1. Post-Enlightenment Culture as a Missionary Problem
My purpose in these chapters is to consider what would 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 which those of us who share it usually describe as “modern.” The phenomenon usually called “modernization,” which is being promoted throughout much of the Third World through the university and technical training network, the multinational corporations, and the media, is in fact the co-option of the leadership of those nations into the particular culture that had its origin among the peoples of western Europe. For the moment, and pending closer examination of it, I shall simply refer to it as “modern Western culture.”
The angle from which I am approaching the study is that of a foreign missionary. After having spent most of my life as a missionary in India, I was called to teach missiology and then to become a missionary in a typical inner-city area in England. This succession of roles has forced me to ask the question I have posed as the theme of this book: What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call “modern Western culture”? There is, of course, nothing new in proposing to discuss the relationship between gospel and culture. We have Richard Niebuhr’s classic study of five models of relationship in his book Christ and Culture. We have had the massive work of Paul Tillich, who was so much concerned with what he called, in the title of his first public lecture, the “theology of culture.” But this work has mainly been done, as far as I know, by theologians who had not had the experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to transmit the gospel from one culture to a radically different one.
On the other hand, we have had a plethora of studies by missionaries on the theological issues raised by cross-cultural missions. As Western missionaries have shared in the general weakening of confidence in our modern Western culture, they have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for the relativities of one culture.
For some on the liberal wing of Protestantism, such as W. E. Hocking, Christian missions were to be almost absorbed into the worldwide spread of Western culture, and this was quite explicit. But those at the opposite end of the spectrum, the conservative evangelicals, were often unaware of the cultural conditioning of their religion and therefore guilty, as many of them now recognize, of confusing the gospel with the values of the American way of life without realizing what they were doing. In the last couple of decades there has been a spate of missionary writings on the problem of contextualization. This has been preferred to the terms indigenization and adaptation, earlier much used by Protestants and Catholics respectively. The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms—forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of “modernization.” The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, adaptation, was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary’s preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture. The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.
The weakness, however, of this whole mass of missiological writing is that while it has sought to explore the problems of contextualization in all the cultures of humankind from China to Peru, it has largely ignored the culture that is the most widespread, powerful, and persuasive among all contemporary cultures—namely, what I have called modern Western culture. Moreover, this neglect is even more serious because it is this culture that, more than almost any other, is proving resistant to the gospel. In great areas of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, the church grows steadily and even spectacularly. But in the areas dominated by modern Western culture (whether in its capitalist or socialist political expression) the church is shrinking and the gospel appears to fall on deaf ears. It would seem, therefore, that there is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture. Or, to put the matter in a slightly different way, can the experience of missionaries in the cross-cultural transmission of the gospel and the work of theologians who have worked on the question of gospel and culture within the limits of our modern Western culture be usefully brought together to throw light on the central issue I have posed?
Let us begin with some preliminary definitions. By the word culture we have to understand the sum total of ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation. Central to culture is language. The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them. Around that center one would have to group their visual and musical arts, their technologies, their law, and their social and political organization. And one must also include in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. I am speaking, obviously, about religion. Religion—including the Christian religion—is thus part of culture.
In speaking of “the gospel,” I am, of course, referring to 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 must therefore call into question every human culture. Now clearly this announcement is itself culturally conditioned. It does not come down from heaven or by the mouth of an angel. The words Jesus Christ are the Greek rendering of a Hebrew name and title, Joshua the Messiah. They belong to and are part of the culture of one part of the world—the eastern Mediterranean—at one point in history when Greek was the most widespread international language in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time, is there or can there be a gospel that is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.
What I hope to do in this book is the following: first, to look in general at the issues raised by the cross-cultural communication of the gospel; second, to examine the essential features of our modern Western culture, including the present signs of its disintegration; third, to face the crucial question of how biblical authority can be a reality for those who are shaped by modern Western culture; fourth, to ask what would be involved in the encounter of the gospel with our culture with respect to the intellectual core of our culture, which is science; fifth, to ask the same question with respect to our politics; and finally, to inquire about the task of the church in bringing about this encounter.
I begin by looking at what is involved in the cross-cultural communication of the gospel. The New Testament itself, which chronicles the movement of the gospel from its origin in the cultural world of Judaism to its articulation in the language and practice of Greek-speaking Gentile communities, provides us with the models from which to begin. As a starting point, I find it illuminating to consider Paul’s speech in the presence of King Agrippa and his court (Acts 26). The cultural setting is that of the cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world of the eastern Roman Empire. Paul is speaking in Greek. But at the decisive point of his story he tells the court that when God spoke to him it was not in Greek but in Hebrew: “I heard a voice speaking to me in the Hebrew language,” the language of the home and the heart, the mother tongue. Paul is a citizen of that cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world. But the word that changed the course of his life was spoken in Hebrew, the language of his own native culture.
But—and this is equally important—the word spoken to his heart, while it accepts that language as its vehicle, uses it not to affirm and approve the life that Saul is living but to call it radically into question: “Why do you persecute me?” It is to show him that his most passionate and all-conquering conviction is wrong, that what he thinks is the service of God is fighting against God, that he is required to stop in his tracks, turn around, and renounce the whole direction of his life, to love what he had hated and to cherish what he had sought to destroy.
And—this is my third point—a voice that makes such a demand can only be the voice of the sovereign Lord himself. No one but God has the right and the power to contradict my devotion to God. “Who are you?” is Paul’s trembling question. It is the same as Moses’ question at the burning bush: “What is your name?” The answer, “I am Jesus,” means that from henceforth Saul knows Jesus as simply and absolutely Lord.
We have here, I suggest, a model of what is involved in the communication of the gospel across a cultural frontier. 1) The communication has to be in the language of the receptor culture. It has to be such that it accepts, at least provisionally, the way of understanding things that is embodied in that language; if it does not do so, it will simply be an unmeaning sound that cannot change anything. 2) However, if it is truly the communication of the gospel, it will call radically into question that way of understanding embodied in the language it uses. If it is truly revelation, it will involve contradiction, and call for conversion, for a radical metanoia, a U-turn of the mind. 3) Finally, this radical conversion can never be the achievement of any human persuasion, however eloquent. It can only be the work of God. True conversion, therefore, which is the proper end toward which the communication of the gospel looks, can only be a work of God, a kind of miracle—not natural but supernatural.
This pattern is brilliantly exemplified in the Johannine writings. “John” freely uses the language and the thought-forms of the religious world for which he writes. Much of it is suggestive of the sort of world-view that is often very imprecisely called “Gnosticism” and has obvious affinities with Indian thought. For this reason the Fourth Gospel was early suspected of Gnostic tendencies and has later been eagerly welcomed by Hindus as placing Jesus firmly within a typically Indian world-view. Yet “John” uses this language and these thought-forms in such a way as to confront them with a fundamental question and indeed a contradiction. The logos is no longer an idea in the mind of the philosopher or the mystic. The logos is the man Jesus who went the way from Bethlehem to Calvary. In my own experience I have found that Hindus who begin by welcoming the Fourth Gospel as the one that uses their language and speaks to their hearts end by being horrified when they understand what it is really saying. And so, logically, we move to the third point to which “John” gave equal emphasis: that—as Jesus puts it in the sixth chapter—“No one can come to me unless the Father draws him” (John 6:44). The radical conversion of the heart, the U-turn of the mind which the New Testament calls metanoia, can never be the calculable result of correct methods of communication. It is something mysterious for which we can only say that our methods of communication were, at most, among the occasions for the miracle.
The same threefold pattern is exemplified in the experience of a missionary who, nurtured in one culture, seeks to communicate the gospel among people of another culture whose world has been shaped by a vision of the totality of things quite different from that of the Bible. He must first of all struggle to master the language. To begin with, he will think of the words he hears simply as the equivalent of the words he uses in his own tongue and are listed in his dictionary as equivalents. But if he really immerses himself in the talk, the songs and folk tales, and the literature of the people, he will discover that there are no exact equivalents. All the words in any language derive their meaning, their resonance in the minds of those who use them, from a whole world of experience and a whole way of grasping that experience. So there are no exact translations. He has to render the message as best he can, drawing as fully as he can upon the tradition of the people to whom he speaks.
Clearly, he has to find the path between two dangers. On the one hand, he may simply fail to communicate: he uses the words of the language, but in such a way that he sounds like a foreigner; his message is heard as the babblings of a man who really has nothing to say. Or, on the other hand, he may so far succeed in talking the language of his hearers that he is accepted all too easily as a familiar character—a moralist calling for greater purity of conduct or a guru offering a path to the salvation that all human beings want. His message is simply absorbed into the existing world-view and heard as a call to be more pious or better behaved. In the attempt to be “relevant” one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.
In spite of these dangers, which so often reduce the effort of the missionary to futility, it can happen that, in the mysterious providence of God, a word spoken comes with the kind of power of the word that was spoken to Saul on the road to Damascus. Perhaps it is as sudden and cataclysmic as that. Or perhaps it is the last piece that suddenly causes the pattern to make sense, the last experience of a long series that tips the scale decisively. However that may be, it causes the hearer to stop, turn around, and go in a new direction, to accept Jesus as his Lord, Guide, and Savior.
The Jesus whom he thus accepts will be the Jesus presented to him by the missionary. It will be Jesus as the missionary perceives him. It is only necessary to look at the visual representation of Jesus in the art of different people through the past eighteen centuries, or to read the lives of Jesus written in the past 150 years, to understand that Jesus is always perceived and can only be perceived through the eyes of a particular culture. Think of the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics, a kind of super Emperor, the Pantocrat; the Christ of the medieval crucifix, a drooping, defeated victim; the Christ of liberal Protestantism, an enlightened, emancipated, successful member of the bourgeoisie; or the Christ of the liberation theologians portrayed in the likeness of Che Guevara. It will inevitably be the Christ of the missionary to whom, in the first instance, the new convert turns and gives his allegiance. This may express itself in the adopting of styles of worship, dress, and behavior copied from the missionary—sometimes to the embarrassment of the latter.
But this will be only the first expression of it. The matter will not stop there, for the new convert will begin to read the Bible for himself. As he does so, 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 within his culture) finds in the New Testament and the picture that was communicated by the missionary. From this point on, there are various possible developments. The convert, having realized that much of what he had first accepted from the missionary was shaped by the latter’s culture and not solely by the gospel, may in reaction turn back to his own culture and seek, in a sort of hostile reaction to the culture that had invaded his own under the cloak of the gospel, to restate the gospel in terms of his traditional culture. Some of what is called Third World theology has primarily this negative orientation, rather than being primarily directed toward the communication of the gospel to those still inhabiting the traditional culture. What can also happen is that the missionary, and through him the church he represents, can become aware of the element of syncretism in his own Christianity, of the extent to which his culture has been allowed to determine the nature of the gospel he preaches, instead of being brought under judgment by that gospel. If this happens, great possibilities for mutual correction open up. Each side, perceiving Christ through the spectacle of one culture, can help the other to see how much the vision has been blurred or distorted. This kind of mutual correction is at the very heart of the ecumenical movement when it is true to itself.
But even where this mutual correction does begin to take place, it is still—in the modern world—under the shadow of the overwhelming predominance of modern Western culture. All the dialogue is conducted in the languages of western Europe, and this in itself determines its terms. Only those who have had what is called a modern education are equipped to take part in it. That is to say, it is confined to those who have been more or less co-opted into the predominant modern Western culture. Most of the missionary outreach across cultural boundaries still comes from churches that are part of this culture. How, then, can there be a genuine encounter of the gospel with this culture, a culture that has itself sprung from roots in Western Christendom and with which the Western churches have lived in a symbiotic relationship ever since its first dawning? From whence comes the voice that can challenge this culture on its own terms, a voice that speaks its own language and yet confronts it with the authentic figure of the crucified and living Christ so that it is stopped in its tracks and turned back from the way of death? One might think that the vision of the mushroom cloud that has haunted the mind of modern Western people ever since it first appeared over Hiroshima would be enough. But we know that fear does not bring deliverance. From whence can the voice, not of doom but of deliverance, be spoken so that the modern Western world can hear it as the voice of its Savior and Lord?
In starting from the simple model of the role of a missionary in cross-cultural communication of the gospel, I referred to the part played by the Bible. How does or can the Bible function in the confrontation of modern Western culture with the gospel? In the next chapter I have to examine in some depth the nature of this culture that we share, but at this stage it is necessary to anticipate a little. Since the time of the Enlightenment, which—as I shall argue—is the point at which our modern culture emerges into full consciousness of itself, it has been impossible to speak of the Bible simply as the word of God in the way earlier ages did. The Bible has been intensively studied during the past 250 years as part of the cultural history of humankind. We have been taught to recognize its immense diversity, the complexity of the processes through which it came to its present form, and the culturally conditioned character of its views of the world and the human person. If a Christian who is part of modern Western culture says, “I accept Scripture as God’s word,” it will be seen as a personal decision, one of a number of possible decisions among which those of the Muslim, the Buddhist, the positivist, and many others must be counted, and one that must be supported by arguments a modern person can accept.
Peter Berger is among those who have written extensively about the possibility of Christian affirmation in the context of modern Western culture. In The Heretical Imperative he has argued that the distinctive feature of this culture is that there is no generally acknowledged “plausibility structure,” acceptance of which is normally taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is regarded as heresy, that is, according to the original meaning of hairesis—choosing for oneself, making one’s own personal decision instead of accepting the given tradition. In premodern cultures the heretic was in a minority. In medieval Europe or in contemporary Saudi Arabia, for example, only the rare individual questions the accepted framework of belief. It is just “how things are and have always been.” In modern Western culture, so Berger argues, we are all required to be heretics, for there is no accepted plausibility structure. With respect to ultimate beliefs, pluralism rules, and thus each individual has to make a personal decision about ultimate questions. In that sense, we are all now subject to the “heretical imperative.”
In this situation Berger describes three possibilities for Christian affirmation, which he calls (not very happily) deductive, reductive, and inductive. The first simply selects one of the given traditions and reaffirms it—preferably in such a loud voice that other voices are reduced to silence. Berger takes Karl Barth to be the most notable exponent of this strategy. But, after some respectful remarks about the great Swiss theologian, he finally rules him out of the discussion. Even thirteen volumes of dogmatics are not enough to make your case if you cannot show rational grounds for taking this starting point and not another. It will not do to say simply, “The Bible tells me so,” if you cannot give reasons for choosing the Bible rather than the Qur’an, the Gita, or Das Capital.
The second, or “reductive” possibility, is typified in the Bultmann program of demythologizing. In this it is fully recognized that the plausibility structure of traditional religious faith simply collapses in the atmosphere of secular urban society. In effect, says Berger, Bultmann takes the mental world of the modern secular man as the criterion of what can be believed. When, in a famous phrase, Bultmann said that “one cannot use electric light and radio, call upon modern medicine in case of illness, and at the same time believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the New Testament,” his “man kann nicht” was an unconscious echo of Luther’s “ich kann nicht anders”; but the impossibility rested on a totally different perception of ultimate reality. In the end, the reductionist program takes the modern world-view as ultimate and must eventually jettison even those parts of the Christian tradition Bultmann was seeking to safeguard. One does not need Jesus in order to embrace the existentialist’s view of life.
Berger opts for the third alternative, which he calls the “inductive.” This takes the universal human experience of what Berger has called in another book “signals of transcendence,” the religious experience that is the presupposition of all theologies (whether of Barth or Bultmann, or of Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist) as the clue to the human situation. The paradigmatic figure here is Schleiermacher. The direction in which he pointed is, according to Berger, the only way forward in the conditions of our modern secular world-view. The movement associated with the name of Karl Barth must be regarded as a temporary deviation, and Berger is happy that theology is now returning to the main road. The obvious question is: Among the many signals of transcendence, how does one distinguish the true from the false? Berger answers with the words of al-Ghazali, the Muslim theologian and mystic: they must all be weighed in “the scale of reason.” He insists that in giving this answer he is not surrendering to a rationalism in the style of the Enlightenment. He defends what he calls “sober rational assessment” as the only way to distinguish between true and false religious experience; but he does not attempt to describe the criteria for assessment or the basis on which such criteria can be accepted. Perhaps the adjective “sober” has more than ordinary significance, for the original context of al-Ghazali’s image of the “scale of reason” is a passage in which he likens the actual religious experience to a kind of drunkenness and goes on to say: “The words of lovers when in a state of drunkenness must be hidden away and not broadcast”; but later “their drunkenness abates and the sovereignty of their reason is restored—and reason is God’s scale on earth.” This accords with Berger’s own formulation that religious certainty is located only within the enclave of religious experience itself, and cannot be had—except “precariously in recollection”—in the ordinary life of the world.
It seems clear that the “sober rationality” with which we assess the value of different religious experiences does not belong to the enclave but to the public world outside. It is not a kind of rationality that derives from the religious experience itself but one that judges this experience. And it is not difficult to see that it is in fact the rationality that rests on the assumptions of our culture.
I believe that Berger is correct when, in an earlier part of his book, he takes as fundamental to our modern Western culture the fact that it has enormously enlarged the area in which the individual is free to make his own choices. A vast amount of what earlier ages and other cultures simply accepted as given facts of life are now subject to human decision. With the aid of modern technology, modern man chooses when he will live, to whom he will talk, how he will behave, what style of life he will adopt. He can, if he has successfully mastered the techniques of modern living, change at will his job, his home, his company, and his spouse. The old patterns of belief and behavior that ruled because they were not questioned have largely dissolved. Each person makes his or her own decisions about what to believe and how to behave. It is therefore entirely natural that religion too is drawn into this way of understanding the human situation. 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. We are all in this sense subject to the “heretical imperative.”
It is not my purpose at the moment to look critically at the whole way of understanding the world that is expressed in the modern Western culture. I shall do that in the next chapter. My point here is simply this: while Berger correctly shows how the traditional plausibility structures are dissolved by contact with this modern world-view, and while he correctly reminds us that the prevalence and power of this world-view gives no ground for believing it to be true, he does not seem to allow for the fact that it is itself a plausibility structure and functions as such. It is not that there is no socially accepted plausibility structure and thus we make our own choices. This is the ruling plausibility structure, and we make our choices within its parameters. It is, if I may anticipate what has to be developed later, the public world of what our culture calls facts, in distinction from the private world of beliefs, opinions, and values. This is the operative plausibility structure of our modern world.
Berger’s inductive method of dealing with the phenomenon of religion is itself part of this plausibility structure. His sober rationality in contrast to the inebriation of religious experience is the rationality of this world-view. The public world, which he contrasts with those enclaves where religious certainty is possible, is the world governed by the assumptions of this world-view. The inductive method Berger espouses has been basic to the whole development of the modern scientific world-view from the time of Bacon and Galileo. If, instead of looking at Christianity from the point of view of this scientific world, we look at the scientific world from the point of view of the Christian revelation, we can see that the validity of the inductive method is both real and limited. It is a valid way of coming to the truth because the created world is both rational and contingent—rational as the creation of God, who is light and not darkness, and contingent because it is not an emanation of God but the creation of God, endowed by its Creator with a measure of autonomy. Consequently, through the study of things and happenings in the created world, we can arrive at a true understanding of them. That is the foundation on which all science rests. But this inductive method has a limited validity in that it cannot decide this question: By whom and for what purpose was this whole world created? The answer to that question cannot be reached by any method of induction until history reaches its end, for—short of that point—the full data for an induction are lacking.
Within the world-view of modern Western culture it is perfectly possible and legitimate to insist, as Berger does, that the phenomenon of religious experience should be studied along with all the other facts that are available for information, and that conclusions should be drawn by induction from all these observations. In this way it is perfectly possible and right to challenge a kind of narrow positivism that has sought to deny cultural acceptance to the data of religious experience. Berger is a true follower of Schleiermacher in commending religion to its cultured despisers, and in seeking to show that there is a proper place for religious affirmation within the plausibility structure of the modern scientific world-view. But all of this procedure leaves that world-view unchallenged. The autonomous human being is still in the center—with total freedom of choice. There is nothing that is simply given, which he must accept as the starting point for his inquiry. The whole method of inquiry and discussion simply excludes the possibility that it might actually be the case that the one who created and sustains the entire universe of created beings has personally made himself known at a certain time and place in universal history. Any claim that this has actually happened is simply bracketed with other similar claims to be included in a syllabus for the comparative study of religion. In other words, it has been silenced by co-option into the modern scientific world-view. The gospel is treated as an account of something that happened in one of the enclaves where religious experience took place. It has to be brought out of that private enclosure into the public world to be weighed in the scale of reason along with all the other varieties of religious experience.
I shall argue later that this dichotomy between the private and the public worlds is fundamental to modern Western culture, and that if there is to be an effective missionary encounter of the gospel with this culture, the understanding of this dichotomy is a prime requirement. But at this stage—and with regard to Berger’s argument—something must be said. When Berger says that we are all—in Western societies—under the heretical imperative, he is surely right; and yet that statement conceals as much as it explains. What it makes plain is the fact of what is usually called “pluralism.” In contrast to traditional societies, modern Western society leaves its members free, within very wide limits, to adopt and hold their own views about what is good and desirable, about what kind of life is to be admired, about what code of ethics should govern one’s private life. As a natural extension of this, with the growing presence of large numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists in areas formerly designated as Christendom, it is assumed by a large number of Christians that the principle of pluralism applies here also. The rival truth-claims of the different religions are not felt to call for argument and resolution; they are simply part of the mosaic—or perhaps one should say kaleidoscope—of different values that make up the whole pattern. Berger’s phrase “the heretical imperative” correctly renders this situation. There is no such thing as orthodoxy in the old sense. We are all heretics in the original sense of the word, that is, we make our own decisions about what to believe. And even orthodoxy (which now has to be called neo-orthodoxy) is just a particular style of heresy.
All this is neatly exposed to view in Berger’s phrase. What is concealed, however, is that there is a world in which we are not all heretics. There is a world of what are called “facts,” as distinct from what are called “values.” In the latter world we are all free to choose what we will cherish and what we will neglect; in the world of values the heretical imperative operates. But it does not operate in the world of what our culture calls “facts”; here it is assumed that statements are either true or false. Where statements of alleged fact are in contradiction to one another, we do not simply leave it at that, much less congratulate ourselves on our faithfulness to the principle of pluralism. We argue, experiment, carry out tests, and compare results, until we finally agree on what the facts are; and we expect all reasonable people to accept them. The one who does not accept them is the real heretic. Of course, he will not be burned at the stake, but his views will not be published in the scientific journals or in the university lecture rooms. With respect to what are called “facts” (and I am not pretending to define the word, because to do so will take us much further into the heart of the argument; I am simply using it as it is constantly used in ordinary speech) a statement is either right or wrong, true or false. But with respect to values, and supremely with respect to the religious beliefs on which these values ultimately rest, one does not use this kind of language. Value systems embodied in styles of living are not right or wrong, true or false. They are matters of personal choice. Here the operative principle is pluralism, respect for the freedom of each person to choose the values that he or she will live by.
The way the concept of “facts” functions in our culture is a matter to which we shall have to return in the fourth chapter. It is the centerpiece of the plausibility structure by which our culture seeks to sustain itself. It is, if you like, the center of the temple, the ultimate object of veneration. Berger’s use of the word enclave to designate that area in which the original religious experience happens is—I think—very suggestive. He interprets the primal religious experiences that lie at the root of the great world religions—the experience of the disciples with Jesus, or the experience of Muhammad on the Night of Glory—as varieties of a single phenomenon called religion, and he asserts that “an investigation of the truth claims of any one of them must be grounded in comparative and historical analysis. Christianity is not an exception to this. It is one of the historically available religious forms, analyzable by the same empirical and phenomenological methods as all the other forms.” It follows that “Christian theology cannot occur in a sanctuary that provides immunity from the questions of historical science and of the other empirical disciplines.”
Religious experience occurs in the sanctuary, but its claim to truth has to be tested in the public world of facts where scientific disciplines operate. Individual religions may have value for those who prefer them and are to be respected as such. But claims to truth have to be tested in the public world where the principles of modern science operate. Here pluralism is not accepted. No question is raised here about the presuppositions upon which these scientific disciplines operate. No place is given to the possibility that what was given in the religious experience could provide an insight into truth that might radically relativize the presuppositions of the scientific disciplines. It is indeed true that Christian theology cannot be done properly without facing the questions raised by modern science and by other world religions. But two things are here simply taken for granted, without argument: first, that the essence of Christianity is the same as that of the other world religions, and second, that all the religions have to submit their truth-claims to the discipline of the scientific method. At this point we are all required to be orthodox with respect to the plausibility structure that is called the modern scientific method. We are not allowed to be heretics. The claim that is massively presented in the Fourth Gospel, that in the man Jesus there was actually present the one who is the Creator and Sustainer and Lord of the entire universe, that he is the light of the world, and that it is only in that light that both the world religions and the whole structure of modern science will ultimately be seen for what they truly are—this belief is excluded. It would not, of course, be labeled heresy. It would have to be called invincible ignorance. But it is nonetheless excluded from the discussion. My concern in these chapters is to ask, How can that claim—in all its winsomeness and awefulness—be heard by this world of which we Western Christians are so much a part?
In this first chapter I have simply tried in a preliminary way to ask what is involved in an encounter of the gospel with modern Western culture. In the next, I want to speak more fully about the nature of this culture. But the argument so far leads directly to one point that should be made now that I have talked about the separation between fact and value. In the next chapter we have to look at the origin of that separation. At this stage it is already clear that the separation corresponds to another division characteristic of our culture: the division between the private world and the public. The public world is the world of facts upon which every intelligent person is expected to agree—or to be capable of being persuaded. Of course, the vast majority of people depend most of the time for most of their information on experts in the various fields. But this dependence implies that we trust the experts to be scrupulously honest and careful in their analysis and testing. It implies that their statements rest on evidence that we could—if we had the time and training—verify for ourselves. Where there are contradictions between alleged facts, we expect that further investigations and discussion will resolve them. In contrast to this is the private world where we are free to follow our own preference regarding personal conduct and lifestyle, provided it does not prevent others from having the same freedom. There are no “right” or “wrong” styles of life. Perhaps the only thing that is really wrong is condemning as wrong the lifestyle of another. In the field of personal values pluralism reigns.
This separation of value from fact is reflected in the separation of private from public life that is one of the characteristics of our culture. And, as I shall argue, the response of the Christian churches—or at least of the Protestant churches—to the challenge of the Enlightenment was to accept the dichotomy and withdraw into the private sector. Having lost the battle to control education, and having been badly battered in its encounter with modern science, Christianity in its Protestant form has largely accepted relegation to the private sector, where it can influence the choice of values by those who take this option. By doing so, it has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial field. As an option for the private field, as the protagonist for certain values, Christianity can enjoy considerable success. Churches can grow. People can be encouraged, as the posters in General Eisenhower’s day used to put it, to “join the church of your choice.” All this can happen. 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 of 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.
A hundred and forty-three years ago, the great English statesmen W. E. Gladstone wrote these solemn and prophetic words:
Rome, the mistress of state-craft, and beyond all other nations in the politic employment of religion, added without stint or scruple to her list of gods and goddesses, and consolidated her military empire by a skilful medley of all the religions of the world.
Thus it continued while the worship of the Deity was but a conjecture or a contrivance; but when the rising of the Sun of Righteousness had given reality to the subjective forms of faith, had made actual and solid truth the common inheritance of all men, then the religion of Christ became, unlike other new creeds, an object of jealousy and of cruel persecution, because it would not consent to become a partner in this heterogeneous device, and planted itself upon truth, and not in the quicksand of opinion.… Should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government, it will be a proof that subjective religion has again lost its God-given hold upon objective reality, or when, under the thin shelter of its name, a multitude of discordant schemes shall have been put upon a footing of essential parity, and shall together receive the bounty of the legislature, 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.
What Gladstone foretold is essentially what has been happening during the 140 years since he wrote those words. The result is not, as we once imagined, 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.