Foolishness to the Greeks: A Summary…

February 27, 2007 | 12:30 PM

Lesslie Newbigin was a missionary to India for nearly 30 years before he moved back to England to work in the inner city. He credits the transition from India back to England as a large reason why he wrote his books on cultural communication. His book, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, was based on a series of lectures he presented at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1984. Newbigin breaks his book down into six major sections: communicating the Gospel to a post-Enlightenment culture, a profile of the modern Western culture, how the Bible relates to the modern worldview, how Christianity relates to the scientific world, how it relates to politics, and the role of the Church in modern Western culture.

Newbigin spends the first chapter discussing the necessity for understanding a culture in order to relate the Gospel to those in it. He brings forth the idea of contextualization through the lens of the past. “The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future” (2). The primary focus of Newbigin’s first chapter is to explain the importance of exegeting a culture in order to translate the Gospel in a way that the indigenous people will understand. In doing so, he defines contextualization, the Gospel, and culture. These concepts will be further discussed later.

Newbigin’s second chapter is a profile of what he refers to as “modern Western culture.” By this he refers to the culture found predominantly in Western Europe, North America, and Australia that was heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. The emphasis here is on the historical background of modern Western culture beginning with the Greeks, traversing through the Roman Empire, spending a considerable time in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and ending at the time of authorship (the mid-1980s). The point Newbigin so laboriously strives to make is that the culture of today emerges completely from that of yesterday. Any exegete of culture must study that culture’s foundations. Newbigin, in the latter part of the second chapter, shows that America’s foundational beliefs of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” come straight out of Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment.

Moving on from a profile of modern Western culture, Newbigin begins to work the Word of God into culture in chapter three.

For our modern Western society, both the society and the book are already extremely familiar. They are not perceived as addressing any fresh challenge to our accepted worldview. Critical scholarship, using the tools developed in the past two hundred years, has brought the Bible into the brilliant light of the modern scientific worldview. The story it tells is now placed within the general work of any other ancient document. Under this light, the Bible can have no privileged status. It is part of the whole corpus of ancient literature (42).

All supernatural events and claims, Newbigin contends, must be reviewed by scientific method and reason. No longer does the Bible or Christianity have the proverbial “get out of jail free” card. They, like all other ideas, are subject to no favor but thorough examination as any other document or system of beliefs. However, Newbigin emphasizes a change in worldview upon what he refers to as a “radical conversion of the mind.”

In chapter four Newbigin discusses the relationship and growing rift between science and Christianity in the modern Western culture. Once again he offers a detailed historical overview by explaining the effect of the Enlightenment on modern scientific thought. At the end of the chapter, he offers five propositions that summarize his thoughts on the dialogue between science and the Gospel:

1. While the methodological elimination of final causes from the study of nature has been immensely fruitful, the attempt to explain all that exists solely in terms of efficient cause leads to conceptual absurdity and to social tyranny. …
2. We must ask these questions: “Is anyone there? Is there a word?” …
3. The church exists to testify that there is someone, that he has spoken, and that we can begin got know his purpose and to direct our personal and public lives by it. …
4. The church must be bold in bringing that encounter to the modern Western culture. …
5. It will perhaps be the greatest task of the church in the twenty-first century to be the bastion of rationality in a world of unreason. But for that, Christians will have to learn that conversion is a matter not only of the heart and the will but also of the mind (64).

Newbigin’s fourth and fifth points are explained in detail in the final chapter of the book, and will be discussed further in the final section of this paper.

Just as Newbigin discussed the relationship between science and Christianity, he follows it with the relationship between politics and Christianity in chapter five. It is here that he elaborates on points he brought up in his profile of modern Western culture in chapter two. At one point he draws a parallel between the Church under Roman rule and the Church in modern Western culture. Under both, the Church was guaranteed a certain freedom to exist and propagate. Under the Romans all that was necessary was a simple registration as a cult, but instead of guaranteeing their own freedom the Christians chose another way. He suggests the opposite occurs in modern Western culture.

Newbigin draws the book to a close with a call to the Church to be the bearer of the Gospel to all nations. He explains, “There cannot be what Islam has set out to establish: a single Sharia, which controls a single society and all its life…” (93-94). Rather than institute Christianity across the world through politics, Newbigin strongly calls the Church to bring forth a transformation on the individual level that propagates throughout a culture and changes it, a la Richard Neibuhr’s Christ and Culture. The end point is that Christ transforms culture, not that the Church forces a cultural change. He closes with seven challenges to the Church: a firm understanding of eschatology and the kingdom, an understanding of the Christian the doctrine of freedom (which begins with surrender), the education and edification of lay leadership, a critique of denominationalism, looking at Western Christianity through the lens of a non-Western Christian, to know that Christianity cannot be scientifically proved, and finally that all our power comes from God and it is an outflow of praise (134-150).

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