MetaCatholic

Maggi Dawn comes out of the closet about her dislike of the word “missional” which has been gaining some recent currency. As she notes (but read the whole post)

I also notice that, like lots of buzzwords, “missional” has now begun to function like one of those shorthand terms to identify yourself with a particular brand of Christianity. That can be a kind of tribal identity thing - you say you belong to a missional, intentional community, and I say so do I, and that identifies us to one another that we are “in the same club”.

One blogging author who’s been making a lot of the word in reflecting on the gospels is Scot McKnight, who has been running a series on the Missional Jesus which starts here. First, I want to acknowledge that in all sorts of ways this is a very positive series of biblical reflections on the church learning its pattern of mission from Jesus’ way of mission. Scot is a very generous, careful and thoughtful exegete a good practical teacher and theologian, and a prolific blogger who gives a lot of pastoral attention and advice to his readers. I don’t want this to be heard simply as carping.

Nonetheless, alarm bells really started going off in my head when he said:

I have been tossing around in my head for months, if not more than a year, whether or not the word “Pharisee” can be defined as “those who are non-missional to the other.”

In a comment on that post (to which he responded positively and with a significant degree of agreement) I said:

I think I’d be extremely concerned about defining Pharisee in this way. Apart from the fact that I don’t think it does justice to the historical context by imposing questions they were not asking and answers they were not giving on them, it seems to me too like what Christians of the past have done with disastrous consequences: making “Pharisee” and later “Jew” a code-word and symbol for an attitude among other Christians with whom one disagrees, as Luther did with the Catholics of his day. I don’t think this is what you would intend, but I implore you not to go there. It is asking for a “Jesus good, Pharisee bad” stereotyping of both history and contemporary church arguments.

On the one hand, I agree that the church needs to identify what Jesus did, and the way in which he did it, and learn from it. On the other hand, I’m really quite anxious (rather like Maggi) about the ways in which this easily spills over into a tribal identification.

I think (as I noted in a previous post) that Jesus and the Pharisees were both passionate about the kingdom of God. (I recognise that I asserted my views there, more than argued them.) Both Jesus and the Pharisees were operating in a context of the expected vindication and renewal of God’s people. “Mission” in the sense we use that word today, simply wasn’t on their agenda. Where they differed was in their understanding of how God was acting, and would act to bring that kingdom into being.

At the risk of gross generalization and over-simplification, and of sounding ignorant of decades of careful gospel and historical Jesus scholarship, Jesus believed that to respond to him was to respond to God, and that when someone did respond to him, it showed that God was working in that person to forgive them and bring them into the kingdom. Wherever Jesus was, there was the opportunity to respond to God.

In one sense, this affirms a great deal of what those who are arguing today for a “missional” approach are on about. In another sense, it leaves us with a serious question. When Jesus was walking around Galilee in the flesh, it was relatively easy to see what responding to him might look like. It is less easy to define that now, and so the church in many ways is right to ask the sort of question the Pharisees were asking then on the basis of Torah: “What counts as a pattern of faithful obedience?” The difference is that Christians today ask that question on the basis of Jesus.

One answer is given by the whole panoply of “entering the church” complete with sacramental initiation and obedient membership of the community once founded on Peter and now bound together under Peter’s successor. Papa Ratzi has been busy reaffirming that one recently. Another is given by the “I’ve got Jesus in my heart” docetic existentialism of some sectors of evangelicalism. Those are the extremes. But we perhaps need more humility in recognising that the question is not an easy one, and simply introducing a new “missional” division fails to acknowledge that, after 2000 years of history, all of us are much closer to being in the place of the Pharisees seeking to define faithful and expectant obedience to God.