Missions Resources - Bibliography
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Authors: Lesslie Newbigin
ISBN: 0802804268
Publisher: Eerdmans
Number of pages: 251
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
by Paul Grant
The Church is the most important witness to God’s truth in the world. When sinful human beings can live together in harmony, miraculous power is more evident than in umpteen compelling sermons or pop culture-literate worship services.
Sometimes newer isn’t better. Lesslie Newbigin’s contemporary classic (sixteen years old) said first what many recent contributions windily pronounce: that the gospel is more relevant than ever before in today’s pluralist world.
A small industry supplies the evangelical intellectual world with books, resources and speakers for “reaching the post-modern generation,” “becoming relevant” and other uncritically wished-for qualities. Much of this quest for with-it-ness is driven by fear of being tried in the court of popular opinion, and found stodgy. So we go to workshops on reaching hipsters, or the creative class, or other loosely defined but desirable demographic clusters.
It’s a tactical retreat doomed to failure, says Newbigin. The world does not ask the questions that lead to life, so in trying to answer the world’s questions the Church is barking up the wrong tree: “Where the Church is faithful to its Lord, there the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the question to which the gospel is the answer. And that, I suppose, is why the letters of St. Paul contain so many exhortations to faithfulness but no exhortations to be active in mission.”
That’s not to say the church should take a stiff upper lip approach to translating the gospel into the context of contemporary society. But the gospel is so much more life-giving than the ways of the world that our attempts at cooling up the Bible can only result in our presenting an impoverished gospel to the world. As Harry Stam long ago said at Urbana 54, “As missionaries we are not paupers or misers; we are of the race of kings and priests.”
In warning the Church against misguided apologetics, Lesslie Newbigin was hardly advocating an exile from the world. Newbigin was an English missionary in India, who upon retirement realized that England had changed more than India during his life. As he considered the significance of a “Post-Christian” Britain, he came to the conclusion that the West had never been a Christian civilization in the first place, and that the demise of folk-Christianity in the West in recent decades provided a tremendous opportunity for the gospel to be brought to Europe afresh. During his last years of life, he dedicated himself to imagining an encounter between the gospel and the ostensibly Christian West. After his smallish book Foolishness to the Greeks, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society emerged as the statesman’s great treatise on the contradiction between Christ and the Western worldview.
The Western church has been fighting a losing battle precisely because it affirms the West’s intellectual foundation: the notion that truth is accessible to the individual, and accessible through logic (or science). Though the West’s intellectual edifice is continually on its deathbed – at least according to breathless reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Science, the foundations remain secure. Even the New Age movement, for all its anti-intellectual bent, relies on the Western “Plausibility Structure” of truth abstracted into equations.
By way of contrast, the Gospel is based on a story. God’s self-revelation through Jesus and through his church is true, and the sooner the church operates out of this reality the better. Evangelism by logic will never win the world for Christ; any more than intellectual assent to Christian maxims softens a hardened heart.
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