This week's selections are of my collection of church mission and evangelism books.
The one I want to highlight is Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks.
I first read this book as an incoming Duke Divinity student -- it was the book the faculty had chosen for our incoming class to read as a whole, the book that was meant to introduce us to our studies and for shaping our theological imaginations as incoming Duke students.
Lesslie Newigin's Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture has a theme that remains one of my primary life concerns: "What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call 'modern Western culture'"? (page 1) Newbigin quickly turns to defining the important terms of contextualization, culture, language, and "the gospel". Then he dives into "the issues raised by the cross-cultural communication of the gospel ... the essential features of our modern Western culture ... how biblical authority can be a reality for those who are shaped by modern Western culture ... the encounter of the gospel with our culture with respect to the intellectual core of our culture [science and then politics] ... the task of the church in bringing about this encounter" (page 4). Newbigin strikes home by stating:
"Chapter 2: Profile of a Culture" reminds me how often students and faculty with whom I interact embrace nature as the ultimate reality over God (page 27), the nation-state as the provider (27), the "doctrine of progress" (28), urbanization as the proper direction of culture (32). "Chapter 3: The Word in the World" addresses liberal interpretations of Scripture and the importance of obedience to the Jesus Christ of the Word of God, challenging the missionary to not lose sight that they are extending a "call for radical conversion", a "paradigm shift" (64). Newbigin's engagement with science would benefit from incorporating current followers of Christ who are the sciences, e.g., Francis Collins, and their interaction with the "'methodological atheism' of modern science" (72). Newbigin states,With respect to ultimate beliefs, pluralism rules, and thus each individual has to make a personal decision about ultimate questions. In that sense we are all now subject to the "heretical imperative" (page 11).
As resident aliens and agents of God's kingdom, Christians are to extend the love of the cross of Christ, the foundation for justice (pages 103-105, 124). We are to do such with the hope of the resurrection and the new heavens and new earth. A challenging call, but one to be embraced by each and every day in whatever vocation we have be called to in this creation.A missionary encounter with our culture must bring us face to face with the central citadel of our culture, which is the belief that is based on the immense achievements of the scientific method and, to a limited but increasing extent, embodied in our political, economic, and social practice -- the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not of final causes, a world that is not governed by an intelligible purpose, and thus a world in which the answer to the question of what is good has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in the body of accepted facts that control public life ... The twin dogmas of Incarnation and Trinity thus form the starting point for a way of understanding reality as a whole ... at the center of this disclosure, providing the clue to the whole, there stands the cross ... resurrection, in which that very death became the source of life (79).
This is an amazing little book that church leaders and pastors should read and reread every few years.