Seeking unity in mission and peace

Beautiful Upon the Mountains: Biblical Essays on Mission, Peace, and the Reign of God Mary Schertz and Ivan Friesen, editors. Herald Press, 2003. 270 pages.

Beautiful Upon the Mountains is the seventh book in the Studies in Peace and Scripture series. This collection of essays, which would be difficult to analyze in a short piece such as this, seeks to show that in the breadth and depth of the biblical canon there is a unity in evangelism and social action. While not casual reading, these essays “represent the foundational scrutiny and intense self-questioning that are basic to more popular articulations of the relationship between mission and peace” (xiii), and are examples of rigorous biblical scholarship, by scholars who are themselves committed church people, searching for ways to integrate the fruit of scholarship into faithful personal and church life.

The book contains six Old Testament and eight New Testament essays, some dealing with brief passages (Isaiah 2:2–5, Micah 4:1–4) or an entire book of the Bible (Matthew, Revelation). Of special interest to readers of the Herald might be the essays by Gordon Matties (CMU) and Gary Yamasaki (CBC). Matties’s essay deals with God’s reign and the missional impulse of the psalms, in which he argues that the psalms offer resources for the shaping of the identity and mission of the people of God. Yamasaki’s essay, described as an audience-oriented critical analysis of Luke 2:8–14, shows in the familiar account of the angel’s visitation to the shepherds prior to Jesus’ birth how the coming of Jesus proclaims a message transcending any barrier that might exist between those who focus on peace and justice and those who focus on evangelism.

This book is a valuable resource for fostering a biblically-based peaceful imagination.

Paul Doerksen is a Ph.D. candidate in theological ethics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.