Review: Foolishness to the Greeks : The Gospel and Western Culture
Review: Foolishness to the Greeks : The Gospel and Western Culture
Lesslie Newbigin
William B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986. 156 pgs.
Introduction Published in 1986, Bishop J.E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks remains a relevant criticism of post-Enlightenment society. Newbigin offers a fascinating look at the development of modern thought. Despite the rise of postmodernism, the groundwork was laid in previous ages. Newbigin’s historic survey and critical engagement with western culture broadly and science and politics specifically highlights his central thesis: the Enlightenment created a great chasm between the “public world of fact” and the “private world of value.”[1] By engaging western culture, he hopes to provide the church with the understanding and potential techniques to communicate the Gospel in our age. Newbigin’s experience as a missionary to India of thirty-eight years ungirds his thought as he returned to his native UK in 1974. He then participated in the World Council of Churches, especially dealing with ecclesiology and missions. By Foolishness of the Greeks of 1986, he recognized the need to consider his own native western culture as a mission field with great barriers to evangelization. [2] Newbigin believes that our culture requires a “forthright missionary encounter.”[3] Critical contextualization by evangelists has focused on foreign contexts and has ignored modern western culture. Western culture possesses its own presuppositions which color the Gospel. The Gospel for Newbigin is “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.”[4] This Gospel is culture-bound to the first century Mediterranean world. Yet, it calls into question every culture through the ages. It is not relegated to the private world of values but also engages the public world of facts. Summary Foolishness continues with six major sections, each dedicated to a chapter. First, Newbigin consider the general issues of cross-cultural communication. Second, he offers a summary of the essential features of modern western culture. Third, he demonstrates the basic conflict between the reality of the Bible and modern culture. Fourth, to highlight the conflict, he considers the intellectual core of society, science. Fifth, he interacts with political and economic theory. Lastly, Newbigin offers seven suggestions of how the church can engage modern western culture. What issues does Newbigin perceive in communicating the Gospel to a modern western worldview? He recognizes that Paul’s missionary engagement called his audience’s life into question. Paul was uniquely skilled, with his Greek, roman, and Hebrew backgrounds. His call of Acts 26 is for metanoia, to turn away from their previous life. This confrontation is absent from western culture. Western man has significantly more choice. The plausibility structure is the “public world of culture.”[5] Since the Enlightenment, plausibility has shifted to an inductive method, with no definite end goal or purpose. Pluralism rules the day. The “heretical imperative”[6] means there can be no orthodoxy. “Facts” are “true” even if heretical. Science is the new orthodoxy. All religions must subject their truth claims to the scientific method. Rather than endure this historical and empirical scrutiny, most Protestant churches have withdrawn to the private world of value. What happened during the Enlightenment that caused such a radical shift? Previously the Gospel was the stance from which all culture was evaluated. It uniquely embodied in each culture yet dialogued and critiqued the culture. The Enlightenment caused a mass conversion to the worldview of Newtonian physics. Science replaces the explanatory framework of purpose and design with mere cause and effect. Through analytical and mathematical powers, the Enlightenment sought to attain complete understanding and mastery of nature and reality. Man becomes autonomous. The eschaton is moved to earth. Happiness, life, and liberty are a current not teleological pursuit. Society moves from reciprocal hierarchy to the nation-state. Economics are divorced from ethics. All human activity is absorbed into labor. The family is no longer a working unit. In its place grows an urban society governed by bureaucracy. Most important to Newbigin’s thesis is the consequent removal of purpose. An intentional fissure between the public fact and the private value is born. Purposes have no value or authority in the world of fact. The study of phenomena explains all that is fact. Post-Enlightenment western man is built on an illusionary anthropology of Schleiermacher. It seems peace between science and faith is born but at the expense of the “basis for traditional morality.”[7] The consequence of this new worldview is a radically different understanding of Biblical authority. On the one hand, the modern world objectified the Bible. Critical scholarship takes the active role and leaves the Biblical witness passive. The scientific method begins in its own world and seeks ideas or principles (heilsgeschichte) outside of faith or value. The historic Jesus cannot be the Jesus of faith. Newbigin does not dispute this conclusion but he disputes the paradigm or plausibility structure which gave birth to it. The phenomenological plausibility structure of the Enlightenment is not transcendental but born within the culture. The Biblical culture gives birth to radical shift towards plausibility around purpose. With this plausibility structure of the world of faith, higher criticism can serve a positive role. For example, the resurrection of Jesus can be examined by both faith and history, value and fact. Such a claim is irrational to the modernist. While logic may not settle the debate, a radical shift towards understanding purpose will, according to Newbigin.[8] Newbigin suggests a radical reintegration of faith and fact, private and public is necessary for the Gospel. To demonstrate he engages with science. He suggests science is inherently atheist because it has a mechanical view of nature. God is relegated to the gaps, serving a purely mystical explanation until the advances of science. Ironically, the rationality of the Bible made science possible but now science attempts to understand faith. All is not lost. Modern science (i.e. Einstein) rejects the mechanistic view. DNA research is purpose-driven. Sociologists consider gain and loss. “Facts” are considered “value-free”[9] in the view of Francis Bacon but scientists make value decisions daily. Humans are governed by a mutual understanding guided by purpose. Here Christianity can bring a radical paradigm shift according to Newbigin. The character of the revealed “Creator and Sustainer”[10] determines what is good and purposeful. Humanity’s mutual understanding can return to an understanding of reciprocity in view of the doctrine of the Trinity. Science cannot answer with purpose. Instead, the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity give us a new understanding. The cross “forces us from sheer irrationalism” moreover inculcates a new “purpose of good.”[11] Despite the cosmos decaying, humanity advances, in love and service. Newbigin believes this is due to God’s hand. Most dramatically Newbigin’s thesis of the divorce of public fact and private value is demonstrated in the public realm of politics. The Bible does not claim to be only interested in the individual. It is the story of relationship, a relation guided by faith, obedience, repentance, and love. It is not merely “religion” but actions of God and his people in the history of Old and New Testaments and into the present.[12] Part of our political setting is a result of our history. Initially the Gospel conflicted with the imperialism. With Constantine, the “Christendom experiment”[13] was born and with the Enlightenment church and society were forever divorced. Newbigin articulates a two kingdom theology, relying heavily on Augustine’s City of God. He asserts that the love exerted in the family, then community, and then nation is the preserving force for the city of man. Medieval society was governed by reciprocity. The Reformers applied the Bible to economics, insisting that capitalism promotes covetousness. Newbigin agrees. Ultimately, the Enlightenment applied scientific theory to economics. The focus became distribution leading to production. Newbigin argues neither capitalism nor Marxism will succeed without a value system of morality. “Growth for the sake of growth is cancer.”[14] Christians must not be absent from public life. Both marriage and family are anti-capitalist and not self-interested. Neither the theocracy of Iran or the radical efforts of the “religious right” are solutions. Christianity must offer a radical paradigm shift. The goal of government is not happiness, freedom, or equality, for it operates without a fixed destiny. It cannot define what is needful. The Biblical goal is relatedness, namely the reconciliation of God and His people. The public values which the Gospel upholds are respect, honor, and love. All three call for differentiation and are characteristics of the Trinity. We have a shared goal of eternal life and a unity around the death and resurrection of Jesus.[15] There can be no “corpus Christianum” or Christian society. Newbigin asserts that Christianity must challenge the public life of the nations. Rather than protest outside the state in the comfy confines of our houses of worship, the Christian suffers the cross of faith in the public square. Newbigin suggests that the part of the cross-bearing is to bring Christ’s kingly rule to bear upon the state. Christians should exercise political power. A Christian civilization is not wrong, in Newbigin’s view.[16] Christians can give the state direction and purpose. He believes that the success of the Gospel requires the state to acknowledge the sovereignty of God.[17] To conclude, Newbigin offers seven essential correctives. One, we should restore a teleological vision, with purpose lived in view of the eschaton. Two, we should assert a social order governed by freedom of though and conscience, lived in patience, humility, and open to others’ experience. This includes listening to others while asserting Christianity is true. Three, we should bring theology to the people. Four, we should reject denominationalism and keep a spirit of ecumenism. Five, we should be willing to learn from other culture-bound understandings of Jesus. Six, we must hold fast to our belief in purpose and value even it can’t be proven. Seven, we must remember that the Spirit of God is the source of the radical paradigm shift needed to reintegrate value and fact, private and public. Evaluation Foolishness of the Greeks delights the reader with a critique of western thought. Newbigin’s perspective upon returning from India uniquely qualifies him. He effectively demonstrates the conflict between the Biblical worldview and the modern western worldview. He offers an appropriate use of contextualization to better understand where bridges can be built of consistent thought but also where a radical shift in thought is necessary to maintain the Christian faith. His diagnosis of the Enlightenment divorce of public fact and private value resonates. The abuses of science and politics are well articulated. He correctly recognizes that faith is now subject to science, the inverse of the pre-Enlightenment position. The ramifications upon public and private life are immense. Most importantly, we do well to insist upon the reclamation of purpose and design in the public sphere or at the least a simple teleology. (Consider Ben Stein’s Expelled.) His text is not without shortcomings. While he articulates briefly the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, on the whole the argument is lacking in Biblical mandate. Especially in his two kingdoms presentation, I would like to see a greater emphasis on the mandates for Christians to be active in the public sphere. So too, his Incarnation theology is weak, betraying a Zwinglian influence. Where is Jesus and where is Jesus’ Spirit? Jesus is in the preface and conclusion. The Holy Spirit doesn’t show until the very end. Concerning his use of scripture, Newbigin defines the Gospel as the narrative of Jesus and the Bible as the narrative of the people of God. Additional Biblical witness was lacking and would be useful. The greatest conflict for the Lutheran reader are with his seven correctives. We believe that the Christian ought to operate in the public sphere freely, for the love of neighbor. Assertion of the kingly rule of Christ over the world might be or perceived as a confusion of the two kingdoms. Let God rule through Caesar or Turk or God-willing by a Christian! It makes little difference. Here too a conflict arises. A Christian state is perceived as valuable to the missionary endeavor. Conversion and faith are God’s work. We teach that under a theology of the cross man may experience suffering at the hands of civil authorities or even martyrdom but that God uses such events for good and even preservation of the faith. We would agree that the patience, love, and humility of Christ granted in our Baptism should govern our whole life. Laypeople should be taught to engage theology and so engage their neighbor unequivocally. Yet, Newbigin’s World Council of Churches and ecumenical non-denominationalism is not the best solution. Woefully absent is an articulation of the life of faith lived out with the ministry of the Word. Newbigin avoids discussing the confession, worship life, and sacramental life of the Christian. For the Lutheran reader these are essential to preserving the faith unto life everlasting. This is likely an intentional oversight by Newbigin to make his argument appeal broadly to a number of traditions. The absence of these do not disqualify the book and its value. No, Newbigin offers a detailed and engaging look at the development of the modern world. We may call the next generation “postmodern,” yet the majority of our society and life is governed by the consequences of the Enlightenment. It is a valid primer to any theological students first forays into the evangelism endeavor. The strength of Foolishness of the Greeks is opening the eyes of the western man to reintegrate his public and private life as one life of faith and love for the neighbor.[1] Newbigin, Lesslie. Foolishness to the Greeks. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1986, 35. [2] Shenk, Wilbert R. Lesslie Newbigin’s Contribution to the Theology of Mission, TransMission, Special Edition, 1998: 3-6. (http://www.newbigin.net/general/biography.cfm, cited 02/24/09) [3] Newbigin, 1. [4] Ibid., 3-4. [5] Ibid., 13. [6] Ibid., 16. [7] Ibid., 36. [8] Ibid., 64. [9] Ibid., 76. [10] Ibid., 88. [11] Ibid., 91. [12] Ibid., 98-99. [13] Ibid., 101. [14] Ibid., 114. [15] Ibid., 123. [16] Ibid., 129. [17] Ibid., 133.
