The document discusses various theological approaches to mission such as the Trinitarian, Christocentric, humancentric, and ecocentric approaches. It also summarizes the views of prominent theologians on topics like God, Jesus Christ, justification by faith, and the nature of mission. Key figures discussed include Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, and Jurgan Moltmann. The document emphasizes that theology and mission must be grounded in both the divine and human realities.

1. THEOLOGY OF MISSION
Joshva Raja

2. BIBLE AND RESOURCES FOR MISSION
 Bible
 Biblical Context
 Tradition
 Intertextual context
 Contemporary Context

3. Method of Approach
 Logic - In Logic, an argument is a set of declarative
sentences (statements) known as the premises, and
another declarative sentence (statement) known as the
conclusion in which it is asserted that the truth of the
conclusion follows from (is entailed by) the premisses.
 Constructing a case with supportive arguments or
cases or sentences that can either be true or false.

4. Develop a Tree of Mission
 Next week please develop a tree of mission
history from Jesus Mission to your context
 Just names – if possible dates and place
 Include Medical, Development and other
types of Mission too
 Two presentations – Methodists and Mission;
Anglicans and Mission – historical or
theological issues only

5. Joshva session four
5
Do You
read
Handouts?

6.  Trinitarian Approach
 Theocentric Approach
 Christocentric Approach
 Humancentric Approach
 Ecocentric Approach

7. QUEST FOR GOD/CHRIST AND FOR MISSION
 Just God (Hooft)
 Participating with God (Missio Dei – Karl
Barth)
 Mediating Christ (M M Thomas)
 Christ with others (Bonhoeffer)
 God in Context (Schleiermacher)
 Liberating God (Gutierrez)

8. QUEST...
 Christ the uniting power (Koyama)
 Accommodating Christ (Thauren)
 Acting God (Cullmann)
 Dialogic God (Kraemer)

9.  The whole secret of the Christian Faith is that
it is [human]-centred because it is God-
centred.
 But a Christianity which would use the
vertical preoccupation as a means to escape
from its responsibility for and in the common
life of humanity is a denial of the incarnation
of God’s love for the world manifested in
Christ.

10.  Human Spirituality undergirds all human
strivings for health and sex, for development
and justice.The primary concern of the Christian
mission is with the salvation of human
spirituality with right choices in the realm of self-
transcendence and sacredness relating to and
expressed within the material, social and cultural
revolution of our time.
 It is that men and women and their strivings are
truly saved and made human, and become
sacrament and foretaste of the ultimate
salvation freely offered by God in Christ to all.

11.  The Mission of the church is to participate in
the movements of human liberation in our
times in such a way as to witness to Jesus
Christ as the Source, the Judge and the
Redeemer of the human spirituality and its
orientation which are at work in these
movements and therefore as the Saviour of
humankind today.

12.  Christian faith begins with human experience
intelligible and the theology reflection upon
human perception of that work of God’s
grace.
 The Redeemer assumes believers into the
power of His God-consciousness and this is
His redemptive activity.

13. KARL BARTH
 Barth’s argument follows from the idea that
God is the object of God’s own self-
knowledge, and revelation in the Bible
means the self-unveiling to humanity of the
God who cannot be discovered by humanity
simply through its own efforts.
 “Jesus does not give recipes that show the
way to God as other teachers of religion do.
He is himself the way."

14. BARTH 2
 “There is a notion that complete impartiality is the
most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true
exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence
of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea
threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in
Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly
describe it as merely comical. ” (Church Dogmatics
1:2, 469)
 "The center is not something which is under our
control, but something that controls us. ” (Church
Dogmatics)

15. BARTH
 ‘God so loved’—not the Christian, but—‘the world’.
‘I am the light of the world’, says the Lord, and by His
own self-giving He passes the light on to His
disciples: ‘Ye are the light of the world!’ It is the duty
of the real Church to tell and show the world what it
does not yet know. This does not mean that the real
Church’s mission is to take the whole or even half the
world to task. It would be the servant of quite a
different Master if it were to set itself up as the
accuser of its brethren.
—Karl Barth, “The Real Church,” Against the Stream:
Shorter Post-War Writings 1946-52 (London: SCM
Press, 1954), 73.

16. KARL BARTH AND MISSION
 Its mission is not to say ‘No’, but to say ‘Yes’; a strong ‘Yes’ to the
God who, because there are ‘godless’ men, has not thought and
does not think of becoming a ‘manless’ God—and a strong ‘Yes’
to man, for whom, with no exception, Jesus Christ died and rose
again. How extraordinary the Church’s preaching, teaching,
ministry, theology, political guardianship and missions would be,
how it would convict itself of unbelief in what it says, if it did not
proclaim to all men that God is not against man but for man. It
need not concern itself with the ‘No’ that must be said to human
presumption and human sloth. This ‘No’ will be quite audible
enough when as the real Church it concerns itself with the
washing of feet and nothing else. This is the obedience which it
owes to its Lord in this world.

17. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
 For Bonhoeffer, the mission discourse in
Matthew became a powerful text describing
costly discipleship and the confessing
church's s mission as the National Socialist
Party (Nazis) increased its influence and
control over most Germans. Matthew 10
spoke of a risk-taking discipleship at a time
when most Christians, including pastors,
were unwilling to challenge the current
situation.

18. BONHOEFFER
 All people go to God in need
For help and calm and food they plead
That sickness, guilt and death may cease,
All Christians and Pagans, pray for peace.
 But some turn to God in God's need and dread,
A God poor, despised without roof or bread.
By sin's harm weakened and by death distressed,
Christians stand steadfast by their God oppressed.
 God goes to all in their need and dread,
Their souls' loving grace and their bodies' bread.
By the crucified Lord who for them was slain
Both Christians and pagan God's pardon gain.12

19. THE CHURCH FOR OTHERS
 The church is the church only when it exists
for others. To make a start it should give
away all its property to those in need. The
church must share in the secular problems of
ordinary human life, not dominating, but
helping and serving. It must tell of every
calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist
for others.

20. CALVIN AND GOD
 God
 Calvin said that there could be no knowledge of self without knowledge
of God. All men have a natural awareness of divinity, which is both
planted in their minds and made evident through creation. However,
man has suppressed or corrupted this knowledge, and confused the
creation with the Creator. It is only when men contemplate the greatness
of God that they can come to realize their own inadequacy. God is
providentially in control of all things that come to pass, including evil
things, but this does not make him the author of evil.
 [Man
 Man is created in the image of God. This image has been marred by the
Fall, though not destroyed. Before the Fall, man's will was truly free;
however, now it is corrupt and enslaved to sin. Man is totally unable to
seek or choose God unless God chooses him first.

21. CALVIN...
 [Jesus Christ
 The person of Christ, the God-man, provides the solution to this
moral dilemma. Christ is the only possible bridge between God
and men. In the Incarnation, God and man were joined
inseparably in one person, yet not in such a way that the divine
and human were confused. The relationship between Christ's
human and divine natures is paradigmatic for Calvin's theology
whenever the divine touches upon the human.
 Calvin was the first person to describe the work of Christ in terms
of the threefold offices of prophet, priest, and king. As prophet,
Christ's teachings are proclaimed by the apostles for the purpose
of our salvation. As priest, Christ's sacrifice of himself and his
mediation before the Father secures the salvation of men. As
king, Christ rules the Church spiritually in the hearts of its
members.

22. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH
 Justification by faith is the material principle of
the Reformation. It is based upon the mercy of
God, not the merits of humanity. Although the
doctrines of election and predestination are
linked with Calvin's name, the doctrine of
election actually plays a relatively minor part of
Calvin's theology. As a second-generation
Reformer, his primary concern was with the
government and organization of the church
rather than theology. Nonetheless, Calvin
believed in unconditional election.

23. JURGAN MOLTMAN
 Moltmann presents Christian eschatology as an
active doctrine of hope in order to give hope for
an alternative future to the oppressed and
suffering of our present time. This hope for him
acts as the motivating force behind liberation in
the world. In re-examining the sources of
eschatological thought, Moltmann finds that
Christian eschatology looks toward the
revolutionizing and transformation of the
present.

24.  This is why for him "[t]he theologian is not
concerned merely to supply a different
interpretation of the world, of history and of
human nature, but to transform them in
expectation of a divine transformation"(84).
Therefore, for Moltmann history is the reality
instituted by the promise of God in God’s
presence and experienced by human beings
as the moving horizon of promise in
anticipation.

25.  In the context of a theologia crucis Moltmann
develops the thesis that real Christianity
must hold on to both ends of the various
alternatives that are often presented for an
understanding of Christianity—evangelization
and humanization, the "vertical dimension" of
faith and the "horizontal dimension" of love of
neighbor, the humanity and the divinity of
Jesus.

26. INCARNATIONAL MISSION
 Incarnational mission can be seen as (1)
following Jesus as the pattern for mission, (2)
participating in Christ's risen presence as the
power for mission, and (3) joining God's
cosmic mission of enfleshment in which
God's self-embodying dynamic is evident
from the beginning of creation.