Abstract
This article demonstrates how an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about mission allows for a more dynamic definition of who belongs to the Christian community. It argues that the church ought to understand its relationship to its sociocultural environment not in terms of who is “in” and “out” but in terms of the One toward whom this community is oriented, and the corresponding movement towards or away from this center. This will be done by bringing the exegesis of John 17:14–19 and Romans 12:1–2 into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Paul Hiebert’s “bounded-set” and “centered-set” models in order to show how the centered-set model provides a more theologically nuanced and faithful depiction of the church’s missional identity. Additionally, the trinitarian theologies of Thomas Torrance and Lesslie Newbigin will be added to this conversation to further demonstrate how Hiebert’s centered-set model, in partnership with a trinitarian ecclesiology which focuses upon participation, fellowship, and communion, reduces the stark divide of “in” and “out,” instead defining belonging to the Christian community with reference to the God who gathers and calls the church together.
Keywords
The particular context in which this article is written is New Zealand, an increasingly secular society, where between 2001 and 2013, the percentage of the population claiming no religion increased from 29.6% to 41.9%, while the percentage of the population affiliated with Christianity decreased from 60.6% to 48.9% (Statistics New Zealand, 2014). This decline in institutional religious affiliation is reflective of a wider trend towards secularism. Krogt (2015: 84) observes that whereas due to increased multiculturalism New Zealand generally “treats religion as an aspect of culture, not as religion in the sense that religious adherents would recognize,” because Christianity is the “majority heritage religion … [it] is not as readily recognized as an aspect of culture, receives less protection, and is more easily made into an object of ridicule and satire.”
In a context where Christians are seen as socially compassionate volunteers at best, or as brainwashed and intolerant at worst, how might the church respond in a manner that continues to proclaim God’s gospel-faithfulness, and yet does not alienate those who do not identify as members of the Christian community? It is the thesis of this article that the interdisciplinary approach undertaken here enables us to develop a model of missional engagement that is less concerned with defining appropriate behavior, and more concerned with orientation towards the Triune God. Biblical studies, systematic theology and missiological observations should—and must—intersect if the church is to continue to offer a cohesive response to a post-Christendom society. The doctrine of the church is essential for having the right view of the church’s mission; with a theologically shallow, or incorrect, understanding of the nature of the church, we will inevitably conclude with an incorrect view of the relationship of the church to the world, which will result in an incorrect understanding of mission.
This thesis will be unpacked through integrating three strands of enquiry. We begin with an exploration of the scriptural material that lies behind the extrabiblical aphorism, “Be in the world but not of it.” This section will draw on Romans 12:2 and John 17:14–19 to discuss how the New Testament presents the distinction between those who are followers of Jesus and those who are not. Following this, we consider Paul Hiebert’s socio-missiological differentiation between bounded-sets and centered-sets, proposing that a centered-set perspective in mission and witness lends itself to a less stark division between “insiders” and “outsiders” and instead encourages a vision of mission as “turning towards the triune God.” Finally, we will draw upon the work of Thomas F. Torrance, a systematic theologian, and Lesslie Newbigin, a missiologist, who worked in distinctly different contexts, but who both argued for the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to the doctrine of the church and the mission of God’s people. These three strands will be drawn together to identify how an interdisciplinary conversation between theology, biblical studies, and missiology provides a more theologically faithful consideration of the relationship between the church and the world. It will be argued that the centered-set model, in partnership with a trinitarian ecclesiology which focuses upon participation, fellowship, and communion, allows for a more compassionate understanding of who is part of the church community, without obscuring the church’s distinction from the world.
Exegetical considerations: “Be in the world but not of it”
It is not uncommon for popular sayings that sound biblical to be thought of as biblical. Barna Research Group’s findings (2014) on the aphorism, “God helps those who help themselves,” illustrates this well. According to research undertaken between 1997 and 2000, three-quarters of the American audience surveyed believed that “God helps those who help themselves” is a direct biblical saying, despite the fundamental incompatibility of such a statement with Scripture’s proclamation that God in Christ acts to save us because we are utterly incapable of saving ourselves. In a similar associative vein, the phrase “Be in the world but not of it” is treated as if it has scriptural authority; the key difference is that, although it is never stated explicitly in Scripture, the saying possesses strong theological precedent.
In order to work out what scriptural content “Be in the world but not of it” is associated with, I undertook that most rigorous of searches: I used Google’s exact phrase search tool. Of the first 40 or so results, this passage is most frequently attributed to Romans 12:1–2 and the whole of John 17. While there are many theological themes which these passage contribute to, for our purposes, we may explore their emphasis that while the New Testament makes a clear distinction between the kingdom of God and the world, this distinction is not fully visible in the time between Christ’s first and second comings.
Romans 12:1–2
It is widely recognized (Dunn, 1988: 715–16; Moo, 1996: 748, 2000: 393; Morris, 1988: 431; Jewett, 2007: 724–27) that Romans 12 signals a shift within the literary structure of Romans, where Paul moves from doctrinal to ethical considerations. Stott (1994: 317) suggests that this is a movement from “exposition to exhortation, from the gospel to everyday Christian discipleship,” although Moo (2000: 393) rightly observes that this division is not absolute, since “all theology is practical, and all practice, if it is truly Christian, is theological.” Paul’s instructions to his brothers and sisters in Rome on how they are to live flow from and are intertwined with his previous gospel summation. The latter chapters of Romans are not an “essay in abstract ethics” (Morris, 1988: 432); 12:1 begins with “therefore” (oun) which shows that Paul is arguing that the ethical instructions following in chapters 12–16 are to be the believer’s response to the mercy that God has shown in Christ, the contours of which Paul has outlined in chapters 1–11.
In Romans 12:1, Paul urges his audience to present themselves to God as living sacrifices, and to do this as an act of spiritual worship. While there is some ambiguity over how to best translate the phrase λογικήν λατρείαν, given that the adjective can be translated as rational or spiritual and the noun can be translated as worship or service, the leading suggestions are rational worship or spiritual service. What is clearer is Paul’s intent; he exhorts believers to serve God wholeheartedly in everything. This emphasis is borne out by the continuation of Paul’s thought in the following verse, with its instruction to believers not to become conformed to this world, but to instead be transformed by the renewal of their minds, in order to be able to discern the will of God.
It is the first half of Romans 12:2 that attracts our attention here in relation to the encouragement to “be in the world, but not of it.” Paul uses two key verbs, “conformed,” which comes from syschēmatizō, and “transformed,” which comes from metamorphoō. While older scholarship emphasized the two different roots of these verbs, suggesting that schema relates to the external, outward form, while morphē relates to the inward essential being, contemporary scholarship rejects such a distinction, arguing that it is too hard to sustain, so that the two should be taken as synonymous (Moo, 1996: 756; Schreiner, 1998: 646–47). 1 Moo (2000: 395) helpfully notes that while the neat syllabic contrast that we find in English between “conform” and “transform” does not exist in the Greek, “the English rendering is true to the sense of the Greek,” making the English contrast easily memorable.
Alongside these contrasting terms, Paul’s use of aiōn rather than cosmos is notable. Although most contemporary English translations render aiōn as “world,” it is better translated as “this age” in order to reflect Paul’s salvation-historical framework involving the conflict between the current age and the age to come (Morris, 1988: 435; Schreiner, 1998: 647). 2 Humankind have been transferred from the realm of sin and death in Adam to the realm of righteousness and life in Christ, but “while belonging to the new realm, we continue to live, as people still in the ‘body’ in the old realm” (Moo, 1996: 755). In urging believers not to conform to the present age, Paul is emphasizing the strong incompatibility that exists between the kingdom of God, and the world system that stands in opposition to the kingdom of God, and the resulting inability of believers to wholeheartedly belong to both.
To be in the world, but not of it, requires a distinctive lifestyle that sets believers apart; the difference is that God is their reference point. Paul does not outline the model of transformed living here—that is what he will go on to do in the following chapters—but it is nevertheless clear that Jesus Christ is “both the pattern and source of this renewal and transformation” (Dunn, 1988: 718), resulting in a “fundamental transformation of character and conduct, away from the standards of the world and into the image of Christ himself” (Stott, 1994: 323). Paul is not looking for external adherence to a moral code, but rather, as Morris (1988: 435) observes, is “looking for a transformation at the deepest level that is infinitely more significant than the conformity to the world’s pattern that is distinctive of so many lives.” Although Stott and Morris both use the term “world” in keeping with the predominant translation of the Greek text, we should keep in mind the Pauline sense of the contrast between the current age and the age to come. We need to resist the gnostic temptation to dismiss everything that is not overtly spiritual as dangerous in some way, for God is at work redeeming all things, even the structures of our society. However, the point that is important here is the Pauline exhortation to avoid syncretistic tendencies. In this way, believers are able to remain participant in societies that are apathetic about, or opposed to, the Lordship of Jesus Christ and yet live wholly submitted to Christ’s rule.
John 17
Alongside Romans 12:2, and the Pauline “already but not yet” salvation-historical framework, we should place a section of the Johannine farewell discourse of John 13–17. In John 17, we find a record of Jesus’ prayer which has been recorded for a didactic purpose (Beasley-Murray, 1991: 293; Köstenberger, 2004: 482). 3 In 17:1–5, Jesus begins by asking the Father to glorify him in the events that will follow. In 17:6–19, Jesus prays for the disciples, before finally praying for those who will hear the disciples’ message and come to faith in 17:20–26. The internal development of this prayer moves from the mission of the Son to the mission of the disciples, and then to the mission of the church. The key section which attracts our attention is the final segment of Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, which we find in John 17:14–19.
In 17:14–16, Jesus acknowledges the conflict that will take place between his disciples and the world. Having heard the “word of God” through the life of the incarnate Son, the disciples now stand contra the world. The Greek terminology here is cosmos as opposed to the Pauline use of aiōn in Romans 12:2, but the referent is the same (Köstenberger, 2004: 35);
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Jesus acknowledges the distinction between those who are his followers and those who belong to the world, and warns that those who choose to identify with him will become hated by those who do not. However, Jesus does not ask the Father to take his followers out of the world. Jesus has already acknowledged that he will soon depart but that his disciples will remain. Instead, he asks the Father to protect the disciples from evil (tou ponērou). As Beasley-Murray (1991: 300) observes, the Lord explicitly disavows a prayer that the disciples may escape the evil one by their removal from the world. That should never be, for the Father, far from abandoning the world in its rebellion, is engaged in the process of delivering the world and through the Son establishing a sovereignty that spells salvation for the world.
The task of every Christian is not to withdraw from the world, nor to act in a way that is indistinguishable from the world, but to remain in the world to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ (Carson, 1991: 564–65). The function of the disciples was to bear witness to God’s faithfulness, a task which cannot be completed if one is removed from contact with the world that rejects God. This instruction to “remain” is explicated in the remaining verses of the pericope, where in 17:17–19 it is emphasized that Jesus does not offer escape from the world to his followers, the disciples are sent into the world. Jesus asks that the disciples might be sanctified so that that they may be sent into the world, just as Jesus was sent into the world by the Father. John 17:17 and 17:19 parallel the disciples’ sanctification with Jesus’ sanctifying work, while 17:18 parallels the Father’s sending of Jesus into the world with Jesus sending the disciples into the world.
One final point should be noted here. Jesus does not ask the Father to provide the disciples with metaphorical biohazard protection suits, so that they may remain unaffected and untouched by the problems of the world. Instead, Jesus asks the Father to ready the disciples for mission and engagement so that they will be equipped to bear witness to Jesus despite the conflict that this will provoke. At the same time, even though the disciples will remain in the sphere of the world, living within the political and cultural context of a world system that does not acknowledge the sovereignty of God, their primary allegiance has shifted. Thus, Jesus’ prayer for the disciples is not intended to introduce an “absolute cleavage of communication” between the disciples and the world, but rather to strengthen them to live counter-cultural lives of mission. As Carson (1991: 566–67) observes, seekers reading this Gospel are thus introduced to the profound mandate and unique example that animate the witness of Christians. More, they are thus exposed to the mutually exclusive circles that demand a choice: the circle of the world, in all its rebellion and lostness, and the circle of the disciples of Jesus, in all the privilege of their relationship to the living, self-disclosing, mission-ordaining, sanctifying God.
Bounded- and centered-sets—how our models affect our view of mission
Carson’s phrase “mutually exclusive circles” allows us to segue into the second strand of our enquiry; Paul Hiebert’s socio-missiological differentiation between bounded-sets and centered-sets. The images and patterns which shape how we think about “belonging to the church” inherently affect our view of mission.
Take the phrase, “mutually exclusive circles.” This suggests that the church and the world are completely separate with no point of contact, language which does not seem particularly scriptural, or grounded in reality. Instead, a more helpful perspective is found in Paul Hiebert’s (2008: 36) differentiation between bounded-sets and centered-sets. This model is discussed in Developing Worldviews. In this work, Hiebert describes the different ways in which humans form cognitive categories in order to group people or things. Hiebert identifies three main approaches—bounded-sets, centered-sets, and fuzzy-sets, although only the first two are relevant to this discussion.
Bounded-sets are those which have clearly identified essential characteristics and clearly defined boundaries. Objects within each bounded-set have uniform essential characteristics, and the set remains static. This rather technical language is much easier to understand through Hiebert’s (1978: 24–29) example of apples. An apple is a specific type of fruit. All apples are 100% apple. Although they may vary in quality—size, shapes, and varieties—they remain apple. One is not more apple than another. There is also no change in this category, as a rotting apple is still an apple. The only change that occurs takes place when something is done to change the essential characteristics of the apple—for example, when an apple has been eaten.
When the bounded-set model is applied to Christianity, it establishes a firm dichotomy between those who are in and those who are out. Given the difficulty of validating another individual’s faith commitment, the bounded-set approach generally focuses on externally verifiable measurements such as adherence to doctrine or particular behaviors. One is either a Christian or a non-Christian, with the result that the bounded-set model looks to identify the “event” when people move from the outside to the inside; this is generally the moment of conversion.
However, the difficulties of applying this bounded-set model to Christianity are numerous. Church history demonstrates the issue of the bounded-set approach in the repeating pattern of denominational splits over issues of doctrine and praxis as each denomination creates and then maintains their own boundaries to define membership. The bounded-set model does not acknowledge different commitments to discipleship or the generous diversity that life in the kingdom of God entails. It almost inevitably results in a formal and legalistic perspective on who belongs to the church and who does not. The potential for unjust power dynamics is also inherent to the bounded-set model, and must be acknowledged, because it is those who identify as Christians that seem to have the power in defining where the boundaries lie. We must beware the danger of self-justification as those on the inside, conveniently ignoring the consistent theme in Jesus’ teaching that it is those who are on the outside, the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed, who will inherit the earth. Spiritual development practitioner Sheila Pritchard (2011) describes this risk of self-justification through the metaphor of a fence; the bounded-set model shows that Christians risk spending so much time maintaining the fence that we never go outside the fence to invite others inside. If this were to be the primary model of mission, our emphasis would be “come out of the world” rather than “be in the world.”
What might be a better model than the bounded-set model? It is here that Hiebert describes the centered-set model and its less stark divisions than the bounded-set model. Instead of the metaphor of a fence, Pritchard (2011) suggests that we should think of the centered-set model as a well, referring to the practice of Australian outback ranchers who don’t build fences to keep the cattle inside a particular area—instead, they dig wells. The cattle aren’t motivated to roam when doing so means leaving their source of life—they don’t go far from the well in a place where there is no other source of water—so that there is no need for the building of fences.
Hiebert’s (1978: 27) more technical definition explains that a centered-set is created by “defining a center, and the relationship of things to that center.” This allows more dynamicity than the bounded-set model. The focus falls less on the distinction between being inside or outside the category, and is instead on the direction in which objects are moving—either towards the center, or away from the center. The set, according to Hiebert (1978: 27), “is made up of all objects moving towards the center.” This means that in comparison to the “fence maintenance” of external behavior or doctrinal adherence that is modeled by the bounded-set, a centered-set model instead defines Christianity in terms of its center. This article will argue with reference to Torrance and Newbigin’s work in our next section, that this center is the God who has revealed himself to humanity through Word and Spirit. Consequently, we define those who belong to the Christian community as those who are facing towards the triune God. It is not that behavior and doctrine are unimportant, but rather than they are not the primary defining characteristics of what it is to be a Christian. The centered-set model is better able to describe the journey of someone joining the Christian community, because it both acknowledges the need for conversion—in that someone changes direction, and begins to move towards the center—and it embraces the need for an ongoing process of growth.
However, the centered-set model presents significant challenges to traditional ways of thinking about the church, not least in terms of identifying who belongs to the Christian community. Hiebert (1978: 29) himself asks, “How do you organize an institution such as the church as a centered-set? Is it not essential to maintain the boundaries by setting high standards for membership?” Various forms of this question have driven dialogue about “church expressions” in the last few decades. There is widespread support for the idea that we need to change how we “do church” in order to attract new believers, and yet no common agreement on how this should change. It is in response to this conversation that we draw in our final strand of enquiry; the suggestion that the church does not need more models just for the sake of ‘relevance’; instead we need to be recentered in relation to the triune God.
Systematic theology, missiology, and the relation of the church to the world
Ralph Del Colle (2007: 253) observes that the ecumenical developments of the twentieth century, with the parallel focus on the doctrine of the Trinity, “resulted in a near consensus that the nature of Church life and order is a matter of communio or koinōnia.” The systematic themes of the triune God, ecumenical commitment, and a renewal in evangelism and mission were among the key impulses of missional engagement in the twentieth century. We will briefly explore this ecclesiological trajectory from both the dogmatic and the missiological perspective, drawing on the works of Thomas F. Torrance and Lesslie Newbigin, who both integrate trinitarian, ecumenical, and missional notes.
Newbigin spent a large proportion of his career as a minister in the Church of South India, becoming a noted missiologist on his return to England. Torrance grew up as the child of missionary parents in China, before returning to Scotland where he spent the majority of his career as Professor of Christian Dogmatics at New College, Edinburgh. Despite their different contexts, and the relative lack of direct interaction between them (Newbigin, 1964: x), 5 they share the stance that the distinctive nature of the people of God is essential for witness, and that the church’s primary identifying characteristic should not be morality, separation, and a sense of being “holier-than-thou,” but rather should be the life-giving way in which the church is a community formed through participation in trinitarian fellowship.
The central concept of koinōnia, or communion, features strongly in Torrance’s understanding of the Trinity. Torrance (1996: 24, 28, 104) is adamant that we must maintain the perichoretic coinherence of the three divine persons, who are what they are only in relation to each other; Father, Son, and Spirit are the eternal Godhead. The language of “parts” and “whole” is inadequate because Father, Son, and Spirit are each wholly God, so that God’s being is not a monad, a single undifferentiated reality, but rather a “fullness of Personal Being,” and a “transcendent Communion of Persons.” When discussing the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the church, Torrance (1996: 220) describes it as a “differentiated analogical correspondence,” elucidating that The doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the very heart of saving faith where it constitutes the inner shape of Christian worship and the dynamic grammar of Christian theology: it expresses the essential and distinctively Christian understanding of God by which we live, and which is of crucial significance for the evangelical mission of the Church as well. (Torrance, 1996: 10)
The agreement between Torrance and Newbigin on the centrality of the triune God for the life of the church is borne out by Newbigin’s (1964: 98) insistence that “we must take simply and seriously the truth that the Church is a communion in the Holy Spirit, and that He is no cypher, no abstract noun, but living Lord.” For Newbigin (1964: 53), belonging to the church is not a matter of intellectual assent or cultural conformity, since the church “in its essential nature it is a work of the Holy Spirit binding us to one another in the love wherewith Christ loved us; and its essential human condition is the faith which consists in casting oneself wholly upon that love.” Although Newbigin does not draw as heavily upon the idea of koinōnia as Torrance does, Newbigin (1964: 90) comments that “the Church is, in the most exact sense, a koinōnia, a common sharing in the Holy Spirit,” and observes (1964: 104) that it is the same Spirit that empowered Christ’s ministry that is given as the “permanent principle” of the church’s life. The result of this focus on the Trinity as the foundation of the church’s existence is rejection of the idea of the church as a voluntary society, or a voluntary association (Torrance, 1993: 277; Newbigin, 1964: 62). Instead Newbigin and Torrance both argue that the growth of the church was primarily the growth of a community, not the promulgation of an abstract message.
This community initially took shape around the apostles, who Torrance and Newbigin both describe as plenipotentiaries, a word which describes an ambassador who is fully authorized to represent the one who sends them. Newbigin (1964: 51, 61) notes that the disciples were Christ’s representatives and plenipotentiaries, who received “not so much a formal course of instruction in divine truth as an introduction into the intimacy of His Spirit,” while Torrance (2008: 22–23) observes that “the disciples are apostles or trained plenipotentiaries of Christ, specially trained in order to be authoritative transmitters of his own kerygma, so that whoever hears them, hears Christ himself.” In order to explain the nature of the disciples’ sending, Torrance and Newbigin draw on the Hebrew concept of shaliach (Greek apostolos) to explain the nature of the sending of the Twelve; being sent in Christ’s name and therefore with his authority.
While Newbigin (1964: 94) simply comments that Christ sent the apostles as his representatives in the sense of “having and ministering to the world His own divine power to heal and to forgive,” Torrance stresses the dependent nature of the apostles being sent, and wants to make it clear that there is an essential difference between speaking of the Spirit as shaliach and the apostles as shaliach. Although the disciples are also sent to bear witness, they are not shaliach in the way that Christ and the Spirit are shaliach (Torrance, 2008: 39–40), which is to do with the mutual coinherence of the Father, Son, and Spirit. However, this is not to say that the apostles do not have a genuine role in the growth of the church. The concept of koinonia is not only to be applied to the inner life of the Trinity, but also to the communal existence of all those who, drawing upon our previous sections, choose to be identified with the God who reveals himself in Christ and the Spirit, rather than the world, and are thus moving towards him as the center by which they are oriented.
The pattern of shaliach might be helpfully described as the outwards direction of the Christian community, the obverse of our movement towards the triune God. As our love for God increases, so too should our love for our neighbors; the love of God is embodied through the community. The Christian community has a vital role in the transmission of the knowledge of God, which can only take place in this embodied form.
Reflecting further on this, Newbigin (1964: 100) suggests that the gospel is communicated through a “mediated approach,” where God approaches each human through his or her neighbors, concluding that “it is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community” (Newbigin, 1964: 27). Torrance (2001: 98–130) echoes Newbigin’s conclusions about the importance of the Christian community for witness, describing the church as a community of reciprocity, or the “social co-efficient of theological knowledge.” By this, Torrance means that the knowledge of God cannot be abstracted from the community through which God continues to reveal himself, a community established by the Spirit among the first disciples, and sustained by the Spirit ever since.
Weaving this all together
At the start of this article I identified the challenge that faces the church in responding to the increase in its societal marginalization, and identified my context as a New Zealander as a specific example. I asked how the church might continue to proclaim God’s gospel-faithfulness in such a context, and suggested that the intersection of biblical studies, systematic theology, and missiological observations could bear fruit in answering such a question. Having developed three representative strands of enquiry, we may now weave them together in order to fully develop our thoughts.
The doctrine of the church is essential for having the right view of the church’s mission; with a theologically shallow, or incorrect, understanding of the nature of the church, we will inevitably develop an incorrect view of the relationship of the church to the world, which will result in an incorrect understanding of mission. To return to the New Zealand context, on one end of the spectrum, we have the predominant scenario of pluralism with its claim that all religions lead equally to God (if there is one), and so the church has no exclusive right to salvation. At this end of the spectrum is any example that downplays or removes the distinction between the church and the world. Forms of civil religion where church and state become intertwined also sit on this end of the spectrum; in this scenario, the church is assimilated into culture or society in such a way that it loses the ability to bear witness that there is an alternative to the status quo. At the other end of the spectrum are the approaches where Christians entirely separate themselves from the world, such as the Gloriavale community on the West Coast of New Zealand. Their practices are most similar to that of extreme interpretations of the Exclusive Brethren; living in isolated community, Gloriavale is an example of such a separatist Christianity, which controls the access of its members to the world, whether through media or in person (Evans, 2017).
When we interpret these extremes in the light of the biblical, theological, and missiological strands of our enquiry, we see that neither of these examples offers us a faithful understanding of how the church is to relate to the world in fulfillment of the command to proclaim the gospel. To return to Hiebert’s language, the Gloriavale example erects a boundary that is so high that no one can see out, and very few people can see in, while at the other end of the spectrum, pluralistic approaches have no fence, but also no fixed central point, so that there is no clear distinction between the church and the world, and no way in which to evaluate whether people are moving towards or away from the God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
By itself bounded-set and centered-set language paints too neutral a picture, but when brought into dialogue with biblical exegesis and systematic doctrine, we recognize that on one hand there needs to be a clear distinction between the church and the world, and yet on the other hand, we should be more concerned with the direction of an individual’s journey towards God, rather than their external adherence to expectations of Christian morality, or the social subsets of Christian culture. The centered-set model, in partnership with the Pauline insistence that believers should not conform to the predominant culture and the Johannine emphasis that the disciples are to remain in the world in order to bear witness to what God in Christ has done, and with the contribution of both Torrance and Newbigin that it is the triune God who is the foundation, and therefore the fixed center of the church’s existence, offers us a model for missional engagement. As Beasley-Murray (1991: 303) observes, The Church is to be the embodiment of the revelation and the redemption of Christ before the world, so that the world may not only hear that Jesus is the Christ, who has achieved redemption for all, but they may see that the redemptive revelation of Christ has power to transform fallen men and women into the likeness of God and to bring about the kind of community that the world needs.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.