Tag Archives: Foolishness to the Greeks

These are my last quotes from Leslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks. What a book! I highly recommend it for anyone wrestling with the issues of church and state, Christ and culture, etc. — not so much because of his conclusions (though they are certainly worth wrestling with), but because of the way in which he demonstrates the weaknesses of what many today consider easy and obvious answers to these questions.

“When the classical vision faded and the pagan empire disintegrated, it was right that those who had been given a new vision of the eternal order through the Incarnation of the Son of God should accept the responsibility of seeking to shape public life in the power of that vision. The attempt to create a Christian civilization, to shape laws consonant with the biblical teaching, to place kings and emperors under the explicit obligation of Christian discipleship — none of this was wrong. On the contrary, to have declined these immense responsibilities would have been an act of apostasy. It would have been an abandonment of the faith of the gospel” (129).

“Of course, the distinction of church and state has to be maintained and would have to be maintained even if every citizen of the state were also a member of the church. Church and state have different tasks, but both receive their mandate from God who is revealed in Christ, and both are responsible to him” (130).

“With such an understanding, we can envision a state (whether or not such a thing is a present political possibility) that acknowledges the Christian faith as true, but deliberately provides full security for those of other views. It would be different from both the Christian states of the past that suppressed dissenting minorities and from the pluralistic states of the present that profess to be guided by no vision of human nature and destiny — but are in fact guided by a very specific ideology, namely, he ideology of the Enlightenment (as, for example, Muslim minorities in Britain are very acutely aware). It would be a state embodying the idea of the proper role of the political order that the Bible seems to suggest” (140).

“Any idea that one can be neutral is an illusion. I believe that the Christian gospel provides and opens up the possibility of a life — public and personal — that includes both the ability to hold vital convictions that lead to action and also the capacity to preserve for others the freedom to dissent” (140).

“Whatever the institutional relationship between the church and the state … the church can never cease to remind governments that they are under the rule of Christ and that he alone is the judge of all they do. The church can never accept the thesis that the central shrine of public life is empty, in other words, that there has been no public revelation before the eyes of all the world of the purpose for which all things and all peoples have been created and which all governments must serve. It can never accept an ultimate pluralism as a creed even if it must – as of course it must – acknowledge plurality as a fact.

“Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place” (Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 115).

“Thus the earliest church never availed itself of the protection it could have had under Roman law as a cultus privatus dedicated to the pursuit of a purely personal and spiritual salvation for its members. Such private religion flourished as vigorously in the world of the Easter Mediterranean as it does in North America today. It was permitted by the imperial authorities for the same reason that its counterparts are permitted today: it did not challenge the political order.

“Why, then, did the church refuse this protection? Why did it have to engage in a battle to the death with the imperial powers? Because, true to its roots in the Old Testament, it could not accept relegation to a private sphere of purely inward and personal religion. It knew itself to be the bearer of the promise of the reign of Yahweh over all nations. It refused the names by which the many religious societies called themselves, and which critics such as Celsus applied to the church (thiasos, hieranos); it called itself the ecclesia tou theou, the public assembly to which God is calling all men everywhere without distinction. This made a collision with the imperial power inevitable — as inevitable as the Cross” (Leslie  Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 99-100).

“A missionary encounter with our culture must bring us face to face with the central citadel of our culture, which is the belief that is based on the immense achievements of the scientific method and, to a limited but increasing extent, embodied in our political, economic, and social practice — the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world that is to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not of final causes, a world that is not governed by an intelligible purpose, and thus a world in which the answer to the question of what is good has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in the body of accepted facts that control public life. We have to go back to the point where Lord Bacon advised his followers to collect facts and abjure speculation and ask exactly what is meant by knowing the facts” (Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 79).

“But those who belong to the community that is controlled by the rendering of God in Scripture will surely be precluded from a dichotomizing of their lives into a private sphere where God is acknowledged and a public sphere in which events are finally interpreted without reference to God. The long-running debate about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is simply one manifestation of the illusion that has haunted our culture ever since the Enlightenment. There is only one Jesus, and there is only one history. The question is whether the faith that finds its focus in Jesus is the faith with which we seek to understand the whole of history, or whether we limit this faith to a private world of religion and hand over the public history of the world to other principles of evaluation” (Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 61).

“The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated by the figure of the living God who acts, speaks, calls, and expects an answer. The biblical language is as much about God, about the created cosmos, and about the world of public events as about what can be called ‘religious experience.’ …

“What if it were simply a fact that the one by whose will and purpose all things exists, from the galactic system to the electrons and neutrons, has acted and spoken in certain specific events and words in order to reveal and effect his purpose and to call us to respond in love and obedience? If this were a fact, we might still sit down coolly to consider it in relation to other facts. But by doing so we would be asserting our right to make the final decision, and we have no means of proving that we have that right. It might be that we do not, that the history of Western man in the past two hundred years has been shaped by an illusion. And it might be that the signs, manifest all around us, of the disintegration of this culture of ours are ultimately attributable to that illusion” (Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 41).

“My point here is simply this: while Berger correctly shows how the traditional plausibility structures are dissolved by contact with this modern world-view, and while he correctly reminds us that the prevalence and power of this world-view gives no ground for believing it to be true, he does not seem to allow for the fact that it is itself a plausibility structure and functions as such. It is not that there is no socially accepted plausibility structure and thus we make our own choices. This is the ruling plausibility structure, and we make our choices within its parameters. It is, if I may anticipate what has to be developed later, the public world of what our culture calls facts, in distinction from the private world of beliefs, opinions, and values. This is the operative plausibility structure of our  modern world” (Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, 14).