Newbigin and His ‘Foolishness to the Greeks’
In “Foolishness to the Greeks,” Lesslie Newbigin addresses the question of how to take the gospel to modern Western culture. Drawing from his decades of missionary experience, he brilliantly analyzes Western culture to appropriately engage the context. The gospel itself has come from a particular cultural context and, in turn, enters another culture at every time and place. “There can never be a culture-free gospel” (Newbigin, 1986, 4). Therefore, it is crucial to exegete culture effectively and respond accordingly.
The post-Enlightenment context of Western culture is a secularized society. With cultural characteristics such as pluralism (the celebrated reality of multiple cultures existing together as one society), globalization (the access and spread largely of Western culture throughout the globe), and individualism (the rise of autonomy and perceived authority of the self), the traditional structures that existed before the Enlightenment are being reduced and replaced in our modern society. Newbigin further articulates this cultural shift, suggesting that “[sober rationality] is the operative plausibility structure of our modern world” (Newbigin, 1986, 14). This structure or dogma has become the dominating framework for analyzing and critiquing all other structures. Sober rationality is based on what can be known according to the modern scientific worldview of facts. Science, therefore, has become the trusted and unquestioned means of learning and knowing. “Nature—the sum total of what exists—is the really real. And the scientist is the priest who can unlock for us the secrets of nature and give us the practical mastery of its workings” (Newbigin, 1986, 25).
Science is now considered the ultimate voice of what can be known as fact, and as a result, Christianity (along with other belief systems) is forced to rediscover where we have a voice. “[T]he age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world” (Newbigin, 1986, 26). The aftermath of this reality is that a clear separation takes place between public and private life. What safely lies within public life is anything governed by reason according to the modern science worldview. These are the facts—that which can be known and measured. Consequently, what is relegated to private life are values, opinions, and beliefs (religion). Newbigin goes on to show how this public and private divide cannot be maintained. To separate the facts from values leaves a gap in understanding. This gap is addressed by purpose.
“A scientific understanding of the world of phenomena must exclude the idea that there is a given purpose running through all things, about which one may be in truth or in error” (Newbigin, 1986, 38). Herein lies the great fallacy of the operative plausibility structure of our modern world—what can be known of the facts apart from purpose? As Newbigin affirms, “purpose remains an inescapable element in human life” (Newbigin, 1986, 35). Consider a particular machine, says Newbigin (Newbigin, 1986, 73); there is a lot that can be known about the machine—what parts it has, what it does, etc. However, until one knows the purpose of the machine, the facts are unable to determine if the function of the machine is effective. The church cannot remain in the private sphere because the scientific worldview fails to answer the greater questions of life. While facts can be known in this age of reason, one still falls short of discovering what is true.
When the ultimate explanation of things is found in the creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming work of a personal God, then science can be the servant of humanity, not its master. It is only this testimony that can save our culture from dissolving into the irrational fanaticism that is the child of total skepticism.
(Newbigin, 1986, 94)
Practical Implications To Recover in the Church Today
At the close of “Foolishness to the Greeks,” Newbigin offers seven essentials the church must recover in our day. I find these suggestions to be a helpful challenge to the Church today as we face many of the same cultural dynamics today. As part of reviewing these seven essentials, I will offer some of my own practical reflections in light of our present cultural moment. Here are the seven essentials Newbigin suggests.
“The first must be the recovery and firm grasp of a true doctrine of the last things, of eschatology” (Newbigin, 1986, 134). As a Christian, it is the hope of eternity that provides both peace and purpose to our day-to-day reality. To banish teleology as a culture seems reasonable to those who live according to what can be measured or achieved. However, it is a logical fallacy to assume one can know what is real (the facts) without some sense of values according to purpose—furthermore, everyone brings their own set of values through which they engage with the facts. For the Christian, we live according to the values of the Kingdom of God and therefore strive to live according to his will and his purpose. We believe that there is a Creator God who has made and, to this day, sustains all of creation. He is bringing redemption and restoration of all things through Jesus. This redemptive work culminated in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, and the restoration of all of creation will be fully and finally accomplished when Jesus returns to finish what he started. For those who have given up on this perspective and adopted the modern scientific method as the most plausible structure for understanding reality, there will remain unanswerable questions for our modern society. Questions of purpose that will be determined apart from the One who gives purpose to all things. I believe our society has now begun to grow skeptical of the promises of modernity, seeing and feeling the tension of these unanswered questions.
The second essential for the church to recover is the Christian doctrine of freedom (Newbigin, 1986, 137). There is a bright side to the Enlightenment. We have seen and benefited daily from progress in medical, technological, electrical, and economic advancements. Perhaps the most important characteristic of a postmodern society is the heightened sense of human dignity. I think this is a value that finds its origin in God himself. From the very beginning, Scripture places a value on humanity as the only created thing that is an image-bearer of the God who created them (Gen. 1:26-27). The value of human life was an identifier of the Jewish people, which was carried through to the church that Jesus started in the first century. The church stood against the different class systems of determining one’s worth. The church stood to raise the value of women and children as image-bearers of God in a context that considered them little better than slaves. The church also stood against the dehumanizing system of slavery. The Enlightenment simply revealed what the people of God have been maintaining as a standard for centuries—that every human being is of inestimable worth and, therefore, given freedom and rights to live according to their highest calling and purpose. Where this becomes complicated is seeing that one person’s freedom can lead to the oppression of another. As followers of Jesus, we have discovered that freedom in Christ comes through wholehearted submission to his Kingdom and his will. Without Jesus, the freedom we experience in this modern society would lead to the captivity of others—if not leading also to our own captivity.
“As the third requirement for a missionary encounter with our culture, [Newbigin] would list what might be called a ‘declericalized’ theology” (Newbigin, 1986, 141). This is a call for every Christian to bring the gospel to every area of life. One of the major problems with maintaining a public and private divide—again, relegating values, beliefs, and religion to the private sphere—is that the ways of God are never seen in public life through those who live as part of his Church. When Jesus started his Church, he did not envision an isolated group of folks who practice the ways of the Kingdom in dark hidden places on earth. He said, “[L]et your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16, NIV). Nor was the religious stuff intended to be carried out by a select few. As Peter wrote in his first letter, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9, NIV). A church on mission means that everyone who has surrendered to Christ carries the gospel with them into every facet of life. As Newbigin says, those who are truly his disciples are “men and women and children whose personal and corporate life is a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingly rule over all creation and all nations” (Newbigin, 1986, 133). We live up to Jesus’ vision of being a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14-16) when God’s kingdom shows up, not only when the Church is gathered on Sunday, but when she is scattered into every corner of culture throughout the week.
The fourth essential that Newbigin calls for is a “radical theological critique of the theory and practice of denominationalism” (Newbigin, 1986, 144). In many ways, this has been a black eye for the church for a long time. The night before Jesus went to the cross, he prayed, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23, NIV). The love and unity the church has for one another is one of the ways we point to the love and goodness of our God. A church that is divided and splintered tends to undercut its validity to a watching world. While I do think there are pockets of the church in America that are beginning to look beyond the denominational distinctives, we still have a ways to go in terms of unity. It is also important to realize that the culture does not see the church the same way as 40 years ago. We are beginning to experience cultural hostility towards the church in such a way that there is no room for competitive dissension among churches. Perhaps one of the benefits of no longer being the home team in our culture is that we are going to need to discover how to sort through our differences for the sake of the gospel.
