Review of Morna Hooker and Frances Young's "Holiness and Mission"

A renowned New Testament scholar and an eminent theologian deliver a series of lectures on Mission and Holiness, looking for lessons for today’s church from the remarkable growth of Christianity in the urban centres of the Roman empire.   Intriguing.

Morna Hooker, offers an account of mission in the scriptures from Israel through Jesus to the New Testament church.  She detects a common thread originating in the call to God’s people to be Holy as God is holy.   This Holiness is social holiness, a particular people living an ethically distinct life in the midst of other peoples, thus pointing to the reality of God and offering an embodied invitation to come, know and worship.  Words alone, whether proclamation or personal testimony, aren’t enough.  Witness is dependent on corporate godliness, ecclesial bodying forth of Christ the God-revealer.

According to Hooker, living the holy life in a city offers particular challenges.  The Bible is ambivalent about urban living.  From Babel through Babylon to Rome the city is a place of alienation, corruption and hubristic rejection of God.  Both Jesus and his followers meet the challenge of urban godlessness and in so doing offer a challenge to the cities that sought their death.  Yet in the vision of Zion restored and Babylon/Rome become the heavenly Jerusalem, scripture offers us assurance that God isn’t done with the metropolis.  So, the church today is called to meet the challenge of the city and to offer a challenge to the city by living otherwise, thus pointing to the promise of the city, God’s promise.

In her treatment of early church growth Frances Young also emphasises the significance of holiness, the quiet, distinctive, engaged presence of the first Christian communities.  She recognises that early Christian mission took many forms including demonstrations of power through exorcism and healing, remarkable confidence in the face of death and verbal announcement of gospel.  But it is the presence of Christian networks both like and unlike Roman institutions, quietly overlapping the structures of society and offering a place to belong, a sense of identity, practical care and a distinctive philosophy that gets most of the credit.  The church grew because it was an articulate, attractive anomaly.

Young then ventures beyond Constantine when the booster rocket of state of approval carried church growth into stratospheric dimensions.  She offers us a welcome, nuanced rendition of an oft told story – church moving from household to basilica, from lifestyle to religion, from radical alternative to the mainstream, from simplicity to flamboyant dazzle.  Mission becomes enculturation and growth through conquest; organic, grass-roots life becomes top-down establishment and as society is Christianised, the church is de-Christianised.

And the implications for today?  What is called for is an integration of verbal witness and embodied witness, rooted in social holiness.  We could do worse than allow Marshall McLuhan to provide commentary on Leviticus:  be holy as I am holy – the medium is the message.

All in all then not a bad little book.  Not bad, but not great.  I can find nothing with which to take exception in Hooker and Young’s exposition and I approve their central message but I’d hoped for more.  A book by these two commended heartily by James Dunne and David Ford is one that I was eager to read but one that taught me very little.  All too familiar.  I was much more impressed by the Kreiders’ Worship and Mission after Christendom which tells a similar story and offers a similar vision.  Still, I’ll probably use Hooker and Young as a set text for my first year course on mission.  It’s short, clearly written, reliable and makes some important points; ideal for those beginning to study missiology.  If that’s how you see yourself, go ahead but if you want more than an introduction I’d look elsewhere.

This review was originally written for Regent's Reviews and is reproduced here with permission of the editor.  Check out the web site to get a free pdf of a whole bunch of reviews.