Musings: Notes From My Daybook

Lesslie Newbigin, British missionary, returned from a long missionary career in India and then embarked upon a second career. Challenged by the radical, secular changes that had occurred in England, he took to exploring how the church makes the gospel heard in a (now) pluralistic world. His writings continue to spawn reflection and dialogue. For example, The Gospel and Our Culture Network is one such place where Newbigin's insights continue to be explored.

I have been working with Newbigin's book, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Though written twenty years ago, his observations ring true. Over the next few days I want to explore seven trajectories that Newbigin offers as the book concludes. He puts these seven ideas out as a way of extending the discussion as to how the church continues to be the church in post-Christian world.

In summarily he suggests:
1. A renewed focus on eschatology--particularly on the idea of kingdom.
2. The Christian doctrine of freedom must be heard again--freedom for all, even when Christianity is the dominant force in society.
3. A re-energized focus on theology for lay people and the integration of biblical faith and public issues.
4. A strong critique of denominationalism. Denominations creates great barriers to allow for the lordship of Christ to be seen and experienced.
5. Seeing Christian faith through cultures other than our own.
6. Avoiding the temptation to prove the Christian faith on the terms of what our culture says makes for truth.
7. To live with hope.

Why Newbigin? In part, because he saw things, important things clearly. Early in this book, as he reviews Christianity's loss of its dominant role in the public sphere he pointedly states what is really at stake:

"Having lost the battle to conrol education, and having been badly battered in its encounter with modern science, Christianity in its Protestant form has largely accepted relegation to the private sector, where it can influence the choice of values by those who take this option. By doing so, it has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial field. As an option for the private field, as the protagonist for certain values, Christianity can enjoy considerable success. Churches can grow. People can be encouraged, as the posters in General Eisenhower's day used to put it, to 'join the church of your choice.' All this can happen. And yet the claim, the awesome and winsome claim of Jesus Christ to be alone the Lord of all the world, the light that alone shows the whole of reality as it really is, the life that alone endures forever--this claim is effectively silenced. It remains, for our culture, just one of the varieties of religious experience."

Christianity as merely one variety of religious experience--I think that the church can do better than that.