Best of It: The Story and the Mission (Part 7)

[Series Index]

Today we wrap up Chapter Six from John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It. We've been talking about "The Story and the Mission." In the previous two posts, we looked at the Creation Commandments: Creation Mandate and the Great Commandments. Today we turn to the two Redemption Commandments: The New Commandment and the Great Commission.

Redemption Commandments

The New Commandment

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (Jn. 13:34-35)

Stackhouse emphasizes, "This is not a simple reiteration of the Great Commandment to love your neighbor, but a new commandment to love Christians in particular." (216) I think his observations here are very important. In the Old Testament, the covenant people of Israel were to be a beacon to the nations via the way they conducted their affairs. The nations would be drawn into relationship with God and their shalom by the attractive nature of their lives together. Contrary to many who want to make the church solely about outward mission, Stackhouse believes Jesus' command parallels Old Testament Israel with the church as the shalom-filled community that draws outsiders into community and relationship with God. We work from the particularity of our own context outward to the universal. I think Stackhouse offers an important corrective here.

The Great Commission

Stackhouse says, "What is fundamentally wrong with the world is that human worship of something of other than God." (218) If "being one" is the centripetal force that draws people in, then the Great Commission is the centrifugal force that sends the church out in mission to encourage them to abandon false gods.

So how do the Redemption commandments fit into God's overall mission? Stackhouse writes:

 … The redemption commandments were given, therefore, not to supersede the creation commandments, but to serve them."

To obey full the creation commandments is to live in the Kingdom of God. Thus Jesus' proclamation of the arrival of the Kingdom is the proclamation that God is setting things right, with himself properly in the center and everyone and everything else accordingly being put in its proper place. To live in the light of the Kingdom is to live in shalom, and to seek the Kingdom is to see a world in which the creation commandments are once again honored by everyone, every moment, in everything. (219)

I thought this paragraph was particularly important:

… we must not restrict Christian ethics to the project of redemption and thus to its particular vocabulary of self-sacrifice and non-coercive invitation. Yes, redemption is all about these things. But redemption is not all that we're about. To say so would be to misunderstand the New [Testament] as being cut off from and uninformed by the Old [Testament] – and by its own eschatology. Rather, we must see the redemptive project and vocabulary as relating to the distinctive (but not the total) work of the church, which is nested within and indeed contributive to the generic mission of all human beings to cultivate the world. (219-220)

One thing Stackhouse noticed that I had observed as well is the seeming parallel between God's creation mandate to "fill the earth" with his co-regent eikons and the net effect of the Great Commission, which, if successful, would result in a world filled with God's co-regent eikons. The inhabited world would be brought under dominion. Old and New have the same objective.

Well, there you have it. It only took seven posts, but there is my summary of "The Story and the Mission." I'm sure I've massacred some of what Stackhouse has written, but hopefully, I've given you a taste of this meaty chapter. In my opinion, he has pulled together a masterful summary.

What are your thoughts about Stackhouse's characterization of the story and mission?

Next, we will turn to Chapter Seven, "Vocation."

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Comments

[Travis Greene]

This is all good. The devil's in the details, of course, but I agree totally that mission now (in redemption) has to be tied to original mission.

The commandment to love has huge missional implications too, of course. Hence the NT warnings against Christians going to the civil magistrate to sue each other--it's making us look bad!

[Michael W. Kruse]

When I read through the New Testament with the lens of being an attractive community it is interesting how many times you see various actions being justified based on how it will play with those the church wants to reach.