But mission is not restricted to the Church: God’s saving activity is at work in the world as well as the Church, especially through the secret moving of the Spirit in human beings, advancing the salvation of people through love. And such secretive work may, by the grace of God, issue in a more humane world. So Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s ‘Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world’, speaks of human progress in creating a more just social order in the modern world. It then declares,
The Spirit of God, who, with wondrous providence, directs the course of time and renews the faith of the earth, assists at this development . . . such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, in so far as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society. (Gaudium et Spes 26, 39, in Vatican Council II, pp. 192, 204; quoted in Bosch 1991, p. 392)
Conclusion
The recognition that mission is God’s mission represents a crucial breakthrough in respect of the preceding centuries (Bosch 1991, p. 393). It transforms the whole way in which mission is viewed and liberates the Church from trying to depend upon its own limited resources. It is the starting point for the explorations of this Studyguide. It also allows us to return to the quotation which began this section of the book, from the poem ‘The Night’ by the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1622–95), which spoke of a ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’ where ‘not all [was] clear’. These words were quoted because they describe well the contemporary crisis of understanding over mission in the churches. But Vaughan’s verse goes on to welcome this night time because it allows him to enter into union with God:
O for that Night! Where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim!
The churches, now, might welcome the night of crisis for mission because it has allowed them to rediscover the way authentic mission springs from God himself. They now know they are fundamentally dependent on life ‘in him’ and that this Trinitarian life can liberate them from having to rely upon their own weak resources.
| Discussion questions Can you detect the Spirit of God at work in the secular world? Describe some examples. How do these signs of the missio Dei develop or change your understanding of the mission of the Church? |
Further reading
Avis, Paul (2005), A Ministry Shaped by Mission, T & T Clark
Bosch, David J. (1991), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Orbis
Evans, G. R., and J. Robert Wright (1991), The Anglican Tradition: A Handbook of Sources, SPCK
Moltmann, Jürgen (1977), The Church in the Power of the Spirit, SCM Press
Neill, Stephen (1964), A History of Christian Missions, Penguin
Thomas, Norman, ed. (1995), Readings in World Mission, SPCK
Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (1996), ed. Austin Flannery OP, Dominican Publications
3. Digging Deeper Mission as Participation in the Trinity
The walker who is lost in the fells will not only look back along the route they have come. They will also consult their map, a human document of abstract symbols that represents the key features of the hills and valleys all around. In a similar way, as we seek to get our bearings on the nature of mission, it is worthwhile consulting the maps that have been produced by the Christian community, as it were, because they can direct our attention to the key features of God’s mission in the world.
The last chapter established that the Willengen Conference, under the influence of Karl Barth, marked a rediscovery of one very significant map for mission, the doctrine of the Trinity. Since then a number of theologians have explored and interpreted the meaning of this map and drawn out its implications for Christian mission, and to them we now turn.
Background
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, articulated in the pronouncements of the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), states that God is three hypostases (Greek) / personae (Latin) / persons (English), in one ousia (Greek) / substantia (Latin) / being (English). This doctrine has always been at the heart of belief in the Eastern Orthodox churches but was down-played in the Western Church for many centuries. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the great German Reformed theologian who is often described as ‘the father of modern theology’, placed the doctrine at the end of his systematic presentation of the Christian faith, almost as an afterword. But theologians over the last 80 years have rediscovered its centrality in a significant way. Karl Barth, whom we have seen to be a pioneer in these matters, argued for the foundational importance of the doctrine of the Trinity to all Christian thinking. He famously placed discussion of the Trinity at the start of his Church Dogmatics, reminding the churches that because God has revealed himself as inherently three in one, all theology, ethics, and pastoral work must begin, and end, here.
After the Second World War two Protestant theologians, Wolfhart Pannenberg and especially Jürgen Moltmann, made an important connection between the Trinity and human history. The Trinity was seen as intimately involved within human history through the ministry of Christ: ‘It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfil in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church’ (Moltmann 1977, p. 65). Christian mission, then, has its roots in an eternal sending within God, so that participation in one is participation in the other.
But what is the precise connection between the two: how is participation in one participation in the other? A number of theologians have recently provided some answers to this question.
Leonardo Boff
Boff is a Roman Catholic Franciscan priest who has worked within the tradition of Latin American liberation theology since the 1980s. He had his licence to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian removed by the Vatican over some of his views. In one of his most famous books he made an explicit connection between the Trinity and human society, suggesting that the perfect relationships of the three equal persons within the one society of God provide a model for human society to strive towards. In Trinity and Society, first published in Brazil in 1986, he wrote that, ‘The community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes the prototype of the human community dreamed of by those who wish to improve society and build it in such a way as to make it into the image and likeness of the Trinity.’ This revolutionary view sees the Trinity ‘as a model for any just, egalitarian (while respecting differences) social organisation. On the basis of their faith in the triune God Christians postulate a society that can be the image and likeness of the Trinity’ (Boff 1988, pp. 7, 11).
The missionary role of the Church alongside other groups in society therefore becomes this: to struggle to move the human community away from current unequal relationships of exploitation and oppression and towards this perfect kind of society, a society like the society of the divine Trinity.
Catherine Mowry LaCugna
LaCugna, on the other hand, an American Catholic theologian who published God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life in 1991, did not see the Trinity as presenting a template for society but as issuing an invitation to enter a relationship. She has become an influential figure in the renewal of understanding of the Trinity. She built her understanding on the insight that persons are not isolated self-contained entities but beings in relationship, who exist for communion. She believed that human life expressed its true nature and meaning when persons come together in a loving fellowship, and the essential meaning of the Trinity is that God reaches out to the world in Christ, through the power and presence of the Spirit, and invites all people to enter into a loving communion of human and divine persons:
Trinitarian theology could be described as par excellence a theology of relationship, which explores mysteries of love, relationship, personhood and communion within the framework of God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ and