David Bosch&s book is an exhaustive reading in Mission. Last week's reading covered Jesus' Mission, Mission of the early Church, Medieval Church and the Modern Church. Through out the history of the church there has been a paradigmatic change in the mission of the Church. Hans Kung identifies six distinctive theological paradigms, Apocalyptic, Hellenistic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Enlightenment and Ecumenical. Needless to say these are not water-tight compartments. These names are helpful to distinguish rather than to separate from each other. These paradigm shifts are rationalized by the paradigm shift theory of Thomas Kunh, which says, when the existing model become insufficient due to social and scientific reasons another model will emerge. Bosch seems to invent new words like, ecclesiasticization.
This week's bible study on Matthew's gospel is very much related to the mission of the Church. Matthew's Gospel is a missionary Gospel, and Matthew try to makes it clear that the converted rabbi is for all nations. Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you (Mt:28:20). It is interesting to note that Matthew's Gospel mainly consists of five discourses on discipleship, Mission of the Christian community, Reign of God, Church discipline and eschatology.
This week’s reading gives a detailed account of mission in during Enlightenment era. Empiricism (Bacon) and Rationalism (Descartes) played an important role in the Enlightenment. Freedom of thought based on anthropocentrism was the slogan of the Enlightenment era. This development found its way into the Church: Reason became important in theological inquiry and theology became scientific. Privatization of religion and increasing secularization were the hallmarks of the Enlightenment period. Emergence of missionary societies was a positive development of the period, lot of Christian energy was channeled to overseas through missions. Enlightenment which promised a new world based on equality and freedom never came, and this disillusion indirectly led to the spiritual renewal and great awakening in Europe and later in US in the 18th century. This awakening led to the Millennialism (Biblical vision of golden age in history which connected with the thousand years rule of God) which was later replaced by post Millennialism and Amillennialsim brought in by Albert Ritschl and Rauschenbusch. Both proclaimed that God’s kingdom is an ethical reality based on a social gospel. With all this history we come to know that, a post-modern paradigm of mission is due for the Church in the third millennium.