How to do missions.

The importance of creation in ground floor evangelism, from a missiologist at Fuller.

 

Panel | N. T. Wright, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Scott Sunquist - YouTube 

 

Wright's response, while very theologically helpful, is dead from the get go because he disparages the timing of creation. And the theology is good: even for a venue like Fuller!

 

I think these guys live in a split world. Wright for instance in his NT theology is about as non-Platonist as one can get, but in his anthropology and cosmology is as 'forked tongue' as a pagan with a Platonic context.

 

TE/LA-ers seem to have platonised the creation and placed it in some form of 'upper story', mysterious, inaccessible and defying description (and so unteachable). Yet, this is the God who speaks; who reveals himself to man who he made in his image for fellowship. It is contradictory and without scriptural foundation for them to overturn this in the most important relational passage in the Bible: Genesis 1 ( to 3:8). On their terms Wright obscures God's act of initiating fellowship, and hides it from we who are to be rulers of that  very creation as his image-bearers: thus his primary act of identity and his chief credential for worship is hidden and inaccessible. How can creation reflect his glory when he's not told us its glorious basis? Sounds like a shell game!

But Wright is wrong in his disparagement. It is essential that days are days because by them God engages his creation in its terms: makes an ontological grounding for fellowship by the terms he created to delineate our experience of his creation. This underscored by using the days that he made as basic to his engagement with his creature who will go on to reflect him; not in some ineffable mystical miasma, but in this real world of the days in which our God created and robustly ground our relationship with him.

The direct coupling of event with word in the days plays an important role in showing also the God is the Lord of these days and of the creation, completely government the creation with his direct action and evaluation that underwrites his pleasure in the result. There is thus no room for pagan fantasies, unstated intermediaries (Hebrews 11:3 has a role here too). This also makes the Sabbath of the Covenant also pregnant with the glory of his creation and love of his creature.

 

Wright dashes all this into a Platonic bowl of pottage with his denial of the basic organizing tempo and connection of creation to our world.