The issues Benjamin H. Kim raises concerning mission and its relation to the missio Dei are the questions being asked by thoughtful missiologists and especially theologians of mission. . . . It carries the missio Dei argument forward to its next stage of development and to a deeper level, with consequences for how we see the church and its mission. All missiologists and theologians of mission should be interested in this book.
— W. Ross Hastings, Regent College
In this systematic work, Benjamin H. Kim adds significantly to the debate on the twentieth-century origins of the problematic concept of missio Dei. By appropriating Barth's theology of revelation through Bonhoeffer's explication of "person," Kim offers a fecund mission theology of the church community being Christ's body with and for the world.
— Kirsteen Kim, Fuller Theological Seminary
There is no theologian of the twentieth century who diagnosed the significance of the current context for the church as well as Bonhoeffer and in so thoroughly a theological way. Benjamin H. Kim draws out the deep theological logics of Bonhoeffer’s work for a theological account of mission. His work is scholarly, ecclesial, and – most importantly – timely.
— Tom Greggs, FRSE, Marischal Chair (1616) and Head of Divinity, University of Aberdeen
While acknowledging that what has come to be the dominant paradigm in missiological thinking and theologizing for the past 75 years, the concept of missio Dei, needs to be reevaluated and reassessed, Kim has creatively done this through a sustained and serious engagement with the writings of Barth and Bonhoeffer, whose own views come across with surprising freshness and vitality when viewed through the lens of acknowledging mission in terms of the gathered community testifying to the abiding presence of Christ, with whom they “exist with and for others."
— Rev. J. Jayakiran Sebastian, United Lutheran Seminary
The expansion of its conceptual lexicon is one of the most urgent tasks facing missiology. Benjamin Kim’s development of Bonhoeffer’s idea of person makes a welcome contribution to this task. Much of the talk of “being” and “act” has tended to remain abstract and without clear paths for translation into missionary practices. Kim aids that work of translation by locating the formal language within the framework of the relationality of persons. The result is a conceptual framework which moves beyond traditional anthropological and ecclesiocentric points of departure, to locating mission in God’s ongoing self-revelation in history and so in the eschaton. We need more of this type of work!
— John G. Flett, Pilgrim Theological College