Does mission flow from theology, or should theology flow from mission? Which came first chronologically (if there is chronology for such things), and which has primacy?

Andrew Jones is at camp, and asks this question based on something Alan Hirsch said here at Radical Congruency a few years ago:

Missiology or Theology? Chicken or the egg? Is missiology a slice of the theological cake or a foundational layer? And what about the sequence that goes missiology-christology-ecclesiology? Or as Alan Hirsch has laid it out, Christology-Missiology-Ecclesiology. How would you sequence it? link

Alan Hirsch said:

By my reading of the Scriptures, ecclesiology is the most fluid of the doctrines. The church is a dynamic cultural expression of the people of God in any given place. Worship style, social dynamics, liturgical expressions must the result from the process of contextualizing the gospel in any given culture. Church must follow mission. We engage first in incarnational mission and the church so to speak, comes out the back of it. But if it is consistent with incarnational practices, that church will take the shape of the cultural group it is trying to reach. Mission in the incarnational mode is highly sensitive to the cultural forms and rhythms of a people group because these are the means of meaningful relationship and influence. Incarnational mission thus engages people from within their cultural expression. Once this essential missional listening, observation, connecting, and networking has been done, then the forming of Jesus communities can take place. This is the only way to ensure that the Christian community truly incarnates itself and is fully contextualized. link

Rob, a commenter on Andrew’s post takes it to another level:

I’m glad someone mentioned Chris Wright’s The Mission of God in this thread. Wright argues, and I think convincingly, for the primacy of mission. If there were no mission, there would be no Scripture, indeed, no Christ.

And if one sees Mission as unfolding in the pageant of Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration then other themes come under this rubric somewhere.
…
Back to the first question, “Is Mission the Mother of Theology?” Perhaps the question is really one of perspective. In one sense, Theology Proper precedes mission, in that the providential purpose for mission proceeds from God himself prior even to creation. So if we approach the issue under the rubric of “Theology from Above,” then although the providential ordering of creation, fall, redemption and restoration is subsumed under the Mission of God, theology is primary.

If we are doing theology from below, with the camera here, though, Mission is primary, and becomes the lens through which we look at theology.

In either case, it would seem that God is logically prior to Mission. Yet theology, the study or knowledge of God, is not God himself. Any theology that attempts to know or apprehend God in himself risks being too speculative. God is apprehensible only insofar as he has revealed himself, and that revelation is always and ever subsumed under God’s mission of redemption and restoration.

…I would be inclined to conclude that in abstract terms Theology comes first. But if we are talking in concrete terms we can get our fingers on, then Mission is logically prior for our purposes, and arguably becomes the primary medium through which we apprehend God.

I appreciate Rob’s thinking here, but will go in a slightly different direction in addressing question of whether mission or theology is primary.

First, I agree that theology is primary. God, existing eternally in trinitarian community, is the beginning and the end. I do not think mission is the reason for Christ; that is, God did not come up with Christ because we screwed up and needed to be rescued. Paul says of Christ:

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Col 1:17

Second, I think the next movement, proceeding from an eternal trinitarian God, is creation. God created the world, including us, and it was good. This creation was and is continually a relational act - God created us to be in relationship with him, and that was and is good. But we too quickly forget this goodness and move on to “the fall,” which we pump up in importance because it somehow heightens our need for Christ and the redemption that he brings.

If we say that Christ is necessary only because of our sin and fall, we make our sin a requirement for Christ to reach out to us. I’d like to suggest instead that we are created for relationship, and that relationship has always been possible through covenant with God. The problem is that we fail to live up to the terms of the covenant, and screw up the relationship (just as we screw up relationships with one another).

Jesus is God saying to us that he will fix it, if we’ll let him. Sin or rebellion or evil or fallenness cannot be the determining factor; Christ triumphs over and trumps all of these. To again quote Paul:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8:38-39

Third, therefore, is redemption. We often look at the fall and redemption as singular, one-time events, the latter canceling our the former. Again, I think this is a mistake. We are perpetually in need of redemption and righting, and this is what God continually provides through Christ. The restoration of relationships among humans, and between humans and himself, is simply what God does as our Creator and as an inherently relational trinity.

That brings us to mission. Where does mission fit? We can either put it into some sequence like Christology > Missiology > Ecclesiology, or we can say mission is what’s behind the whole story, as Rob alludes to above.

I don’t think I can see mission as the whole deal, because that presupposes that God created us in such a way as to ensure that we would become estranged, so that he could then reach out to us and save us. If God’s clear purpose is to be in relation with us, there’s no inherent need for sin or mission - though sin and our voluntary estrangement from God do make mission necessary. That’s why it’s a good idea, as I said a long time ago, to let ecclesiology (the form our churches and structures take) flow from missional concerns.

But saying God’s mission to us is a practical necessity given the current state of humankind is different from saying the purpose of Christ or of scripture or of Israel is mission. Christ does not have a “purpose.” Our trinitarian God just is, always, and that is the fundamental fact of the universe as we know it.

EDIT: Cultural Savage suggests Christology> Pneumology> Missiology> Ecclesiology> Eschatology> Theology> Christology