Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture

by Lesslie Newbigin

How can biblical authority be a reality for those shaped by the modern world? This book treats the First World as a mission field, offering a unique perspective on the relationship between the gospel and current society by presenting an outsider's view of contemporary Western culture.

Genres: Theology, Christian, Christianity, Cultural, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Faith

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1986

About the author

Bishop James Edward Lesslie Newbigin was a British theologian, missiologist, missionary and author. Though originally ordained within the Church of Scotland, Newbigin spent much of his career serving as a missionary in India and became affiliated with the Church of South India and the United Reformed Church, becoming one of the Church of South India's first bishops. A prolific author who wrote on a wide range of theological topics, Newbigin is best known for his contributions to missiology and ecclesiology. He is also known for his involvement in both the dialogue regarding ecumenism and the Gospel and Our Culture movement. Many scholars also believe his work laid the foundations for the contemporary missional church movement, and it is said his stature and range is comparable to the "Fathers of the Church".

Reviews

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newbigin gives us an analysis of Western culture from the perspective of a long-term missionary. His primary question is, "What would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and modern western culture?" His close reading of the modern western world is insightful, revealing our long held but mostly subconscious presuppositions. He shows us a culture which is committed to the autonomy of the self and to a deep public/private divide, a society which is safely inoculated against the gospel by a controlled dose of it and so has little fear of getting swept away by the real thing.

[Mark Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable book. Way back in the 80s Newbigin was saying what struck me as new in the late 90s and early 2000s. I wish I'd been exposed to his way of thinking earlier.

[Jenny Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. I took a long break in the middle of reading it - I'm not used to things this dense - but so glad I picked it back up.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has given me so many things to think about. Its primary strength is pointing out the fallacies embraced by Western culture that make people resistant to the gospel, and the changes that need to happen within the Church to effectively address the culture.

The points that made the biggest impact on me were:
1. rejection of the idea that humans can separate their public witness from their private beliefs.

2. identification of the flaws in the western plausibility structure which is based on scientific proof devoid of purpose.

3. comparison of the ideals of capitalism and socialism, and their inability to bring about the freedom or equality that its champions endeavor to create. Rather, Newbigin explains how both of these ideals are met through the relatedness we are called to in Christ.

4. a 7-point list of what must happen for the Church to effectively challenge Western culture. Some of these points might be quite disconcerting to some. (I can hear many people's objections to them now.)

5. portrayal of the Church as a whole, and how this relates to the pervasive (and dangerous) belief among Western Christians that the manifestation of truth in their experience is, in actuality, The Truth.

I have a book of quotes that I keep, in which I write worthwhile passages from the books I am reading. While reading this book, I gave up writing, and started attaching photocopied paragraphs.

I think this book needs to be read by anyone who is serious about engaging our culture with the gospel. Unfortunately, many of the Christians who need to be engaging that culture are fast becoming victims of it, and probably wouldn't even attempt to read a book like this one. So, if you are like me, you will read this book and be convicted as well as enlightened... but you will probably also be grieved at the number of Christians you can find who even see how important these ideas are.

[Brenton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a smart book--a missiologist's approach to what Christianity means in a post-Christian culture. It contains long technical philosophical arguments, but they are accessible to most well-read laypeople. Newbigin has been important to my intellectual formation, though I often find his arguments difficult to grasp. This audiobook is a great way to work up to his more difficult "Gospel in a Pluralistic Society."
I wish that American Christians would read this book.

[Andy Littleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense little book, a bit outdated, but still quite relevant. What if a deeply thoughtful former missionary assessed western culture as if it were a foreign culture? That’s what Newbigin did, and it’s very eye opening!

[Brice Karickhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written by a man who was a missionary in India for a number of years. The premise is that he is challenging Western Christians to consider the nature of a “missionary encounter” with their own culture. He rightly points out that Western thought and Christianity have been so intertwined that we often fail to view the beliefs and customs of our own culture through the same lens as we would, as Christians on mission, approach any other culture. Thus we are more apt to conform than to challenge, often to our own demise.

The book is VERY dense. It was profound and challenging, and I took notes and highlighted the fool out of it so that in writing a review, I could pull all the pieces together and give the whole thing some coherence in my own head. Then, I accidentally took my kindle off of airplane mode to download, of all books, Kamala Harris’s autobiography, and my loan on this book expired and it was removed from my Kindle along with my notes. What an unworthy sacrifice. Thanks a lot Kamala. Good luck getting my vote now.

SO, I don’t have much to say except that I loved it as I was reading it. Minus one star because every chapter was long, dense and not broken into sub-sections or any kind of outline, so it was basically unapproachable if I was remotely tired or distracted in any way.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I read this before “The Gospel in a Pluralist Society”- much easier to swallow and there are a lot of themes that are shared.

Pondering on what a “missionary encounter with” any culture (here, modern western culture) and how “cross-cultural communication of the gospel” manifest within a believer’s life has been so informative to how I can approach my faith, and even more so inspiring for me to communicate to others of the gospel and be that encounter for everyone effectively, faithfully, and powerfully in my everyday life.

It is near-autobiographical given how much Newbigin had to reflect on the above questions as a long-term missionary of a completely different worldview, and then once mastered, comes back to his home culture, yet, ironically, doing the work all over again.

The point that it is not the gospel that has to answer to the rules of any plausibility structures, but inversely that all structures must explain themselves to the foundations of the gospel was such an important takeaway for me.

For those who have been blessed with having their feet dipped in various and diverse spaces, Newbigin’s writings make those same feet all the more beautiful for carrying the good news.

[Thomas Duell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I teetered between a 4 or 5 star rating for this book. One the one hand, much of this book rests in the realm of theory, which feels scary. However I think that is exactly the tension that Newbigin is trying to foster. 5 stars for the incredible intellectual AND practical effort that is contained in this book. Easily one of the most quotable theology books I have read, I underlined something on almost every page. Even with some of the vagueness that comes out when trying to contextualize the gospel, Newbigin has soundly challenged the Western church to look critically at its own context and culture, calling it to return to an exciting place of mission under the authority of Christ.

[Drew]

It had been a while since I read Newbigin, and this was phenomenal.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newbigin has executed a fascinating and concise engagement with modern, post-Enlightenment culture. I find it interesting that he doesn't really use the term "post-modern," and ultimately I do not think his book lacks anything for that omission. The book is concise, but Newbigin packs quite a punch in the pages. He is pretty unflinching when it comes to the reality that Enlightenment thought has quite thoroughly relegated religion (and religious thought/action) to the private sphere in the Western church.

The first chapter charges that the church really needs to be able to look at the culture it resides in and approach it and analyze it just as any missionary would do approaching any new culture. The problem, he points out, is that we have centuries of accepting our culture's overarching thoughts as part of our Christianity and we have trouble really allowing the Gospel to critique our culture and call its falsehoods to task.

The second chapter strives to illumine the overarching outline of Western culture, specifically noting the influence of the Enlightenment upon modern thinking. The third chapter then raises up the power of the Gospel to engage and critique every culture, for while Gospel is fully embedded culturally, it speaks with a power that can transform every culture.

Epistemology is the next point of engagement, and Newbigin takes science and the mindset undergirding modern scientific thought to task in the fourth chapter. In a sense, this is a continuation of the second chapter, almost an integration of an understanding of the culture revealed in the second chapter with the power of the Gospel laid out in the third. Thus the fourth chapter is the ideological conflict of our age.

The fifth chapter again raises the significance of what Augustine accomplished in his day and age with his City of God, and it calls for a similar level of analysis and engagement by the church (and its leaders and thinkers) for the modern age. He also has a fascinating and stirring admission that the rise of the church as a political power was not really as bad a thing as so many make out. His point is that when the church was offered the opportunity to sit in a seat of political power, its worldview demanded that it take the seat it had been offered, for to refuse it would be to refuse the opportunity to shape the world of its day for the Kingdom of God. While he acknowledges that the resultant political entity (of the Roman Catholic Church) and the religious path of the middle ages was not the best and there were many (sometimes grave) mistakes along the way, he challenges us to learn from the mistakes of the past without rejecting completely the path taken.

This is a theme he continues into the final chapter, where he calls for the church to undertake a greater level of political and worldwide engagement. The final chapter concludes with seven points of engagement or areas where the church has to step up. An interesting point among them is the self-defeating nature of demonimationalism. It would be interesting to compare/contrast Newbigin's thoughts on this specific point with Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, because Newbigin accuses denominationalism as being a result of the modern secular age, an embrace of the Elightenment thought that religion is private and therefore demonimations are "gathering points" or "like-minded groups" wherein people who--practicing their religion privately--can gather with others like them. Newbigin, in a sense, almost seems to call for the reform of the World Council of Churches so that they can provide a gathering point, a united front of sorts for the church at large to engage the world at large.

Newbigin's challenge to the church in the final chapter builds off the cultural analysis he has constructed in the previous chapters. I think it's a timely and insightful challenge which cuts to the heart of the church's engagement with modern culture. I highly recommend it for all pastors and anyone interested in striving to think well about how the church engages the culture it strives to minister within. It is also a fresh perspective which runs parallel to James K. A. Smith's very recent Awaiting the King and even Andy Crouch's Culture Making, complementing both.

[Paul Mullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie Newbigin writes with a kind of clarity of thought that I really love. The central idea of this book is the answer to the question, "If one were a missionary to the modern western culture, what approach would one need to take?"

A key idea is that all cultures have a plausibility structure... a system of cultural artifacts and belief systems that make a new idea either acceptable or unacceptable. He decodes the enlightenment-informed plausibility structures of the society of his time. (He was a contemporary of CS Lewis.) Core to understanding this culture, in Newbigin's formulation is that in our culture there are some ideas that are apparently value-free and purpose-free and self-evident. And yet, we know very few things of value that are purpose-free. We can know the intricate finger work of a pianist, or the electrical brain signals of a lecturer, but still not understand the purposes of the music or the lecturer's key point. Knowing "how a thing is" is distinct from knowing the purposes behind a thing.

I am reminded in reading this of the reading I recently did in Man's Search for Meaning in which Frankl (1940s) shows that when people lose their sense of purpose, their lifespan comes to a quick end.

There is so much more here. One of the best mind-stretching books I've read in a long time.

[Josh Wilhelm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review forthcoming. An excellent book!

[Abigail Hartman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally finished!! (After switching over to audiobook.) The first time I attempted to read this, I got bogged down around chapter 4, but it's in the next two chapters that Newbigin begins to tie things together and make suggestions for the church's "missionary encounter" with Western culture. I find Newbigin a tough one to read. I'm not sure if it's his prose style, or his engagement with social theory and philosophical ideas -- both of which are abstract, and I struggle with abstract thinking. Yet there are moments throughout where I think, "Oh, THAT'S where you were headed!" and I can appreciate his insights.

I didn't agree with all of his points or suggestions here, unsurprisingly. I'm not sure the kind of Christian society he proposes is at all possible, however ideal it sounds, and I likewise think his idea of ecumenicism has proven to be a broken reed: it too often means finding the lowest common denominator between professedly Christian churches, which is usually not the Gospel but rather some fuzzy notion of brotherly love, a particular strand of activism, and/or a mystical personal encounter with God. Where I did strongly agree with Newbigin was on his assessment of the underpinnings of Western "secular" society, which have really not changed all that much since he published this book in the 1980s. His discussion of the "heretical imperative," integrated from another scholar, was helpful in light of my own experiences in academia; it's not hard to see that secular, evolutionary materialism is the orthodoxy of today, and cannot be departed from without repercussions. Likewise, I thoroughly appreciated Newbigin's argument, drawn explicitly from the Gospel of John, that receiving the Gospel inevitably entails a conversion of the mind -- a paradigm shift -- that allows the individual to see the world in a new light; this vision is impossible for the unconverted mind. Thus, "Western culture" and its occupants can never be argued into a Christian way of thinking by using the tools of that same Enlightenment-shaped culture. Faith is not illogical or irrational, but by its nature, its propositions cannot be proven by the empiricism that is the idol of the age.

Newbigin, in speaking of a Christian missionary encounter with current Western culture, doesn't endorse attempts to go back to the medieval model of Church-and-State or to grab the reins of government. Yet he also doesn't endorse ecclesiastical quietism. He encourages thoughtful, biblical, prayerful consideration of engagement with the world. I can't recall whether he uses the phrase, but what he describes is the prophetic (and therefore world-challenging) voice of the Church as the advance guard of God's kingdom. He doesn't ultimately give a clear picture of what that looks like on a practical level, but I'm not sure there can be a clear picture so much as a constant wrestling with the mandate to live as the expression of God's sovereign rule in a rebellious world.

Certainly the sort of book that needs to be read more than once.

[Marcas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A layered and rich witness testifying to what Mission is and should be about. Newbigin dismantles the idols of secularism and pretensions of 'neutrality', recalibrating our orientation towards The One Living God. Lesslie's prodigious publication fills in the Christ-shaped holes in Rabbi Sacks' otherwise excellent book The Great Partnership. Furthermore, foolishness To The Greeks fits neatly with Edward Rommen's and Alexander Schmemann's books on Christian Mission. Lesslie has studiously explored the scriptures, the Christian tradition and the opposing imposters, whilst commensurately and creatively drawing on his own experiences in the life in Christ to take down the false private-public dualism we live under, with it's 'private values' and 'public facts'.

[Dave Herman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the rare cultural critics whose insights seem to become increasingly relevant with time, Newbigin acknowledges the benefits of our post-Enlightenment world while rejecting its materialistic assumptions. Similarly, he recognizes the contributions of the church as it has engaged secular society in the last two thousand years while lamenting its abuses. Lastly, Newbigin prudently proposes paths forward in how the church can engage modern Western society with humanity and respect, based on its eschatological vision of the future-yet-present kingdom of God.

[Joshua Reinders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this book twice consecutively. There's a lot to think about and understand here, both with the flow of Western culture and the gospel's engagement with it. While it was first published in 1984, it seems surprisingly prescient of the current era. Newbigin's thinking is rather complex. I particularly struggled to grasp the connective tissue between modernity and post-modernity, the way a total commitment to reason and unreason can exist in the same space. I thought Simon Vance did an excellent job narrating such dense material.

[Philip Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

V. challenging and thought provoking. Christians thinking through Christian identity in the post-enlightenment world should wade through it. Newbigin is simultaneously measured and idealistic. I didn't agree with everything, but he gave me much to ponder.

[Lindsay Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was hard to start but ended really well. Lots of good things to contemplate. I will be reading it again.

[Blake Randolph]

Excellent. You should all read it. I kind of want to re-read it already just to catch things I know I missed.

[Reinhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! It would be hard to find a more stimulating 150 pages. Written in 1986, but remarkably prophetic. Even more relevant today than when it was written.

Full of insight. Very highly recommended.

A few random notes from each chapter:

1
He begins talking about the concept of us being all heretics now as the plausibility structure that underlies culture is gone, and we have to decide everything for ourselves from scratch. We also distinguish between the public and private sphere, where in a private sphere religion is accepted, and in the public sphere everything is subject to the discipline of scientific inquiry. The idea that science itself should be subjected to questioning from a religious point of view is not possible. The church has ceded the public sphere and operated purely in the private sphere, which was acceptable to the culture at large. The result is not a secular culture, but a pagan culture that is more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian pagan culture.

2
Western culture turned to science, which avoids any talk of purpose, contrasting it with the Greek idea for nature. Fundamentally, it was driven by purpose. All movement had a purpose. This rationalism led to the idea that people are free to choose to think and it results in the concept of human rights as opposed to the network of reciprocal rights and duties of the medieval society. When there is no happiness beyond death, the quest for happiness becomes hectic. Since the concept of the right to happiness has an infinite domain rather than the limited rights, reciprocal rights of the medieval age, there is no potential for reciprocity. The reciprocal duty to honor the claim to the right of happiness can only be fulfilled by a state. The state replaces the church as the center of culture. The pursuit of happiness is endless to the demands on the state or without limit. In the quest for happiness, the young become a symbol of hope, and the old become objects of embarrassment. Hanna Arent’s three-tiered concept of labor, work, and activity provides a useful tool for understanding society. Labor is the base work, work is activity that transcens biological care, and action is activity of mutual human interaction. Post-enlightenment transformed human activity into labor. Economics became a science and was no longer part of ethics. Religion has multiplied human networks rather than the single network of a rural society that embraces his work, leisure, family, and religion. The decisive feature of our culture is the division of human life into the public and private, in the separation of fact and value. Hinduism doesn’t have the conflict of science and religion because Eastern religions don’t understand the world in terms of purpose.

3
Schleiermacher fenced off an area of inward, religious experience, protected from the dominance of the objectifying consciousness, reducing theology to anthropology. Separating faith from objective fact. This shouldn’t be accepted. We all come to the Bible with pre-understanding and with pre-existing concepts. We have to be willing to allow the text to challenge our understanding, as in Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, which require a discontinuity. The Bible is not a book that just got dig up from the past. It has a reciprocal relationship with the community. There are not two histories, one sacred and one profane, but one history in which God acts. There is no way to prove competing paradigms. Only at the end will the full truth be revealed.

4
Science attempts to create a world without God, but it lacks any ability to give existence meaning. Particularly in cosmology, science and religion come into contact. Science itself requires fate in the rationality of the universe. Indian metaphysics supports the rationality needed for signs but does not support the independent existence of nature outside of the soul itself. The mechanistic view of the universe was shattered by General Relativity and quantum mechanics. These new developments in physics and cosmology open the way for dialogue between believers and scientists. Purposeful movements, for example, of the hand must be explained in terms of responsible action by a person capable of understanding purpose. This explanation is unscientific, and that is why it moves to non-mechanistic explanations. The concept of a fact was developed by Francis Bacon, who advised against speculation, referring to the belief that things can be understood in terms of their purpose. Fact are value-free in that they have no relation to an end or purpose. But the practice of science itself involves the decision of what is important and hence values. Knowing the smallest component of an entity does not mean we know that entity unless we know the pattern. Knowing about protons and electrons does not make one understand humans, for example. The pattern is ultimately the purpose for the item. The chemical and physical movements of the components of a machine are not enough to explain the purpose of a machine. Total skepticism leads to irrationalism. With a true ultimate explanation of things and purposes found only in the work of a personal God, perhaps the greatest task of the church in the 21st century will be to be a bastion of rationality in a world of unreason.

5
What are the political implications of the kingdom? It is common to subsume the Old Testament and spiritualize the message, but this doesn’t do justice to the message of the NT. The victory of God in Jesus involves a new order. The church from the beginning avoided the Roman protection provided for cultus privatus - a purely spiritual and personal religion. Secular authority should be recognized, but when used to propagate a lie, it will come into conflict with the reign of Jesus who embodies truth. The church is often tempted by power, but would it have been better for the church to avoid all political influence and have avoided a ‘Christian’ Europe? It seems better to use influence for good. Christ has kingship over all realms, public and private. We cannot return to Christendom or pre-Constantine innocence. Per Augustine, faith working through love is the foundation of justice, which is the foundation of the commonwealth. Citizens of heaven will seek good order. Capitalism cannot survive in a purely secular society. All power exists to serve Christ. A secular society in which there are no commonly acknowledged norms becomes pagan. There is a danger of Christians who acknowledge the universality of sin but exempt themselves from its operation and identify their cause with God’s. The Enlightenment gave birth to the idea that happiness can be provided by the political system, and that is its goal. Freedom pursued at the cost of equality or vice versa both rely on seeing individuals as autonomous. Neither freedom nor equality is supreme but relatedness. Only respect, honor, and love freely given can lead to a humane society. The business of the church is to bear witness to the truth in the public square. There can be no unity of the human race other than in Jesus. The only way to bind nations together. The church as a supranational institution is the bearer of that vision.

6
The church is the witness to the kingdom, but not tasked with establishing Gods kingdom. Return to medieval Christianity is not the goal. The church lives in the world and bears witness. Church and state would be separate even if everyone were a Christian. They serve different roles. The church’s goal is not Christian Sharia. We must be agents of Gods justice. The church must see a unified hope for the future. The church must promote freedom and tolerance. Firm in the gospel of Christ but ready to listen. Tolerance is not indifference to truth but preserves freedom to dissent. Develop robust ‘lay’ theology including art, science, politics as sovereign spheres with the church as servant. Denominations are the result of secularization - the privatization of religion. The church must be shaped by other cultures (global south), other portraits of Jesus to correct ours. We need courage to hold beliefs which cannot be proved. All reality involves a commitment. Purpose and value cannot be proved. It is the radiance of a supernatural reality not human heroism. The church’s witness is an overflow of God’s gift.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently took an ecclesiology class where my professor quoted Newbigin often and urged us to read everything that he wrote. This book is listed as required reading for my next class that I am taking on Christianity and Culture. I guess because of the missiological conversations we had in class around Newbigin concepts, I expected this book about culture to involve a bunch of ministry strategies, drawings or graphs, and 10 ways to engage culture type of things. What I found instead was a thoroughly academic and logical critique of western culture and how Christianity is to interact with the secular explanations of the how? and why? questions that rule our society. His engagement with science and his critique of different types of biblical interpretation and the types of traps that they lead to were helpful as well. It was almost like reading a C.S. Lewis book. So much of engaging with our culture in a meaningful way has to do with engaging the purpose and ethics of human life and the world. Newbigin does a great job leading the conversation to this point of ethics and purpose and shows possible ways of engaging with culture as a result.

[Sean Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much as I didn't care for "The Open Secret", this book seems to be the crowning masterpiece of Newbigin's life as a missiological practitioner.

The latter chapters were what really grabbed my attention. The author's discussion of the church's dialogue with science and the limitations of rationalism and post-Enlightenment though were very insightful. He persuasively makes the case that we live in both a rational and contingent universe.

However, my favorite part of the book were the final two chapters. Here he discusses how the church ought to dialogue with the state in politics. The questions he flirts with have shattered my current understanding and I'd imagine it will take me decades to recover from this book.

If you only read the last half of the book, that alone is worth the purchase price.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Newbigin perceptively traces thinking in the West (reminiscent of Francis Schaeffer's "How Should We Then Live?" but from a more postmodern position), pointing out the paradoxes and inconsistencies in secular culture and analyzes how Christians can engage in missionary encounters. He devotes special attention to Christian witness in politics and addresses issues surrounding the role of science in modern society.

[Eric C 1965 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great philosophy is early chapters gives way to recommendations for a Christian engagement with the state. Not sure if I can agree with everything in later chapters. Still, it is a book with much to say about culture and the church.

[Brant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hope that the West can indeed be transformed once again by the Gospel.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read as Christianity, and the Church at large, struggles to find it's identity in a post-enlightenment culture.

[Chris Schutte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book full of profound wisdom as we seek to understand and share the gospel in our increasingly secular context.

[Glenn Wishnew III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Game-changer.