Years ago, in the 1940’s, Mrs. Greene and I spent more than seven years as
missionaries in China. Looking back, we realize that the Gospel we proclaimed carried
within it marks of our American culture. That was inevitable. Everyone in the world is
affected deeply by the culture in which he or she is raised, and that cannot but influence
our understanding of the Gospel as well. That is part of what is meant by the Scripture
passage that says that we know in part and we prophesy in part. (1 Cor. 13:9). Many
missionaries have struggled with this problem in recent decades, particularly under the
theme of "contextualization."
If a culture influences our concept of the Gospel, is it possible that the message of the
Gospel may be muted or suppressed by culture? And if it can be, how do we break free from
that constraint in order to bear witness to our own culture? Modern Western culture is at
once secularized and idolatrous. If we as Christians are affected in our own thinking
processes by our culture, how do we break free in order to present to our own culture the
dynamic message of the Gospel of Christ? That is the question with which this issue and
the next will deal. We would, as always, be interested in your reactions if you care to
write.
A WITNESS TO THE WESTERN WORLD
Al Greene
The Bible speaks of thunder as the voice of Jehovah (Psalm 29). It says that he brings
the wind out of His treasuries (Jeremiah 10:13; 51:16), and that the snow both comes and
is melted by His Word (Psalm 146:16-18). These are Old Testament passages, but the New
Testament continues the connection between the living God and the physical world. It
insists that all things have been created by the Word of God, who is clearly identified
with the Person of Jesus Christ. (John 1:1-3). It declares that Christ holds all things in
being by the Word of His Power (Hebrews 1:3) and that "in Him all things consist, or
hold together." (Colossians 1:17).
As Christians we read and repeat such passages with pious fervor, and we do so quite
properly. However, when it comes time to explain the weather to our children, we are
likely to do so in different words and within a different framework for thought. We tell
them about the natural laws which account for thunder and lightning, or we put the weather
cycle into simple terms so they can understand the origin of the winds, the precipitation
of moisture, ands the melting of the snow. We move from the spiritual significance of the
weather to the natural explanation of it without any sense of having passed over a
boundary line between two different worldviews, one of which is based upon the reality of
God and the other of which rigidly excludes Him from its view.
The argument of this paper is not that the scientific explanation of natural phenomenon is
false, but that it is inadequate. Unless that inadequacy is recognized and forthrightly
affirmed, we compromise the Gospel and forfeit the power of the Holy Spirit in bringing
the Gospel to bear upon the consciousness of modern man. But that is getting ahead of
ourselves. The first step in the argument is that a Christian mind provides a radically
different way of looking at the world that can recognize and appreciate the amazing
achievements and spectacular blessing of modern science but can, at the same time, take
scientific rationalism up into a higher type of explanation that gives God the glory that
belongs to Him.
These thoughts have been triggered by two recent books by Leslie Newbiggin, The Other
Side of 1984, and Foolishness to the Greeks. In them, Newbiggin analyzes the
nature of the Enlightenment and raises the question of how the church can effectively
bring the missionary message of the Gospel to the mind and heart of modern people. I am
indebted to him for some very stimulating thoughts, a good many of which will be
recognized below by anyone familiar with the books, but the responsibility for what is
said remains my own.
Newbiggin makes the point that Augustine, living at the time when the ancient culture of
Greece and Rome was collapsing, provided a new framework for thought that dominated
Western Europe for at least a thousand years. Augustine’s approach was that faith
precedes knowledge. We believe in order to know. And what he believed was the Biblical
revelation of the holy Trinity and the incarceration of Christ. The Enlightenment, coming
at the close of the Middle Ages, offered a radically different approach. It insisted that
we must doubt in order to know, and that we could only be assured that something was true
if it could be scientifically proved. But now, after more than 300 years, the
Enlightenment is bankrupt. It has confronted us with questions to which it has no answers.
What to do about the danger of nuclear holocaust, the depletion of the ozone layer, the
possibility of the greenhouse effect and the melting of the polar icecaps, the fateful
widening of the gap between the rich and the poor of the world - these and a multitude of
other questions indicate that the Enlightenment, for all the marvel of scientific and
technological advances it has provided, cannot lead us out of our difficulties. Newbiggin
calls on the church to offer the world once again a worldview based on faith rather than
doubt, a view in which the witness of the Bible is taken seriously.
The Historical Preparation for the Enlightenment’s Conquest
It may seem strange that a perspective that was so universally believed in Western
Europe for centuries should have collapsed so quickly with the advent of the modern
scientific movement. In the Middle Ages God was thought to be involve in everything. All
of life was structured around the great truths revealed in the Bible. The structure was
not without its faults, but that is not the point here. It was a structure in which God
and the Bible were central and in which all of life was impregnated with meaning which
ultimately led up to God Himself. Within a relatively short time the Enlightenment had
eliminated God from the whole realm of physical science, and this was followed rapidly by
His elimination from other areas of human study and activity: economics, politics,
sociology, etc.
There is a history behind this collapse. The ground had been prepared for it over a very
long period, and the church itself was considerably to blame for the conditions which made
the triumph of atheistic science so assured and so complete. Francis Schaeffer and others
have traced this history in detail. Let us look at it briefly here.
In the thirteenth century, the century when the modern university movement was born in
southern Italy, the writings of Plato and Aristotle found their way back into a Europe
that had been deprived of them for centuries. The question arose, Can good Catholics
(there were, of course, no Protestants at that time) study the works of these heathen
Greek writers? The answer for the Catholic Church was given by St. Thomas Aquinas. He
posited two areas in life and scholarship, the lower area of Nature and the upper area of
Super-Nature or Grace. The lower area included the affairs of everyday life: business,
government, philosophy, art, etc. The upper area was the area of God, salvation, heaven
and hell etc. St. Thomas struggled manfully to maintain the connection between the two
areas and to make the upper superior to the lower, but he clearly accepted two areas. In
the lower area he said it was acceptable to study Plato and Aristotle because it was
possible to understand ordinary things by the use of human reason. Catholic dogma held
that man’s mind was not ruined by the fall but his will was taken captive. So if one
had a good mind, he could understand the ordinary things of life whether he was a
Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Jew, or an atheist. But the upper area of Grace could only be
understood in the light of the Bible (and the Church) and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Thus St. Thomas laid the groundwork for the dualistic way of looking at life and the
world. He did not mean to do that, but his teaching was to have a tragic impact on the
church and on the world in the centuries to come.
Unhappily, the Reformation did not penetrate to the root of Thomistic philosophy and
reject it. Luther and Calvin were reformers and theologians. They had their hands more
than full with the proclamation of justification by faith. However, the men who set up the
school systems for the Lutherans (Melancthon) and the Calvinists (Beza) both did so on the
foundation of the dualistic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, the prevalence of
that philosophy can be detected even in the senior disputation and theses of the early
college graduates in the thirteen colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thus the church entered the conflict against modern secularistic science with its hands
behind its back. It had already agreed that much of life could be understood without
fundamental reference to God and His activities. As Schaeffer puts it, "Nature ate up
Grace."
The Continental Divide and the New Explanation of Things
The Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains of the United states is the watershed for
rivers running east and south to the Gulf of Mexico or west to Great Salt Lake, the Gulf
of California, or the Pacific Ocean. The corresponding watershed between the medieval and
the Enlightenment worldviews can probably be fixed with fair accuracy at the beginning of
the 17th century. Both Francis Bacon, the father of modern empirical
science, and Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, were alive and active as
Europe moved into the 1600’s.
During the Middle Ages everything in human experience was felt to have meaning or purpose
because it related to God. Lions were thought of as kings of beasts because they pointed
beyond themselves to the kings among men. Human kings wore purple robes and gold crowns
because they pointed beyond themselves to the Great King in heaven. All of life was
significant because it pointed beyond itself and ultimately to God, who gave meaning to
all things. (This is why Christ called Himself the Truth in John 14:6.)
With the dawn of the Enlightenment, however, this changed. There was a deliberate and
conscious decision to give up any thought of purpose or meaning in the ordinary world and
only look for causes which could be scientifically discovered and proved. Technology (from
the Greek word "telos", meaning "end or goal") was abandoned. All that
counted now was facility, which had no element of meaning in it. Newbiggin puts it as
follows:
"But we shall not be wrong, I think, if we take the abandonment of technology as
the key to the understanding of nature for our primary clue to understanding the whole of
these vast changes (the Enlightenment way of thinking, ed.) in the human situation. I
shall argue that this is what underlies that decisive feature of our culture that can be
described both as the division of separation and value." Foolishness to the Greeks,
p. 34
He points out in another place that Bacon urged his contemporaries to give up
speculation and concentrate on collecting facts. By "speculation" Bacon referred
to Aristotle’s belief that things were to be understood in terms of their end or
purpose. If something has meaning or purpose, it calls upon us as humans for some response
or commitment. Bacon’s bargain said that we could forget about purpose and the facts
would give us control over the world. It was a bargain that has brought modern culture to
the brink of collapse. The difficulty of disposing of radioactive waste may be as good a
symbol as any for that threat.
It should be noted that Bacon’s move depended upon getting scientists to agree that
we need not consider meaning or purpose in research. Facts are without meaning, and they
explain - in terms of cause and effect - all the things that happen in the physical world.
But they do not explain those things if, indeed, there is a purpose behind them. They only
explain if there is no purpose. This perspective has so thoroughly captured the mind if
western man that today anyone who denies the laws (facts) of physics and chemistry account
totally for the effects which those laws occasion is regarded as either a religious
fanatic or insane. However, it is well to remember that physical laws do not explain
anything unless it is already agreed that there is not purpose or meaning to be explained.
There is an interesting parallel between the Enlightenment’s rejection of purpose or
meaning in favor of "facts" of things in themselves and what happened in the
Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve, according to Genesis 3:6, succumbed to the temptation to see
the forbidden fruit as something that in itself could give them pleasure ("good for
food"), ownership ("a delight to the eyes"), and status ("to be
desired to make one wise"). Before this they had understood that pleasure was
God’s gift, mediated through the creation but not coming from it. They knew that the
Garden was God’s possession, and they were stewards in it. They realized that being
someone depended on reflecting the image of God and was impossible apart from Him. Now
they were tempted to believe that pleasure, possession, and status could come from the
fruit itself and that these things could be had apart from dependence upon God. As the
Enlightenment began to develop, another famous apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head.
Whatever may have been Newton’s personal faith in God or his idea of the relation of
scientific study to the Lord, the thrust of the Enlightenment dogma quickly began to
assert that what was important was only the exploration of the physical causes involved in
the apple’s fall and that these would give us command of a "Nature" in
which God was no longer a significant factor.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
