I’ve just begun reading Leslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and, so far, it’s reminding me why I love Newbigin. Newbigin’s concern is to explain how we can proclaim the Gospel as normative in a world that denies the concept of normativity for anything but “science,” without falling into the trap of sublimating the Gospel to the demands of rationalism. Here is some of the flow of the argument from the first chapter:
We must affirm the gospel as truth, universal truth, truth for all peoples and for all times. . . . The Christian believer is using the same faculty of reason as his unbelieving neighbor and he is using it in dealing with the same realities, which are those with which every human being has to deal. But he is seeing them in a new light, in a new perspective. . . . [I]t is essential to the integrity of our witness to this new reality that we recognize that to be its witnesses does not mean to be the possessors of all truth. The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions; it is a story. Moreover, it is a story which is not yet finished, a story in which we are still awaiting the end when all becomes clear.
This is so central to much of where my thinking is right now, as reflected even in the theme I chose for this blog. We’ve tried making the Gospel primarily about the propositions we’ve extracted from the story, and we so often insist that the propositional nature of truth is essential to defending “absolutes.” But this just isn’t so; it doesn’t reflect the Biblical witness or the witness of the Spirit speaking in and through the church in history. Propositions are valuable, but the story’s the thing.