A Negligible Rock, or the Chief Cornerstone?

On Mission: A Dialogue with John Zizioulas

Abstract

In several places of his magnificent work John Zizioulas argued that mission does not belong to the very self of the Church. For him mission is historically conditioned, which means that it is only a transient activity, in sharp juxtaposition to the eschatological identity of the Church event. The following paper questions this approach on the basis that, since the Church is not the Kingdom of God, but the sign—the foretaste and the manifestation—of the Kingdom, she not only has a mission, but she is mission. Zizioulas’s brilliant emphasis on the Church’s task to transfigure the world and history is in reality an affirmation of the missionary nature of the Church; however, he remained impressively negative towards missionary engagement, in the sense that he conceived it as a Protestant emphasis on preaching which undervalues the sacraments and has an antagonistic attitude toward the Eucharist. This dichotomy does not do justice to a holistic understanding of mission as the symbiosis of action and sacrament. This paper articulates certain objections to Zizioulas’ approach, claims that ontology has to take seriously into account the activity of God in history (activity which is the foundation of mission, i.e., the establishment of the Church as co-worker with God), shows that the Eucharist includes the missionary impulse, and asserts that not only the Eucharist but also praxis (the loving move of the faithful toward the other, and solidarity with the broken) are in history icons of, and witness to, the eschatological Kingdom.