Insider Jesus by Dyrness William A.;

Author:Dyrness, William A.; [Dyrness, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830873166
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Religion and the Mission of Christ

In the attempt to propose a theological framework for understanding the newer forms of insider and emergent mission, I have sought in earlier chapters to make two fundamental points. First, in chapter two I emphasized that creation and renewal represent God’s primary and ongoing work and that the formation of culture and religion is always to be seen, in part, as a human response to this work and this presence. Second, because of this, although culture and religion are human work, God has a continuing stake in both, and in them, as Scripture says, God is not left without a witness—in and through them God seeks to work out the renewal of all things. The third chapter developed this second claim by reviewing the way religion is portrayed in the biblical narrative and showing that, because religion reflects the human longing and search for God, God’s attitude toward religion changed to reflect not only God’s ongoing re-creative work but the changing historical situations of this human response. All through Scripture and human history, God is not indifferent to the cry of the human heart, whatever the circumstances surrounding that cry. The previous chapter of case studies in various ways confirmed both the renewing presence of God in these other faiths and, at the same time, the centrality of the work of Christ in transforming communities and cultures.

In this chapter we turn more directly to ask how, in the light of Christ’s command to make disciples of all the peoples, followers of Christ are to understand and engage the variety of religions and the obvious working of God’s Spirit in these places. This will involve in large part seeking to clarify what religion is and how it functions in people’s lives. To do this we return to the disparity between Western and non-Western views of religion and illustrate this difference by comparing Christian and Muslim notions of worship. Finally, we will want to ask, in the light of these intractable differences, how mission may be reconceived to better relate and promote God’s transforming work.

As we have seen, in his address on Mars Hill Paul stressed that God had allotted to each people group times and spaces, “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:27). Religion, then, in its basic sense represents the practices associated with the human search for God, and the times and spaces they employ in this search. I have called these particular places and times hermeneutical spaces, and I want to develop this notion in more detail in this chapter. I find it telling that Paul should underline that God allotted to people places and times because this puts forward an essential dimension of all religions. That is, they grow out of and express the texture and feel of places people call home. This was evident in all the case studies we reviewed in the last chapter.

One of the problems associated with recent

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