Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture I (Book Review)

 Last week I had mentioned a concept from a man named Lesslie Newbigin, someone that - prior to March of this year - I had never heard of.  A quote of his was used in a sermon and it was so thought provoking I ended buying a book or two.

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was born in England.  A convert in college, he entered the mission field in 1936 and went to India, where he remained until 1959.  After a spell at the Internal Missionary council, he returned to India in 1965, remaining there until 1974.  Of note, both in 1947 and 1969 he was named a bishop of an ecumenical church in a country not his own - a rarity in the day.  He returned to the UK in 1974, where he lectured, wrote, and preached up to his death.  (Fuller biography here.)

Newbigin is a rarity, a man who became completely immersed in another culture who had the ability to compare two cultures and their concepts, practices, and understandings of Christianity.  The two books of his I purchased - Foolishness to the Greeks:  The Gospel and Western Culture and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society  - are in a way both books on a similar theme:  the nature of what Western Civilization has become and the idea that we, as Christians, need to view our own society as a mission field.  

His writing is excellent, thought provoking, and dense.  Rather than try to press it all into a single review, I propose to space it out to a chapter a week.

A note:  Newbigin is an excellent writer, well read, and has very well developed arguments.  All errors and misrepresentations of them should be charged to my account, not his.

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Newbigin, in the first chapter - "Post-Enlightenment Culture as a Missionary Problem" - lays out the following statement:

"My purpose in these chapters is to consider what be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and the culture that is shared by the peoples of Europe and North America, their colonial and cultural off-shoots, and the growing company of educated leaders in the cities of the world - the culture those of us who share it usually describe as modern".

Studies of missionary culture, he suggests, miss the mark in not focusing on the West, as "it is this culture that, more than any other, is proving resistant to the gospel".  Why is this?  This is one of the questions he spends time on developing.  At the moment, he simply recognizes it as a problem.

The Church, posits Newbigin, exists in a culture.  It originally started in a Jewish culture, then expanded to a Roman-Greek culture, and from there expanded into the cultures of what became medieval Europe before being transmitted to larger world mostly (but not entirely) during the Age of Discovery (The Thomasine Churches of India, for example, being an exception).  The communication of the Gospel, has to include communication in the language the receptor culture understands, calls for a change (metanoia or turn in direction in the Greek, which we call repentance in English) - but also has to rely ultimately on a work of God. We cannot make anyone convert; we can only call them to it.

The classic view of the missionary involves someone that goes to a culture and communicates in the language of that culture (Newbigin's first point) and calls for a change in the individual's direction, repentance and salvation (Newbigin's second point).  The third point - the work of God - is beyond the missionary's scope of control.

To those who are accepting Christ, they accept Him through the one that presents Him - if a missionary, then how the missionary views and experiences Christ.  But as the Christian grows in faith and in the reading of Scriptures, 

"...he will gain a standpoint from which he can look in a new way both at his own culture and at the message he has received from the missionary.  This will not happen suddenly.  It is only as the fruit of sustained exposure to the Bible that one begins to see familiar things in a new light.  In this light the new convert will both see his own traditional culture in a new way and also observe that there are discrepancies between the picture of Jesus that he (from in his culture) finds in the New Testament and the picture that is communicated by the missionary."  

What can happen?  In one version, the new convert retreats to his own culture, seeing the Gospel as merely a tool for the missionary's culture to implant itself in the converts culture and take power or take over - or in turn, converts the Gospel into a vehicle for the new convert's message (such as Liberation Theology).  In the other version, the new convert reflects back to the missionary how the missionary's culture has influenced his vision of Christ.  Taken this way, suggests Newbigin, lies the possibility of mutual correction - no one culture has a monopoly on Christ; we all interpret him through the culture that we live in.  

The modern world has what Newbigin (taking from Peter Burger) calls a "plausibility structure", that which can be normally taken for granted without argument and from which dissent is considered heresy (in the old definition, of the individual deciding making a decision instead of following the given tradition) - in the modern world's case, it has developed this structure such that the public world of facts are considered different from the private world of beliefs, opinions, and values.  We, as the self center of our own universe, are ourselves heretics because "we make our decisions about what to believe".

But herein lies the issue.  In the modern world, says Newbigin, there exists a world of "facts" distinct from "values":  "Values systems embodied in styles of living are not right or wrong, true or false.  They are matters of personal choice.  Here the the operative principle is pluralism, respect for the freedom of each person to choose the values that he or she will live by". 

But in the world of facts, everything has to be tested.  Pluralism is not allowed; "No place is given to the possibility that what was given in the religious experience could provide an insight into the truth that might radically relativize the presuppositions of the scientific disciplines." In fact, Newbigin suggests that the modern world will not consider them as such because it takes two things for granted:  that Christianity is the same as all other religions and that all religions have to submit their truth claims to the discipline of science.  Whether or not the discipline of science will consider them remains for further discussion later.

It is Newbigin's belief and argument that the claims of the Risen Christ can be checked as a historical event - and if historical, then true and a "fact".  But the plausibility structure will only allow personal beliefs to be a value (and thus not in the public realm).

"This separation of value from fact is reflected in the separation of private from public life that is one for the characteristics of our culture." And the Church, he suggests, accepted this dichotomy due to the challenge of the Enlightenment and retreated into the world of the private sector and values.  By doing so, he says, it insured its survival as an institution, but at the cost of surrendering "a crucial field":  "And yet the claim, the awesome and winsome claim of Jesus Christ to be alone the Lord of all the world, the light that alone shows the whole reality as it really is, the life that alone endures forever - this claim is effectively silenced.  It remains, for our culture, just one of the varieties of religious experience".

The result of this, says Newbigin, is that modern Western culture and Civilization is not a secular society:  "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."

Newbigin foresaw that the coming greatest mission field for Western Civilization is not abroad.  It is literally in our own backyards.  We as the West have become the people we need to send missionaries to.  And to do that, he posits, we need a more fuller understanding of our culture not as we live in it, but as a third party would understand it.