Prompt: freedom, Art by Makoto Shinkai

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Among the numerous themes for public discourse, I find the concept of liberation or freedom the most important. This is not only given the threat of the increasing power of the State and its bureaucratic apparatus, but it is also because people are either unaware of its real character and potential for empowerment.

Reading Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, 2000), we observe how the concepts of mission evolve throughout history. Combining his insights with those of Charles Brock (The Principles and Practice of Indigenous Church, 1980) and David Chilton (Paradise Restored, 1985), we will come up with at least six important concepts in doing mission: humanization, development, liberation, revolution, contextualization, and reconstruction.

Missiological Insights from Christian Higher Education

Teaching Foundations of Christian Education for quite some time, I find it interesting that we can observe similar concepts in Christian Higher Education. Nicholas Wolterstorff for instance, in one of his essays (Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education, 2004), mentioned the existence of five models in Christian education at the tertiary level. One of these models, the Christian humanist model made freedom or liberation its dominant concept.

Relying on the insight of Michael Oakeshott, Wolterstorff agrees that liberation is the way to achieve humanization where he defines becoming human as an inhabitant “of a world composed . . . of meanings . . .” (p. 12). Based on this perspective, once an individual understands this, that’s how he attains liberation from his particularity and is initiated “into a more universal human consciousness” (p. 15). Trusting Oakwshott, Wolterstorff continues that part of this liberation is to interpret “our cultural heritage . . . as religious beings . . . as beings of diverse religions” (ibid.).

At this point, Wolterstorff claims that William Harry Jellema upholds this last component in Oakwshott’s concept of liberation. For Jellema, education ultimately is “both a manifestation of the life of some religious kingdom and an initiation in that life” (p. 17). The initiation in that life means initiation “into the Christian mind” (p. 18).

Wolterstorff concludes based on the foregoing consideration that the purpose of Christian education at the tertiary level is therefore “to initiate students into the cultural heritage of humanity from a Christian perspective, thus freeing them from their parochialism and partiality” (ibid.).

The above view of liberation from the perspective of Christian higher education is different from the concept of liberation in doing a mission. We find here an example of using a similar term with different connotations due to divergence in context.

Nevertheless, in terms of issues for public discourse, I observe that Wolterstorff's primary critique of all models of education including the Christian humanist model very relevant. Based on his analysis, we can find the key shortcoming of all the proposed models of education in terms of dealing adequately “with the wounds of humanity” (p. 22), especially the moral wounds.

Bosch’s Concepts of Comprehensive Salvation

In Toward Comprehensive Salvation, Bosch mentioned some insights that I think would greatly contribute to public discourse. In his view of comprehensive salvation, he recognized that the challenges we are facing today require a new kind of response. See how Bosch introduced his idea of comprehensive salvation as the purpose of the mission:

It, therefore, makes sense that in missionary circles today, but elsewhere as well, the mediating of ‘comprehensive’, ‘integral’, ‘total’, or ‘universal’ salvation is increasingly identified as the purpose of the mission, in this way overcoming the inherent dualism in the traditional and more recent models. . . Missionary literature, but also missionary practice, emphasizes that we should find a way beyond every schizophrenic position and minister to people in their total need, that we should involve individual as well as society, soul and body, present and future in our ministry of salvation (p. 399).

I like the phrase "total need". I am not sure if the writer is epistemologically aware of the implication of such a phrase in the world of economics, finance, and technology. One of the pressing needs today that the Austrian economists have been arguing for decades is the need for a "sound" or an "honest" monetary system. Digesting the three sections in Bosch’s book, it appears to me that the problem of poverty plays a vital role in his thinking about the mission of the church. However, I am not sure if both his analysis of the root cause of poverty and the alternative he is proposing are accurate.

Being involved for close to two years now in the financial technology sector, I find some analysts there that though their interpretation of the current problem that concerns the global economy and finance is not as exhaustive as what the theologians and missiologists do in terms of ideological foundation, their conclusion as to the source of the problem, and their proposed alternative made more sense than what Bosch seems to offer.

In this article, I just covered the first two prospective precedents for public engagement coming from Christian Higher Education and from David J. Bosch’s concept of comprehensive salvation. In the next post, we will continue what we started here and we will take a more detailed look at other prospective precedents beginning with the concept of mission as development.

Grace and peace!

References:

Bosch, David J. 2000. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. New York: Orbis Books.

Brock, Charles. 1980. The Principles and Practice of Indigenous Church Planting. Manila: Southern Baptist Mission.

Chilton, David. 1985. Paradise Restored. Texas: Dominion Press.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2004. Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education. Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U. K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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