Amos Yong, The Missiological Spirit: Christian Mission Theology in the Third Millennium Global Context (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), xvi + 275 Pps., $33.00.
Amos Yong is Professor of Theology and Mission and the Director of the Center for Missiological Research at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is the author and editor of more than two dozen books, including Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor (2008). This book is a companion to his The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method in the Third Millennium (Cascade, 2014).
This title is a companion to Yong’s other 2014 volume, The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method for the Third Millennium (Cascade Books, 2014). Herein, Yong notes that the last two-to-three decades have witnessed a renewal of missiology. This book enters into the theology of mission, accentuating how the Christian theological enterprise as a whole can be understood from a Missiological perspective. The four parts of this title work from explicitly missiological concerns toward reconsiderations of aspects of the systematic and dogmatic theological landscape. The thesis of this volume is that the Missiological compulsion of the twenty-first century global and pluralistic context can be invigorated by a pneumatological imagination derived from the Day of Pentecost narrative, and can not only inspire more faithful witness but also be a resource for Christian theology of mission for the third millennium. It provides an autobiographical perspective on this matter, following out the thread of Yong’s thinking about Pentecostal faith and Christian mission in a pluralistic world.
Part 1, “Reluctant Missiology: Christian Mission’s Irrepressibility,” notes that Pentecostal spirituality generates a distinctive hermeneutic, method, and imagination that revolves around encountering the living God through the Spirit, and this spirituality of encounter has the potential to revitalize and renew Christian theology for the third millennium. Yong considered his work in the period covered by this section of the book to be demarcated by the fields of religious studies and systematic theology, rather than that of missiology. However, the missiological character of the Christian theological task was not marginalized by these early works reprinted in this section of the book. He does not urge an untenable universalism or a naïve syncretism of Christianity and other faiths, but urges us to think theologically through the fact of religious plurality and its implications for Christian self-understanding and mission.
Part 2, “Pentecostal Missiology: Missiological Praxis,” is comprised of three chapters, and reflects Yong’s thinking regarding Christian missiology from a distinctively Pentecostal perspective. It notes that all Christian theology is missionally-related in some respect, and therefore Christian missiology is also fundamentally theological. He suggests that what may be called a performative theology of interfaith encounter is conducive to emphasizing the work of the Spirit in enabling relationships between people of different faiths. The fifth chapter is co-authored with Tony Richie, and seeks to elucidate Pentecostal theology as it transects with theology of religions and comparative theology.
The third part, “North American Missiology: Mission Post-Christendom,” have their locus in the North American setting of Pentecostal theology, rather than a global one. This part reflects Yong’s own diasporic identity as an Asian American theologian, born and raised in Malaysia, but present in the USA since his middle school years. These chapters deal with the post-Western, post-Enlightenment, and postcolonial realities as played out specifically in North America. Part 4, “Systematic Missiology: Toward a Missiological Theology,” is similarly comprised of three chapters. As a systematician, Yong appreciates how Christian theology is mission-minded. These chapters, more or less, provide a pneumatological theology of mission famed by the classical history of salvation Christian narrative, explicate a pneumatological Christology of mission, and proffer a Trinitarian vision of contemporary global mission.
What emerges from this book is a distinctively pentecostally- and evangelically-informed missiological theology, one rooted in the Christian salvation-history narrative of Incarnation and Pentecost that is yet open to the world in its many and various realities. The argument moves through dialogical engagements with the work of others, concrete case studies, and systematic theological reflection. The central thesis and argument of this book is that only a pneumatological imagination can secure the Trinitarian vision that empowers missional performance among the many tongues of the many missionary contexts. I recommend this title without hesitation to all comers.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary