I. Introduction

In one of the war scenes of his award-winning film The Burmese Harp¹ (Venice, 1956), director Kon Ichikawa pans the camera over a pile of mutilated Japanese soldiers, to the tune of "O sacred Head sore wounded, with grief and pain weighed down". Deceived by the war propaganda, most Japanese had believed in victory until, on 15 August 1945, they turned on the radio and heard the hoarse voice of their emperor announcing the capitulation and occupation of their country.

A single camera shot is all that is needed to enable us a switch from this plot to contemporary history, where scenes "with grief and pain weighed down" belong to the worldwide film set of the evening news. On the fringe of the fourth ecumenical Latin American meeting of “Teología India”,² in Asunción, Paraguay, in May 2002, I visited a group of Guarani who had settled on the edge of the giant garbage dump of the metropolis. About 5000 people live there, scavenging among the trash of the affluent society, with vultures vying with them for the best finds. Crosses in the small yards around the dump mark the burial places of newborn babies found in the garbage. "Such a grave in your backyard brings you luck", people say. The Jesuit priest accompanying us gives a friendly nod to one of the garbage collectors, while others interrupt their work for a few seconds to embrace the priest and reminisce about some mutual experience like old friends.

Our young companion then tells us that he was ordained to the priesthood a few years earlier at the foot of this rubbish mountain. There were protests from the Roman Catholic hierarchy afterwards about the unconventional liturgical setting. Can the venerable liturgy of ordination still have any meaning when enacted at such a site? The global church liturgy is speechless before the local trash heap. The church advises distance, in the belief that holy and venerable rites are at risk of desecration.

The symbolic gap that has emerged through speechlessness has been filled everywhere by the neo-liberal consumer culture. Never at a loss for words, it has coined new names for itself, staged powerful ceremonies and, with the promise of total quality, issued missionary slogans. The Brazilian supermarket chain Casas Bahia promises, "Total devotion to you". The City Bank promises 24-hour service, like the fire brigade, with the slogan, "The City (hank) never sleeps". And Philco sacrifices itself for customers through a special effort: "There are things that only Philco does for you". The "total devotion" means a total rat race. Anyone who slips up in this race for a place in the world lands on the trash heap, from which the film director and those of us who are Christians endeavour to extract a modicum of meaning with the metaphor of "Golgatha" and "O sacred Head sore wounded".

We are all familiar with such scenes somewhere in the world that have the same background music. Among defeated assailants and wounded losers, it is often difficult to distinguish between the causes and effects of the suffering meted out to others. War scenes in Palestine and Colombia, the New York World Trade Centre, and Afghanistan, the terror of arms build-up versus the terror of narcotics trafficking, famines in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, mass shootings in Erfurt and São Paulo: can the theological concept of missio Dei, which is about the presence of God in the world, be communicated meaningfully in such scenes of violence'? Does anyone (still) speak from the burning bush'' I must admit often to being struck dumb by such situations.

Latin America has its 500 years of church history that, while intertwined with colonial history, has never fitted into the thirty or forty-thousand-year-old human history of the continent. In addition, we have often shown a healthy disrespect for anything smacking of formulae, claiming, "By their fruits you shall know them" (Mt. 7:20) and not by their liturgies or theologies. After all, it is possible to do the right thing even with the probably wrong theology of the Samaritan, while theological orthodoxy has often concealed anthropological emergencies behind temple walls.

Again, for Latin American theology, practice has played a more important role than digging ever deeper with discourses aimed to justify or reconstruct but whose spades only get bent on the stony ground of reality. Or is the "crooked spade" of the missio Dei still good enough at least to fill in the odd theological ditch that sometimes seems to divide us so that we can move backwards and forwards, to our mutual benefit'? Perhaps missio Dei can be understood as an initiation rite that is always preceded by a testing time of desecration or a descent into the underworld. Perhaps missio Dei, despite the most varied conceptual trinitarian analogies of which it is the end product, does work as a metaphor after all. Perhaps it can mean something to people wandering around rootless, unwanted and blind, and can speak to them of the love of God.³

II. Concepts

How can the topos of missio Dei be made into good news for the poor, for the "other"? The concept of missio Dei presupposes a long history of reflection about the mystery of the Trinity. Even today, this still involves us in a complex tangle of linguistic terms about the inner life (processiones) and external workings (missiones) of the triune God. To what extent can these missiones, where we are dealing with analogies to start with, serve as analogies for that which we today call mission or the missionary nature of the church? Has missio Dei anything to do with the grounds and fruits of our hope, of which we can give an account (1 Pet. 3:15)?

The missio Dei model is for Christians initially about the presence and, at the same time, the transcendence (German: Unverfügbarkeit) of God. No creature has ever seen God (Jn 5:37; 6:46). Jesus' mission is precisely due to his own seeing, his authoritative testimony (Jn 3:11). The tension between God's transcendence, on the one hand, and God's presence in the world, on the other, draws our attention to the question of the mediating divine presence. Missio Del' is the theological concept that allows us to speak of both - the presence and transcendence of God.

The cultural loans made to explain missio Dei come from afar, it is true, but I rather suspect that mission without the link to missio Dei would, in the hands of an insipid pragmatism, be reduced to a short-term mission of social-ethical liberation. Alternatively, a mission fixated on the truth of its salvation message would end in fundamentalism.

Christians seek the ground of mission, which they understand as a mission of hope and love in faith, in God, who is unfathomable. This loving God cannot remain alone and withdrawn but has to give him/herself in relationship. This unfathomable and transcendent God has left visible tracks not just in creation but, for Christians, above all in the revelation and incarnation of the logos. We retrace these tracks of God when we seek the grounds of mission and its contextual and universal legitimization. We go back over the path of verbal and documented revelation, over the revelation in non-verbal signs (creation) until we reach its invisible ground. Starting from the specifically Christian path of salvation, as offered to humankind through the incarnation of the logos in Jesus Christ, we strive to proclaim Gods benevolence to all human beings. Local salvation history forms the matrix of universal redemption. This universality must just be accepted because, otherwise, salvation would become a matter for the privileged and the happy few.

Missio Dei indicates the universal mission and presence of God without any reservations. It indicates a particular form of the presence of the one and triune God in the form of the pneuma and the incarnate logos. The invisible foundation of missio Del is described in theology by "immanent trinity". "Immanent trinity" combines what theology calls the internal processions (processiones) of the pneuma on the basis of the "spiration" of the Father and the Son, and of the logos through "procreation" by the father. These processions of logos and pneuma-understood in theological reflection as required by the love presupposed in God - are then described more exactly as "communication" and "relationship" (relatio). The invisible ground of the "immanent Trinity" coincides with the visible consequences of the "salvation-history (economic) trinity" (incarnation, cross/resurrection and sending of the Spirit) that we call missio Dei. That explains why classical theology considered missio Dei to be the crux of the most important mysteries of faith and an analogous continuation of the processions that had begun "before the foundation of the world" (Jn 17:24).

III. God's presence

Missio Dei first means the presence of God on the basis of the sending of the logos and the pneuma. The sending of the logos into the real human nature of Jesus of Nazareth is continued in the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world and the church. The sending of the Holy Spirit also happens in respect to individual persons. The indwelling of the triune God in pardoned human beings is one of the goals of missio Dei (Jn 14:23) that must, however, not be understood as a particularization of God's presence and salvific action. "Sending" and "triune dwelling" always mean the whole presence of God. God the Father does not remain somehow "behind" the sent pneuma and the incarnate logos, thereby suffering loss of identity, as the metaphor of missio might suggest, presupposing as it does a recipient and messenger different from the sender. God is revealed through the Son as the sender of the logos and of the pneuma and at the same time as being lop, os and pneuma. In our everyday understanding, mission and sending are always linked to a change of place. With missio Dei" this is not the case. The arrival of logos and pneuma in our very small world, cosmologically speaking, does not make God or "parts of God" (logos and pneuma) absent "elsewhere", but can only be understood as a special manifestation of the one and all-present God under historical and anthropological conditions.

It is always the one trinitarian God who comes to us in different forms of giving and divine life as pneuma and logos, as Holy Spirit and Son, and who is God from everlasting to everlasting, while remaining the God of infinite and mysterious distance. God is not only the sender. In the Son and in the pneuma, God is at the same time the envoy. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). The two of them have a kerygmatic identity: "The Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak" (Jn 12:49).

Since the one God is always also the triune God, God's mission - missio Dei - can always only be understood by analogy. God does not send parts or envoys of the Trinity. God's mission is basically only a sign of God's whole presence in our midst. In other words, God does not come to godless human beings through mission, and does not need to be brought to regions far from God. Mission is therefore about spreading faith and not about spreading God. Mission only proclaims the specific manner of the God who has always been present. If we also consider that the church is "missionary by her very nature" (Ad gentes, 2), and we understand this nature such that in the church there is no non-missionary proclamation or action, either ad intra or ad extra, the distinction between church history and mission history can no longer be upheld. Deepening faith in traditionally "Christian countries" is also a form of spreading faith. Church history is always mission history, and mission history is church history. So there are no "mission countries" as against countries which are not, and this has not just been the case since secularization started a general corrosion of Christian substance.

Church mission is mission through the founding of communities. Churches and communities that have understood what Christianity is about are missionary, and the sending out of their members is only a special form of their missionary character. The same applies to life in religious orders. Following Jesus, living as brothers or sisters in community, and gospel poverty are signs of the missionary spirit of every order.⁴  Missio Dei in the history of the world, of the churches and of mission can only be proclaimed in discipleship. It is the continuation of the history of revelation of the triune God, whose self-emptying in words and signs always happens inside and outside the churches as institutions: "As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world" (Jn 17:18).

Everyday church practice does not always leave space for missio Dei. Even in the church we have to draw attention to the mysterious presence of God. We have to call a halt to the everyday routine of the institution, with all its longing for magic solutions and general business. Believers also have constantly to grapple with unbelief (Mk 9:24).⁵  The self-expression of God always takes place in the form of an ambiguous self-emptying.⁶  Evangelization and missionary proclamation are therefore always addressed both to our own church and to those outside it. The essentially missionary church always evangelizes itself at the same time (Evangelii nuntiandi, 15). Every teacher of scripture is also a student of the kingdom of God (Mt 13:52). And the call to repentance that is part of the proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom of God always presupposes the repentance of the preacher and of the church.

IV. God's plan

If missio Dei is a manifestation of God's radiating love, no grounds for missio Dei are needed, apart from that very groundless and essential divine love.⁷ In missionary practice and reflection this radiant love of missio Dei has often been presented too tentatively. It has often been overshadowed by pessimistic talk of redemption as a "planned repair job" to God's creation, caused by the Fall. However, to see God's so-called "plan" in a way that is rooted in missio Dei will lead to a shift in emphasis. This "plan" then takes on a different form: the "radiant love of God" is reconfigured through the sending of the logos, the saving Son of God, and the pneuma, the giver and bearer of that dynamic force we call grace. The Spirit breaks through the incarnate structures of evil that represent the matrix of a counter-plan. The Son who becomes human in Jesus of Nazareth opens up new prospects for God's plan. In the unity and continuity of the pneuma, the incarnation of the logos brings a decision between "antiproject" and "project".

Mission has throughout history endeavoured to come closer to this "divine plan". Vatican II speaks of it in connection with the missionary nature of the church, "since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father" (Ad gentes, 2). The church unfolds the missio Dei in its missionary activity, as "a manifestation of God's decree and its fulfillment in the world and in world history" (Ad gentes, 9).

In terms of the documents, all this would seem conclusive, were it not for the fact that the underlying concepts have lost their original freshness through modernity's breaks with tradition, and, secondly, that pre-modern colonial conditions still prevail. That has led to two fronts arising between the élite, who can - postmodern-style - afford to live without a plan, and the great majority of Latin American people, who interpret "God's plan" as affirming that injustice is "God's will". They think that "God's plan" unfolds in two stages, the first stage of colonization and "earthly suffering" being overcome in a second stage, viz. that of "heavenly glory". The Jesuit provincial, Antonio Vieira was thus able to call the slavery of Africans in Brazil "a great miracle of heavenly providence and mercy". Visiting a sugar mill in Bahia in 1633 he declaimed to the slaves:

The placebo preaching of yesterday has not ceased to this day. In Latin America people learned early to accept consolation from the hand of divine providence, where they could have tried to work to bring about change. That may have been a survival strategy. The suffering saviour was a refuge for many. However, the powers-that-be made this Christianity into an ideology oh oppression. Good Friday Christianity lacks the dimension of the "resurrection justice" that annuls the death sentences imposed by the victors.

V. The Project of Jesus

The sobering experiences of the modern age caused liberation theology and its accompanying pastoral practice to revise fundamentalist views and ideological justifications; former colonialist Christianity has achieved greater self-awareness. The dynamics of missio Dei were too rapidly forced into an apparently one-size-fits-all ontological "eternal divine plan", where the dream of God's will was turned into a regular timetable. But this "divine plan" can also be interpreted as "God's project", continued in the project of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is the task of mission, based on the premise of faith in Jesus Christ and in the kairos of different historical and cultural contexts, to proclaim liberating redemption over and over again. Against the backdrop of the burning issues of every age, mission must show redemption to be an option, both historically and collectively and in the personal lives of individuals.

The Gospel of Luke confronts us at the beginning of Jesus' public life with the important decision between the project of the world, here called the "anti-project", and God's project, that represents the central message of Jesus' teaching. Using the expression "anti-project" seems to me to cover many elements of what we conventionally term "original sin" in theology, even though there are fundamental differences. If we address Jesus' humanity seriously, then the reality of the temptation of the incarnate logos cannot be devaluated as merely playacting for pedagogical purposes.

The story of Jesus' own temptations depicts the possibility of a comprehensive, i.e. social, political and religious, anti-project on the kingdom of God (Lk 4:1-13). This anti-project follows Jesus throughout, not just in the voices of his adversaries but also in the questions asked by his disciples about the "restoration of the kingdom of Israel". Their dreams are directed to the past. They think of the kingdom of David as an alternative to the Roman empire. They even confront the risen Christ with this possibility when they ask, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6).

The anti-project is the project of the princes of this world. It makes one blind. "In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers", says Paul (2 Cor. 4:4). The anti-project is the realm of continuity, populist partial agreements and small-scale bartering that leaves the world as it is. It is in the realm of offering small crumbs of comfort in order to preserve one's own privileges, the realm of the consumer society, and the realm of power, prestige and idolatry. For Jesus the stakes were high and this was a real alternative. Why not meet the expectations of the ordinary people? Why not take the course of history into one's own hands and, with one powerful word, improve the world?

The church inherited this temptation and has been haunted by it through history. It has found many reasons not to break with the rulers, and has been continually battered by power claims, privileges and prestige. When Latin American Christians, who were allied with the colonial powers and invoked divine providence, committed themselves to the fight of good against evil but also accepted privileges from the powerful and held the prestige of the devil on the pinnacle of gilded temple facades for the glory of God, they were blind to the evil in their own ranks and denied the crucified Christ the justice of the resurrection.

Jesus pilloried the culture of privilege of his age because every privilege concealed a voice that had been silenced. Privileges are the investments of the powerful; in an economy of exploitation they demand compliance and silence in return. In political and socio-economically privileged situations there is a patent decline in spiritual zeal and vocations to be apostles. The power that bestows favours on missionary work, and endows it with money, honours and privileges, is its corrupter. The best way to silence the prophetic voice of churches is not by persecution but by furnishing them with material and symbolic privileges.

The trappings of patronage, for example, damaged evangelization and also the church. When the missionaries began to cast off ideological ballast they became dangerous to the colonial system. The repeated eviction of the Jesuits from Brazil shows how their presence and role of cultural go-between between colonial rulers and indigenous society suddenly became dangerous when their evangelization challenged important premises of colonization. Eviction, plundering of the mission stations and martyrdom: these are the moments of the "dangerous memory" of history that permit a rethink of the whole of the missionary past, present and future. These occasions led, often belatedly, to that responsibility for the victims of colonization that we today call "the option for the poor and the ‘other"'.

If the church is poor and unrecognized, owing to its people being unrecognized, the "others" and the poor are able to come together in its buildings. The nearness of the poor is the touchstone for well-meaning sermons and bold declarations. It also tests the calling to engage in mission, which lives not from good intentions but from greater justice and love. The option for the poor and the "other" as adult protagonists demands a professional ethic in missionary work that breaks with the culture of privileges. This break is a kind of praeambula fidei of any proclamation of a faith, and one that recognizes the poor and the "other" as adults and also recognizes their protagonist role in a new world and a living church. Bread on the tables of all human beings and roses in their neighbours' gardens will not just be the outcome of long struggles for justice but also of incarnate celebrations of the eucharist and the Lord's supper.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit (Lk 4:1-14), puts up programmatic resistance to the real temptation of a world order based on the privileged access to bread, power and prestige. He incarnates missio Dei in the project of the kingdom of God and, in three defining discourses and wherever the gospel is about bread, marks the contours of a radically different logic. In the discourses in the Nazareth synagogue (Lk 4:14ff), the sermon on the mount (Lk 6:20-49, Mt 5:3-12) and the judgement of the nations (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus highlights the addressees and protagonists of the kingdom of God; the feeding of the five thousand reveals his structuring principle. Jesus' project is for those who are poor, depressed, captive, blind, hungry, hated, foreign-looking, ill and excluded. They are both the addressees and promoters of this project. God accepts the human touch of the poor and the dregs of society. They are divine revelation and sacrament in the world. They are the historic exponents of missio Dei.

Of course, traditional normality collapses here. Jesus' project presupposes a quite different logic. The basic needs of humanity are not satisfied by privileged access or economy measures but through the logic of sharing and distributing. Bread is not just collected to be distributed - first the small remnant, five loaves and two fish, are distributed. Jesus' suggestion "Give them something to eat" contrasts with that of the disciples who think that the people should "go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat" (Mt 14:15f; Mk 6:36ff). When all is distributed and given away there are twelve baskets over (Mt 14:13-21). It is not accumulation, economy or precaution - the logic of the world - that solve the problems. On the contrary, they have a blinding effect and produce misery. It is only in distribution and breaking bread that the disciples' eyes are opened and recognition in turn becomes a form of loving, as at the beginning of creation (Lk 24:13-35: Gen 4:1).

The question now is whether the new protagonists of Jesus' project do not mean exclusion for us all in our churches, since we do not live on trash heaps but in comfortable homes. The gospel responds to this question by presenting us with two people who, perhaps like us, also want to climb aboard Jesus' project, i.e., the kingdom of God. These two late-starters were a teacher of the law and a rich young man. They believed everything, observed tradition and kept the commandments. One knew everything and the other had everything. They were worried about whether they belonged to the kingdom of God. They both asked Jesus the same questions: "Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Lk 10:25: 18:18)

The two men wanted access to Jesus' project via the old, legalistic, moral channels. They wanted to participate in it by means of the privileged access to the law and the commandments that are available to the educated and well-todo. They would have willingly accepted a few more regulations or laws, of course without dismantling the temple walls in their hearts. Don't break with the system! Don't change my way of thinking! And please, no participation for all! But the goods of this world will not suffice for everybody if the privileges of the rich are not abolished.

Jesus imposes no extra regulations on the men. Instead of the cemetery avenue they are travelling along, he offers them a new orbit across the heavens through diakonia in service of those who have fallen among thieves or, right away, through the radical sell-off of their accumulated possessions. It is about time that the churches cleared out all their junk, too. Missio Dei commits them to diakonia and the school of the poor. The churches' questions about truth can only be communicated through the active presence of poor people in church life. When the church has understood that it is not some question of truth understood only by analogy anyway - but the poor and outcast who are the tokens of the presence of God in its institutional brokenness, and when those who are poor are not just at the receiving end of the gospel but commissioned as its bearers, then this church will be able to claim that it has taken the missio Dei to heart and is truly a missionary church.

God's mission that came in Jesus of Nazareth and lives on in the Holy Spirit can be summed up quite simply: the mediation of the presence of God leads to the crucified ones of history. Missio Dei always leads us by way of Golgotha, by way of suffering. But missio Dei, as the sending of the Spirit, also means breaking with the scenarios of brutal bondage and fatal subjection. Missio Dei is not just the journey to killing fields. It is the initiation rite that turns the greater love into the greater justice. It means being caught up in the loving moment of God, who does not just record the injured and the dead, like a camera, but breathes into them God’s Spirit so that they may live (Ezek. 37:14). The divine gaze is accompanied by a new song that tells of the justice of the Resurrection: “Christ is risen!” Through missio Dei  the day of Resurrection  became the first day of the week and the key to history.

 

(Translated from the German, Language Service,

World Council of Churches) 

Notes

* Paulo Suess is theological advisor to the Brazilian Missionaries Council for Indigenous People, and president of the International Association for Mission Studies. In 1987, he founded the first post-graduate course in Brazil for the study of missiology.

**This is the English version of Paulo Suess's original German paper as presented during the Willingen consultation.

 

1. Based on the novel of the same name by Makeyama Michio (1903-84), 1946.
2. “IV Encuentro Ecuménico Latinoamericano de Teología India, Ykua Sati. Asunción, Paraguay (6-11.5.02)", Porantim  XXIII/246, p. 8f.
3. The relatively few texts in Brazil on the concept of missio Dei include Martin A. Dreher, "Missão de Deus na Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil". Estudios Teológicos, 33/3, 1993, pp. 261-277; Roberto Zwetsch, "Missão e alteridade. A contribuição da pastoral indigenista na missio Dei ou Os outros como sinais", Estudios Teológicos, 34/2, 1994, pp. 159-175.
4. See John Paul II, Vita consacrata, No. 72, 1996.
5. Christianity identities itself not just in contrast to external atheism but also to its own inherent atheism. E. Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1968.
6. See K. Rahner, Grundkurs des glaubens. Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums, 5th ed. Freiburg i. Br., Herder, 1977, p. 222.
7. Ad gentes, 2: This decree, however, flows from the 'fount-like love' or charity of God the Father". Ad gentes, 3 then elaborates on "this universal design of God for the salvation of the human race".
8. Antonio Vieira, "Sermão décimo quarto (1633)", in: Sermões. Obras completas do Pe. Antõnio Vieria. Porto, Lello & Irmãos. 1951, vol. 4, Tomo 11, No. 6. p. 301.

 

Ref.: International Review of Mission, Vol. XCII, n. 367, October 2003.