RECONCILIATION AS A PNEUMATOLOGICAL MISSION PARADIGM: SOME PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS BY AN ORTHODOX

Abstract

Abstract This article underlines the importance of reconciliation and healing in the life and mission of the church. It develops a new theology of mission that is no longer based on the old Christocentric universalism but on a new trinitarian (i.e. pneumatological) understanding of the witness of the church. This is possible nowadays because of the reinforcement of pneumatology into missiological reflections, which together with the amazing expansion worldwide of the Pentecostal movement, determines the present day Christian mission. The article is based on the assumption that the Holy Spirit in both the biblical and patristic traditions is first and foremost eschatologically- (Acts 2:17ff) and communion- (2 Cor. 13:13) oriented. Since, however, a pneumatological approach of Christian mission cannot be received in the wider Christian constituency unless it is christologically conditioned, the article makes Christology its starting point. It argues that on the basis of Christ's teaching, life and work, the apostles were, and all Christians thereafter are commissioned to proclaim not a set of given religious convictions, doctrines and moral commands, but the coming kingdom. The message, therefore, is the good news of a new reality of full-scale reconciliation. From the epistemological point of view, the article builds upon the existence of two types of pneumatology in the history of the church. One type is historicaland is more familiar in the West. It understands the Holy Spirit as fully dependent upon, and being the agent of Christ in order to fulfill the task of mission. The other type is and is more widespread in the East. It understands the Holy Spirit as the source of Christ, and the church in terms more of 'coming together', i.e., as the eschatological synaxis of the people of God in his Kingdom, than of 'going forth' mission. Taking this second type of pneumatology one step further, the article argues that mission in the conventional sense is the outcome and not the source of Christian theology. That is why the Orthodox what constitutes the essence of the church is not her mission but the Eucharist, the divine Liturgy; the mission is the meta-liturgy, the Liturgy after the Liturgy. Nevertheless, reconciliation being the primary precondition of the Eucharist, it also automatically becomes a source of mission. ********** There are two parameters that constitute and, to a certain degree, determine the new perspective of the theology of mission in the third millennium of the Christian presence in the world. The first is the pneumatological dimension, expressed in two seemingly contradictory but certainly highly converging phenomena in the field of mission, at least with regard to their future perspectives: on the one hand the amazing expansion worldwide of the Pentecostal movement, and on the other hand the consolidation of trinitarian theology as a useful tool in the ecumenical dialogue in almost all ecclesiological, sociological, moral and, above all, missiological reflections. This comparatively new methodological paradigm was strongly proposed mainly (but certainly not exclusively) by the Orthodox, who are experiencing a renaissance in missionary activity. The trinitarian revolution in contemporary Christian theology, which was strongly felt across denominational boundaries--from post-Vatican II Catholicism to evangelicalism--was a rediscovery of the theology of the Holy Spirit of the undivided Christian church, and in fact a radical overcoming of the old medieval (but also later) Christocentric universalism that in some cases developed in a christomonistic imperialism and oppressive expansionism. The second parameter is an increasing awareness of the liturgical dimension of our Christian self-understanding. This is an awareness that has been underlined in post-modernity as an important element of the Christian witness, maybe not as central as the proclamation of the word, but certainly as a constitutive element the presence of the Word in our historical realities for the life of the world (John 6:51). …