Dunn, James D.G. – Call to Discipleship

Jesus’ Call to Discipleship
James D.G. Dunn

Paperback: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 241pp.

Introduction

James D.G. Dunn is a widely regarded New Testament scholar, and in this slim volume he explores the dynamics of the sort of discipleship into which Jesus called his disciples. “[Any] understanding of what discipleship of Jesus is and involves,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “must surely take its lead from the discipleship to which he actually called followers during his life and ministry” (2). Dunn is quick to clarify though that our discipleship today is not a “mere imitation” of this discipleship that Jesus offered, but rather must take Jesus’ account seriously and discern its meaning in our present world.

Jesus’ Call to Discipleship undertakes three main tasks: 1) understanding Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God; 2) asking the question: “To whom was Jesus’ call to discipleship primarily directed? and 3) exploring the communal nature of the call of discipleship as Jesus offered it. Although these tasks don’t line up cleanly with the key practices of Live the Word, Dunn offers a rich feast here for those who desire to live the Word.

Active Disciple-making

Disciple-making is the primary theme of this book, and in particular, the question of how Jesus made disciples. First, Jesus’ work of making disciples was guided by his sense that the kingdom of God is at hand, or as Dunn emphasizes, that God’s reign is at hand in such an imminent way that “made it impossible for those who attended to what [Jesus] said to ignore that rule or effectively to push it to the margins of their lives” (12). The presence of God in the world in this way also highlighted the urgency of the work of making disciples. Pointing to this urgency in the parables of Jesus, Dunn writes: “Jesus took the prospect of divine judgment on human action and attitude with the utmost seriousness. He portrayed it as an imminent crisis which demanded immediate response. He made his hearer aware that any presupposition that life would simply carry on in its normal course was a dangerous and likely to be fatal delusion” (17). Given the urgency of God’s reign breaking into the world, the response that Jesus expected was repentance, which to his Jewish hearers would mean something akin to “’turn round’ and head in a quite new direction” (20). Dunn summarizes the sort of active disciple-making that Jesus taught and practiced:

In short, what Jesus called for was not just belief, not just verbal assent to some creedal formula, but trust, trust in God. What he sought to encourage in his disciples was an attitude, an orientation of life, a worldview or mind-set rooted in their innermost being, a base-rock conviction; and not an attitude or conviction which could be cherished inwardly or privately without making a discernible difference to the rest of life, but an attitude which informed and infused everything else, every other attitude and action, a fundamental conviction that motivated and gave character to the whole range of daily living and relationships (29-30).

Radical Kinship

Although Jesus’ Call to Discipleship is primarily about the practice of active disciple-making, a substantial portion of the book (two of its five chapters) is devoted to the people on the margins who constituted the primary focus of Jesus’ disciple-making work – specifically, the poor and those on the margins of first-century Jewish society who would have generally been deemed “sinners.” Both of these groups are not likely ones that most religious people – in the first century or today – want to seek and initiate friendships with, but they are the ones to whom Jesus was most attracted as he sought to proclaim the in-breaking of God’s reign and to make disciples. Jesus, Dunn observes, followed the ancient Israelite teachings of the Law and the Prophets in his understanding of the central role of the poor in the life of God’s people. God is the champion of the poor, the Hebrew Scriptures emphasize at every turn, and thus God’s people have an obligation to care and provide for the poor. Similarly, one of the most frequent themes of the Prophets was the call to cease oppression of the poor.

The sort of radical kinship that Jesus proclaimed, in which the poor and non-poor were drawn together, was rooted, Dunn notes, in the conviction that: “Discipleship of Jesus begins with the poor, with being poor, with recognizing one’s own poverty” (59, emphasis in original). Similarly, it was not just the poor to whom Jesus oriented his disciple-making, but also to sinners, those who were – for whatever reason – outside the boundaries of faithful Judaism. Radical kinship flowed from love of one’s neighbor, the central lens through which the Ancient Israelite law was to be viewed. Jesus, Dunn writes, “set forth love of neighbor as a principle which showed how the law should be observed in the light of circumstances, rather than as a rule to be obeyed whatever the circumstances” (84, emphasis in original). Love of neighbor also cultivated a readiness to forgive in the heart of the disciple of Jesus. Dunn makes a compelling case that Jesus was a boundary-breaker, and that a significant part of discipleship to Jesus is following him in boundary-breaking. By embracing the poor and the sinner, as Jesus did, we begin to cultivate the sort of radical kinship that is at the heart of the way of Jesus.

Table Fellowship

One crucial way in which we practice the boundary-breaking love of Jesus, Dunn observes, is table fellowship. Dunn explores briefly the ways in which table fellowship was practiced in first century Judaism. He particularly emphasizes that among the Pharisees table fellowship was often a ritual of purity. “For at least some of the Pharisees,” he writes,” the meal table was precisely the point at which their attempt to maintain the purity of the temple in their daily life was most at risk” (74). He concludes: “Jesus’ practice of table-fellowship was not only an expression of the good news of God’s kingly rule. It was also an implicit critique of a Pharisaic definition of acceptability, of a Pharisaic practice which classified many fellow Jews as sinners, effectively outside the law and the covenant, like the Gentiles ‘without God in the world.’ What to many Pharisees was a sinful disregard for covenant ideals was for Jesus an expression of the gospel itself” (76). The table was, for Jesus, a place at which boundaries were broken and people at odds with one another were reconciled.

Jesus’ Call to Discipleship is a brief book, but it is an important one, drawing upon the Gospel accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus to bring into focus what disciple-making (and discipleship) in the way of Jesus looks like. It is therefore a valuable resource for those who seek to understand what it means to live the Word.