Contours of Culture
Mission Conversion
by Ken Myers
About halfway into his book Foolishness to the Greeks, Lesslie Newbigin presents a claim that illumines the relationship between the book's title and its subtitle: The Gospel and Western Culture. What is it that makes the gospel foolish to our own (and not just the first century's) cultural moment? "From the point of view of our contemporary culture, the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead is irrational. It cannot be incorporated into the existing plausibility structure. . . . It must be regarded as the esoteric belief of a community that is living in a world of make-believe rather than the world of facts."
The gospel is foolish—belief in the Resurrection irrational—because it is unscientific. According to the dominant belief system in Western culture, science (understood in terms established by the Enlightenment) holds the keys to understanding all of reality. When the Apostle Paul preached the Resurrection, rationality was not equated with the inductive, analytical, reductionist methods of science; but today, the unscientific is by definition irrational.
It is unfortunate that Newbigin's fine little book is not better known. I can think of no other book that summarizes so well in such a short space the challenges faced by the Church in its confrontation with modern Western culture. These challenges are external to the Church—entrenched in the post-Christian institutions, assumptions, and practices of the secularized modern West. But they are also internal: a Church that has been domesticated and trained to define its mission solely in terms of personal and private spiritual experience is unlikely to perceive the extent of its cultural captivity, and thus at best will be selective in its recognition of the disorders in the surrounding culture.
A Call for Radical Conversion
After a long career as a missionary in India, Newbigin (who died in 1998) assumed the role of a missiologist, then served as a missionary to an inner-city area in England. His book is an exercise in summarizing the necessary elements of "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 offshoots, and the growing company of educated leaders in the cities of the world." In other words, modern culture. As a genuinely missionary encounter, the goal of this encounter is not simply to understand, but to present "a call for conversion, for a radical metanoia, a U-turn of the mind."
This theme of the necessity of radical conversion runs through the entire book and through all of Newbigin's other writings. "This will not be only a conversion of the will and of the feelings but a conversion of the mind—a 'paradigm shift' that leads to a new vision of how things are." Modern science is crippled by a materialistic reductionism that eliminates the category of purpose in explaining reality. Modern social and political institutions promote a depersonalizing individualism that renders the pursuit of the common good precarious if not impossible. The paradigm shift effected by the gospel is embedded in the subject of the gospel: a King and his kingdom.
Newbigin's early chapters summarize both the formation of the modern mentality by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Church's subsequent strategies for confronting that mentality, for presenting "the Word in the world." The middle chapters offer two "dialogues," one with science (in which Newbigin displays his sympathy for the insights of Michael Polanyi) and one with politics. In the latter chapter, Newbigin insists that the gospel of the kingdom of God must have public consequences:
The church witnesses to that true end for which all creation and all human beings exist, the truth by which all alleged values are to be judged. And truth must be public truth, truth for all. A private truth for a limited circle of believers is no truth at all. . . . If the Christian faith about the source and goal of human life is to be denied access to the public realm, where decisions are made on the great issues of the common life, then it cannot in the long run survive even as an option for a minority.
Discipleship as Cultural Formation
In the book's final chapter, Newbigin suggests seven conditions "for the recovery by the church of its proper distinction from, and its proper responsibility for, this secular culture that we have shared so comfortably and so long with what [Alasdair] MacIntyre would call the barbarians." Here Newbigin reminds us that discipleship properly understood is nothing less than cultural formation. "What kind of churchmanship will enable us so to preach the gospel that men and women are called to be disciples in the fullest sense—men and women and children whose personal and corporate life is a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's kingly rule over all creation and all nations?"
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on conversion from the online archives
more from the online archives
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Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith
32.4—July/August 2019
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