Missions Resources - Bibliography
Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture
Authors: Newbigin, Lesslie
ISBN: 0-8028-0176-5
Publisher: Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary: In the last two decades, Mr. Newbigin has played a role similar to that of Francis Schaeffer before him: author of canon books and hip intellectual for Christian grad students.
Foolishness to the Greeks is one of his better known works. It is a short book that explores Western culture from the perspective of the Gospel. He assumes (healthily) that the West is not Christian in the hegemonous sense of the word, and examines where the core pillars of Western culture stand when confronted with the Gospel.
Mr. Newbigin spent much of his life in India, so he is quite qualified to look at the West from an outsider's point of view. On the other hand, most of the problems in this book come from looking at the West from that same outsider's point of view.
For example, Newbigin locates science as the core value in modern westerners' hearts. A quick gloss over the world's (English-language) newspapers would confirm this diagnosis, with the addition of rational capitalism of the Max Weber ideal-typical mode.
However, these are the values other nations believe are the West's. They are the values of the entrepreneurial buccaneers and businessmen who strut through the world's streets. They are no longer the values of the American population: that exalted rank belongs to entertainment, the true mobilizing force for Americans.
Even if Newbigin is wrong about the core values of the west, his analysis is erudite and lucid, and will force you to deal with your faith's and mind's foundations.
You might take a look at Foolishness to the Greeks if you are a humanities major, and your professors level sophomoric blows on Christianity, or if you get bored with your student newspaper's half-baked analyses that locate all of the West's troubles in Evangelical Christianity. The absolute truth value of Newbigin's thought is not as important as the depth of his insight and the humble confidence in the gospel which colors the pages of this book.
- Paul Grant
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register