Some current and recent reading on what the Bible says the church should be has helped me find new language for a question that is often present for me. Is the Bible meant to be prescriptive, or descriptive?

If the Bible is prescriptive, then we come to it with an understanding that it is a manual of sorts. It prescribes how life is to be lived by humans both individually, and in community. If we need to know how the church should operate, or how a marriage should work, or most any “how to” question, we assume that the Bible can prescribe the appropriate answer to that question.

To understand that the Bible is descriptive is to hold to a more historical understanding; the Bible describes what was going on with God’s people in the specific context that each book was written. For example, Jesus’ teachings (Sermon on the Mount, parables, etc.) should be understood primarily the the lens of what he was trying to communicate to his listeners at that time. (Or, for another perspective, what the Gospel writer wanted his original readers to understand about what Jesus had communicated to those hearers.)

I think the obvious answer is that we have to see both patterns in the Bible. But, modern Christianity often errs on the side of prescriptive, and we should err on the side of descriptive. While there are prescriptive portions throughout the Bible, the whole of the Bible should be seen as descriptive. It is the contextual account of how God has been at work in creation and with humanity through recorded history. Those parts that are taken as prescriptive must first be placed within a descriptive framework.

To put it simply, context, no matter how elusive it might sometimes be, always, always matters.

Some books read like a light snack…maybe a small package of pretzels on an airplane. Snacks aren’t bad, but sometimes you need a hearty feast. Transforming Mission satisfies the belly and fills the mind with memories and Ideas to revisit.

This book is a classic on mission, and rightfully so. David Bosch traces the history of how mission has been understood, and how that understanding has been shaped by context. When seeing how others have formed their understanding of mission from their context, it helps us to step back and form a more clear image of how we have rightly or wrongly understood mission in our time. This seems like such an important book for anyone in a primary role of shaping a church community, because if you get mission wrong, pretty much everything goes askew.

Here are some table scraps from my reading (heck, some of these could be a full meal by themselves) to whet the appetite of any hungry or ambitious readers out there.

• We have to distinguish between mission (singular) and missions (plural). The first refers primarily to the missio Dei (God’s mission), that is, God’s self-revelation as the One who loves the world, God’s involvement in and with the world, the nature and activity of God, which embraces both the church and the world, and in which the church is priveleged to participate. (pg. 11)
• Even so, personal conversion is not a goal in itself. To interpret the work fo the church as the ‘winning of souls’ is to make conversion into a final product, which flatly contradicts Luke’s understanding of the purpose of mission. Conversion does not pertain merely to an individual’s act of conviction and commitment; it moves the individual believer into the community of believers and involves a real — even a radical — change in the life of the believer, which carries with it moral responsibilities that distinguish Christians from ‘outsiders’ while at the same time stressing their obligation to those ‘outsiders’. (pg. 117)
• There have, of course, always been Christians (and theologians!) who believed that their understanding of the faith was ‘objectively’ accurate and, in effect, the only authentic rendering of Christianity. Such an attitude, however, rests on a dangerous illusion. Our views are always only interpretations of what we consider to be divine revelation, not divine revelation itself. (pg 182)
• it should be clear that theologies designed and developed in Europe can claim no superiority over theologies emerging in other parts of the world. (pg 189)
• The Protestant preoccupation with right doctrine soon meant that every group which seceded from the main body had to validate its action by maintaining that it alone, and none of the others, adhered strictly to the “right preaching of the gospel”. The Reformational descriptions of the church thus ended up accenuating differences rather than similarities. Christians were taught to look decisively at other Christians. (pg 248)
• The Enlightenment tenet that all problems were in principle solvable had an equally far-reaching effect on theology and the church. … Where God was still used as a hypothesis he had become the ‘God of the gaps’. We needed him only for exigencies such as cancer and similar incurable diseases. Step by step, however, our knowledge was expanding; the gaps were being closed. God was pushed further and further back and was becoming more and more redundant. (pg 273)
• Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission.” (pg 390)
• The primary purpose of the missiones ecclesiae can therefore not simply be the planting of churches or the saving of souls; rather, it has to be service to the missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world in a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. (pg 391)
• Evangelism should never deterioriate into coaxing, much less into threat. It is not the same as (1) offering a psychological panacea for people’s frustrations and disappointments, (2) inculcating guilt feelings so that people (in despair, as it were) may turn to Christ, or (3) scaring people into repentance and conversion with stories about the horrors of hell. (pg 413)
• Even so, the gospel is not individualistic. Modern individualism is, to a large extent, a perversion of the Christian faith’s understanding of the centrality and responsibility of the individual. (pg 416)
• Contextualization, on the other hand, suggests the experimental and contingent nature of all theology. Contextual theologians therefore, rightly, refrain from writing “systematic theologies” where everything fits into an all-encompassing and eternally valid system. (pg 427)
• If it is true, as has been argued throughout this study, that the entire life of the church is missionary, it follows that we desperately need a theology of the laity — something of which only the first rudiments are now emerging. (pg 472)

Contextualization, on the other hand, suggests the experimental and contingent nature of all theology. Contextual theologians therefore, rightly, refrain from writing “systematic theologies” where everything fits into an all-encompassing and eternally valid system.
— David Bosch, Transforming Mission

Much of the dialogue I have been around in recent years about the church carries an emphasis to return to the teachings of Jesus. Many have described how the church has tended to overemphasize the epistles of Paul in recent decades, and there is a definite push to spend more time with the Gospels. After all, if the term Christian means to follow Jesus, it would make sense that we spend a lot of time studying and meditating on what Jesus did in his time on earth, and how we continue that work today. By way of illustration, though their views might be very different on many things, including some of Jesus’ teachings, both Driscoll (Vintage Jesus) and McLaren (The Secret Message of Jesus) apparently agree on the need to restore an accurate picture of the work of Jesus in his time on earth.

A few years ago, in The Shaping of Things to Come I was first introduced to the idea that our understanding of Christ (Christology) must shape our mission (missiology), and that understanding of mission must then shape what it means to be the church (ecclesiology). I have spent a lot of time with that idea in recent years, and have found it a helpful way to think about what it means to truly be the church in any context.

But this morning, I find myself struggling with that idea a bit. If Jesus is only an equal third of the trinity, does the above thinking too strongly emphasize Jesus in the work and mission of the church? Is it possible to overemphasize Jesus at the expense of the other two thirds of the Trinity (even in typing that, I find great discomfort in suggesting that one might possibly overemphasize Jesus)? What does it look like to live out faith in a way that equally emphasizes the whole of the trinity? What does a trinitarian-informed ecclesiology look like?

In July and August, I’m going to lead a study on film and theology in our home. As I’m thinking through how this will look, the purpose of the study is not going to be to use a few movie clips here and there to illustrate some points or Bible verses I want to reinforce.

Rather, each week, participants will be asked to watch a film ahead of time with an understanding that all truth is God’s truth. They will be asked to bring that perspective to our discussion and share how they experienced truth in each film. We will then grapple with how those truths might be congruent, or incongruent, with the understandings we have of the Christian faith and Scriptures.

So, I am asking for help from you, my loyal (or very bored!) readers who have stuck with me through my inconsistent posting of late. What films come to mind that you think might be good for us to experience in this study?

Some random thoughts that went through my head while watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End late last night:

• “I wish Captain Jack would get some kind of ointment to put on that sore on his cheek. It hasn’t healed for three movies now.”
• “Was I supposed to take LSD before watching this scene?”
• “I want more Chow Yun-Fat!”
• “I can’t keep all of these guys in the white wigs straight.”
• “I don’t really care what happens to these people…I just want to sleep.”
• “must….stay…awake”
• “hrmph…where am I? Holy cow…this movie is still going?”
• “Is Alex still in the bathroom?”
• “Is it Thursday already?”
• “I sat through the credits for that?”

There have been a splattering of quotes on other blogs, but for those who haven’t read it, the Christianity Today has a worthwhile interview with NT Wright called Mere Mission.

In the his answer to the first question, he states why I’ve grown to appreciate his work so much:

Because I’ve done all that historical work, my view of the gospel and how it works out in the real world has been deepened and enriched in all kinds of ways that I would never have guessed 25 years ago when I was starting out writing about Jesus. So in Simply Christian there’s a lot about justice, what it means to be human in the mandate to work, the putting to rights of God’s world, generating beauty, alleviating poverty, working with ecology. Thirty years ago I would have said those were secondary issues.

Wright hasn’t just been sitting in the proverbial ivory tower for the last several decades, he’s been climbing higher and higher within it. Yet even as he has done so, he has labored to make the working out of his theology more meaningful and more accessible. He understands that theology isn’t important because of the knowledge that we gain from it, but because that knowledge really matters — we have to do something with it.

Read the rest of the article…it’s worth the time. And figure out what to do with it.