6. A Missionary Encounter with Western Culture
6
A Missionary Encounter with Western Culture
According to Newbigin, “The Church exists to embody and to tell the story which is the true story.” The church makes the “stupendous claim” that “the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story . . . the true interpretation of all human and cosmic history.” If this is so, there are two implications. The first is that all “others are to be evaluated by reference to it . . . and that to understand history otherwise is to misunderstand it, and therefore misunderstanding the human situation here and now.” The second is that the church “is bound to call into question any plausibility structure which is founded on other assumptions.” If the biblical story is true, then all other cultural stories misunderstand the nature of the world and the meaning of human life. The church’s very existence is to live and tell the biblical story as the true story in such a way as to call its cultural story into question and invite conversion. This is what is involved in a missionary encounter.
This is exactly where Newbigin believed the Western church had lost its way. If he is correct, it is no small failure: the very reason for the existence of the church is endangered. He was at pains to communicate that this was a serious matter. Surely “the most urgent task facing the universal church at this time” is to recover a missionary encounter with Western culture.
The Urgency of a Missionary Encounter between the Gospel and Western Culture
Newbigin believes that there is “no higher priority” than “to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture.” He offers five reasons why this task is so urgent.
First, Western culture is the most powerful global force at work in the world today. In the process of globalization, Western culture now “has more worldwide influence than any other culture, including that of Islam.” “What we call the modern Western scientific worldview, the post-Enlightenment cultural world, is the most powerful and persuasive ideology in the world today.” The nations of the world are eager to adopt this understanding of the world, and urban areas in particular have been drawn into this story.
Second, it is the most pervasive cultural force in today’s world. It has spread through the process of globalization to all the urban areas of the world. It has become a global culture. “Among all the cultures with power in the contemporary world, the culture which originated in Western Europe is the most powerful and pervasive. It dominates the cities of most of the world. What is called ‘modernization’ in Asia and Africa is usually co-option into this way of thinking and behaving.”
Third, Western culture is the most dangerous foe the church has ever faced in its long history. “The church is awakening slowly to the fact that modernity is the most powerful enemy it has faced in its two thousand years of history.” Newbigin often employed a metaphor used by Walter Lippman of the “acids of modernity,” which have proved powerful in dissolving the Christian faith wherever this culture has penetrated. “The Christian gospel continues to find new victories among the non-Western, premodern cultures of the world, but in the face of this modern Western culture the Church is everywhere in retreat.” The churches of the West are in retreat at present, and there is nothing to suggest that as modernity penetrates other non-Western cultures the same thing won’t happen to those churches as well. “In all the great and growing urban centres of the world, ‘modernisation’ is in progress and is spreading its influence even into the remotest villages. Everywhere it has the effect of marginalising religion—including the Christian religion. It is, without possibility of doubt, the most powerful and pervasive of human cultures. Wherever it goes it becomes the controlling doctrine for public life and drives religion into a smaller and smaller enclave.”
Fourth, “it is precisely this powerful culture which is most resistant to the Gospel.” The long association of Western culture with the Christian faith appears to make it immune to the critique of the gospel. Western culture has deep Christian roots but has rejected the gospel as public doctrine, relegating it to the sphere of private opinion. It has developed many powerful defenses against the gospel that make it difficult to mount a missionary encounter.
The peaceful co-existence of Christianity with post-Enlightenment culture . . . has endured so long that it is hard for the Church now to recover the standpoint for a genuinely missionary approach to our “modern” culture. . . . The Church has lived so long as a permitted and even privileged minority, accepting relegation to the private sphere in a culture whose public life is controlled by a totally different vision of reality, that it has almost lost the power to address a radical challenge to that vision and therefore to “modern Western civilization” as a whole.
Most powerful, most pervasive, most dangerous, and most resistant to the gospel—surely this global culture constitutes an enormous challenge. Yet it is the fifth reason, perhaps more than the others, that makes the issue so urgent: the church in the West is living in a state of syncretism with this culture. Instead of challenging its idolatry, it has been content to live in a “cozy domestication with the ‘modern’ worldview.” The problem is with the church: it has accepted the cultural story as the true story and allowed the gospel that it exists to tell and embody to be accommodated to the more comprehensive cultural narrative. This constitutes the biggest problem.
And so Newbigin does not primarily address the unbelieving world. Indeed, one should expect those outside the church to dismiss the Christian faith as a private option; this is precisely how grand narratives work. It is the church that must be addressed, since they have accepted a place in the private sphere and been unfaithful to the gospel entrusted to them. “The churches have so largely accepted relegation to the private sector, leaving the public sector to be controlled by the other story.” Even Western missionaries live in “symbiotic alliance with their culture” and have analyzed every other culture in terms of contextualization but, surprisingly, have “largely ignored the culture that is most widespread, powerful, and persuasive among all the contemporary cultures—namely, what I have called modern Western culture.” Newbigin is not utilizing apologetics to convince people outside the church. He is directing his critique and challenge to the church so that they might again understand and gain confidence in their own gospel—“everything depends on a recovery of confidence in the gospel.” When he examines and exposes the idolatrous roots of Western culture, it is so that Christians may more confidently affirm their faith. For Newbigin the most powerful apologetic is a church that believes the gospel and lives by it.
Loss of a Missionary Encounter: An Advanced Case of Syncretism
Upon his return to England after almost forty years of missionary service in India, Newbigin found the West to be as much of a mission field as the nation of India he had entered four decades earlier. He found a “very tough form of paganism,” which he believed was “the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the church.” The problem was not simply the tremendous power of the global culture he found, although that was true. It was that the church was not living out its vocation in terms of a missionary encounter with this culture.
Just prior to his return he had been sitting next to an Indonesian leader at a missionary conference in Bangkok and heard him mutter under his breath, “Of course the number one question is: Can the West be converted?” This question reverberated in his mind afterward. As a missionary he understood well the ever-lurking danger of syncretism. When the church’s message and life is accommodated to the idols of the culture, the church is unfaithful to its very being and vocation. He believed that this was what had happened to the church in the West. He characterized it as a “timid syncretism” and made the serious charge that the Western church was “an advanced case of syncretism. . . . Instead of confronting our culture with the gospel, we are perpetually trying to fit the gospel into our culture.” This is the “cultural captivity of Western Christianity.” Western Christians are often quick to point out the syncretism in the churches of Asia and Africa, but the “most obvious examples of syncretism . . . are to be found in the Western churches, which have worked so hard to tailor the gospel to fit the so-called requirements of modern thought.”
On a number of occasions Newbigin offers an arresting image of just how serious he is in making this charge. In the great hall of Ramakrishna Temple, there is a gallery of all the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day, Hindus offer their worship to Jesus as one of many manifestations of deity in human history. Newbigin comments, it was “obvious to me as an English Christian that this was an example of syncretism. Jesus had simply been co-opted into the Hindu worldview; that view was in no way challenged.” He continues, “It was only slowly that I began to see that my own Christianity had this syncretistic character, that I too had—in a measure—co-opted Jesus into the worldview of my culture.” Jesus had been absorbed into the Hindu worldview accepted as one of many in the pantheon of gods. Similarly the gospel had been accommodated to the modern Western worldview alongside its many gods.
The question, then, is how the Western church, which has been co-opted into the idols of its culture, could recover the normal position, the faithful posture, of a missionary encounter with its culture. “How, then, can there be a genuine encounter of the gospel with this culture, a culture that has sprung from the roots in Western Christendom and with which the Western churches have lived in a symbiotic relationship ever since its first dawning?” What is needed is an Archimedean point from which the church can challenge the culture in which it has been absorbed. Newbigin believed that the experience and insights of cross-cultural mission offered this Archimedean point. And Newbigin brought his extraordinarily broad and rich cross-cultural experience to the task of liberating the Western church for a missionary encounter.
Liberating the Western Church for a Missionary Encounter
“The gospel is like a caged lion. It does not need to be defended, just released.” Newbigin believed the gospel was caged by the idolatry of Western culture. His task was to bring the insights of the cross-cultural missionary experience to bear so that the gospel might be liberated for a missionary encounter. We can see at least three tasks in Newbigin’s copious writing on the issue: cultural, theological, and ecclesiological.
Cultural Task: Uncovering the Hidden Credo
The first task of any missionary is a diagnosis of culture. Newbigin says that a “missionary going to serve in another country is advised to make a thorough study of its culture.” This is precisely so the missionary will not be unwittingly seduced into a syncretistic alliance with the reigning religious vision of the culture. To do so would spell death for the missionary task. Cultural analysis, for the missionary, is a matter of life and death for faithfulness to the gospel. And so it is for the church.
We might start with the following paragraph as summarizing some of the key issues that would be important in his diagnosis of Western culture:
Incomparably the most urgent missionary task for the next few decades is the mission to “modernity.” . . . It calls for the use of sharp intellectual tools, to probe behind the unquestioned assumptions of modernity and uncover the hidden credo which supports them. . . . At the most basic level there is need for critical examination from a Christian standpoint of the reigning assumptions in epistemology (How do we know what we claim to know?) and in history (How do we understand the story of which we are part?). . . . It means probing the hidden assumptions behind our practice in economics, in education, in medicine, and in communications (the media). All of this has to be seen and done as part of missionary obedience.
Missionary obedience calls for a diagnosis and analysis of the post-Enlightenment West. A diagnosis aims to uncover the hidden credo that lies at the foundation of the public life of our culture. And the hidden credo may be exposed to view and unmasked in its true religious nature by analyzing both history and epistemology.
Diagnosis: Unmasking Our Unquestioned Religious Assumptions
Our first problem is that we hold unquestioned assumptions. If we have been immersed in one culture all of our lives, we have no critical distance from it. Newbigin references the Chinese proverb, noted earlier, that if you want a definition of water you do not ask a fish. Water is the only environment it has ever known. How can we gain some critical distance from our assumed environment? In other words, “what is the Archimedean point from which we can challenge the culture of which we are ourselves a part?” What is needed is a kind of cultural analysis that somehow will give the church critical distance to examine the unquestioned assumptions of culture.
But for the church the problem is far more serious. The waters in which we swim are polluted by idolatry. The unquestioned assumptions that need to be examined are radically religious and to some degree stand opposed to the gospel. And one of the deepest unquestioned assumptions is that our culture is not religious. This is difficult indeed. If the church is to be freed from its captivity to Western culture, one of the first tasks is to expose the deeply religious nature of our culture’s public doctrine. A peculiarity of Western culture is that we have judged religion to be one more cultural product alongside others such as politics, economics, sports, medicine, media, and education. However, religion is a directing power at the root of culture that integrates and shapes all those other areas. Newbigin gets at this with his imagery of a hidden credo. We observed in the last chapter that he believed that religion is not separate from the rest of life. The whole life of Western society is permeated and shaped by beliefs that are religious. He mentions here probing the hidden assumptions behind education, economics, medicine, and the media. Religion is “a whole worldview, a way of understanding the whole of human experience” and 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 human life, that which claims final loyalty.” All cultures have a credo, ultimate beliefs that lie at the foundation of culture and integrate, shape, and give meaning to the whole of cultural life together. And the West is no exception.
The problem in the West is that there is the dangerous belief that we live in a neutral and secular culture: “Modernity pretends to have no creed. It pretends to stand for an ‘open’ society in which all creeds are tolerated. It applies to itself the adjective secular, with the implication that it is neutral in respect to beliefs that come under the name ‘religion.’ In this way it conceals from its adherents the fact that it is itself based on a particular view of the human situation, a view that is open to question.” But Newbigin rejects the “idea that we ought to be able to expect some kind of neutral secular political order, which presupposes no religious or ideological beliefs.” And he calls this assumption a myth in two senses: first, as an unproven belief accepted uncritically to justify a social structure and, second, as a belief that is mistaken.
Denis Munby believes a secular society is one that is uncommitted to any religious vision. It is pluralist and is tolerant of all visions of life. It rejects all religious claims and builds its common aims for the good of all citizens on scientific facts. Newbigin subjects Munby’s argument to a withering critique. Munby’s own vision, observes Newbigin, is that “his secular society is committed to a very particular view of society.” And it is not pluralist and tolerant; it excludes Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, which believe that all of human society is under the sovereign rule of God. We do not have a “secular society but a pagan society . . . a society which worships gods which are not God.” And sadly, the “idea of secular society has been accepted by many Christians uncritically because it seemed to offer the Church the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with false gods, a comfortable concordat between Yahweh and Baalim.” The secular society “is not a neutral area into which we can project the Christian message. It is an area already occupied by other gods. We have a battle on our hands. We are dealing with principalities and powers.”
The belief in a neutral secular or pluralistic society is a powerful myth that blinds people to the reality of the spiritual battle in our world. It is certainly an unproven collective belief that is accepted uncritically. But even more than that, it is an assumption that requires the church in its mission to follow in the way of Jesus to unmask and challenge the principalities and powers and the ruler of this world. “It calls for a new kind of enlightenment, namely the opening up of the underlying assumptions of a secular society, the asking of unasked questions, and the probing of unrecognized presuppositions.” Discipleship and mission must challenge “in the name of the one Lord all the powers, ideologies, myths, assumptions, and worldviews which do not acknowledge him as Lord.”
These religious beliefs that enslave Western culture, and sadly often the church, lie hidden below the surface level of culture like tectonic plates, unseen yet shaping all that is above. They are the directing power of the ruler of this world that molds a cultural way of life. Diagnosis of Western culture, then, is an excavation task. It requires sharp tools to dig below the surface level of our lived culture so as to uncover the hidden credo that gives form, unity, and significance to the inhabitants of Western culture.
Or, to change the metaphor: these religious beliefs lie hidden behind the mask of the claim to a secular and neutral society. “The church has to bear witness to the truth that unmasks the illusions and falsehoods of modernity.” Diagnosis is, therefore, an unmasking task that requires tearing away the presumed mask that hides the religious beliefs of Western culture.
Historical Analysis: Unmasking the Religious Story We Live By
Newbigin employs two tools to unmask the public doctrine of Western culture and expose its idolatry—historical and epistemological analysis. One of the ways Newbigin believes it possible to gain some critical distance from the polluted waters of Western culture is to tell the story of just how this particular vision of the world came to be. “One way to gain a perspective on our culture is to look at it from the angle of history. European culture was not always so.” What we take for granted as the way things are is not incontrovertible truth but a constructed way of life that falsely claims universality. It is simply a product of one particular tribal history of the European peoples. The illusion of self-evident truth can be unmasked by telling the story. With regularity, Newbigin examines the roots of our culture historically to show that the universal claims to truth are constructed and “that the axioms and assumptions of our modern culture are not simply an objective account of ‘how things really are,’ but are themselves questionable and vulnerable.”
An African proverb says: “Until the lions have their historians, the hunter will always be the hero of the story.” Newbigin is aware that the “hero” of the story will shape the way the story is told—from the facts selected as significant to the way those facts are arranged and interpreted in a narrative. The question is, What is the point of the story? Where is history going? What is the purpose of the human story? The telling of the Western story assumes an answer to those questions. It is the triumph of autonomous humanity over evil through the application of scientific reason to technology and social organization in order to master nature and human affairs with the goal of building a better world. This is not simply a neutral recording of the facts. Rather, it is a way of understanding the story and meaning of human life within it. It offers a way of salvation from evil and an eschatology. It is a religious narrative.
Like the biblical story, the metanarrative of Western humanism offers a comprehensive vision of life and demands ultimate allegiance. There is a clash between two religiously ultimate and comprehensive, yet incompatible, stories.
The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story. What is the real story of which my life story is part? . . . In our contemporary culture . . . two quite different stories are told. One is the story of evolution, of the development of species through the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise of civilization, and its success in giving humankind mastery of nature. The other story is the one embodied in the Bible, the story of creation and fall, of God’s election of a people to be the bearers of his purpose for humankind, and the coming of the one in whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are two different and incompatible stories.
An early experience in Newbigin’s life sheds light on this view of the Western story as the true human story. The strongest impact on Newbigin’s thinking during his last year of school, he says, was made by a book by F. S. Marvin titled The Living Past. “It gave me a belief in the human story as an upward striving towards growing mastery over all that stands in the way of man’s full humanity.” The book invited him to participate in this story, which he says led him to join lustily in singing the words of John Addington Symonds’s hymn at the school assembly: “Spill no drop of blood, but dare all that may plant man’s lordship firm on earth and fire and sea and air.” He comments, “I saw myself as part of that noble campaign.”
That book articulates the metanarrative that Newbigin sees gripping Western culture. He engages it already in his Bangalore Lectures in 1941 and uses the same language fifty-four years later to describe his analysis of gospel and culture. It is “the master-narrative which ‘modernity’ since the Enlightenment has told. In this narrative human history is the progressive triumph of ‘civilization,’ understood as the mastery of nature and of human affairs by means of the universal power of ‘reason’ as the Enlightenment understood it.”
Seminal to this Western master narrative is the notion of progress. “The idea of progress raises for Christianity in a very acute form the question of God’s purpose for history as a whole.” Progress is more than simply the development of human culture. Rather, for “our modern Western world,” progress is our “eschatology.” While the medieval world, taught by the Bible, saw the holy city of Revelation as the goal of history, the “eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this.” The Western story is progress toward paradise created by humanity, a society of freedom, brotherhood, and peace.
This new world is created by human effort and is “no longer a gift of God from heaven.” Rather, “it is the final triumph of science and skill of the enlightened peoples of the earth.” It is humanistic in a deeply religious sense of confidence in humans to save themselves. This story of progress toward a better world is rooted in an understanding of humanity that we are godlike, good, and capable of liberating ourselves from the misery and evil of the world. In this metanarrative of modernity, the way humanity will move history to this paradise is summarized in four words Newbigin often strings together: science, technology, economics, and politics. Universal reason is disciplined by the scientific method to liberate it from dogma, tradition, and superstition. This emancipation from “dogma, tradition, and superstition, and the purposeful exercise of the newly liberated powers of human reason would lead to such a growing understanding and a growing mastery that all the evils that enslave men and women would be conquered.” The growing mastery to conquer evil would come as science is translated into technology to subdue nature and into economic and political social organization to control human culture.
This vision of universal history came to maturity in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the point where, “after a long period of gestation, modern Europe came to birth and to consciousness of its own unique character.” This is the period that Newbigin often focuses much of his attention on. He signals the religious nature of this story as he observes that people living at this time refer to this period as the “enlightenment.” There is a “collective conversion” as Europe is converted to a new religious vision. “Light had dawned. Darkness had passed away. . . . ‘Enlightenment’ is a word with profound religious overtones. It is the word used to describe the decisive experience of Buddha. It is the word used in the Johannine writings to describe the coming of Jesus: ‘The Light had come into the world’ (John 3:19).” Europeans were convinced that the light of “a true scientific method” had dawned. “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: ‘Let Newton be’, and all was light.” Those living before Newton or living elsewhere, outside his influence, were in darkness. And if you have the light in a dark world, you are obligated to share the light with others; you become a missionary religion. “They were the bearers of light in a world still strangely dark. They had therefore both the duty and the capacity to carry their civilization into every corner of the world. And they proceeded to do so.”
What happens in the Enlightenment is a profound conversion. It is “the substitution of one credo by another. It is a conversion . . . of one creed to another.” This conversion meant that no longer was the biblical story “the locus of truth. Rather, truth was to be found by the exercise of autonomous reason.” Newton’s scientific method now functioned as the paradigm of truth. Scientific truth, rather than the biblical story, was now the “ground for human unity. The long period of the Christianization of Europe was now seen as the dark ages, or—at best—the middle ages between two periods when reason reigned, the ancient classical world and the present.”
As the new ground for human unity, it begins to reshape every aspect of public life. Newbigin’s analysis of Western culture shows how this vision sets out to reform all of human life, from politics to scholarship to economics to gender. What we call “modern Western culture . . . is a whole way of organizing human life that rests on and in turn validates” the Enlightenment vision. His discussion of public education serves as a good example of this.
With the rise of the doctrine of progress in the eighteenth century, as a direct result of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, a conscious movement arose throughout Europe to take the education of the young out of the hands of parents and churches. A system of government-controlled state education was developed that inculcated into successive generations a different view of the world. The whole idea that education should be the responsibility of the government is a very recent concept and is one of the implications of that new doctrine of progress.
While the Enlightenment is the focal point of Newbigin’s analysis, his writings abound in clues for the way he would construct the whole Western metanarrative, from the ancient Greeks to the present. This is important since Newbigin often relies on a background grand story to buttress his arguments. He refers to the source of Western culture in terms of two incompatible streams: classical rationalistic humanism and the biblical story. The difference between these streams is the location of reliable truth. In the humanist vision, truth is timeless ideas that stand above history, while in the Bible truth is found in a story of historical events centered in Jesus. These two streams are brought together in Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries, and for the better part of a thousand years it is the biblical story, in which faith leads reason, that is ascendant, and it is the biblical story that is the source of truth, not humanism’s timeless truths. These two traditions are pried apart in the thirteenth-century work of Aquinas and the scholastics who followed him through their introduction of Aristotle into Western European culture. The humanist vision began to gain growing cultural power with the flood of classical ideas that flowed into Europe in the Renaissance, in the religious wars following the Reformation that discredited the Christian faith, and especially in the triumph of the new physics of the scientific revolution. All of this led to the conversion of the West in the Enlightenment.
Newbigin also offers much on the way the Enlightenment vision developed, especially in the twentieth century. The events in twentieth-century Europe have led to a growing loss of confidence in promises of Enlightenment progress, since it has “failed disastrously to deliver what was promised.” The rational planning of society has been abandoned in favor of leaving all to the irrational forces of the market. In one part of our culture—the private sphere—there is a collapse of modernity into postmodernity: a growing relativism and pluralism and the reduction of truth claims to power. However, the bigger threat is that the public life of Western culture still embodies the modern vision of life, albeit in a new global and economic form. And therefore modernism is still the major challenge the world faces. This economic form of modernity had its roots in the eighteenth century: it is in economics that “the Enlightenment was to have perhaps its most far-reaching consequences.” The “new economics” of the Enlightenment vision would “create unlimited material growth” and “higher levels of fulfilment and happiness” through the operation of the free market. It is true that the “free market is a good way of balancing supply and demand,” but “if it is absolutized and allowed to rule economic life, it becomes an evil power.” This is what has happened at the end of the twentieth century. And this economic idolatry is reshaping all of cultural life and becoming a global culture. Modernity in an economic form—the “modern, scientific, liberal, free-market culture”—is spreading across the globe in the process of globalization. After the collapse of the command economies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the whole world “has become locked together in a single economic-financial-technical unit.” With the development of information technology, all the peoples of the inhabited earth are being sucked into this global “financial-economic system.” This is modernity or modernization on a global scale, and to understand it we must dig down to a “deeper level” than political and economic systems, down to “the level of fundamental beliefs, of ultimate commitments, in fact of idolatries.”
Economic modernity has produced in the latter part of the twentieth century the “meaningless hedonism of a society.” Our confession is “I shop, therefore I am,” or “Tesco ergo sum.” We are dealing with the “depth and power of a religion whose cathedrals are the great shopping malls and supermarkets where families come week by week for the liturgy of consumerism.” This religious vision is creating a growing divide between rich and poor. In 1960, at the beginning of the first development decade, the world’s richest billion received 30 times the income of the poorest billion. In 1990 that number had moved to 150 times. Moreover, this economic and consumer way of life is destroying the environment. If the whole world were to live at the level of the developed world, the planet could not sustain us. Economic modernity and consumerism—this is the central idolatrous threat to the church today.
There may be much to quibble about in Newbigin’s analysis of Western culture or the way he told the story. However, what must be firmly fixed in our minds, if we are to understand what he is doing, is that he does not see himself as a cultural analyst or a historian. Rather, he is attempting to expose the roots of our culture that are enervating the church’s witness. His concern is that the church gain confidence to embody and tell the gospel as the true story, unencumbered by the powerful idols of the West. In other words, it is not an academic task, first of all, but a missionary task. The church is compromised and timid because of the power of the Western story. Newbigin wants the church to see it as a rival story to the gospel—just as comprehensive, just as religious, just as rooted in faith. Nevertheless, it is to some degree incompatible with the gospel. And, if the church’s very nature is to embody and tell the biblical story, then to accommodate the gospel to this rival story is unfaithfulness.
Epistemological Analysis: Unmasking the Idol of Reason
Time and again Newbigin says that the real issue is whether the gospel is true. And if it is, the churches need the confidence that it is so. The brief sketch of the Western story above shows us why Newbigin spent so much time exposing the myth of neutral reason. For Newbigin, the public doctrine of Western culture was the march of autonomous reason to master the world and build a paradise on earth. But our confidence in reason to build paradise is based squarely on our trust that scientific reason tells us the truth: we know the truth by reason. The enthronement of reason challenged the truth of the gospel, and Christians had become timid and lost confidence in the gospel. That confidence had to be recovered if there was to be a missionary encounter. The messianic pretensions of scientific reason had to be unmasked. And so Newbigin spilled a lot of ink on fairly nuanced analyses of the epistemological questions of how we know. “The fundamental issue is epistemological: it is the question about how we can come to know the truth, how we can know what is real.” Interestingly and tellingly, he often begins with an analysis of the knowing process before turning to discuss the mission of the church.
It would be easy to mischaracterize Newbigin’s concern with epistemology and ask the question I often received from my students: Why are we spending time on epistemology when we are studying mission? The answer, quite simply, is that we live in a culture that “has prized above all the autonomy of reason.” This idol must be exposed because our culture, and the church with it—which, again, was his primary concern—is captive to this vision. The church has become timid about proclaiming and living the gospel as public truth. It has meekly acquiesced to the confinement of the gospel to the wholly unsuitable place of private values and personal preferences. In other words, a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge has constructed a cage that imprisons the gospel and confines the church’s mission.
Epistemological analysis may help to remove those bars. We have become captive to a scientific approach to knowledge as the only way to valid truth, and this has emasculated a missionary encounter. To liberate the church from its captivity to the idol of autonomous reason, Newbigin engages frequently in a “resolute attack on the fundamental problem which is epistemology, the way we formulate an answer to the question: ‘How do you know?’”
Newbigin’s attack is twofold. First, he challenges the unquestioned epistemology that lies at the heart of Western culture. He does so through historical analysis and the exposure of the false dualisms that have emerged from that history. The hero of the story is Augustine, for whom reason worked in the context of faith. And the primary villains are René Descartes, John Locke, and Francis Bacon, who turned that around. His analysis also draws on the insights of postempiricist philosophy and history of science to show the naïveté of assuming neutral reason. Second, he offers a more truthful model of the way we know the truth, drawing on such philosophers as Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
In the work of Enlightenment philosophers Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, scientific reason was extracted from its proper creational place amid faith commitments that shaped a communally embodied tradition. It was crowned as the final arbiter of all truth claims, including the truth of the gospel and the Christian faith. This set up a number of artificial dichotomies that are deeply embedded in the Western worldview: reason and revelation, knowing and believing, fact and value, doubt and dogma, public and private, truth and opinion, and objective and subjective. In each case, the first term correlates with scientific knowledge and the second with the role and place of the gospel. Yet these are false dichotomies that misunderstand the nature of knowing. The pretensions of autonomous scientific reason must be unmasked to liberate the gospel from its cage in the private realm of opinions and values.
These are not simply the theoretical dualisms of scholars. Rather they are deep-rooted assumptions that lie at the foundation of our culture. “The most distinctive feature of our modern culture is its sharp division of human affairs into a public world of ‘facts’ and a private world of ‘values.’ The former is the world of public doctrine. . . . The latter is the world of free personal choice.” When scientific reason is the final authority for truth, only what can be proved by reason is validated as truth and thus able to play a role in the public square. All other truth claims must be relegated to the private realm of values and opinion. They are mere tastes, like chocolate ice cream, that are subjective and have no objective grounding in the world. Thus we have a bifurcated culture in which science and technology, acknowledged as truth, provide the main dynamic for public life. But there is no shared public doctrine on the purpose of human life that may guide public life, including science and technology. All claims to the meaning of human life are mere subjective preference and have lost touch with reality, which has left much of what matters in human life to degenerate into subjectivism and relativism.
The idol of autonomous reason has been masked by a false claim to objectivity: scientific knowledge is assumed to be objectively true and tells us the way things are. Autonomous reason, disciplined by the scientific method, can rise above our subjectivity to gain objective knowledge. It judges all traditions and beliefs with an air of invincible authority. Yet this is simply not how scientific knowledge works. Rather, to pursue scientific knowledge one must embrace and indwell a fiduciary framework or a faith-based perspective. This is a framework of beliefs, assumptions, practices, and skills that the scientific community assumes and trusts when it carries out its work. This framework contains a vast array of tacit beliefs and unexamined, unquestioned knowledge. It is passed along to a student who wants to be a participant in the scientific tradition; they receive and trust the whole faith framework they have been given.
Thus, autonomous reason is an illusion; reason always works in the context of the authority of some tradition with all of its beliefs and assumptions. Reason always works to make sense of the world within some socially embodied tradition. In the case of science, reason functions within a community of scientists who work together in carrying forward this tradition and bringing its foundational insights to bear on various situations and experiences. So even the tradition of science works in the light of an unquestioned faith commitment: the scientific method will guide us to truth. This light is not questioned; it is trusted in faith to provide illumination for further understanding.
Newbigin appropriates these scientific insights in a missiological way. He draws an analogy between the scientific tradition and the Christian tradition. In both cases, reason only operates within the context of a continuing tradition; the tradition is socially embodied by a community; the tradition works with a faith commitment that functions as the ultimate light in which the community works and lives; and the tradition continues as that community brings the light of the original disclosure to bear on new contexts and situations. The only questions are: Which tradition? Whose light?
While there is an analogy between the scientific and Christian traditions, there are also fundamental differences. First, the scientific tradition begins with “I discovered with the scientific method,” while the Christian tradition begins with “God has spoken in Jesus Christ.” One begins with I-It knowledge, while the other begins with the trustful listening characteristic of I-Thou knowledge. In the Christian faith, reason has become the servant of a listening and trusting openness to God’s revelation rather than the servant of a masterful autonomy over creation in the humanist tradition.
Second, the faith commitment that gives rise and light to the Christian tradition concerns ultimate questions of purpose and meaning, whereas the scientific tradition is limited to issues of cause and effect that probe the rational structure of the cosmos. Indeed, science has eliminated purpose from the outset. If someone finds a machine that has never been seen before, they may well be able to analyze its structure. But the only way one may know the purpose of the machine is if someone explains it to them. Science may analyze the structure of the universe, but we can only know its purpose if the Creator reveals it. The gospel reveals the purpose and meaning of the creation and thus serves as a more comprehensive rationality tradition that can account for the findings of science. The ultimate purpose of the world revealed in Jesus Christ can find a place at lower levels of analysis for cause-and-effect scientific knowledge that probes the structure of the creation. But it does not work the other way.
Newbigin believes that not only are these dichotomies false; they are dangerous and destructive. When we put our “trust in the findings of science,” we may well gain insight into the structure of our world, but we will be “left with no answer to the question of ultimate meaning.” Thus, the way is open “to develop a pantheon of idols” that guide our public life. Moreover, a faith commitment to the critical principle of doubt engendered by autonomous scientific reason is ultimately proving to destroy Western culture. We are being led inexorably to a nihilistic relativism and subjectivism that threatens our society. Descartes inevitably begets Nietzsche.
Newbigin calls for a return to the insights of Augustine: credo ut intelligam (I believe so that I may understand). The idols of pagan classical culture, like the idols today, produced dichotomies that threatened its very existence. There was a need for a new starting point or arche, and the church offered the gospel. It was this good news offered as public truth that ultimately saved all the insights and gains of classical culture. So today the church must take up its missionary task to embody and proclaim the gospel as public truth. Only in its light can the true nature of the world be understood and Western culture be saved from descent into the meaningless hedonism of a consumer society. And only in its light can all the marvelous treasures of Western culture be saved from destruction. Religion has been wrongly imprisoned within the bounds of reason for two centuries. This must be reversed: reason must be liberated to rightly function within the bounds of true religion.
Theological Task: Gospel as Public Truth
If there is to be a missionary encounter with Western culture, observes Newbigin, there is an “urgent need for the development of a coherent and intellectually tenable doctrine of Scriptural authority.” Elsewhere he writes that “one of the central issues involved in a missionary encounter with our culture is the question: How do we appeal to scripture as the source of authority for our mission?” The problem that confronts the Western church is that the Bible has been part of the culture for so long that it has accommodated itself to the fundamental assumptions of the culture and appears unable to challenge them. Newbigin asks, “Have we got into a situation where the biblical message has been so thoroughly adapted to fit into our modern western culture that we are unable to hear the radical challenge, the call for radical conversion which it presents in our culture?”
Newbigin tells the story of biblical authority in the West to give us a perspective on the problem. For a one-thousand-year period, the Bible was read and interpreted “from within the Christian tradition.” What that means for Newbigin is a twofold affirmation:
(a) It is Jesus Christ, the total fact of Christ as witnessed in the apostolic testimony, which is the touchstone for the interpretation of all Scripture; and
(b) We are to understand Jesus as he understood himself, namely as the one who brings the story of Israel to its crisis and fulfillment. In other words, Jesus is totally misunderstood if we detach Him from his place in the history of Israel.
Newbigin explains that “to bring (a) and (b) together, we require the whole canon of scripture—the Old and New Testaments together.” For a millennium, Scripture was interpreted within this faith commitment: it is the true story of the whole world that finds its climactic point in Jesus Christ. This is the confession and creed that shaped the reading of Scripture within the church.
This all changed in the eighteenth century when a new creed took hold of Europe with a faith commitment to autonomous reason disciplined by the scientific method. The Bible was read and interpreted now from within another belief system, another worldview, another creed, another credo, another dogma. The Bible moved from the church to the university, from the hands of ordinary Christians into the hands of scholars who could deploy this scientific method in their interpretation of Scripture. The Bible was “no longer Holy Scripture, but a corpus of ancient writings to be understood and assessed in the light of a different creed. . . . The ordinary Christian needed the scholar to interpret it . . . [as] a person certified as competent in terms of the new credo.”
The new world of biblical scholarship claimed the high ground of truth with an attempt “to distinguish a scientific approach to the Bible from the confessional approach.” But “this move is misunderstood if it is seen as a move to a more objective understanding of the Bible. It is a move from one confessional stance to another, a move from one creed to another.” And the deep-rooted faith and commitment to this new belief system made it “very hard to persuade the practitioners of the historical-critical method to recognize the creedal character of their approach.” This so-called objective scholarship that substitutes the Enlightenment faith for the biblical faith as the rightful context for true interpretation is not simply neutral with respect to the biblical message; it is unbelieving scholarship. The biblical texts are written from faith to faith; they testify to God’s acts from a believing position with the purpose of evoking faith in the hearers (e.g., John 20:31). The “objective” standpoint is a decision not to believe the gospel on the basis of a rival credo.
And scholars were faithful to their new credo. The Bible was no longer considered to be God’s Word but an object of methodological analysis. An I-It scientific analysis of an ancient text replaced an I-Thou listening to the voice of God. Specifically, the methods of Isaac Newton in physics became the model by which Scripture was analyzed. Newton broke down the world to its smallest bits and then reassembled it based on his understanding of the laws of the cosmos. “Modern scholarship, following the models of modern science, has worked by analysing and dissecting the material into smaller and smaller units and then re-classifying and re-combining them—obviously on the basis of a modern understanding of ‘how things really are.’” This led to a fragmentation of the Bible into historical-critical bits. “Theological students, unfortunately, are asked to spend so much time analyzing and dissecting the various strands which make it up that they often miss the shape of the whole. It is like trying to understand a photograph in the morning paper by taking a magnifying glass to it. You see only a lot of black dots; you don’t see the picture.” And when you break the big story into bits, those bits are incorporated into a different picture or absorbed into the modern worldview. There is no challenge to the idolatry of modernity—only capitulation. There is no authoritative Scripture and no missionary encounter.
The impact of this kind of post-Enlightenment dogma on biblical scholarship permeated the churches, especially those in the more liberal and mainline camps, as it shaped generations of pastors and leaders within the church who during their theological training were “gently but firmly moved from the confessional position to the scientific one.” But the Enlightenment faith gained a foothold in the more conservative churches as well.
The triumph of higher criticism and the Enlightenment religious vision split the church into two camps: liberal and fundamentalist. The liberal tradition reduced the Bible to a mere “collection of records and religious experience, part of the history of religions, having therefore no unique authority which sets it apart from all other books.” This brought forth the rightful reaction of conservative Christians who want to preserve the authority and truth of the Bible. However, they have done so with the very Enlightenment tools that produced the liberal tradition they reject. The conservative churches defend the truth of Scripture by reducing it to an account of timeless dogmas and objective truths about God, nature, and humankind in which human subjectivity plays no part. In terms of the foundational fact-value dichotomy characteristic of the post-Enlightenment West, conservatives fall on the side of facts and liberals on the side of values. And both undermine the given narrative unity producing their own construct. The liberal tradition breaks down the Bible into historical-critical and ancient religious bits and then reassembles it in terms of a whole tailored to fit the dictates of the prevailing modern worldview. The conservative tradition breaks down the Bible into theological bits and reassembles it according to their own systematic theologies and apologetics schemes.
This analysis leads Newbigin to a threefold diagnosis of the problem with current views of Scripture and a threefold response that is needed if there is to be a missionary encounter. First, the Bible has been lost as the authoritative Word of God; it must be recovered as truth. Second, the Bible has lost its comprehensive authority and been relegated to the realm of private values; it must be recovered as public truth. Third, the Bible has been reduced to either a record of religious experiences or a collection of theological propositions; it must be recovered as narrative truth. What is given to us in Scripture is neither religious experiences nor timeless propositions but the story of universal history with its center in Jesus. A missionary encounter is only possible if we recover the Bible as comprehensive and narrative truth. In a word, if there is to be a missionary encounter between the gospel and Western culture, then the Bible must be regained as the true story of the whole world with authority over all of human life.
Newbigin does not want to cast aside all the gains in biblical scholarship that have been made in the post-Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment did bring real light—not ultimate light, but real light. Higher criticism has brought much insight into the human component of Scripture. And so, for Newbigin, there is no return to the precritical days of the West before the Enlightenment or of, for example, India, where people can still read the Bible without post-Enlightenment glasses. That route is not open to us. We have to face both the insight and idolatry of the Enlightenment. If a jellyfish syncretism is not an option, neither is a fossilized return to precritical days. The way forward is to recover the Bible as public truth in its narrative and comprehensive authority so that there might be a missionary encounter with the religious vision of Western culture.
Ecclesiological Task: A Missionary Church beyond Privatization and Christendom
It should not surprise us that in his major publications on a missionary encounter with Western culture, as well as in his smaller papers on the issue, Newbigin often concludes with the ecclesiological task. In the final chapter of Foolishness to the Greeks, titled “What Must We Be? The Call to the Church,” Newbigin says,
The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, and all nations, and all human lives. . . . What does the calling imply for a church faced with the tough, powerful, and all-penetrating culture [of the West]?
There are two options that the faithful missionary church is barred from: privatization and Christendom.
Neither Privatization nor Christendom
Newbigin is constantly concerned with the foundational dichotomy in Western culture between the public world of facts that are known and the private world of values that are simply believed. The gospel and the church’s mission had been consigned to the latter place. This understanding of the gospel as a private religious message stands in stark contradiction to the gospel’s own claim for itself. On this misunderstanding of the gospel, the church and its mission are similarly misconstrued. The church is the new humankind called to embody the comprehensive sovereignty of God in all of life. It is no accident that in the quote above, Newbigin uses the word “sovereignty” three times and stresses the comprehensive gospel of the kingdom—all nature, all nations, and all of human life. In this Western setting split by public and private life, what is the church to be?
Clearly we must not accept the privatized place that the humanistic narrative of the West assigns to us. It is nothing less than unfaithfulness to the message of the gospel and to our missionary calling. Newbigin insists we cannot “accept the view that the only task of the church is to provide for individuals a place in the private sector where they can enjoy an inward religious security but are not required to challenge the ideology that rules the public life of nations.”
There are at least three reasons that the church has been willing to accept its role in the private realm, and each of these must be challenged. The first is that the church has often accommodated itself to a pagan Greek anthropology and eschatology. When humanity is conceived in terms of an immortal soul dwelling in a physical body that awaits a return to its true home in heaven, an ancient pagan dichotomy has overruled biblical teaching. The goal of human life, according to Scripture, is a renewed humankind liberated from sin and its curse, living the fullness of creational life together in resurrected bodies in the context of a restored nonhuman creation. This biblical goal of history gives meaning to the church’s engagement with public life. A spiritualized and individualized eschatology is not concerned with history and will weaken any resolve to engage the public life of culture. A proper eschatology will be essential for a recovery of the church’s missionary calling in the West.
A second reason the church has accommodated itself to the private realm is a misconstrual of the gospel as something less than the kingdom that Jesus announced. God’s reign is comprehensive, and the community that is sent to tell and embody that reign cannot neglect its obligation “to declare the sovereignty of Christ over every sphere of human life without exception.” To embody the good news of the kingdom will mean the church is called to challenge the idolatry of the public life of culture. To call for submission to Christ as Lord is to reject all other lords. But if the church reduces its gospel to individual salvation, it misunderstands its gospel and neglects its comprehensive vocation. “The Gospel is vastly more than an offer to men who care to accept it of a meaning for their personal lives. It is the declaration of God’s cosmic purpose by which the whole public history of mankind is sustained and overruled, and by which all men without exception will be judged. . . . Only an interpretation of the Gospel which puts in the centre God’s total purpose for human history is true to the Bible.”
Thus, the gospel calls the church to a far-reaching mission that engages all of cultural life. To refuse engagement with the public life of culture and to seek a safe place in the private realm is to misunderstand the gospel and accept a role that the early church refused to accept. The private realm offers the possibility of peaceful accommodation to culture. “As long as the Church is content to offer its beliefs modestly as simply one of the many brands available in the ideological supermarket, no offense is taken. But the affirmation that the truth revealed in the gospel ought to govern public life is offensive.”
Here we are reminded of the way Newbigin contrasts the contemporary Western church with the early church. The early church could have accepted the designation of a cultus privatus by embracing the terms of its enemies—heranos and thiasos. These terms pointed to a community that proclaimed an individual and otherworldly salvation that did not confront Roman idolatry. Imperial Rome was happy to permit and protect this kind of private religion because it did not challenge the public order. Newbigin asks, “Why, then, did the church refuse this protection? Why did it have to engage in a battle to the death with the imperial powers?” He answers, “Because, true to its roots in the Old Testament, it could not accept relegation to a private sphere of purely inward and personal religion. It knew itself to be the bearer of the promise of the reign of Yahweh over all nations.” Since the early church understood its gospel as the rule of God over all nations and all of life, it refused to be called a private religion and instead took on itself the designation of ekklesia tou theou, a public assembly. “In other words, the early Church did not see itself as a private religious society competing with others to offer personal salvation to its members; it saw itself as a movement launched into the public life of the world, challenging the cultus publicus of the Empire, claiming the allegiance of all without exception.” This challenge “made a collision with the imperial power inevitable.” Newbigin believes the Western church has become what the early church refused to be. Our task is to recover the Old Testament roots of the gospel and understand it again as the summons to serve the sovereign Lord, who rules all of life. This will entail a challenge to the public doctrine of our culture.
The third reason Newbigin notes that the church has accommodated itself to the private realm is that it does not rightly understand the religious and idolatrous nature of Western culture. It misunderstands the Bible’s teaching on the spiritual powers. The power of secularism has led the church to have to accept the presumed neutrality of the public square. But the “truth is that, in those areas of our human living which we do not submit to the rule of Christ, we do not remain free to make our own decisions: we fall under another power.” The shrine of the public square is not empty, nor is it neutral; it has fallen under the power of other gods. To restrict Christ’s lordship to the private realm has serious consequences: the majority of life will be lived under the sovereign rule of another lord.
Privatization is not a legitimate option if the church is to be faithful. But neither is a return to Christendom. The primary problem in Christendom was that the church forgot that it existed in a missionary situation. Churches defined themselves apart from their vocation in the world. The lack of a missionary identity shaped all manner of churchmanship including congregational structures, patterns of ministry, sacraments, and theological education. The church in Christendom, writes Newbigin, “thinks primarily of its duty to care for its own members, and its duty to those outside drops into second place. A conception of pastoral care is developed which seems to assume that the individual believer is primarily a passive recipient of the means of grace which is the business of the Church to administer.”
But Newbigin’s primary concern with Christendom was that the church lost its critical relationship to culture. The church has two relationships to its culture: solidarity in cultural development and dissent from its idolatrous direction. While the Christendom church takes responsibility for the cultural development and social life of culture, it forgets the antithetical tension that comes with it. “We are painfully aware of the consequences of [Constantine’s] conversion; for centuries the Church was allied with the established power, sanctioned and even wielded the sword, lost its critical relation to the ruling authorities.” When it loses its prophetic-critical stance in relation to culture, it accepts a role as the “protected and well decorated chaplaincy in the camp of the dominant power.”
Yet Newbigin is not entirely negative about Christendom. He believes that the church was right in taking responsibility for the cultural, social, and political life of medieval Europe. Christendom was the “first great attempt to translate the universal claim of Christ into political terms.” The result was that “the Gospel was wrought into the very stuff of [Europe’s] social and political life.” It shaped our science, political democracy, and traditions of ethical behavior, and “we still live largely on the spiritual capital it generated.” Yet “we cannot go back to the corpus Christianum,” nor for that matter can we “go back to a pre-Constantinian innocence.” The challenge for us, according to Newbigin, is to “learn how to embody in the life of the church a witness to the kingship of Christ over all life—its politic and economic no less than its personal and domestic morals—yet without falling into the Constantinian trap. That is the new, unprecedented, and immensely challenging task given to our generation. The resolute taking of it is fundamental to any genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture.”
No matter how hard Newbigin tried to distance himself from advocating a return to Christendom, that accusation continued to cling to him. No doubt the primary reason was his insistence that the gospel is public truth for all of cultural life and that the church must not allow its mission to be confined to the private sphere. If the church must press the claims of Christ in every area of cultural life, then what other possibility can there be besides Christendom? Christendom seems like the only option available if one rejects privatization, and so “there is suspicion that in talking about public truth we are motivated by nostalgia for a lost security, for the time when Christianity was either acknowledged or enforced as public truth—a nostalgia for lost Christendom.”
Nevertheless, for Newbigin there is no way back to Christendom: it is neither possible nor desirable. Yet the very nature of the gospel demands we confess it as public truth. So what is the way forward? How can the church embody the lordship of Christ in every area of public life without returning to Christendom? “We are now faced with a new task which may be defined as follows: how to embody in the life and teaching of the Church the claim that Christ is Lord over all life, without falling into the Constantinian impasse?” This was the difficult ecclesiological challenge Newbigin tackled.
Distinctive People: Alternative Social Order and Callings in Public Life
As the people of God living in Western culture today, we ask, What must we be? There is a sense in which this whole book up to this point has been an answer to that question. The primary motivation for this book is that Newbigin offers a weighty call to the church today, and even though his writings are from the last century, the call remains profoundly relevant. Indeed, all the areas of a missionary ecclesiology that I have elaborated in the earlier chapters can be found in Newbigin’s challenge to the church in Western culture today.
What must we be? We must be a people who believe the gospel of the kingdom and live in the Bible as the true story of the world. We must be a people whose lives, deeds, and words bear witness to the gospel of the kingdom both nearby and far away. We must be a people whose worship, leadership, and structures nourish a comprehensive obedience. We must be a people who understand the religious core and the controlling story of our culture so as to joyfully affirm God’s creational gifts and resolutely reject our idolatrous ways. All of this answers the question, What must we be? But there are at least two emphases in Newbigin’s writings that deserve mention in this chapter on a missionary encounter with Western culture.
The first is the repeated dual responsibility to “tell and embody” the story of God’s mighty acts revealed and accomplished in Jesus Christ. Newbigin constantly insisted “that God has entrusted to [the church] this story and there is no other body that will tell it.” And so one of the most urgent tasks is the recovery of confidence in the public truth of the gospel so that the church will tell it faithfully. “The first requirement is, quite simply, a recovery of confidence in the truth of the Gospel.” Much of Newbigin’s work in epistemology was precisely for this purpose—to renew confidence in the public truth of the gospel. But if that telling is to be credible, there must be an embodiment. And if the telling is the announcing of a gospel of the kingdom that calls all areas of human life to submit to Christ the Lord, then the embodiment must correspond to the message. This is why Newbigin stressed two areas of this embodiment: the church as an alternative social order and its callings in the public life of culture. Both stress the importance of the church being distinctive over against the syncretism that corrupts the Western church. And both emphasize the comprehensive breadth of the gospel’s authority across the spectrum of human life. For Newbigin this is the way beyond privatization and Christendom.
While these two emphases are common in Newbigin’s writing, it is perhaps in Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth that the logic is made most clear. The book contains three lectures. The first compares the early church to the church in the West today. In the Roman Empire various dichotomies produced by cultural idolatry were destroying the empire. The church offered the gospel as the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord of public and private life. The second lecture deals with the way the church has had trouble in both its liberal and its conservative wings with affirming the public truth of the gospel. Both have been captive to Enlightenment assumptions. If the church is to embody and tell the gospel as public truth in the midst of culture, it must itself affirm the truth.
The third lecture, “Speaking the Truth to Caesar,” turns to the mission of the church in the public life of culture. Newbigin begins by closing off two options: Christendom and pre-Constantinian innocence. He proceeds by challenging the church with its task to unmask the various ideologies of Western culture, especially economic idolatry, in a way analogous to the German Confessing Church during World War II. He then offers three ways the church is to embody the gospel as public truth. First, “it must be the responsibility of the Church to equip its members for active and informed participation in public life in such a way that the Christian faith shapes participation.” Second, “if such training were widely available, we could look for a time when many of those holding responsible positions of leadership in public life were committed Christians equipped to raise the questions and make the innovations in these areas which the gospel requires.” And third, “the most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.” Here we see two things Newbigin stresses—being a distinctive community and our vocations in public life—that enable the church to embody the gospel as public truth.
It is significant that these two emphases pick up on two traditions that have been hard at work for centuries attempting to understand what it means to embody a gospel that is as wide as creation—the Anabaptist and Reformed traditions. The Anabaptist tradition has emphasized that the church is a countercultural community called to challenge the idolatry of culture in its own life together. The Reformed tradition has stressed the callings of its various members in culture.
The question that arises is whether stressing the distinctiveness of the church in its gathered and scattered life really moves us beyond Christendom. On this, three things may be said. First, Newbigin offers the notion of “committed pluralism” as a way of thinking about participation in the public life of culture. The way of committed pluralism rejects both a coercive Christendom and a privatized faith. He distinguishes between an “agnostic pluralism” and a “committed pluralism.” An agnostic pluralism believes that truth is unknowable and therefore that there are no criteria to judge truth from falsehood in the public square. Supposedly all traditions may be equally tolerated. Over against this, a committed pluralism is devoted to a search for truth, justice, and freedom in the public square. The truth claims of all traditions must be taken seriously. A committed pluralism is committed to dialogue between different traditions to find a way to public justice. It is modeled on what Polanyi calls the “republic of science”—the way the scientific community searches for truth. “Because it is believed that there is a reality to be known, differences of opinion are not left to coexist side by side as evidence of the glories of pluralism. They are the subject of debate, argument, testing, and fresh research until either one view prevails over the other as more true, or else some fresh way of seeing things enables the two views to be reconciled as two ways of seeing one reality.” The believer in his or her calling engages their area in public life, pursuing truth, justice, and freedom from the standpoint of the gospel and attempting to convince others that this comports with reality.
Second, Newbigin recalls the Dutch neo-Calvinist notion of sphere sovereignty. This tradition argues that the problem with Christendom is not that Christians exercised power in their particular cultural callings. The problem is that the institutionalized church coercively exercised power. There is a distinction between the church as an institution and the church as the new humankind, as well as the church gathered and the church scattered. God has given a measure of autonomy to the various areas of human life such as art, science, politics, and economics. The institutionalized church does not mediate God’s authority in these areas. Rather, each of these spheres is ruled directly by God’s Word and implemented by people who work within those spheres. This avoids both the post-Enlightenment notion of the total freedom and autonomy of the various social spheres and the medieval idea that the church rules over all of them. The church has no right to dictate how these areas are to be shaped, but Christians with insight and vocations in each of these areas must seek to shape these areas in conformity with God’s Word. People with cultural power in the various spheres are to use that power in a way that is directed by the gospel. This corresponds with Newbigin’s long-running defense of power as creational and the problem being its misuse. Some vision of truth will shape the public square. And if the gospel is true, then the truth, justice, and freedom of God’s Word should most faithfully correspond with reality and may find a response in the hearts of those who do not believe the gospel.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the story of the Bible that the church is called to embody in the public realm has as its center the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross pictures for us that God does not coerce or compel but gives freedom for rejection. The metanarrative of the Bible does not look for an intrahistorical triumph. God’s victory is beyond history, and until then, suffering love is the way power is exercised. Newbigin writes, “The fact that the cross stands as the central Christian symbol must forever forbid the identification of the gospel with political power. The Church’s witness to the gospel must always be made in the knowledge that the manifest reign of God can only be at the end when he brings all things to final judgement, that for the present age the reign of God must be veiled in the weakness and foolishness of his Church, and that it is God alone who can reveal to people his presence within this veil.” The victory of the gospel comes at the return of Christ. Thus, until that day, Christians in their various offices are free to witness to and work for the justice and freedom God wills in the light of the gospel and to let God work out his purposes. Suffering and rejection may well be the response. But there should be no attempt to coerce or compel. Rather, there may be a trusting and joyful witness to the truth that leaves room for God to work and for others to respond in freedom.
Conclusion
In C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair from the Chronicles of Narnia series, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the witch-queen of the Underland, begins to seduce and hypnotize Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill. With soothing words and music, and with magic smoke produced by the powder she throws in the fire, she begins to gradually take them under her spell. As they listen to the music and inhale the smoke, they are slowly enslaved and drawn under her power. They forget the mission given to them by Aslan to free Rilian from the witch-queen and turn themselves to serve her. The Marshwiggle Puddleglum realizes what is going on. He rouses himself from his own enchantment and attempts to foil her plan by stomping his webbed foot on the fire to put it out. The children come to their senses and are awakened from their enchantment. They rise up and slay the queen, who has now revealed herself in her true nature as a serpent.
Newbigin is like Puddleglum. With the fresh eyes of someone who has lived in another culture for four decades, Newbigin has seen how the church has been seduced and enslaved by the idols of Western culture. He has awakened many of us to see ways in which we have come under the spell of the gods of our culture. But this is only a small beginning. Surely Newbigin was right: the most powerful, pervasive, and dangerous culture to the gospel is that of the West, which has now spread to every part of the urban world, seducing its millions. The church is called to rouse itself from its enchantment and, rooted in Christ, to show what it really means to be human.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and Modern Western Culture,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1993), 12.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 76–77.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 93.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Culture of Modernity,” in Dictionary of Mission: Theology, History, Perspectives, ed. Karl Muller, Theo Sundermeier, Steven B. Bevans, and Richard H. Bliese (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 98. For an analysis of Newbigin’s mission and Western culture project, see Michael W. Goheen, “Liberating the Gospel from Its Modern Cage: An Interpretation of Lesslie Newbigin’s Gospel and Modern Culture Project,” Missionalia 30, no. 3 (November 2002): 360–75; Michael W. Goheen, “As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You”: J. E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2000), 371–416 (chap. 9).
. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 3.
. Newbigin, “Culture of Modernity,” 98–99.
. Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 67.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Mission and the Crisis of Western Culture, ed. Jock Stein (Edinburgh: Handsel, 1989), 1.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Living Hope in a Changing World (London: Alpha International, 2003), 83.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 66.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 185.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture—but Which Culture?,” Missionalia 17, no. 3 (1989): 213.
. Newbigin, Mission and the Crisis of Western Culture, 1 (my emphasis).
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983), 22–23.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Pluralism in the Church,” ReNews (Presbyterians for Renewal) 4, no. 2 (May 1993): 1.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 156.
. Newbigin, “Culture of Modernity,” 99.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 2–3.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 187.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 7 (my emphasis).
. Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Updated Autobiography (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1993), 236.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West Be Converted?,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6, no. 1 (1985): 25–37.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” Clergy Review 69, no. 1 (1984): 11.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 67; see Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 23.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 66.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 130.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “England as a Foreign Mission Field” (address, Assembly of the Birmingham Council of Churches, Birmingham, UK, 1986), 2. See also Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 3; Newbigin, Word in Season, 99.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 9.
. This has been attributed to Martin Luther but I have never been able to verify it. Charles Spurgeon has used a similar analogy at least three times but not just these words. See https://elliotritzema.com/2012/07/31/spurgeons-let-the-lion-out-of-the-cage-quote/. Accessed 18 April 2018.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 100.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 21. It is remarkable, if this is true, that we spend almost no time in theological education teaching pastoral leaders how to understand their culture.
. Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture—but Which Culture?,” 214. Newbigin’s reference to these six areas of modern culture (history, epistemology, education, economics, medicine, and media) set an agenda for the gospel and culture movement in the UK, a movement spawned by Newbigin’s gospel and Western culture project. A book that was prepared for a national conference in 1992 was published with a chapter on each of these six areas, with two more added—science and the arts. See Hugh Montefiore, ed., The Gospel and Contemporary Culture (London: Mowbray, 1992).
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 68.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 172.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 3.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 194.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission (1963; repr., Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998), 46.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 211.
. D. L. Munby, The Idea of a Secular Society and Its Significance for Christians (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 217.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 220. Newbigin suggests that an important task will be the “identification, the naming of the false gods that our society worships. Ours is not a secular society, it is a society which worships false gods” (Newbigin, Mission and the Crisis of Western Culture, 14).
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 150.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 220.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 221.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “A Missionary’s Dream,” Ecumenical Review 43, no. 1 (January 1991): 9.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and Modern Western Culture,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1990), 2.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 74.
. Newbigin, “Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” 16.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 171–72.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 15–16.
. Newbigin observes that this hymn expresses well the Western grand story of progress and, strangely, is included in many Christian hymnbooks. See Lesslie Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 5–6.
. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 6.
. Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble, 3–55; Lesslie Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture” (unpublished speech, Denmark, November 1995).
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and Our Culture: A Response to Elaine Graham and Heather Walton,” Modern Churchman 34, no. 2 (1992): 8.
. Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble, 5.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 28.
. Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble, 6.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 28.
. Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble, 6.
. E.g., Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture,” 8, 12.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 28.
. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 251.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 23.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 7.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 10.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 8.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People” (keynote address, Europe and Middle East Regional Conference, Eisenach, Germany, April 1991), Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham, 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Mission Agenda” (lecture, Trinity College, Dublin, November 2, 1992), 3.
. Newbigin, “Mission Agenda,” 3–4.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 29; see the full chapter, “Profile of a Culture,” 21–41.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Discovering Truth in a Changing World (London: Alpha International, 2003), 103.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1–3; Proper Confidence, 3.
. Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture,” 6; Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and the University” (unpublished sermon, Chapel of Royal Holloway, University of London, June 27, 1993), 2.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 6–7.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 30.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 10.
. Reflection on Newbigin’s analysis of the post-Enlightenment West has usually centered on how his sustained focus on the modern scientific worldview relates to scattered comments he makes about the postmodern West, especially in the area of epistemology. Not enough attention has been paid to his growing concern in the last decade of his life for the way the modern idolatry of the Enlightenment has taken an economic and global form.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Truth and Authority in Modernity (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 73–74.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 27; Lesslie Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism: A Missiological Approach,” Studia Missionalia 42 (1993): 231–34; Newbigin, Truth and Authority in Modernity, 7–9, 82.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Modernity in Context,” in Modern, Postmodern and Christian, ed. John Reid, Lesslie Newbigin, and David Pullinger, Lausanne Occasional Paper 27 (Carberry, Scotland: Handsel, 1996), 8.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 11.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Speaking the Truth to Caesar,” Ecumenical Review 43, no. 3 (July 1991): 375.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 188.
. Newbigin, “Missionary’s Dream,” 5.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel as Public Truth: Swanwick Opening Statement” (unpublished address, 1992), 6.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “It Seems to Me,” Transmission (Spring 1997): 4; see Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 30–31.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “What Is Culture?” (unpublished address, 1990), 4. Tesco is an enormous multinational chain superstore in the UK.
. Newbigin, “Gospel as Public Truth,” 6.
. Newbigin, “Gospel as Public Truth,” 5–6.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 104.
. E.g., Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1–65; Newbigin, Discovering Truth in a Changing World, 1–20.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 51.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 25.
. Paul Weston has offered a detailed analysis of Newbigin’s epistemology, especially in its dependence on Michael Polanyi, in Paul Weston, “A Critical Engagement with the Writings of Lesslie Newbigin” (PhD diss., University of London, 2001).
. Newbigin, “Culture of Modernity,” 100.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 58.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 52–65.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 60.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 93.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 49.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 150.
. Newbigin, “Gospel and the University,” 3.
. Newbigin develops this thesis in dependence on Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study in Thought and Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). He refers to this book as one of the three or four most important books crucial to his thinking (Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 15).
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 15–39.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “New Birth into a Living Hope” (keynote address, European Area Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches meeting, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 28, 1995), 7.
. Newbigin, “Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” 13.
. Newbigin, “Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” 11.
. Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People,” 1.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1997), 2.
. Newbigin employs all these various terms—“belief system,” “creed,” “dogma,” “worldview,” and “credo”—to describe the Enlightenment approach to biblical studies.
. Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People,” 1.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 79–80.
. Newbigin “Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” 14.
. Newbigin, “Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” 14. See Lesslie Newbigin, “The Role of the Bible in Our Church” (unpublished speech, United Reformed Church Forward Policy Group, April 1985), 1.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Other Side of 1990” (unpublished lecture, Clare College, Cambridge University, 1989), 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” unpublished notes, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (n.d.), 1.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 79.
. Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People,” 6; see Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 43–44.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 124. See Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 55–62; Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 222–32.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 124.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 71–72.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 46.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 7.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 99–100.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Sign of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 46.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 100.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 39.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (New York: Friendship Press, 1954), 1–2; Newbigin, Honest Religion, 104.
. Newbigin, Honest Religion, 102–5.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 166–67.
. Newbigin, Sign of the Kingdom, 48.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Christ, Kingdom, and Church: A Reflection on the Papers of George Yule and Andrew Kirk” (unpublished paper, 1983), 4.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 100–101.
. Newbigin, Sign of the Kingdom, 47.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 1.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 124.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Priorities for a New Decade (Birmingham, UK: National Student Christian Press and Resource Centre, 1980), 6.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 102.
. Newbigin, “Gospel as Public Truth,” 2.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 34.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 76–78; Newbigin, “Gospel and Modern Western Culture,” 7; Lesslie Newbigin, “Human Flourishing in Faith, Fact, and Fantasy,” Religion and Medicine 7 (1988): 409; Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in Today’s Global City, Selly Oak Occasional Paper 16 (Birmingham: Selly Oak Colleges, 1997), 6; Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel and Our Culture (London: Catholic Missionary Education Centre, 1990), 4.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 78.
. Newbigin, “New Birth into a Living Hope,” 6.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 81.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 84.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 85.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 58.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 143–44.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 167–68.
. I borrow this analogy between Newbigin and Puddleglum from my wife, Marnie, who once suggested it to him, much to his great amusement.