Missional Hermeneutic: Initial Thoughts by Michael Gorman
Michael Gorman is professor of Sacred Scripture and Dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland
Gorman has posted an essay “Missional Hermeneutic: Initial Thoughts” in which he sketches out the necessity of reading the Bible from the perspective of God’s mission. He draws the following conclusions/implications from such an approach:
This way of understanding mission has many implications, only a few of which may be mentioned here briefly:
1. Mission is not a part of the church’s life (represented locally by a small line item in the budget) but the whole, the essence of the church’s existence; mission is comprehensive.
2. Mission is not the church’s initiative but its response, its participation in God’s mission; mission is derivative.
3. Mission is not an extension of Western (or any other) power, culture, and values; rather, it is specifically participation in the coming of the kingdom of God. It is therefore critical of all attempts to coerce Christian mission for implicit or explicit political purposes other than the “politics” of the reign of God—the realities of new life, peace, and justice (shalom) promised by the prophets, inaugurated by Jesus, and first spread to the world by the apostles. For Christians in the West, it is crucial that they recognize the failure of Christendom as something to be welcomed, and that they see the church appropriately and biblically as a distinctive subculture within a larger, non-Christian culture. Mission is theo- and Christocentric.
4. Mission is not unidirectional (e.g., West to East) but reciprocal.
5. Mission must become the governing framework within which all biblical interpretation takes place; mission is hermeneutical.
Check out my essays on missional reading/hermeneutics here.