God’s word and God’s mission—these are two long-standing, driving concerns at Fuller Theological Seminary. The primacy of scripture is baked into the definition of evangelical, and Fuller is an evangelical seminary. Interest in mission is baked into the name of one of our constituent schools: the School of Mission and Theology. We are a community that seeks to know and follow Christ by studying the Bible and by aligning our lives with God’s work in the world.
The question of what the Bible says about God’s mission is therefore perennial for us. We have been asking it, and we need to keep asking it. We need the expertise of our Bible faculty and of our whole faculty. We need to check our provisional answers against the voices of the global church. These endeavors remain ongoing, open-ended, and multifarious.
Given the Bible’s own internal diversity, many individual scripture texts have inspired a theology of mission. The Great Commission in Matthew 28 is a prominent example; it galvanized early Protestant mission, and many church charters and mission declarations still center on it. Or again, Christ’s sending of the disciples in John’s Gospel—“as the Father sent me, so I am sending you” (20:21)—played a key role in twentieth-century conversations about mission. Instead of modeling mission on early capitalist corporations like the East India Company, mid-twentieth-century ecumenical meetings tried to re-model mission after God’s own Triune life. The sending of the Son became a premier mission template.
Reflection on the Bible and mission after the 1960s drew on the book of Genesis, which had been relatively unimportant in earlier mission thinking. A German scholar named Gerhard von Rad offered a powerful new interpretation. According to his commentary on Genesis, God creates a good and beautiful world, but then humans fail to comply with God’s instruction. A cascade of tragic and damaging consequences trails out after this event: alienation, expulsion, violence, hubris—the Garden, the Field, the Flood, the Tower. God shows countervailing grace throughout these episodes. But, von Rad claims, in the calling of Abraham God reveals a more decisive initiative to undo these harms and to restore creation. In this chapter (Genesis 12), God makes promises—in particular, to bless all nations—that subsequent literature on Bible and mission treats as a hermeneutical cornerstone. God’s mission on this reading is to repair humankind and indeed all creation.
Mission as divine repair: This had long been the default answer given by theologians in response to the headline question about God’s mission. Many key biblical terms for God’s work in the world correspond to this overall divine purpose; to say that God saves, or God redeems, or God heals, or God liberates—these all amount to saying that God repairs. God is fixing the broken creation. The new, mid-twentieth-century reading of Genesis lent this perspective fresh exegetical footing. The entire approach came to feel natural, almost inevitable.
Yet in my view, it has serious problems. One of these problems, biblically speaking, is divine activity that does not fit this reparative description. When God blesses creation in the beginning, the purpose is not to reverse damages; at that point, creation had not sustained any. But this same dynamic applies to other, subsequent instances of divine blessing. When Jesus blesses children in the Gospels, he is not healing them or forgiving their sins or driving out unclean spirits. He is just blessing them. Blessing may effect repair, but it has its own integrity: It expresses and enacts God’s sheer goodwill. An identical gratuity might characterize God’s blessings promised to Abraham as well. Contrary to von Rad, God may not have called Abraham as part of God’s mission to repair creation. Instead, God may have blessed Abraham out of sheer goodwill.
Similarly, at the heart of the Pentateuch is the Tabernacle, the mobile dwelling place for God. In the rare instance when mission thinkers comment on the Tabernacle, they use Abraham’s calling as their roadmap. Abraham’s vocation faces toward the nations. So also must the Tabernacle: It is, they argue, meant as a kind of display—a bulb lit up with Israel’s vocation to be a light to the nations. But God’s own express purpose for the Tabernacle is more basic. God commands Moses: “Have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Exod 25:8, NIV). A little later, God promises: “Above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant, I will meet with you and give you all my commands” (25:22). God wants to dwell amid Israel. God wants to meet with them. These activities are not primarily about repairing.
Instead of repair, I submit that God’s mission in scripture is communion. God’s will to bless is, quite literally, first, and God’s desire to draw near is, quite literally, at the center. This centrality is true of the Tabernacle. It is also true of the incarnation in the New Testament. Most Christian theology puts Christ’s coming under a reparative heading: If Abraham’s calling commences God’s counter-initiative to restore creation, the incarnation culminates that task. And there is plenty of biblical evidence for this understanding. Jesus Christ does save, set free, heal, exorcize. But it may be that the eternal Son has other, prior reasons for becoming flesh—non-reparative reasons. Perhaps Christ’s presence with us is not only or exhaustively a response to sin and evil. Perhaps, as Colossians says, creation was through him and for him, all along (1:17), meaning that all creatures are meant toward the Son from the outset, and the Son is meant toward them. Perhaps God comes close to creatures in the incarnation out of sheer divine goodwill, to bless and be present, to enjoy and to fellowship. As Julian of Norwich once wrote, “love was his reason.”
Collin Cornell is assistant professor of Bible and mission.