God Draws Near: Rethinking the Biblical Theology of Mission

by Collin Cornell

In God Draws Near, Old Testament expert and missiologist Collin Cornell challenges conventional thinking about the theology of mission. The prevailing paradigm has been of a single grand story encompassing creation, fall, and redemption. The understanding of God's mission that follows is that of rescue or repair. In the first part of the book, Cornell interacts with and critiques this line of thinking, pointing out how it influences our interpretation of the canon of Scripture, our view of Israel, and even how we view Christ and his incarnation. These problems have consequences for mission practice.

Cornell then offers a new model for the biblical theology of mission, recentering it on God's purpose to draw near to creatures out of love and delight. The Song of Songs provides a key inspiration. Cornell argues that rather than being linear, the Bible is geometric, flowing outward from God's presence in the tabernacle in the Old Testament and in Christ in the New. This perspective honors God's relationship with Israel and keeps Christ at the center of God's work in the world.

God Draws Near will be of use to students, pastors, mission workers and educators, and interested lay readers. Even those who disagree with Cornell's approach and conclusions will need to grapple with his critiques and proposals.

224 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2025

Reviews

[Daniel Rempel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three cheers for mission as communion!

As an outsider to the biblical theology of mission, many of the finer missiological bits did not immediately resonate with me. However, it is easy to look past the missiological foregrounding and see the importance of this project for all students of the Bible, and thus all Christians.

The message of the Bible is truly that God draws near, and in this drawing near God delights in God’s own creation. This is, indeed, good news!

[Victoria (TheMennomilistReads) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like there is a lot of pressure on me right now, as the first reviewer for this book on Goodreads, but I need to express my thoughts freely on what I think of this book. I am really glad that Baker Academic & Brazos Press sent this to me to review.

I really love theological books and learning more deeply about God and what He teaches people about Himself and His Son. This book was sadly, a bit dry and boring with too many gigantic words that "simple people" such as myself will have to look up and research (and thankfully I am a researcher).

In this book, it just seems like there is an overemphasis on comparing the thoughts of Arthur Glasser, Christopher J. H. Wright, and Michael Goheen. I didn't know who these people were at all. This book definitely is for the use of people who are probably going to seminary school or trying to further their academic role. Nothing about the background of these people were explained (and I love learning about missionaries and was sad I had never heard of them and still know so little of their lives), so I had to look them up. Glasser was a missionary in China during the 1940s and 1950s and is known for his works on Missiology. Wright was an Irish scholar and pastor, though his parents had been missionaries in Brazil before he was born. He eventually did mission work living in India. Goheen is currently a professor of Missional Theology and Director of Theological Education who had been a part of church planting in the Canada and the US. He also trains pastors in Brazil and Chile.

Throughout this entire book, those three names come up, that it is actually tiresome to read. I want to feel the meat of mission work and understand what this "rethinking" was supposed to be. I didn't feel I understood anything different at all, honestly. A lot of this is the same things I have always known and been taught about.

Here are things this book seemed to focus on:
-God's mission works through communion
-Much of this book focuses on the people of Abraham and the mission God had for His people
-There is restoration in God's creation through Christ's blood and body

I felt like it wasn't until the conclusion of this book, that there was actually talk about Christ and the mission work that He sent people out into the world to reach "gentiles" with the message. Much of this book seems to be through a Messianic perspective, where I felt like anyone not Jewish, didn't really deem important to Christ. When I read the scriptures, I see that God constantly tried to teach and guide His people, only to send Christ, not have Him recognized for being the Son and Messiah, that Jesus opens up the world to non-Jews to be able to receive salvation. It was in the conclusion that this was talked about more, and that was weird for a book about missions.

Here are some quotes I did enjoy of had to think about a bit:
"The measures God takes within the scriptural story are means towards that end; hence, too, God's calling of Abraham and God's covenanting with Israel are means. But this whole conception taken in theological isolation, generates anxiety, because once means reach their end, they are no longer needed. The basis of Israel's relationship with God is therefore put on precarious grounds, or rather, grounds with an expiration date."

"The New Testament foreground the saving work of Christ, in his Incarnation and in his death on the cross. It concentrates on repair. But this concentration does not displace or exhaust God's larger, prior purpose."

"Christ comes for us-The Son of God draws near to us for love's sake. And-the and of the creed-Christ draws near to us for salvation, to rescue us from dire effects of sin and evil. These events coincide. But the are distinguishable and must be distinguished to counteract obsolescence. The dramatic paradigm accommodates only one economy, the reparative. But a vision of mission that refuses obsolescence must take the first economy of communion, as its point of departure."

"The Spirit directs them toward their goal, pulling them into orbit around the one who is both particular and ultimate; the one through whom all things were made and toward whom all things were made."

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a much-needed book in the discussion! If we think of God’s mission primarily as a reparative task, we will fall into obsolescence thinking—the sort of thinking that gives rise to Israel and the Incarnation becoming obsolete. But if we center God’s mission on communion, we come closer to biblical truth and the heart of God to dwell with his people.

“If we turn to the classic definition of mission as cross-cultural evangelization, we would do well to think about what we are inviting people into. Is it primarily a task? Do we say, first, ‘Come and join us on mission?’ Do we lead with God’s calling to become and instrument, a channel, of God’s saving purpose toward others? I hope not. It seems to me that a far more attractive prospect is to invite people into an ongoing and ever-deepening communion; to say, first, ‘God is drawing near; come and meet with God.’” (186)