Chapter Ten: Reflections on Conversion
NOTES
Chapter One: Mission
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 5.
W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, in The Uppsala 68 Report, ed. Norman Goodall (Geneva: WCC, 1968), 317-18.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 6.
Chapter Two: Reflections on Mission
I have explored this dimension of mission in more detail in “People Who Send and Are Sent,” in Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 201-21.
Cape Town Commitment, I.10. Bible references original to the text of the statement.
I should recall that when I first used this word missional in John Stott’s presence, he looked somewhat askance. “Is that really a word?” he inquired with an infinitesimally raised eyebrow. He was an avid consulter of dictionaries. To be honest, it is a relatively recent coinage (in 2008 Christianity Today referred to it as scarcely ten years old). I explained (as I do in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006], 22-25), that it is a needed word, since missionary has too much baggage, and missiological refers to theological reflection on mission. Missional means a quality or a dimension that pertains to, or contributes to, or applies to, or is characterized by mission.
J. Andrew Kirk, What Is Mission? Theological Explorations (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1999), 20. The phrase “the Bible as a book about mission” of course begs the question. That is to say, it assumes an answer to the question, “Whose mission?” Only when we start our definition of mission by reference to God is it possible to say that the whole Bible is “about mission,” or make sense of the idea that it is “written by missionaries for missionaries.” The latter phrase can be true, not in the sense that the Bible authors were sent out by the church like modern missionaries, but only in that they were in some sense commissioned by God for his purposes, including his purpose in inspiring the writings that were collated into the canon of Scripture. Kirk’s language makes sense only when we see the Bible itself as the product of, and witness to, the mission of God.
David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 494. A richly informative compilation of key theological texts in relation to every chapter of Bosch’s book is Norman E. Thomas, ed., Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity: A Reader’s Companion to David Bosch’s Transforming Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995).
It might be appropriate to add that The Mission of God was written after I had left All Nations in 2001 and taken on the leadership of the Langham Partnership, founded by John Stott. As a result, much of the book was written at Stott’s own writing retreat, The Hookses, in Wales, and often when we were there together. He took a great interest in the work and encouraged me constantly in it, often discussing this or that topic or biblical text. I think the book aligns well with the trajectory of Stott’s own implicitly missional reading of Scripture (even if he could never quite welcome the neologism missional!).
Indeed the shift toward seeing mission as not merely an activity of the church, but fundamentally as the purpose and action of the Trinity—the missio Dei as it is classically known—goes back much further in ecumenical circles, to the International Missionary Council that met in Willingen, Germany, in 1952. And even earlier, interest in reading the biblical texts from a missionary perspective attracted even the renowned British Old Testament scholar H. H. Rowley, in Israel’s Mission to the World (London: SCM Press, 1939) and The Missionary Message of the Old Testament (London: Carey, 1944).
Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission (London: Edinburgh House, 1963; repr., Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998); The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978); Foolishness to the Greeks: Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (London: SPCK, 1991).
See the Gospel and Our Culture website at gocn.org. A very helpful survey of the different senses in which the phrase “missional hermeneutic” is being used by various scholars (including myself) is provided on this site in an article by George R. Hunsberger, “Proposals for a Missional Hermeneutic: Mapping the Conversation,” January 28, 2009, www.gocn.org /resources/newsletters/2009/01/gospel-and-our-culture. See the website for the Newbigin House of Studies at newbiginhouse.org.
See Michael W. Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today: Scripture, History and Issues (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014). This builds on Goheen’s earlier work in Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). See Scott W. Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission: Participation in Suffering and Glory (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013).
Stott refers to the practical, loving, serving work of the church in society as a crucial dimension of how local church evangelism works out in practice (and he made sure that his own church practiced it) in his earlier book on evangelism, Our Guilty Silence: The Gospel, the Church and the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967; repr., Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 1997), 77. But he does not directly address in that book the question of how evangelism and social action are to be related—theologically and in mission. He did later tackle it briefly, with much the same concern as in this book to avoid the extremes of evangelical withdrawal from the world and ecumenical equation of evangelism with sociopolitical action, in Christ the Controversialist: A Study in Some Essentials of Evangelical Religion (London: Tyndale, 1970), 185-89; rev. ed., Christ in Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 175-181. The issue surged to major importance at and after the Lausanne Congress of 1974.
The impression that Stott made on them, as one who listened attentively and sought to understand their contexts and commitments, is told by themselves in their contributions to Christopher J. H. Wright, ed., Portraits of a Radical Disciple (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 112-18, 119-21.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 5.
Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What Is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom and the Great Commission (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 59. I think their criticism of Stott somewhat unfairly misinterprets him, but that is an argument for elsewhere.
In addition, one might add, Stott built up a model of gospel-centered, holistic mission in his own church, All Souls, Langham Place, London, that still characterizes its ministry. Stott not only pioneered various fruitful forms of local church evangelism but also initiated ministries among the poor and the homeless, as well as stressing the importance of equipping Christian laypeople for ministry and mission in and through their daily work. Fascinating details of his systematic structuring of the whole life and work of All Souls around such a comprehensive missional agenda are recorded in Our Guilty Silence.
The full report of that event is available as Lausanne Occasional Paper 21, www.lausanne.org/content/lop/lop-21. It can also be read, along with other major Lausanne documents between 1974 and 1989, in John Stott, ed., Making Christ Known: Historic Mission Documents from the Lausanne Movement 1974–1989 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 165-213.
The Manila Manifesto, paragraph 4, “The Gospel and Social Responsibility,” www.lausanne.org/content/manifesto/the-manila-manifesto.
Michael W. Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 82-83; quoting from Lesslie Newbigin, One Body, One Gospel, One World: The Christian Mission Today (London: International Missionary Council, 1958), 43-44. David Bosch also adopted Newbigin’s distinction favorably: Transforming Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 372-73.
John R. W. Stott, The Contemporary Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 337-55.
As early as 1983 I was striving after such a concept of mission in one of my earliest booklets, The Use of the Bible in Social Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Grove Books, 1983). I wrote, “The social and evangelistic tasks of the church have to be seen as inseparable parts of its single mission. On the one hand, evangelism which is faithful to the whole biblical gospel must include the social nature of man’s constitution, the effects of sin in the realm of social life and relationships, and a challenge to repentance and conversion which has profound effects on that realm. . . . On the other hand (and this is the more neglected side of the matter), Christian social ethics cannot evade an evangelistic dimension if it is being true to the total biblical basis, motivation, and goal of its operations. . . . Precisely such a unified and integrated [understanding] characterized the public ministry of Jesus: socially effective evangelism; evangelistically effective social action. How many wasted and fruitless hours of argument in Christian gatherings . . . over the imagined competing claims of evangelism and social action would be saved, if it could be seen not only that a fully biblical understanding of mission includes them both, but that in fact each necessarily involves the other, in biblical thought?” (21-22).
Micah Declaration on Integral Mission, September 27, 2001, www .micahnetwork.org/integral-mission. This statement is quoted, along with the Lausanne Covenant, in the Cape Town Commitment, I.10.b.
I have since discovered that this imagery of a wheel as a metaphor for integrated mission was used by Martin Alphonse, thinking of a cartwheel, with its hub integrated through its spokes with the rim. For him, the “hub” was the person and lordship of Jesus Christ—the opening affirmation of the great commission itself. See Martin Alphonse, “Mission on the Move: A Biblical Exposition of the Great Commission,” in C. V. Mathew, ed., Integral Mission: The Way Forward; Essays in Honour of Dr. Saphir P. Athyal (Tiruvalla, India: CSS Press, 2006), 143-56. See also the interesting collection of essays in Tetsunao Yamamori and C. René Padilla, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology of Integral Mission (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Kairos, 2004).
Cape Town Commitment, IID.1.e (italics added).
In preparation for the Cape Town Congress in 2010, the Lausanne Theology Working Group held three consultations in collaboration with the WEA Theological Commission in the preceding years examining each phrase of the familiar slogan “The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.” The reports and papers are published in three special issues of Evangelical Review of Theology: vol. 33, no. 1 (2009); vol. 34, no. 1 (2010); and vol. 34, no. 3 (2010). The full statement from all three consultations can also be read online at www.lausanne.org/content/twg -three-wholes.
See for example, “Holistic Ministry: Reflections from the Theological Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance,” October 2008, www .worldevangelicals.org/tc/statements/holistic-ministry.htm.
INFEMIT, originally standing for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians, was officially launched in Kenya in 1987, binding together continental mission movements in what was then known as the Two-Thirds World. See its website at http://infemit.org/. It oversees the work of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS) and publishes through Regnum Books. See, for example, René Padilla, “What Is Integral Mission,” http://lareddelcamino.net/en/images/Articles /what%20is%20integral%20mission%20cr%20padilla.pdf. The history and current status of the holistic mission movement within the global evangelical community is surveyed in great depth in Brian Woolnough and Wonsuk Ma, eds., Holistic Mission: God’s Plan for God’s People (Oxford: Regnum, 2010). An earlier symposium brought together a number of predominantly Indian scholars to reflect on the holistic nature of mission: see Mathew, ed., Integral Mission, foreword by John Stott.
See Dean Flemming, Recovering the Full Mission of God: A Biblical Perspective on Being, Doing and Telling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013); Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today; Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission; Samuel Escobar, The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); René Padilla, Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985); Rosemary Dowsett, The Great Commission (London: Monarch, 2001); John Dickson, The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission: Promoting the Gospel with More Than Our Lips (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010); Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden, eds., Mission as Transformation: A Theology of the Whole Gospel (Oxford: Regnum, 2000).
I recall my bemusement when I was asked, in an email, to declare whether I was a “prioritist” or a “holist,” and to specify my location on a certain spectrum. I politely declined to label myself according to somebody else’s boxes.
Goheen, Introducing Christian Mission Today, 232, in his chapter “Holistic Mission: Witness in Life, Word and Deed.”
Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission, 320, in his chapter “Witnessing Community: Evangelism and Christian Mission.”
The Manila Manifesto, paragraph 4, “The Gospel and Social Responsibility.”
See the Au Sable Institute website at http://ausable.org and the A Rocha website at arocha.org.
“On the Care of Creation,” Evangelical Environmental Network, accessed April 24, 2015, http://creationcare.org/creation-care-resources/evangelical-declaration-on-the-care-of-creation/.
This is a small sample. The later works include substantial bibliographical resources for further exploration of this field. Loren Wilkinson, ed., Earthkeeping in the Nineties: Stewardship of Creation, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991); Ron Elsdon, Green House Theology: Biblical Perspectives on Caring for Creation (London: Monarch, 1992); R. J. Berry, The Care of Creation: Focusing Concern and Action (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); Edward R. Brown, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006); Ian Hore-Lacy, Responsible Dominion; A Christian Approach to Sustainable Development (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2006); Dave Bookless, Planetwise: Dare to Care for God’s World (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008); Dave Bookless, God Doesn’t Do Waste: Redeeming the Whole of Life (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010); Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block, Keeping God’s Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010); Lowell Bliss, Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees (Pasadena, CA: William Carey, 2013); John Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today, 4th ed., rev. and updated by Roy McCloughry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 135-60; Wright, Mission of God, 397-420; Mission of God’s People, 48-62, 267-70.
John Stott, The Radical Disciple: Wholehearted Christian Living (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010), 55-65.
Cape Town Commitment, I.7.a-b. Bible references original to the text. Since Cape Town 2010, the Lausanne Movement now also sponsors the Creation Care Network, which produced the “Jamaica Call to Action” after its international consultation in 2012. See www.lausanne.org/content /statement/creation-care-call-to-action.
John Stott, The Contemporary Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 140-42 (italics original).
“About LICC,” London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, accessed April 24, 2015, www.licc.org.uk/about-licc.
Mark Greene, Thank God It’s Monday: Ministry in the Workplace (Bletchley, UK: Scripture Union, 2009); The Great Divide (London: LICC, 2010); Fruitfulness on the Frontline: Making a Difference Where You Are (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2014). Many others, of course, have written on a biblical and missional understanding of “ordinary work.” Outstanding among these are: Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); and Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavour: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012).
Chapter Three: Evangelism
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 6.
J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 45.
W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, “Evangelism in the Neo-pagan Situation,” International Review of Mission 63, no. 249 (1974): 84.
C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936).
René Padilla, in J. D. Douglas, ed., Let the Earth Hear His Voice (Minneapolis: Worldwide Publications, 1975), 128-29.
Samuel Escobar, in Douglas, ed., Let the Earth Hear His Voice, 308.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 4.
Chapter Four: Reflections on Evangelism
Stott’s personal account of his conversion can be read in Why I Am a Christian: This Is My Story (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 14, 29-32. The more detailed account can be found in Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a Leader (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 85-102.
I first used the term ultimacy of evangelism in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), chap. 13. In a section relating to the necessity of a holistic response to the terrible scourge of HIV/AIDS, I speak of “The ultimacy of evangelism and the nonultimacy of death.”
Scot McKnight argues strongly for the need to recover the narrative nature of the gospel, including its roots in the Old Testament promises of God and the story and hope of Israel, rather than reducing it only to an individual plan of salvation. See McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011) and Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014). See also Tom Wright, How God Became King: Getting to the Heart of the Gospels (New York: HarperOne, 2012).
Perceiving this universal, missional thrust within the whole Old Testament canon is the argument of, and explains the subtitle of, my book The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative.
And indeed God’s promise to Eve that her seed would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15) is often referred to as the protoevangelium, the “first announcement of the gospel.”
Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Narrative Thought World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 2.
As on many issues, Lesslie Newbigin had already articulated the crucial importance of recovering Christian confidence in the Bible as a universal story that demands to be heard as public truth, not merely one among many books of religion in the world. See especially “The Bible as Universal History,” in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1989), 89-102. Newbigin’s influence can be strongly felt in Michael W. Goheen, A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011).
Andrew Walker explores the nature of the gospel as story, and the seriousness of the loss of that story within Western cultures, in Telling the Story: Gospel, Mission and Culture (London: SPCK, 1996).
To mention just a few: Vaughan Roberts, God’s Big Picture: Tracing the Storyline of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002); Philip Greenslade, A Passion for God’s Story: Discovering Your Place in God’s Strategic Plan (Carlisle, UK: Authentic, 2002); Michael W. Goheen and Craig G. Bartholomew, Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008); Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004; 2nd ed., 2014).
The full statement, along with the other documents of the Lausanne Theology Working Group, can be downloaded from the website. See www .lausanne.org/content/twg-three-wholes. The rest of the papers presented at the Chiang Mai 2008 consultation, including my own, “‘According to the Scriptures’: The Whole Gospel in Biblical Revelation,” are published in Evangelical Review of Theology 33, no. 1 (2009) and can also be accessed at www.lausanne.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/LOP63 -2008ChiangMai-Thailand.pdf.
Texts where this narrative nature of Paul’s gospel come to the fore include Romans 1:1-4; 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; Galatians 1:11-12; 3:6-8; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-15 (which presents the story of the gospel in the same order as the story of Old Testament Israel—loved, chosen, saved, sanctified, glory); 2 Timothy 1:10; 2:8.
The various affirmations about the gospel in the Chiang Mai statement are based partly on an exercise that I did in preparation for my own paper at the consultation. I read carefully through all of Paul’s letters and identified all the places where he uses the word gospel. Then I classified them according to the various nuances of his usage. My concluding paragraph was as follows:
If we could ask Paul what content he might give to Lausanne’s phrase ‘the whole gospel’ . . . I think he would at least have urged us to understand that the whole gospel is
• a Christ-centered story to be told
• a hope-filled message to be proclaimed
• a revealed truth to be defended
• a new status to be received
• a transformed life to be lived
• a divine power to be celebrated.
And I believe, that in urging us to understand these dimensions, Paul would have directed us continually back to what he knew simply as ‘the Scriptures’—our Old Testament, for it was ‘in accordance with the Scriptures,’ that Jesus died and rose again for our salvation. Our whole gospel, then, must be drawn from the deep well of the whole Bible.
John Stott, Christ the Controversialist (London: Tyndale, 1970), 127; Christ in Conflict, rev. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 129-136.
Compare Wright, How God Became King.
Cape Town Commitment, section I.8, on the nature of the gospel.
Chapter Five: Dialogue
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971).
J. G. Davies, Dialogue with the World (London: SCM Press, 1967), 31.
National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele, paragraph 83.
Gottlob Schrenk, “διαλέγομαι, διαλογίζομαι, διαλογισμός,” in Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 2:93-97.
William Arndt, et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature; A Translation and Adaptation of Walter Bauer’s Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch Zu Den Schriften Des Neuen Testaments Und Der Übringen Urchristlichen Literatur, 4th Rev. and Augm. Ed., 1952 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
W. H. Temple Gairdner, Edinburgh 1910: An Account and Interpretation of the World Missionary Conference, Kindle ed. (HardPress, 2010), 135.
Hendrik Kraemer, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (London: Edinburgh House, 1946).
Ibid., 302. The notion that Christ was the fulfillment of non-Christian religions was popularized by R. N. Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913).
Quoted by Carl F. Hallencreutz in New Approaches to Men of Other Faiths (Geneva: WCC, 1969), 78.
Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations V (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 131.
Raimundo Pannikar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, rev. ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981).
World Council of Churches assembly at Uppsala, report 2, paragraph 6.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 3.
E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road (New York: Abingdon, 1925); Christ at the Round Table (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1928).
Jones, Christ at the Round Table, 19, 20.
Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1956).
Stephen Neill, Christian Faith and Other Faiths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 65, 66, 69.
David Sheppard, Built as a City (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974).
David Edwards, review of Built as a City, in Church Times (January 25, 1974).
Chapter Six: Reflections on Dialogue
There is also a third, political sense of the word pluralism. It can be used not to affirm that all religions are equally true in some ways (or equally false in others), but rather to assure all religions of equal freedom under the law within the protection of a democratic state. This political pluralism makes no moral or theological judgment about the truth claims of different religions but seeks to protect the rights and freedom of people to pursue their own religion. It is, in theory at least, the meaning of secular in the Indian constitution, for example.
Christopher J. H. Wright, “The Christian and Other Religions: The Biblical Evidence,” Themelios 9, no. 2 (1984): 4-15.
Chris Wright, What’s So Unique About Jesus? (Eastbourne, UK: Monarch, 1990).
Chris Wright, The Uniquness of Jesus (London: Monarch, 1997).
John Stott, “Our Plural World: Is Christian Witness Influential,” in Issues Facing Christians Today, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 71-94. This book, with its four editions, 1984, 1990, 1999 and 2006, is a remarkable compendium of Stott’s extensive research and reflection on a wide range of social, political, economic, ecological, medical and sexual issues—all addressed with his characteristic “double-listening” to the world and to the Word, and his staunch commitment to holistic Christian mission with evangelism at its heart. See also “The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” in The Contemporary Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 296-320.
Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982). See also the helpful discussion of the terms, followed by an even more helpful widening out of the whole issue in relation to our biblical hermeneutics, by Ida Glaser, The Bible and Other Faiths: What Does the Lord Require of Us? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 19-33.
Harold A. Netland, Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 9-10. Netland later produced an even larger survey of the issues, in which he recognizes that, while the three categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism serve a useful academic purpose in structuring a survey of the breadth of scholarship, the empirical and experiential reality is far more complex. See Encountering Religious Pluralism: The Challenge to Christian Faith and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). This book has a very thorough and helpful bibliographical guidance to all shades of opinion on the topic.
Rahner’s work spanned many years and produced twenty-three volumes in English of Theological Investigations (London: Darton, Longman & Todd). However, he summarized his central views on this matter in a lecture published as “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaite, eds., Christianity and Other Religions (Glasgow: Collins Fontana, 1980), 52-79. A helpful summary and discussion of Rahner’s position can also be found in Michael Barnes, Religions in Conversation (London: SPCK, 1989).
Chris Wright, The Uniqueness of Jesus (London: Monarch, 2002), 61-62.
David L. Edwards with John Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1989).
Details of the document, its signatories and addressees and its essential content can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Common_Word _Between_Us_and_You. The full text is available at www.acommonword .com/the-acw-document/.
The World Evangelical Alliance response can be read at www.worldea.org /images/wimg/files/We_Too_Want_to_Live_in_Love_Peace_Freedom _and_Justice.pdf.
The full text of the Yale response can be read at http://faith.yale.edu /common-word/common-word-christian-response.
The Manila Manifesto, paragraph 12.
Chapter Seven: Salvation
Michael Green, The Meaning of Salvation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), 16.
See, for example, Phyllis Garlick, Man’s Search for Health (London: Highway, 1952); Evelyn Frost, Christian Healing (London: Mowbray, 1949).
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Will Hospital Replace the Church? (London: Christian Medical Fellowship, 1969).
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973).
The “theology of liberation” is an authentic product of Latin America. Beginning with historical reality rather than with Scripture or tradition, and drawing on the help of the social sciences, it registers its spirited protest against the theologies of North America and Europe. Its best-known exponents apart from Gustavo Gutiérrez are Ruben Alves (Theology of Human Hope) and Hugo Assmann (Oppression—Liberation: A Challenge to Christians). Orlando Costas distinguishes them by saying that “if Alves is the prophet of the movement, and Assmann is the apologist, then Gutiérrez is the systematic theologian” (in The Church and Its Mission: A Shattering Critique from the Third World [London: Coverdale, 1974], 223).
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 145.
Ibid., for example, 29, 36, 37.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 5.
Werner Foester and Georg Fohrer, “σῴζω, σωτηρία, σωτήρ, σωτήριος,” in Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 7:965-1024.
Michael Ramsey, Freedom, Faith and the Future (London: SPCK, 1970), 15, 12.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 4.
Green, Meaning of Salvation, 240.
John Poulton, A Today Sort of Evangelism (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1972), 60-61.
Chapter Eight: Reflections on Salvation
Some of the material in this chapter is drawn from Christopher J. H. Wright, Salvation Belongs to Our God: Celebrating the Bible’s Central Story (Downers, Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008).
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 5.
Actually, he surveys the broader senses of salvation language only in the New Testament. In my book Salvation Belongs to Our God, I surveyed the vocabulary across the whole range of both Testaments. Salvation in the Old Testament (meaning ways in which God is the subject of acts of saving people), can include deliverance from oppressors, victory in battle, rescue from enemies and vindication in court. In the New Testament, salvation language is used (of Jesus or God) to include rescue from drowning, recovering from terminal illness, being healed of disease or disability and being rescued from death or threatening dangers. And in both Testaments (not just the New), salvation includes God saving people from sin. See Salvation Belongs to Our God, chap. 1.
John Stott, The Cross of Christ, 20th anniversary ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006); The Contemporary Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992).
Among recent books with a strong emphasis on the eschatological (new creation) fullness of the biblical salvation hope, and its consequent impact on how those who are saved should live here and now in the world, see, for example, John Colwell, ed., Called to One Hope: Perspectives on the Life to Come (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2000); Michael Wittmer, Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004); Darrell Cosden, The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006); Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2007); Stephen Holmes and Russell Rook, eds., What Are We Waiting For? Christian Hope and Contemporary Culture (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2008).
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973).
See, for example, for survey, critique and wider bibliography, J. Andrew Kirk, Liberation Theology: An Evangelical View from the Third World (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1979); Kirk, Theology Encounters Revolution (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980); David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 432-47; Orlando E. Costas, The Church and Its Mission: A Shattering Critique from the Third World (London: Coverdale, 1974); José Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); M. Daniel Carroll R., “Liberation Theologies,” in A. Scott Moreau, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 574-76; Samuel Escobar, “Latin American Theology,” in John Corrie, ed., Dictionary of Mission Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 203-7; John Corrie, “Evangelicals and Liberation Theology,” in John Corrie and Cathy Ross, Mission in Context: Explorations Inspired by J. Andrew Kirk (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 61-76.
Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), chap. 8, “God’s Model of Redemption: The Exodus,” 265-88.
Stott, Contemporary Christian, 319.
The case for the possibility that (or rather more strongly, the affirmation that) some among those who never hear the gospel will nevertheless be saved by God on the basis of the atoning work of Christ (not by their own religions) is made from an explicitly Arminian point of view by Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). An even more thorough exploration of the issue, historically, theologically and biblically, is by John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992). Arguing this case from a strongly Reformed perspective comes the major work by Terrance L. Tiessen, Who Can Be Saved: Reassessing Salvation in Christ and World Religions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). A symposium that canvasses a variety of views but comes down most clearly in its critique of the “possibility of salvation for the unevangelized” position is William V. Crockett and James G. Sigountos, Through No Fault of Their Own? The Fate of Those Who Have Never Heard (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991).
Chapter Nine: Conversion
Lesslie Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (London: SCM Press, 1964), 88.
“Christian Witness, Proselytism and Religious Liberty in the Setting of the WCC,” WCC Central Committee Minutes, 1960, 214, quoted by Philip Potter in his address to the Central Committee in Crete, August 1967.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 12.
J. C. Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (London: SCM Press, 1967), 21.
James Denney, The Death of Christ (London: Tyndale, 1951), 86.
M. M. Thomas, Salvation and Humanization (Madras: CLS, 1971).
Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today (London: SPCK, 1972), 37.
Mark Gibbs and T. R. Morton, God’s Lively People (London: Fontana, 1970), 206.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 10.
Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1956), 336.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology (London: SCM Press, 1971), 2:34-35.
Chapter Ten: Reflections on Conversion
They are not, of course, on Stott’s own gravestone. The words he himself chose to have engraved there are modeled on one of Stott’s great heroes, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (1759–1836), whose epitaph reads, “Whether as the ground of his own hopes, or as the subject of all his ministrations, he ‘determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.’” John Stott’s gravestone in the Welsh village of Dale, Pembrokeshire, close to The Hookses (the coastal cottage where he wrote most of his books), bears the inscription, “Buried here are the ashes of John Robert Walmsley Stott, 1921–2011, Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, 1950–1975 and as Rector Emeritus 1975–2011, Who resolved both as the ground of his salvation and as the subject of his ministry to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 1 Corinthians 2:2.”
This in itself shows something of the breadth of Stott’s international reading. M. M. Thomas was a renowned and profound Indian theologian who advocated a more indigenous form of Indian Christianity, had a strong concern for social reform, seeing salvation as humanization, and in his opposition to the oppression of Dalits reflected the liberation theology of Latin America.
A sample of some of the positions taken by different protagonists in the debate can be found on the Lausanne website, for example, Joseph Cummings, “Muslim Followers of Jesus?,” accessed April 25, 2015, www .lausanne.org/content/muslim-followers-of-Jesus. The issue also occupied Christianity Today, which hosted a series of “Global Conversations” in the year leading up to the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town, October 2010. The article and responses can be read in the December 2009 issue, available at www.lausanne.org/global-conversation-articles. A good summary of the whole topic, with further bibliographical links, is also available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_movement.
Later incorporated into the Bible Speaks Today series as The Message of Ephesians: God’s New Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979).
See especially his groundbreaking The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), but also in more recent and popular work, chapters such as “Reshaping the Church for Mission,” in Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008) and “The Launching of God’s Renewed People,” in How God Became King (New York: HarperOne, 2012).
Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014).
Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 227.
Lausanne Covenant, paragraph 6.
I explore this missional-cultural dimension of Deuteronomy in my commentary: Christopher J. H. Wright, Deuteronomy, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996); republished in the Understanding the Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012).
It is a sobering fact that the language of conversion is directed far more frequently at God’s own people than at the foreign nations—though they too can be summoned to “turn . . . and be saved” (Isaiah 45:22). It reminds us that though there may be a moment of specific conversion associated with one’s first exercise of repentance and faith, being converted is a lifelong and ever-deepening process of turning, and returning, to love the Lord our God with heart, soul, mind and strength.
Andrew F. Walls, “Converts or Proselytes? The Crisis over Conversion in the Early Church,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 2-6.
Christopher J. H. Wright, “Implications of Conversion in the Old Testament and the New,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 14-19.
Those are subheadings in the chapter “Culture and Family,” in Christopher J. H. Wright, An Eye for an Eye (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983), now revised and expanded in Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 327-62.
“The Willowbank Report—Gospel and Culture” can be accessed at www .lausanne.org/content/lop/lop-2. It is also included in John Stott, ed., Making Christ Known: Historic Mission Documents from the Lausanne Movement, 1974–1989 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
The outstanding historian of Christian mission through all its centuries since the New Testament is undoubtedly Andrew F. Walls, and some of his most stimulating articles in this field are collected in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996). And of course, Lesslie Newbigin had his customary penetrating insights: for example, “Church Growth, Conversion and Culture,” in The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 121-59. Other relevant works include Vinay Samuel and Albrecht Hauser, Proclaiming Christ in Christ’s Way: Studies in Integral Evangelism (Oxford: Regnum, 1989); David J. Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen, Contextualization: Meanings, Methods and Models (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989); David Burnett, Clash of Worlds (London: Monarch, 1990); David Smith, Against the Stream: Christianity and Mission in an Age of Globalization (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003); Dean Flemming, Contextualization in the New Testament: Patterns for Theology and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005); A. Scott Moreau, Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012); John Corrie and Cathy Ross, eds., Mission in Context: Explorations Inspired by J. Andrew Kirk (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012).