Michael Horton Dialogues with Kevin DeYoung
Horton: Do you think there is a connection between the Em-ergent movement and the people who have been involved with the trend of broadening out the gospel and the mission of the church to include all sorts of things’the horizontal human-centered emphasis we see in treatments of the gospel now being seen as mission? Is there a connection here between the view of the gospel as our living it and doing it and the view of mission as making the world a better place? Your book with Greg Gilbert What Is the Mission of the Church? engages the questions being raised in the wider evangelical and Reformed world regarding the church's mission. Especially in the Emergent movement, there has been a lot of talk about our "living the gospel"’even "being the gospel." That's led to message creep, confusing ourselves with Jesus. However, you seem to be concerned in this book about mission creep as well; that is, the confusion of the Great Commandment with the Great Commission. Are these two expansionistic tendencies related?
DeYoung: Yes, I think there are a number of connections. Of course, there are deeper differences I'd have with someone like Rob Bell than I have with brothers and sisters who are well within the bounds of the historic Christian faith. Yet with that caveat, yes, I definitely see a connection, and it comes across in a couple of ways. First, as you said, there is a radical continuity between this life and the next. I think a lot of these folks are reacting against the simplistic caricature that you just fly up to heaven and that's all that matters in life. Or people think that heaven is earth coming down, that this is something we've just discovered for the first time in history, or that the kingdom is going to be here in some way. But any sort of discontinuity has been obliterated, such that everything we do now is going to be carried over somehow into the next life, which of course then translates backward that we are partners with God in recreating this world or in building or bringing his kingdom. It comes through pretty clearly in Bell's work that we don't want this "small gospel," as he says, which is just about "sin management" (I think that phrase came from Dallas Willard). But it's this bigger, grander vision of partnering with God to recreate the world. Of course, there are many problems (not the least of which is hubris) that we're doing this with God, when really the promises in Scripture are that we bear witness to it and receive it as a gift.
Horton: I hope for the good of the world that I'm not part of the gospel! It's good news because it's for us, not about us. What is your basic thesis in What Is the Mission of the Church?
DeYoung: Our basic thesis is that the mission of the church is summarized in the Great Commission. We pretty much know what people mean by "mission," what we are sent into the world to accomplish. So what we argue for in this book is that the church is sent into the world to bear witness to Christ, to testify that he is Lord. We see this in not only the Great Commission, but also in the early church in Acts. Acts is about the Word going forth and what happens when the apostles bear witness to these events and the theological significance of Christ's death and resurrection. The church should have a clearer focus on what God has called her to do. Greg and I have a whole chapter on doing good deeds, because we want to do good deeds and there are lots of reasons to do them. Galatians 6:10 says, "Do good to all people, especially to the household of faith." But to live the gospel, to be the gospel, to bring the kingdom, or help restore creation, are not the right theological categories, and they can be pretty damaging if people embrace them. It can lead to a kind of triumphalism or, on the other end of that, a real defeatism: "I'm burned out. I'm thirty-five. I can't change the world like I thought I would, and the church is failing in every way possible." We want to guard people against some of that, while still saying yes to helping and serving others.
Horton: Do you think there's confusion of the Great Commission with the Great Commandment today in talk about mission?
DeYoung: I think the two get equated. People say, "We're Great Commission/Great Commandment people." Obviously, they are both important. But I think it's telling that in the Great Commission Jesus gives us a very specific mandate: "We're sending you into the world to accomplish this." In the book of Acts, the apostles aren't being sent into communities looking for as many ways as possible to love and to bless others. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but they believe that they're sent into these different places to bear witness to Christ, to plant churches, to establish churches, and to nurture and encourage churches.
Horton: So the Great Commission is a mandate to plant, water, and grow churches through Word and Sacrament ministry?
DeYoung: Yes. In Acts 14 we have a good summary of what Paul was doing. He preached the gospel to the city and returned to Lystra and Iconium, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, saying that we must enter the kingdom of God through many tribulations. When he had appointed elders in every church, he committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. His mission was evangelistic preaching, the planting of churches, and then the nurturing, establishing, and strengthening of those churches. That's why in Romans 15 he could say, "My work in these regions is done, and I've proclaimed Christ all the way around to Illyricum," because he had established gospel-preaching, firmly grounded churches. He saw that as his mission, and I think this is the church's mission.
Horton: In your book, you quote Stephen Neill: "If everything is mission, nothing is mission."
DeYoung: That is a great line. I think one of the dangers in our day is that we have a diffuse definition of mission, and it becomes practical in what churches are going to support with their missions budget, where we're devoting our energies. There are many good things to do in the world, and many things we choose to do as individual Christians. And yet, because our time, our resources, our energy, and our people are all finite, we can't do everything. So understanding our mission is important. Mission is not everything we might do in Jesus' name, such as plant trees in the park or start a film school that makes true, good, beautiful films. I'm not at all minimizing those things. We believe in vocation and that God is pleased in all sorts of things we can do. But whether those are the mission of the church is what we're questioning in the book.
Horton: So the mission of the church isn't necessarily as broad as the mission of Christians in their vocations of loving and serving their neighbors?
DeYoung: Exactly. One Christian might be passionate about pro-life work, while someone else might have a heart for digging wells in Africa. We can pray for this and hold them up as good things, and we can use those as application points when appropriate in a sermon. But whether that's going to be conceived of as the mission of the church isn't quite what I think we see from Jesus and the apostles.
Horton: I'm sure you're familiar with The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, the head of World Vision. I love World Vision and I love a lot of what he says in that book about what Christians ought to be doing, but do you see the same problem there? It's not a "hole in the gospel"; it's our failure to act appropriately in response to the gospel as we follow the law of love.
DeYoung: We love the word "love." I think we would do a lot better to encourage Christians in churches to love and to follow this law of love. What happens is that we load onto that impulse, as you said, a gospel sort of language, that we have a mistake with our gospel, when it would be much wiser to look at all that Christ has done for us. We've already received the greatest gift. Now we should go love. There are many ways in which the world needs to know love and the alleviation of suffering. So it's just some category confusions. I too read Stearns' book, and he seems like a winsome, likeable guy, and I certainly applaud many of the things he wants to do; but I think some categories are wrong. We don't have to encourage love by redefining what is meant by the gospel.
Horton: I noticed Chuck Colson's endorsement: "After reading it you will no doubt be asking yourself, 'What should I do?'" Now that's not a bad question to ask sometimes, but not for a book titled The Hole in Our Gospel. When you're talking about the gospel, the question should be, "What should I believe?" Right?
DeYoung: Right. What does this announcement mean for me? What is the good news I'm embracing? In your new systematic theology book, I'm sure you intentionally chose your subtitle: "A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way." We need to recover the sense that the Christian faith is for pilgrims on their way to this celestial city. We have a hyper-activist kind of faith that is for those who want to recreate this city. I understand that because I know the danger of Christians who are blissfully ignorant of the concerns around them and who feel that they've got their doctrine right. We know that those are real dangers. But I think we need to recover a sense that the gospel is first and last about what God has done for us, not what we need to do for God. When we get that confused, we load our people with low-level guilt. So many Christians go through life with this pervasive nagging sense that they've never measured up, that they've never done anything good enough, that there are always more needs, always more things to do. That's a failure to understand the radical nature of the gospel.
Horton: It's no longer that they have to quit smoking and drinking, as it was in many of the churches of their youth. Now it's that they have to get out there and change the world.
DeYoung: I write about this because I personally wrestle with it. I know the tension of not wanting to excuse my own disobedience in some area. And yet, if we get to the point as Christians where we look at all the things that are supposed to be expected of us, all the things that it seems God is commanding of us, and we think, "I need forty hours in a day to be obedient to God," then we've not understood something correctly. That is how a lot of Christians feel. It's not just that they're not supposed to commit adultery. But when you get some of these other things that involve the most intractable problems in the world, we wonder how we're going to find time to possibly be pleasing to God and obedient to him. Then we're traveling the same path Luther walked down before his experience in the tower.
Horton: It's easy for us to turn the gospel into something that we do, and forget what the writer to the Hebrews said: "Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken"’not building one’let us worship with reverence and awe. Grateful for receiving a kingdom, we then go out and live as salt and light in the world.
DeYoung: That's a great passage. The verbs with "kingdom" are important. I've been banging this drum, and you probably have been too. It's not building; it's not creating; it's not even extending the kingdom. The kingdom simply is: It breaks in and infiltrates our lives. But it's a kingdom that God has created and that Christ will finally consummate. We bear witness to it, and in our local congregations we're sort of outposts of it. But it's God's work to do, and that's why, as you pointed out, the verbs are that we receive it, we inherit it, we enter it. It's not that we build it.
