The Old Testament Basis for the Christian Mission

The Old Testament Basis for the Christian Mission

by G. Ernest Wright

17The rootage of the Christian mission in the faith of Israel may be discussed from several perspectives, of which three in particular are here mentioned. The first centers in the assembling of the texts which portray the redemptive relation existing between the Chosen People and the peoples. A second and deeper level of discussion centers in the doctrine of God which the Old Testament presents as an integral and exceedingly vital part of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Atonement, and Ecclesia, of which the mission of the Church is one important element. A third level, closely allied with the second, might proceed from a discussion of the offense of the Old Testament for the missionary enterprise, an offense deriving both from the contemporary Church’s misunderstanding of the Old Testament and from the offense inherent in the very nature of the Gospel itself.

I

H. H. Rowley, in his small volume The Missionary Message of the Old Testament, has performed a worthwhile service in assembling what might be classed as the various “missionary texts” of the Old Testament.¹ He affirms that “‘Moses was the first missionary 18of whom we have any knowledge,” for God had sent him both to save Israel and to lead them to worship Him, to the end that in Israel “all the families of the earth will bless themselves” (i.e., find blessing). Visions of this goal are to be glimpsed in a large number of passages, especially in the Psalms and Prophets. The following motifs predominate: In the days to come all nations shall stream to Jerusalem as the religious capital of the world. There they shall bow before the Lord, sing praises to Him, learn of His righteousness and acknowledge His universal rule. There God will be enthroned; and there He will judge the peoples with equity, and bring peace to replace the sword.? God’s claim to sovereignty over the whole world, a universal rule that He will one day bring about, is never doubted but triumphantly affirmed again and again in appropriate contexts. These are especially in passages which relate creation and history, in prophetic views of “the last 19days,” and in the psalms which reflect the celebration of God’s universal rule in relation to the office of the Davidic king (i.e., the royal and “enthronement” hymns).

As to the mission of Israel in the world, the Old Testament, of course, gives no united voice, except on the fact of the mission and on the necessity of becoming and remaining a loyal “people of God.”⁴ The deepest penetration into the method of the mission appears in the Books of Jonah and Second Isaiah. The former undoubtedly sees in the figure of the unwilling prophet the Chosen People herself who attempt to escape from God’s calling of them for an important responsibility in the redemption of the world. In the figure of “servant of the Lord” Second Isaiah presents the people of God with an eloquent and deeply moving portrayal of their mission, one fulfilled in Christ and become the pattern for the Church’s life in the world. Not only has the servant suffered for his own sins (Is. 40:2, 42:18-25), but he has vicariously borne in his body the wounds inflicted by the world’s evils (52:13- 53:12). Moreover his present mission is that he continue his humble mien before the world (“a bruised reed he will not and serve as a mediator of the redemptive righteousness of God, of “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind” (42:1-7). In the crisis of world history the servant is God’s witness in the trial of the nations, His chosen agent to testify that the Lord of history and the meaning of history is the God of Israel, beside whom “there is no saviour” (43:8—13). Consequently, for the servant to assume that his essential task is self-salvation and the restoration of his people to their land is too trivial, too “light,” an understanding of his calling. God has appointed him “a light to the nations, that [the news of] my salvation may reach to the end of the earth…. I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people…, to say to the prisoners, ‘Come forth,’ and to those who are in darkness, ‘Appear’” (49:5-9).⁵

It is in Second Isaiah, therefore, that the finest missionary texts 20in the Old Testament appear. The people of God as both His elect and His servant in the crisis of the empires is a picture of poignant power, and through Christ must lie at the very center of the Church’s self-understanding. It cannot be emphasized too strongly, however, that the terms “elect” and “servant” in Second Isaiah and in Biblical theology as a whole do not connote primarily a substantive or ontological status. Numerous problems have surely arisen in the history of the Church because the Bible has been misinterpreted at this point. Instead, the primary emphasis in the terms was understood to be verbal, having to do with function or mission, not status. The latter was simply for the sake of the former, and could be withdrawn at any time when the mission was betrayed.

II

At a different level of discussion, however, one could well point to the significance of the canon of Scripture for the Christian doctrine of God. The trinitarian formula in one sense can be understood as an attempt to state in the language of the Greco-Roman world the complexity of the divine self-revelation in the Scripture as a whole. For all three “persons” of the Trinity the Old Testament reveals much, without which the Church would be so impoverished as to be easy prey to idolatry. In the Old Testament faith is a gift to a people living amidst the basic idolatries of mankind. There God reveals Himself as the sole saviour against the multitude of rival claims to knowledge, security, and wisdom in ancient and respected religious cultures. The Old Testament’s radical devaluation of all earthly powers breaks the natural man’s easy adjustment to the “natural” order, including particularly his adjustment by the institutional means of cult and state which so easily become the vital links between earth and heaven. In this sense it can be 21claimed that the Old Testament is the Church’s bulwark against the “natural” powers that invade and weaken, where they do not destroy, her faith.⁶

For certain other facets of the Old Testament’s revelation of God we may point to the theological inferences drawn from or seen to compose the real meaning of the event of the Exodus. In the earliest period of the nation’s life in Palestine the spring and fall nature festivals had been “historicized” as celebrations of God’s act of deliverance from Egyptian slavery and His leading and feeding of Israel in “the great and terrible wilderness.” With this theme is associated the conquest of Canaan, understood, not as Israel’s victory, but God’s gift of a land to the dispossessed who were outside the protection of law. The sacraments of worship were commemorations of events which had been interpreted as the gracious deeds of God. The events had created the community, and their celebration served the purpose of community renewal. The pagan festival was by contrast an acted rite or cultic drama, in which the primordial security in nature was achieved and the basic rhythm of nature on which life is dependent was continued. The drama was not primarily a celebration but a rite which re-created the event of nature and secured again its benefits. It had its setting in magic and dealt with the elemental forces of life, reproduction, and death in nature. The Old Testament sacrament by contrast centered in particular events in history and brought community renewal through meditation on God’s action, common worship, and renewal of commitment. This is surely the soil in which the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is to be understood, though in the history of its interpretation and celebration there would appear to be a poorly adjusted conflict between the two basic conceptions to which allusion has been made.

In any case, the celebration of the Lordship of God by historical narration meant ultimately that the Bible as a religious literature would center, not in ritualistic, spiritual, or ethical teachings, but in the history of a people who were on the crossroads of the world in the first great era of imperialism. Theology thus produced an interest in history and in historical tradition, until even the creation is represented as simply the beginning of historical time and 22of the Lordship of God over time. Furthermore, the association of God with particular events in time and place brought meaning into history and resistance to every attempt to convert the faith into a philosophy. Time thus is more than a cyclical or rhythmic framework of human existence; it is more akin to purpose in history. When Jesus affirms according to Mark 1:14 that “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand,” he is speaking of the salvation of God which is being effected in history, which began with Abraham and is “filled full,” completed, in Christ. The canonical “time” of God’s purpose is surely the setting of the incarnation. God in Christ is an event in history, in “time” and space. He is an action of God, and to emphasize the ontological aspects of the divinity of Christ at the expense of his active, functional relation to God and to God’s “time” or purpose in time, is surely in some measure to miss the point.

One may suggest, therefore, that it is the Old Testament’s presentation of the nature of God’s self-revelation which, on the one hand, keeps the eye focused on what is central in the Incarnation, and, on the other, reveals with clarity the setting of the Church’s mission. God’s active Lordship over His creation, over all “times” and places, His actively prosecuted claim to sovereignty over all men—this is the only setting in which the Church’s mission and the individual Christian’s vocation in the world is meaningful. In a ense it is because God has a mission and has placed Christ at the center of it that the Church exists at all or that the question of the Church’s mission is even raised. The Old Testament basis for the Christian mission must surely center, then, in its doctrine of God, in its revelation of the nature of the first Person of the Trinity and of the very ground of the Trinity itself. This is the God who is determined to be Lord, and not simply the philosophical Absolute or First Cause or the Ineffable in whom we are absorbed and “saved” from history.

Central to God’s action in history is His election, His choosing, His formation and commissioning of a new community: “I will be your God, and you shall be my people.” The language whereby the meaning of this election was made clear was that of Covenant, a particular type of treaty well-known in ancient times. God’s action was a free, unmerited gift which drew Israel to Him, as one is indeed drawn to a gracious Giver. The bond between God and people was thus established in a gracious act which pulled from 23the recipients a gracious response, or, where the response was otherwise, gave rise to feelings of guilt, infidelity, betrayal of personal relationship. The language which gave expression to this bond, and the requirement of fidelity implicit within it, was adapted from a certain type of covenant in the realm of international law, that is, from vassal treaties of the second millennium B.c.” In this form God appears not as a king among kings, but as a suzerain, a “King of kings and Lord of lords,” who enters a special relationship with His vassal. He identifies himself to the vassal as one whose gracious acts should lead the vassal to keep the covenant, not because of legal necessity, but because he wishes to be gracious in return. The rights or prerogatives of the suzerain are then specified, and the vassal is left free to order his own life within the framework which the prerogatives of the Ruler specified. Thus in the Biblical text the Ten Commandments specify the will of the Lord, the elemental bounds within which the people of the Lord must live. These commandments alone are called the “Words” of God and considered to be direct revelation. All other laws are mediated; they are the “ordinances” (mishpatim), most of which we know to have arisen in judicial decisions which have been preserved to become precedents. A clear distinction thus exists between the Decalogue and all other laws of a mediated nature. The former may be described as the legal policy of the new community, within which it is free to order its life by the adoption of a variety of specific legal procedures (“ordinances”). Old Testament law was never meant to be constitutional law; the original Mosaic covenant was an order of freedom, freedom to live within the boundaries determined by the Lord, which were a denial of the right to serve other lords and the requirement of internal peace within the community. Judaism arose in the postexilic period as a reform movement based on the collection of the variety of legal materials in an atmosphere of delayed eschatology, and their interpretation as the Law or constitution within which every step was to receive regulation. In the New Testament Jesus and Paul revert to the older Israelite conception of the Covenant, jumping over as it were the Judaistic reformulation.

The political symbol of the ruler in special treaty with his people 24stands behind the Old Testament’s confessions of faith and provides the structure of the language of the faith. In this context “truth” is not primarily an idea or ideal, but an acknowledgment of God’s covenanted claim upon us, a fidelity in commitment and action so that mind and will function together under a commission or vocation. God as Ruler in the form of commanding general is He who would make the world His kingdom, and the convolutions of history are to be understood in this light. God the Ruler as Judge, setting exterior standards of right to which men and nations are responsible, is the dominant form under which He is presented in prophecy. As the Lord, Shepherd, and Father of His people, God is also their Saviour, their Rock and Fortress, He who blesses and

forgives. In other words, the covenant language is wholly symbolic, and

truth is understood within the frame of reference that language provides. Here again the very language of the faith prevents its complete conversion into a philosophy, an ethical system, a sacramentalism, or a mysticism. It is held within history, and the truth it envisages is not, therefore, the same truth which another religion with a totally different symbolic apperception of reality may seek or promise. This is one way of affirming that the way to Christ must be through the faith of Abraham, not through the other religions. While it may be held that the Biblical language must be continually translated into the tongues of the contemporary world, yet that language itself sets limits to these attempts, creates tensions, and causes a return to Scripture before a new attempt is made. The basic Old Testament symbols of the active sovereignty or kingship of God and His fatherhood over His people appear to be so integral to the Christian understanding of truth that they can never permanently be set aside. Theologically, it may be said that God has chosen to reveal Himself within these historical forms, that while He Himself is independent of them, He has nevertheless given Himself thus to us and does not intend that we shall really know Him in the Church by means of the nonhistorical, nontemporal, nonsymbolic. While a tension exists between the real and the symbol, we are only given the latter, and for Biblical man this was clearly sufficient as the guide to life.

Finally, we have only the space to mention the fact that the Exodus gave rise to a language which was central to the Bible as a whole: for example, “deliver,” “redeem,” “salvation,” “bring 25out,” “lead forth,” “mighty acts,” “signs and wonders,” and the like. The event became a nucleus around which a whole cluster of meanings adhered which influenced the nature of prayer and piety, and which always kept before the worshiping community the direction of God’s action and the nature of His righteousness. The prayers of Israel, as a result, were firmly rooted in the great variety of life’s problems, tragedy, sin, frustration. God’s saving action in the past became the ground of hope and trust that salvation could be known as a present experience in history, and not solely as a future event beyond current history, as was the case in later Jewish apocalypticism. This element in the Israelite’s faith in the living God, as much as any other, is the soil which made possible the New Testament’s reinterpretation of Judaism’s apocalyptic hope so that in Christ it could become both “here” and “not yet.” Christianity in this sense was able to rescue the hope of the Jews from the realm of historical embarrassment and to reform it as the context of the Church’ life.

The righteousness of God, furthermore, was seen to be the ultimate power at work in history to deliver or to save the weak, the oppressed, the poor, the enslaved, the dispossessed. It is not a distributive justice, but a zealous action on behalf of the weak, a redemptive action for earth’s needy, regardless of their social status. Here, then, was the ground of hope in history, that what is now present is not what shall be, that we can lift up our hearts to the Lord who alone gives power to the faint and makes them mount up with wings like eagles. And as God is righteous, so His people are to be righteous. This meant that weakness and poverty were not to be made into a source of profit by the strong (cf. Ex. 22:25-27 in the earliest Israelite teaching collection of legal precedents). The commandments to love God and neighbor (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18) had their setting originally in this type of legal and community context. The meaning of economic life was not profit, but the love and service of the neighbor as our obedience to the Lord..:

The special concern for the poor was an integral part of the earliest legal corpora in Israel, and furnished part of the background for the prophetic announcement of God’s controversy with Israel for her failure to maintain a just order. The prophetic proclamation of God’s judgment furnished the means whereby -Israel’s destruction at the hands of Mesopotamian imperialism

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26was understood. Central to the Bible is God’s creation of a new community in which the individual finds his true humanity.⁸ The ethic of this community, therefore, is not merely the private affair of individuals but is at the same time a social ethic for which the community as a whole bears responsibility. And there will be no peace where the Lord is disobeyed. The Old Testament’s proclamation of the righteousness of God, of the community’s responsibility for obedience as a community, of history as God’s struggle, not only with the nations, but with his Chosen People for unrighteousness—all this is surely a vital and integral part of the Church’s Gospel and self-understanding, of its view of history, of its understanding of man, and of its mission in the world. Could it be said that one of the difficulties of the missionary effort in the past has been the temptation to view the Gospel as a matter of individual conversion by proclamation and education, while the corporate aspects of the Church’s life were largely left unexamined, only to become identified with a particular secular ethos in the Western world?

Other aspects of Old Testament theology, including especially its anthropology, are here omitted for lack of space, and some readers may feel them more important than what is here written. Yet the theocentric emphasis, which alone can give adequate theological meaning to the canon of Scripture, seems to me to be the real setting of the Church’s mission, and without it there would be no mission. If this is true, then the Old Testament’s revelation of the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ is a vital part of the Scriptural basis for the Church’s mission. That basis is not primarily an injunction to the Church to preach the Gospel to the world, though this is certainly part of it. Instead it is the doctrine of God, the God who Himself is the mission.⁹

27In spite of what has here been said, however, it is not assumed that numerous questions do not remain. Indeed, the Old Testament has always been and will always remain something of a problem to the Church, and certainly to the Church’s mission. While at any one period there have been various levels of misunderstanding in the interpretation of the Old Testament, the question is nevertheless posed as to whether the essential offenses of the literature must not be considered as an integral part of the Gospel’s offense in the world.

The most common impression concerning the Old Testament is that for the Word of God it is a very inadequate book, with blood on so many of its pages and with faulty moral examples so numerous as to enable Christians by its means to excuse almost any action they may care to take. This problem is particularly acute, however, for those who expect of Scripture primarily a series of ideals, or who impose upon it a doctrine of inspiration which God did not design it to bear. If the Old Testament proclaims God’s sole Lordship over history and His role as the righteous redeemer of history, then one would expect history to be portrayed as it is, with heightened apprehension of its real nature, rather than simply as in ideal one would like it to be. Here all men stand revealed as they are, the object of both God’s judgment and salvation. Sin is here taken so seriously that wherever God touches it, blood is understood to flow. This is true when men rebel against God, when God punishes by holding men accountable for their acts, when God’s representative or elect fulfills his (or its) mission in the world, or even when rites of atonement are undertaken. Evil is sO serious a matter that blood, understood as the seat of life, must be spilled both because of it and in atonement for it.

One phase of this problem which commonly is thought to be most acute is the Conquest of Canaan. Here God is presented as 28the Commanding General of a war of conquest. Two things in particular may be noted. One is that “the wars of Yahweh” (in the Conquest) are interpreted within the institution of Holy War, a particular institution of the premonarchial days of Israel. It was a part of that history, and, one might say, an institution which God used to gain His historical ends. If God is Lord of history, one cannot assume that He withdraws when the conflicts of men become bloody. Hence the Lordship of God is even here to be affirmed, and at the same time the context of historical evil in which that Lordship is seen to be at work by mediate means, using people as they are to effect His ends. God’s election does not deliver His servant from history, nor even, it appears, from the ambiguities in all historical action. The authority of the Bible lies primarily in its truth about God, but its focus in history prevents that authority from being transferred to absolutize anything in the human scene, including even His elect people’s testimony to Him.

Still another area of difficulty which Christians have encountered in the Old Testament is the problem of the laws and the Law. Is not the Old Covenant filled with so many laws as to make it a religion of works, which in Christ is set aside for freedom under grace? Or as Protestant oxthodoxy was at one time inclined to say: Is not the Old Covenant the proclamation of the law of God which led men to despair and thus prepared them for the proffer of grace in Jesus Christ? The interpretation of the Old Testament as a legal document which stands at the opposite pole from the New Testament is a misunderstanding, derived particularly from the books of Romans and Galatians. Yet these epistles of the Apostle Paul are to be understood as polemic against Judaism, not as an exposition of the relation of the Old to the New Testament. As already pointed out, the Pentateuchal laws were the legal procedures adopted by a people who were living within the covenant. The rubric “ordinances,” given them, and the fact that they were mediated, was Israel’s way of indicating the difference existing between them and the Decalogue. The latter alone was the “Words” of God. With this distinction clearly in evidence between legal policy and procedures, it can further be said that the whole structure was given Israel, not to lead her to despair, but as a guide to life for a people whom God had already saved and redeemed. It is precisely the genius of the original Mosaic covenant that obligation was tied to the recital of God’s saving acts, that didache 29(teaching) was seen to follow from kerygma (proclamation), that obedience was placed within the context of response to gracious, redeeming activity. Judaism, on the other hand, created from the variety of scattered legal materials a constitution, so that covenant became the gift of the Law and obedience to that constitution. It can thus be argued that Paul’s attack on the Judaism of his time was in a sense a reformulation in Christ of the original intention of God in Israel. In any event, Law and Gospel cannot be considered an adequate formula for the understanding of the relation between the Testaments, because it falsifies the revelation of God to Israel.

Finally, it is often claimed that the exclusivism of the Old Testament’s claim, based upon the doctrine of God’s jealousy and wrath, makes it difficult for the Church to enter a viable relationship with people of other religions. We live in an age of tolerance, when it is necessary for mankind to live together without undue friction, and it is being claimed that the Christian religion is not a help but a hindrance to mutual understanding. Its exclusive claims and its lack of tolerance, which appear to divide it into many camps, each in competition with the others, hardly furnish a setting for the unifying of mankind. Modern Christianity in the multiplicity of its missionary forms¹⁰ is an enemy to itself, and, more important, to the achievement of one world.

From one perspective, namely the sectarianism of the churches, the charge against the Christian mission is surely true. The churches as institutions have gone far to absolutize their external forms, so that the element of exclusivism in the Gospel, which belongs to God alone, is transferred to externals. On the other hand, there is adequate evidence that major Christian groups understand full well the prophetic indictment against all religious forms and piety which are anchored anywhere but in God Himself. Hence the contemporary churches are now suffering and must expect to suffer the judgment of God. Among the evidences of this is the very fact that their evangelizing efforts do not meet with more success, and 30that the figure of Jesus Christ in Scripture is more respected universally than the Church’s attempts to preach and to teach him. The Church’s mission has always been more hampered by the churches themselves than by Biblical difficulties.

At a deeper level, however, there can be no doubt that the Biblical witness demands an exclusivism of faith, and that particularly so when the God and Father of Jesus Christ is known as the God before whom all other gods are idols. The absolute claims to sovereignty on God’s part, His determination to be God and God alone, surely set limits on the tolerance of Christians in matters of syncretism, that is, in the reinterpretation of Biblical faith in such manner as to relieve the tension between it and another religion. Yet it is the radical Lordship of God which for the Christian actually makes possible the breaching of the barriers which divide the world. The reason is that the Christian is (ideally) created by God as a humble person who faces another human being as a brother in need like himself, not as a subject to be proselytized. He knows that he cannot make converts; only God himself can do that. He must share what has been given him, but it is God who validates it. He is a servant of God to the needy, not an imperialist or a righteous patriarch who with gracious condescension assists the unfortunate. He is one also who has a keen eye to discern God’s work by the Holy Spirit, knowing that the charisma of God cannot always be channeled into the organizational bounds in which he has been reared. Indeed, at a given moment in history it may not be God’s will to enlarge the numbers of converts, but possibly instead to reform another religion from within, and that especially where no community of Christians exists to replace an old one being broken.

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