of England and 11 grandchildren. And I had coffee with one of them this morning, Isabel, who's at university in Edinburgh. So we had a great chat together which was very nice. So that's me in a nutshell.
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B
Appreciate that detail that you went into and certainly appreciate the work of Langham Partnership. I think a couple of the authors that I've interviewed in 2025 publish their dissertations through Langham Academic Publishing.
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C
Yes, that's right. Langham literature started out mainly as John Stott wanting to get books into the hands of pastors in the global south in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the majority world as we call it. It's where the majority of the world's Christians now live. And so it was a distribution ministry mainly and still does a lot of hundreds of thousands of books every year. But then in the last maybe 15 years or so it's become a major publisher. But A publisher for authors in the majority world who often would not be able to get their books published by the classic Western publishers, some of whom can't pronounce their names. It's not easy for non Western authors to break into the Western academy and marketplace, but Langham has brought their books, published them well, with good professional editing, high quality production, but made them available at affordable prices and accessible and then available also of course, in the majority world itself. So yes, I'm glad that you got some of those. Langham Academic is the imprint of a whole series of monographs of dissertations, but also the Langham Global Library, there is a catalog, I think it's just called langhamliterature.org where you can find a whole range of books published by non Western authors. Very good resource, particularly for Western Christians who often are not so aware that there is a global church out there and some very fine theology being written by our brothers and sisters outside the West.
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B
Yes, definitely, we could talk about that topic for quite a while. I'd love to talk about that. But let's go ahead now and zero in on this book. Maybe I could just ask an open ended question. How did you come to write this particular book? Why did you write it in the first place?
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C
That's a very good question. And it became an awful lot bigger than it was originally intended to be, to be honest. It's a big book, as you can see. And have you said. Well, as I told you, I taught for a number of years in India at the Union Biblical Seminary and my background was in Old Testament ethics. That is, how does God, the God of the Bible, expect His people to live in this world? When I was in India, I realized that that concept of God's people living in God's world for God's sake and for God's mission is not just an ethical context, it is also a missional one. In other words, we are supposed to be a people with purpose. We have a reason to be here if we really think about it. So that became quite clear to me while I was teaching in India. Then I came back to All Nations Christian College in England and I was struggling to find any books that would really treat the whole Bible, including the Old Testament, which after all is about three quarters of the Bible from the perspective of God's mission. In other words, a missional reading or interpretation of the Bible. An awful lot on the New Testament, but very, very little on the Old. And then one day in the 1990s there was a book published which was very much looked forward to, written by a South African author, David Bosch, called Transforming Mission. And it was really sort of heralded as a really first rate book, which it is, there's no question it is a landmark book. But when I got my copy, I opened it quite eagerly to see what he would have to say about the Old Testament and mission. And to my great disappointment, I find three pages on the Old Testament in a chapter called the New Testament Contribution. And I remember being so disappointed, not because the book, I mean the book is excellent, but it just here was a huge gap as I perceived at the time. And I remember standing there in my office as a principal of all nations and saying to myself, I must write a book on Old Testament theology of mission. That was my desire to do because I was teaching a course on the biblical basis of mission and about three quarters of that course was based on the Old Testament, as it happened. And I would tell the students, I'm not going to start with a great commission. We're going to start with Abraham and see what we get. So I then spoke to my agent because I've got a literary agent, Peter Quandt, who's a very good agent and also to ivp, who had already published some books with. And I said, I want to write a book on an Old Testament theology of mission. And they said, well, there you've got three words that nobody will want to read about the Old Testament and mission. That doesn't ring people's bells. We need to make it wider than that. So I said, okay, well then let me make it a biblical theology of mission or a missional reading of the Bible. And so I began to work and I took the lectures that I'd done at all nations and I expanded them and built them out and tried to bring Old and New Testament together. And in the end the book grew significantly, especially since I was beginning to discover other people working in the same area who were quite interesting colleagues. And so in the end it was, I think probably IVP us, the Intervalsity Press in the US who were the originating publishers of the book, who came up with the suggestion of the Mission of God as a title, a kind of catchy title, but with the subtitle Unlocking the Bible, the Grand Narrative of the Bible, seeing the Bible as one whole story, which is really quite remarkable when you think about it. I mean, I don't know how familiar your listeners are obviously to the Bible itself. I'm sure they know that the Bible basically is a library of books. You know, there's 66 different books written over a period of about 1500 years, probably by 40 different authors. And yet this whole library has a remarkable coherence. You know, it begins at the beginning, in the beginning, the creation, and it ends with a new beginning and a new creation. And in between it, it tells this grand, vast, overarching narrative of the God of the creation and the God who calls this of Israel, the God who sends his son Jesus, the story of the church and the early mission of the church, and then ultimately a future return of Christ and a new creation, new heavens, and a new earth at the end. So to see the Bible as one whole narrative was what I was really trying to convey through the book. And I realize that I'm probably answering one of your later questions, but maybe that doesn't matter. But that's how I divided it had very specific origins. One day in my office say, I must write a book about an Old Testament theology of mission. And then it ended up as the mission of God.
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B
Yeah, I love that summary. And there's so many different directions we could go with this, but I think maybe this would be the point where I invite you to describe not only the core thesis, but how you develop that argument, what elements. I mean, you. You do engage the Old Testament a lot more than most of the mission theology books that I've read in my own course of studies. So maybe you could help us understand a bit the flow of the content.
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C
Yeah, okay. Well, some books which are. You used the word earlier missiology books about mission are nearly always talking about the mission of the church and missionaries and then want to say, well, what does the Bible have to say about missions in that sense of sending missionaries? And the answer is, yeah, well, a bit. Jesus sends his people out to go and make disciples of the nations. We are called to bear witness to the God we believe in. That's a Christian commitment, is to, say, the God, the Christ that we have encountered, we want to share with others in love and compassion and seeking justice and doing all of the things that God is concerned about. So there are those kind of texts in the Bible. But what I wanted to do was to go back a bit further and to say, well, if we are those who are in that sense sent on a mission, some sense of being, which is what the word mission really means, isn't it? You know, ascending with a purpose. There must be somebody behind that sending, somebody who does the sending. And that, according to the Bible, is the God of all creation, the God who made this world in the first place. And so what I wanted to do was to go back to the beginning and then trace through the biblical narrative the great, as it were, nodes, the great turning points, the significant moments in the biblical story in which God is active and in which he calls his people to participate. Initially, the people of Israel in the Old Testament, and then those who become followers of the Messiah of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. So we begin then with God, who calls Abraham. Well, we begin with the fact that the Bible begins with creation, Genesis 1 and 2. God creates the world. But then it describes or gives the answer to how has everything gone so badly wrong? Why is the world in the mess we're in? And it fundamentally says, well, because we chose to rebel against our Creator. The mess the world is in is down to us. We have created the mess we're in. And so that's all. Genesis 3:11. The Bible very quickly sets the issue. It says, here's our world, here's the God who created it. Here's the mess we've made of it. Now, what's going to happen? And that you've already got to Genesis 11, just the first 11 chapters. And what happens is that God says, ah, right, there's this old man, Abraham, and his wife Sarah. Through them I'm going to create a people. Through them, I'm going to bring blessing to all the nations on earth, into a world which seems fallen and cursed and evil. God says, I'm going to do something that will be called blessing. And that comes in Genesis 12, and that's sometimes called the election of Abraham. That's the word that's, you know, the theological term that's used for God choosing to act through a people. So I look at that whole theme of what does that mean for God to choose the people? We sometimes take it wrongly as that they're terribly favored or they were wonderfully special, or, you know, that somehow they're God's favorites. That kind of language can be misused. What I was trying to say is, of course God chose them. God called them, God loves them, but he does so for a purpose. Because God has in mind not just that people, but through that people. All nations on earth will be blessed, is what God promises to Abraham. So that then takes you on through. And so I come to the rest of the story. This people becomes a nation, the nation of Israel. But they end up in slavery in Egypt, in the book of Exodus, they're being oppressed by Pharaoh. And God redeems them out of there. He rescues them, he liberates them. So you move from the theme of election to the theme of redemption. And again, it's a major biblical word, redeem, redemption. It's very biblical. We still use it today. We use it in a secular sense. When you redeem something or you have redemption points of your. But here's the act of God's redemption is when he rescues the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and that then leads on into relationship with God. God gives them his law, he enters into a covenant with them at Mount Sinai. And so you move on into the land where they live in economics and in ethics. And so my book tries to trace the story, asking the question, who are these people? What are they there for? How does this represent the God of all nations? So the missional dimension constantly comes back of this sense of here's a story which is very particular, it's very historical, it has its own ancient Near Eastern context, but it is deliberately universal. Also, there's this constant looking to all nations. There is a universality, as it were, embracing the particularity, if I can use those two words. So we look at all of that in the Old Testament and then move through to, of course, obviously to God's purpose for the nations. How the nations are built into the language of the law, the prophets, the psalms, and how that then issues through into the New Testament. And the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, who is portrayed in the Gospels as, yes, the Messiah, the Savior of Israel. But as Simeon says, when Jesus parents take him to the temple and this man Simeon takes him in his arms and says, this is not just the glory of your people, Israel, but a light for the nations, that here is the one who is ultimately intended to be a blessing for the salvation of all nations. And that's then where the story goes in the Book of Acts and at the end of the Gospels, when Jesus commissions his followers to be those who will bear witness to what God has done through Jesus of Nazareth for the salvation of the nations and ultimately for the redemption of all creation. So you end up with an eschatology. That's another one of these theological words which just means the ultimate future. What is the end of the world? How is this story going to end? And the story ends with a new creation, a new heaven, a new earth accomplished by God through Christ. So the book tries to trace this story thematically and then connect it by saying, if this is the mission of God, if this is God's purposefulness, then what does that mean in terms of our mission as God's people? Whether we're thinking of Old Testament Israel or of the New Testament followers of Jesus, seeing that as one organic whole. By the way, there's one people, it's not two. It's one people through the whole Bible. So that's something of the kind of the book in a nutshell. I wish I could have done it in that time, but it actually took years to work it all out.
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B
Well, you said it simply. But it wasn't a simple project to come to that.
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C
No, it wasn't. And the revision took another couple of years and I ended up doing that, too.
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B
Yes, you spoke of the revision. What is it that prompted you to feel that a second edition is needed?
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C
Well, two or three main reasons. First of all, to say I haven't changed my mind on anything. It's not sort of a revision in that sense of having sort of shifted a position. First of all, in the 20 years almost since the first edition came about, a lot has been written in this field of the Bible and Christian mission, the missional theology of Scripture and so on. The field of, as you referred to earlier on, missional hermeneutics, missional reading, the Bible, that as a discipline, as an academic discipline, has grown and flourished in many ways. So there's been a lot of books. I ended up buying about 50 books in the course because I thought I need to take into account for the bibliography and the footnotes and the references, need to be aware that this is a living discipline, because I'm aware that this book, the Mission of God, has become used in quite a number of seminaries as a textbook. And so if you. If a book is a textbook, it needs to be updated to keep it relevant and keep the discipline alive. But secondly, because in a number of areas, the reviews that I'd had, there were some where I thought I'd been a little bit misunderstood or misinterpreted. And so I needed to clarify some of the things that I'd said in terms of what I did or didn't mean, perhaps particularly in the area of what's sometimes called holistic mission. That is, that the word mission, in the way I'm using it, doesn't just mean the church going out and evangelizing and planting churches and doing missionary work. A biblical understanding of mission includes all that God sends his church into the world to do, which is also to serve and to love and to care and to show compassion and to be concerned for justice and. And to seek to be the hands and feet of Jesus as he himself was, in an integrated, holistic way around the centrality of the gospel. So some had misunderstood some of what I'd said on that score. And I felt I need to explain more fully what I mean by gospel centered, fully gospel related, holistic mission, mission including evangelism and social engagement. All of those things together, but all of them rooted in a. Grounded in the gospel itself, meaning what God has done to save the world. There was another area where I think I'd been misunderstood, that because I speak of God's choice of Abraham and therefore God's choice of the people of Old Testament Israel as purposeful, that is, for the sake of the nations. And in the first edition of the book, I used the word instrumental or the instrumentality of God's election that had been misunderstood to mean that Israel was simply instrumentalized, they weren't valued for their own sake. And that therefore I was underplaying or even denying, which is certainly not true, the election of Israel as God's purpose for his people, Israel for the Jewish people, ever since that God has an eternal relationship with that people, which goes back to Abraham. I was not denying that. I was simply saying, yes, that's true, but God had a purpose in that relationship. It is unique, but it's a uniqueness for a reason. And the reason is God's intention to bring blessing to all the nations on earth. And I needed to clarify that, that my theology is not, as sometimes people say, replacement of theology. Somehow God has replaced the Jews with the church, sort of supersessionism, the technical word for that. And I want to say that that's not my position, but I need to be careful in the way I try to explain and interpret that. So there's a whole new chapter in the book, chapter eight, with the title Election and Supersessionism, where I try to tease out that issue and discuss it more carefully and respond to those who were critical of what I'd said in the first edition of the book. So that's perhaps where I felt the second edition need more clarity on that issue.
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B
Thank you. I did notice in going through the second edition, I didn't make a deliberate effort to say, oh yeah, this wasn't in the first one, I see this in the second, but that one was obvious where you dealt with supersessionism, which was a term I wasn't fully familiar with, but I felt it was enlightening. I also noticed just looking at the footnotes now that slows down your reading. But referring to books, and this book was published in 2019, or this one was in 2020, or this one 2022 even. And I realized, oh, this is all new references since 2006 when I first booked.
- [31:00]
C
That's right, yeah, very definitely. And indeed, the bibliography has expanded by about 190 items. And the publisher very helpfully agreed that all new titles in the bibliography which weren't in the first edition would be marked with an asterisk. So if people go to the bibliography, they can see anything that's new that wasn't in the first one, which I thought was quite, again, from a textbook point of view, quite helpful to. Just to show that. But, yeah, there are a lot more footnotes. The book is a bit longer than the first one, which is long enough. But there are some parts of the book which I was able, I think, to delete and say, well, we don't really need that anymore. But it was thoroughly revised. I did try to, you know, every paragraph, a lot of it is saying the same thing, but sometimes with greater clarity or with quotations. There's quite a lot of new quotations from more recent writing. Just to show that I tried to keep up with the discipline and to respect other authors because there are now quite a lot of other authors in the field.
- [32:07]
B
I think what people appreciate so much about the Mission of God is that it's very readable. You know, it just draws you in. At least that. That has been my experience. I'm not. Not in school anymore. It's not an assigned text, but you sit down and just read it for your own personal enlightenment. That's. That's what I found. Maybe I could ask a question. You mentioned that it's been used as a textbook. Is that the primary use that you've noticed or if you have any advice to a reader? It's a big book, as you said. It's long. Do you have any advice to the reader how to get the most out of it?
- [32:52]
C
Yeah, well, I think the fact that it has been taken up by a number of seminaries as a textbook, of course, is what has kept it alive over the years because books of that size can very quickly disappear if they don't get good circulation and publicity. But thankfully it is, and I'm very grateful for that. I mean, I never quite expected that. I'm always surprised by things, but it's been a blessing to know that many students have been able to make use of it. Thank you for saying that. It's basically fairly readable. I mean, I aim at that. I really feel that if anything is worth saying, it's worth saying, well, and it doesn't have to be complicated just because it's profound. I mean, you can say things that are deep and significant, but try to say them with sentences that are clear and short and well structured, which is what I try to do. So I think for an ordinary reader, possibly skip past the first two chapters, because the first two chapters are asking the question, what is a missional hermeneutic? How are we searching for some of the ways in which people have talked about that in the past? Those are more for the academy, for the discipline, and maybe move fairly quickly into. I think it would be chapter three, where we talk about the God of mission and the uniqueness of God and then the uniqueness of Christ and so on, which may perhaps be a bit more directly relevant to someone just reading it especially. But I would have thought that most people who've. Who have a level of education where they can read commentaries or read basically decent Christian books, not technically theological, not full of jargon, full of Hebrew and Greek and all of that, doesn't have that. Though there are discussions obviously of Hebrew and Greek texts, when that's important. But on the whole, I've tried to keep it at a level that an average Christian with a moderate education, even those who might be students or pastors or church leaders of various sorts, could get their heads around. You don't read it overnight, but I've heard of people who sort of read it together with others in a group and read maybe a chapter or two a month or something like that, and then get the best out of it.
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B
Well, appreciate that advice. I think listeners will too. In the epilogue, I noticed a statement that really caught my attention and you mentioned that this book has indeed been a journey of discovery for its author. It caught my attention because many times you think of an author who knows exactly everything they want to say, and then it's just the work of putting it down, editing it, and so on and so forth. Might I ask in what way this was a journey of discovery for yourself?
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C
Yeah. Thank you. And that's a very genuine comment. You see, as I said earlier on, the book began when I thought to myself, I need to write an Old Testament theology of mission. And I thought of my lecture notes and I thought, I'll just turn them into a book. So I had something relatively short in mind. But as I got into each chapter, I thought about the issues of election and Abraham and God's choice and the universality of that, the particularity of it, one people for all nations. And then I read other books because once you start to Write, you need to be reading as well. And so I remember I had a sort of sabbatical few weeks term from my work and I was at the Overseas Ministry Study Centre, which at that time was in New Haven, quite close to Yale Divinity School. And I had the privilege to go to Yale Divinity School library, you know, for it must have been about eight weeks when I was staying at OMSE and just revel in digging up articles, periodical literature, journals and books in this whole area. And then what you had to do in those days was photocopy them and then pile them into a suitcase and take them home and read them. And so I began to realize that there was so much more in this area than I'd even been able to teach in a 10 lecture course at a Bible college. And particularly then when I began to donate more and more to be convinced that the Bible really is the story of God. It is God's story. It's. Here is the God who, as it were, plants his mission statement almost in every page saying, this is where we're going, that's where we're getting obstructed. This is why that's wrong. This will end in tears. This is what I'm going to do in the future. You need to look out for this. Please worship me only. This is God as it were, God in relationship with a people, but the God who relates to that people initially, of course, Old Testament Israel, who relates to that people as the God of all the earth. The psalms of let all the earth praise him, all the nations will praise Him. So you get this sense of the universe, universal God in very particular relationship. And the more that impressed upon me was this feeling, I need to somehow let this God speak through His Word in a way which then reorientates our life around the centrality of Him. One of the ways that that struck me was, you know, people may realize that one of the famous missionary texts, as it were, is the call of Isaiah, or Isaiah as you probably call him in the States in Isaiah chapter 6, where Isaiah is in the temple of the Lord and he has this great vision of God, high and exalted. And then he hears a voice saying, who will go for us? Whom shall we send? And Isaiah says, here am I, send me. And that's often been sort of built up as, you know, Isaiah standing there saying, here am I, send me. I'm ready, I'm your missionary, I'll go. And it becomes almost a kind of hero moment. And suddenly I realized when you look at that text, the whole Focus of that text is on the altitude and the glory and the supremacy of God. I mean, Isaiah is humbled, on his knees. He thinks he's going to be struck dead. And it's not that he's standing up and saying, here am I. He's actually raising a finger off the floor. He hears God in the heavenly council. God and the angels, whoever they are, saying, you know, here's a mission. Here's something we need to get done. Who can we. Excuse me, Lord, I could do that. You know, the whole center is God, and Isaiah is on the margins, as it were. And I thought, yeah, so often we make mission about us, you know, our mission, what we are going to do to save the world, all the strategies and everything else. And we need to somehow get God back into the center of mission. And then the thinking of the Bible as God's story also made me realize that the way many of us have been taught to read the Bible and speaking again for us, those of us who are Christians, is that we read the Bible and we ask the question, how do I apply this to my life? Which is a big question to ask because we should be trying to say, if the Bible is the word of God, then how do I apply it to my life? Which is good, but it still leaves my life sort of as the center of the universe. And the Bible becomes somewhat adjectival. You know, I've got to be a biblical Christian, so I need to have the Bible as part of my life. And I thought, if God is really the center and the Bible is the story of God, it should be the other way around. I should not be asking, not only asking, how do I apply the Bible to my life, but how do I apply my life into the Bible? Because that's the true story. This is the story of life, the universe and everything. It's the true story of the universe, of the past and the ultimate future. So where do I fit into God's story rather than where does God fit into my story? So that's what I meant in the epilogue by saying there's something that is paradigm shifting here. When you get the centrality of God into the Bible and into our mission, it sort of relativizes us. And that's not a bad thing. It makes me think, okay, I've got a reason for living. I've got a purpose, I've got a mission. But I need to connect it to what God is doing. And that in itself is both humbling, but it's also exhilarating because it's humbling because he'd say, it's not all about me. It's what God is doing. It's God's mission. But it's also reassuring because, yeah, well, God's going to accomplish that mission. It doesn't all depend on me. I can play my part. But at the end of the day, God will do what God will do. And that's the conviction, really, that lies behind this book.
- [42:12]
B
Sorry, I shouldn't pause because people are listening, but I'm just thinking, I appreciate that so much. I noticed. Clearly you talked about our mission as God's people and God's mission, and the former is rooted and founded and embedded in the larger God's mission. I'm sure there's listeners who are going to want me to ask, you've been talking about the mission of God in many different ways, but what actually is the mission of God? Can that be stated in a relatively succinct way? I realize you might want to say, well, that's what the book read, the book which people will do and have been doing and should do. But I wonder if you could boil it down into a relatively succinct summary of what you would say is the mission of God.
- [43:20]
C
Well, it's good you asked that question, because I think the Apostle Paul was absorbed with that question. The word mission, of course, is an English word, and it has a sense of plan and purposefulness. In Paul's language, it's sometimes spoken of as the will of God or the counsel of God. There are Greek words which express will and plan and purpose. And Paul was as a Jew, of course, the Jews have always had this sense that the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of promise, the God who has a purpose, the God who is fulfilling his plans through his people. But in Ephesians, Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus, he makes what I think to me is the most succinct statement of the mission of God. And I sometimes when I'm teaching this or giving a lecture on it, I say, this is where I would draw it from. For people who would want to look it up in the Bible, it's Ephesians 1, 9, 10. Paul talks about the wisdom and understanding that he's been given. And he says, God has made known to us the mystery of his will, which is another word for plan, purpose, mission, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment. So this is something he's looking forward to in the future. And then he says to bring unity to all, all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. And that last part of the verse, I think, is the mission of God. God's ultimate purpose is the healing, reconciliation and unifying of the whole creation, which has been so broken, spoiled, twisted by our sin and rebellion. Human, satanic. But you know, we've messed things up. And the Bible tells us that doesn't only affect us as human beings, it also affects the environment, the creation. It invades our culture, it invades history. Sin and evil permeate the whole creation. And Paul says that God's ultimate purpose is to put that right, that God's plan and purpose is to do that. And he has done it through Christ, the Messiah, the anointed king, the one who is the Son of God incarnate in Christian thinking. And so there, I think, Ephesians 1:9, 10, Paul says that's the mission of God is his plan to heal the whole of creation. Now he expands that a bit more in his letter to the Colossians, which he probably wrote about the same time, actually, where he speaks about Christ as the one for whom all creation was made through him, in him, for him. And then he says that through Christ, God has reconciled to himself. That's a word like unity, healing, reconciling to himself all things, whether things in heaven or things on earth, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. So for the Apostle Paul, the salvation that we Christians talk about, the salvation through Christ, through the cross and his resurrection was not just for us as individuals so that we can get saved and have our sins forgiven. Ultimately, God's purpose through Christ and the cross and resurrection is cosmic through the whole of creation. And so that's why my book treats the mission of God as from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. It's not just about solving our sin problem, which it does. It's also about solving the problem of the tower of Babel, the fracture of the nations, and ultimately the brokenness of creation. That is the mission of God. So I'm, you know, getting a little bit carried away with myself. Paul is much briefer, but I would commend that statement in Ephesians 1, 9 and 10 as basically, that is the mission of God. It's for the whole creation, and it's been accomplished through Christ. And everything else, in a sense, is us being what Paul called himself. Paul says we are simply co workers with God. Remember, he uses that word in 1 Corinthians. That's our task. We are the saviors of the world. I hate the idea of white saviorism. You know, somehow we get to save the world. No we don't. We get to participate with God in what God is doing in the world and ultimately will accomplish in the new creation.
- [47:56]
B
That's powerful. What runs through my mind is I think of this as a work of theology that underlines all the mission project. It makes me realize, and again I'm thinking now in terms of some of the critique of missions, that the mission of the Church is not a colonial project. It's not a project of imperialism, one part of the world imposing its will on the other. It is a submission to the overarching purposes of God and seeking as our responsibility to be his agents in this massive project.
- [48:44]
C
I think that's so important to say. Dave. I would agree entirely. I mean, let's be honest. The history of the missions of the Christian Church is full of wrong turns and mistakes and colonialism and oppression. I mean, Christians have done an awful lot of bad things or people who claim to be Christians and Christianity. We need to acknowledge that it's a reality which we shouldn't shy away from. But at the same time one needs to say that that association of so called Christian mission with Western colonialism is a pretty late thing. The Christian faith was expanding throughout the world long before there was any sort of British Empire or Spanish Empire or any other empire. In fact, it was expanding from the bottom of the Roman Empire when it was a persecuted minority and eventually sadly ended up so becoming the religion of the Roman Empire that it then itself became oppressive in the whole realm of what we call Christendom. But the reality is that Christianity expanded in Africa, in the Middle east, in Syria, in Russia, right out to Afghanistan, right up to China. By the 6th century, Christianity expanded in a totally non colonialist way by people simply bearing witness to the saving power of Christ. And today in today's world there are more cross cultural missionaries, people who are engaged in bearing witness to what God has done in Christ throughout the world, who come from non Western countries, from African and Asian countries and Latin American countries than from North America or from any European country. Again, not a colonial project, but simply a missional thrust of people who are committed to believing that the God of the Scriptures is the God who has actually accomplished something for the salvation of the world through Jesus of Nazareth in his death and his resurrection and that that is fundamentally good news. And the other thing I would say because you've mentioned that my book treats the Bible as One whole narrative, an overarching story of the universe. And some people are afraid of that, because in our postmodern culture, the whole idea of a metanarrative is sometimes regarded with suspicion. Metanarratives are oppressive. It's a way in which one power simply exerts power over other people. Say, you must all fit into our story. We will tell the world the way it is. And so meta narratives become a power play, oppressive. And I would want to say that the biblical metanarrative, overarching story is the opposite of that, because it is precisely for the sake of all nations and all cultures. Here is the story which actually gives value to the stories of the little people. There's so much in the biblical narratives of the little people, those who are not powerful, that God rescues from the powerful, like the Hebrews being rescued from the empire of Pharaoh and so on. And then the way in which, even in the Old Testament, it embraces the reality of the wisdom of so many other nations and then brings it within. The wisdom of Israel reaches out to other peoples. Even the genealogy of Jesus has Gentiles within it, four Gentile women who are mentioned in the narrative. The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter one, for example. So here is a narrative which in a sense is inclusive of cultures and nations, showing that, yes, they need redemption. There is something about all human cultures which both reflect our creator, God. Something of the image of God, something of the dignity of all humanity is represented in all human cultures. But also there is the infection of that which is sinful and evil and demeaning in all cultures, including our own, perhaps especially in our own. So God, as it were, the story of the Bible is not anti culture or oppressive or totalitarian simply by being a metanarrative. It's a metanarrative which seeks to embrace, dignify, purge, cleanse and redeem human cultures. So that the last great picture of the Bible, the picture we get in the book of Revelation, is precisely where John says that he sees a great multitude that no one could number from every tribe and nation and language and culture in the world. It's not a homogenizing, it's actually an embracing of diversity. Here's the vision saying that the final humanity of the new creation will not be just a kind of melting pot in which we all look like each other and we've all become white and Western or whatever it might be, or Nigerian or Chinese or anything else. It's not a melting pot. It's more like a salad bowl in which every color and texture and flavor is there. And they all contribute to the wonderful diversity that's in that bowl. But they all retain their individualism and their flavor. Every tribe, nation, language and culture. That's what the biblical metanarrative embraces. And that's why Christian mission ought not to be colonial, even if, sadly it has been. It ought in fact to be anti colonial. It should be affirming culture and language and often indeed has done so in many parts of the world. I referred earlier to my own parents. My father went to the Amazon region and he lived among indigenous people and he learned three languages of what used to be called Indian people, the native people of Amazonia before Wycliffe Bible translators. He sought to learn and then eventually to write and to seek to engage with those languages and those cultures of those people. So it's an. An affirming attitude towards human dignity rather than a denial. So I thought it was worth saying that.
- [55:08]
B
Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you for saying that. Because it relates on a personal level as well as on a cognitive and academic level and heart level as well. Clearly. Actually, I'm looking here, we probably need.
- [55:24]
C
To begin a week in the time as well.
- [55:26]
B
Yeah. Begin to wrap up.
- [55:27]
C
Yeah. Can't remember people's patience for too long.
- [55:34]
B
Maybe you could share if you are working on a next project, what you're working on next, or maybe if you're not, if you have any suggestions on some things related to the mission of God that younger scholars could be working on.
- [55:56]
C
Well, yeah, I mean, I was a younger scholar once and some of my early books were very intuitive. But I would say what I'm working on this year, I hope is on the book of Deuteronomy. I did a commentary on that quite a while back in the 1990s. But you may have seen that I have a very small series of books which begin with the phrase hearing the message of published by Zondervan. Hearing the message of Daniel was the first. And then hearing the message of Ecclesiastes, hearing the message of Habil. They are more popular level exposition, accessible exposition. You know, how I would teach or preach the book, really, rather than a major commentary. And I'd like to do something like that on Deuteronomy because I think it's a very neglected book. Well, the Old Testament in general is. But many people never get past Genesis if they get anywhere, or maybe a bit of Exodus. But certainly once you get past into Leviticus, you get stuck. But Deuteronomy is in many ways John's Gospel or the Epistle to the Romans of the Old Testament. I mean, so much of the theology of the rest of the Bible is expressed in Deuteronomy. And I'd like to help people to get their heads around it a bit more. I think for younger scholars and writers, I suppose my main advice would be patient and how can I put it? Stay humble. I mean, there's always a temptation which I felt very strongly early on. When you get a book published with your name on feels good, you can't deny that we're all human, we're all, all have ambition and we all. But my desire has always been to write in such a way that is of help to quote ordinary Christians. I mean, we're all ordinary Christians. As I said at the very beginning, I'm just a wee Belfast boy originally. That's my roots. And so whatever you come to think about or study or write, keep the church in mind, Keep the people in the pew, the ordinary Christians who want to be nourished and fed by God's word, keep them in mind and speak to them, write to them. I tell you one piece of advice that I got from, I don't know who gave it to me, but when I'd finished my PhD and when you're doing a PhD you're writing for your supervisor, you know, the person you have in mind is the academic who's going to evaluate your work. So you have to be academically credible and write all that way. And when you then come to write at a more ordinary level, you have to, in a sense, stop looking at your supervisor and stop thinking about the academy if you want to write for the church. And this person said, think of one person in your church whom you know personally, who you would like to be reading what you're writing and write for her. And I remember doing that the first time I wrote the book, which became an eye for an eye in the US living as the people of God. Old Testament ethics for the people of God. I remember thinking of Margaret, Margaret in our church. She was an educated lay woman. She was not ordained, she was not a theologian, but she'd had a university education. So she was intelligent and she was thinking, but she had no technical theological language. So I thought, when I write, I want Margaret to be able to read and understand and make sense, but also stimulate, you know, give her something to think about, something to chew on, something that isn't just a wishy washy devotional thought for the day, but something to actually engage her mind and her heart. So I think that was a good piece of advice, because I've tried to do that since then, that if you're writing an academic commentary, then you're writing for pastors and others with theological education who are going to read that sort of commentary. So you need to cross the T's and dot the I's and do the footnotes and get all that in. But if you're writing for someone that's an average church member who doesn't have theological education, and then speak their language and speak in a way that they could hear you and receive it in a way that's nourishing and draws them closer to God and gives them a better understanding of the Bible. So I think that's the advice I would give.
- [60:33]
B
That's rich. That's rich. That's kind of like a bonus. We've been talking about your book and now you've given some great advice to others who might be writing their own. Well, I think we'll draw a line here. And I want to thank you very much for this interview and for sharing, both from your head and from your heart. And I'm sure that a lot more people are going to be interested in following up with the second edition of the Mission of God. Thank you.
- [61:01]
C
Thanks so much, Dave. When I was writing it, people would say, what am I doing? I'd say, I'm revising the Mission of God, which sounded a bit arrogant. And then I said, no, I'm revising my book about the Mission and God. God mission doesn't need revision. Anyway, it's been good to talk, Dave. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.