"A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions."By Lesslie Newbigin, Eerdmans 219 pp.; $14.99, paper

Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, & Certainty in Christian Discipleship

By Lesslie Newbigin

Eerdmans

105 pages; $7.99, paper

The overarching theme of ecumenical missionary Lesslie Newbigin's recent writing is summarized in a question asked by an Indonesian acquaintance: "Can the West be converted?" After serving as a British missionary to India for over 30 years, Newbigin has now been pastoring in Birmingham, England, for over a decade. He is a minister of the United Reformed Church (UK), former bishop of the Church of South India, former general secretary of the International Missionary Council, and former associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Now he is assuming the mantle of Christian critic of Western culture and doing a much better job of it than some of his forebears.

"A Word in Season" is a collection of Newbigin's essays--mostly dealing with missiology and related topics--drawn from the past 30 years. Three or four of them are obviously preparation for Proper Confidence and presage its main themes and arguments. There is, therefore, much overlap between the two books. The general unifying theme is Christianity and culture. The specific unifying proposal is this: Whereas Western Christians once thought that "syncretism" (inappropriate blending of Christianity with non-Christian culture) was a particular problem mainly for non-Western Christianity, today it is as much or more of a problem for Western Christians as it is for those elsewhere in the world. Hence the question "Can the West be converted?"

Newbigin draws on his long and deep acquaintance with culture and Christians on the Indian subcontinent to point out the pervasive syncretism he now finds in Britain, on the European continent, and in North America. "Every church is tempted to do this [syncretize] in its own culture, tempted to become the domestic chaplain to the nation instead of being the troublesome, prophetic, missionary voice to the nation--challenging all syncretistic entanglements," he writes in "Mission in the World Today" (A Word in Season). "The most obvious examples of syncretism, however, are to be found in our Western churches, which have worked so hard to tailor the gospel to fit the so-called requirements of modern thought."

Newbigin points to a trend called "the larger ecumenism" in some missionary circles as one example of how Western Christianity cuts the heart out of the gospel through cultural accommodation. This "larger ecumenism" is really a euphemism, he argues, for sheer pluralism, which attempts to achieve human unity by discarding the distinctives of Christian truth, such as salvation through Jesus Christ and his Cross. To Newbigin, pluralism is not a product of a surplus of humility on the part of liberal Christians but a failure of nerve brought about by capitulation to secular modernity.

For every strong word directed toward liberal Christians, Newbigin has at least one for conservatives or traditionalists. While pluralism may be a more recent form of syncretism that undercuts Christian missions, paternalism is an old and enduring one. The veteran missionary is harsh in his exposure and condemnation of all mission endeavors that refuse to recognize the integrity of indigenous Christians and their competence to develop their own Christian forms of life and worship.

Newbigin brings many fresh and stimulating insights to the world Christian missionary enterprise in "A Word in Season." His most interesting and incisive criticisms of modern Western culture, however, appear in "Proper Confidence." Packed into this book of slightly more than 100 pages is a masterful demonstration of the bankruptcy of secularism and all forms of Christian accommodation to it. Here his answer to "Can the West be converted?" would seem to be: Only by a complete transformation of its mind--away from the distinctive patterns of Enlightenment thought and toward at least an openness to grace, faith, and revelation.

In his own words, Newbigin writes "Proper Confidence" "as a missionary who is concerned to commend the truth of the gospel in a culture that has sought for absolute certainty." According to Newbigin, certainty is the controlling myth of modernity. Unfortunately, in different ways, both liberal and fundamentalist Christians have adopted modernity's rage for certainty--with deleterious effects on their forms of Christian discipleship. But that is to get ahead of the story.

Like many other critics of modern Western culture, Newbigin traces twentieth-century relativism, nihilism, and despair, as well as rigid conservativism, absolutism, and militant traditionalism back to Rene Descartes's revolutionary thoughts about human knowledge. By insisting that knowledge begins with doubt and that the ideal of knowledge is absolute certainty (what cannot be doubted), Descartes opened up a split between knowing and believing (including valuing) that was destined in the long run to lead to a loss of absolutes in every realm. Newbigin masterfully traces this development from Descartes through the scientific revolution and the philosophical Enlightenment and on through Nietzsche into postmodernism.

Newbigin believes that all kinds of untenable dualisms result from the Cartesian-Enlightenment insistence on knowledge as certainty. One such dualism is the distinction between "facts" and "values" (a staple of modern education); another is the divorce between the public and private sectors of life. These dualisms are "untenable" because, in the end, they simply cannot function. Newbigin shows that, in principle, there can be no knowing without believing and no public life without personal faith in something.

A major secular ally both in diagnosing modernity's ills and in proposing cures is the Polish-born philosopher of science Michael Polanyi. Newbigin turns to Polanyi's writings for support in showing that even the natural sciences involve something like "faith." Arguing that the "myth of certainty" must be overcome if the West is to be converted, Newbigin suggests that Polanyi can help Christians deconstruct this myth, opening the postmodern Western mind to the cultural contributions of a faith-based, revelation-based Christian perspective.

Newbigin harshly criticizes both liberal and fundamentalist forms of Christianity as syncretistic in that they inappropriately blend the gospel with modern Western culture. Liberal theology, he contends, rushes to accommodate Christianity to relativism in the realm of beliefs and values. It too often takes its cues from the "plausibility structures" of modernity instead of beginning with the Christian story. This is obvious, he says, in many of higher criticism's assumptions about what is "fact" in the biblical narrative and what is not. Underlying this obeisance to secular culture is liberal theology's acceptance of the Cartesian mindset.

On the other hand, fundamentalism, Newbigin asserts, is just as much a product of the Enlightenment in defining faith as assent to objective propositions divorced from personal and cultural faith perspectives.

According to Newbigin, liberals and fundamentalists share a common "mistaken policy" in favor of apologetics as the basis for Christian belief. This is a mistaken policy, because it assumes some neutral, objective plausibility structure outside the Christian story to which it must conform or before which it must defend itself. Newbigin believes that no such narrative-and-perspective-independent plausibility structure exists and that "proper confidence" for Christian discipleship must begin with a rejection of certainty and an openness to the truth of the Christian story that is always open to doubt ("faith seeking understanding").

Newbigin warns both liberals and conservatives that "the story the church is commissioned to tell, if it is true, is bound to call into question any plausibility structure which is founded on other assumptions." This truth is not one we come to know through an objective reasoning process that excludes doubt and focuses on certainty, but one that begins with redeemed experience and the story of what God has done for us in Christ.

Newbigin's critique of modern Western culture and Christianity is a valuable "word in season." Both his critique and his outline of a proposed alternative bring some sanity back into the entire debate over religious epistemology. Claims that Christian belief must either be constantly subjected to doubt and revision before the bar of some independent plausibility structure that provides certainty, or that it must be held in blind faith with an absolute certainty that rules out all possibility of doubt, can lead to self-torment and spiritual paralysis.

Proposing proper confidence as an alternative to absolute certainty, Newbigin offers sound therapy for the hubris that besets modern Western Christians on the Left and the Right. Such confidence is the best basis for knowledge available this side of the eschaton. Of that we can be certain.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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