Household: Reviewing the Big Picture (Part 1)

We have now taken a whirlwind tour of fictive family and fictive household metaphors found in the Bible. This wide-ranging discussion can get us lost in the proverbial trees to the point we lose sight of the forest. So before we go any further, let us step back with a wide-angle lens and recapture the family metaphor's role in God's mission for the world.

Genesis' creation narratives tell of a world created by God. Humanity is God's crowning achievement. Upon completion of creation, there is perfect shalom between the triune God, humanity, and creation. Humankind rebels. Shalom is deeply marred. Human beings are separated from God and each other. They find themselves in a life-and-death struggle with nature. Human beings are alienated from themselves.

The early chapters of Genesis present us with a picture of humanity where power and domination have become the modus operandi. Through religion, myth, custom, and political power, humanity forms cultures that create their own versions of the "eternal present" (ala Brueggemann) where "what is" is cast as that which always has been and always will be. Competing cultures battle it out on the pages of human history to make their eternal present prevail and to keep back the chaos that threatens to destroy their systems of meaning and survival.

God's mission is to reunite humanity and all creation in God's self. God's strategy is atonement, or as some would have it, "at-one-ment;" nothing less than the restoration of shalom. The strategy begins when God sets apart a people for God's self, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Through this people, God will redeem the world. Christopher Wright captures this simply but powerfully in a diagram.

(Source: Christopher Wright, "Mission of God," IVP. 2006. 395.)

The small triangle represents Israel and the Promised Land. It is within the broader context of all humanity and of all the earth. The mission of God is to expand the smaller triangle until "Israel" expands to encompass "humanity" and "the land" becomes equivalent to "the earth."

Israel was to be a beacon to the Gentiles, drawing them to God, thus expanding the triangle. But Israel rebelled and turned inward, even to the point that by Jesus' day, the Jews had come to understand God's mission to include the destruction of the Gentiles. At this point in history, God took center stage in the person of Jesus Christ, who, through his birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, expanded the called community to include Jew and Gentile alike. They were then sent into the world to give witness of the at-one-ment that has been achieved in Christ, imaging (ever so imperfectly) the coming shalom of God and inviting others into community.

The challenge for Jesus and the New Testament writers was to craft images and metaphors that would enable us to capture the essence of our relationship with God and each other. These metaphors had to capture the eschatological relational realities that will exist in the coming age of shalom while also guiding our existence in this time before the fullness of the new creation is realized. I have labored to demonstrate that Christ firmly established the household and family metaphors and became the metaphors of choice for New Testament writers (but far from the only choice), especially Paul. So let us summarize again what meaning these metaphors conveyed.

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Comments

[neil]

It's good to know some things I've learned have stuck! I first encountered Wright's diagram in his 1983 book "Living as the People of God." I think his work is very helpful

[Michael W. Kruse]

I didn't realize he had used this before. Like the saying goes, a picture says a 1,000 words.

[Dana Ames]

In this his thought would be consonant with "the other" Wright, and his missional conclusions as well. This heartens me, as I understand their theological backgrounds would not necessarily overlap.

Dana

[Michael W. Kruse]

Two men from different perspectives and yet isn't it amazing that both of them are always Wright?

:)