Dr. Wright – The Mission of God 8/22/12

Dr. Wright continues in Chapter II entitled “Shaping A Missional Hermeneutic”:

Page 48 second paragraph, “A missional hermeneutic of the Bible begins with the Bible’s very existence.  For those who affirm some relationship (however articulated) between these texts and the self-revelation of our Creator God, the whole Canon of Scripture is a missional phenomenon in the sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God toward His creation and us, human beings in God’s own image, but wayward and wanton.  The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God.

The very existence of the Bible is incontrovertible evidence of the God who refused to forsake His rebellious creation, who refused to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to His original design for it…The very existence of such a collection of writings testifies to a God who breaks through to human beings, who disclosed Himself to them, who will not leave them unilluminated in their darkness…who takes the initiative in re-establishing broken relationships with us.  [Charles R. Taber, "Missiology and the Bible, " Missiology 11 1983: 232].

…page 49 paragraph two, “…Most of Paul’s letters were written in the heat of his missionary efforts: wrestling with the theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles, affirming the need for Jew & Gentile to accept one another in Christ and in the church, tackling the baffling range of new problems that assailed young churches as the Gospel took root in the world of Greek polytheism, confronting incipient heresies with clear affirmations of the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and so on.

And why were the Gospels so called?   Because they were written to explain the significance of the evangel-the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, especially His death and resurrection.  Confidence in these things were essential to the missionary task of the expanding church.  And the person to whom we owe the largest quantity of the New Testament, Luke, shapes his two-volume work in such a way that the missionary mandate to the disciples to be Christ’s witnesses to the nations comes as the climax to volume one and the introduction to volume two.

More from Dr. Wright in the next entry……