John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

Mission has never had a place in systematic theology. This is exceedingly strange, since theology is born of the missionary encounter: re-read Romans with an eye to how St. Paul develops the doctrine of justification by faith precisely because of the surprising inclusion of Gentiles in the apostolic mission and you’ll see just how strange the omission has been. And that has had severe material consequences for mission and theology alike.

In the former case, the great push for missions starting in the 19th century, especially among Protestants (Catholics got to work on world mission already in the 16th century), became all too closely aligned with the imperial projects of their respective nations. Mission itself got discredited as colonialist propaganda, a tag that remains attached to it even today long after official colonial programs have ended. Theology, for its part, forgot why after all the Father sent the Son and the Spirit, why the Son and the Spirit sent the apostles, why the church exists at all—for the sake of the world, not for the sake of its own navel-gazing self.

In The Witness of God, John G. Flett uncovers exactly this dangerous cleavage between church and mission. Though there is reference back to seminal decisions in the doctrine of the Trinity in the early church fathers, most of the drama takes place in the early twentieth century, amidst a complex of movements: the first waves of serious anti-colonialist critique; the competing mission visions of the Anglo-American world and the German-speaking world; the evolution of ecumenical construals of Christian doctrine. The tale is little known outside this specialized field, but needs to be better known—especially among American Lutherans who fall squarely in both the Anglo-American and German (read: “Lutheran”) worlds of mission thought.

The former model of the Anglo-American stripe is more instantly recognizable for its dangers to those of us who know American culture all too well. The goal of mission in this view is to reproduce the church as we know it elsewhere. America (or Western civ generally) already possesses all the ideals of a Christian-informed culture, in our forms of government, social arrangements, philosophical and existential outlooks like individualism and self-improvement, and even the arts. Mission is bringing the rest of the world up to speed on our progress, which is self-evidently the outcome of our Christian faith. It’s rare to hear anyone within our church circles argue this outright anymore, though you can often detect it on a muted level lurking there still (the discomfort with differing ethical views comes to mind).

The German “Lutheran” (I put that in quotes because of the equivocal sense of the word Lutheran: it can mean either “deriving from the theology of Martin Luther” or “deriving from the historical tradition that claims affinity to Martin Luther,” and it seems to me in this case that the latter is a better definition than the former) mission theorists were rightly uncomfortable with this construal. But if ever there was a case of out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire, this is it. The Germans proposed that every culture had to receive the gospel into itself, rather than something external being superimposed or simply eradicating what was already there. So far so good. But they took this practical insight and made it metaphysical. Culture is a free-standing entity, an essential reality into which the gospel fits, rather than the other way around, the interim space between God and humanity. A missionary should strategically seek out the analogous bits and show how the gospel lines up; or should find the deep desires of the society and prove that the gospel provides. The notion that the gospel might challenge the culture, or analyze the human problem differently, or offer a solution not previously sought, is to be quietly ignored. The transition to Christianity is to be so smooth that perhaps the people won’t even realize what’s happening. The focus is then on the skill of the missionary in locating these openings (not, for instance, the transformative power of the Word moving hearts with the Spirit). To use a more recent turn of phrase, context is everything. Practically, this meant a particular attention to the Volkstum—the culture of the people in their ethnic and linguistic bonds—and you can see where that’s going. It made preservation of culture the highest good, and anything interfering with that culture an evil; and this was exactly the logic employed in Germany’s National Socialism. The historical records shows that in fact there was an affinity between these mission theorists and the Nazi party. This cautionary tale warns against too eager an embrace of context without due attention to the actual message of the gospel; the danger is as great as with the colonial-imperialist approaches to mission.

This analysis alone makes Flett’s book well worth the read for American Lutherans. Its setting in the larger struggle of the ecumenical community to find a way of talking about mission is instructive as well. Early in the 20th century it was realized that mission had to be grounded in the missionary nature of God Himself, not the foreign policy of various nations. But filling in what exactly that missionary nature is, and how it corresponds to the Trinity, has been the difficulty. Flett traces out several abortive attempts to give content to missio Dei, and in the second half of the book lays out Karl Barth’s trinitarian account of mission. While Barth operates on certain assumptions that won’t sit entirely easy with Lutherans—the collapse of atonement and justification into the single act of Christ, and the concommitant rejection of the sacraments as Luther understood them—the analysis is nonetheless studded with so many insights into the compromised state of the church in the West that it’s well worth following Flett and Barth through to the end. The deep sickness that many of us intuit in Western Christianity is deeply connected with the loss of the missionary essence of the church.

Above all it becomes clear that a church—whether a congregation, an institution, or the whole body of believers—that no longer can or desires to proclaim the good news to the nations has ceased to be the church in any meaningful sense. Church and mission are not separate entities and acts: they are one. How badly our churches today need to retrieve this long-lost truth.