Fall 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 2 · pp. 199–201
Book Review
The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission
Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023. 156 pages.
Respected Old Testament scholar and missiologist Christopher J. H. Wright serves as the International Ministries Director of the Langham Partnership group of ministries and has played a major role within international evangelicalism as a leader within the Lausanne Movement. Notably, he served as the chair of the Statement Working Group that drafted the Cape Town Commitment at the third Lausanne Congress in 2010. Important works include Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (IVP, 2004), The Mission of God (IVP, 2006), and The Mission of God’s People (Zondervan, 2010). p. 200
The present effort is the continuation of a lifetime of thought about the concept of mission, with its genesis originating in Wright’s 2020 Hayward Lectures, delivered at Acadia Divinity College, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. True to trade, Wright’s Old Testament background informs mission in a biblically holistic way, considering the story of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. The Great Story and the Great Commission, as its title suggests, is the outworking of this methodology that takes seriously the entire biblical narrative while asking how the Bible’s whole story informs what Christians typically refer to as “the great commission.”
Wright calls for a “missional hermeneutic” that sees the entire Bible as having a missional bent, not merely a few isolated texts. The Scriptures serve as the record, product, and tool of God’s mission. Wright therefore sees the broader story of God’s mission starting in the Old Testament and moving into the New, and notes how from Abraham to the present, God’s people are called to be part of this blessed mission. That story is provided in a seven-fold sequence: creation, rebellion, promise, Christ, mission, judgment, and new creation. When applying Wright’s hermeneutic to each of these seven acts of “the Great Story,” several implications develop. Perhaps chief among these is the reorienting of the believer’s outlook to see how God has already been accomplishing his own redemptive mission and how the believer fits into that mission.
From here, Wright considers the grand story’s import for “the Great Commission” with a priority on Matthew 28:18-20. Expositing Jesus’ final words in Matthew, Wright posits a fivefold articulation of this mission for the church: evangelism, teaching, compassion, justice, and creation care. What holds these five components together is the central message of the gospel, that great affirmation of the lordship of the resurrected Christ over all creation. Each of these five aspects is then elaborated upon in separate chapters. In the final chapter, Wright puts it all together: “The story tells us what God intends for his whole creation and all nations; the commission mandates us to be co-workers with God under the lordship of Christ, in the certainty that God will fulfill his intentions and achieve his mission” (141). Therefore, “God’s whole mission is for God’s whole church” to impact the “whole of life” (both the sacred and the secular) for the glory of God (146, 149).
With this summary in mind, several questions present themselves. For example, why are there five components in Wright’s articulation of the great commission instead of more or less? No answer is provided or a defense given beyond assertion. Or should there be or should there not be a level of priority given to the “make disciples” aspect of the commission (mathēteusate, the central imperative of Matt 18:18-20) over, say, creation care? Does Wright adequately answer the objection that “if everything is p. 201 mission, nothing is mission” in his inclusion of components that many conservative evangelicals would not normally include in their articulation of Jesus’ final words in Matthew? For a significant work such as this that should be considered for any missiologist’s library, one would hope for clearer answers to these questions.
Still, from an historical Anabaptist perspective that has cherished the great commission since the Reformation, Wright provides a welcome contribution on several fronts. First, the priority on narrative structure serves as a continued caution for students of systematic theology (as this reviewer) that the articulation of propositional truth must never be divorced from the redemptive arc of the Bible (for a helpful approach melding both propositions and narrative, see Michael Bird’s Evangelical Theology, 2nd ed., Zondervan, 2020). Similarly, Wright’s repeated emphasis on how the story that leads to the great commission necessarily begins in the Old and moves into the New Testament is a corrective to a practical Marcionism that merely heeds the New Testament’s ethical mandates without considering how they are grounded and are echoed from the Old. Finally, Wright’s centering of the great commission in the lordship of Christ strongly anchors the commission to God’s overarching plan of redemption from rebellion to new creation. God who is the Creator of all has subjected all things underneath his Son who will be victorious over all in the final judgment as he restores his creation in the new heaven and new earth.
