The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative

I just finished The Mission of God by Christopher J.H. Wright for my next doctorate class entitled “Reading & Preaching the Bible Missionally.” Wright happens to be N.T. Wright’s brother, who is one of my favorite authors, so I was pretty excited about tackling the book. I wonder what family dinners are like with those 2 guys sitting around the table?

I have to say, this is one of the longest books I have ever read, clocking in at 581 pages. But a good read nonetheless.

The book is broken up into 4 parts:  The Bible & Mission (understanding how a biblical, missional hermeneutic is shaped), The God of Mission (how God makes himself known in the Old & New Testament), The People of Mission (why people are chosen by God, what they are chosen for, what is the mission of Israel & the church), and The Arena of Mission (what mission looks like from the Bible into the cultures we live in).

The point of the book is that the Bible is about the mission of God. That is God’s message, what drives everything in the Bible. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians “Do everything for the glory of God.” Getting to the glory of God is the mission of God. In fact one of the first things Wright says in the book is “The whole Bible itself is a missional phenomenon.”

Here are some things that jumped out:

•  The Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, “life, the universe and everything,” and with its center, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, “what it’s all about.”
• The proper way for disciples of the crucified and risen Jesus to read their Scriptures is messianically and missionally.
• The Bible is to be read precisely in and for the context in which its message must be heard and appropriated.
• Since the whole Bible is the story of how this God, “our God,” has brought about his salvation for the whole cosmos, we can affirm with equal validity, “Mission belongs to our God.” Missions is not ours; mission is God’s.
• God alone is uncreated, self-existent, noncontigent. God’s being depends on nothing else outside God’s own self. All other reality, by contrast, is created by God and therefore is dependent on God for existence and sustenance. The creation is contigent on God. It cannot and would not exist without God. God did and coult exist without it. This essential ontological duality between two orders of being (the created order and the uncreated God) is foundational to the biblical worldview.
• Wisdom in mission calls us to be discerning and to recognize that what may be appropriate in one situation may not be so helpful in another.
• The whole Bible could be portrayed as a very long answer to a very simple question:  What can God do about the sin and rebellion of the human race? Genesis 12 through to Revelation 22 is God’s answer to the question posed by the bleak narratives of Genesis 3 – 11. Or in terms of the overall argument of this book, Genesis 3 – 11 sets the problem that the mission of God addresses from Genesis 12 to Revelation 22.
• The greatest human achievements cannot solve the deepest human problems. God’s mission of blessing the nations is a radical new start. It requires a break, a radical departure from the story so far, not merely an evolutionary development from it.
• Mission is God’s address to humanity’s foreit.
• The common opinion that the Bible is a moral code book for Christians falls far short, of course, of the full reality of what the Bible is and does. The Bible is essentially the story of God, the earth and humanity; it is the story of what has gone wrong, what God has done to put it right, and what the future holds under the sovereign plan of God. Nevertheless, within that grand narrative, moral teaching does have a vital place. The Bible’s story is the story of the mission of God. The Bible’s demand is for the appropriate response from human beings. God’s mission calls for and includes human response. And our mission certainly includes the ethical dimensions of that response.

Click here to read what Scot McKnight had to say about this book, some great posts. To read some other reviews on the book, click here, here, here.

While it was hard reading at certain parts because of the length and the first part was a little dry but entirely necessary for the whole book. Once it got to part 2 it was great. Definitely worth reading and chewing on. Chapter 6 & 7 on how election fits into the mission of God were great.