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Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
I feel honoured to have been asked to give a lecture at this mission congress that is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the world mission conference here in Willingen. There is certainly ample reason to celebrate. We celebrate not only the Willingen Conference of fifty years ago, but we also want to remember the dramatic developments in missiology during the second half of the last century that in many ways began in Willingen. The development that found its most extreme form in the 1960s and early 70s (1) involved a change from a more anthropocentric understanding of mission to a more theocentric, and from a more ecclesiocentric perspective to a more cosmocentric. In the latter perspective, the world, both in its socio-political and religious dimensions, is at the centre of attention.
The theocentric perspective was, of course, not new in the 20th century. It can already be found in Martin Luther's thinking about mission. The American Lutheran missiologist, James A. Scherer says, "For Luther, mission is always pre-eminently the work of the triune God--missio Dei--and its goal and outcome is the coming of the kingdom of God. Luther sees the church, along with God's word and every baptized believer, as crucial divine instruments for mission. Yet, nowhere does the reformer make the church the starting point or the final goal of mission, as 19th-century missiology tended to do. It is always God's own mission that dominates Luther's thought, and the coming of the kingdom of God represents its final culmination". (2) Here, already, we encounter the three concepts that form a dynamic triangle in post-war missiological thought: missio Dei, the kingdom of God and the church. Much of the discussion is centred on how they relate, and the answers given diverge strongly.
Before looking at the concept of missio Dei and the understanding of it in a historical perspective, I may be allowed two comments on my theme. Firstly, missiology is a global ecumenical discipline. Some of the most important milestones of missiology in the 20th century were the great mission conferences that for the most part were global in scope. Hence, to restrict the discussion of missio Dei to European churches and missiology seems somewhat arbitrary. I shall, however, for the most part limit my comments to European missiologists, but I cannot promise not to have the larger picture in mind.
Secondly, the words "understanding and misunderstanding" assume that something more than a historical perspective is required. In some sense, there is a right understanding and a wrong one. This implies a normative perspective, and I will in this article present some normative positions. I would like to characterize them as Lutheran and evangelical. (3)
2. The origin and content of the concept missio Dei
The term missio Dei has a long history that goes back to Augustine and relates to the doctrine of the Trinity, but this is not our main concern here. It is the use of the phrase in missiology that is our topic. Although one of the main reasons for the fame of the Willingen conference is the introduction of the concept of missio Dei, I have not been able to find the term in the documents from the conference itself. (4) It seems that it was Karl Hartenstein who, in his report from Willingen, coined the phrase when he spoke of mission as "participation in the sending of the Son, in the missio Dei, with an inclusive aim of establishing the lordship of Christ over the whole redeemed creation". (5) To quote Hartenstein more fully, "Mission is not just the conversion of the individual, nor just obedience to the word of the Lord, nor just the obligation to gather the church. It is the taking part in the sending of the Son, the missio Dei, with the holistic aim of establishing Christ's rule over all redeemed creation". (6)
In my estimation, however, the emphasis in Willingen on a trinitarian basis of mission is even more important than the somewhat ambiguous phrase missio Dei. It is also this that is most clearly brought out in the report itself when it says, "The missionary movement of which we are part has its source in the triune God Himself. Out of the depths of His love for us, the Father has sent forth His beloved Son to reconcile all things to Himself, that we and all men might, through the Spirit, be made one in Him with the Father, in that perfect love which is the very nature of God". (7) It is this trinitarian basis of mission that should form the foundation of any understanding of missio Dei. In addition, we may note that Hartenstein only negates the "onlys" and therefore does not deny that mission also is conversion of the individual, obedience to a divine word, and an obligation to gather the church. The emphasis, however, lies on the trinitarian foundation and the universal redemptive purpose of mission.
It was another German missiologist, Georg F. Vicedom, who has the honour of having developed the concept of missio Dei in a way that seems to be consistent with the more classical missiology that preceded Willingen, and quite different from the more radical missiology that, under the same label, was worked out during the 1960s. In his book Missio Dei, Vicedom emphasizes that mission is God's work from beginning to end. God is the acting subject in mission. However, Vicedom does not thereby exclude the church from the mission of God but includes it: "The mission, and with it the church, is God's very own work". (8) Both the church and the mission of the church are "tools of God, instruments through which God carries out His mission. (9)
In this mission of God, God is both the sender and the one being sent. This accounts for the trinitarian structure of the missio Dei. "The highest mystery of the mission out of which it grows and lives is: God sends His Son, Father and Son send the Holy Spirit. Here God makes Himself not only the One sent, but at the same time the content of the sending". (10) From this content of the mission, Vicedom argues that the purpose of the mission is salvation. The revelation of God in his mission is always for the sake of the salvation of human beings. Mission is a continuation of the redemptive act of God: "The mission can be nothing else than the continuation of the saving activity of God through the publication of the deeds of salvation. This is its greatest authority and supreme commission". (11) I agree with this understanding of the mission of God.
It should be said, however, that in his book Vicedom also opens up an understanding of missio Dei that is not restricted to this combination of the trinitarian perspective and the redemptive purpose. This reveals a basic problem that often appears when the concept of missio Dei is combined with an understanding of the kingdom of God as the "rule of God". (12) The differences in the understanding of missio Dei correspond with differences in the understanding of the kingdom of God. It is therefore necessary to take a brief look at two major concepts of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God (Greek: basileia theou) may either be understood as the reign or rule of God over the whole of creation (sometimes including redemption), or the present and final salvation that God offers in Christ (sometimes including ethical and social transformation). If it is understood in the former sense, the kingdom may be seen as universal, relatively independent of the church, primarily ethical (i.e. the realization of the will of God in the world), an object of faith and hope in the present (though some signs of it may be discerned), and as something to be fully empirically realized in this world only in the future. Its growth includes all of history. Its realization is therefore often seen...
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