Evangelism and social action: an effective new contribution

MISSION IN ACTION
A Biblical Description of Missional Ethics
By Martin C. Salter
IVP Apollos. 281 pages. £19.99
ISBN 978 1 783 597 802

What is the mission of the church? This is a debate that continues to roll in the world mission community, and this book is a significant new contribution to be considered.

Martin Salter has published his Ph.D thesis on the subject of missional ethics. That might seem a strange combination, but proves instead to be an effective new direction for the debate on the relationship between evangelism and social action. Our behaviour cannot be divorced from our witness. The whole life of the people of God will either testify to or contradict our message.

The first chapter deals with hermeneutical method, giving a survey of current approaches to canonical, narratival, missional and performative hermeneutics. This has to be worked out in a Ph.D thesis, but delays the development of the argument.

Deuteronomy’s missional ethic

The main argument focuses on Deuteronomy, the major prophets, and Luke-Acts. Chapter 2 on Deuteronomy is the longest, and is a thorough and competent handling of a range of passages across a much-neglected book of Scripture. If you are going to preach through Deuteronomy, you need to have this book to hand. He shows that Israel’s election and redemption are for the purpose of a missional ethic.

Israel’s distinctiveness is to demonstrate wisdom to the surrounding nations, in their love for God and their love for neighbour. The nations will see their worship and lifestyle and be drawn to worship YHWH. He gives a capable handling of the conundrum of how to relate Deuteronomy 4:6 with 7:2. This chapter is particularly helpful in showing how Israel’s worship is a central component of their missional ethic.

Fascinating and rewarding

Chapter 3 explores the three major prophets, and draws close connections to Deuteronomy in all three. Israel and Judah should have been living the life set out in Deuteronomy before the nations. Instead they have followed their idolatry, and face exile. In each of the major prophets he drills deep into selected texts, as well as observing the wider context, to show that God’s people are to live under God and before the nations. Lots of exegetical knots are addressed along the way, and it can feel at times as though the main argument is a little lost in the detail, but the details are fascinating and rewarding!

A light to the nations

Chapter 4 covers Luke and the early chapters of Acts. Salter is at pains to show that Luke is connecting to both Deuteronomy and the major prophets. In his desire to show the connections, some of the radical change of the ministry of Jesus does not get as much emphasis as it should. One chapter of 40 pages gives a survey of Luke and Acts to show that the character of the Christian community is a vital part of their testimony to the gospel. ‘The mission of Jesus to reach outsiders and the ethics that accompany discipleship belong together and cannot be neatly separated.’ The ethical life of the Jerusalem church in the early chapters of Acts is well covered, though the treatment of Acts 2:41-47 could have been longer. ‘Love for God and love for neighbour are the shape of the new Israel’s ethic, and the result is a people, centred around a person, who become a “light to the nations”.’

Worship in mission

Chapter 5 draws the argument together with a helpful survey of the place of justice, charity and (perhaps more surprisingly) worship in the mission of the church. Interacting with Bosch, Wright, Keller and Goheen, his argument will shift current debates about mission more closely towards the local church as ‘the hermeneutic of the gospel’.

A plea for plain English

This is a dense book, not helped by some curiously obscure language. The need to avoid plagiarism produces a style so busy citing others that the author’s own view lacks room to breathe. I want to make a plea to all theologians and biblical scholars for the use of plain English. Please can we avoid words like ‘missio-telic’, ‘theopolitical’, ‘deontological’ and ‘consequentialist’ and most of all a ‘qualitatively distinctive monolatry.’ If anyone can tell me what ‘the placement of the copula’ refers to, how ‘Modality plays second fiddle to sodalities’, what a ‘Torah-morphic community’ is, how illocution differs from perlocution of the text, or what the ‘physiognomic consciousness’ of the ancient world refers to, I would be most glad.