Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture

Rating:
Summary: Academic, Powerful, and Profound
Review: Lesslie Newbigin's asks the question, how can the Gospel transform a western culture that has fragmented life into two categories: Facts and Values. Facts are scientifically proven matters of public knowledge where there is either Truth or False. Values are the private beliefs a person lives by and makes decisions by. They are not provable according to the scientific method, so there is no way to state them as fact. So, is this the realm of the Gospel? Should the sovereignty of God and the sacrifice of Christ stay carefully stowed and talked about in the private parts of our lives? Or should the Gospel become a mandated part of the public life? Throughout the book she discusses the delicate dichotomy between and the tightrope we as recipients of Grace should live. It was an eye-opening and profound book. My one critique is that the content at times was so thick I got lost in the minutia versus the heart of her message. I think anyone interested in the conversation of Christianity, Culture, Capitalism, and the desire to prove all facts with the scientific method would be benefited by reading this careful academic text.

Rating:
Summary: Christian, concise, and egaging
Review: Reading this book bound to Westernized Christianity will bring one into and incredible confrontation with the Gospel. A Gospel which undermines so much of what we never even think of questions. Newbigin's experience as a missionary in Africa brings an amazing perspective to how Christ relates to culture. One that in my opinion even surpasses Niebuhr's Christ and Culrue and Tillich's Theology of Culture.

Rating:
Summary: The West and the Gospel
Review: This is a superb theological treatment of the relationship between the Christian gospel and Western culture. Newbigin skilfully guides his reader through the contours of jsut how Western culture has impacted and in some respects, subverted the Christian message. Newbigin begins by describing the necesity of a missionary paradigm for the church in our current, post-enlightenment setting. He observes the domestication of the Christianity in the Enlightenment, and shows how the church must not allow it's convictions to become relegated to the "private sphere." Thus, Newbigin questions the whole "fact-value" dichotomy that characterizes Western culture. According to Newigin, the gospel is not a collection of "values" that can be relegated to our private spirituality, but are our beleif about what is ultimately real, true and meaningful.

He then goes on to examine the nature of culture and the issue of the enculturation of the gospel. His discussion of culture is increidibly superior to the monolitith and gernealized conception of Neibhur. Newbigin notes the particularities of culture and recognizes that the church must respond differently to culture depending on which culture it resides in.

Following this discussion, Newbigin engages with the modern scientific worldview that has come to dominate the public sphere on what does and does not count as true. Newbigin shows how science is in actuality, not an objective, disinterested discipiline, but a faith-based, tradition-bound, communally embodied paradigm (following Kuhn) to which the church should afford no privileged status.

Similarly, Newbigin moves into a helfpul discussion of Christianity and politics. Newbigin shows how the church has ben influneced by COnstantinianism and Christendom, and yet must also recognize that we are in a decidedly post-Christendom position and can never go back (nor should we want to). Newbigin goes on to examine how the contempororary situation is analagous to Israel in exile. He concludes by offering a distinctly Christian political theology in which the kingdom of God is embodied in the suffering servanthood of the church who bears witness to the rule of God without seeking to force that rule upon the world in Constantinian fashion.

Newbigin concludes his book with a call to the church to engage the West missionally. For the gospel to bear fruit in Western culture again, it must remember that it is in a constant state of missionary service and action.

Throughout the book, Newbigin's proposals are lucid and powerful. All will benefit from the wisdom of this great missioloist and theologian.