Newbigin in the morning

I have been crashing on Newbigin this morning. Some deep thinking to get my mind going. A bracing shot of metaphorical cold water to the face as a wake up call.

I first re-read his 1985 article/presentation “Can the West be Converted.”. This was one of the things that woke me up back five years or so ago.

Check out this diagnosis of the problem from “Can the West be Converted”:

[in our current world culture which divides facts from values] That human beings exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever is not a fact. It is an opinion held by some people. It belongs to the private sector, not the public. Those who hold it are free to communicate it to their children and church; it has no place in the curriculum of the public schools and universities. And since the publicly accepted definition of a human being excludes any statement of the purpose for which human beings exist, it follows necessarily that (in the ordinary meaning of the word “fact”), no factual statement can be made about what kinds of behavior are good or bad. These can only be private opinions. Pluralism reigns. Here, I submit, is the intellectual core of that culture which, at least from the mid-eighteenth century has been the public culture of Europe, and has – under the name of modernization extended its power into every part of the world. Two hundred years ago it was hailed in Europe as, quite simply, the dawning of light in the darkness: the Enlightenment.

and then look at this framework for the answer from the same article:

Let us attempt something quite different from what Berger proposes. Instead of weighing the Christian religious experience (along with others) in the scale of reason as our culture understands reason, let us suppose that the Gospel is true, that in the story of the Bible and in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus the creator and lord of the universe has actually manifested himself to declare and effect his purpose, and that therefore everything else, including all the axioms and assumptions of our culture have to be assessed and can only be validly assessed in the scales which this revelation provides. What would it mean if, instead of trying to understand the Gospel from the point of view of our culture, we tried to understand our culture from the point of view of the Gospel?

oh yeah! make me stand up and holler! Yes. Yes! YES!. Now, what does that mean for us, practically, here in this world, in this time right now? Newbigin’s 1989 answer from “Our Missionary Responsibility In The Crisis Of Western Culture” (for some reason the article in the bibliography is entitled “Mission and the Crisis of Western Culture: Recent Studies”):

To take this position means, of course, to be a minority in our culture. It means questioning the things that no one ever questions – like the Christian missionary in India questioning the law of karma and samsara. And it means, I believe, being enabled to find a more rational way of understanding and coping with our world than that which is offered in our contemporary culture, a culture which is enormously productive of means but unable to speak about ends, fertile-in finding new ways to do things, but incapable of answering the question: ‘What things are worth doing?’ It is not, let me insist, a matter of appealing to ‘revelation’ against ‘reason’. This absurd opposition is, I am sorry to say, a commonplace in English discussions. Reason is not a separate source of knowledge. It is the power by which we seek coherence in the data of experience and it operates, can only operate, within a complex of language, concepts, symbols, images which make up the ‘fiduciary framework’. No move towards understanding reality is possible except by the use of reason; the question is, ‘Within what “fiduciary framework” is reason operating?’ And when we offer a different fiduciary framework, alternative to the one which is dominant in our culture, we are calling for conversion, for a radical shift in perspective. We need the boldness of the foreign missionary who dares to challenge the accepted framework, even though the words he uses must inevitably sound absurd to those who dwell in that framework. In the contemporary crisis of western culture there is a widespread failure of nerve. There is a widespread tendency to retreat from the whole splendid adventure of western culture and to look elsewhere – especially to the East – for something different. That is a terrible mistake. We cannot run away from our responsibilities. It is we in the West who have developed this culture which is penetrating the whole world under the name of modernization, It is we Christians who have failed to challenge its fundamental assumptions, who have allowed the Gospel to be co-opted into it instead of challenging it. It is upon us that there now rests the formidable responsibility for a task which is both intellectual and practical: to recover a concept of knowledge which will heal the split in our culture between science and faith, between the public world and the private; and to embody in the life of our congregations a style of life which expresses in practice the purpose for which God has created all things: to glorify him and to enjoy him for ever.

emphasis added.

Oh my goodness. as the marxist peasant in Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail would say, “that’s what I’m on about.”

The question is, do we have the faith in God, and the courage to evaluate our culture in light of the values framework of the Bible? Do we have the nerve to face up to our responsibilities as ministers of reconciliation? Go read my rock of offense article to see how Jesus showed us the way to speak the truth in love, meeting the woman at the well where she was in her culture and moving her to faith in Himself.