Abstract
Oscar Cullmann is a rarely-heard name in current-day theological discourse. Yet his proposal, first lofted in the 1950s, that the Bible tells a more or less single and unilinear story has left a deep impression—particularly in the area of biblical theology of mission. Already Johannes Blauw in his 1961 book The Missionary Nature of the Church appeals to Heilsgeschichte, or salvation-history, as a governing concept, and ever since then, it has reigned supreme. Subtitles of other, more recent volumes bear out the dominance of this one-big-story paradigm. See, for example: Arthur Glasser, The Story of God’s Mission in the Bible; Christopher J.H. Wright, Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative; or Michael Goheen, The Missional Church and the Biblical Story. J.D. Payne’s book belongs to this same school. The first sentence of chapter 1 reads: “The Bible is comprised of multiple stories that unite to form one grand story revealing God and his mission” (1).
The virtue of A Theology of Mission relative to these kindred works is its concision; and its bibliography. Payne’s latest clocks in at 192 pages, but the first twenty-four pages of that are front matter: a preface briefly sets forth the rationale for the book and a few of its key themes, and then chapters 1 and 2 respectively introduce a “missional hermeneutic” and stage a whirlwind tour of “sending” in Scripture. The final chapter makes several manifesto claims, each in bold typeface and followed by one paragraph of explanation, in just over three pages. Bibliography and indexes take up another twenty-one pages—meaning that the meat of the book occupies only 127 pages. These pages are allocated, roughly equally, to the theme of mission in nine canonical units: Torah, Prophets, Writings, Synoptics, John, Acts, Pauline Epistles, General Epistles, Revelation. The result is a biblical-theology-of-mission blitz.
The controlling categories of this rapid-fire presentation are blessing and nations. Each chapter features “blessing the nations” in multiple section headings: “blessing the nations through restoration: return and reconstruction” (46), “blessing the nations through sovereignty” (62), “blessing the nations through a people: the church” (111), and so on. The calling of Abraham in Genesis 12, to be a blessing to the nations, thus provides the architecture of the book. “The Bible,” says Payne, “begins with God’s dealings with the nations and concludes with God’s concern with the nations. God’s purposes related to the nations form the basic story of Scripture” (6). The Abraham story brings this all-nations scope into relationship with the particular family, institutions, and histories of Israel. Payne speaks of God’s universal desire to bless nations and the particular people through whom God instrumentally pursues that end (15).
In all this—its one big story framework, its subordination of the particular to the universal, and its treatment of Abraham’s calling as a foundational template—A Theology of Mission resembles other recent entries in biblical theology of mission. As such, it shares in their theological problems. Many biblical texts simply do not appear much concerned with the nations, and hence engaging them under that heading feels like shoehorning. For instance, Payne says of the tabernacle that it “served to remind Israel of her responsibility to communicate the message that if the nations wanted to know and experience the blessings of their Creator, then they should look to Israel and join her before the tabernacle” (32). But the tabernacle texts themselves publish a far more basic divine purpose. God commands Moses: “Have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Exod 25:8, NIV).
Elsewhere, in common with these other books, Payne understands Israel’s vocation in terms of responsibility to the nations, and he charges Israel with failure. More than that: Israel’s failure sets up for the coming of Christ. “Israel failed to be the community of God’s people. They did not live up to the expectation to be royal priests, a holy nation, and a model to the world. . .They failed to serve as a magnet, drawing the nations to Mount Zion. . .What Israel failed to do, Jesus did” (72). This view of the Jewish people, especially in the postexilic period, constituting a “diminuendo” in God’s purpose (70) taps into longstanding and pernicious Christian tropes about Judaism. For Payne as for nineteenth-century German critical scholars, the lowest point in God’s mission coincides with the emergence of early Judaism. Payne also arguably frames the incarnation in far too narrowly responsive and compensatory terms. He denies that Christ is the backup team (2)—but Christ is, on Payne’s schema, an auxiliary in the larger divine project of redeeming creation. This kind of Christology falls short of the New Testament, which includes passages to the effect that all things are created through Christ and for Christ (Col 1:16b).
The brevity of Payne’s presentation makes it usable as a teaching resource—as do the reflection questions at the end of each chapter. His footnotes are robust, ranging across older works in biblical theology of mission. It is impressive, for example, that Payne traces the terminology of centripetal and centrifugal mission all the way back to a 1936 French article (16n11). In other ways, Payne’s A Theology of Mission represents a miniature version of the regnant story paradigm now common to many biblical theologies of mission.