W. Davd Phillips

In Chapter one of this book, Christopher Wright begins to lay out the search for a missional hermeneutic. We need to move past the search for a biblical basis of missions, but to see the Bible through a missional lens.

Drawing from Luke 24, Wrights begins to express his basis for a missional hermeneutic. He believes that beyond a messianic centering of the Old Testament there is a missional thrust as well. Luke 24:45-47 states:

45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. (ESV)

In this, “He seems to be saying that the whole of scripture (which we know as the Old Testament) finds its focus and fulfillment both in the life and death and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah, and in the mission to all nations, which flows from that event.” Thus the proper way for disciples of Christ to read the Bible is both messianically and missionally.

In doing this, we need to move past trying to express a “Biblical Foundation for Missions.” We need to see the Bible not as containing several verses about being on mission (ie Matthew 28:19-20), but to see everything through a messianic and missional framework.

One of his concerns is how the Western world has failed to recognize the transition of Christianity, and thus it’s global hermeneutic. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90% of all the world’s Christians lived in the West or the North (primarily Europe and North America). Today, 75% of all Christians live in the South and East – Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia and the Pacific. “The whole center of gravity of world Christianity has moved south – a phenomenon described, not entirely felicitously, as ‘the next Christendom’…”

Yet Western culture has rejected, according to Wright, the very thing that led to the protestant reformation. “There is a great irony that the Western Protestant theological academy, which has its roots precisely in a hermeneutical revolution (the Reformation), led by people who claimed the right to read Scripture independently from the prevailing hegemony of medieval Catholic scholasticism, has been slow to give ear to those of other cultures who choose to read the Scriptures through their own eyes, though the situation is undoubtedly improving”

“The phenomenon of hermeneutical variety,” Wright goes on to say, “goes right back to the Bible itself, of course. The New Testament was born out of a hermeneutical revolution in reading those Scriptures we now call the Old Testament. And within the early church itself there were different ways of handling those same Scriptures, depending on the context and need being addressed. Jewish and Greek forms of Christian identity, the product of the church’s mission, felt themselves addressed and claimed in different ways by the demands of the Scriptures. Paul wrestles with these differences in Romans 14-15 for example.”

A missional hermeneutic, therefore, must include a recognition of multiple perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the Scripture. What persons of one culture bring to the text may illumine the text in ways that people from another culture may not have noticed.

If this is the case for Wright, are there any boundaries for reading the biblical that are right or wrong? What is important, Wright points out, is a “plurality in interpretation”, not pluralism as a hermeneutical ideology nor even relativism. “The starting point for understanding the meaning of biblical texts, in my view, remains a careful application of grammatico-historical tools in seeking to determine as far as is possible their authors’ and editors’ intended meaning in the context they were spoken or written. But as we apply those tools and then move to appropriate the significance and implications of these texts in our own context, cultural diversity plays its part in the hearing and receiving of them. But it is a diversity with methodological and theological limits.”

Though we, in the West since Enlightenment, like to claim that we can have an objective and. rational view of scripture, this is a myth. The reality is that the Bible cannot be separated from who we are, the experiences that have shaped our lives, and the context we live in. “The Bible is to be read precisely in and for the context in which its message must be heard and appropriated.”

A missional hermeneutic also embraces liberation. It actually subsumes liberationists readings into itself. While not promoting a social gospel, but a liberationalist gospel, “[i]nsomuch as the Bible narrates the passion and action (the mission) of this God for the liberation not only of humanity but of the whole creation, a missional hermeneutic of Scripture must have a liberationist dimension.”

Finally, a missional hermeneutic moves past postmodernism. While postmodernism “celebrates the local, the contextual and the particular, it goes on to affirm that this is all we’ve got.” The grand narrative is missing. Yet since the incarnation of God, the church has wrestled with problems of multiple contexts but has sustained the conviction “that there is an objective truth for all in the gospel that addresses and claims people in any context.”

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