which mission rests. If there is but one God, then He is the God
Pauline Motives for the Christian Mission 73
Motive is defined as "any consideration... moving the will." 1
If the will of the Church is to be moved to purse he mission task before her, she must reexamine those "considerations" which
initially turned the Church out toward the whole world. All of the objections stated above, save interference with international rela-
tions, were as valid in the first century as in the twentieth.? And
yet, "the history of the New Testament is a history of missions." * We turn to Paul, the greatest missioner of them all, to search for
the motives which made this so.
The Self-Revelation of God
To Paul, mission was involved in the fact that God had revealed Himself. Paul was "a Hebrew born of Hebrews" (Phil. 3:5). To him, Israel was God's "people," "the natural branches" of the tree of God's promise into which the Gentiles had been "grafted" (Rom.
11:17 ff.). His description of them even after he became a Christian—"They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the
glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ" (Rom. 9:4 f.)—indicate that Paul's faith was not a reaction against Judaism but an outgrowth of it. The Church, according to Paul, was the true Israel, the heir of ancient Israel's mission. What Paul knew, therefore, of the God who had revealed Himself in the history of His people was basic to his understanding of his mission as a Christian.
1. The revelation of God as one is the ultimate foundation on which mission rests. If there is but one God, then He is the God of all men. How early a clearly defined monotheism developed
is debatable, but it is now plain that its roots go back into the earliest stages of Israel's history and underlie her whole development.* The patriarchal stories Bugle God's call of Abraham — from a missionary perspective: "in you all the families of the earth
will be blessed" (Gen. 12:3, R.S.V. margin). Amos brought non-
1 Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition, 3 unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: G. C. Merriam Company, 1947).
2 Cf. Robert E. Speer, Some Living Issues (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1930), pp. 224 ff.
* John Bright, The Kingdom of God (New York and Nashville: AGivedoe Cokesbury Press, 1953), p. 257. oo *Cf. John Bright, op. cit., pp. 24 ff.; H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel er (Denlon: SCM Press, 1956), pp. 71 ff.