[This is a minimally updated excerpt from an ethics paper I wrote last year. I'll follow up soon with a comparison to other ethical systems. I share it here because I think that the ethical framework with which I engage and anticipate the Age of Less is both illustrative for my other articles here, and could be an important contribution to the broader "missional" conversation. -- BDR]
This article will attempt to charter a system of missional ethics by hybridizing several other ethical systems together with the emerging theological themes of the missio dei, narrative and narrative truth, and the centrality of the Kingdom or Reign of God. It is very similar in form to narrative ethics, affective faith ethics, and kingdom ethics, but differs by painting it with gentle hues of inaugurated eschatology, and by its central incorporation of the missio dei in its interpretive schema. Missional ethics is teleologically oriented toward the inbreaking eschatological Reign of God, deontologically honed by following the model and teachings of Jesus Christ, narratively lived out in a particularly faith community partaking in the broader missio dei, and birthed out an affective response to the delivering God of the biblical accounts.
Dialogically shaping the narrative framework for Missional Ethics
Missional ethics begins by asking several questions about God’s story of historical redemption so as to find His followers’ roles in that drama.[1] It is from that role in God’s drama, that identity in Christ, that place on God’s cosmic canvass, which the missional ethicist can begin to make ethical assessments.
What are God’s intentions for the creation project? God intends to merge Heaven and Earth so that “the dwelling of God is with men” (Rev 21:3). Some day, the Reign of God will be complete, and completely encompassing. This Reign as alluded to in Isaiah is characterized by: deliverance/salvation, righteousness/justice, peace, joy, God’s presence as Spirit or light, and healing.[2] These themes are echoed in John’s final vision of the New Heaven and New Earth in Revelation 21-22. It reflects a world turned rightside up, in which by grace everything is doing what it was intended to do. It is God’s dream for the world arriving at last.
What has and is God doing in relation to that promised future? That future has already broken in to this sin-stained and demon-occupied world through God’s active work and presence in Israel, and in Jesus and the Church. God has ever been in the process of setting the world to rights – the missio dei – in partnership with his creatures. Since the Incarnation, He does this by restoring, recreating, and redeeming all of creation.[3] The relationship between his restorative, re-creative, and redemptive work now and His robust denouement of “fast-forwarding” to the New Earth is a holy mystery.
Where does humanity today fit into that drama? Humanity’s original and ongoing vocation is to be God’s image-bearers on Earth. They were to administer God’s Reign over creation, and enjoy creation with justice and love. After the Fall, all creation (and so all humans) are called to be partakers in the restorative missio dei, God’s work in setting the world right side up. This means humanity should enjoy right relationship with God, and flowing out from that, right relationship with their fellow creatures. This is not only an issue of rightly-oriented hearts, but of rightly-shaped societies teeming across the surface of the Earth. That is, the missio dei includes affective reorientation and socio-political characteristics. Roger Hedlund identifies God’s socio-political priorities as revealed to Israel in the Torah as: concern for the poor (Deut. 15:4-5, 11), truthful court justice (Deut. 16:19), care for creation (Deut. 20:19, 22:6-7), equality through “a style of life both egalitarian and humane” (Lev. 25; Deut. 10:18-19; 15:12; 16:20; 19), and special concern for foreigners (Exodus 22:21).[4]
To accomplish the missio dei, God chose the descendants of Abraham to be models and agents of His dream for creation, a sort of “authentic creation in microcosm”.[5] In choosing to bless the house of Abraham, God revealed his goal of a redeemed community on earth: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3). From God came a special election of Abraham’s descendants to usher in the fullness of salvation for the world. Yet Israel’s “election does not imply favoritism. Election is not for private enjoyment, but to service. God’s election of Israel does not thereby exclude anyone.”[6] Although God certainly deals with nations apart from Israel,[7] he chose the house of Jacob to be the thrust of his missio dei.
What role does Jesus the Christ have in this? National-ethnic Israel failed terribly in their vocation (cf. Isaiah 26:18). They never got on with the business of either faithfully worshiping Yahweh or joining Him in setting the world rightside up; or not for long, anyway. So, God promised new creation. He has already begun the work of new creation in the person of Jesus Christ, whom N.T. Wright says “was God’s future suddenly rushing in to the present.”[8] This was particularly so in his bodily resurrection, the fatal blow to evil and the final outworking of His victory on the cross. That cruciform victory was “the hinge upon which the door to God’s new world had swung open.”[9] Because of those incredible events – the Cross and Resurrection – Satan has been bound, evil crushed, death defeated, the powers disarmed and shamed. So also came the New Covenant, that by God’s grace He writes the law on His peoples’ hearts (Jer. 31:33) and enables their hearts to do good works (that is, partner in the missio dei as image-bearers) by faith. Grace-enabled faith isn’t the end, but rather is the means toward empowering and commissioning His people for authentic participation in the missio dei.
How should the people of God be understood in this chapter of God’s story, as the church? God’s restorative movement in history continues through process of making new creations of those in His church. They are firstfruits guaranteeing what is to come. Guder says the church represents God’s eschatological Reign by bringing “what is hidden [God’s future] into view as sign and into experience as foretaste. At the same time, it also represents to the world the divine reign’s character, claims, demands, and gracious gifts as its agent and instrument.”[10] In this sense, the church is made in Christ as God’s new humanity, a new way of being the dispersed and denationalized people of God sent in worshipful participation of the missio dei to the ends of the earth. They as 'eschatological Israel' continue to be seeds, salt, and light of God to the Earth, authentically renewed image-bearers improvising God’s promised future reign today. Bell describes them as God’s “counter-cultural insurgency that actually believes the world can be put back together.”[11] It is a community of disciples of Jesus whose love and justice bear witness to the love and justice of their King and Lord, Yahweh Almighty.
The idea of the inbreaking future of God bears repeating: the idea of "eternal life" in the New Testament was to its original audience the idea of olam haba, a Jewish way of saying either "life in the age to come," or even "harmony with God." Therefore, those who inherit eternal life need not wait for it, but get to enjoy tastes of the Eschaton today. Indeed, they improvise it. All those wonderful visions throughout the Bible of a renewed creation full of renewed creatures dwelling with YHWH: that is what the church anticipates in their together.
What guides do the people of God have to partake in that reality? The church is to function differently in its partnering in the missio dei than national-ethnic Israel. While both were created for this partnership with God, how that works itself out is now considerably more dynamic and organic. Instead of cultic-political law, God’s people in this chapter of God’s story are to follow Jesus’ teachings (Mat. 7:24ff.) and follow his model of the Way. This places the Sermon on the Mount at the center of Christian living. It guides them in understanding Christ’s life, and so also in understanding how Christ’s life can be brought out in today’s redeemed faith communities. As Glen Stassen and David Gushee write,
Jesus offered not hard sayings or high ideals but concrete ways to practice God’s will and be delivered from the bondage of sin. In other words, he taught his followers how to participate in God’s reign. He taught what the kingdom is like, what its characteristics are, and therefore what kinds of practices are done by those who participate in it and are ready for it. We believe that this approach to Christian ethics is most faithful to the biblical witness about what God in Christ intends to do in us and in the world.[12]
Jesus taught his disciples to follow the prophetically re-imagined essences of the Law and Prophets (Love and Justice) in their dispersed and (now) denationalized situation, and so how to overcome the vicious spiritual, religious, relational, and political cycles of sin and oppression which the Law itself was powerless to neuter.[13] Such teachings, like narrative ethics, inspire not only what to do, but how to be.[14] His teachings and life illustrate God’s creatively upside-down Way of undercutting evil. It is how humanity is to get on with their duty of partaking in God’s plan to heal the creation project. Biblically, it is simply to follow Jesus.
Ethics arising from this great drama points squarely at the “incarnate Jesus, who taught the Sermon on the Mount and the kingdom of God, in the tradition of the prophets of Israel, embodied it in his practices and called us to embody it in our practices of discipleship.”[15] Discipleship in the Way of Jesus is how to be God’s people called not only to an eternal Heaven, but also to creatively let bits of that future break into today among them, and so contribute to flow of the missio dei in history. Missional ethics is the community consideration of how to be that kind of people at this time.
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[1] There is insufficient space here to explain and defend the epistemology behind this more narrative, dialogical style here used to unpack missional ethics. Its absence should not detract from the thesis. This section may feel like too much throat-clearing of Bible basics, but it is critical for building missional ethics.
[2] David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 25.
[3] Randy Alcorn, Heaven. (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale Press, 2004), chapter 15.
[4] Roger E. Hedlund, A Biblical Theology: The Mission of the Church in the World. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1991), 76-82.
[5] Andrew Perriman, “Cracks in the pavement: an emerging story of creation”. Available at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/1082/.
[6] Hedlund, 37.
[7] Ibid, 68-70.
[8] N.T. Wright, Lecture: “God’s future for the world has arrived in the person of Jesus.” The Future of the People of God series. 2004. Available at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks.
[9] N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, with Marcus J. Borg. (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1999), 103.
[10] Various authors, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Edited by Darrell L. Guder. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 102.
[11] Rob Bell, Sermon: “Jesus Died to Save Christians VI”. Mars Hill Bible Church. 10/22/2006. Available online at www.mhbc.org.
[12] Stassen and Gushee, 31.
[13] Stassen and Gushee, chapter 6.
[14] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 116.
[15] Stassen and Gushee, 58-59.
