It’s a really great book and am glad I read it! This is the set text for Mission Foundations at college. It paints a sweeping picture of God’s saving activity across the stages of salvation history but also gives a good level of detail at each.

The section on intertestamental Jewish missionary endeavour made convincing use of the historical data (they argue that there was not organised, systematic evangelisation by 2nd temple Jews) and the investigation of what each gospel writer contributes individually to a theology of mission was great. For me the gold was the language of inclusion/ingathering. The OT presents Israel as under a general mandate to include (which happens in a few cases – ruth, rahab etc) but with Jesus death and resurrection a new eschatalogical age of ingathering has begun. The key is to realise that this is exactly what Isaiah’s ‘servant’ would do (cf. Is 56 esp v8).

Another bonus, the book has an excellent synthesis/conclusion chapter which gives you the whole book in a few short pages.

So #4 on the list is done!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Reuben & Jodie's Blog, The list, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.