Gospel & culture

Lesslie Newbigin set out what an effective missionary approach to Western culture by the church could involve. He argued that Western culture developed as the result of a “collective conversion” from the Greek/Medieval framework of thought that explained nature in terms of purpose to a framework of thought that viewed nature as governed by natural laws of cause and effect. As the new framework did not need to invoke purpose or design as an explanation (to have discovered a cause is sufficient to provide an explanation) there was essentially no place in this framework for miracles, divine intervention or even God at all.

The new framework worked by observation of phenomena and induction from the results of observation. Science used tools of analysis to dissect, separate and observe each of the elements that construct any phenomena. Analysis was then followed by reconstruction. Mathematics provided the tools whereby all reality can be quantified and arranged into relatively comprehensible structures. It was thought that by these analytical and mathematical powers humans could attain to a complete understanding and mastery of nature or reality in all its forms. Human beings therefore believed they had the right, as well as the potential, to exercise reason in the search for reality. This tendency led to the formulation of the “rights of man”. Rights can only exist where there are legal and social structures that define them and such definition led to the creation of nation-states. The individual nature of these rights, however, enabled each person to pursue and define their rights as s/he wished. Finally, this combination of ideas led to the doctrine of progress - a developing understanding and mastery of nature through human reason leading to the development of life, liberty, property and happiness for all.

Newbigin argues that this is the culture in which, in the West, a missionary encounter with the gospel needs to take place. We need to consider how the church can engage in this encounter and what the nature of the encounter should be.

In order to understand how the church can be engaged we need an understanding of the relationship between the Church (the Christian community) and the Bible. The Bible is the book of community, and neither the book or the community are properly understood except in their reciprocal relationship with each other. It is this relationship that is the clue to the meaning of both the book and the community. The Bible functions as authority only within a community that is committed to faith and obedience and which is embodying that commitment in an active discipleship embracing the whole of life, public and private.

The Bible is the body of literature which renders accessible to us the character, action and purpose of God. Taken as a whole, the Bible fitly renders God but this can only be understood as we are in engaged in the same struggle that we see in scripture. This is the struggle to understand and deal with the events of our time in the faith that God creates purpose, sustains all that is and will bring all to its proper end. The Bible comes to us in its “canonical shape”, as the result of many centuries of interpretation and re-interpretation, editing and re-editing, with a unity that depends on two primary centres - the rescue of Israel from Egypt and the events concerning Jesus - events, happening in the contigent world of history, which are interpreted as disclosures, in a unique sense, of the presence and action of God. However, the interpretation has to be re-interpreted over and over again in terms of another generation and another culture. The original interpretative language becomes a text which in turn needs interpretation. Yet the text cannot be eliminated. The events are not mere symbols of an underlying reality which could be grasped apart from them. What is presented in the bible is testimony.

Conversion is required because Western culture is outside of the believing community where the authority of the bible is accepted. Here a paradigm shift is required whereby the current framework of thought of the culture can be radically understood from the viewpoint of the new (in this case Christian) framework of thought but which cannot be arrived at from any process of thinking within the current framework.

The nature of the missionary encounter will include testimony and questioning in five areas:

• Understanding what it means to be a human person: The Enlightenment saw the human person as an autonomous centre of knowing and judging. The biblical vision is not one of equality but mutuality - “one-anotherness”.
• The goal of human life: Our culture has generally accepted as self evident that the “pursuit of happiness” is the proper goal of any person. Happiness, in the biblical vision, is a gift of God, not a human achievement.
• The capabilities and rights of Governments: Governments have come to be seen as the source from which all blessings flow and, because none can deliver what is expected, cynicism follows. The biblical vision is one of human life in terms of mutual responsibilities rather than of equal rights, and of happiness not as a right but as a gift.
• Our vision of the future: The Enlightenment gave birth to the hope of an earthly utopia achieved by the liberal vision of gradual progress. The biblical vision is of the future controlled by the events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The vision is of deepening conflict, of the destruction of what seemed stable, and of a final victory beyond the darkness. The hope is for the accomplishment of God’s whole purpose in nature and history.
• Assumptions about what is involved in knowing: We have been tempted to believe, because of the awe-inspiring scientific achievements of the past two hundred years, that the methods of science are the sufficient key to knowledge in all its fullness. The biblical vision places at the centre a relationship of trust in a personal reality much greater than ourselves.

The twin dogmas of Incarnation and the Trinity form the starting point for a way of understanding reality as a whole, a way that leads out into a wider, more inclusive rationality than the real but limited rationality of the reductionist views that try to explain the whole of reality in terms of the natural sciences. A wider rationality that in no way negates but acknowledges and includes these other kinds of explanations as proper and necessary at their respective levels.