The Postmodern Worldview (Part 3)

Lesslie Newbigin’s seminal book on missiology, Foolishness to the Greeks, discusses the matter of realizing and articulating the authentic, historic Christian kerygma, in the midst of our contemporary culture. He brings his vast experience of cross-cultural evangelism to bear on examining the essential good news of the Christian faith in contrast to the culturally bound trappings of western Christianity. From his vantage point of being a virtual stranger to western culture after being in the foreign mission field for so long, he distinguishes between contextualizing the true gospel to our western mindset, and indiginizing (or adapting) the message to that mindset. He insists, with al-Ghazali (the Muslim theologian and mystic), that Christians must distinguish between the true signs of transcendence and the false ones through sober rational assessment.

Newbigin argues that the authority for distinguishing between the true and the false signs of transcendence is the Christian Scriptures. He contrasts the authentic approach to the Bible from several historic, popular approaches to it. He dismisses the “fundamentalist” approach to treating the Bible in a wooden literal sense. He rejects the popular Gnostic approach to the Bible where it is used as a personal spiritualist text that merely confirms one’s esoteric experiences. He also spurns the use of the Bible as an encyclopedia of morality. He refuses the neo-orthodox view of the hidden, divine story behind the story of the Bible approach. Instead, he embraces (with Frei, Lindbeck, and others) the approach to the authority of the Bible that sees in this document of divine origin the true witness that “renders accessible to us the character and actions and purposes of God.”

Newbigin investigates what the true witness of the Scriptures has to offer in its dialogue with science and politics. These two pillars of modernist, secular ideology are dealt with clearly and definitively. Newbigin makes a great case for the Christian’s confidence in the midst of opposing views. Here, Newbigin does what Alister McGrath commends us to do, challenging believers to “rattle their cages,” rather than seeing themselves as being “in the cage getting rattled.”

Finally, Newbigin challenges the postmodern Church of Jesus Christ to continue to be the authentic faith community it has always been within the context of every culture; influencing our culture as agents of profound relatedness in bonds of mutual love and obedience that reflect the mutual relatedness in love that is the being of the Triune God himself. This is done, Newbigin says, by being communities of transformative truth and grace, and by being led by the Holy Spirit into all understanding. In this way, Christians can boldly engage in dialogue with science and politics (or any other ideology of any age) with confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and the knowledge of his revealed truth found in the Scriptures.