Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern WorldRichard Bauckham
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Carlisle, Grand Rapids: Paternoster Press, Baker Book House2003Andrew Perriman
 review:

This is a straightforward synopsis of Richard Bauckham’s Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World. The book has some good ideas that might be worth exploring further. It understands the problem of universalism and offers a number of perspectives on the nature of the biblical narrative and Christian witness that may help in the development of a constructive response to postmodernism.

A hermeneutic for the kingdom of God

This is a short, focused book, originally
presented as a series of lectures in Cambridge and Ethiopia. It starts with
September 11 and an article in The Times by the Chief
Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, addressing the problem of ‘cultural
universalism’. Sacks’ argument is that September 11 represented the collision
of two universalist cultures, two militant metanarratives: Islam and global
capitalism. His solution to the problem is an essentially postmodern call to
respect diversity, especially religious diversity: ‘God no more wants all
faiths and cultures to be the same than a loving parent wants his or her children
to be the same’ (7).

Bauckham then asks where Christianity
stands in all this. Rather than making God universal and religion particular as
Sacks does, he argues that God is both universal and particular:
‘We do not find God by abstracting God from the particularities of God’s
history with Israel’ (10).

This is central to the structure of
Christian faith. The Bible itself ‘embodies a kind of movement from the
particular to the universal’; mission is always a journey from the particular
to the universal. Bauckham sketches a narrative hermeneutic that recognizes the
force of this dynamic on three levels: i) a temporal movement from
creation to the eschatological future; ii) a spatial movement from a
particular place to the ends of the earth; and iii) a social movement
from the one to the many. In the realistic, historical narratives of scripture
this pattern is always incomplete and recurrent; the expectation of fulfilment,
however, is expressed through a ‘rich variety of narrative metaphors and
images’ (16).

The language of the New Testament ‘strongly
suggests that this universal goal has been almost or even already achieved at
the time of writing’ – Bauckham has in mind, for example, the parousia
expectation. This ‘hyperbole’, however, with its ‘anticipated closure of
history’, is offset by a ‘permanent narrative openness’: the abrupt termination
of the book of Acts is read as an example of how the story of mission is left
 open-ended.

From the one to the many

Chapter two examines the movement from the
particular to the universal in relation to four biblical narrative
trajectories, the first three of which begin with a singular choice: Abraham,
Israel, David.

The trajectory that moves from
Abraham to all the families of the earth is the trajectory of blessing. The
trajectory that moves from Israel to all the nations is the trajectory of God’s
revelation of himself to the world. The trajectory that moves from God’s
enthronement of David in Zion to the ends of the earth is the trajectory of
rule, of God’s kingdom coming in all creation. (27)

The fourth trajectory begins with God
choosing not an individual but ‘the least’: the poor, the powerless, the weak,
the marginalized. The central paradigm for this trajectory is, of course, the
 cross.

The claim that God
is to be encountered and salvation found in a crucified man – a man stripped of
all status and honour, dehumanized, the lowest of the low – is the offence of
the cross. This is the real scandal of particularity – not just that God’s
universal purpose pivots on one particular human being (though that was
stumbling-block enough for the philosophically educated in Paul’s day and the
Enlightenment rationalists of our own), but, much worse, that God’s universal
purpose pivots on this particular human being, the crucified one. (52)

This trajectory also has social and ethical
implications: ‘The gospel does not come to each person only in terms of some
abstracted generality of human nature, but in the realities and differences of
their social and economic situations’ (53).

Geography – sacred and symbolic

In chapter three Bauckham argues for the
idea of a ‘representative geography’ as a means of reading the universalism of
Old Testament prophecy correctly (63). The nations mentioned in the Old
Testament have their own particularity, but as such they also stand for all
peoples at all times. So when Isaiah speaks of an eschatological ‘mission’ to
Tarshish, Put, Lud, Meshech, Tubal, Javan and the coastlands, these places are
representative, Bauckham suggests, of the scope of the early Christian mission
to the Mediterranean, which in turn is representative of the whole world.

Roughly speaking, the Old Testament has a
centripetal view of mission (the nations are drawn to Zion) whereas the New
Testament model is essentially centrifugal (the disciples are sent out into the
world). There are, however, exceptions: Isaiah 66:19 speaks of ‘survivors’
being sent out to the nations; Jesus’ image of a city set on a hill in Matthew
5:14 echoes Old Testament ideas. Both movements presuppose the geographical
centrality of Jerusalem (75). But the ‘new Temple’ is the church, and as the
church spread throughout the world, the distinction between centre and
periphery, between centripetal and centrifugal movement, has become less
relevant. Bauckham suggests that ‘witness’ as a missiological paradigm transcends
both these aspects – an argument that is developed in the final chapter. In
this case, the more appropriate geographical image may be that of diaspora:

It may be that this image will come
into its own again as the church in the postmodern west reconceptualizes its
missionary relationship to a post-Christian society. The church in the west may
have to get used to the idea that its own centre in God, from which it goes out
to others in proclamation and compassion, is actually a position of social and
cultural exile or marginality. This may improve its witness to the Christ who
was himself so often found at the margins.

Witness to the truth in a postmodern and globalized world

In chapter four Bauckham develops the idea
of ‘witness’ as a paradigm for mission in a postmodern and globalized world. He
recognizes the force of the postmodern critique of metanarratives:

Is not the narrative movement of
the Bible from particularity to universality, which has been the main theme of
this book, a kind of narrative imperialism or ecclesiastical globalization, a
form of self-aggrandizement on the church’s part, by which the church
universalizes its own story, foists it on others, subjects others to it,
suppresses their own stories and deprives them of the opportunity to write
their own stories? (89)

His response is to suggest that there is an
important respect in which the biblical story is not like the modern totalizing
metanarratives that are the target of postmodernist deconstruction. The
biblical story is not one of ‘human mastery’; space must be allowed for human
freedom; history becomes comprehensible only to the extent that God reveals and
fulfils his purposes. ‘The biblical story certainly does, in an important
sense, disclose the meaning of the whole, but not in such a way as to make
history transparent to its divinely intended purpose’ (91). In effect, the
argument is that it is God who deconstructs any tendency that we may have to
make of mission a modern totalizing project: ‘In many ways… mission is not the
imposing of predetermined patterns on to history, but openness to the
incalculable ways of God in history’ (92).

Bauckham also points out that the Bible
does not have a ‘carefully plotted single story-line’; it is a ‘sprawling
collection of narratives along with much non-narrative material that stands in
a variety of relationships to the narratives’. There is no definitive,
summarizing narrative; the Bible ‘resists closure’. The high degree of
complexity and fragmentation in the biblical narrative makes it difficult to
suppress the particular ‘for the sake of a too readily comprehensible
universal’ (93).

However, when it comes to the question of
the truth of the biblical metanarrative Bauckham believes that
Christians must simply contest the postmodern ‘preference for diversity over
truth’. In the openness of history claims to truth must remain debatable, but,
paradoxically, it is those who are committed to truth claims who can be
genuinely open to dialogue. The form of assertion most appropriate to the
nature of Christian truth is ‘witness’ – ‘an extremely valuable image with
which to meet the postmodern suspicion of all metanarratives as oppressive’
(99). Witnesses ‘mediate the particularity of the biblical story and the
universality of its claim’.

Witness is understood essentially as a
telling of the biblical story or stories, rather than as a recounting of
personal experience. It is these narratives that convey the ‘qualitative
difference’ of the Christian understanding of God, that subvert the will to
power, and call into question the globalizing metanarratives of political and
cultural imperialism. ‘What Jesus projects is a counter-metanarrative…, a
narrative not of coercive power but of witness’ (107).