Beginning at the beginning: Reading missio Dei from the start of the Bible

Missio Dei and Biblical narrative

Just as Christian missiology has embraced the notion of missio Dei as theologically foundational to mission activity, so too it has come to embrace missio Dei as giving the Bible its narrative unity. Six years after the missio Dei concept surfaced at the International Missionary Council Willingen Conference in 1952, Georg Vicedom argued for the need to go beyond Biblical hermeneutics that “attempted to prove that the mission was justified on the basis of missionary thought in the Bible”, to seeing that “the Bible in its totality ascribes only one intention to God: to save mankind” (Vicedom, 1965: 4; translation of 1958 original). Moving beyond the more obvious mission-related passages, Vicedom used salvific themes, of divine sending and the extension of God’s kingdom to explore how God’s mission pervades all of God’s dealings with Israel, the apostles, and the church. More recently, Western evangelicals have seen the need for a more deliberate set of “missiological hermeneutics”, moving in turn beyond Biblical mission themes to a double process of: (i) discerning through the Biblical canon an underlying narrative unity around the missio Dei; and (ii) revisiting various texts, using the missio Dei narrative as a tool to uncover their full significance (Bosch, 1986: 65–69; Hunsberger, 2011: 312). While missiological hermeneutics as an approach involves far more than discerning missio Dei at the core of the Biblical metanarrative ¹ , this has become an important element within it. Christopher Wright’s influential The Mission of God, lays out a “hermeneutical map” of the whole Bible, showing that even in the Old Testament, God’s Mission is a reliable guide to discerning God’s dealings with Israel, the Gentiles and the earth (Wright, 2008: 48–69). Wright’s book is just one example of many recent efforts to trace the missio Dei as the controlling core of the Bible’s storyline ² .

But here is the incongruity I want to address: those who read the whole Bible as the story of God’s mission have rarely traced God’s mission activity back to the start of the Bible’s story. Theologically, the missio Dei originates, by definition, with God himself. Yet chronologically, canonical cases for the missio Dei tend to begin God’s missionary initiative with his call of Abraham in Genesis 12 ³ . Lesslie Newbigin starts earlier with God’s covenant with Noah in Genesis 9 (Newbigin, 1995: 31–32). Several missio Dei advocates have pointed to the “protoevangelium” in Genesis 3: 15 as the first prophetic anticipation of God’s mission, though they do not portray it as the start of God’s sending activity ⁴ . The point is that Biblical narrative accounts of missio Dei have begun after the entrance of sin in Genesis 3, but not before. Vicedom is explicit that this is because sin is what makes any sending activity necessary:

“There was no necessity in this fellowship for a special sending or for emphasis on the lordship of God. The fellowship God granted to mankind was the Basilea of God. Herein man stood under the lordship of God. The vis-a-vis of God in this fellowship is once more restored through redemption” (Vicedom, 1965: 15).

Since (in this view) God’s loving reign is entirely fulfilled at the creation, sin’s disruptive entrance is what provokes the narrative of God’s missional activity. As Wright puts it, “The whole Bible could be portrayed as a very long answer to a very simple question: What can God do about the sin and rebellion of the human race?” (Wright, 2008: 195). At this point, I suggest that there may be a tension between missio Dei theology and hermeneutics: we have a theology of God’s mission arising from the Triune God’s cosmic purposes and loving initiative, yet we have a narrative hermeneutic of God’s mission arising as a response to the entry of sin. We will return to this problem.

With canonical descriptions of missio Dei beginning with Abraham after the Fall, God’s commission to his image-bearing humanity in Genesis 1: 28 – “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” – has been taken by many evangelicals as a “creation mandate” (or “cultural mandate”) to all people, held in distinction from the redemptive mandate particular to the church’s participation in missio Dei (Ott et al., 2014: 149–152). In this reading, the creation mandate is then restated to Noah after the Fall, continuing to apply to all humanity, even as God chooses Abraham’s descendants in particular to participate in his redemptive purposes (Glasser et al., 2003: 139; Peters, 1984: 170). When Jesus entrusts his church with the “gospel mandate” to be his witnesses, he also renews the church’s responsibility to the universal cultural mandate – understood by missiologists as relating to stewardship of a wide variety of human relationships and structures: “family and community, law and order, culture and civilization, and ecological concern” (Glasser et al., 2003: 38). But difficult issues then arise: are both mandates part of the missio Dei? ⁵ Should one be prioritized over the other? ⁶ . Wright’s approach seems to show a trend among evangelicals to tie a renewed creation mandate tightly into a missio Dei that encompasses both the Adamic commission and the Great Commission (Wright, 2008: 412–419; cf. 211–212). The persistence of a two-mandate approach remains a problem, however – not only for a unified approach to mission activity ⁷ , but also for a unified conception of missio Dei. If God’s mission calls, singularly and directly, for every role and relationship of our creation-embedded humanity to be re-oriented towards Jesus’ lordship, then dividing such a call into two spheres seems incongruous.

Pre-Fall elements of the missio Dei in Biblical theology and Biblical studies

The broad notion that God did not perfect his creation before the Fall, but rather made it as the beginning of the full working out of his purposes, was explored by Iranaeus of Lyons in the second century. In Against Heresies, Iranaeus argues that God deliberately created humans in a state of infancy, intending to graciously bring them to maturity in the unfolding of eternity, and with them perfect the whole of creation (Against Heresies 4: 38: 3). In Iranaeus’ writings, these anticipatory creation purposes seem to point to the future incarnation of his Son, who would perfect the divine image in which Adam and Eve were made, and bring humanity to full maturity ⁸ . In this view, the incarnation is not primarily directed against sin but is the initiative always anticipated at creation (Steenberg, 2008: 5–9). In Iranaeus’ scheme, the Fall is the satanic disruption of a purpose that had already begun: humanity’s movement towards perfection in God (Wingren, 2004: 51–52). In terms of tracing a missio Dei hermeneutic from the start of the Bible, Iranaeus shows us one possible way of understanding an unfinished divine purpose in the creation narratives of Genesis 1–2. Keeping in mind that the theology of missio Dei centers on the Father’s sending of the Son ⁹ , Iranaeus allows us to see the Son’s commissioning as potentially inherent to God’s aims at creation – and so discern the Triune God’s missional activity at the start of the Biblical narrative.

In recent scholarship, a compelling exegetical case for beginning the story of missio Dei in the creation narratives has been set out by G. K. Beale in The Temple and the Church’s Mission (2005). Beale’s overall thesis is that the Old Testament sanctuaries were designed as microcosms of the cosmos, pointing to God’s eschatological intention to fill the earth with his presence, an expectation that begins to be realized in the New Testament, with the expansion of the Spirit-filled church as the new temple (Beale, 2005: 25, 392–393). He begins by arguing that Eden was the first such temple, and that God intended Adam and Eve to guard its holiness and expand the boundaries of his presence from Eden outwards (Beale, 2005: 85) ¹⁰ . The immediate textual evidence connecting Eden to a tabernacle is certainly interesting: the term used to describe God walking around the garden in Genesis 3: 8 is used later in the Torah to describe how God walked among the Israelites encamped around the tabernacle ¹¹ ; while the task given to Adam and Eve to “work and keep” the garden is given in terms frequently used to describe the duty of priests in the tabernacle and temple ¹² . Behind these clues is a wider Ancient Near East tradition of creation accounts being linked to temple-building, and the common sequence of the god creating and then coming to rest in his sanctuary ¹³ .To support his assertion that God intended for Adam and Eve not only to guard this sanctuary but expand it to the ends of the earth, Beale first points to strong conceptual parallels between Adam and Eve’s task to “work and keep” the garden and the commission given to humanity in Genesis 1: 26–28, particularly the instruction to “subdue and rule” the earth ¹⁴ . Then he points to the story itself: even taken in isolation, the Genesis 2 narrative invites the question of what would happen to the garden and the uncultivated land outside it as the human couple grew their family; but viewed in its canonical sequence after the commission of Chapter 1, the most natural reading is that God intended the humans to cultivate an ever-expanding garden as they moved to subdue and rule the earth (Beale, 2005: 85) ¹⁵ . Beale’s thesis, then, offers us a way to understand God setting out his mission, and involving humans in it, from the point of creation onwards.

In fact, Beale’s temple theme is not the only plausible way of reading God’s missional purposes as beginning in Genesis 1–2. God’s commission to his image-bearers to “subdue” and “rule” over the creation, seems to make them kingly representatives, and might be seen as the start of his cosmic purposes of extending his kingdom to the ends of the earth ¹⁶ . But if this first commission is to be read as an earlier equivalent of the church’s gospel commission, it must be adapted with care (and the humility befitting a postcolonial era), so as to read it through the lens of the Fall’s corruption of power and the Messiah’s overturning of what it means for humans to enact authority. We are not called to dominate the earth, let alone its people ¹⁷ . Another potential narrative thread of the missio Dei might be found in the “be fruitful and multiply” aspect of God’s blessing on humanity. Cut off from the intimate presence of God, such a command might be seen as still inherent in the created order in a withered form (Genesis 3: 16–19; 6: 1), but the Genesis text repeatedly focuses this language on the future of the Abrahamic line ¹⁸ . If so, the blessing given to Abraham might be seen not as the start of God’s salvation project but the continuation of the blessing given to the first humans; and the language of fruitfulness and multiplication attributed by New Testament writers to the gospel might be seen as more than analogous to the first commission but continuous with it (e.g., Colossians 1: 5–6, 1: 10; Galatians 5:22; Mark 4: 1–20; John 4: 35–38). Yet another aspect of missio Dei theology in the Genesis creation narratives might be election: God taking Adam from the earth, bestowing life on him, setting him apart for a holy purpose of mediating his blessing on all other things that God has made, and placing him in holy space on the cusp of an onlooking creation ¹⁹ . While the textual allusions to Israel’s election are not obvious, the priesthood of Adam and Eve in the garden makes the link more plausible as an aspect of the Torah’s narrative (see Walton, 2015: 107–108). In each of these potential threads, a non-malevolent disorder still present after creation seems to allow room for God’s commissioning to bring ever-increasing fruitfulness, function and divine reign ²⁰ – even before the entrance of evil. Certainly, the narrative is complicated by every aspect of this special commissioning being perverted by sin, and by the resulting situation that humanity itself – not just the rest of creation – has become part of the darkened territory into which God sends his chosen mission-partners. But in essence, God’s mission – centered on the sending of his Son, and witnessed to by a Spirit-sent church – is not a parallel commission to Adam’s but the same commission, reconfigured and restored after many trespasses by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ ²¹ .

Implications for beginning missio Dei at the start of the Biblical narrative

If the mission of God is being enacted from the first page of the Biblical narrative, I suggest a number of important implications for understanding our participation in it. Firstly, (i) participating in God’s mission is inherent to being human. Our vocation, of being God’s priestly representatives throughout the creation, began before the Fall and will continue after evil has been defeated. The resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Spirit renews this part of our humanity, rather than begins it ²² . John Piper famously begins his classic text on mission: “Mission is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is”. His argument is that the church’s mission-related activity is temporary, and is directed towards a larger goal that will last beyond itself, of all nations and all creation glorifying God (Piper, 2010: 15–18). But if, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were not just worshipers but representative emissaries, then the two activities may be more closely and even permanently intertwined. This is especially so in Beale’s (2005) canonical scheme, where mission is viewed precisely as the cultivation of ever increasing temple worship.

A second implication is that (ii) sin is reframed as that which has perverted human partnership in God’s mission. Rather than causing the creation to “fall” from a perfected state, evil aims from the start to divert God’s perfecting missional activity and so – not least through the corruption of his human mission agents – set it onto a destructive course. At the heart of humans’ capitulation to sin is the neglect of their God-appointed vocation. Refusing to be the channels of God’s outward blessing to the creation, Adam and Eve’s consumption from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil might be seen at one level as a move to become the center and source of that blessing (Walton, 2015: 140–148). But more pertinent still to the Bible’s narrative, it was an attempt to hoard the blessing for themselves – grasping and consuming it, rather than channeling it outwards; using their privileged appointment to their own advantage, rather than to the advantage of God’s cosmic purposes. In this way, the story of sin’s origins lines up with what Lesslie Newbigin (Newbigin, 1995: 32) articulates as a persistent tension in the Biblical narrative between God’s mission and his people:

“Bearers – not exclusive beneficiaries. There lay the constant temptation. Again and again it had to be said that election is for responsibility, not for privilege. Again and again unfaithful Israel had to be threatened with punishment because it was the elect of God.”

When Adam and Eve themselves gave into this temptation, God seems to have preserved their mission-based human nature by preserving a kind of “shadow mission” for humanity, involving dominion, multiplication and fruitfulness, but in a withered and distorted form (Genesis 3: 15–19) without the partnership and presence of God (Genesis 3: 23–24).

Thirdly, starting the missio Dei in Genesis 1 (iii) clarifies for the church a single, creation-oriented mission mandate. My argument is that for communities redeemed by Christ, the gospel does not add a second “gospel mandate” to their continuing “creation mandate,” but rather renews that first mandate under the authority of Jesus, whose vindicated cross gives it new shape in relation to a creation now enmeshed in sin. Before turning to Christ, humans participate in only a shadow of God’s mission to creation, estranged from his partnership and presence. Afterwards, this same engagement is now driven forward in the compassion, discernment, and authoritative efficacy of the Last Adam, and his Spirit of the age to come. Here I agree with David Bosch who argues for the centrality of gospel proclamation, not because it holds priority over social engagement, but because evangelism is precisely the way God enlists humans into a holistic mission oriented towards filling the whole earth with his justice and reconciling love (Bosch, 1987: 101–102). As we pursue a more unified mission engagement – with individuals, communities, the structures of institutions and government, and the natural world – Beale’s (2005) scheme of garden/temple expansion offers an interesting template. If Jesus’ rule and indwelling Spirit mark the beginning of the eschatological temple, then we might conceive of God’s mission as him involving us as priests in his sacrificial work of bringing created people and things into that temple and cultivating them for his glory ²³ . Such a scheme seems to unite rather than bifurcate centripetal and centrifugal movement, evangelism and social engagement, individual and community. But it also raises questions over whether in this age God’s Spirit can make his home amid power structures or within a still-groaning natural world.

Conclusion

I have argued that our reading of God’s mission in the Bible ought to begin at the beginning. Readings where God’s mission activity starts after the Fall with the call of Abraham sit uncomfortably with the very missio Dei concept they are aiming to serve – both its hermeneutic of mission uniting the Biblical narrative from start to finish, and its theology of mission originating with the Triune God himself rather than arising from human agency. Yet the opportunity to begin at the beginning seems to be there in the Genesis creation narratives themselves – in the earth-oriented commission and vocation which God gives his humans, with its intimation that, even before sin, God had involved them in an unfinished project of cosmic blessing. G. K. Beale’s (2005) contention that humans were appointed to guard and extend the borders of God’s sanctuary seems both exegetically compelling and canonically rich. Perhaps, other threads of God’s mission are present in Genesis 1–2 and then renewed with God’s calling of Abraham: fruitfulness; blessing through the reign of God; and election. Others may want to explore these connections, or even take my thesis further back and ask in what sense the mission of God in the Bible begins in Genesis 1: 1–3. In reading the Genesis texts missionally we do well to share Iranaeus’ wonder at how these passages, even God’s molding and breathing of dust into flesh, find their theological orbit in the Father’s sending of the Son and Spirit.

I hope that this is not a philosophical exercise. If participation in the missio Dei is inherent to our created humanity then this would seem to both sharpen our message and widen its scope. It sharpens it because our calling others to turn to Jesus, to find in him their very humanity redeemed, and to involve themselves in his mission – becomes a single, inseparable invitation. And yet the scope of this invitation is to go with the Spirit of God into every aspect of the creation God has entrusted to humanity’s stewardship. Here too is prophetic warning: if we neglect this calling, if we turn from bearers to hoarding beneficiaries, then we do not just become ineffective in mission, we contradict the core of our humanity. Yet for the church found as faithful stewards at the Master’s coming, there is the prospect of being entrusted with even more responsibility in God’s glorious cosmos-filling purposes.