Conclusion: Ongoing Imperative for World Mission

From Gospel Translations

Granted the interests and character of our honoree John Woodbridge, granted the focus of the essays in this Festschrift, and granted the title assigned me—“The Ongoing Imperative for World Mission”—I should relieve your suspense and tell you right away that I’m for world mission. I hope that doesn’t come as too big a surprise.^[1]

Yet what shall I do with this title? To show something of the sweep of possible discussions the title might call forth, I shall begin by outlining some of the roads I might have traveled in this address, but chose to resist resolutely, before pursuing another way.

The Roads Not Traveled

I shall offer an apostolic number of such roads. Granted “the ongoing imperative for world mission,” we might have usefully surveyed:

(1) An array of “Great Commission” texts.^[2] We might have begun with Matthew 28:16–20. Here we observe that the controlling verb is “make disciples,” not “make decisions” or “entertain the sheep.” The three supporting participles, all carrying some imperatival force from the context, require us to go, baptize, and teach the disciples everything Jesus has commanded—which sounds as if there might be some further propositional and imperatival content, and not just the biblical storyline. The form of the Great Commission in Luke 24:46–49 is cast as fulfillment and prediction—fulfillment, in that Jesus Christ’s passion and resurrection were predicted in Scripture, and prediction, for in consequence of Jesus’ death and resurrection, “repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”^[3] The disciples are witnesses of these things, and Jesus further promises “to send what my Father has promised”—doubtless a reference to the Holy Spirit—so that these believers will be “clothed with power from on high.” Similar themes are developed in Acts 1, with the geographical extension of the ministry of the witnesses spelled out rather more clearly: “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). John’s form of the Great Commission (John 20:19–23) is prefaced by Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in a closed and locked room and His greeting “Peace be with you.” Doubtless this is meant to be more than a casual Shalom; it is meant to be evocative of a huge theological structure. For John’s Gospel has made clear that the person who does not obey the Son stands under the abiding wrath of God (John 3:36), while in His death and resurrection the Son fulfills His role as the ultimate sin-bearing “Lamb of God” (1:29, 34). The peace that Jesus promised His followers just a few days earlier, on the night He was betrayed—“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives” (14:27)—is anchored in His own death and resurrection. And now, risen from the grave, Jesus tells the ten disciples gathered in the room, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (20:21). Some have bled the dramatic parallelism in this commission for more than it can carry,^[4] yet the power of this standard of sacrifice and service will never be matched by even the most heroic missionary. And once again, the commission is tied to the gift of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins.

Of course, the theme of the Great Commission extends beyond these specific texts. For instance, we cannot forget the instructions of the Spirit to commission Paul and Barnabas for the work of the first missionary journey; nor can we forget the apostle’s self-understanding — he is an ambassador of the Great King, conveying His message, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). But although such texts clamor for attention, for our purposes they must remain a road not traveled.

(2) The biblical theology of “Great Commission” texts. Very often Christians have studied the Great Commission texts in isolation from the books or corpora in which they are embedded, and thus unwittingly denuded them of some of their power. To take but one example—before reading Matthew 28, we are expected to read Matthew 1–27. The very first verse announces the ancestry of Jesus through David back to Abraham. Abraham figures elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew 3, John the Baptist tells us that God is able to “raise up children for Abraham” out of the stones themselves. Apparently genetics does not control the locus of the people of God, despite the covenant with Israel. A little later, Jesus Himself tells us that “many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). We are not far from anticipating the theology of the apostle Paul, who says that the real children of Abraham are those who share Abraham’s faith (e.g., Rom 4). The genealogy of Jesus, in Matthew 1, draws attention, among other things, to the non-Hebrews, including Ruth, a Moabitess who, according to the law, should have been excluded from Israel. The name of Jesus is carefully parsed for us—it is nothing other than the Greek form of Joshua, which means “Yahweh saves”—and so Jesus comes to save His people from their sins (Matt 1:21). Coming as it does in the opening lines of the book, this explanation provides a grid for the rest of this first Gospel. This is the book which shows us how Jesus comes to save His people from their sins—by His teaching, by the inauguration of the kingdom, by His death and resurrection, by His consummating return. Small wonder there is a trainee mission (Matt 10) to prepare His disciples for the work of outreach they will have to undertake, in both Jewish and Gentile contexts (and thus cross-culturally), after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. The eschatological discourse reminds us that “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt 24:14). Much more could be said, but you get the idea—the Great Commission is not simply tacked on at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Rather, it brings to a climax one of the themes that drives through the entire book. Similar things could be said, with various emphases, of every book and corpus in the New Testament, anchoring our Great Commission texts to the very structure of the new covenant. And of course, precisely because such themes have been marvelously probed in recent years by, on the one hand, Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien,^[5] and, on the other, by Eckhard Schnabel,^[6] little needs to be said about them here.

(3) The still larger biblical storyline. Rather myopically, I have limited myself so far to New Testament texts. Yet the New Testament documents nestle within an entire canonical framework. The first responsibility of sentient creatures, not least of God’s image-bearers, is to recognize their creatureliness, with all that creatureliness entails. Failure to do so is the beginning of idolatry, and therefore of condemnation and death. The most spectacular evidence of God’s grace is His pursuit of rebels. Despite the amount of space devoted to God’s choice of Israel and to all of the history that flows from this choice, Paul is entirely right to point out that the history of Israel is itself nestled within the still larger history of humanity’s creation and fall. That is why we need a New Adam Christology, as much as, say, a high priestly Christology; and that is why we must recognize that the promise to Abraham that through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed is not done away by the Mosaic covenant. It would be enriching to tease out the countless Old Testament anticipations of the cultural and racial open-endedness of the people of God in the last times—texts such as Isaiah 19:23–25: “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” But these massive biblical structures of thought and expectation I must reluctantly set aside—though I will briefly return to this specific passage a little later.

(4) Responses to objections: alternative exegeses. Despite the apparently straightforward nature of the Great Commission texts, some have argued that the commission applied only to the apostles, or only to the first generation of believers, so it has no ongoing mandate today. Certainly the apostles enjoyed some unique functions. Nevertheless, if the Great Commission itself tells the apostles to teach their disciples to obey everything that Jesus commanded them, presumably the command inherent in the Great Commission should not be excluded. Matthew’s version of the Great Commission does not read, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, except for this commandment to make disciples. Keep their grubby hands off that one, since it belongs only to you, my dear apostles. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” The ludicrousness of this reading merely has to be spelled out; the laughter will handle the rest. Moreover, Paul can instruct a Timothy to find reliable men who will be able to teach others (2 Tim 2:2) He certainly does not mean, “. . . teach others everything except the gospel, of course, since that job was given to apostles only.” The believers in Revelation 12 overcome the devil himself by three means—and one of them, as we shall see, is the word of their testimony. But enough—there is little value in exploring that particular objection further.

(5) Responses to objections: the job’s already done. This objection is grounded in a peculiar reading of a handful of texts. Jesus had predicted that the gospel would be preached to all nations. Paul, writing to the Colossians, happily asserts that the gospel “has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven” (Col 1:23; a handful of texts express similar thoughts: e.g., Rom 10:17–18; 1 Tim 3:16). Lest we succumb too quickly to pedantry, it is worth recalling that elsewhere Paul asserts, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known” (Rom 15:20), and as a result plans to head to Spain (15:24). The sweeping claim that the gospel has already been preached in all nations and to every creature, then, must be qualified by Paul’s own assessment. More importantly, the claim must be read in the light of the Bible’s handling of salvation-historical developments. For two millennia, the focus of much of God’s redemptive work was among the Israelites; now, Paul is saying, in fulfillment of God’s ancient purposes, the gospel has gone to all the nations, to every creature. That is precisely the point Paul makes, among others, when he addresses the Athenian intelligentsia (Acts 17:30). But once again, we cannot pause to focus on this question.

(6) Responses to objections: postmodern predilections. I have no intention of taking cheap shots at postmodernism, partly because I’m still trying to figure out what it is. If it is tied to our finiteness, and thus to the insistence that we cannot escape the narrowness of our vision, then it is hard to deny its cogency. Surely it is true to say that there are two kinds of perspectivalist—those who admit it and those who do not. Of beings that can be said to know, only an omniscient God is free from perspectivalism.

Nevertheless, the harder voices of postmodernism raise two objections to the Great Commission. The first is nicely articulated by Brian McLaren. In the light of the cultural move from modernism to postmodernism, he argues, we should stop thinking so antithetically and join hands with co-religionists such as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, refusing to proselytize each other’s members as we stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, against the far greater dangers of injustice, social evils, and secularism.^[7] Indeed, in his most recent book, McLaren says that what he calls “the secret message of Jesus,” stripped of events in Jesus’ life such as the cross, is potentially of great benefit to all the world’s religions: “This reappraisal of Jesus’ message may be the only project capable of saving a number of religions, including Christianity, from a number of threats, from being co-opted by consumerism or nationalism to the rise of violent fundamentalism in their own ranks.”^[8] I confess I am finding it difficult to decide whether McLaren more seriously misunderstands and misrepresents Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, or Christ.^[9]

The second hard voice ties postmodernism to anti-colonialism, anti-cultural-hegemony, and the like, and is either suspicious of all proselytization in principle (and evangelism is viewed as merely one species of proselytization), or stands against any proselytization undertaken by people from countries with a colonial heritage. Certainly we are on the cusp of massive transformations of perspective.^[10] We have expected the majority of world Christian leaders to be white and Western, to be (relative to most of the world) affluent and capable. But there are now far more believers in the Two-Thirds world than in the West. I have preached in churches of 30,000 people in Asia; a big church in France draws 150 people. The West still produces more well-trained theologians than any other part of the world, but this owes much to economic factors, and I suspect it will change in the years ahead. It is only a matter of time until the leaders of Christians in the Two-Thirds world become better known around the world. Witness, for example, the courageous and influential stance of the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, on the debate over homosexuality within the world Anglican communion. Many churches in São Paulo, Brazil, have something to teach us about energetic racial integration. When we in the West go somewhere as missionaries, even if we ourselves come from humble backgrounds, we are perceived as coming from the affluent world; our ministry is naturally read as “reaching down.” When someone from a Two-Thirds world country becomes a missionary to a country of similar socio-economic level, that missionary is naturally read as a peer. When that same missionary serves in a more affluent country, he or she is naturally read as “reaching up.” As a result, expectations change, social dynamics change, modes of influence change. Moreover, for better and for worse, Christian missionaries bring some of their culture with them. In recent decades, there have been more efforts by Western missionaries than in the past to disentangle the gospel from the export of American and other Western cultures, but the challenge is considerable. Now, however, with missionaries coming from many different countries, we are finding pockets of churches served by, say, Korean missionaries that have absorbed not only the gospel but also substantial dollops of Korean culture. It is all very fascinating, sometimes confusing, invariably complicated. It’s a grand thing that Jesus is building His Church—often by means of His people, sometimes despite us. What is undeniable, however, is that massive changes lie just ahead.

But none of these developments argues against the ongoing imperative for world evangelism. They merely suggest that in the future, we will be less inclined to think of missionaries going from “us” to “them,” and more inclined to think of missionaries going from everywhere to everywhere. Korea (to mention but one prominent mission-sending country) sends out a formidable number of missionaries (at the moment, between twelve and fifteen thousand). In addition, Korea sends “tent-makers” into other Asian countries that would otherwise be completely “closed.” Many African churches send missionaries cross-culturally to other tribes and to other African countries—and, increasingly, to Western countries, primarily to serve those who have emigrated from African countries to the West. Worldwide statistics are complicated and not always easy to come by, and one is not always sure how accurate they are—but in any case, this development is not in dispute, and one must rejoice over it, even if some of the reasons for getting to this point (e.g., the decline of the West) are disappointing. Jesus has told us He will build His Church. He has not told us that such building will necessarily take place in our hometown or school district. It helps to get things into perspective if we take time to read up on worldwide developments in order to gain a worldwide appreciation for what God is doing. Two or three decades ago, missiologists and other Christian leaders were endlessly debating the precise nature and limits of “contextualization,” which was understood to go beyond the well-known indigenous principle by demanding not only that churches in any area be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating, but also that their theology be shaped, in measure, by the local cultural context. Nowadays, however, debates over contextualization sound faintly old-fashioned. In the era of global, instantaneous, digital communication, pressures are rising to think through what “globalization” might mean, for good and ill, in the theological arena.^[11]

In any case, I cannot take time to run down these related rabbit warrens, as interesting as they are.

(7) Fundamental skepticism about God, Christ, and the Bible. In many theological seminaries and universities, not to say in the broader culture, prominent thinkers dismiss what the Bible says about itself, about God, about Christ, and therefore inevitably about the gospel. Transparently, where the gospel is disbelieved, no one will feel the weight of the mandate to proclaim that gospel. Because many of these skeptical voices are influential throughout our culture, some of their strong distaste for anything that smacks of “evangelism” or “world mission” sloshes over into the church itself. That makes no sense, of course, but it is what happens. The skepticism of some parts of our world about the truth of the gospel becomes, among believers, not exactly skepticism, but a sort of waning confidence.

Clearly this is not the place to confront these skeptical voices head-on. But I cannot resist one small observation. From the perspective of Christians whose confidence in the gospel is unwavering, the siren voices of unbelief, far from chilling their fervor for evangelism, constitute a fresh call to evangelize. After all, these siren voices of unbelief need conversion, repentance, faith. Not a little of twentieth-century Western Christian thought has been directed toward meeting exactly that need—whether in biblical scholars like F. F. Bruce, who paved the way for many successors, or in apologists like E. J. Carnell and Francis Schaeffer, who taught us to be orthodox while addressing men and women deeply embedded in contemporary culture, or in popular speakers such as Ravi Zacharias, who continues to challenge the shoddy thinking that infects so many minds with pernicious idolatry. The improving quality of Christian books during the past three-quarters of a century—despite the sad sluice of rubbish—is cause for a great deal of quiet thanks to God. But this aspect of the ongoing mandate of world evangelism I must set aside.

(8) Nuanced judgments as to what “world mission” includes. It is perennially important to work hard at the proper relation between ministry of the Word and other ministries, including social concern. Exclusive focus on the former is in danger of fostering a docetic view of the Christian life; exclusive focus on the latter is in danger of abandoning the actual proclamation of the good news. Although there are some important principles to work out, the actual balance of time allotment must depend in part on the local situation. When people are crying on a devastated beach after a tsunami, it is not the best time to distribute Bibles, absent fresh water, food, and shelter. Yet an ostensibly Christian organization which, decade after decade, distributes tons of blankets and food, founds orphanages, and combats HIV, without ever offering Bible studies or explaining what doing this in Jesus’ name means, and what the gospel is about and how important it is for time and eternity, is indistinguishable from UNICEF or Médecins sans Frontières, and is no more Christian than they. Around the world, organizations are wrestling with these and related issues. Always there should be two overlapping circles to the discussion: first, what the Bible actually says about these matters, so far as we can discern it aright; and second, how it applies in any particular context. As a rule, we are most impressed by Christian witness that is full of the Bible, full of Jesus, full of the gospel, full of excellent teaching, full of sacrificial service, full of ministering to the whole person, and, where possible, the community itself, in the conscious outworking of the transforming gospel. For obvious reasons, this can vary enormously around the world. To discuss these matters at length here would take us into an expanding debate.

In fact, this debate has in recent years become far more complex than it had been, owing to renewed interest in the study of culture. Such study shows that, while we may wrestle over what it means to penetrate the culture, or to transform the culture, or to contribute to the time when the glory and honor of the nations will be brought into the city of God (Rev 21:26), we cannot afford to forget that we ourselves are part of the culture. We may constitute a sub-culture with a distinguishable profile from the larger surrounding culture, but we cannot avoid the fact that, for better and for worse, we ourselves belong to that larger culture. The notion of doing good to the city and seeking its prosperity is irrefragably tied to the fact that we are part of the city (Jer 29:7). But from all this important discussion, we will reluctantly turn aside.

(9) Strategies to fulfill the ongoing imperative for world mission. In a remarkably penetrating paper, still unpublished (as far as I know), Tim Keller reads Acts very carefully^[12] to learn some of the strategies of the early church as the first generation of believers sought to evangelize the Roman world. Apart from observing the much-noted fact that the apostle Paul planted churches in urban centers, from which the gospel spread out into the surrounding regions,^[13] Keller draws attention to the centrality of the gospel, rightly conceived; to the transformation of human life under the gospel (e.g., freeing the slave girl in Acts 16); to the power of communal life and the integrity of corporate worship. These and other themes in Acts contribute to the drama of the Church’s rapid expansion. All of them are worth exploring, and I hope Keller’s paper will achieve wide circulation. But I shall not take that road here.

(10) Statistics. With my background in chemistry and mathematics, I am probably more impressed by numbers than I ought to be. Moreover, because Trinity Evangelical Divinity School stands at the hub of a worldwide network of Christian leaders, it is fairly easy to tap into a great deal of interesting data.^[14] Christians interested in the worldwide church eagerly note that in the late 1970s Cambodia could boast of only 2,000 Christians; today the number is about 150,000. As recently as 1989, there were only four known Christians in Mongolia; today, there are about 20,000, meeting in over 100 churches and 500 house churches. The first church in Nepal began in 1959 with twenty-nine members. Today there are more than half a million believers meeting in 5,000 congregations. The number of Christians, broadly defined, in Asia as a whole, has grown from 22 million in 1990 to over 300 million today, of whom 140 million are evangelicals. In South America, there are more than 8,000 Ibero-missionaries to other parts of that continent. The megalopolises of the world are becoming more and more cosmopolitan. London, for instance, boasts 440 spoken languages, and 51 percent of the churchgoers in that city are non-English-speaking. Europe is by far the “darkest” continent, as measured by the percentage of the population without evangelical faith—certainly under 3 percent (by contrast, the percentage in Latin America is 14.5 percent). Vienna has more registered prostitutes than evangelicals; Belgium has more Muslims than Protestants. Other statistics are no less disturbing. Brazil alone has 12 million children living on the streets. It is estimated that more than eight million children in Latin America are victims of pornography and sexual trafficking.

These and many other statistics tell their own stories. Transparently, they have a bearing on how we think about missions. But once again, I shall shunt such information to one side.

(11) Pragmatic tips, “how to”-style instructions. These are not always bad. Some time ago, J. Herbert Kane, who taught missions for many years here at Trinity, wrote a book titled Life and Work on the Mission Field.^[15] The work is rather dated now, of course, but in its time it was wonderfully helpful at the level of practical advice and insight. Many books of a more specialized nature, but belonging to the same species, have been published since then. It would be a useful exercise to scan and summarize such work. But once again, I forbear.

(12) The training needed to sustain and nurture world mission. Once again, this is a huge topic, and what place better than Trinity to explore it? Our doctoral programs in education and in intercultural studies are constantly exploring such matters, and our resident missiologists doubtless know far more about such matters than I do.^[16] So I have additional reason to avoid this topic.

Having listed a dozen roads not traveled, I turn at last to where I want to spend the remaining space of this essay.

The Way of Fundamentals

I wish to highlight three fundamental biblical truths as they relate to the ongoing mandate for Christian missions.

(1) The sheer desperate lostness of human beings. We dare not overlook how implacably opposed our culture is to viewing human beings in this way. I still manage to engage in university missions from time to time. By and large, university students display an awesome ignorance of matters biblical and theological. They have never heard of Abraham or Isaiah, do not know the Bible has two Testaments, and are considered gifted if they can remember three of the Ten Commandments. If, then, I set out to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to them, or say something about the incarnation, or insist on the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus, a lot of the terrain is new to them—and there are very few objections. Initially, at least, their response is mild curiosity more than anything else: “Oh, is that what Christians believe? Very interesting.” But the one topic almost guaranteed to ignite their ire is sin. Even for many Christians, the catena of biblical quotations collected by the apostle Paul sounds a bit over the top:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;

there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.

All have turned away,

they have together become worthless;

there is no one who does good,

not even one.”

“Their throats are open graves;

their tongues practice deceit.”

“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”

“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”

“Their feet are swift to shed blood;

ruin and misery mark their ways,

and the way of peace they do not know.”

“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

References

1. ↑ As this paper was presented at a banquet honoring Dr John D. Woodbridge, and not as one of the technical papers of the conference, I have decided to preserve the slightly chatty nature of the presentation, and to keep footnotes to a minimum.
2. ↑ Most recently, see the competent survey by Robert L. Plummer, “The Great Commission in the New Testament,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 9.4 (2005): 4–11.
3. ↑ Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. TNIV ®. Copyright© 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
4. ↑ See the careful treatment by Andreas J. Köstenberger, The Missions of Jesus and the Disciples According to the Fourth Gospel: With Implications for the Fourth Gospel’s Purpose and the Mission of the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998).
5. ↑ Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission (NSNSBT 11; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001).
6. ↑ Early Christian Mission. Vol. 1: Jesus and the Twelve. Vol. 2: Paul and the Early Church (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004).
7. ↑ E E.g., see Brian D. McLaren, The Church on the Other Side (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003), 83: “The church must present the Christian faith not as one religious army at war against all other religious armies but as one of many religious armies fighting against evil, falsehood, destruction, darkness, and injustice.”
8. ↑ Brian D. McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (Nashville, Tenn.: W Publishing Group, 2006), 7–8.
9. ↑ McLaren believes that “it’s significant to note that all Muslims regard Jesus as a great prophet, that many Hindus are willing to consider Jesus as a legitimate manifestation of the divine, that many Buddhists see Jesus as one of humanity’s most enlightened people, and that Jesus himself was a Jew” (ibid., 7). This is formally correct, and profoundly misleading. (a) Although “Muslims regard Jesus as a great prophet,” none of them sees Him as the greatest prophet. That is strictly reserved for Muhammad. Moreover, they think that Trinitarianism is ridiculous at best and blasphemous at worst, deny that Jesus rose from the dead, and, for the most part, deny that He died on the cross. (b) True, “Hindus are willing to consider Jesus as a legitimate manifestation of the divine,” but this willingness extends equally to seeing all religious leaders as a manifestation of the divine. Indeed, some Hindus think of all human beings as manifestations of the divine. This has nothing to do with the uniqueness of the incarnation. Moreover, the structure and assumptions of Hinduism mean that Hindu perception of where the human dilemma lies is radically different from that found in biblically faithful Christianity, so it is not surprising that the “answer” lies in cycles of improvement as one gains the karma to make each reincarnation a little more favorable—not in a sin-bearing substitute. (c) Yes, “many Buddhists see Jesus as one of humanity’s most enlightened people,” but the “Jesus” they thus evaluate is a carefully winnowed Jesus far removed from the historical reality. No religion is more offended by the uniqueness of Jesus’ claims or by His insistence—not to say the insistence of His followers—that salvation is found in no other name than His, than is Buddhism. (d) Of course “Jesus himself was a Jew.” Moreover, all of His earliest followers were Jews. Yet virtually all of the conflicts Jesus endured during the days of His flesh were with Jews. At the end of the day, Jews and Christians have a fundamentally different reading of Tanakh (what we call the “Old Testament”). As undiplomatic as it is to say so in a culture of kosher pluralism, passages like Matthew 23 and John 8 and the letter to the Galatians—and there are many others—will not go away. If McLaren understands these things, then he is misrepresenting these religions; if he does not, then he is making pronounce ments where his misunderstandings are troubling. Either way, his argument is manipulative and, ironically, as offensive to deeply committed and knowledgeable Muslims as to deeply committed and knowledgeable Christians.
10. ↑ Several paragraphs here and under subheading #8 in this address are taken from my earlier essay, “The SBJT-Forum: Being Missions-Minded,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 9.4 (2005): 86–89.
11. ↑ See Craig Ott and Harold A. Netland, ed., Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006).
12. ↑ Tim Keller, “Reaching the 21st Century World for Christ,” unpublished paper prepared for The Gathering, San Antonio, TX, September 2005.
13. ↑ On the church of the first century being an urban movement, see, not least, Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
14. ↑ Many of the following figures were reported at the most recent summit of the World Evangelical Alliance (2005).
15. ↑ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1980).
16. ↑ See also the brief but thoughtful essay by Benjamin L. Merkle, “The Need for Theological Education in Missions: Lessons Learned from the Church’s Greatest Missionary,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 9.4 (2005): 50–61.