28 Edward W. Poitras

Edward W. Poitras

ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE MISSIO DEI: A Reflection on Mission at the Close of the Twentieth Century'

Truth itself, co-eternal with the Faith, took a beginningfrom the earth, when the Son of God so came that He might become the Son of Man, and that He might take to Himself our faith, and lead us to His own truth (Augustine 1963: 161).

Present-day Mission and Augustine's Missio Dei

Contemporary mission thought and practice deal with a changing world and a set of urgent issues, many of which are different from those which Augustine addressed in his time. As we enter another millennium, the world Christian community finds itself challenged most deeply by world poverty and the overwhelming scale of human suffering. In addition, the encounter with other vital world religions and innumerable religious sects has left divided within, some favoring exclusivism, others wanting to reach out in dialogue. The wide variety of Christian experience across the many cultures of the world has produced a lively conversation about the relation between contextualized local forms of faith and the universal claims of the shared Christian gospel. These are quite different issues from those Augustine faced. He struggled with the historical vicissitudes of that day, probably the most urgent being the incursions leading to destruction and confusion within the Roman Empire. He was in the forefront of Western theological reflection upon the and the church, and pioneered in creative thought about the human personality. He also dealt with many vexing issues posed by dissenting groups of believers, notably the Donatists and Pelagians, but also

* Edward W. Poitras was for thirty-three years a United Methodist in South Korea, serving mainly in theological education. He is Professor Emeritus ofWorld Christianity at Perkins School ofTheology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA and lives at 31 Heron Pond Lane, Freeport, ME, 04032, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Mission Studies, Vo!. XVI-2, 32, 1999 St. Augustine and the Missio Dei 29 contemporary versions of Arianism and Docetism. Because of the thought world in which he lived, Augustine usually expressed himself through the relating of the eternal to the temporal, two different worlds seen to be intersecting and interacting. He often appeared to see reality in Neoplatonic terms, yet it seems clear that he reinterpreted its substantialist categories through his Christian belief in the centrality of the will. While Augustine did occasionally deal with the question of as the spread of the gospel among the nations, he was more concerned about theodicy and the relation of the church to the world. In a late twentieth-century world where post -Christian cultures exist alongside non-Christian, anti-Christian, pre-Christian and actively Christian societies, Augustine's smaller, simpler world might seem to have limited relevance. Yet, curiously, it has been one of Augustine's central missional concepts, the missions of God, that has captured the imagination of a wide variety of thinkers and helped them to move beyond the most serious problems and deficiencies of recent Christian missionary activity. Why should this be so? The potential relevance of Augustine's for mission today becomes evident when we notice how a descendant of his concept of Missio Dei has become commonplace in recent mission thought. The term Missio Dei appears to have entered the public conversation first at the fifth International Missionary Council Conference, held in Willingen, Germany in 1952 (Vicedom 1965: 5). In his magnum opus, Transforming Mission, David 1. Bosch commented that "[d]uring the past half century or so there has been a subtle but nevertheless decisive shift toward understanding mission as God's mission" (Bosch 1991: 389). Bosch goes on to say, "[s]ince Willingen the understanding of mission as Missio Dei has been embraced by virtually all Christian persuasions--first by conciliar Protestantism, but subsequently also by other ecclesial groupings, such as the Eastern Orthodox, and many evangelicals" (Bosch 1991: 390). As might be expected, the term has been used to express mutually exclusive theological positions, yet there seems to be an agreed common affirmation behind them. Bosch summarizes it as follows:

... the Missio Dei concept has helped to articulate the conviction that neither the church nor any other human agent can ever be considered the author or bearer of mission. Mission is, primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the