Well, hello and welcome to another episode of
Oak Hill College's Deep Roots podcast, where
we bring you conversations to help you build
deep roots, to see you thrive in Christian life
and leadership, to see the church flourish in
the UK and around the world. My name is Chris
Howells. I serve at Oak Hill College as Director
of Cross -Cultural Training, and I'm delighted
to be joined today by Reverend Dr. Chris Wright.
Chris, thank you so much for joining us. familiar
with you through perhaps your preaching and teaching
ministry perhaps they're former students of yours
even and certainly through some of your many
books but for any of us who are not familiar
with who you are could you give us a little snapshot
of your current role and some of the journey
that has brought you to that Thank you, Chris.
It's great to be here and having a chat. Well,
the accent, by the way, in case anybody's wondering,
is from Northern Ireland. That's where I was
born and brought up, in Belfast. My current role
is with the Langham Partnership, which is a number
of ministries founded by John Stott. The word
Langham simply comes from Old Souls Church, Langham
Place, where he was as rector when he founded
the ministries. And I've been in this role now
with Langham for nearly 25 years, which is almost
half my working life. A bit scary to think of.
And how did I get there? Well, I did a PhD in
Cambridge. I was ordained in the Church of England,
served in a parish down in Tunbridge. Then with
my wife and young family, we went to India, taught
there for five years, teaching the Old Testament,
and then had 13 years, 13 wonderful years at
All Nations Christian College, which, as you
referred to some of my students, and possibly
some of them are listening if they remember me,
but those were good years at All Nations up the
road there at Easney. Thank you, Chris. And so
am I right that your role in Langham is as an
ambassador, no less? Could you give us a brief
overview of what that entails? What is it that
you are sort of seeking to achieve and foster
and catalyse through that Langham movement and
your role there? Yes, well, Langham itself is
basically ministries which are to resource and
serve the church outside the West. Our support
and our funding comes from Western countries
mostly at the moment, like UK and the US, Australia
and so on. But our ministries are in Africa,
Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the Pacific,
Caribbean. The global church, as some people
call it, or the majority world. And the ministries
are, first of all, Langham Scholarships, which
are for people to do a PhD and then return to
teach in seminary. So it's for theological education
and is strengthening that all around the world.
There are now nearly 400 Langham scholars teaching
around the world. And then the second program
is Langham Literature, which is not just providing
books for seminaries and libraries, but also
now is a major publisher of books by... majority
world authors so that the western church can
hear the voice of the global church which is
considerable and then also langham preaching
which is training for the skills of biblical
preaching and that's now operating in more than
100 countries my role was originally to be the
international director that's what john stott
asked me to take on from him back in 2001 And
I occupied that role, a kind of pooling the ministries
together, creating some organizational structure.
And I was doing that, yes, for about 20 years
or so. And then they have now appointed a new
international director who, thankfully, is not
a Westerner. He's an Arab. He's from Lebanon.
His name is Riyad Qasis, Reverend Dr. Riyad Qasis.
He's the international director, but they didn't
seem to want to kick me out. So they gave me
this title of international ambassador. I'm still
part of the leadership team, but I don't have
to run everything. I don't have to be managing.
I don't have to know everything that's going
on. I get to speak and write and do what I'm
doing now, which is tell people about the ministries.
Thank you so very much. We wish you well in all
that you're doing, you and your colleagues and
many partners through Langham. Thank you for
that ministry. One thing that we'd love to talk
about today with you, Chris, is a recent... book
that has been published of yours but of course
in some senses it's not recent because it is
the second edition that came out in late 2025
of your book The Mission of God so 20 years old
of course some books in the world land with a
splash but the the ripples kind of fade away
fairly quickly but this book is running and running
isn't it could you kindly give us a a little
bit of a a sense of A summary almost of what
the mission of God in all its 600 pages is about
a headline, so to speak, and why you think that
it still resonates so much 20 years later. Thank
you, yes. Yes, the title of the book is The Mission
of God. The subtitle is Unlocking the Bible's
Grand Narrative, which sort of says what it's
trying to do. Because The Mission of God is not
600 pages of my book, but whatever number of
pages are in the Bible, depending on which language
it's in. Because the book really originated from
my teaching at All Nations Christian College.
That's sort of the roots of it. Because when
I came there after teaching in India, I inherited
a course from Martin Goldsmith called The Biblical
Basis of Mission. And the basic idea was that
all these students have come to All Nations because
they're committed to mission. They know what
mission is, but they just need some Bible verses
and Bible teaching to sort of support the idea
of Christian mission. And what I told them after
a while of teaching, I said, what I really would
like to rename this course as the missional basis
of the Bible. Because it's not that we do mission
and we've got a few Bible verses to support it,
but rather that God is on mission and the whole
Bible is the record and the tool and the evidence,
the product. of the God who reveals himself in
the Bible. The God of the Bible is the God who
has a mission, he has a purpose, he has a plan,
which Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 verses 9 and
10 is to bring all things in the whole creation,
all things in heaven and earth into unity under
Christ and through Christ. And that creation
-wide, nation -wide vision of God's purpose in
Christ for the world is what drives the Bible
story forward. And I wanted this book, in a sense,
to help people to see that as they read the Bible,
they are entering into a narrative, a story,
which is the story of God, the true story of
the universe. So that's the reason for the title.
And that's what the book is trying to do in a
fairly lengthy way. But it's because the Bible
is a pretty big book. And we've got a pretty
big gospel and a very big God. So I don't apologize
for the fact that it's a big book. Thank you.
The sort of theological phraseology that's often
associated with what you've just outlined is
often called a missional hermeneutic or sometimes
missiological hermeneutic. I think many of our
listeners will be familiar with the idea of hermeneutics,
our interpretation, our systems of interpretation
of the scriptures. And many of our listeners
will, of course, be familiar with the basic paradigm
of mission and God's mission. And yet those two
things are rarely placed together. as you did
in the book, The Mission of God, and as you've
just outlined. And so what does it look like
to place those two things together? If we have
God's mission, how does that relate to how we
read and teach and understand the scriptures?
Thank you. Yes, well, that phrase, missional
hermeneutics, yeah, it's probably maybe 20, 30
years old. I only came across it after I'd started
writing this book. I was just trying to think
of what does it mean to read the Bible from the
perspective of looking at everything in the Bible
in the light of the God who reveals himself there
as the God with a plan and a purpose, and a God
who then creates a people. I mean, the point
is... We have a mission. We are a people of purpose.
And when I say we, I don't just mean us as Christians.
I mean the people of God who fill the pages of
the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. So if we're
going to think about who we are as Old Testament
Israel, as the people of God in the Messiah of
Israel, the people who are followers of Jesus.
We have to think of ourselves as those who are
called to participate in the plan and purpose
of God. So we have a mission because God is on
mission. And that's a fundamental point of the
book. So therefore, whenever we're reading the
Bible to ask ourselves, what should we do? How
should we live? What does God want of us? What
does God think of the rest of the world? What
is his purpose for the nations? All of those
questions we ask from the perspective of this
is the God who's revealing himself as being on
mission. It's a missional way of thinking. I
think with the church sometimes we don't ask
that question. Not just who are we as a church
and who's allowed to belong and are you Presbyterian
or Anglican and are you church down the road
or the church that we don't go to. We often ask
about the church in those kind of definitional
terms and forget to ask the more fundamental
question, which is, why is there a church at
all? Not just who are we, but what are we here
for? What's our reason for existence? I mean,
even in the secular world, we find now that more
and more institutions and organisations are...
creating so -called mission statements. I've
even seen one in a restaurant. You know, our
mission is, and then they say they're going to
feed you the best food. And you'd have thought,
we ought to know what the mission of a restaurant
is. But if you didn't... It might be helpful
if you come from Mars and you don't know what
a restaurant is, you see their mission. This
is why we're here. We're on this street because
we're going to provide food. So we should be
asking those kind of questions about ourselves.
What are we here for? And that's not just that
we're here to come to church on Sunday in order
that we can send a few people out to foreign
countries as missionaries and then say, that's
mission. They're doing it for us and we're paying
them. But rather we ask, yeah, but... Who are
we? Are we non -mission partners? Are we not
involved? Yes, we are. Because if we're in Christ,
we are disciples of the one who said, now look,
I am sending you into the world as the Father
sent me into the world, so go. Go and make disciples
of the nations. So that's a missional hermeneutic.
It's a way of reading and thinking about the
Bible, which I think goes along the grain of
the Bible. In other words, I think it's appropriate.
It's not an extraneous question. trying to relate
the bible to some other thing it's trying to
see the line and the purpose of the story itself
that this is what it's all about so chris if
one were to um want to do a bible study about
marriage for example we would no doubt use both
old and new testaments there'd be some key verses
that we pick out and we'd sort of put them together
into a coherent topic, topical teaching about
marriage. And that would be a perfectly valid
thing to do. But if I'm hearing you, what you're
suggesting is that actually mission is not quite
the same and it's not simply a theme that we
can extract from the scriptures as legitimate
a practice as that might be, but actually that
it is more than that. It is a lens by which we...
can or should understand and interpret the scriptures
if if that's the case what um what implications
might that have for a local church perhaps even
a local church leader who might be used to a
once a year mission sunday for example um but
actually What does it look like to really integrate
mission much more widely into our reading of
the scriptures? Yeah, thank you. That's a very
good way of asking the question. Because, as
you say, you could speak about there is a biblical
doctrine of marriage, but you wouldn't talk about
a marital basis of the Bible. I'm trying to say
it's not just that there is a biblical doctrine
of mission, but there is a missional basis of
the Bible, which is a much bigger claim. I quite
agree. I like your illustration of a lens. In
other words, what it's trying to say is if the
God whom we meet in the Bible is the God who
reveals himself from beginning to end as a purposeful
God. I mean, even we meet him in the first page,
Genesis 1. He is thinking, planning, deciding,
let's do this, let's do that, let there be. He
is a God of purposeful, systematic action, which
reaches a conclusion. He's evaluating it all
the way through, and he comes to the answer,
it's very good. So here is a God who's about
something, and it's about the whole universe.
It's not just about the rain or the weather or
sex. This is a God who is... involved in the
whole of life, the whole of creation, for which
he has a purpose. And I want to say, read the
Bible with that in mind, and it begins to turn
the sort of question we sometimes ask about the
Bible in a very typical, if I may say so, evangelical
way that I was brought up to do, which is that
you read a passage of the Bible and then you
ask the question, how does that apply to my life?
Please don't misunderstand me, that's a perfectly
good question to ask. We should be seeking to
apply the Bible. But the trouble is that that
can leave the Bible very bitty. Just, here's
another little bit, how does that apply? Here's
a nice promise, here's a command, I should be
doing that. And it all makes the Bible very adjectival.
It has to be biblical, but the centre is still
my life. I've got the Bible out there and God's
out there somewhere and I want to get them into
my life because my life is the center of reality
and so on. And what I want to ask is the other
way around. What does it mean to say it's not
so much that I am applying the Bible to my life
as to say, how do I apply my life into the Bible?
If the Bible is reality, if this is the story
of God. if this is the true story of what God
is about in the world, hey, please, can I be
in this? Can I be part of this? I want my life
to count in this story, not just the bits of
the Bible that mean something to me today, a
promise I can claim or a warning or a command,
but my whole life is now, in a sense, an actor,
a participant in the great drama and the great
story that God is leading all the way through.
So I begin to see mission as meaning me, being
in the Bible story for God's purposes and for
God's ultimate glory. And that gives great significance
to my life because it means I'm not just a tiny
little cog in a machine. I'm actually playing
a part in something that God is doing in the
world. My life will count for him. And in today's
world, where there's so much sense of meaninglessness,
and especially, I think, with younger people
just wondering, well, what's the point of having
a life in this great space -time universe, which,
you know, I'm so insignificant. And this way
of looking at the Bible says, that is reality.
That's God's truth. And you are significant when
you plug yourself into this story and participate
with God in this mission. That's a really beautiful
reflection. Thank you. This is so encouraging
and really delightful to hear and think about
what implications it would have for us in the
way we read our Bibles personally and, of course,
teach and preach the Scriptures as well. Chris,
there's a... A few verses from Luke's Gospel.
I'm actually just going to read a couple of verses
very quickly, if I may. I know you're familiar
with them. It's from Jesus' post -resurrection
appearance, just after he's met up with Cleopas
and his friends on the road to Emmaus. And Jesus
says to the disciples, This is what I told you
while I was still with you. Everything must be
fulfilled. that is written about me in the law
of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms. Then he
opened their minds so that they could understand
the scriptures. He told them, this is what is
written. The Messiah will suffer and rise from
the dead on the third day and repentance for
the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his
name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem. So
here's this remarkable moment where the post
-resurrection Jesus is opening the minds and
the scriptures, really, to the disciples. And
he points out to them that his summary of the
Psalms, the prophets, the law of Moses, his summary
is that it points to him, the Messiah. and the
mission that he is calling his people into. And
I think the way you've put it is that there is
a messianic reading of the scriptures, but therefore
a missional reading as well that Jesus is pointing
us to. Chris, could you outline a little bit
for us the difference between those two, how
they integrate as well? And I think... Maybe
we're better at one than the other. What would
your reflections be on that? Thank you. That
is such a wonderful passage, isn't it? Luke 24
is amazing. I mean, that's actually the second
lecture. That's the second Old Testament hermeneutics
lecture of the day, because the first is in the
all afternoon on the road to Emmaus with the
two disciples there. And he does the same thing.
How much we would love to have listened in on
that. And so here again is Jesus. By the way,
Chris, it's one of the encouraging things for
me is being an Old Testament teacher, to ask
the question, how did Jesus spend the first day
of his resurrection life? He spent it explaining
the Old Testament. Although, of course, it wasn't
known as the Old Testament. For him, it was simply
the scriptures, as it was for the disciples,
their scriptures. So that's the first thing to
say. He is opening their minds not to know the
scriptures. They already knew the scriptures.
He's offering them fundamentally. A messianic,
missional hermeneutic. He's saying, this is the
way to understand the Scriptures. And I've often
thought if we'd been there with the disciples,
we'd have had our notebooks out and we'd have
been saying, excuse me, Master, where is that
written? This is what is written. Well, what
are you quoting? Is this Isaiah? But Jesus is
not quoting any particular verse. He's saying,
this is the whole Scripture. is ultimately pointing
towards me as the messiah coming dying rising
again tick tick tick done you know but that's
not where he stops the scripture now is also
saying that repentance and forgiveness of sins
will be preached to all nations beginning in
jerusalem and the last that he says you didn't
mention it and you will be my witnesses which
is almost certainly a quote from Isaiah, that
one. God had said to the Israelites, you are
my witnesses that I am God. Jesus says to his
disciples, you will be my witnesses. Now, what's
the connection between these? We are often, as
you say, quite good at the messianic understanding
of the Old Testament because we can tick the
boxes. Born in Bethlehem, tick. He's the Messiah,
tick. We can connect Old Testament scriptures
to the identity of Jesus, but we forget, yes,
but, going back to my earlier question, who were
Israel and what were they there for? What was
the very reason why God created Israel in the
first place? And God says that very clearly to
Abraham, that through you, all nations will be
blessed, through you and your descendants. So
the people of Israel, one could say, had a mission.
Now, it wasn't a mission to go and be missionaries
to other nations. There were one or two people
who think that they should have done. I'm not
convinced. I don't think God meant the Israelites
to go off on mission trips. Well, except for
Jonah, I suppose, who was a... in the end quite
a successful missionary, even a very reluctant
one, and a very embarrassed one at the end. So
it's not that God was sending the Israelites
out to the nations, but he says, you will be
for me in the midst of the nations, my priesthood,
my holy nation, you will be the people who will
know the living God, and through you I will make
myself known to the nations. So Israel had this...
mission to live as God's people for the sake
ultimately of God bringing blessing to the nations.
So that's why Jesus says now that the Messiah
who embodies Israel, because let's remember that
the Messiah was not just the anointed one, he's
the king, he is Israel in a sense. He's sent
to Israel, but like the servant, he is the servant
who embodies the reality of God's people, Israel.
He has now completed the mission that God gave
to him. He's borne the sin of the world on the
cross. He's defeated death. He's risen again.
And now he's saying, now this reconstituted people
of God, the people that you are now as my disciples,
you must now continue the mission of Israel.
You must now go where the scriptures said this
story is going. He knows the story he's in. He's
saying, the scriptures say this. Here we are,
Messiah, now is the time for this to go to the
nations. Repentance, forgiveness of sins, you
will be my witnesses, and so they go. And so
that's why I would say that Luke 24 is, in a
sense, Jesus authorizing a missional hermeneutic
of the Old Testament scriptures. Read those scriptures
as that which points to Christ, yes, but also
that which points to mission to the ends of the
earth. And in my book, a large proportion of
the book is actually Old Testament. But so was
my course, and I used to teach it at All Nations.
I think about six or seven of the ten lectures,
we hadn't even got out of the Old Testament.
So we don't just start with the Great Commission.
We look at the whole flow of the story all the
way through, which is ultimately leading to the
nations. And so, Chris, I think the way that
many of us in our churches operate... consciously
maybe subconsciously is that once or twice a
year we might have a sunday often called world
mission sunday or something like that where we
hope that there'll be such a kind of Filling
up of the missions buckets in our church. For
the next 51 weeks, it's kind of as it starts
to leak out and dissipate, we'll have enough
there to keep us going until next year's Mission
Sunday. And then we'll come back to another familiar,
often New Testament passage, commonly maybe Matthew
28 or Acts 1 or something like that. And again,
there's validity, there's legitimacy to that.
That's not a disaster, is it? But actually, I
think what you're hinting at here is that...
a sense if we're reading and teaching the scriptures
as jesus read and taught them every week in a
sense is a mission sunday and it's not trying
to fill people up once a year it's actually trying
to keep on feeding people through the normal
week by week teaching of the scriptures yeah
exactly and i think please again don't misunderstand
me i have nothing whatsoever against world mission
sundays But I would like the word world or cross
-cultural or international to be in there because
when we have a so -called a mission Sunday and
we rightly want to pray for and support and give
towards the support of whoever we may have appointed
or sent or encouraged or on quotes the mission
field in some other part of the world or some
other part of this country, that is right and
good to do and we should be doing that. But I
remember the day that Hugh Palmer once said,
on a World Mission Sunday, Hugh Palmer was the
Rector of All Souls for years, and he said, you
know, this church sends out 1 ,500 mission partners
every week, which was the approximate membership
of the church. And then he added, and some of
them are serving overseas. And of course, what
he meant was every Sunday when we go out the
doors of the church, we are entering the mission
field. We are going into the world where Jesus
sends us. We're going as those who now, as it
were, have embraced the kingdom of God and we're
going into the kingdoms of the world. We are
those who are people of belief and faith into
a world of unbelief. And that is the front line.
And so therefore, you're right. the people of
God to gather, to worship and praise the living
God and be renewed in their faith and their love
for God, which is a huge motivation for mission.
and also to be equipped to live as saints in
the world, whether that is in professions or
business or as a street sweeper or as a school
dinner lady or as a parent or whatever it is,
what God has put you in, that is where your front
line is, that is where you are to live for God.
And the job of the pastor is to equip you for
that ministry and that mission. I've sometimes
said on Mission Sundays to the congregation,
I hope you don't think that you come to church
every Sunday to support the vicar in his ministry.
Because it's precisely the other way around,
according to Ephesians 4, when Paul says that
God has gifted the church with apostles and prophets
and pastor teachers, the pastors of the church,
to equip the saints for works of ministry. So
his job is to come to church every week to equip
you for your ministry. You are the ones who are
in the world, engaged in God's mission, wherever
you are. So part of the burden of my book is
that mission is not just an agenda for a professional
class. quotes of missionaries though again don't
misunderstand we need missionaries and they're
important and God calls some people to do that
and we need to pray and support them but that
mission is for the whole church as a church we
are called to be missional and as a church therefore
every church member is called to be engaged with
God wherever they are And the role of the church
on Sunday is to equip, motivate, inspire, renew,
bring us back into that mode of existence as
God's people in God's world for God's purpose.
And yeah, that would be my burden. Chris, in
the final few minutes we've got... There will
be some listeners who this very week are preparing
maybe talks or sermons, maybe Bible studies or
Sunday school talks and so on. There'll be plenty
of listeners who are reading their Bibles regularly
for themselves as well. As our listeners do that
going forward, what are the kind of questions...
that you would encourage them to ask of any scripture
whether it be new testament or indeed old as
we've been discussing um that would help them
to recognize where that scripture is in in god's
story in god's mission story and our participation
in that what does it look like to approach the
scriptures ready to teach or learn from them
with with this kind of big picture missional
lens in mind. Is there any kind of practical
advice you might be able to offer in that? Thanks,
Chris. Yeah, well, I used to sometimes give talks
on a missional reading of Jeremiah or a missional
reading. I developed a kind of a group of questions
which I find helpful. The first one is, where
is this in the story? You hinted at that. When
we look at a passage of the Old Testament or
whatever, we should be saying, where does this
fit into the grand narrative of God's purposes
in creation and new creation? Where are we in
the story? That's an important question to ask
because that will help to locate the text. in
the missional context of the people of God at
that time, who may be in a wonderful situation
or may be in a disaster situation, whatever it
is. And then there are two other questions about
the God of mission. What does this book or this
text... How does it show me the God of purpose?
What is God doing here? What is he saying here?
How do I see God at work? And does this connect
with the way God has acted in the past? Or does
it point to the way God is going to act in the
future? So explore the text theologically, looking
for God. But then also in this text will be the
people of God, because that may be Old Testament
Israel or the disciples or the New Testament
church. And if God's people are called to be
on mission for God, how does this text help to
shape them, to rebuke them, to challenge them,
to show them what God is about and to call them
to participate with him? So what is it about
God's people in this text that relates to the
kind of people we should be if we're going to
be faithful to God and maybe need the rebuke
or the challenge or the encouragement of this
text? And then two other questions. Because mission
is basically about the gospel, the good news
of God, God is on mission. Because he's a good
God and he wants to bring redemption. And good
news is all over the Bible. It's not just quotes
in the Gospels. The God of the whole Bible is
the God who is constantly acting for people's
salvation or redemption or rescue. Even when
they anger him, he judges them, but he comes
in mercy. He's the God of salvation. So in this
text, there's just something that speaks of the
Gospel in the broadest way, the good news of
God. And alongside that, of course, is the other
side of that core in the dark side. is what in
this text is revealing the reason why we need
a gospel? So what can we see here of the radical
diagnosis of sin that the Bible offers? What
is the problem that mission is solving? So a
text will often expose sinfulness in multiple
dimensions and then we can see the bigness of
the gospel related to that. So those are some
of the questions I would ask. And then to go
on to some sense, is there anything in this text
which points to God's universal plans for the
nations? Sometimes this may be a text which includes
the nations. A lot of the Psalms do. It's amazing
how many of the Psalms speak about the whole
earth and all nations and all peoples. Well,
take that seriously and ask, what is it saying
about the peoples of the earth? How does it speak
of them? And does this show something of God's
heart and plan ultimately for the nations? So
in those ways, I think we can ask questions.
which just get at reading the text conscious
of the fact that this is part of a big story
in which God is bringing about the salvation
of the world through the Messiah Jesus ultimately
leading to the new creation and then just getting
into the habit of asking those kinds of questions
won't always get an easy answer but just asking
the questions puts the lenses on and will sometimes
help you to see things that you might not have
seen before Thank you, Chris. Mission of God
as a book was released 20 years ago. Wonderfully,
a second edition was commissioned and has now
been released. Could you tell us a little bit,
what's the difference between the first and second
editions and what was it that prompted you to?
to go, to update it? Well, the first thing to
say is I haven't changed my mind or anything.
It's not revised in that sense. I used to say
I'm revising the mission of God and things very
arrogant. I'm not changing anything. I think
several things. One, it's 20 years. Well, 20
years is a long time in scholarship. So there's
been a lot of books written on the missional
hermeneutic over those years and I needed to
take them into account. The reason I wanted to
do it was because I was asked actually, IVP,
the publisher, asked me quite a few years ago
to do a second edition because... It has, by
God's grace, started to get used as a textbook.
So there's quite a lot of seminaries, Bible colleges
around the world who have picked it up as a book
that's useful for students. And if a book is
going to go on being useful for students, it
needs to be updated with its bibliography so
that they can see. So there's a lot more bibliography,
a lot more footnotes, a lot more engagement with
scholarship. But there are also one or two things
I wanted to clarify. I think some people had
misunderstood my broad understanding of mission
as somehow detracting from the importance of
the gospel and evangelism. And that's very far
from the case. So I wanted to make a whole chapter
on what does it mean to have a gospel -centered,
holistic, integral mission in which we are engaged
in society, in works of love, compassion, justice,
all the things that the Bible talks about, but
we do it around the gospel. And so there's a
chapter on that. And then there's another chapter
which was added because some people were saying
that... By saying that God created Israel for
the sake of being blessing to the nations means
that once Jesus comes, there's no more purpose
for God for Israel or for the Jews. classic name
for that is supersessionism or replacement theology
and I just wanted to say that's not what I believe
we need to think more clearly about the relationship
between God's election of Israel and the Old
Testament what the Apostle Paul says about the
Jewish people in Romans 9 to 11 and so on and
to be careful to distinguish those things from
the Jewish people as a whole in today's world
and the modern state of Israel which is another
matter altogether so I just felt there needed
to be a chapter which addressed some of those
issues to clear up some of the, not just misunderstanding,
but some of the ways in which I think I'd been
misinterpreted as well by other scholars. Thank
you so much. I'm very pleased to say that I'll
be teaching from that book this coming week for
our first year as we use it here and there in
different parts of our modules and curriculum
here. And it continues to be a blessing to us.
Thank you so much for the vast amount of scholarly
insights and careful biblical thought that you
have put into that book in order to bless the
church more widely. So we're grateful for that.
Final question, Chris, as this new edition of
the Mission of God comes out. Just briefly, what
would you like to say? would you love to see
in the next 20 years with regards to this book,
but perhaps more widely the field itself? Where
are we going here? Well, I think the field is
flourishing. As I say, there are a lot of people
now picking up the idea of missional hermeneutics
in a way that wasn't the case 20 -something years
ago, which I'm grateful for. I think what I'm
seeing is a number of people who are picking
up the idea of a missional hermeneutic and applying
it to particular books of the Bible. So I'm seeing
in our books a missional reading of... Amos or
of the Proverbs or whatever it is and that's
encouraging because people and I sort of putting
on the lens what will it do how will it affect
it doesn't change our in a sense our understanding
the Bible the Bible is still God's word it still
needs to be preached in its in its simple you
know, the wonderful word of God. But this is
just a way sometimes of seeing things that we
may not have seen before. And I think there'll
be more and more of that kind of textual, exegetical
work with a missional lens, and that's good.
So I'm pretty encouraged at the way it's going,
but I'm more concerned that people, maybe some
pastors can take up this book, but I do have
one or two others, like The Great Story and The
Great Commission, which is a much smaller book.
and maybe much more accessible for average church
groups to say, well, what is our mission as a
church? The Great Story and the Great Commission,
putting the two things together. is a more popular
level book. That's right. The Mission of God,
for all its sort of massive magnificence, is
large. And it may not be for everyone to easily
get into that and digest it, but there's other
resources you've produced that slim down that
a little bit. And I have a website as well. I
hesitate to say because I didn't really want
to, but Langham insists because all my royalties
go to Langham. So I've got a website, which is
just my name, Christopher J. H. Wright. And that's
got all my books on it. all my sermons and everything
else. So ChristopherJHWright .com will get you
through to more than everything I've done in
life. Well, thank you so very much for all that
you have done and continue to do. We pray that
the Lord richly blesses you in those many ministries
that you are continuing with, not least your
writing in this area of missional hermeneutics.
We wish you all the very best for the future,
Chris. Thank you so much for coming on to Oak
Hill College's Deep Roots podcast and sharing.
wisely with us we're really grateful listeners
thank you so very much for joining us for this
episode and we look forward to seeing you again
in an upcoming episode soon blessings thank you