Transcript
How large a place should the idea of the nation have in the Christian mission? Now here we have to begin to speak about German missiology, because the Germans were the pioneers in missiological science, and in their hands the concept of the nation, volk, came to play a very central role in missionary thinking. The German word volk has overtones that are not present, I think, in the translation of it into any other language. If you think of
the way that the word volk functions in multitudes of compound nouns in German, one realizes that the concept of the Volk has a kind of resonance for the Germans. Of course, this is partly what made possible the rise of National Socialism with its appeal to the volk. But far behind that, I suppose, I don't know how far back, perhaps dating from the Reformation itself, is this very profound... This profound sense of Volkstum, of the being of
the people, the nation. And the word volk is really not adequately translated by the English word nation. It's an almost mystical entity of which I am simply a part. And the first great pioneer of missiology, Gustav Warneck, W-A-R-N-E-C-K, Gustav Warneck, 1834 to 1910, taught that the gospel is addressed both to the Volk and to the individual. That ideally, the object of missions is that the whole volk should be baptized together.
Disciple the nation. Disciple the people. And thereby, its good customs should be preserved. So that missions would not disrupt, destroy the old customs of a people, of a tribe, but that the whole tribe as a whole would be converted and brought within the Christian family. So that there would be Christian nations in Africa. In the same sense that there were Christian nations in Europe after the conversion of the barbarians. However, Warneck's was a balanced view. He
said, as I say, that the gospel should be addressed to the volk and to the individual, to both. A much more extreme position, and one that we should look at, was taken by the great German missionary to East Africa, Bruno Gutmann. G-U-T-M-A-N, Gutmann. Bruno Gutmann, 1876 to 1966, who was the evangelist of the Chagga people. His position was that, that the gospel is addressed to the volk, to the people. And that
there should therefore be no individual baptisms. That the baptism should be the baptism of the whole people. There should be no training of young men for the ministry. But the leaders of the people, the tribal leaders, would become the ministry. Of the new church. One might almost say that the work of missions is to strengthen and perfect the God-given order of the old society. The structure of the tribe, with its laws, its taboos, its customs,
its rituals. These are all part of God's good creation. They may be defective. They may, they may be part of the fall. But it is this entity which has to be one for Christ. And the real enemy against which we have to guard is civilization. Which disrupts modern Western civilization. Which disrupts that good creation. So that Gutmann labored to create a Christian nation among the Chaggas. And of course the Chagga church, the Lutheran church, in Tanzania,
is a very strong church. And is a product, I suppose, humanly speaking, of the work of Gutmann. A more moderate position, and an extremely important one, was taken by the German missionary Christian Keysser. K-E-Y-S-S-E-R, Christian Keysser. The great apostle of New Guinea. Whose work was among the, among the tribal peoples of the highlands of New Guinea. Where a great multitude of people have been one for Christ. And are still being
one for Christ at this time. His dates are 1877 to 1961. His principle was that the whole tribe should be brought to accept Christianity. Together as a tribe, as a people. And that only after that, there would be individual baptisms. And that then, the tribe itself becomes responsible for carrying the mission to neighboring tribes. Now as you can see, all of these missiologies have strong affinities with McGovern's position. They were developed long before McGovern was heard
of. But, they can claim to have a very ancient background in the conversion of Europe. Which undoubtedly proceeded mainly in this way. The normal pattern in Europe, and in England certainly, was that the tribal leaders with their king, who was not an absolute monarch, but a leader among the leaders, the tribal leaders decided to accept the new faith. And then the whole tribe was baptized altogether. And undoubtedly, this is the way in which Europe was Christianized.
And I suppose this is the way in which the greater part of what is now Christendom has become Christian. But this whole line of thinking has been very strongly, strongly attacked. Not least by Karl Barth. I quote a sentence from Karl Barth. He refers to the Greek text of Matthew 28:18. Where, as he points out, it is the word autus, which is here translated them. Autus is not a neuter, but a masculine. And ta ethne
is a neuter. So that when you say, disciple the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, that them is not a neuter, auta, but is a masculine, autus. And therefore it cannot refer to ta ethne. Barth says the autus cannot refer to ta ethne. It is not the nations as such that are to be made disciples. This interpretation once infested missionary thinking. And was connected with the painful fantasies of
the German Christians. It is worthless. That is Karl Barth. Now, of course, the background of Barth's rejection is very understandable. Barth was fighting the battle against Hitler. And the theological and philosophical basis of Hitler's movement was the idea of the folk as a kind of God-given and sacred reality. And therefore Barth is very understandably fighting against this as a false doctrine which can lead to paganism and is leading to paganism in his own time. And
yet, of course, one has to say that while Barth is obviously right in saying that the object of baptize is autus, and therefore must mean individual people. So there is no question of baptizing the nation. And there is a famous hymn in English. I don't know whether we have it in America. Baptize the nations far and wide. The triumphs of the cross proclaim. This is obviously illegitimate. Baptism is to be administered to persons, not to tribes
or nations. This is clear. But on the other hand, it is also equally clear that the object of the verb to disciple is the nations. Disciple the nations. Baptizing people. Autus. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Now, we have here a theological question. How do we understand the facts of tribes people, community, nation, in relation to God's creation and God's redemption? Surely we must agree with Barth that the nation cannot be
treated as a kind of sacred entity, a kind of absolute. In fact, it's a significant fact that if you look at the 70 nations, in Genesis 10, not one of those nations now exists except the Jews, except the sons of Eber. Nations are changing entities. And if you look at the 26 nations depicted on the great vast reliefs of Persepolis, bringing their offerings to the emperor, to Darius, there are some of those nations which still exist.
The Greeks, the Arabs, the Indians. There are some of them which no longer exist. The Bactrians, the Scythians, and so forth. And nations are not eternal entities. They are changing entities. But yet surely also it is true that nations, tribes, peoples have some reality. That human beings are not simply identical billiard balls who happen to be put into different bags. But if you turned all the bags out, they would all be identical billiard balls. Obviously, being
a human being includes also being part of a people. I cannot define my identity apart from the fact that I speak English, that I have the kinds of prejudices and so forth that a typical Englishman has. This is part of what I am. And I cannot be understood as a real human being apart from my nation, my culture, my language, and so forth. I am going to argue later that, theologically speaking, the right way to understand
these facts is in terms of Paul's doctrine of the powers. Paul, you remember, speaks a great deal about the powers. And sometimes it is difficult to know exactly what he is talking about. In Romans 13, it is very clear that he is talking about the state. And in Galatians, it is clear that he is talking about the law. And in Colossians, it is clear that he is talking about certain kinds of pagan philosophy. But I think
that the theologians are right who say that we are to understand Paul's language about the powers as referring to what we in our day would call the structures by which human life is shaped and ordered, which on the one hand are part of God's creation, as Paul says, but on the other hand have been disarmed by the cross, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2 and in Colossians, and in other places. In the cross, the powers,
the law, the state, religion, tradition, all these things, confronted God himself in Jesus Christ. And in seeking to destroy him were themselves not destroyed, because they still exist, but disarmed, de-absolutized, robbed of their final authority, so that we can still say that they have a place, they are part of God's, of the framework, so to speak, within which our created life has to be lived, but that they can never again claim an absolute status, as
they did, for example, under Hitler, where the folk became the ultimate authority, or as they did in 19th century capitalism in England, where the economic order became the ultimate authority, and whatever, immoral consequences followed, however much human misery was created, it was claimed that this simply has to be accepted because the economic order cannot be tampered with, and so forth. So that I would understand folk, tribe, nation, people, as being within this concept of the structures
which are part of God's creation, without which we could not exist as human beings, but which can become demonic when they are invested with absolute powers, which do not belong to them, but belong only to Jesus. Now in relation to this phenomena of the nation, and here let me stop for a moment and justify the confusion there, that I created at the beginning by talking about the mission to the nations and gospel and culture. I used
the word gospel and culture because obviously to define a nation is very, very difficult, but we would, I think, agree that culture is one of the essential characteristics by which we define the togetherness of a human group. It's notoriously difficult to define the word nation, and what is a nation? One, I think, universal aspect of a nation is that it shares a common culture. When I say nation, obviously, I'm not talking about member bodies of the
United Nations, nor am I talking, talking necessarily about a single ethnic group, because people of different ethnic groups can share a common culture. Sometimes a group is defined primarily by its race, say whites and blacks in the United States, sharing a common language and a common culture, also divided ethnically, and therefore having distinct subcultures within the total North American culture. Or one thinks of groups like the French and the English in Quebec, sharing, I suppose, an
enormous amount of a common culture divided by language and no doubt by subcultural elements, which I wouldn't personally know. Or one takes the Scots and the English. As you know, the Scots are passionately concerned about their national identity at the moment. It's very difficult to know what the roots of that are. They're not ethnic and they're not language, because it's a common ethnic origin and a common language. But there are cultural elements which separate them. So
it's extremely difficult to define the word, what is the modern equivalent of ta ethne, the goyim, the nations. But it seems to me that the most practical definition for our purposes is that it is a group of people who share a common culture, or whose sense of identity is governed by the sense of identity. It's that they share a common culture. And if you put it that way, of course, there are cultures and subcultures. The whole
people of North America, in some ways, share a common culture, which is easily recognizable anywhere else in the world. But within that, there are subcultures, black, Hispanic, and so forth. Italian. Italian, yes. And of course, many, many more smaller ones, like the Amish people in western Pennsylvania and middle Pennsylvania, and so forth and so on. Many, many subcultures. And this would be true everywhere. And as I said yesterday, in respect of the relation of mission to
culture, missions have pursued a very, very zigzag course. I referred yesterday to the story of missions in India, or at least to some aspects of it, where completely opposite attitudes have been taken at different periods to the local culture. And where one has very, very complex and difficult to describe combinations of missions and differences. It's a striking fact, for example, in South India that whereas nearly all the churches that one sees are built without any pretensions
to look anything like a Hindu temple, rather one would think to look as far as possible like a barn, or at least like an English village church, there are scattered around South India a few churches, that are built in the style of a Hindu temple. But in almost every case, those have been built by a foreign missionary against furious opposition by the local Christians. And this is, one could quote, many, many illustrations of the same complex
relationships. It's very, very commonly said now that missionaries have destroyed traditional cultures wherever they go. But this is an enormous oversimplification. It is equally true that missionaries have rescued and restored disappearing cultures all over the place. If language is an important part of culture, one has to recognize that the Renaissance, the development of most of the Asian and African languages has been almost entirely the work of missionaries. There stand on the beach at Madras a series
of eight great bronze statues commemorating the great creators of Tamil culture. And three out of those eight are 19th century missionaries. And these are statues put up 25 years after independence, when there are no possible influences of, for foreign influences on that decision. What has more often happened is that people whose culture has been invaded by a foreign culture have passionately wanted what the foreign culture could bring and tended therefore to reject their own culture. And
when the attempt is made to prevent this, as in South Africa, where the South African government tries to prevent the black peoples from becoming acculturated to the white culture and to insist that they remain within their own culture, speak their own language, and keep their own customs, then we have the abomination which we call apartheid. If one looks at the story of English and Portuguese colonization in Africa, one can see that on the one hand the
Portuguese adopted the policy of assimilation, trying to assist the native peoples to become Portuguese, and therefore making all the language in Portuguese. The English tried to preserve the old cultures by insisting that education, at least at the primary levels, should be in the mother tongue, and that government should remain in the hands of local tribal leaders. But neither solution by itself solves the problem. The one and the other can both lead to to injustices. Or one
looks at the story of black and white relations in the United States. Twenty years ago, Christians felt that integration was the one thing which the gospel required. Today, I think it is recognized that that integration would have meant integration on the white man's terms. And therefore, we understand the reaction of black power and the insistence that black culture must have its own authentic expression which is acknowledged as such and which is not allowed to be simply
assimilated into the dominant white culture. So that the questions that are raised in this field of gospel and culture, which ultimately arise from the question, how do we interpret this phrase, disciple the nations, are very, very complex and difficult questions. It seems to me that while we have to accept Barth's warning against a tendency to absolutize the nation, as though it were a kind of eternal entity, to recognize the relativity, of the nation, the culture, the
community aspect. Nevertheless, one has to recognize that it does have a reality that man cannot be addressed except as the person he is in his culture, in his language, in his community, in his folk. So you are, you come to the question, how do you address man in his culture? How does the gospel relate itself to a culture? How far does the gospel have to be adjusted to the culture? The typical Roman Catholic word here is
the word accommodation, which has figured in Roman Catholic missiology. Typical Protestant word has been indigenization. The idea that the gospel is to be indigenized. How far does the gospel accept human cultures? How far does it judge them? How far does it change them? Similarly, in the epistles, one does not find an emphasis or a concern about numbers. The emphasis is always placed upon making Christ fully known. And St. Paul uses that phrase in several places, making
Christ fully known. Making the Gentiles an offering acceptable to God. Romans 15 to 21. This, I think, is a good passage to read. Romans 15, 15 to 21. I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God, to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
In Christ Jesus I have reason to be proud of my work for God. I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that from Jerusalem as far around as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ, thus making it my ambition to preach the gospel not
where Christ has already been named, lest I build on another man's foundation. And then he goes on to say that he has no further work in these regions. He has finished his work as a missionary, but that work is not to have brought everyone in that region into the church, surely not. It is to make Christ fully known throughout that region. And again, his concern is that the light should shine, that we should give a true
witness. But I do not find in St. Paul's letters a concern about numbers as such. I would be glad to be corrected if you think that I am wrong, but I simply do not find that in Paul's letters. If one looks at the fourth gospel, at St. John, there is, of course, an immense interest in the world. The world is constantly referred to in John's gospel, and Jesus in John's gospel is the savior of the world.
And in the 17th chapter, the church is consecrated and sent into the world in order that the world may believe. But there is no suggestion here that the salvation of the world depends upon the size of the church. So that I do not find that the New Testament as a whole supports the kind of picture that McGovern gives, although I acknowledge that there is a real interest in church growth. Secondly, looking not at scripture but at
church history, there have, of course, been times in history when the church has grown with enormous rapidity. In the Roman Empire after the baptism of Constantine, in Western Europe after Charlemagne, in South America during the invasions of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, when the South Americans were baptized en masse. There is even a story of priests climbing up into trees and spraying water. From a hose over the converts so as to achieve the largest number of
baptisms. Well, that is church growth of a kind. They were discipled and baptized. But we would surely not be very satisfied with it. But according to McGovern's argument, if one takes it seriously, that the business of missions is simply to convert and baptize and that discipling, teaching, is all to come later. How can one deny the statement that on McGovern's calculus, that should be regarded as one of the most successful periods in the history of the
church? Now, of course, again, one has to speak the other side. It is extraordinary how, in some cases, peoples who have been converted in that way have become among the staunchest Christians. The immensely strong Roman Catholic Church in South India has as its absolutely solid faithful core the Parava community, which is originally a fisher community. And the Paravas in the 15th and early 16th century were attacked by the Muslims. And they appealed to the Portuguese for
protection. And the Portuguese said, we will protect you on condition that you are all baptized. And so the whole Parava community was baptized. They were not even told the name of Jesus. They were simply baptized. Full stop. The Paravas remain to this day the absolutely faithful solid core of the Catholic Church. Now, one must add that later on, Francis Xavier came and lived among the Paravas and taught them. They were what you would call baptized heathen.
And he did teach them. So that it's not just, it didn't end there. And Francis Xavier was a great saint. But nevertheless, the fact remains that these people converted in that way have remained four centuries later, five centuries later, an absolutely solid faithful body of Christians. So you can't dispose of the matter too quickly. And yet, I don't think we would accept the kind of things that went on in South America during the period of the
conquistadores as a model of what the church should be. And we have to face the fact that when the church has become large and therefore rich and therefore powerful, it has not been most obviously recognizable as the body of Christ. And thirdly, even apart from that kind of triumphalism, which has gone along with periods of rapid church expansion, when the church is primarily concerned with its own self-aggrandizement, does it bear a credible witness to the
crucified and risen Jesus? Here I find, myself in difficulty, with a good deal of the language of McGovern. If I had my own library here, I could pull out some books and quote typical passages from the writing of the church growth school in Pasadena, which uses all the time the kind of language of the Pentagon, so to speak, cost effectiveness, bring in heavy reinforcements, hold back your forces, mobilize your resources, and put in very heavy resources
here, and so forth. Now, if you read that at the receiving end, you feel rather as if you were reading a memorandum from the Pentagon rather than from a mission board. Do you know what I mean? The feeling that it becomes assimilated to the kind of strategy of a military or a commercial campaign. And there's no doubt that the idea that if you begin by saying that the one criterion is numerical growth, it's very difficult to
avoid ending up with that kind of mentality. But now let us take McGovern's thesis for a little more detailed examination. I think that his point about the limited role of missions is a valid point. Here, I want to make the distinction that I have made before between mission and missions. I think we need a distinction of this kind. Mission is the total mission of the Church, which includes everything for which it has been sent into the
world by Christ. In that sense, it is the necessary inclusive word which we need. But we need also a more limited word which describes the particular order of operations which are directed towards making Christ known in a situation where he is not known. This is how I interpret Paul's own understanding of his role. When he says that he has completed his work in the whole region from Jerusalem to Illyrica, it does not mean that all the
people have been converted and baptized. It means that there has been established a witness to Christ, in all these communities. And that is his role. And that more limited idea of missions I think is right, and I think McGovern has a point there. Paul accepts the fact that he has laid a foundation and that other people will build upon it, such as Apollos. But his role is to lay the foundation. I think I have referred earlier
to the distinction that becomes very clear in the Vatican documents between Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes. Did I speak about that before? You know in the Vatican documents, the documents of Vatican II, the first great document on the Church, the Constitution on the Church, the greatest of the Vatican II documents, is called Lumen Gentium. Christ is the light of the world. And it gives a doctrine of the Church, which is a missionary doctrine. It portrays the
whole Church as a missionary body. But then you go farther along and you find another document called Ad Gentes, to the nations, which is a document on missions. And there missions are defined as a particular activity. Now I don't exactly accept the Roman Catholic definition of missions. We would have to discuss that. But the point is that it is a particular activity, missions, within the total task of mission. And I think that McGovern is right in
saying that there are certain priorities for missions which are not the same as the priority for the mission of the Church as a whole. Secondly, I think McGovern is right in his attack on the mission station approach. There are real movements of the Spirit which are inhibited and blocked by what he calls the mission station approach. This involves, and I think here McGovern is right, accepting existing social structures. You do not lift people out of their
social structure and attach them to another social structure. You pray and work for an action of the Holy Spirit by which within that social structure a form of Christian life develops which is appropriate to that social structure so that it is a church of that people, of that community, of that group. You accept that. God accepts world cultures as McGovern says. And therefore also you do not impose an alien pattern of leadership. I want to come
back to that in the last lecture on mission and ministry. But you seek a leadership that emerges from this social structure. You do not impose an outside model of leadership. And therefore thirdly, you do not demand immediate perfecting. You do not impose as a condition of baptism a standard of behavior which is developed within your own group. Now that leaves unanswered some very difficult questions that we come to. But I think up to then I would
say yes. But then there are some points where I would say no. Take for example the question of caste. Is McGovern right in saying that the church in India should be organized on a caste basis? The history here is fascinatingly interesting because the church has pursued a zigzag course through history on the question of caste. It's worth pausing for a moment because it's a beautiful example. When the first missionaries came to India, well the first ones
of course were the Portuguese conquerors. Then you have the Jesuits, the famous Robert de Nobile who came to Madura, who saw that what the Portuguese were doing was simply to detach a few marginal individuals from the outcast groups on the fringes of society and attach them to the Portuguese compounds as kind of Portuguese assimilados. Brown Portuguese so to speak. And that there was no possibility that the central citadel of Hindu culture could ever be touched. And
so Robert de Nobile took the radically opposite course. He went and lived right in the temple quarters in the middle of the city of Madura. He wore the sacred thread of the high caste Indians. He dressed as a Hindu. He ate as a Hindu. He learned Sanskrit and Tamil, the first European to do so. He studied the Vedas which no European hitherto had known to exist. He became accepted as a guru, a holy man, who lived
according to all the rules of caste in a Hindu society, who in all the social customs of Hinduism, so far as they did not obviously involve idolatry, accepted them and was accepted by the high caste Hindus as a holy man and therefore was able to baptize large numbers of high caste Hindus and to build up a community. At the cost of totally separating himself from these outcaste were the Portuguese Christians, Indian Christians, who were part of
the Portuguese setup. Now, de Nobili was fiercely attacked. There was a famous case which went on for about a century and was finally settled only by Rome and the literature of that is extremely interesting. But it did result in the creation of a genuine Indian caste at the cost of accepting caste. When the Protestant missionaries came along from Germany in the 18th century, they also accepted caste. They came from a hierarchical society. They argued that caste
is simply the Indian equivalent of nation. The churches of Europe are national churches. The church of England, the church of Hesse-Nassau, the church of Brandenburg, the church of Hanover, the churches in Europe from which they came, the church of Denmark, the church of Sweden, the church of Norway, they are national churches. So why not have a church of the Brahmins and a church of the Nadas and a church of the Velalas? It's part of God's
ordering of things. So the Protestant missionaries also accepted caste. And in their churches, the high caste people received communion first and the low caste people received it later. Or the high caste people had it on one Sunday and the low caste people had communion on another Sunday or else they had separate buildings. The result of that is that the church in South India spread very rapidly. And the church in South India is much, much stronger now
than the church in North India which was even more evangelized later. We'll come to that in a moment. Then you get to the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century, the French Revolution, the Aufklärung, the new ideas about liberty for eternity and equality. A new generation of missionaries come out of which William Carey is the example, who passionately believe in the equality of all men and who fiercely attack their predecessors and say
there were no missionaries at all and these Christians are no Christians at all unless your Brahmin will sit down and eat beef and drink beer. He is not a proper Christian. And therefore they simply insist that the caste barriers should be broken down. All kinds of exciting consequences happen including the formation of the Lutheran Church because when the Anglican Metropolitan in Calcutta issued an order that the Christians in Madras must no longer take communion separately high
caste and low caste, all the high caste Christians walked out and formed their own congregation which is now the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church. They separated themselves on that basis. Well, it was this fierce anti-caste movement among the new generation of missionaries which dominated the growth of the church in North India. The result is that the church in North India has always been a small and weak body but not troubled by caste problems. The church in
South has been a strong body but deeply troubled by the question of caste because caste is still a reality in the life of the church. If you take the Hindu nation as a whole, it is the second message and not the first which has been accepted. The non-Christian Hindu, the non-Christian Indian now regards caste as an evil and tries to eliminate it while caste is to some extent still preserved, although they are ashamed of
it, by Christians in the South. Now, McGovern comes along and says for the sake of church growth you should have separate caste congregations for the different communities in Madras. And Christians in Madras would regard that as absolutely horrible from an ethical point of view. Where does the right lie? I do not think you can simply absolutize McGovern's principle. We can discuss it after coffee. I agree with McGovern about the whole concept of leadership, the imposition of
a ministry modeled upon another community and not upon the receptor community. But there is surely always an ethical content to conversion. We can agree with McGovern that the missionary does not have the right to lay down an ethical standard to say no baptism unless you conform at this and this point. But on the other hand, conversion cannot be defined in terms which omit any kind of change in behavior. It is very hard to see that a
man has truly decided to follow Jesus, if that does not result in some recognizable outward change in the way that he behaves. And therefore, to make this completely sharp separation that McGovern does between discipling and perfecting seems to me to be impossible. And that of course brings us to the crucial issue that divides, fiercely divides, a man like McGovern. From a man like Miguez Bonino, whom we were studying earlier on. For Miguez, here you have the
two extreme polarizations, so to speak. For Miguez Bonino, the essential meaning of conversion is that you are committed to follow Christ in the struggle for liberation of the oppressed people. And therefore, the church is those people who are so committed in the name of Christ. And those who claim to be Christians, but are not so committed, are not truly members of the church. The biblical meaning of knowing God is not simply that you confess with your
lips, yes, I believe in Jesus. Not that you just say, Lord, Lord. But that you do what he commands. And that is the true church, says Bonino. And this so-called church growth is bogus. It is not the true church, which consists simply of people who say, Lord, Lord, and do not what he commands. And on the other hand, McGovern's position that the essential commitment is to Jesus and his church, and that those who are so
committed can, by a process of perfecting which comes on later, learn to follow Jesus. In all the paths of righteousness. And of course McGovern would not dispute for a moment that a Christian has to be concerned about social justice. Of course he would not dispute that for a moment, but he would say that social justice and many other things belong to the field of perfecting which come later. Well, there is the issue in its sharpest form,
perhaps. And since we've all been told to come to prayers, and since it's now 12 minutes past 10, maybe we'd better go. I think we'll start. As you know, I gave for today's lecture the title, Mission to the Nations. No, I'm sorry. The title, Gospel and Culture. Which is, well, I mean, it is related to that. It's in a sense the same issue because it's the question of how we understand the nations. The nations, really. Anyway,
let's leave it with that title, Gospel and Culture. Come on in. It's a matter of looking again at this famous text, Matthew 28:18. We were rather pulling it to pieces yesterday following McGovern, who is, as you know, insisting on taking the three elements in the right order. Disciple the nations, baptize and teach. But now, I want to direct your attention to this word, the nations. What does it mean to speak of discipling the nations? The
nations are, in Greek, ta ethne, in Hebrew, the goyim, the peoples who are outside of Israel, outside of the covenant. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus firmly tells his disciples that they are not to go to the nations. In the first missionary charge, in Matthew 10, Jesus says these twelve, these twelve Jesus sent out charging them, go nowhere among the Gentiles, the nations, the goyim. And enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The message of the coming of the kingdom is first of all for Israel. But in his teaching, Jesus also announces the gathering of the Gentiles, which is promised for the last days. In the Old Testament, it is repeatedly promised, that in the last days, the nations will be gathered to worship Yahweh on Mount Zion. And Jesus says that these last days are now impending. And so we have such
sayings as, many shall come from the east and the west and sit down in the kingdom of God, and so forth. Now the death and resurrection of Jesus is, according to the New Testament, the ending of the present order and the dawning of the new day, the day of the Lord, the Lord's day, which dawns on the day of resurrection. And therefore, on that day, the risen Lord meets with his disciples, and gives them their commission
to go to the nations. And we have that commission in three different forms, the form given us by Luke, the form given us by Matthew, the form given us by John, which have their differences, but are basically referring to the same reality, to go to the nations. So the call which was addressed to Israel is now addressed to the nations, ta ethne. But who are the nations? The crucial question that we are asking here is, does
it mean just go to everybody? Could you just say, go to the whole world population? Or is there some significance in this phrase, the nations, ta ethne? As I've reminded you in the first week of this course, we have the background of this in Genesis 9 and 10, where we have the listing of the 70 nations, who are the offspring of Noah, and are the recipients of God's covenant of blessing. And it is out of one
of these nations, out of the clan of Eber, that God, chooses the man Abraham, to be the beginning of the story of salvation.