What is wrong with mission?
What is new about our era, it seems to me, is that the Christian mission - at least as it has traditionally been interpreted and performed - is under attack not only from without but also from within its own ranks... The crisis we are referring to is, naturally, not only a crisis in regard to mission. It affects the entire church, indeed the whole world. (p2-3)
Something is clearly wrong with the state of mission; mission as we know it is in a state of flux and transformation. Calling it a "crisis" may seem, from the point of view of traditional missions, to be overstating the case - "crisis? what crisis?" But the world is changing quickly and mission, basically, has failed to keep up. Bosch highlights six areas which are not so much what is wrong with mission by factors in society which have contributed to its crisis:
- Secularisation and modernisation means that people have no "need" for faith
- The West has been deChristianized
- Religions have gone global, and the West is a mission field for missionaries of all faiths, including Christianity
- The Western church has a shameful history of what it has done in the name of mission
- The rich-poor divide is increasing
- The rise of contextual theologies mean that Western churches are finding it harder to "dictate" practices to the mission churches they plant.
Bosch argues that the time is ripe for a full-on rethinking of mission to meet the needs of a postmodern world, and argues in Part 2 of TM that such a "paradigm shift" in mission thinking is not a new thing, but has happened several times in the past two thousand years.
If you're going to rethink mission, you have to start with some big questions, and this is how TM begins...
What is mission?
In the field of missiology, it doesn't get much bigger than this one. The major part of the book - which we're not going to summarise - examines the various styles of missionary endeavour throughout the ages and the understandings and theologies behind them. What is this thing called mission that ties them all together?
Bosch deals with his presuppositions and his definition in pages 8-11; as well as being his starting points, these are his conclusions, and can be seen as his own summary of the book:
- "The Christian faith is intrinsically missionary." Christianity without mission has no purpose.
- "Missiology... seek to look at the world from the perspective of commitment to the Christian faith." We are critical, yes, but we are not neutral.
- "Ultimately mission remains undefinable." Newbiggin says that if mission is everything, then mission is nothing; Bosch disagrees. A definition of mission is always going to be too narrrow, and miss out some important aspect. So we have to learn to operate without definitions.
- "Christian mission gives expression to the dynamic relationship between God and the world." That is, it is grounded in the story and stories of God's self-revelation.
- "The Bible is not a storehouse of truths on which we can draw at random." In particular, it does not tell us how to do mission today. The Bible is not a missionary manual. It tells us something of how God does mission throughout history, and how the Early Church did mission in its context. Even then, it tells stories rather than giving principles; it relates successes and failures without necessarily telling us which is which. And our context is different to theirs and so we must remain tentative about how we apply its principles.
- "The church on earth is by its very nature missionary." (Vatican II, Ad Gentes) The Gospel is universal, and our existence must carry the same universality.
- "The difference between home and foreign missions is not one of principle but of scope" - the same theological underpinnings apply to both.
- "We have to distinguish between mission (singular) and missions (plural)." "Mission", the missio dei, is what God is doing in Christ to reconcile the world to himself. "Missions" are what we do to respond to that.
- "The missionary task is as coherent, broad and deep as the need and exigencies of human life." Or, as Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia puts it, "if salvation is to be salvation, it must reach the point of human need." We cannot distinguish between spiritual and material salvation.
- "Mission includes evangelism as one of its essential dimensions." Evangelism is defined by Bosch in terms of an invitation to join a community and a life of service.
- "Mission is also God's 'no' to the world." The church is not a worldly entity. As well as being involved in the issues of human need, we are not continuous with them; the church can never become just another political or social entity, even when it is doing political or social things.
- "The church-in-mission... may be described as a sacrament and a sign." That is, it points to salvation, but it is not salvation; it mediates salvation, but it is not salvation. More on this later.
Why do mission?
The obvious answer, picked up by Warneck and other missiologists is, of course, "because God told us to". But using Warneck, Verkuyl and others, Bosch identifies several more beliefs that people have about why we do mission - some good, some not so good. See how many you can identify with!
- The absoluteness and superiority of the Christian religion
- The acceptability and adaptability of Christianity to all peoples and conditions
- The superior achievements of the Christian mission on the "mission fields"
- The fact that Christianity has... shown itself to be stronger than all other religions.
Bosch points out that the last two are a circular argument - we keep doing mission because we're good at doing mission; the fact that we're successful then proves that we should be doing it! How about a few more...
- The imperialist motive - turning natives into docile subjects of colonial authorities
- The cultural motive - mission as the transfer of the missionary's "superior" culture
- The romantic motive - the desire to go to far-away and exotic countries and peoples
- The motive of ecclesiastical colonialism - the urge to export one's own confession and church order to other territories
Those are obviously the bad ones, but even the following "good" motives have some particular pitfalls; please chew on these ones very thoroughly because they're going to form the basis of much of the "creative tensions" that Bosch is going to build his new model around.
- The motive of conversion, which emphasizes the value of personal decision and commitment - but tends to narrow the reign of God spiritualistically and individualistically to the sum total of saved souls.
- The eschatological motive, which fixes people's eyes on the reign of God as a future reality but, in its eagerness to hasten the irruption of that final reign, has no interest in the exigencies of this life
- The motive of church planting, which stresses the need for a gathering of a community of the committed but is inclined to identify the church with the kingdom of God
- The philanthropic motive, through which the church is challenged to seek justice in the world but which easily equates God's reign with an improved society.
We all know of missions and theologies which swing too far in one of these directions. Bosch's main thesis is going to be that missiology - and, in fact - the whole Christian faith, is broad enough for all of thse categories to fit together. While previous missionary activity was all about purely getting souls saved, or purely planting churches which were replicas of our own churches back home, now we have the opportunity to rethink mission, we should be trying to come up with a view of mission that has all the elements: conversion, God's reign, the community of the faithful and social justice.
Mission in Paul
Paul's Apocalyptic (pp139-154)
It is therefore impossible to select one single element as the fundamental motif of Paul's theology. There are, rather, several important motifs, all of which are interrelated. To mention only some of those which are associated with his understanding of his mission: his interpretation of the Law, of justification by faith, of the interdependence of a mission to Jews and Gentiles, of the absolute priority of the Gentile mission for the present moment, of the universal, indeed cosmic, significance of the gospel, of the incontestable centrality of Christ and the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection, and of the relevance of his mission in paving hte way for God's coming triumph. I shall begin with this last-mentioned motif, with the qualification, however, that the other motifs have to be presupposed throughout. (p139)
When we talk about apocalyptic here, we should take care not to confuse the term with "eschatological". We're not talking about the last days; we're talking about God decisively acting in human history. So as we must take care not to boil down Paul to a single idea - justification by faith, say - we must take care not to boil down his apocalyptic to the end times. We're talking about how Paul is ushering in a new work of God, and we'll introduce this work in a few moments. But first, where's this all coming from?
In an essay published in 1959, Wilckens suggested that Paul (or Saul) before his conversion was not to regarded as a typical orthodox rabbinic Pharisee (as countless generations of Christians have portrayed him). Rather, Saul (a Pharisee!) stood in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition from Daniel onward, a tradition which decisively influenced the theology of Paul the Christian; we shall never understand Paul until this is fully recognised. (p.140)
Remember what's just been happening to the Jewish people: the last few prophecies they had spoke of a new era of God's work on earth, and then it all went silent for a few hundred years. During this time they were under a new occupation and looking to Messianic figures to bring about God's reign. Suddenly, prophecy starts up again, the Messiah comes - God is on the move!
Enlightenment mission
We'll now skip to chapter 9, "Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment"; this is the pattern of mission that we grew up with and is still prevalent in many areas. This is where we draw the most lessons from.
Mission and the Missio Dei
In the emerging ecclesiology, the church is seen as essentially missionary... the church is not the sender but the one sent. (p372)
For Bosch, the church is essentially missionary. That doesn't mean that the church has missionaries, or that the church has people who are essentially missionary; the church is missionary. If you like, the church, the whole global entity, is a missionary. It is the whole church that is sent into the world to "do mission".
It has become impossible to talk about the church without at the same time talking about mission... These perspectives have implications for our understanding of the church's catholicity. (p372)
Mission isn't just the nature of the church - what it is - but it is the purpose of the church - what it's for. A church that isn't doing mission simply isn't a church. From this, we can see that if the Church is not working together and doing mission corporately, it isn't the Church.
Newbigin has introduced the helpful distinction between the church's missionary dimension and its missionary intention. (p373)
OK, so the church is missionary. But how - what does this mean? It doesn't mean that the church is always "doing mission" in the sense that we, as "professional missionaries", "do mission". The mission of the church is as much to be a worshipping community, supporting and upholding the local believers, as it is to go out and transform the society outside the church walls. One leads directly into the other; "being church" and "doing church" are two sides of the same coin.
Under the overarching rubric of soteriology, Barth develops his ecclesiology in three phases. (p373)
Soteriology is how we get saved and what that means; ecclesiology is how we do church and what that means. For Karl Barth, you can't have one without the other. In Church Dogmatics, Barth alternates between talking about how you get saved, and then how you work out your salvation in the church context:
| Aspect of salvation | Implications for church |
|---|---|
| Salvation is justification - we are made righteous in God's sight. | The church is the righteous people of God gathered together to worship Him. |
| Salvation is also sanctification - we're made more like Jesus. | The church exists to build each other up and help each other become more like Jesus. |
| Salvation is also vocation - we're given a purpose. | The church is sent out to achieve the purposes of God in society. |
The church is viewed as the people of God and by implication then, as a pilgrim church... in fact, the church as the people of God may be viewed as the conciliar church model.
By "conciliar", Bosch means "when the Catholic church talked about stuff", and particularly Vatican II. So Yves Congar had this idea inside Roman Catholicism about the church being the people of God, and people ignored him until Vatican II or so, when suddenly it seemed like a very good idea. This idea of the wandering people of God, taken from Hebrews and obviously most of the OT, makes a lot more sense now in post-Christendom, when there aren't Christian countries to speak of; the Church is once more "strangers and outcasts in the world", which is the way it was meant to be all along. The Church has rediscovered the fact that it is foreign, uncomfortable, and fighting against society instead of beating society into submission.
Also the Church has rediscovered that we're all just passing through this world, and that we don't belong here. When the Church gets too established, we forget this and get complacent. Now the Church is realising that we've been put here just for a while to get some work done as we head on towards the destination.
Other NT images of the church which represent the same idea are salt, light, yeast, servant and prophet. In subsequent centuries, however, these notions disappeared almost without a trace. Only in our own time did they surface again and give birth to the idea of the church as sacrament, sign and instrument. (p374)
Bosch is looking at the idea of priesthood in the church; that the Church - again, the whole corporate entity, is a priest. The Catholics obviously had fun with that one, but they see the Church as the sign that God is in communion with humanity.
The Church is also the means of salvation; if the Church is the community of God building up the Kingdom of God, then to be saved means to be part of the community of God building up the Kingdom of God - that is, to be saved means to be part of the Church, not the other way around. The Protestants obviously had fun with that one.
West and Sundermeier have, however, alerted us to the fact that such enthusiasm for the Bonhoeffer formula may hide from us the reality that its background is the typical liberal-humanist bourgeois climate in which Bonhoeffer had grown up, particularly the idea that Western Christians know what is best for others and, hence, that they tend to proclaim themselves the guardians of others. (p375)
The "Bonhoeffer formula" is "The church is only the church when it exists for others." It's a cute saying, but there's a problem here; how do you be the "church for others" without becoming colonialist again? Bosch talks about the "church with others instead", drawing alongside them and helping them in the ways that they want, not the ways we think they ought to want.
Sundermeier's observations show that the language of "the church for others", "the church as sacrament", etc., is indeed not free from hazard. (p375)
Of course, it hard to state anything definitive about the church because (a) you tend to talk about the church as it should be or as you want it to be and not as it actually is, (b) talking about the church is generally metaphor and metaphors are imperfect, and (c) there are always exceptions. So people get upset about "the church for others" because it could lead to colonialism; people get upset about "the church as sacrament" because we're not actually all communicating and working together as we should be; people get upset at "the church as sign" because the only sign of the church is the Cross.
Basically, you can't please some people.
Words like "sacrament" are, moreover, not attributes that the church arrogates to itself... Its members are not proclaiming "Come to us!" but "Let us follow him!" (p376)
We want to say that the church is a sign that God is communicating with us, and that it is a sacrament that demonstrates the unity of humankind, and that it is an instrument through which God brings His grace into the world. Unfortunately, the church as it really is right now is so broken that it sounds not only arrogant but unrealistic to say these things. How do we get out of this?
First, we have to remember that we're not saying this about the church; it's God saying it. God has chosen the church, with all its faults and weaknesses to be the instrument of salvation and the sign of communion and all that. We just need to hear what God is saying about us. Second, the church is only these things not by its own merit but because it is the bride of Christ; it is Jesus that makes the church holy, not we ourselves. The church is not a substitute for Christ. It is only the presence of Christ in the church which makes the church into the church. Also we need to remember that the church is not the totality of the things we are claiming: yes, the church is a sign of the love of God - but it is not the whole of the love of God.
However, we still have a big problem - if we, with all these qualifications, can still say that we are the expression of God's love to the world, then the world has a damned good right to ask us why we're not behaving like an expression of love to it. Descriptions of the church like this might make us feel good, but they have to make a difference to the rest of the world as well.
Reading the theological treatises from earlier centuries, one gets the impression that there was only church, no world. Put differently, the church was a world on its own. Outside the world, there was only the "false church". Christian ministry and life was defined exclusively in terms of preaching, public worship, the pastorate and charity. (p.376)
Somewhere along the line, we lost the way; we thought the church was an end in itself, and our job was to make the church bigger so we have a bigger church. Bosch sees the church only in relation to the world for which it was sent. The Roman Catholic church came around to this way of thinking with Vatican II, which talked a lot about the church sharing the joys and sorrows of the world at large.
Second, the church is not the kingdom of God. Yes, the church must display and model the characteristics of the kingdom of God, but the role of the church is to transform the world into the kingdom of God. When this transformation occurs, it'll happen, by definition, outside the church!
Third, the church must be political, not just bringing people into the church "as a waiting room for the hereafter"; we have to liberating people from their social, economic and political problems as well as tell them the Good News.
Also, because the Spirit is the go-between between God and the world, if the church is the dwelling-place of the Spirit, it must also be God's messenger to the world.
Finally, anything that takes the church out of involvement with the world is heretical, for these reasons. The church must work to the world's salvation; that is what it's for. And it must do it with joy!
Mission as the Missio Dei
During the past half a century or so there has been a subtle but nevertheless decisive shift toward understanding mission as God's mission. (p389)
| Event | Group emphasizing it | Implications |
|---|---|---|
| Incarnation | Orthodox, RC, Anglican, Liberationist | Jesus as a flesh-and-blood human who can identify with others in their suffering |
| Cross | RC Protestant | Humble suffering; reconciliation; forgiveness of enemies |
| Resurrection | Orthodox | The center of the missionary message and the call for us to show this new life |
| Ascension | Calvinist, ecumenical | The reign of God in heaven and on earth; the slain lamb as one on the throne |
| Pentecost | Charismatic | The era of the Spirit; God's power and presence among us now |
| Parousia | Adventist | The coming reign of God as a focus and a magnet affecting us already |
Mission as mediating salvation
That these were missionary consultations makes eminent sense, since one's theology is mission is always closely dependent on one's theology of salvation; it would therefore be correct to say that the scope of salvation - however we define salvation - determines the scope of the missionary enterprise. (p393)
It's easy to say that "Jesus saves", but unless we know from what and to what Jesus saves, we don't really know what we should be doing as missionaries. The understanding of salvation has changed over the course of mission history; in the early church, salvation is very broad. Luke's Gospel speaks of a salvation which happens right now in this live - from poverty, from illness, demon possession and so on. Paul speaks of salvation as a process which begins with an encounter with Jesus Christ and continues until we get to glory.
Paul's thought is apocalyptic, predicated on what will happen to us - we were reconciled to God, and we shall be saved. But Paul still sees salvation not just in "religious" but in practical terms. Now that Philemon and Onesimus are Christians, Paul tells Philemon that he must forgive and accept Onesimus back; Onesimus has been saved.
The Eastern Church thinks of salvation as moving closer in godliness, through the incarnation; the Western Church in deliverance from the effects of sin, through the cross.
In this design, the "person" and "work" of Christ were increasingly separated from the other... Thus even if...remarkable service has always been rendered in respect of the care of the sick, the poor, orphans and other victims of society... these ministries were almost always viewed as "auxiliary services" and not as missionary in their own right. (p394)
Because of our narrowed understanding of salvation, services to the needy became seen as something less than the proclamation of the Gospel. We saw proclaiming deliverance from sin (or spiritual union with God) as the whole of the Gospel, and all these good works as "softening them up" so that people would be prepared to receive the Gospel. Salvation became purely spiritual, and from there, we saw mission as dragging people into the church.
The reaction of the church and mission to the challenge of modernism was - generally put - twofold. The first reaction - in both Catholic and Protestant churches - was for people to continue to define salvation in traditional terms, ignoring, as it were, the challenges of the Enlightenment, and proceeding as if nothing had changed. The second reaction was to attempt to take the challenges of modernism seriously, also with respect to its understanding of salvation.
Something happened which caused a crisis in the way we see salvation; the Enlightenment meant that people were starting to see salvation not through the Church or religion but through science and technology. We can eradicate diseases, say, by developing vaccination programmes. More progress = more salvation! Mainly we continued to insist that people really do need outside help, and that modernism was a Bad Thing. Some people did take it on on its own terms, though.
One of those ways was to abandon the idea of Jesus dying for sin, but to present Jesus as the ideal man, a very modernist principle. So again we looked at what he did and taught, but not at who he was. Jesus turned into a "good teacher".
In this paradigm, sin is defined preeminently as ignorance. People only had to be informed about what was in their own interest. The Western mission was the great educator, which could mediate salvation to the unenlightened. (p396)
We need to, and we've pretty much failed to, face the fact that people aren't looking for spiritual salvation any more. In a secularized society, people look to technology and progress for their answers. So for theologians like Mesthene, you see salvation developed in terms of sharing progress from the West to the rest; at the same time, Marxist views of salvation lead to the liberation theology.
One conference, in 1973, tried to put all this together, seeing salvation as (1) economic justice (2) human dignity (3) solidarity against alienation (4) hope in personal life. Spiritual salvation had all but gone away; yes, it's very good that we're seeing salvation in human relationships, but "conquering of famine, illness and meaningless is part of the salvation for which we hope and labour". (p397)
To summarize, salvation and well-being, even if they are closely interlocked do not coincide completely. The Christian faith is a criticla factor, the reign of God a critical category, and the Christian Gospel not identical with the agenda of modern emancipation and liberation movements. We cannot, however, simply return to the classical interepration of salvation...(p398)
With postmodernism came the realisation that the dream of conquering injustice and oppression by social or technological means simply couldn't be realised. We had gone too far along with the modernists, thinking, with them, that we could achieve our own salvation if we work hard enough. Grace had gone away, and the devastation of the third world, the environment, and the Bomb, showed us that technological progress was not without its drawbacks.
So where from here? We need to remember that "Salvation in Christ is salvation in the context of human society en route to a whole and healed world".
We stand in need of an interpretation of salvation which operates with in a comprehensive christological framework which makes the totus Christus... indispensible for church and theology. (p399)
I love this. What it means is that we first thought of salvation based on the incarnation, the beginning of Christ's life; then we thought of it in terms of the cross, the end of Christ's life; then we thought of it in terms of the teaching, the middle of Christ's life. But all of Christ's life was for our salvation! We shouldn't reduce it to just one element.
This means that not just in theory but also in practice we need to be breaking down the dualism between "spiritual" and "non-spiritual" needs, and ministering to the whole person - wherever they need salvation, it can be brought through Christ. The job of mission is to change the world for the better. Of course we need to also recognise that we cannot do this ourselves - our task is not to bring in the reign of God; only God can do that. We also need to keep on calling people to faith in God through Christ. "Salvation does not come but along the route of repentance and personal faith commitment".
But mission should be about bringing God to people, with all that that entails; the fact that salvation is at hand, but is yet to be realised, should spur us on to the "salvation imperative" - go bring it to people! And that, my friends, is mission.
Mission and Dialogue
At the outset, I would like to posit my belief that we are in need of a theology of religions characterized by creative tension, which reaches beyond the sterile alternative between a comfortable claim to absoluteness and arbitrary pluralism. And perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the various models discussed above are found wanting. They are all too neat... Even before the dialogue begins, all the crucial issues have been settled. (p483)
Bosch's view of "creative tension" is that there's an awful amount of stuff in theology that we simply can't know; but so often we try to pin down every last detail. The relationship between religions is one area where there's a lot we don't know and so we have to tread carefully. Creative tensions allow us to actively not know about stuff; it can be uncomfortable, but, as Bosch argues, more fruitful than simply writing off the other person's point of view ("comfortable absoluteness") or, on the other hand, claiming that what's OK for you is OK. ("arbitrary pluralism")
Perhaps the theology of religions is preeminantly an area which we should explore with the aid of poiesis rather than theoria. (p483)
poiesis is "doing"; theoria is thinking about it. By this Bosch means that we cannot solve interreligious issues in the academic forum, but "dialogue" must be found in the disaster areas, the hospitals, the practical outworkings of our respective faiths.
We cannot possible dialogue with or witness to people if we resent their presence or the views they hold. (p483)
I want to pull this quote out because, for Bosch, "dialogue" is not a wooly thing that leads to Christians and other faiths going away feeling good about each other, but an integral part of witness. And to bolster that:
True dialogue presupposes commitment. It does not imply sacrificing one's own position - it would then be superfluous. An "unprejudiced approach" is not merely impossible but would actually subvert dialogue. (p484)
Of course, we were not planning to sacrifice our position, but were rather hoping those we were dialoguing with would sacrifice theirs... So what is the point of dialogue? For Bosch, it's to learn more about God than we already know:
We do not have him in our pocket, so to speak, and do not just "take him" to the others; he accompanies and also comes toward us. We are not the "haves", the beati possidentes, standing over against spiritual "have nots", the massa damnata. We are all recipients of the same mercy, sharing in the same mystery. (p484)
Now that, as Bosch goes on to say, takes a lot of humility. It takes self-criticism of the Christian position, and requires us to understand that judgement is not just issuing from the Church, but also upon the Church. The weak witness, the willingness to be crucified, is the essence of the Christian witness. Humility because we have much to repent for, but humility also because Christ commanded it.
Humility also means showing respect for our forebears in the faith, for what they have handed down to us, even if we have reason to be acutely embarrassed by their racist, sexist and imperialist bias. The point is that we have no guarantees that we shall do any better than they did. We delude ourselves if we believe that we can be respectful to other faiths only if we disparage our own. (p485)
So what is the role of dialogue in missions? It is to help us realise that the religious worldviews are different. We have this awful habit that other religions are just Christianity missing something - Islam is Christianity lacking relationship, say, or Buddhism is Christianity lacking grace. But this will not do:
This turns other religions into little more than echoes of Christianity's own voice, and shows little appreciation for the fact that they are putting their own questions to Christianity. (p485-6)
The culmination of this silly ideology is the "anonymous Christian" idea. But this denies that "Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths know only too well that they are unanonymous". We have to toe a middle line and say, yes, Christ is working cosmically in the world, but his role is not restricted to "converting" entire religious systems, and making them more like Christianity.
Now others like Knitter fall into the opposite fallacy, complete relativism, where they say that all religions are basically the same because they're expressing a sense of salvation, or a focus on the universal God, or (when those two viewpoints were shown to be false) a sense of the divine. But that robs us of the very valid question of truth; once you relativise truth, you take away its seriousness, and any religious conviction without the conviction of truth is unauthentic.
So what's the difference between dialogue and mission?
They're certainly similar, but the aim of dialogue is to understand and also to encourage both sides in their convictions and lifestyles. The aim of mission is the proclamation of the kingdom of God. Bosch doesn't really deal with how these differ, but he takes up the question of salvation once again - with provisos:
Much of the debate about the relationship between the Christian faith and other faiths has been confounded by the perennial question whether other religions also "save"... I repudiate the notion, however, that this is all religion is about, that this the only reason why people (should) become Christians. (p488)
In the words of the Tearfund strapline, "We believe in life before death". Religion is not just a ticket to heaven, but a relationship here on earth. Acceptance of the Christian faith is best characterised, therefore, as a change in lordship over one's life, from oneself to Jesus; and part of that is promoting God's reign in others. So how can we do dialogue? Well, you should be able to guess the answer - it's a creative tension.
Two affirmations, which seem to be mutually incompatible, speak to us from these (Vatican II) documents - God's universal salivific will and the possibility of salvation outside the church versus the necessity of the church and of missionary activity... "We appreciate this tension, and do not attempt to resolve it". (p489)
Bosch's appreciation of this creative tension is based on the principle that we don't have all the answers; "we know only in part, but we do know". We know that we are called to respect others and treat those of other faiths with humility and love as we would wish to be treated ourselves; we also know that we are called to confess Christ and him crucified. We don't know how these two fit together, but it's perhaps not our job to know right now. And actually, that ought to keep us honest. If we admit that there's much we don't know, then...
We do this, however, not as judges or lawyers, but as witnesses; not as soldiers, but as envoys of peace; not as high-pressure salespersons, but as ambassadors of the servant Lord.