Foolishness to the Greeks Day 1

This morning I began reading Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture by Lesslie Newbigin. Although this book is dated (published in 1986) I thought I'd give it a read since it deals directly with one of my main concerns: the evangelization of France. Newbigin served as a missionary in India as well as in England and was considered to be a leader in the world of Ecumenical missiology. The fact that he functioned within a more liberal sphere does not negate necessarily his insights into missions in Western Europe. Let's see what he has to say.


Chapter 1: Post-Enlightenment Culture as a Missionary Problem

Newbigin sets out to answer a very specific question: "what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture" (3). He defines culture as the "sum total of ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation" (3). This includes religion. That definition is pretty normal. A little less clear is his definition of gospel: "the announcement that in the series of events that have their center in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ something has happened that alters the total human situation and therefore must call into question every human culture" (3-4).

He offers Paul's speech before Agrippa as a paradigm for what is involved in the cross-cultural communication of the gospel: 1) must take place in receptor language, including the intellectual framework of the culture, 2) must be confrontational in nature, calling for "radical metanoia," and 3) must rely upon supernatural working for results (5-6). Concerning this work of communicating the gospel cross-culturally, he includes a caveat that remains true today: "In the attempt to be 'relevant' one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant" (7). He also warns missionaries that the Jesus received by their converts is the Jesus they present. By this he intends to call attention to the fact that far too often the Jesus and his gospel preached is in fact a very culturally influenced Jesus and gospel (8).

He pinpoints the Enlightenment as the beginning of a self-conscious Western thought that disallows identifying the Bible as the Word of God (10) and then takes up the analysis of Western culture set out in The Heretical Imperative. Basically, Berger (author of The Heretical Imperative) argues that since there is no viable "plausibility structure" (read absolute by which to judge) in Western culture, this culture demands that every individual be a heretic; i.e., each must determine for himself what he will believe (11). Newbigin agrees with this aspect of Berger's analysis, writing that it is natural "in a culture controlled by this kind of experience, for religion also to be a matter of personal choice, unconditioned by any superhuman or supernatural authority" (13). But he disagrees with Berger's insistence that there is no "plausibility structure." Instead he asserts that Western culture's insistence on "facts" in the public venue (as opposed to the private realm) is the new plausibility structure. This dichotomy between private and public is integral to understanding Western culture. On the private level, pluralism and an absence of any plausibility structure is accepted and required. But on the public level of "fact," Western culture does not allow for the same level of choosing for oneself. Newbigin correctly (and colorfully) identifies "facts" as the "center of the temple" for modern Western culture [an interesting word picture in light of the French revolution's idolization of reason]. Based on this dichotomy, Newbigin decries attempts to offer Christianity as a legitimate topic for study within the existing structure of thought because doing so "leaves that world-view unchallenged. The autonomous human being is still the center--with total freedom of choice" (15).

He believes that Protestant churches have accepted Western culture's relegation of religion to the private sphere. In his opinion, accepting a place in the private sphere may have gained churches ongoing existence in the modern world at the expense of "surrendering the crucial field" (19). He then ends the chapter with a sobering quotation of W. E. Gladstone, part of which reads: "Should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government . . . this will prove that we are once more in a transition-state--that we are travelling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us, towards that in which it found us" (20). Newbigin concludes that this is exactly what has happened, but that the result is not a secular state that was once predicted. Rather, "It is a pagan society, and its paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity, is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross-cultural missions have been familiar. Here, surely, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time" (20).