Foolishness to the Greeks

The Gospel and Western Culture

Lesslie Newbigin

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN / CAMBRIDGE, U.K.

© 1986 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

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Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newbigin, Lesslie.

Foolishness to the Greeks.

Expanded version of the Warfield Lectures given at Princeton Theological Seminary, March 1984.

Includes index.

1. Christianity and culture—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Missions—Addresses, essays, lectures.

I. Title

BR115.C8N467 1986 261 86-2113

ISBN 978-0-8028-0176-0 (pbk.: alk. paper); 978-1-4674-1908-6 (ePub); 978-1-4674-0108-1 (Kindle)

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Preface

1. POST-ENLIGHTENMENT CULTURE AS A MISSIONARY PROBLEM

2. PROFILE OF A CULTURE

3. THE WORD IN THE WORLD

4. WHAT CAN WE KNOW? THE DIALOGUE WITH SCIENCE

5. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? THE DIALOGUE WITH POLITICS

6. WHAT MUST WE BE? THE CALL TO THE CHURCH

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Preface

The following chapters are a somewhat expanded version of the Warfield Lectures given at Princeton Theological Seminary in March 1984. I am deeply grateful to Dr. James McCord, then president of the seminary, who did me the honor of inviting me to give these lectures and to President Gillespie and his colleagues on the faculty who received me with the greatest kindness and hospitality.

At the time I received the invitation I had recently written a small pamphlet entitled The Other Side of 1984, an invitation to the British churches to a more forthright missionary encounter with contemporary British culture, and was much occupied with the resulting discussion. I therefore decided to use this invitation as an opportunity to develop more fully the message of that booklet. This book is the result.

It would be impossible to acknowledge the many debts I owe to friends who have helped me in trying to understand what would be involved by a more explicit missionary encounter with our culture. I hesitate to name any of them lest it might appear that they had some responsibility for my errors. However, I must acknowledge the kindness of Dr. David Ford and Professor Colin Gunton, who read a first draft and made helpful suggestions, and of Dr. Arthur Peacocke, who read Chapter 4 and saved me from one substantial error. The index was prepared by Mrs. Hazel Clawley. And, once again, I must express my debt to Verleigh Cant who, with unfailing skill and patience, converted my illegible writing into lucid type.

LESSLIE NEWBIGIN

Selly Oak

Advent 1985

1. Post-Enlightenment Culture as a Missionary Problem

My purpose in these chapters is to consider what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and the culture that is shared by the peoples of Europe and North America, their colonial and cultural off-shoots, and the growing company of educated leaders in the cities of the world—the culture which those of us who share it usually describe as modern. The phenomenon usually called modernization, which is being promoted throughout much of the Third World through the university and technical training network, the multinational corporations, and the media, is in fact the co-option of the leadership of those nations into the particular culture that had its origin among the peoples of western Europe. For the moment, and pending closer examination of it, I shall simply refer to it as modern Western culture.

The angle from which I am approaching the study is that of a foreign missionary. After having spent most of my life as a missionary in India, I was called to teach missiology and then to become a missionary in a typical inner-city area in England. This succession of roles has forced me to ask the question I have posed as the theme of this book: 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? There is, of course, nothing new in proposing to discuss the relationship between gospel and culture. We have Richard Niebuhr’s classic study of five models of relationship in his book Christ and Culture. We have had the massive work of Paul Tillich, who was so much concerned with what he called, in the title of his first public lecture, the theology of culture. But this work has mainly been done, as far as I know, by theologians who had not had the experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to transmit the gospel from one culture to a radically different one.

On the other hand, we have had a plethora of studies by missionaries on the theological issues raised by cross-cultural missions. As Western missionaries have shared in the general weakening of confidence in our modern Western culture, they have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for the relativities of one culture.

For some on the liberal wing of Protestantism, such as W. E. Hocking, Christian missions were to be almost absorbed into the worldwide spread of Western culture, and this was quite explicit. But those at the opposite end of the spectrum, the conservative evangelicals, were often unaware of the cultural conditioning of their religion and therefore guilty, as many of them now recognize, of confusing the gospel with the values of the American way of life without realizing what they were doing. In the last couple of decades there has been a spate of missionary writings on the problem of contextualization. This has been preferred to the terms indigenization and adaptation, earlier much used by Protestants and Catholics respectively. The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms—forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of modernization. The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, adaptation, was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary’s preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture. 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.

The weakness, however, of this whole mass of missiological writing is that while it has sought to explore the problems of contextualization in all the cultures of humankind from China to Peru, it has largely ignored the culture that is the most widespread, powerful, and persuasive among all contemporary cultures—namely, what I have called modern Western culture. Moreover, this neglect is even more serious because it is this culture that, more than almost any other, is proving resistant to the gospel. In great areas of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, the church grows steadily and even spectacularly. But in the areas dominated by modern Western culture (whether in its capitalist or socialist political expression) the church is shrinking and the gospel appears to fall on deaf ears. It would seem, therefore, that there is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture. Or, to put the matter in a slightly different way, can the experience of missionaries in the cross-cultural transmission of the gospel and the work of theologians who have worked on the question of gospel and culture within the limits of our modern Western culture be usefully brought together to throw light on the central issue I have posed?

Let us begin with some preliminary definitions. By the word culture we have to understand the sum total of ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation. Central to culture is language. The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them. Around that center one would have to group their visual and musical arts, their technologies, their law, and their social and political organization. And one must also include in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. I am speaking, obviously, about religion. Religion—including the Christian religion—is thus part of culture.

In speaking of the gospel, I am, of course, referring to the announcement that in the series of events that have their center in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ something has happened that alters the total human situation and must therefore call into question every human culture. Now clearly this announcement is itself culturally conditioned. It does not come down from heaven or by the mouth of an angel. The words Jesus Christ are the Greek rendering of a Hebrew name and title, Joshua the Messiah. They belong to and are part of the culture of one part of the world—the eastern Mediterranean—at one point in history when Greek was the most widespread international language in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time, is there or can there be a gospel that is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.

What I hope to do in this book is the following: first, to look in general at the issues raised by the cross-cultural communication of the gospel; second, to examine the essential features of our modern Western culture, including the present signs of its disintegration; third, to face the crucial question of how biblical authority can be a reality for those who are shaped by modern Western culture; fourth, to ask what would be involved in the encounter of the gospel with our culture with respect to the intellectual core of our culture, which is science; fifth, to ask the same question with respect to our politics; and finally, to inquire about the task of the church in bringing about this encounter.

I begin by looking at what is involved in the cross-cultural communication of the gospel. The New Testament itself, which chronicles the movement of the gospel from its origin in the cultural world of Judaism to its articulation in the language and practice of Greek-speaking Gentile communities, provides us with the models from which to begin. As a starting point, I find it illuminating to consider Paul’s speech in the presence of King Agrippa and his court (Acts 26). The cultural setting is that of the cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world of the eastern Roman Empire. Paul is speaking in Greek. But at the decisive point of his story he tells the court that when God spoke to him it was not in Greek but in Hebrew: I heard a voice speaking to me in the Hebrew language, the language of the home and the heart, the mother tongue. Paul is a citizen of that cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world. But the word that changed the course of his life was spoken in Hebrew, the language of his own native culture.

But—and this is equally important—the word spoken to his heart, while it accepts that language as its vehicle, uses it not to affirm and approve the life that Saul is living but to call it radically into question: Why do you persecute me? It is to show him that his most passionate and all-conquering conviction is wrong, that what he thinks is the service of God is fighting against God, that he is required to stop in his tracks, turn around, and renounce the whole direction of his life, to love what he had hated and to cherish what he had sought to destroy.

And—this is my third point—a voice that makes such a demand can only be the voice of the sovereign Lord himself. No one but God has the right and the power to contradict my devotion to God. Who are you? is Paul’s trembling question. It is the same as Moses’ question at the burning bush: What is your name? The answer, I am Jesus, means that from henceforth Saul knows Jesus as simply and absolutely Lord.

We have here, I suggest, a model of what is involved in the communication of the gospel across a cultural frontier. 1) The communication has to be in the language of the receptor culture. It has to be such that it accepts, at least provisionally, the way of understanding things that is embodied in that language; if it does not do so, it will simply be an unmeaning sound that cannot change anything. 2) However, if it is truly the communication of the gospel, it will call radically into question that way of understanding embodied in the language it uses. If it is truly revelation, it will involve contradiction, and call for conversion, for a radical metanoia, a U-turn of the mind. 3) Finally, this radical conversion can never be the achievement of any human persuasion, however eloquent. It can only be the work of God. True conversion, therefore, which is the proper end toward which the communication of the gospel looks, can only be a work of God, a kind of miracle—not natural but supernatural.

This pattern is brilliantly exemplified in the Johannine writings. John freely uses the language and the thought-forms of the religious world for which he writes. Much of it is suggestive of the sort of world-view that is often very imprecisely called Gnosticism and has obvious affinities with Indian thought. For this reason the Fourth Gospel was early suspected of Gnostic tendencies and has later been eagerly welcomed by Hindus as placing Jesus firmly within a typically Indian world-view. Yet John uses this language and these thought-forms in such a way as to confront them with a fundamental question and indeed a contradiction. The logos is no longer an idea in the mind of the philosopher or the mystic. The logos is the man Jesus who went the way from Bethlehem to Calvary. In my own experience I have found that Hindus who begin by welcoming the Fourth Gospel as the one that uses their language and speaks to their hearts end by being horrified when they understand what it is really saying. And so, logically, we move to the third point to which John gave equal emphasis: that—as Jesus puts it in the sixth chapter—No one can come to me unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). The radical conversion of the heart, the U-turn of the mind which the New Testament calls metanoia, can never be the calculable result of correct methods of communication. It is something mysterious for which we can only say that our methods of communication were, at most, among the occasions for the miracle.

The same threefold pattern is exemplified in the experience of a missionary who, nurtured in one culture, seeks to communicate the gospel among people of another culture whose world has been shaped by a vision of the totality of things quite different from that of the Bible. He must first of all struggle to master the language. To begin with, he will think of the words he hears simply as the equivalent of the words he uses in his own tongue and are listed in his dictionary as equivalents. But if he really immerses himself in the talk, the songs and folk tales, and the literature of the people, he will discover that there are no exact equivalents. All the words in any language derive their meaning, their resonance in the minds of those who use them, from a whole world of experience and a whole way of grasping that experience. So there are no exact translations. He has to render the message as best he can, drawing as fully as he can upon the tradition of the people to whom he speaks.

Clearly, he has to find the path between two dangers. On the one hand, he may simply fail to communicate: he uses the words of the language, but in such a way that he sounds like a foreigner; his message is heard as the babblings of a man who really has nothing to say. Or, on the other hand, he may so far succeed in talking the language of his hearers that he is accepted all too easily as a familiar character—a moralist calling for greater purity of conduct or a guru