Longing for the Fleshpots

I’m re-reading Sunquist and Young, The Gospel and Pluralism Today. It is a review with responses, 25 years later, of Leslie Newbigin's groundbreaking work The Foolishness to the Greeks. 

In it I came across a remarkable quote: “Newbigin maintains that epistemology is the key to missiology in the West.” (Esther Meek) What Dr. Meek means by this is that Newbigin sought to demonstrate that the epistemic foundations of modernity are both incoherent and antithetical to the gospel. Neebigin proposes an alternative epistemology, one that has been eagerly embraced by western Christians. It is built upon the centrality of faith in God as revealed in Christ providing the framework through which Christians comprehend reality. 

There is a great deal to be said, and written, for Newbigin’s work, and that of Michael Polyani who is a key resource in his thinking. And there are many others who in one form or another have taken up the epistemological critique of modernity and the development of alternatives that take seriously the personal, indeed interpersonal nature of knowledge. Dr. Meek has her own fascinating ideas about resolving the problem of “the one and the many.” 

Yet the assertion that epistemology is central to missiology is misleading. The purpose of Christian mission is quite simply evangelization: the proclamation of the gospel inviting a response of faithful membership into the Body of Christ. 

Proclaiming the gospel in a way that invites response requires understanding at a deep level the worldview, including the epistemic framework, of those to whom the gospel is proclaimed. But the goal of mission is not to formulate or promulgate an epistemic framework. It is to credibly present the gospel in terms that hearers can understand and to which they can respond. 

Thus the central question of missiology is credibility, not epistemology. And credibility depends not on formulating a Christian epistemology, but on comprehending non-Christian cultures. 

Thus, as seen in Meek’s essay, the primary value in Newbigin’s work for Christians has not been in generating missiological insights, but in helping Christians who are at sea in modernity to find their intellectual footing and thus new confidence in their mission. It is the pushback of a threatened church vastly diminished in influence over the last 100 years. Thus Dr Meek says that the epistemology of the modern West "defective" and "damaging." "It continues to hamper science and business and engineering and artistry and everything else. It continues to depersonalize and render the world two dimensional, leaving us bored and clueless. . . " You get the idea.

The problem here for Christian mission is the embrace of Newbigin's epistimic critique of modernity without embracing his epistemological commitment to learning from non-Christian cultures. The result has been an ever-more diminished evangelical commitment to engage contemporary western culture accompanied by ever more shrill attacks upon it. This is exacerbated when Christians identify with the rapid growth of non-western Christianity, and thus adopt a triumphalist attitude that leads to further conflict with and dismissal of modern western culture as a realm within which the gospel can be credibly proclaimed.

As a result instead of focusing on an evangelistic conversation in which the inhabitants of modern western culture discover Christ’s presence in their own history and culture, American Christians have been emboldened by Newbig’s critique to reject their cultural context as a realm in which Christ might be active. One of the authors of the Sunquist volume even speaks of the “collapse” of the modern worldview. And so, repeating the classic failure of colonial missions, Christians demand conversion to their epistemic culture before hearing the gospel is even regarded as possible. 

Cultures and their epistemic frameworks do not evolve through the teaching of philosophers and the complaints of the displaced religious. Nor by the preaching of epistemology. Epistemic frameworks evolve through continued engagement with realities that the culture in it current form cannot comprehend. 

The reality that challenges the West today is Christ’s continuing presence at the core and boundaries of the enlightenment methods of engaging with reality. And that challenge comes from not from philosophy, but the transcendent nature of reality itself breaking into the scientists efforts to characterize it with integrity. I suspect that Newbigin would agree that  it is only Christ present and already transforming western culture that creates both the inspiration and intellectual space for philosophers to work.

Indeed, I would argue that in the last three centuries of the West Christ has been most present in modern culture through the development of what became a scientific epistemology. Descartes’ philosophical project was part of a movement to achieve political freedom through freeing human minds from the oppressive deployment of religious and political dogma. In this it is part of the work of Christ breaking the power of the principalities and powers that dominated the Christian church and Christian rulers. They had to be challenged precisely for the sake of the Christian gospel which sets us free with the truth. 

To deny or roll back what was achieved for human freedom by the enlightenment and modernity would be to work against Christ’s active role in western culture, as it would be to reject Christ’s work in any culture. That Descartes’ project became distorted into a rejection of the foundational experience of faith in God is not surprising. It isn’t even surprising that the church would be drawn into such distortions. That does not invalidate the deep insights into reality that could only emerge through the rise of the enlightenment worldview. Those are the deep insights that brought us the concept of human rights, modern medicine and agriculture, movements for the political equality of all people, modern democratic states and with them the rise of internationalism and systems of global relief for poverty and disease. The pre-modern Christian church never did and never could accomplish these things. 

In a seminal moment in 1910, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference declared that non-Christian religions and cultures could be a preparation for the gospel. If Western Christians would overcome their traumatic sense of having lost the West and recognize that they never had it to begin with, then they might see that modern Western culture isn’t an enemy of the gospel. It is in fact the way in which Christ has chosen to prepare people to hear the gospel. It is that gospel, when credibly presented, that will draw them to Christ, whose Spirit alone can renew their minds.